At least that's what the Wall Street Journal article from last week said. In order to counter terrorism, John Ashcroft has changed FBI rules on infiltration of public meetings, including religious and political groups. Previously "clear evidence of criminal misconduct was required." The rules were previously put into effect durring the 60s and 70s as a reaction to public disgust at FBI infiltration of Martin Luther King and others. Looks like it was just a silly rule and can be undone with another. Oh yeah, the FBI will now be paying agents to "surf the internet" for potential hijackers, mad bombers and other evil doers. I wonder if I could get a job looking for subversives on the internet, like Bobzilbub.
Why does this have the ring of East Germany where every other citezen had been recurited into the secret police?
Let's quote that great document, the US Bill of Rights, so that we don't forget how things are supposed to be:
Amendment I Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Amendment IV The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I'm not sure what the constitutions of other nations say, but this one should keep government file clerks out of my mail. My email is a paper or effect. Why is it that government officials sworn to uphold the constitution tell me I have, "no reasonable expectation of privacy" with it regardless of encyption? My house has windows (not the software kind). Am I paying my governement to look through them?
Organization and teamwork are second-rate when comparing open source projects to commercial projects...But the only way that we will get enough 20 hour a week programmers will be to find some way to recompense them.
Suddenly my Debian system says, "Oh, I hadn't thought of that." and dissapears in a cloud of smoke and logic. For a while, I thought I had and was contributing to something really great. All thanks to you and ZDnet for showing me the error of my ways.
Appologies to Duglas Adams, who now knows the answer to the God question and presumably has no further need to debate it.
I love Free Software. I write Free Software. But I'm not so stupid as to quit my day job to start writing Free Software full time.
So, how is that lack of direct reward keeping you from writing free software again? How does that keep all of this wonderful free software I'm using right now from existing and getting better? The silly article and troll poster claimed that these things were so.
These statements are as false as other fud that claims free software can't be used by comercial intersts. It's all part of the one billion dollars M$ spends a year on adverts. Blah blah blah, anything other than M$ bad. How silly.
I'd never recomend anyone quit their job, unless that job involved something unethical. Even then, unless that violation of others was likely to cause someone imediate harm, I would recomend finding another job before quitting.
Why is it that you can't use free software for your day job? I have to say that it's too bad for you and your company if that is so.
...thinks of Linux as a second-rate, broken Windows because some guy at his office couldn't stop telling him how great "Free Software" was. He'll probably never run anything but Windows again.
That's too bad, but never say never again. That user was mishandled, but it won't take them long to hate XP.
I'd never leave a newbie to install a box themselves and I'd never promise them hardware that won't work will. USB is not something I know how to work, nor am I good with sound, yet. The more people I get using reasonable software, the faster I'll get help.
For computers that sing and dance, I recomend keeping a clean copy of whatever M$ junk the computer came with. People generally look for XP when their 98 (as 60% of all windoze computers still are) fails them. They are sick of the reinstalls, and generally unaware of why 98 fails. Used only to access difficult pieces of hardware and blinded to the network, 98 lasts much longer.
I will however, tell them that free software can now take care of most of their computing needs and is generally superior to comercial alternatives, especially pirated junk, for issues of control, privacy and the ability to block adverts and other trash. A quick demonstation of Mozilla, Balsa, pretty window managers works well.
As for win2k and XP, pure crap. Win2k's USB support is the pits. I thought 98's support was bad because 98 gets confused and has to be rebuilt once in a while. Win2k has managed to make USB a non hot plugable device manager! When you remove a USB device, it give you this pathetic warning about impending system instability and data loss! Geez. When you combine that kind of performance with the rapicious advert pushing of XP and terrible lack of security, privacy and control, your friend is going to think computers suck in general. Too bad, but now you know why no one is buying new PC's. M$ has hyped their new junk over the moon, but it provides a much less enjoyable experience. So sad, too bad.
Free software will eventually replace non free device drivers and these issues will go away. Hardware makers are not going to be able to withstand poor sales forever and will do away with the major problem soon enough. In the mean time, I try not to raise anyone's expectations over reality and enjoy all the sofware I legitimatly own, and share what I can.
Open source is great for people out of work, or screwing around. It sucks if you have 3 kids and a wife, and need insurance, and all the other perks a job offers.
Who says you have to be unemployed to use free code? If you want to get things done, the fastest, cheapest and most sustainable way to do it is now with free code. The world is realizing this as trolls like you and ZDnet authors continue to write nonsense about not being able to earn money as the sun sets on boxed code. People who get things done will always be able to earn a good living. Free code is available to do anything non-free code does and generally does it better. Those who know how to use it will do just fine. Those who ignore it will continue to suffer for their ignorance.
