The government is the absolute antithesis of decentralization. Look at the heirarchy - if there's anything that public servants and the government structure as a whole is known for, it's a pecking order. Government doesn't understand decentralization, because ultimately that tends to make things harder to control and administer, and governments are all about controlling and administering. That's their core goal.
The government's primary self-chosen mission in most countries of the world today is to promote economic growth, which often is interpreted as doing whatever the industrialists ask of them. And guess where the industrialists stand on the commercialization of the internet....
And what are you going to do about it? Absolutely nothing! Here's the real problem with commercialization: despite the fact that everyone thinks it sucks, nobody wants to do anything about it.
The commercial forces are "driving the economy", providing jobs, providing tax revenues to governments, and filling pockets all over the globe. Why on EARTH would anyone EVER want to turn away from that path?
The grand success of commercialism is tying the interests of the rubes^H^H^H^H customers to the interests of the corporation. Trust me, as much as you bitch and moan about commercialization now, if it weren't there most people would be twice as pissed off at the loss of their wonderful privacy-invading, wallet-vaccuuming feature-creeping, RAM-sucking functionality that allows them to talk to hairy-backed 50 year old men posing as 14 year old school girls any time, day or night, from anywhere on the planet!
Why would anyone care? Isn't it extremely intentional that the control of the internet is being consolidated into fewer and fewer hands?
Who is it exactly that would object or do something about it? Do you think the few companies who own major backbones are going to decide that it's not in everybody's best interest and sell their portion off to 10 other companies?
Sure, this is a bad thing, but it's done in order to suit the interests of the people who are doing it. The idea that somebody would wake up, decide this is absurd, and correct the error of their ways is absolutely ridiculous.
Of course, we could always hope that MS would realize their software licensing is not in the best interest of the consumer and turn it all around....but it's statistically safer to bet on being struck by lightning 12 times in succession...
Its just a preview of a future far off OS that you dont even have to use in the frist place.
Are you sure about that? I'm not trying to tell you that the sky is falling, but it might make sense that Palladium would be shipped with Longhorn for the first time. If the palladium architecture actually gets put in place, it might rapidly become very difficult to use free operating systems. Oh sure, they'd work just fine - as long as you're not concerned with interoperating with those who do choose to use proprietary software.
Yes, there are a lot of people who are concerned about how this will be used. But the people who built it are free speech absolutists, and although it can be used for evil, you can hardly argue with their right to guarantee themselves an anonymous secure method of communication.
It's on networks like freenet where you find out what people are really made of. In freenet, people can say anything so there's no concept of people "holding back" because they're afraid of what the consequences might be.
Freenet is just a tool though. It does not make a hammer evil that it can be used to kill people, just like it doesn't make freenet evil that evil people can subvert it for their purposes.
You are right - but what's meant by the statement "nothing can be deleted" is that others can't take things out of the network. Your own node may take something out of the network by choice at some point.
The algorithm removes the least recently used file in the datastore when the store fills up, and has a bias towards larger files.
If you insert content that is popular and gets requested though, it's not possible to delete it even if you (the author) wants to
You have proven yourself quite the Archivist. You've managed to take a 19-year old post, take one tiny snippet of that, take it out of context to boot, and cornerstone your "proof" around it. Obviously nothing has changed in the past 19 years, and obviously the sequencing of words so long ago is equally valid today. Right.
The GNU system is a complete operating system of which the kernel is only one small portion. GNU is an operating system that can work with Linux as its kernel. (although it doesn't need linux to run) On the other hand, Linux is a kernel that is almost useless without a supporting framework of software. Luckily, the GNU system exists to fill in those massive gaps in linux as an operating system. As RMS says, this isn't a mistake - when Linus was looking around for software to use with his kernel, it wasn't a mistake that he found GNU.
GNU is independent of a kernel, but needs a kernel to operate. Because of this, I don't think there is a "rightful" GNU system. Or more accurately, I would consider the "rightful" GNU system to be any operating system that consists of nothing but free as in speech software.
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can
Yep, that's one of those quasi-funny computer "laws" that actually has a very disheartening core of truth to it. Of course some programs such as emacs expanded until they could read mail and then kept going:) I think the ultimate stopping point of development on emacs is going to be when the emacs hackers sit down to make improvements in the program, and the program ends up responding, "I wouldn't do that if I were you, Dave"
Here's another one of those informal computer laws that's ha-ha funny...but serious:
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
I know lots of people don't like the way the FSF does things, the way they define words, the way they say things, and so on. But here's what it comes down to:
When a group has written half of the useful tools on any GNU/Linux system, they can talk all the shit that you want, and they can do whatever they well please.
