Plus she'd prefer me to play Civ over WoW. I can get up and walk away from Civ at any moment.
Yeah keep telling yourself that.. Civ is the worst game ever for just-one-more-turn-itis. That brief scouting trip across the narrow sea turns into an intruiging diplomatic trade-for-technology followed by a forging of alliances, a call for assistance to chastise a bothersome neighbour, blitzkrieg, assassinations, betrayals and the frantic rush to convert your philosophical peacenik citizens into an ultra-nationalist heavily industrialised blood hungry race of warmongers...
And then you realise its dawn.. and you were so close to discovering the secret of rocketry and adding another wing to your imperial palace..
I always wondered how the IOC was able to extort, bully and threaten the way it does against people who use public-domain terms like Olympics, Olympia, and so on. Is there a compelling reason why Congress feels obliged to violate the 'for limited times' provision of copyright/patent/trademark constitutional law in relation to the IOC? Doesnt that make both Congress and the IOC liable for infringement, as the constitution is a higher authority than their collective one?
The regime of so-called 'Intellectual Property' must be the most crime-riddled and corrupt industry in existance, I dont think a day goes by when I dont hear of a powerful entity breaking its affiliated laws with impunity.
How dare governments act with the best interests of their constituents at heart, what an outrage! And in the interest of public health and their citizens well-being, the horror!
Far better that they support a non-entity that has no right to exist at all ( like a corporation ) and allow them to hoard property that cant be owned ( thoughts and ideas, of which patents are a subset ) at the potential cost of millions of deaths.
Nice to see a blow struck against fascism somewhere in the world, hopefully a stand like Taiwan is taking will be the first of many.
I ask you, would you ( and your family ) meekly submit to a long agonising, and easily preventable death if it meant a few extra dollars to a corporations profit margin? What a shining example of humanity you would be..
Its a pyrrhic, hollow victory if by the act of discoving a cure for some infectous disease, the cure is put beyond the reach of those most desperately in need of it via the means of patent licensing costs. In a situation where there is a conflict of interest between the profits of the patent owner, and the lives of thousands, you really have to take the side of humanity.
Thats not to say that corporations cannot be compensated for their work - The way I look at it, in such a situation where the cure for a disease like Malaria was being hoarded by a patent owner trying to extract the maximum profit from their research into creating the cure, then the patent should be revoked, the work made public domain, and the corporation paid appropriate damages.
The profit motive is not justification enough for the existance of patents ( or any other intellectual property ), if it cannot be harnessed for the good of the people then it may as well not exist - let Freedom reign unstifled and unrestricted. All Intellectual Property is an artificial limitation upon freedom done with the proviso that some net benefit will come from it.
Patents are much worse though - they prevent life saving drugs from being cheaply manufactured, an act which directly acts to kill people. Copyright merely stops people from downloading useless and pointless crap like metallica mp3s and microsoft software that does not benefit the owner or humanity as a whole in any way.
Patent fraud is also the least-prosecuted and yet most-damaging ( in an economic sense ) of all the so-called "Intellectual Property" crimes. The article several days ago here on/. about how x% of the human genome is patented by corporations? All 100% patent fraud - the prior art in question has existed for _millions_ of years! Ditto Microsoft committing hundreds of cases of patent fraud every day, patenting TCP/IP, FAT, memory-protection, and dozens of other concepts that have existed in IT for decades as prior art.
Why arent these criminals pursued and prosecuted the way file-sharers are? Being a large megacorp does not grant them the ability to violate the law, regardless of how incompetant or corrupt the USPTO may be.
Re:Maybe an OSS future isn't that bright afterall
on
Nessus Closes Source
·
· Score: 1
IBM, HP, Sun and the like are making lots of revenue from GPL licensed software, as are many other companies. Sure, they arent purely software-orientated, but it lets them sell a lot of hardware with very nice margins, and followup support packages that gives them an ongoing cashflow. So it does them very nicely.