The very idea of the article, that software can only be developed the way M$ does things, falls on it's face when you look at all the fantastic free software available. M$ has managed to develop one GUI with several minor variations and facelifts in ten years. There are several unerlying graphics managers available for Linux, BSD and other free software. On top of that there are dozens if not hundreds of window managers, all of which have significantly better performance and features to Windoze. Virtual desktops and pannels are common to most popular window managers. All are easier to use and configure, with text configuration files for each user and customizable popup menues in easy reach rather than at the bottom corner of the screen. Yet each window manager retains it's uniqueness so that users can chose which one they prefer before they start customizing or, if they chose, modify to their particular purpose. No comercial entity can keep up with the develpment pace. Monetary intrests inherent in their develpment model can hamper them, delaying the release of a new feature in order to sell a new version for example. Oh yeah, can you tell me what M$'s One Billion Dollar promotion of XP did for the quality of XP? Once again, free software can do anything non free does and generally does it better. The amount of free software available will continue to grow exponetially, unless blocked by bad laws.
The only thing free software keeps you from doing is violating the rights of others. Your children will not go hungry because of this, unless your company's business model is to keep others from being able to do what your software does. That, however, is a business model that will make all of us poor.
Make the Debonate virus. It runs under win32 to collect system information which it writes to a small partition at the end of hda. Then it does a Debian net install, completely securing the box by obliterating Windoze.
You can't break down the heavy metals such as mercury and lead - I don't think that thare are any harmless compounds involving them.
Oh, Oh, I know, I know! We could burn them and mix them up with dirt and send them to big holew in the ground, such as abandoned lead mines, then mine them again. Then again, we could just smelt the solder, mix it wit some rosin and roll it up on spools.
However, it appeared to leave a loophole by saying that if "proper methods" were used, the environment need not be harmed.
As the US Internal Revenue Service is fond of saying, "All income is taxable." Proper methods, without doubt, will consist of paying a licensing fee. If all those "made in China" tags on electronic junk is a guide, the Chineese government does not mind paying an environmental price. If they are developing anything like their Former Soviet friends did, the price will be high. This blurb, like any other where there is no freedom of speech and press, is just propaganda.
So we are a long way from using he XBox as a cheap PC.
Hopefully, you are a long way from wanting to do such a thing. For $100 or so, you can have a nice Athlon mobo with a 700MHz processor. Buying a used system would be even cheaper. Of course, any other option would be much less encumbered by silly things M$ likes to put on junk, like the serial number he found.
The point is that stupid M$ and others are working to make hardware that the user has no control over but fail. It's just another proof that Senator Holling's wet dream of control of all digital devices can only be implimented by foolish laws. Inailienable rights are those which require vast expendatures to violate.
I saw, yuck, tin snips in that mailbox link! A $15 paper cutter from any office supply store makes much cleaner cuts.
Sheet metal does rock, but aluminum flashing won't rust and is easier to work. A big roll of the stuff that will last for years. It's easier to work than steel and much lighter. The drawback is that flashing is thin and not as strong as available heavy steel sheet. You can overcome this by bending a few edges and mounting stiffening pieces. I love my aluminum sheet roll almost as much as I love duct tape.
Mixing steel and aluminum is a bad idea. Their electronegativities are far appart so your steel will rust quickly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it can be done and there are places for it.
After nearly a decade of U.S. persuasion and $7 million in technical IP assistance, a new IP law is under debate in the Egypt parliament. The law's authors hope that it will pass before the People's Assembly begins its summer recess on June 30.
FOR SALE, 65 Million like new Egyptians. Good condition, hardly abused. $7,000,000 OBO.
There they go again, folks, trying to start up a GPL/BSD flame war with bogus claims. The parent claims RMS thinks the author is "stupid". The next article makes contradictory claims about ownership of derivative works. The AC post below makes the false claim that BSD license still requires adversising. You can go here for a well thought out and non insulting view of all of it.
Now for the strange contradictory part. Arandir says
If RMS is correct in saying that "software should not be owned", then derivative software should be owned even less.
but also says
As a user of the BSD license, I wondered if Ransom could relicense my code under a per-seat license. The obvious answer is "yes". The not so obvious answer is "yes, but so what?"
The answer you seek is, so then Ransom owns the derivative work. You may not mind that, but you should not pretend it is not true.
Some of us DO mind when our work is used to enrich evil companies which seek to deprive others of their rights. I'm loath to do anykind of software work at all right now. My company is a M$ slave shop, and they own all of my work and ideas by contract. Anything I do is theirs. Anything that works makes the slave world of M$ that much more bearable for them and so perpetuates things that are evil regardless of my intentions and choice of license.