On the other hand, if you're just a slashdot pundit that gets their kicks from overanalyzing and picking apart the works of others, you don't necessarily get a fair say in what is right and what is wrong.
The award is for the advancement of free software. GNU has an entire page devoted to licenses and what qualifies as free software. People who know a bit about GNU will realize that this encompasses X11, BSD, and many other non-GNU GPL licensed software.
Like many other posts in this thread, you've nominated a free software project, and not a person. People get the awards, not software.
Larry Wall got the award one year, (but perl didn't). Guido van Rossum got the award one year (but Python didn't). I think you get the picture.
That said, while Valgrind is a neat tool, I don't think that it has made the same contribution that say, perl or python has made to the free software community. Valgrind allows people to debug very specific problems in very specific languages. But it does nothing for users, nothing for programmers in non C/C++ languages. I think the free software award should probably go to something that's a bit larger than this type of tool.
Since when does pure mathematics need to have an obvious application? Some people study math just because it's interesting. Sometimes, people come up with areas of number theory that don't immediately look promising, but that later get developed into something very useful, like optimum golomb rulers, or the mathematics that goes into public key crypto.
To get into the mind of a mathematician, you must understand the cardinal rule of math - that there is no such thing as an uninteresting number. All numbers have interesting aspects about them (strange prime factorizations, that they're palindromes, that they're the smallest sum of three consecutive cubes, whatever) but here's the real kicker - there's no such thing as an uninteresting number because if anybody was to ever find an unintereting number that had absolutely nothing special about it, it would be interesting purely for the reason that it doesn't have anything interesting about that.
Grasp that, and you can grasp why people do things like this. It's an intellectual exercise that some happen to like quite a bit.
Here's simple code to check this property for all numbers from 0 to 100 - adjust to test it for arbitrary numbers: (Do NOT run this on numbers that don't have known palindromes since it will cause a stack overflow.:)
#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict;
for(my $x=1; $x < 100; $x++) {
paltest($x, $x, 0); } # End for
sub paltest {
my($number, $orig, $reclevel) = @_;
if($number eq reverse($number)) {
print "$orig yields a palindrome at recursion level $reclevel.\n";
return 1;
} else {
my $rev = reverse($number);
return paltest(($rev + $number), $orig, ($reclevel + 1));
} # End else } # End paltest
He has an area on his website that sort of answers this question. Check this out. It has a list of tools that he likes to have in a kitchen, and why. Many are rather multipurpose items, so you can do lots of different things with relatively few tools.
While I'm sure this robot will be impressive in some respects, I really wish people would go ahead and segment the AI field out into two separate fields - "Cognitive Modeling" and "Cognitive Imitation". These types of robots which simulate high-level human behaviour that we realistically just don't understand how it works are essentially parlor tricks. They're entertaining, but do they really tell us more about how the brain works? I don't think so - they mostly push the envelope in the field of pattern recognition and imitation.
In other words, when it comes to "AI", these things tend to be really heavy on the "A" and really light on the "I".
If you truly want to bring the "lesser" coders up to speed, you're going to have to make an investment of time
It's also important to note that there is no relationship between the amount of time you invest and results - that's completely dependent on the clay that you're working with.
In this article, I've seen people say "kick the losers to the curb", I've seen people say "bottle-feed them like babies until they really start to help" and several thing inbetween. You need to invest energy and time educating these people IMHO, but developers shouldn't complain when the following scenario occurs occasionally:
Person X joins project Y. Developers want to integrate X into Y, and so they spend lots of time telling them what's what, helping them out, documenting, and so on. Person X soaks it up like a sponge, but eventually decides that they still can't/won't contribute. Developers lost lots of time.
It happens. Nobody works on free software projects for the chicks, money, or fame. Ultimately it takes an internal spark and motivation that CANNOT be instilled by other developers. Shame that it can sometimes take such a long time to sort the wheat from the chaff. There are some "fanboy" type developers and hangers-on of projects that act like they'd contribute if only they knew how, but when it comes right down to it, never really well because networked quake is just too distracting.:)
Before people get in a huff, we should mention that Apache has a history of integrating well with other technologies, those considered to be "evil" by some people, and others as well. I mean, look at Apache and Java. What about XML? Not to mention perl, PHP, TCL, and others.