RedHat are doing very well also, and.. are you ready for this..they _are_ a software company! Their bottom line is looking great, they are acquiring products and even open-sourcing them when they have previously been under a closed proprietry license like their directory server, so they have cash to burn. How does this correlate with your 'throat slitting' crushing despair and gloom suicide-pact outlook? Thats some great poetic dramatisation by the way, the family-destroying comment amused me greatly - oh the woe of open source!:)
Incidentally, nothing about the GPL prevents you from selling software licensed under it, you are perfectly free to do so, as a person or as a business. You must oblige by the stipulations of the GPL of course ( like making source code available ), but if you want to sell Debian DVDs then go ahead!
In my experience about 30% of managers are actually good. Of the remainder I would say maybe 40% are mediocre ( that is, they do their job at a basic level, and dont get in your way too much ), leaving the 30% remainder as truly awful ( ie company is amazingly happier and more productive when this person is on leave - as soon as they return projects are destroyed and delayed, staff are alienated or resign, customers leave or threaten to sue, etc ). Sad but true.. I'd like to think I'm not too cynical but there really are not many good managers. The ratio of good:ok:bad managers is much worse than general tech staff for a certainty.
My most memorable sign it was time to leave a company ( which sadly I failed to heed with the appropriate urgency.. live and learn ) ia the wonderful morale-boosting pick-me-up speech that follows a round of layoffs or outsourcing. "Its sad to see our esteemed colleagues go, but now we are more competive than ever before, we expect no more layoffs and hope that everyone pulls together as a team for the greater glory of $company !". Followed by the EXACT same speech after the next round of layoffs.. and the next.. until there is a palpable air of restrained panic every time there is a company meeting, and shifty eyed characters are eyeing the server racks thinking of how well that 4RU Compaq box would fit in the back of their car, and how many new harddrives they can sneak out under their shirt.
Its one thing for police to be killed in the line of duty, its another entirely for them to be killed while committing a felony themselves - in which situation they are not likely to have strength of numbers, as it only takes one honest cop to pull the pin on their corrupt colleagues. Do you think its inappropriate for police to be accountable and punished for embracing crime?
Peaceful resistance is only effective against attackers who retain any sort of ethical values. How well do do you think such tactics would work against fundamentalist insurgents, or a sadistic military that routinely employs torture, rape and terrorism against its perceived enemies? Try that against a junkie mugger and it will likely be the last thing you ever do.
Amazing that the police there are not commonly shot to death while in the act of breaking into folks homes the way you describe, badge or no badge. Its a pretty fundamental right to be secure in your home and to defend your family. Can you imagine such a thing happening in Texas for example?
Maybe if people took their rights a litle more seriously then the _government_ would learn to fear the _people_ rather than the other way around. They only exist at our sufferance after all.
Odd, I believe X to be one of the greatest strength of Unix ; yes, its used in other OSes besides Linux - does the presence of X in Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Irix, and so on make them impossible to use? Millions of X users beg to differ.
To fix something, you need to quantify its brokenness first, something you have not done well at:
X is not supposed to look good, nor is it supposed to be ugly, or have any sort of 'look' at all. Perhaps you are thinking of window managers, desktop environments or similar. Many of which arereasonablyattractive, caveat emptor.
Nor do I believe X is slow. What are you comparing it to? I get superior OpenGL performance under X in linux compared to the same hardware running windows with the equivalent version video drivers. X must be doing something right, but it could well be the linux kernel doing a lot better than the windows one at managing the hardware, admittedly.
Complaints about compiling code, fighting with drivers, software dependancies, and so on are not really weakness in X, merely a lack of experience in handling code. But not to worry, most *nix distributions are nice enough to ship binary builds of X that are both fast and include all the nice font rendering and antialiasing you might ever care for. Of course, you have the freedom to compile the lot by hand if you really want to, but it is by no means necessary. If your distribution of choice is not being cooperative, then investigatebetteralternatives.
Granted, nothing is ever 100% easy, but you sound like you are picking the hardest way forward and hence getting unneccessarily frustrated. If X was broken, then like everything else under linux ( driver support, schedulers, scalability, journaled filesystems etc all of which are better now than they have ever been and are still improving ), it _would_ be fixed.