Finally, new advancements in subatomic physics leads to LMR (ludicrous magnetoresistive), giving more bits of storage than there are atoms on the platter. The "flavor" and "color" of each quark are directly manipulated and sampled by the drive head.
If you don't have time, then accept the services offered at the market rate.
What market? In case you have not noticed, it's against the law to use the public right of way in most places. Most towns have a sinble cable company and a single phone company providing lines to houses. So you have a market of two choices. Good eh?
Competition was planned but aborted. The local bells got to compete in the long distance telephone market without alowing DSL access as they were supposed to. The cable companies have been told that they don't have to allow "competing services" on their digital networks, despite laws requiring access by TV broadcasters who represent competing services and can be recieved by alternate means.
Can do can be undone by bad laws. One single stinking frequency has been allocated to wireless networks, and it gets to share it with microwave ovens. Now that it's proved viable anyway, the FCC will crush it, just as they did TV over HAM. Then there you will be, all nice and shut down.
The ones I have at work cost $1K/month for a full CIR frame T-1 to BellSouth for Internet.
We all know what great rates and service BellSouth provides. Just go read their EULA for DSL - no servers kidies! BellSouth made the lowest bid for my University's connections once. They really screwed things up, and I'm not sure the place has recovered after eight years. T-1 is 1.5 M bits/second, that's about 10 DSL lines. $1,000/month is a going rape, especially when you consider that a 485 pcimcia serial line will give you the same performance on twisted pairs 1.5 miles long.
Rapes like that are why people thought opening telecomunications up to competition was a good idea. Consolidation of providers (mostly under Clinton but endorsed by Bush), and their mass purchase by entertainment companies shows how screwed up US law is getting. The poster who says the US is getting like Austrailia is correct.
You, Mr. NetJunkie, are a turd. You should expect more from your ISP than this. They are making plenty of money.
ISPs that do this are going to find their sales more depressed than 1% when they do this. When their friends and neighbors ask them about "broadband" they will report, "It's not worth it." Boom, sale goes away despite all advert generated hype. Sales of XP encumbered computers are having similar problems. When you make things suck, people don't buy them.
Copy means manuscript, so what? Copyright still meant the ability to publish, aka copy, the work.
It's interesting how publishing is devolving back to the days of perpetual ownership of material and guilds. If DRM legislation has it's way, only certian people will have unecumbered machines for publication of all material. If the telcos have their way, everyone will have to meet their demands to publish on the internet. If you combine the wishes of all the stupid and short sighted comercial intests, digital content will prove more difficult to author, copy, and publish than traditional media. Traditional medial will be destroyed.
Remember what Orwell said. The party does not exist for the public good, it wills itself to power for power alone. 2 + 2 + 4, from this all else follows, so long as you can say it and make it known. Truth is the enemy of the party. The party is growing up before us and it's main force is DRM.
To me, a couple agents doing minor stock maniuplations isn't quite sufficient for banning all criminal information databases.
What they have is citizen information databases. Criminal information databases collect information on crimes. They had dirt files on innocent people collected for what? Routine monitoring? I don't need a monitor and I'm not going to pay you to do it.
The FBI's mission needs to be defined better than this. I'm not going to sit here and try to draw a line for them, I'm going to demand that they figure out what they should be doing and convince people it's right before they do it. Incidents like this go a long way toward convincing people that we don't need a federal police force.
Come on. We've known forever that the FBI has huge files on tons of people
Tell me why I'm taxed for this service.
Had it been the actual FBI selling this information and not a couple of bad apple agents pissed they didn't get a raise this year then perhaps it would be a huge story.
Tell me the practical difference. Tell me that the agents involved are not scape goats. Who's gaurding the gaurds? More gaurds? Hmmm.
The abuse of seemingly reasonable laws by corrupt officials is one of the reasons we have a bill or rights. You think you are very well informed, but are not. I suggest you read some history before you tell me to "Come on" again. It is a big deal. The government is NOT supposed to be in a position to do this, no matter how honest you think an government agency can be. Without power, there's no need for checks on it's abuse.
What he is saying is there is room for all.
on
Unlimited Airwaves
·
· Score: 2
Maybe we could start by allocating bandwidth to particular purposes on a lease term basis. Once you reach the end of your term, you have to show that continuing to allow you that bandwidth is the optimum use for the next lease period, if not, then no bandwidth.
Who would you appoint king to divide the oceans?