Java is not a warm and fuzzy free technology. I daresay it's every bit as proprietary as.NET, just in a different way. Apache is wise to be as flexible and accomodating as possible - it's a good thing that it supports.NET, since it will most likely do it in a free way and expose more people to free software. On the other hand, it could always *not* support.NET, lose more market share to IIS, and generally piss people off who are using.NET technologies by wider corporate edict.
This site was hosted in Italy - they were able to shut it down by nature of the fact that the webserver was in Italy.
So I doubt it's a violation of US law for the Italian police to shut down a webserver that is very clearly within their jurisdiction. If you host your site in Finland, there isn't much the US can do (or wants to do) if the Finnish cops shut your machine down due to violation of Finnish laws.
Imagine the scene of a total troll get-together. One guy would be off in the corner pouring hot grits down his pants, while another turned to stone while looking at the large bird perched atop the third's dick. This all being watched over by the goatse guy, who is somewhat occupied trying to, ahem, hold himself shut.
On the other hand, it might just be a room full of pasty white guys sporting various operating system advertising clothing items all hoping to meet the nonexistant geek girls.
VCRs are going to be a whole lot harder to kill. Even this phasing out of VHS is mostly targetted at new sales of movies. But VHS is everywhere, from budget video surveillance systems, to home movie collections, and many other applications that don't have anything to do with the MPAA or movies.:)
Eventually, VCRs will be the kind of long forgotten technical oddity that ends up in an electronics museum, but that's still going to be a while.
I don't mean to criticize them, but sometimes I do wish that people would spend as much time trying to do something about current patent law as they do "playing the patent game". Sure, there's the reasonable realistic drive to try to make the patent game work on free software's terms, but the system is so broken sometimes I'm not entirely sure that's wise or possible.
Red Hat though seems to be making a lot of their money these days on server machines. The suits buying and running these servers don't give a damn about Red hat's policy either way on patents - I wonder why they did this in terms of marketing. Which particular demographic they are appealing to?
Of course, you might say none - they're just doing the right thing. But the cynical part of me wonders...:)
The eventual goal of Reiser is a filesystem that is indistinguishable from a powerful database (if a special purpose database)
Why? Why do we need the all-singing, all-dancing filesystem when we've already got database pacakages that are mature and effective?
A filesystem should be a filesystem. You don't see mail applications trying to add features to remotely configure the server they're sending mail to - that's because they stick to what they need to do, mail.
UNIX - do one thing, and do it well. Leave database functionality to the packages that already do it well and have been for more than 10 years.
I think it's horrible they sell a naked PC that has hardware that requires Windows to be used.
Check the other comments - the modem in this machine can be used by Linux and other operating systems.
Also, as for it being a naked PC, it's not like they're not warning you - find the link in the article to Walmart's site and you'll see that they trumpet it underneath every ad - "THIS PC DOES NOT INCLUDE A COPY OF WINDOWS" in bold. At the top, it recommends users read their PC guide or something before buying, and states that the computers do not include a required operating system.
I think things like this are a VICTORY for consumers. Sure, this product isn't the right thing for some people, but for others, it is the perfect thing. Sure, there are people out there who could mistakenly buy this but I'm glad the option is available for people like me who want a cheap addition to the home LAN.
Great quote from Moglen's article - further to the point that the GPL hasn't been tested in court yet not because it's weak, but because nobody has had the balls to challenge it...
``Look,'' I say, ``at how many people all over the world are pressuring me to enforce the GPL in court, just to prove I can. I really need to make an example of someone. Would you like to volunteer?''
and opt-out agreements when selling non-sensitive (buying habits
Since when are buying habits not sensitive? What if you're buying cream at the pharmacy for your genital warts? What if you're buying a particular product for your spouse, or for a friend? What if you're ordering porno over the net? (They don't ship it in brown paper covers to your house because nobody cares whether anyone else sees it or not) What if you're buying a drug for a medical condition that you'd rather nobody knew about? Sure, Mr. Jones, we don't have access to your medical records, but we see you've been buying AZT, and various magazines and books written by people infected with HIV as support tools. Hmmm.....
Sexual preference, medical history, and lots of other things are tied to what you buy. I don't see how they can say that buying habits aren't sensitive.