The existance or popularity of non-free systems has no real bearing on free systems. Computers that attack their owners, destroy their files, spy on their owners online activity while reporting said activity to mafia-like groups like the RIAA, etc will be the ecosystem that dies out. Why will people pay for OSes, hardware, etc that are not merely defective, but actively hostile to their activities when Free systems exist that can be obtained for little or zero cost? Witness the explosive growth of the Firefox browser as an example that this can and will happen.
Oh, this discussion is not complete without a link to The Right to Read - overly paranoid or eerily prophetic, the predicted orwellian information society is approaching.
Libraries do a similar thing, and no one is stupid or greedy enough to call for the destruction of said libraries.
Remember that whole 'To promote the progress of science and useful arts' justification of the existance of copyright? I would argue that as soon as this justification is not being met for any particular copyrighted work, then copyright for that work should be nullified such that it is then part of the Public Domain in perpetuity.
How does burning down a library _promote_ science and the arts? How does a copyright owner demanding the destruction of copyrighted works fulfil this criteria?
There exists now DRM that can destroy music/video and other IP remotely if the copyright holder chooses to use this ability, like how TIVO is now being told to destroy free-to-air recorded TV shows after a few days, or like how iTunes or WMA will destroy your music should you not placate the record companies with sufficient monetary tribute.
Its all a scam, all of it - the entire industry are criminals in cahoots with corrupt government.
Fear of government oppression, free speech, and so on are not concepts that derive from a democractic government or the lack thereof. A government that is ruled by a benign monarch with absolute power may well be peaceful and prosperous with freedom of speech.
By the same token, a democracy may well be ruled by a tyrant that people vote for out of intimidation and fear, with very few freedoms.. perhaps the citizens have been programmed to fear freedom and the rampant individualism ( leading to new unsettling or unpopular opinions, questioning of the status quo, and social disorder ) that it brings.
Killing people who are citizens of a non-democratic government is just as barbaric and evil a practice as killing people of differing race or religion to impose your own religion or eugenic ideals upon them.
To me, both Thunderbird and Firefox arent so much cleaner as they are dumbed-down ( not to the point of being crippled, but to the point where they are second-class products ), compared to Mozilla. Fewer interfaces, more targeted at the average joe who is confused by the large number of config options in Mozillas Edit->Preferences. They are both 'mozilla-lite' if you will.
Sure Firefox and Thunderbird have their niches that they do very well in, but for my purposes they are inferior to the Mozilla suite, which is why I'm happy development on Mozilla is continuing. Its an interface that has evolved from the netscape 2.x, 3.x and 4.x series codebases, and has been in development from the first mozilla milestone ( Remember those ? ) to now. Its mature, I know where everything is, what its used for, and make use of most features.
That was a nice strawman argument huh? Lets take the purely fictional situation of 'your corporation owns you 24/7 during the course of your employment with them', pretend this covers the entirety of all employees that exist, and therefore conclude that all employees are thieves and hence opensource is inherently criminal and unethical.
How many of those assumptions are complete and total garbage? If your employer claims to own your creative output 24/7, then I hope you are invoicing them for ( or claiming the salaried equivalent of ) 168 hours of work each week.
If you arent, then your employer is underpaying you. Or by the parlance of this pathetic article, they are STEALING from you!!
So you think that it's fine that Microsoft can now release basically any load of old toss (eg, Windows) and label it "Linux"? Or anyone else for that matter.
Should that ever happen, it would take a few nanoseconds for the truth about the fake-linux to come out. The company responsible would be mocked and humiliated in every form of IT media that exists, including here on/.
What I'm fine about is that I now no longer have to worry about receiving extortion notices from laywers demanding bribes ( aka trademark licensing fees ) of thousands of dollars just because I mention that my small business sells Linux support, or systems pre-configured with Linux!
Remember the whole 'free as in speech' aspect of the GPL that the linux kernel is licensed under? That particular freedom has now been upheld in the domain of language and communication, which is a damn fine thing.
Thats a horrid precedent ; the only reason the DMCA was passed was due to the existance of the 'reverse engineering for interoperability' clause - without which the DMCA itself was clearly criminal and in contravention of hundreds of years of standard property law.