The whole point is that there is NO scarcity of bandwith. I'm not a PhD from MIT like Reed is so let's quote the article then the man:
David P. Reed gave a provocative talk to the Federal Communications Commission's Technological Advisory Council. He told the group of experts, in effect, that the FCC's fundamental mission is flawed, maybe obsolete.
Wow, heavy stuff. The FCC invited Reed to tell them they are impeeding the march of progress. That's impressive, perhapse they will listen, you too now:
``Radio waves pass through each other,'' Reed said. ``They do not damage each other.''
In the early days of radio, the gear could easily be confused by overlapping signals. But we can now make devices that can sort out the traffic.
Let's go to Reed's site to learn some more. Woops, freaking Real, encrypted pdfs requiring a non US plugin for ghost script. OK, enlightenment there will have to wait a little.
The basic concept is that there is more specturm than everyone needs, and therfore no need to regulate what was once considered scarce. Haven't you been convinced by the use of a single frequency to handle everyone's cell phones, bluetooth, 802.11 what not? Imagine if the entire specturm was allocated that way, free for everyone. Kinda like air. People like you would like to lease me the air I breath, wouldn't you? Hopefully, technical demonstrations will prove their worth before the FCC crushes everything by encouraging 2.4 GHz light bulbs. The revolution will come when people like you get out of the way and let the rest of the world do as it pleases with a virtually unlimited resource.
you are an absolute moron. if you want idiot-proof software, then buy a mac or a cash register or something.
Typical. You are telling me that anyone who gets burnt by M$ junk is a moron? That makes a whole lot of morons out there. Shame on you for blaming the user again. Thank you, AC and Sheldon for doing it so nastily with words like "incompetent", "stupid". We know what you M$ fan boys really think of people who don't waste all day restarting, patching, and running in circles for Bill Gates.
To think that the parent post was marked as flamebait.
Stupid worms/viruses/exploits will prevail until the MENTALITY of management changes.
Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me. How many times are people going to let themselves be burnt by Microsoft's intentionaly easy to break and push onto software?
All the trolls keep ssying, "Linux is not ready for the desktop." Hmphf! I'm so sick of that bull. M$ is not ready for anything. If it really were easier to get work done on M$ desktops and they could be protected, management might be justified in continuing to order new M$ junk. But it's not.
Debian kicks M$'s but, and Red Hat has all the bells and whistles any corporate user could want. At work, I've got one virtual desktop with tiny picutes on a single bar at the bottom of my screen. There's no way to segregate projects, so I have to cycle the little buttons and place keeping fails. A "power user" in the next cube has two freaking monitors eating his desk top, how stupid! The environment lacks useful scripting, and it's impossible to run processes on other M$ machines without getting out of your seat. Walk, click, click, click, where's the automation? Every two years the file formats change enough to make everyone "upgrade". The GUI's constant flux requires constant relearning, and seems to make less sense with every new improvement. Stability is a joke, as is speed. My first 486 gave comperable perfomance and speed back in 1993. It just burns me up. When I go home I sit at a single chair and look into a single good monitor and can control and run processes on any number of computers I can set up behind my firewall. At home, I move plenty of big pictues and files, no problems. Things at home HAVE gotten faster with new hardware. Why do people at management level put up with this expensive, invasive, rights denying, won't even work well with itself junk?
Someone somewhere is going to get the desk top switchover started and M$ is going to vanish. Poof, back into the cloud of hot air they started with.
Let Sheldon blame the users. Thanks Sheldon, we would not want to blame a poorly designed undocumented bunch of crap on top of an OS without real users and permisions would we? Microsoft fixed all that, didn't they?
Think about the possiblity that holes might be put in firewalls to allow such traffic between corporate sites, that would be another good way to blame the users. That way, every desktop with Access 2000 could be burnt by this. Wow, think of a coroprate cluster fuc, functioning that way. Then imagine a cluster of corperations. BARF.
GPi.org has the explicitly freeware versions of the software available on a number of mirrors worldwide, and does not appear to have been made a target here.
It's kind of hard to enforce the DCMA outside the US, isn't it?
NA is no longer selling PGP, right? It's a cost cutting measure, right? Sure, it's much cheaper to not defy your government and remain in business.
I've seen a lot of posts here accusing radius of being a Warez site. Sounds like big bullshit to me. That letter would have been sent bye the "anti-piracy" division long ago if this were true. Are these posters telling me that radius really does not know what NA has asked them to remove?
NA is within their legal rights in anycase. Their goofey EULA explicity alowed this kind of behavior, and US laws back them up. You never really owned it, you just used it. It's unatural, it's wasteful and it's stupid. That's why there is free software.. Drink all the free beer you want, but don't complain about the hangover or the night you spent sobering up in jail, or the little girl you ran over under the influence. The rest of us will tell you how obnoxious you were later.
