Actually, Mussolini made the trains run on time by changing the schedules to read the times that the trains actually ran -- he didn't change in any way when they ran.
Okay, but if the original schedule was unrealistic, then that's all he could do. And for the most part, the important thing is when the train schedule says 6:54, the train will actually be there at 6:54, which Mussolini actually succeeded at.
Am I to believe that there's a large enough segment of Slashdot users who would drive around downloading child porn to make this a "your rights online" issue?
The theft of communications has nothing to do with child porn. If it was proved that he was parked, full clothed, reading the Wall Street Journal online, he could still be convicted of theft of communications.
Really? I hear a lot of talk around here from non-zealots.
Linux and its community of developers will never be accepted professionally beause of their unprofessional attitudes.
Except for the extent which they are and continue to be. Consider that Big Blue is currently involved in a lawsuit over Linux, which indicates some serious degree of acceptance.
to the anti-Microsoft hatred that drives everything.
BSD is the real professional, secure community around here. Linux feels like it's fueled by Microsoft hatred.
Repeat it enough and it becomes true? I'm guessing you're a BSD bigot, because otherwise you've managed to miss the billions of dollars of actual professional use of Linux, and all the rational and irrational-but-not-zealotical discussion on Slashdot.
I don't see why so many sites have such a fetish with tabbed and spaced HTML when the browser discards it as garbage bytes,
Whitespace isn't going to be your biggest bandwidth waster. So why not leave human readable.
actually wasting time (albeit a tiny amount, but nonetheless) parsing through it.
Why don't you measure it and compare it to other optimizations before you recommend that people spend their time changing it? "Premature optimization is the root of all evil", or something like that?
Yahoo requires you to sign in to your Yahoo account in order to delete that account.
My accidental solution--my account filled up with patches from Microsoft (which I still haven't found a way to install under Linux), and later I got a message from Yahoo saying that they had shut off my services because of the bounces, and they would turn them on if I reactived my account. Even if I had wanted to reactivate the account, I didn't have the password to do so.
OTOH, during the mob era, you could just drop your bags on the curb when you went inside to gamble, and when you came back out several hours later, you could count on your stuff still being there.
Organizations that use the death penalty indiscriminately can often achieve that result. That's probably how Mussolini made the trains run on time. Our government could probably achieve that, if you don't mind throwing out any concept of due process or justice.
J.R.R. Tolkien is a better author then Peter Jackson
Tolkien wrote books. He did not write a movie script. If you want the text of the books to scroll up your screen, there's programs to do that, and the text is out there. If you want a movie, on the other hand, then you need to accept that every word in the books won't literally appear on the screen.
Only a stupid law has turned what should be a perfectly legal activity into a crime,
The government has to be involved, because if there's a hundred thousand dollars riding on a horse or a spin of a wheel, several people have quite a motivation in fixing that game. Historically speaking, they have often fixed the game. If you let every shyster with a deck set up a casino, there's going to be many stacked decks.
On the other hand, in places like Las Vegas where gambling is mostly legal, you don't see legitimate casino operators putting out contracts on each others' lives.
After one heck of a crackdown on organized crime. I spoke recently with an coroner who used to work in Las Vegas. Used to be 170 murders a year for a population of 1/3 of a million. Now it's 170 murders a year out of 2 million people. Gambling is high money and it's all about trust, meaning that the mob is likely to turn up where ever it exists.
It was a British Colony, but gained independence about 55 or so years ago, and promptly began to institutionalise pernicious racially-based discrimination.
It was a Dutch colony before the Boer War, and it was the Boers, not the British, who instituted massive racial discrimination.
Reading some of the comments in this article, I have to wonder when 'Geek' and 'Nerd' transformed into 'Reactionary Luddite'.
Why does Slashdot have a "Your Rights Online"? Because 'Geek's and 'Nerd's don't like taking other people's opinions on what's good for them. Nuclear power has a terrible worst case scenario, so it's entirely reasonable to consider the safety of the system carefully.