I look at this the same way I would look at a situation in which a EULA says "Click on this and you agree we can rape your daughter/steal your car/murder your family". Its not a right that can be given up, EULA or otherwise. No corporation can put themselves above the law by churning out some sleazy clause in some 100 page agreement, they simply have no legal authority to do so!
That being said, its Blizzard who is in violation of the DMCA. Its as much of a legal obligation on the IP creator as it is on the licensors of said IP. This is an obligation they are violating.
Its pretty blantant that 'refilling an ink cartridge' is also an issue that does not meet any of the requirements of a patent application ( no prior art, non-obviousness, etc ). So Lexmark are committing patent fraud, and the USPTO and the Ninth are colluding with them in this fraud.
Furthermore purchasing the product confers upon the buyer all of the rights of ownership, including the right to do whatever they damn well want with the item. Eat it, refill it, use it in a religious ritual, give it away, lease it to others - all of these are perfectly ok. The box and the 'open this package and u r a stupid head hahahaha' so called 'contract' is also the property of the buyer, they can do whatever they please with this as well. The Ninth should be well aware of this.
Why is the Ninth committing fraud against consumers?
The strong force is why the lighter elements are bound so tightly together - if you ever tried splitting a helium atom you would find it takes a lot of energy to overcome the binding power of the strong force that holds the two protons together, more or less this is the same amount of energy released during hydrogen/hydrogen fusion to produce the helium, giving us conservation of mass & energy.
By the same token the heavy elements have nuclei that are very large and chunky, the distances and diamater of which exceeds the distance over which the strong force can operate, its a very short-range effect. So the electrostatic repulsion between all those positive protons bunched in together comes into play - bits and pieces are repelled sufficiently, break off and are ejected. Hey presto, we have radioactivity, giving us a lighter main atom with a few extra bits ( alpha particles/helium typically ) now drifting around on their own. This is why the larger the atom, the shorter the lifespan before radioactive decay kicks in. The heaviest of the elements known dont exist in nature because they decay to lighter elements nanoseconds after being created.
Until we can shovel matter into controlled singularities in a sustainable way, fusion looks like being the next best thing in the way of scalable and efficient power generation. There is a heck of a lot of deuterium in ordinary sea water, at least in terms of the energy output per unit of fuel. Compare this to the pollution, scarce nature, inefficiencies and political problems of coal, oil and even uranium-based energy production, and fusion is the clear winner.
Perhaps its a new ploy by the Australian arm of SCO? Extorting money by virtue of the linux trademark rather than the linux copyright, what a brilliant and innovative idea!
You had PUNCH CARDS? We wrote all our code in HARDWARE! We had to go to the iron ore mines, fight off the dragons, endure the bitter code
There were perl programmers around way back then? Self loathing and masochism must be great for ones longevity, maybe they should look into distilling 'essential essence of perl' into a line of rejuvenating skin-care products.
I'm not a windows person, but I have never seen a windows system with _any_ resistance to spyware, how can you justify the statement 'Windows now does have a pretty good resistance to spyware' ? Has there been some brand new whizz-o-matic piece of microsoft software released that magically protects users that I'm not aware of? Microsoft have in recent weeks tried to aquire spyware companies, how does that bode for the user experience do you think? Maybe their next move is to include other forms of malware like viruses in their next release of windows.
Ad-Adware and related tools are all well and good, but they are third-party addons that most people will never use, and they ( at best ) remove the spyware infections, the system is still wide open and vulnerable to attack.
It seems to me the best remedy to this problem is to throw out Microsoft. Ditch IE for starters, and then systematically throw out every other piece of MS software until your computer is spyware, virus and problem free.
Antimatter would do a great job heating it up, but at the loss of a portion of the coffee, which would be annihilated. I hate seeing good coffee wasted, even on such an efficient process as total conversion of matter to energy.
Fitting a magnetic bottle and cyclotron into a small portable coffeecup is also somewhat of a dilemma.
No discussion on the technical merits and operation of DNS is complete without at least one reference to the following DNS Howto, presented in a pleasing visual format that is easily understood by internet novices.