OS backward compatibility usually takes care of this, especially for such simple command line utilities. I have tools last compiled a decade ago.
Oops, Linux don't do that.
It's very difficult to maintain compatibility with a backward OS, just ask the folks at Wine. =:>
The original poster is correct about things shifting under PGP. If you have not noticed, M$ is killing netscape style pulgins. This is only one example, many other things shift under M$. Have you seen M$?s new ASCII? Ever been frustrated when a print method shifted, forcing you to cut and paste your old program's output to some new piece of shit to print? Ever had a Printman that did not include ASCII box characters so that text art was broken? These are subtle ways of breaking old tools. You should expect more overt measures in the future from a company who's web sites refuse entry based on user-agent not Internet Exploder.
Also, you are a troll about old aplications not running. Debian has a an old libraries package that prommises to take care of problems. I would not know, because I've never had a problem like that.
Most "simple" utilities can be written as scripts that conform to standards for shells much older than 10 year old Linux. Awk, sed, cp, mv, how long have these names been around doing what they always do? Why bother to compile something that just calls reasonable tools for you? I suppose you could compile simple utilities like that if you 1)Don't have many tools so you can remember exaclty what they do without looking at the source, 2)Don't care to ever change what that utility does or how. Strangly enough, the only place that might be true is in an environment that lacks useful utilities to begin with, forcing you to compile substitutes of your own that can't be ported. Backward Compatible is right on target there.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does this have the ring of East Germany where every other citezen had been recurited into the secret police?
Let's quote that great document, the US Bill of Rights, so that we don't forget how things are supposed to be:
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I'm not sure what the constitutions of other nations say, but this one should keep government file clerks out of my mail. My email is a paper or effect. Why is it that government officials sworn to uphold the constitution tell me I have, "no reasonable expectation of privacy" with it regardless of encyption? My house has windows (not the software kind). Am I paying my governement to look through them?
Suddenly my Debian system says, "Oh, I hadn't thought of that." and dissapears in a cloud of smoke and logic. For a while, I thought I had and was contributing to something really great. All thanks to you and ZDnet for showing me the error of my ways.
Appologies to Duglas Adams, who now knows the answer to the God question and presumably has no further need to debate it.
So, how is that lack of direct reward keeping you from writing free software again? How does that keep all of this wonderful free software I'm using right now from existing and getting better? The silly article and troll poster claimed that these things were so.
These statements are as false as other fud that claims free software can't be used by comercial intersts. It's all part of the one billion dollars M$ spends a year on adverts. Blah blah blah, anything other than M$ bad. How silly.
I'd never recomend anyone quit their job, unless that job involved something unethical. Even then, unless that violation of others was likely to cause someone imediate harm, I would recomend finding another job before quitting.
Why is it that you can't use free software for your day job? I have to say that it's too bad for you and your company if that is so.
That's too bad, but never say never again. That user was mishandled, but it won't take them long to hate XP.
I'd never leave a newbie to install a box themselves and I'd never promise them hardware that won't work will. USB is not something I know how to work, nor am I good with sound, yet. The more people I get using reasonable software, the faster I'll get help.
For computers that sing and dance, I recomend keeping a clean copy of whatever M$ junk the computer came with. People generally look for XP when their 98 (as 60% of all windoze computers still are) fails them. They are sick of the reinstalls, and generally unaware of why 98 fails. Used only to access difficult pieces of hardware and blinded to the network, 98 lasts much longer.
I will however, tell them that free software can now take care of most of their computing needs and is generally superior to comercial alternatives, especially pirated junk, for issues of control, privacy and the ability to block adverts and other trash. A quick demonstation of Mozilla, Balsa, pretty window managers works well.
As for win2k and XP, pure crap. Win2k's USB support is the pits. I thought 98's support was bad because 98 gets confused and has to be rebuilt once in a while. Win2k has managed to make USB a non hot plugable device manager! When you remove a USB device, it give you this pathetic warning about impending system instability and data loss! Geez. When you combine that kind of performance with the rapicious advert pushing of XP and terrible lack of security, privacy and control, your friend is going to think computers suck in general. Too bad, but now you know why no one is buying new PC's. M$ has hyped their new junk over the moon, but it provides a much less enjoyable experience. So sad, too bad.
Free software will eventually replace non free device drivers and these issues will go away. Hardware makers are not going to be able to withstand poor sales forever and will do away with the major problem soon enough. In the mean time, I try not to raise anyone's expectations over reality and enjoy all the sofware I legitimatly own, and share what I can.