Although, I've seen some idiots do this with Windows systems like walmart that runs Solaris 8 with MS IIS 5. Forget iTunes, hell really would have to freeze over for that server combo to happen.
Isn't that the point? It'll confusing anything running automatically looking at that, and it's a big sign to hackers that "we know you're out there and your common tricks".
To me its about as big a deal as saying ooh the worlds strongest man just got beaten by a guy with a forklift truck.
Or when weavers were beaten by Jacquard's loom. Or when the first airplanes left the ground or broke the sound barrier. If you want not to be amazed by our tools and their potential, then that's acceptable, but to us it is an amazing thing. Sure, the immediate impact of a computer being superior to any human at chess is as little as a man being put on the moon by his tools, but both times a line was crossed, and we celebrate our skills as tool makers that let us cross that line.
Restricting a society to Open Source Only will stunt the economy of that society,
First place, this is only the government; they aren't proposing to ban importing non-OS programs. Secondly, I'm quite sure the law has a line about exceptions, and after they've filled out the form in triplicate with the appropriate pen (with dark-blue UV-resistent ink) they will be able to use what ever program they need to.
I've known them all, and honor students, giften musicians and (in Canada) Air/Army/Sea Cadets or Boy/Girl scouts get just as drunk and have just as much sex as every other teenager.
Then I guess you don't know me yet. Honest to goodness Eagle Scout, musician, and now I can add teacher to the list.
A teacher? Then you should know that a sample of one is worthless. No one was saying that there does not exist an Eagle Scout who doesn't drink and have sex; he was saying that Eagle Scouts, as a sample of the population, don't statistically drink less or have less sex then other parts of the population. Even if that's not true, it's still true that a number of Eagle Scouts drink and have sex as teenagers, just like any other part of the population.
Debian is 100% Free software. That's a large part of the reason the community of users and developers around Debian exists. You're welcome to expand on Debian and loosen any restrictions you want, but we don't plan to.
why mplayer is missing and xine not? Mplayer has been 100% gpl since 0.9[...]
Because Mplayer was less then 100% GPL prior to 0.9. Because Mplayer has a history of licensing problems, so we're not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
There are plenty of people that own land and property that they have never set foot on.
There's two ways to own property; physical possession and legal grant. Obviously, no government has granted this asteroid to him, or recognized his right to hold it. So the only sense which can claim this land is right of physical possession (which in some cases can lead to legal grant), which he doesn't have.
They are attempting to creeate case law backing the natural right to claim, take, and use unowned frontier land - even in space.
There hasn't been any unowned land on Earth, besides Antarctica, for about 8,000 years. That law has just been an excuse to kill the inhabitants and move in.
In any case, one of the key parts of such law is the using. You establish your right to the land by farming it and living there for several years. If people from the Eros Project were actually living on the asteroid, then I would support their right to claim to ownership.
Should we really be celebrating pieces of software that while powerful, really don't provide anything remotely new or original, and are basically knockoffs of MS and Adobe products
And Microsoft Word was a knock-off of StarWriter and WordPerfect, which were in their own rights knock-offs of previous generation word processors. The advancement of the field is sometimes slow, and it's sometime apparently stagnant as we work on elaborating the current state of the art before we can figure out which direction forward is.
I'd sooner want to see the code to the PDP-11 than the Sys V codebase.
Then go look at it. While SCO/Caldera was still good, they released all the early Unixes and BSDs under a BSD license. The code of PDP-11 Unix is out there legally.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Mussolini made the trains run on time by changing the schedules to read the times that the trains actually ran -- he didn't change in any way when they ran.
Okay, but if the original schedule was unrealistic, then that's all he could do. And for the most part, the important thing is when the train schedule says 6:54, the train will actually be there at 6:54, which Mussolini actually succeeded at.
as well using up a blank CD.
That is what they made CD-RWs for.
Am I to believe that there's a large enough segment of Slashdot users who would drive around downloading child porn to make this a "your rights online" issue?