Slashdot Mirror
The government is the absolute antithesis of decentralization. Look at the heirarchy - if there's anything that public servants and the government structure as a whole is known for, it's a pecking order. Government doesn't understand decentralization, because ultimately that tends to make things harder to control and administer, and governments are all about controlling and administering. That's their core goal.
The government's primary self-chosen mission in most countries of the world today is to promote economic growth, which often is interpreted as doing whatever the industrialists ask of them. And guess where the industrialists stand on the commercialization of the internet....
And what are you going to do about it? Absolutely nothing! Here's the real problem with commercialization: despite the fact that everyone thinks it sucks, nobody wants to do anything about it.
The commercial forces are "driving the economy", providing jobs, providing tax revenues to governments, and filling pockets all over the globe. Why on EARTH would anyone EVER want to turn away from that path?
The grand success of commercialism is tying the interests of the rubes^H^H^H^H customers to the interests of the corporation. Trust me, as much as you bitch and moan about commercialization now, if it weren't there most people would be twice as pissed off at the loss of their wonderful privacy-invading, wallet-vaccuuming feature-creeping, RAM-sucking functionality that allows them to talk to hairy-backed 50 year old men posing as 14 year old school girls any time, day or night, from anywhere on the planet!
Why would anyone care? Isn't it extremely intentional that the control of the internet is being consolidated into fewer and fewer hands?
Who is it exactly that would object or do something about it? Do you think the few companies who own major backbones are going to decide that it's not in everybody's best interest and sell their portion off to 10 other companies?
Sure, this is a bad thing, but it's done in order to suit the interests of the people who are doing it. The idea that somebody would wake up, decide this is absurd, and correct the error of their ways is absolutely ridiculous.
Of course, we could always hope that MS would realize their software licensing is not in the best interest of the consumer and turn it all around....but it's statistically safer to bet on being struck by lightning 12 times in succession...
Its just a preview of a future far off OS that you dont even have to use in the frist place.
Are you sure about that? I'm not trying to tell you that the sky is falling, but it might make sense that Palladium would be shipped with Longhorn for the first time. If the palladium architecture actually gets put in place, it might rapidly become very difficult to use free operating systems. Oh sure, they'd work just fine - as long as you're not concerned with interoperating with those who do choose to use proprietary software.
Yes, there are a lot of people who are concerned about how this will be used. But the people who built it are free speech absolutists, and although it can be used for evil, you can hardly argue with their right to guarantee themselves an anonymous secure method of communication.
It's on networks like freenet where you find out what people are really made of. In freenet, people can say anything so there's no concept of people "holding back" because they're afraid of what the consequences might be.
Freenet is just a tool though. It does not make a hammer evil that it can be used to kill people, just like it doesn't make freenet evil that evil people can subvert it for their purposes.
You are right - but what's meant by the statement "nothing can be deleted" is that others can't take things out of the network. Your own node may take something out of the network by choice at some point.
The algorithm removes the least recently used file in the datastore when the store fills up, and has a bias towards larger files.
If you insert content that is popular and gets requested though, it's not possible to delete it even if you (the author) wants to
You have proven yourself quite the Archivist. You've managed to take a 19-year old post, take one tiny snippet of that, take it out of context to boot, and cornerstone your "proof" around it. Obviously nothing has changed in the past 19 years, and obviously the sequencing of words so long ago is equally valid today. Right.
The GNU system is a complete operating system of which the kernel is only one small portion. GNU is an operating system that can work with Linux as its kernel. (although it doesn't need linux to run) On the other hand, Linux is a kernel that is almost useless without a supporting framework of software. Luckily, the GNU system exists to fill in those massive gaps in linux as an operating system. As RMS says, this isn't a mistake - when Linus was looking around for software to use with his kernel, it wasn't a mistake that he found GNU.
GNU is independent of a kernel, but needs a kernel to operate. Because of this, I don't think there is a "rightful" GNU system. Or more accurately, I would consider the "rightful" GNU system to be any operating system that consists of nothing but free as in speech software.
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can
:) I think the ultimate stopping point of development on emacs is going to be when the emacs hackers sit down to make improvements in the program, and the program ends up responding, "I wouldn't do that if I were you, Dave"
Yep, that's one of those quasi-funny computer "laws" that actually has a very disheartening core of truth to it. Of course some programs such as emacs expanded until they could read mail and then kept going
Here's another one of those informal computer laws that's ha-ha funny...but serious:
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming:
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
Sigh.