Slashdot Mirror
Plus she'd prefer me to play Civ over WoW. I can get up and walk away from Civ at any moment.
Yeah keep telling yourself that.. Civ is the worst game ever for just-one-more-turn-itis. That brief scouting trip across the narrow sea turns into an intruiging diplomatic trade-for-technology followed by a forging of alliances, a call for assistance to chastise a bothersome neighbour, blitzkrieg, assassinations, betrayals and the frantic rush to convert your philosophical peacenik citizens into an ultra-nationalist heavily industrialised blood hungry race of warmongers...
And then you realise its dawn.. and you were so close to discovering the secret of rocketry and adding another wing to your imperial palace..
I always wondered how the IOC was able to extort, bully and threaten the way it does against people who use public-domain terms like Olympics, Olympia, and so on. Is there a compelling reason why Congress feels obliged to violate the 'for limited times' provision of copyright/patent/trademark constitutional law in relation to the IOC? Doesnt that make both Congress and the IOC liable for infringement, as the constitution is a higher authority than their collective one?
The regime of so-called 'Intellectual Property' must be the most crime-riddled and corrupt industry in existance, I dont think a day goes by when I dont hear of a powerful entity breaking its affiliated laws with impunity.
How dare governments act with the best interests of their constituents at heart, what an outrage! And in the interest of public health and their citizens well-being, the horror!
Far better that they support a non-entity that has no right to exist at all ( like a corporation ) and allow them to hoard property that cant be owned ( thoughts and ideas, of which patents are a subset ) at the potential cost of millions of deaths.
Nice to see a blow struck against fascism somewhere in the world, hopefully a stand like Taiwan is taking will be the first of many.
I ask you, would you ( and your family ) meekly submit to a long agonising, and easily preventable death if it meant a few extra dollars to a corporations profit margin? What a shining example of humanity you would be..
Its a pyrrhic, hollow victory if by the act of discoving a cure for some infectous disease, the cure is put beyond the reach of those most desperately in need of it via the means of patent licensing costs. In a situation where there is a conflict of interest between the profits of the patent owner, and the lives of thousands, you really have to take the side of humanity.
Thats not to say that corporations cannot be compensated for their work - The way I look at it, in such a situation where the cure for a disease like Malaria was being hoarded by a patent owner trying to extract the maximum profit from their research into creating the cure, then the patent should be revoked, the work made public domain, and the corporation paid appropriate damages.
The profit motive is not justification enough for the existance of patents ( or any other intellectual property ), if it cannot be harnessed for the good of the people then it may as well not exist - let Freedom reign unstifled and unrestricted. All Intellectual Property is an artificial limitation upon freedom done with the proviso that some net benefit will come from it.
Patents are much worse though - they prevent life saving drugs from being cheaply manufactured, an act which directly acts to kill people. Copyright merely stops people from downloading useless and pointless crap like metallica mp3s and microsoft software that does not benefit the owner or humanity as a whole in any way.
/. about how x% of the human genome is patented by corporations? All 100% patent fraud - the prior art in question has existed for _millions_ of years! Ditto Microsoft committing hundreds of cases of patent fraud every day, patenting TCP/IP, FAT, memory-protection, and dozens of other concepts that have existed in IT for decades as prior art.
Patent fraud is also the least-prosecuted and yet most-damaging ( in an economic sense ) of all the so-called "Intellectual Property" crimes. The article several days ago here on
Why arent these criminals pursued and prosecuted the way file-sharers are? Being a large megacorp does not grant them the ability to violate the law, regardless of how incompetant or corrupt the USPTO may be.
IBM, HP, Sun and the like are making lots of revenue from GPL licensed software, as are many other companies. Sure, they arent purely software-orientated, but it lets them sell a lot of hardware with very nice margins, and followup support packages that gives them an ongoing cashflow. So it does them very nicely.
:)
RedHat are doing very well also, and.. are you ready for this..they _are_ a software company! Their bottom line is looking great, they are acquiring products and even open-sourcing them when they have previously been under a closed proprietry license like their directory server, so they have cash to burn. How does this correlate with your 'throat slitting' crushing despair and gloom suicide-pact outlook? Thats some great poetic dramatisation by the way, the family-destroying comment amused me greatly - oh the woe of open source!