The theft of communications has nothing to do with child porn. If it was proved that he was parked, full clothed, reading the Wall Street Journal online, he could still be convicted of theft of communications.
Genetic engineering just for the heck of it? What purpose do a glowing fish have?
Building computers just for the heck of it? What purpose does an Atari have?
Mixing chemicals just for the heck of it? What purpose does a painting have?
Making sounds just for the heck of it? What purpose does a flute have?
Even if I had wanted to reactivate the account, I didn't have the password to do so.
But don't think that'll stop them. They've started spamming me again.
Yet they are the most vocal.
Really? I hear a lot of talk around here from non-zealots.
Linux and its community of developers will never be accepted professionally beause of their unprofessional attitudes.
Except for the extent which they are and continue to be. Consider that Big Blue is currently involved in a lawsuit over Linux, which indicates some serious degree of acceptance.
to the anti-Microsoft hatred that drives everything.
BSD is the real professional, secure community around here. Linux feels like it's fueled by Microsoft hatred.
Repeat it enough and it becomes true? I'm guessing you're a BSD bigot, because otherwise you've managed to miss the billions of dollars of actual professional use of Linux, and all the rational and irrational-but-not-zealotical discussion on Slashdot.
I don't see why so many sites have such a fetish with tabbed and spaced HTML when the browser discards it as garbage bytes,
Whitespace isn't going to be your biggest bandwidth waster. So why not leave human readable.
actually wasting time (albeit a tiny amount, but nonetheless) parsing through it.
Why don't you measure it and compare it to other optimizations before you recommend that people spend their time changing it? "Premature optimization is the root of all evil", or something like that?
Yahoo requires you to sign in to your Yahoo account in order to delete that account.
My accidental solution--my account filled up with patches from Microsoft (which I still haven't found a way to install under Linux), and later I got a message from Yahoo saying that they had shut off my services because of the bounces, and they would turn them on if I reactived my account. Even if I had wanted to reactivate the account, I didn't have the password to do so.
OTOH, during the mob era, you could just drop your bags on the curb when you went inside to gamble, and when you came back out several hours later, you could count on your stuff still being there.
Organizations that use the death penalty indiscriminately can often achieve that result. That's probably how Mussolini made the trains run on time. Our government could probably achieve that, if you don't mind throwing out any concept of due process or justice.
J.R.R. Tolkien is a better author then Peter Jackson
Tolkien wrote books. He did not write a movie script. If you want the text of the books to scroll up your screen, there's programs to do that, and the text is out there. If you want a movie, on the other hand, then you need to accept that every word in the books won't literally appear on the screen.
Only a stupid law has turned what should be a perfectly legal activity into a crime,
The government has to be involved, because if there's a hundred thousand dollars riding on a horse or a spin of a wheel, several people have quite a motivation in fixing that game. Historically speaking, they have often fixed the game. If you let every shyster with a deck set up a casino, there's going to be many stacked decks.
On the other hand, in places like Las Vegas where gambling is mostly legal, you don't see legitimate casino operators putting out contracts on each others' lives.
After one heck of a crackdown on organized crime. I spoke recently with an coroner who used to work in Las Vegas. Used to be 170 murders a year for a population of 1/3 of a million. Now it's 170 murders a year out of 2 million people. Gambling is high money and it's all about trust, meaning that the mob is likely to turn up where ever it exists.
It was a British Colony, but gained independence about 55 or so years ago, and promptly began to institutionalise pernicious racially-based discrimination.
It was a Dutch colony before the Boer War, and it was the Boers, not the British, who instituted massive racial discrimination.
Reading some of the comments in this article, I have to wonder when 'Geek' and 'Nerd' transformed into 'Reactionary Luddite'.
Why does Slashdot have a "Your Rights Online"? Because 'Geek's and 'Nerd's don't like taking other people's opinions on what's good for them. Nuclear power has a terrible worst case scenario, so it's entirely reasonable to consider the safety of the system carefully.