I know lots of people don't like the way the FSF does things, the way they define words, the way they say things, and so on. But here's what it comes down to:
When a group has written half of the useful tools on any GNU/Linux system, they can talk all the shit that you want, and they can do whatever they well please.
On the other hand, if you're just a slashdot pundit that gets their kicks from overanalyzing and picking apart the works of others, you don't necessarily get a fair say in what is right and what is wrong.
The award is for the advancement of free software. GNU has an entire page devoted to licenses and what qualifies as free software. People who know a bit about GNU will realize that this encompasses X11, BSD, and many other non-GNU GPL licensed software.
Like many other posts in this thread, you've nominated a free software project, and not a person. People get the awards, not software.
Larry Wall got the award one year, (but perl didn't). Guido van Rossum got the award one year (but Python didn't). I think you get the picture.
That said, while Valgrind is a neat tool, I don't think that it has made the same contribution that say, perl or python has made to the free software community. Valgrind allows people to debug very specific problems in very specific languages. But it does nothing for users, nothing for programmers in non C/C++ languages. I think the free software award should probably go to something that's a bit larger than this type of tool.
Yeah, and after spending $50 million on that business, it looks like they'll sell for $2 million!
That's a 200% increase in price/investment ratio!
Since when does pure mathematics need to have an obvious application? Some people study math just because it's interesting. Sometimes, people come up with areas of number theory that don't immediately look promising, but that later get developed into something very useful, like optimum golomb rulers, or the mathematics that goes into public key crypto.
To get into the mind of a mathematician, you must understand the cardinal rule of math - that there is no such thing as an uninteresting number. All numbers have interesting aspects about them (strange prime factorizations, that they're palindromes, that they're the smallest sum of three consecutive cubes, whatever) but here's the real kicker - there's no such thing as an uninteresting number because if anybody was to ever find an unintereting number that had absolutely nothing special about it, it would be interesting purely for the reason that it doesn't have anything interesting about that.
Grasp that, and you can grasp why people do things like this. It's an intellectual exercise that some happen to like quite a bit.
Here's simple code to check this property for all numbers from 0 to 100 - adjust to test it for arbitrary numbers: (Do NOT run this on numbers that don't have known palindromes since it will cause a stack overflow. :)
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
for(my $x=1; $x < 100; $x++) {
paltest($x, $x, 0);
} # End for
sub paltest {
my($number, $orig, $reclevel) = @_;
if($number eq reverse($number)) {
print "$orig yields a palindrome at recursion level $reclevel.\n";
return 1;
} else {
my $rev = reverse($number);
return paltest(($rev + $number), $orig, ($reclevel + 1));
} # End else
} # End paltest
He has an area on his website that sort of answers this question. Check this out. It has a list of tools that he likes to have in a kitchen, and why. Many are rather multipurpose items, so you can do lots of different things with relatively few tools.
Hope this helps.
While I'm sure this robot will be impressive in some respects, I really wish people would go ahead and segment the AI field out into two separate fields - "Cognitive Modeling" and "Cognitive Imitation". These types of robots which simulate high-level human behaviour that we realistically just don't understand how it works are essentially parlor tricks. They're entertaining, but do they really tell us more about how the brain works? I don't think so - they mostly push the envelope in the field of pattern recognition and imitation.
In other words, when it comes to "AI", these things tend to be really heavy on the "A" and really light on the "I".
Course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
If you truly want to bring the "lesser" coders up to speed, you're going to have to make an investment of time
:)
It's also important to note that there is no relationship between the amount of time you invest and results - that's completely dependent on the clay that you're working with.
In this article, I've seen people say "kick the losers to the curb", I've seen people say "bottle-feed them like babies until they really start to help" and several thing inbetween. You need to invest energy and time educating these people IMHO, but developers shouldn't complain when the following scenario occurs occasionally:
Person X joins project Y. Developers want to integrate X into Y, and so they spend lots of time telling them what's what, helping them out, documenting, and so on. Person X soaks it up like a sponge, but eventually decides that they still can't/won't contribute. Developers lost lots of time.
It happens. Nobody works on free software projects for the chicks, money, or fame. Ultimately it takes an internal spark and motivation that CANNOT be instilled by other developers. Shame that it can sometimes take such a long time to sort the wheat from the chaff. There are some "fanboy" type developers and hangers-on of projects that act like they'd contribute if only they knew how, but when it comes right down to it, never really well because networked quake is just too distracting.