Incidentally, nothing about the GPL prevents you from selling software licensed under it, you are perfectly free to do so, as a person or as a business. You must oblige by the stipulations of the GPL of course ( like making source code available ), but if you want to sell Debian DVDs then go ahead!
In my experience about 30% of managers are actually good. Of the remainder I would say maybe 40% are mediocre ( that is, they do their job at a basic level, and dont get in your way too much ), leaving the 30% remainder as truly awful ( ie company is amazingly happier and more productive when this person is on leave - as soon as they return projects are destroyed and delayed, staff are alienated or resign, customers leave or threaten to sue, etc ). Sad but true.. I'd like to think I'm not too cynical but there really are not many good managers. The ratio of good:ok:bad managers is much worse than general tech staff for a certainty.
My most memorable sign it was time to leave a company ( which sadly I failed to heed with the appropriate urgency.. live and learn ) ia the wonderful morale-boosting pick-me-up speech that follows a round of layoffs or outsourcing. "Its sad to see our esteemed colleagues go, but now we are more competive than ever before, we expect no more layoffs and hope that everyone pulls together as a team for the greater glory of $company !". Followed by the EXACT same speech after the next round of layoffs.. and the next.. until there is a palpable air of restrained panic every time there is a company meeting, and shifty eyed characters are eyeing the server racks thinking of how well that 4RU Compaq box would fit in the back of their car, and how many new harddrives they can sneak out under their shirt.
Its one thing for police to be killed in the line of duty, its another entirely for them to be killed while committing a felony themselves - in which situation they are not likely to have strength of numbers, as it only takes one honest cop to pull the pin on their corrupt colleagues. Do you think its inappropriate for police to be accountable and punished for embracing crime?
Peaceful resistance is only effective against attackers who retain any sort of ethical values. How well do do you think such tactics would work against fundamentalist insurgents, or a sadistic military that routinely employs torture, rape and terrorism against its perceived enemies? Try that against a junkie mugger and it will likely be the last thing you ever do.
Amazing that the police there are not commonly shot to death while in the act of breaking into folks homes the way you describe, badge or no badge. Its a pretty fundamental right to be secure in your home and to defend your family. Can you imagine such a thing happening in Texas for example?
Maybe if people took their rights a litle more seriously then the _government_ would learn to fear the _people_ rather than the other way around. They only exist at our sufferance after all.
Odd, I believe X to be one of the greatest strength of Unix ; yes, its used in other OSes besides Linux - does the presence of X in Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Irix, and so on make them impossible to use? Millions of X users beg to differ.
To fix something, you need to quantify its brokenness first, something you have not done well at:
X is not supposed to look good, nor is it supposed to be ugly, or have any sort of 'look' at all. Perhaps you are thinking of window managers, desktop environments or similar. Many of which are reasonably attractive, caveat emptor.
Nor do I believe X is slow. What are you comparing it to? I get superior OpenGL performance under X in linux compared to the same hardware running windows with the equivalent version video drivers. X must be doing something right, but it could well be the linux kernel doing a lot better than the windows one at managing the hardware, admittedly.
Complaints about compiling code, fighting with drivers, software dependancies, and so on are not really weakness in X, merely a lack of experience in handling code. But not to worry, most *nix distributions are nice enough to ship binary builds of X that are both fast and include all the nice font rendering and antialiasing you might ever care for. Of course, you have the freedom to compile the lot by hand if you really want to, but it is by no means necessary. If your distribution of choice is not being cooperative, then investigate better alternatives.
Granted, nothing is ever 100% easy, but you sound like you are picking the hardest way forward and hence getting unneccessarily frustrated. If X was broken, then like everything else under linux ( driver support, schedulers, scalability, journaled filesystems etc all of which are better now than they have ever been and are still improving ), it _would_ be fixed.