Who says you have to be unemployed to use free code? If you want to get things done, the fastest, cheapest and most sustainable way to do it is now with free code. The world is realizing this as trolls like you and ZDnet authors continue to write nonsense about not being able to earn money as the sun sets on boxed code. People who get things done will always be able to earn a good living. Free code is available to do anything non-free code does and generally does it better. Those who know how to use it will do just fine. Those who ignore it will continue to suffer for their ignorance.
The very idea of the article, that software can only be developed the way M$ does things, falls on it's face when you look at all the fantastic free software available. M$ has managed to develop one GUI with several minor variations and facelifts in ten years. There are several unerlying graphics managers available for Linux, BSD and other free software. On top of that there are dozens if not hundreds of window managers, all of which have significantly better performance and features to Windoze. Virtual desktops and pannels are common to most popular window managers. All are easier to use and configure, with text configuration files for each user and customizable popup menues in easy reach rather than at the bottom corner of the screen. Yet each window manager retains it's uniqueness so that users can chose which one they prefer before they start customizing or, if they chose, modify to their particular purpose. No comercial entity can keep up with the develpment pace. Monetary intrests inherent in their develpment model can hamper them, delaying the release of a new feature in order to sell a new version for example. Oh yeah, can you tell me what M$'s One Billion Dollar promotion of XP did for the quality of XP? Once again, free software can do anything non free does and generally does it better. The amount of free software available will continue to grow exponetially, unless blocked by bad laws.
The only thing free software keeps you from doing is violating the rights of others. Your children will not go hungry because of this, unless your company's business model is to keep others from being able to do what your software does. That, however, is a business model that will make all of us poor.
Make the Debonate virus. It runs under win32 to collect system information which it writes to a small partition at the end of hda. Then it does a Debian net install, completely securing the box by obliterating Windoze.
Try, "A good reason not to run Windows."
Oh, Oh, I know, I know! We could burn them and mix them up with dirt and send them to big holew in the ground, such as abandoned lead mines, then mine them again. Then again, we could just smelt the solder, mix it wit some rosin and roll it up on spools.
However, it appeared to leave a loophole by saying that if "proper methods" were used, the environment need not be harmed.
As the US Internal Revenue Service is fond of saying, "All income is taxable." Proper methods, without doubt, will consist of paying a licensing fee. If all those "made in China" tags on electronic junk is a guide, the Chineese government does not mind paying an environmental price. If they are developing anything like their Former Soviet friends did, the price will be high. This blurb, like any other where there is no freedom of speech and press, is just propaganda.
Hopefully, you are a long way from wanting to do such a thing. For $100 or so, you can have a nice Athlon mobo with a 700MHz processor. Buying a used system would be even cheaper. Of course, any other option would be much less encumbered by silly things M$ likes to put on junk, like the serial number he found.
The point is that stupid M$ and others are working to make hardware that the user has no control over but fail. It's just another proof that Senator Holling's wet dream of control of all digital devices can only be implimented by foolish laws. Inailienable rights are those which require vast expendatures to violate.
Sheet metal does rock, but aluminum flashing won't rust and is easier to work. A big roll of the stuff that will last for years. It's easier to work than steel and much lighter. The drawback is that flashing is thin and not as strong as available heavy steel sheet. You can overcome this by bending a few edges and mounting stiffening pieces. I love my aluminum sheet roll almost as much as I love duct tape.
Mixing steel and aluminum is a bad idea. Their electronegativities are far appart so your steel will rust quickly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it can be done and there are places for it.
After nearly a decade of U.S. persuasion and $7 million in technical IP assistance, a new IP law is under debate in the Egypt parliament. The law's authors hope that it will pass before the People's Assembly begins its summer recess on June 30.
FOR SALE, 65 Million like new Egyptians. Good condition, hardly abused. $7,000,000 OBO.
Now for the strange contradictory part. Arandir says
If RMS is correct in saying that "software should not be owned", then derivative software should be owned even less.
but also says
As a user of the BSD license, I wondered if Ransom could relicense my code under a per-seat license. The obvious answer is "yes". The not so obvious answer is "yes, but so what?"
The answer you seek is, so then Ransom owns the derivative work. You may not mind that, but you should not pretend it is not true.
Some of us DO mind when our work is used to enrich evil companies which seek to deprive others of their rights. I'm loath to do anykind of software work at all right now. My company is a M$ slave shop, and they own all of my work and ideas by contract. Anything I do is theirs. Anything that works makes the slave world of M$ that much more bearable for them and so perpetuates things that are evil regardless of my intentions and choice of license.