Before people get in a huff, we should mention that Apache has a history of integrating well with other technologies, those considered to be "evil" by some people, and others as well. I mean, look at Apache and Java. What about XML? Not to mention perl, PHP, TCL, and others.
.NET, just in a different way. Apache is wise to be as flexible and accomodating as possible - it's a good thing that it supports .NET, since it will most likely do it in a free way and expose more people to free software. On the other hand, it could always *not* support .NET, lose more market share to IIS, and generally piss people off who are using .NET technologies by wider corporate edict.
Java is not a warm and fuzzy free technology. I daresay it's every bit as proprietary as
This site was hosted in Italy - they were able to shut it down by nature of the fact that the webserver was in Italy.
So I doubt it's a violation of US law for the Italian police to shut down a webserver that is very clearly within their jurisdiction. If you host your site in Finland, there isn't much the US can do (or wants to do) if the Finnish cops shut your machine down due to violation of Finnish laws.
Imagine the scene of a total troll get-together. One guy would be off in the corner pouring hot grits down his pants, while another turned to stone while looking at the large bird perched atop the third's dick. This all being watched over by the goatse guy, who is somewhat occupied trying to, ahem, hold himself shut.
On the other hand, it might just be a room full of pasty white guys sporting various operating system advertising clothing items all hoping to meet the nonexistant geek girls.
VCRs are going to be a whole lot harder to kill. Even this phasing out of VHS is mostly targetted at new sales of movies. But VHS is everywhere, from budget video surveillance systems, to home movie collections, and many other applications that don't have anything to do with the MPAA or movies. :)
Eventually, VCRs will be the kind of long forgotten technical oddity that ends up in an electronics museum, but that's still going to be a while.
I agree, it is a positive move for Red Hat.
:)
I don't mean to criticize them, but sometimes I do wish that people would spend as much time trying to do something about current patent law as they do "playing the patent game". Sure, there's the reasonable realistic drive to try to make the patent game work on free software's terms, but the system is so broken sometimes I'm not entirely sure that's wise or possible.
Red Hat though seems to be making a lot of their money these days on server machines. The suits buying and running these servers don't give a damn about Red hat's policy either way on patents - I wonder why they did this in terms of marketing. Which particular demographic they are appealing to?
Of course, you might say none - they're just doing the right thing. But the cynical part of me wonders...
The eventual goal of Reiser is a filesystem that is indistinguishable from a powerful database (if a special purpose database)
Why? Why do we need the all-singing, all-dancing filesystem when we've already got database pacakages that are mature and effective?
A filesystem should be a filesystem. You don't see mail applications trying to add features to remotely configure the server they're sending mail to - that's because they stick to what they need to do, mail.
UNIX - do one thing, and do it well. Leave database functionality to the packages that already do it well and have been for more than 10 years.
I think it's horrible they sell a naked PC that has hardware that requires Windows to be used.
Check the other comments - the modem in this machine can be used by Linux and other operating systems.
Also, as for it being a naked PC, it's not like they're not warning you - find the link in the article to Walmart's site and you'll see that they trumpet it underneath every ad - "THIS PC DOES NOT INCLUDE A COPY OF WINDOWS" in bold. At the top, it recommends users read their PC guide or something before buying, and states that the computers do not include a required operating system.
I think things like this are a VICTORY for consumers. Sure, this product isn't the right thing for some people, but for others, it is the perfect thing. Sure, there are people out there who could mistakenly buy this but I'm glad the option is available for people like me who want a cheap addition to the home LAN.
Great quote from Moglen's article - further to the point that the GPL hasn't been tested in court yet not because it's weak, but because nobody has had the balls to challenge it...
``Look,'' I say, ``at how many people all over the world are pressuring me to enforce the GPL in court, just to prove I can. I really need to make an example of someone. Would you like to volunteer?''
Heh heh heh...
and opt-out agreements when selling non-sensitive (buying habits
Since when are buying habits not sensitive? What if you're buying cream at the pharmacy for your genital warts? What if you're buying a particular product for your spouse, or for a friend? What if you're ordering porno over the net? (They don't ship it in brown paper covers to your house because nobody cares whether anyone else sees it or not) What if you're buying a drug for a medical condition that you'd rather nobody knew about? Sure, Mr. Jones, we don't have access to your medical records, but we see you've been buying AZT, and various magazines and books written by people infected with HIV as support tools. Hmmm.....
Sexual preference, medical history, and lots of other things are tied to what you buy. I don't see how they can say that buying habits aren't sensitive.