The existance or popularity of non-free systems has no real bearing on free systems. Computers that attack their owners, destroy their files, spy on their owners online activity while reporting said activity to mafia-like groups like the RIAA, etc will be the ecosystem that dies out. Why will people pay for OSes, hardware, etc that are not merely defective, but actively hostile to their activities when Free systems exist that can be obtained for little or zero cost? Witness the explosive growth of the Firefox browser as an example that this can and will happen.
Oh, this discussion is not complete without a link to The Right to Read - overly paranoid or eerily prophetic, the predicted orwellian information society is approaching.
You could alway flee or defect to, or claim poltical asylum in free nations beyond the reach of the MPAA, RIAA and US Govt.. like Iran and Cuba.
Libraries do a similar thing, and no one is stupid or greedy enough to call for the destruction of said libraries.
Remember that whole 'To promote the progress of science and useful arts' justification of the existance of copyright? I would argue that as soon as this justification is not being met for any particular copyrighted work, then copyright for that work should be nullified such that it is then part of the Public Domain in perpetuity.
How does burning down a library _promote_ science and the arts? How does a copyright owner demanding the destruction of copyrighted works fulfil this criteria?
There exists now DRM that can destroy music/video and other IP remotely if the copyright holder chooses to use this ability, like how TIVO is now being told to destroy free-to-air recorded TV shows after a few days, or like how iTunes or WMA will destroy your music should you not placate the record companies with sufficient monetary tribute.
Its all a scam, all of it - the entire industry are criminals in cahoots with corrupt government.
Fear of government oppression, free speech, and so on are not concepts that derive from a democractic government or the lack thereof. A government that is ruled by a benign monarch with absolute power may well be peaceful and prosperous with freedom of speech.
By the same token, a democracy may well be ruled by a tyrant that people vote for out of intimidation and fear, with very few freedoms.. perhaps the citizens have been programmed to fear freedom and the rampant individualism ( leading to new unsettling or unpopular opinions, questioning of the status quo, and social disorder ) that it brings.
Killing people who are citizens of a non-democratic government is just as barbaric and evil a practice as killing people of differing race or religion to impose your own religion or eugenic ideals upon them.
To me, both Thunderbird and Firefox arent so much cleaner as they are dumbed-down ( not to the point of being crippled, but to the point where they are second-class products ), compared to Mozilla. Fewer interfaces, more targeted at the average joe who is confused by the large number of config options in Mozillas Edit->Preferences. They are both 'mozilla-lite' if you will.
Sure Firefox and Thunderbird have their niches that they do very well in, but for my purposes they are inferior to the Mozilla suite, which is why I'm happy development on Mozilla is continuing. Its an interface that has evolved from the netscape 2.x, 3.x and 4.x series codebases, and has been in development from the first mozilla milestone ( Remember those ? ) to now. Its mature, I know where everything is, what its used for, and make use of most features.
That was a nice strawman argument huh? Lets take the purely fictional situation of 'your corporation owns you 24/7 during the course of your employment with them', pretend this covers the entirety of all employees that exist, and therefore conclude that all employees are thieves and hence opensource is inherently criminal and unethical.
How many of those assumptions are complete and total garbage? If your employer claims to own your creative output 24/7, then I hope you are invoicing them for ( or claiming the salaried equivalent of ) 168 hours of work each week.
If you arent, then your employer is underpaying you. Or by the parlance of this pathetic article, they are STEALING from you!!
So you think that it's fine that Microsoft can now release basically any load of old toss (eg, Windows) and label it "Linux"? Or anyone else for that matter.
/.
Should that ever happen, it would take a few nanoseconds for the truth about the fake-linux to come out. The company responsible would be mocked and humiliated in every form of IT media that exists, including here on
What I'm fine about is that I now no longer have to worry about receiving extortion notices from laywers demanding bribes ( aka trademark licensing fees ) of thousands of dollars just because I mention that my small business sells Linux support, or systems pre-configured with Linux!
Remember the whole 'free as in speech' aspect of the GPL that the linux kernel is licensed under? That particular freedom has now been upheld in the domain of language and communication, which is a damn fine thing.