I'm afraid you jumped directly to plaid.
What market? In case you have not noticed, it's against the law to use the public right of way in most places. Most towns have a sinble cable company and a single phone company providing lines to houses. So you have a market of two choices. Good eh?
Competition was planned but aborted. The local bells got to compete in the long distance telephone market without alowing DSL access as they were supposed to. The cable companies have been told that they don't have to allow "competing services" on their digital networks, despite laws requiring access by TV broadcasters who represent competing services and can be recieved by alternate means.
Can do can be undone by bad laws. One single stinking frequency has been allocated to wireless networks, and it gets to share it with microwave ovens. Now that it's proved viable anyway, the FCC will crush it, just as they did TV over HAM. Then there you will be, all nice and shut down.
We all know what great rates and service BellSouth provides. Just go read their EULA for DSL - no servers kidies! BellSouth made the lowest bid for my University's connections once. They really screwed things up, and I'm not sure the place has recovered after eight years. T-1 is 1.5 M bits /second, that's about 10 DSL lines. $1,000/month is a going rape, especially when you consider that a 485 pcimcia serial line will give you the same performance on twisted pairs 1.5 miles long.
Rapes like that are why people thought opening telecomunications up to competition was a good idea. Consolidation of providers (mostly under Clinton but endorsed by Bush), and their mass purchase by entertainment companies shows how screwed up US law is getting. The poster who says the US is getting like Austrailia is correct.
You, Mr. NetJunkie, are a turd. You should expect more from your ISP than this. They are making plenty of money.
ISPs that do this are going to find their sales more depressed than 1% when they do this. When their friends and neighbors ask them about "broadband" they will report, "It's not worth it." Boom, sale goes away despite all advert generated hype. Sales of XP encumbered computers are having similar problems. When you make things suck, people don't buy them.
It's interesting how publishing is devolving back to the days of perpetual ownership of material and guilds. If DRM legislation has it's way, only certian people will have unecumbered machines for publication of all material. If the telcos have their way, everyone will have to meet their demands to publish on the internet. If you combine the wishes of all the stupid and short sighted comercial intests, digital content will prove more difficult to author, copy, and publish than traditional media. Traditional medial will be destroyed.
Remember what Orwell said. The party does not exist for the public good, it wills itself to power for power alone. 2 + 2 + 4, from this all else follows, so long as you can say it and make it known. Truth is the enemy of the party. The party is growing up before us and it's main force is DRM.
What they have is citizen information databases. Criminal information databases collect information on crimes. They had dirt files on innocent people collected for what? Routine monitoring? I don't need a monitor and I'm not going to pay you to do it.
The FBI's mission needs to be defined better than this. I'm not going to sit here and try to draw a line for them, I'm going to demand that they figure out what they should be doing and convince people it's right before they do it. Incidents like this go a long way toward convincing people that we don't need a federal police force.
Tell me why I'm taxed for this service.
Had it been the actual FBI selling this information and not a couple of bad apple agents pissed they didn't get a raise this year then perhaps it would be a huge story.
Tell me the practical difference. Tell me that the agents involved are not scape goats. Who's gaurding the gaurds? More gaurds? Hmmm.
The abuse of seemingly reasonable laws by corrupt officials is one of the reasons we have a bill or rights. You think you are very well informed, but are not. I suggest you read some history before you tell me to "Come on" again. It is a big deal. The government is NOT supposed to be in a position to do this, no matter how honest you think an government agency can be. Without power, there's no need for checks on it's abuse.
Who would you appoint king to divide the oceans?
The whole point is that there is NO scarcity of bandwith. I'm not a PhD from MIT like Reed is so let's quote the article then the man:
David P. Reed gave a provocative talk to the Federal Communications Commission's Technological Advisory Council. He told the group of experts, in effect, that the FCC's fundamental mission is flawed, maybe obsolete.
Wow, heavy stuff. The FCC invited Reed to tell them they are impeeding the march of progress. That's impressive, perhapse they will listen, you too now:
``Radio waves pass through each other,'' Reed said. ``They do not damage each other.'' In the early days of radio, the gear could easily be confused by overlapping signals. But we can now make devices that can sort out the traffic.
Let's go to Reed's site to learn some more. Woops, freaking Real, encrypted pdfs requiring a non US plugin for ghost script. OK, enlightenment there will have to wait a little.