Although, I've seen some idiots do this with Windows systems like walmart that runs Solaris 8 with MS IIS 5. Forget iTunes, hell really would have to freeze over for that server combo to happen.
Isn't that the point? It'll confusing anything running automatically looking at that, and it's a big sign to hackers that "we know you're out there and your common tricks".
SCO says, "But if you don't sign an NDA, there is nothing stopping you from giving away our code, or putting it into Linux."
Besides copyright law, that is. And the whole complaint is that it's already in Linux.
Honest to goodness Eagle Scout
You mean like Arthur Gary Bishop or John Edward Robinson Sr., both convicted mass rapist/murders?
To me its about as big a deal as saying ooh the worlds strongest man just got beaten by a guy with a forklift truck.
Or when weavers were beaten by Jacquard's loom. Or when the first airplanes left the ground or broke the sound barrier. If you want not to be amazed by our tools and their potential, then that's acceptable, but to us it is an amazing thing. Sure, the immediate impact of a computer being superior to any human at chess is as little as a man being put on the moon by his tools, but both times a line was crossed, and we celebrate our skills as tool makers that let us cross that line.
Restricting a society to Open Source Only will stunt the economy of that society,
First place, this is only the government; they aren't proposing to ban importing non-OS programs. Secondly, I'm quite sure the law has a line about exceptions, and after they've filled out the form in triplicate with the appropriate pen (with dark-blue UV-resistent ink) they will be able to use what ever program they need to.
I've known them all, and honor students, giften musicians and (in Canada) Air/Army/Sea Cadets or Boy/Girl scouts get just as drunk and have just as much sex as every other teenager.
Then I guess you don't know me yet. Honest to goodness Eagle Scout, musician, and now I can add teacher to the list.
A teacher? Then you should know that a sample of one is worthless. No one was saying that there does not exist an Eagle Scout who doesn't drink and have sex; he was saying that Eagle Scouts, as a sample of the population, don't statistically drink less or have less sex then other parts of the population. Even if that's not true, it's still true that a number of Eagle Scouts drink and have sex as teenagers, just like any other part of the population.
-Loose the restrictions a little bit:
Debian is 100% Free software. That's a large part of the reason the community of users and developers around Debian exists. You're welcome to expand on Debian and loosen any restrictions you want, but we don't plan to.
why mplayer is missing and xine not? Mplayer has been 100% gpl since 0.9[...]
Because Mplayer was less then 100% GPL prior to 0.9. Because Mplayer has a history of licensing problems, so we're not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
And it seems to me that life is a bit more complicated than you make it out to be.
Enough to justify that the average CEO get a 1000 times in wages what his engineers get?
There are plenty of people that own land and property that they have never set foot on.
There's two ways to own property; physical possession and legal grant. Obviously, no government has granted this asteroid to him, or recognized his right to hold it. So the only sense which can claim this land is right of physical possession (which in some cases can lead to legal grant), which he doesn't have.
They are attempting to creeate case law backing the natural right to claim, take, and use unowned frontier land - even in space.
There hasn't been any unowned land on Earth, besides Antarctica, for about 8,000 years. That law has just been an excuse to kill the inhabitants and move in.
In any case, one of the key parts of such law is the using. You establish your right to the land by farming it and living there for several years. If people from the Eros Project were actually living on the asteroid, then I would support their right to claim to ownership.
Should we really be celebrating pieces of software that while powerful, really don't provide anything remotely new or original, and are basically knockoffs of MS and Adobe products
And Microsoft Word was a knock-off of StarWriter and WordPerfect, which were in their own rights knock-offs of previous generation word processors. The advancement of the field is sometimes slow, and it's sometime apparently stagnant as we work on elaborating the current state of the art before we can figure out which direction forward is.
I'd sooner want to see the code to the PDP-11 than the Sys V codebase.
Then go look at it. While SCO/Caldera was still good, they released all the early Unixes and BSDs under a BSD license. The code of PDP-11 Unix is out there legally.