Thats a horrid precedent ; the only reason the DMCA was passed was due to the existance of the 'reverse engineering for interoperability' clause - without which the DMCA itself was clearly criminal and in contravention of hundreds of years of standard property law.
I look at this the same way I would look at a situation in which a EULA says "Click on this and you agree we can rape your daughter/steal your car/murder your family". Its not a right that can be given up, EULA or otherwise. No corporation can put themselves above the law by churning out some sleazy clause in some 100 page agreement, they simply have no legal authority to do so!
That being said, its Blizzard who is in violation of the DMCA. Its as much of a legal obligation on the IP creator as it is on the licensors of said IP. This is an obligation they are violating.
Its pretty blantant that 'refilling an ink cartridge' is also an issue that does not meet any of the requirements of a patent application ( no prior art, non-obviousness, etc ). So Lexmark are committing patent fraud, and the USPTO and the Ninth are colluding with them in this fraud.
Furthermore purchasing the product confers upon the buyer all of the rights of ownership, including the right to do whatever they damn well want with the item. Eat it, refill it, use it in a religious ritual, give it away, lease it to others - all of these are perfectly ok. The box and the 'open this package and u r a stupid head hahahaha' so called 'contract' is also the property of the buyer, they can do whatever they please with this as well. The Ninth should be well aware of this.
Why is the Ninth committing fraud against consumers?
The strong force is why the lighter elements are bound so tightly together - if you ever tried splitting a helium atom you would find it takes a lot of energy to overcome the binding power of the strong force that holds the two protons together, more or less this is the same amount of energy released during hydrogen/hydrogen fusion to produce the helium, giving us conservation of mass & energy.
By the same token the heavy elements have nuclei that are very large and chunky, the distances and diamater of which exceeds the distance over which the strong force can operate, its a very short-range effect. So the electrostatic repulsion between all those positive protons bunched in together comes into play - bits and pieces are repelled sufficiently, break off and are ejected. Hey presto, we have radioactivity, giving us a lighter main atom with a few extra bits ( alpha particles/helium typically ) now drifting around on their own. This is why the larger the atom, the shorter the lifespan before radioactive decay kicks in. The heaviest of the elements known dont exist in nature because they decay to lighter elements nanoseconds after being created.
Until we can shovel matter into controlled singularities in a sustainable way, fusion looks like being the next best thing in the way of scalable and efficient power generation. There is a heck of a lot of deuterium in ordinary sea water, at least in terms of the energy output per unit of fuel. Compare this to the pollution, scarce nature, inefficiencies and political problems of coal, oil and even uranium-based energy production, and fusion is the clear winner.
Perhaps its a new ploy by the Australian arm of SCO? Extorting money by virtue of the linux trademark rather than the linux copyright, what a brilliant and innovative idea!
You had PUNCH CARDS? We wrote all our code in HARDWARE! We had to go to the iron ore mines, fight off the dragons, endure the bitter code
There were perl programmers around way back then? Self loathing and masochism must be great for ones longevity, maybe they should look into distilling 'essential essence of perl' into a line of rejuvenating skin-care products.
I'm not a windows person, but I have never seen a windows system with _any_ resistance to spyware, how can you justify the statement 'Windows now does have a pretty good resistance to spyware' ? Has there been some brand new whizz-o-matic piece of microsoft software released that magically protects users that I'm not aware of? Microsoft have in recent weeks tried to aquire spyware companies, how does that bode for the user experience do you think? Maybe their next move is to include other forms of malware like viruses in their next release of windows.
Ad-Adware and related tools are all well and good, but they are third-party addons that most people will never use, and they ( at best ) remove the spyware infections, the system is still wide open and vulnerable to attack.
It seems to me the best remedy to this problem is to throw out Microsoft. Ditch IE for starters, and then systematically throw out every other piece of MS software until your computer is spyware, virus and problem free.
Antimatter would do a great job heating it up, but at the loss of a portion of the coffee, which would be annihilated. I hate seeing good coffee wasted, even on such an efficient process as total conversion of matter to energy.
Fitting a magnetic bottle and cyclotron into a small portable coffeecup is also somewhat of a dilemma.
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