The basic concept is that there is more specturm than everyone needs, and therfore no need to regulate what was once considered scarce. Haven't you been convinced by the use of a single frequency to handle everyone's cell phones, bluetooth, 802.11 what not? Imagine if the entire specturm was allocated that way, free for everyone. Kinda like air. People like you would like to lease me the air I breath, wouldn't you? Hopefully, technical demonstrations will prove their worth before the FCC crushes everything by encouraging 2.4 GHz light bulbs. The revolution will come when people like you get out of the way and let the rest of the world do as it pleases with a virtually unlimited resource.
Typical. You are telling me that anyone who gets burnt by M$ junk is a moron? That makes a whole lot of morons out there. Shame on you for blaming the user again. Thank you, AC and Sheldon for doing it so nastily with words like "incompetent", "stupid". We know what you M$ fan boys really think of people who don't waste all day restarting, patching, and running in circles for Bill Gates.
To think that the parent post was marked as flamebait.
Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me. How many times are people going to let themselves be burnt by Microsoft's intentionaly easy to break and push onto software?
All the trolls keep ssying, "Linux is not ready for the desktop." Hmphf! I'm so sick of that bull. M$ is not ready for anything. If it really were easier to get work done on M$ desktops and they could be protected, management might be justified in continuing to order new M$ junk. But it's not.
Debian kicks M$'s but, and Red Hat has all the bells and whistles any corporate user could want. At work, I've got one virtual desktop with tiny picutes on a single bar at the bottom of my screen. There's no way to segregate projects, so I have to cycle the little buttons and place keeping fails. A "power user" in the next cube has two freaking monitors eating his desk top, how stupid! The environment lacks useful scripting, and it's impossible to run processes on other M$ machines without getting out of your seat. Walk, click, click, click, where's the automation? Every two years the file formats change enough to make everyone "upgrade". The GUI's constant flux requires constant relearning, and seems to make less sense with every new improvement. Stability is a joke, as is speed. My first 486 gave comperable perfomance and speed back in 1993. It just burns me up. When I go home I sit at a single chair and look into a single good monitor and can control and run processes on any number of computers I can set up behind my firewall. At home, I move plenty of big pictues and files, no problems. Things at home HAVE gotten faster with new hardware. Why do people at management level put up with this expensive, invasive, rights denying, won't even work well with itself junk?
Someone somewhere is going to get the desk top switchover started and M$ is going to vanish. Poof, back into the cloud of hot air they started with.
Think about the possiblity that holes might be put in firewalls to allow such traffic between corporate sites, that would be another good way to blame the users. That way, every desktop with Access 2000 could be burnt by this. Wow, think of a coroprate cluster fuc, functioning that way. Then imagine a cluster of corperations. BARF.
It's kind of hard to enforce the DCMA outside the US, isn't it?
NA is no longer selling PGP, right? It's a cost cutting measure, right? Sure, it's much cheaper to not defy your government and remain in business.
I've seen a lot of posts here accusing radius of being a Warez site. Sounds like big bullshit to me. That letter would have been sent bye the "anti-piracy" division long ago if this were true. Are these posters telling me that radius really does not know what NA has asked them to remove?
NA is within their legal rights in anycase. Their goofey EULA explicity alowed this kind of behavior, and US laws back them up. You never really owned it, you just used it. It's unatural, it's wasteful and it's stupid. That's why there is free software.. Drink all the free beer you want, but don't complain about the hangover or the night you spent sobering up in jail, or the little girl you ran over under the influence. The rest of us will tell you how obnoxious you were later.
Oops, Linux don't do that.
It's very difficult to maintain compatibility with a backward OS, just ask the folks at Wine. =:>
The original poster is correct about things shifting under PGP. If you have not noticed, M$ is killing netscape style pulgins. This is only one example, many other things shift under M$. Have you seen M$?s new ASCII? Ever been frustrated when a print method shifted, forcing you to cut and paste your old program's output to some new piece of shit to print? Ever had a Printman that did not include ASCII box characters so that text art was broken? These are subtle ways of breaking old tools. You should expect more overt measures in the future from a company who's web sites refuse entry based on user-agent not Internet Exploder.
Also, you are a troll about old aplications not running. Debian has a an old libraries package that prommises to take care of problems. I would not know, because I've never had a problem like that.
Most "simple" utilities can be written as scripts that conform to standards for shells much older than 10 year old Linux. Awk, sed, cp, mv, how long have these names been around doing what they always do? Why bother to compile something that just calls reasonable tools for you? I suppose you could compile simple utilities like that if you 1)Don't have many tools so you can remember exaclty what they do without looking at the source, 2)Don't care to ever change what that utility does or how. Strangly enough, the only place that might be true is in an environment that lacks useful utilities to begin with, forcing you to compile substitutes of your own that can't be ported. Backward Compatible is right on target there.