This is a Commercial News Outlet [. ..] it should be subjected to the same criticism that CNN, Fox News, or any other influential news outlet should be subject to
Come now. First of all, I hardly consider a few banners and the ability to buy your way out of them "commerical news." I don't consider somebody else paying for everything "commercial news." And even if the editors are pulling in salaries--and I don't know if they are or not--the two groups still can not be compared for several reasons.
1) Slashdot is a niche site. How many pro-Windows articles have you seen lately? How many great submissions applauding Microsoft's successful business ventures? A handful? None? The site is not meant to apply to everybody and it is not meant to be bias-free. In fact it lives largely on bias. I see no reasons the editors or submitters should be expected to rein in their bias if the commenters don't have to rein in theirs. (See #2.) Besides, if you're telling me Fox News reins in their biases, you're out of your mind.
2) The main appeal of Slashdot is the comments, not the news. A quick search of Yahoo or Google can find most of the news stories. The value is in coming here and reading the reactions of people. The value is the community that has surfaced around the site. The best thing here is that there is some sort of expert on just about any topic that comes up here; there are always some people who have experienced what is reported on or can add other insights to them. When Fox News or CNN lets every Joe Citizen off the street who wants to talk about a subject into the studio, then perhaps I'll buy the comparison.
3. Even if the editors were made multi-millionaires for dedicating their day to Slashdot--and again, I do not know one way or another (minus the exaggeration)--their work on stories is minimal. The average submitter is not an editor, they are readers like you or I. So even in the event that editors might deserve to be held to higher standards as a "commercial news source," we damn sure shouldn't be bitching about the volunteers submitting articles for us to read.
I personally VALUE comments like these as indicators of how people feel about Slashdot insofar as I'm concerned that Slashdot maintains an acceptable reputation for a serious forum of discussion.
Insofar as Slashdot maintains an acceptable reputation for a serious forum of discussion. Yes. Where does "has anyone noticed that most of the 'submitter's' writeups fall into the poor category?" fall in to serious discussion? What does it add to the article? What does slamming the submitter for "his slant and myriad questions" help to provide? And what the hell is wrong for a submitter to provide those myriad questions to provoke discussion? Why is that a capital offense around here?
If you don't like the criticism, don't read them
Preface your nonsense with a title of "USELESS CRITICISM - DON'T READ" and I will oblige. And yes, it is useless. The sheer volume of it should tell you that even if you really are concerned about it, it's not doing a damn bit of good. So save the breath and save those of us who don't want to read it the headache.
I think the article had it just about right: people simply don't understand open-source. It used to be that unless they researched themselves, or were personally involved, that they probably knew nothing about it. But now, as companies such as Microsoft are beginning to see products such as Linux as increasing threats on their market share, the average consumer is hearing something--and it's coming from Microsoft. Needless to say, that's not going to be positive! And when even open-source's most respected people step up and say something, they get responses like, "Linus who?"
And the bottom line is, the average consumer just doesn't care. The common conceptions have become that OS crashes are to be expected and put up with. They don't see why they should they take on the admittedly somewhat steep learning curve of a transition from Windows to Linux even if they do understand the stability difference.
Another problem is support. It's nice and true that in open-source, you can often contact the developer directly. But any response you get is often at the developer's leisure and time-permitting. Many don't deal with support issues at all aside from, say, putting together a manual/FAQ. Community input is great, it's something I've always enjoyed, but it's not the end-all be-all, especially for the novice user.
So, what exactly is wrong with these sorts of articles? Yes, a lot of it is preaching to the choir. More of it is that people are not given a convincing reason to switch. The biggest problem is likely that it just doesn't reach enough people; not nearly as many as MS or other companies bent on keeping open-source down can. And open-source is fighting the uphill battle here. MS can just roll rocks down as we climb. The only real risks MS takes is letting us reach the summit.
One thing I've learned from working with Dell for the past few years is that they don't give a flip about the home users
I don't agree. I just purchased a Dell a few weeks ago. I did have a problem with it: When I got it, it began lagging to unusability (five minute boot times and about the same to load any program) about the second day. It would randomly alternate between terrible lag and perfectly fine. My guess was that the hard drive was on its way out.
Anyway, it was a new computer. I am quite capable of replacing a hard drive--and indeed, they offered to send a replacement--but I didn't care to do it for a computer I had just bought. They offered a new motherboard; again I refused. It didn't take long. They offered to replace the entire computer. To top it off, they got the new computer coming to me the day after my call and sent it Next Day Air. They, of course, provided free shipping for the broken computer back to them, so the two weeks of delay I was worried about was slashed to days and the potential hassle turned out to be minimal.
Now I'm not happy about getting a machine that started dying the minute I took it out of the box, but I was happy with their level of responsiveness and the speed with which they remedied the problem. Also, my brother bought a Dell about a year before about had absolutely no problems with them. (He also purchased several Dells for his workplace, with no complaints, and Dell showed their appreciation for his multitude of purchases--they were in his name, not the companies, by the way--by giving him a free PDA.) I know other people who have Dells as well and haven't heard them complain about the machine or the service.
Is the tech support good? No. It's the same thing you encounter at most places though: Somebody reading from a set of files. Sadly that is sufficient for most callers who forgot to plug their machine in but little beyond. We just saw an article on/. that Dell is moving their call centers back from India, so maybe that will help. I'm not holding my breath, but I'm not willing to complain about Dell's support when even companies as huge as Microsoft, with their sort of money they could be throwing around, have their techs reading from a document that I could have just read from the Internet. As far as their responsiveness to my issues and willingess to fix the problem, I have no absolutely no complaints. I pushed for the solution that would cause them the absolute worst headache and monetary cost and they agreed without incident.
Why the hell is it that people continually feel the need to run down the submiters, the editors and everybody else here who is working for you to provide you a free service that, by your being here, I assume you find both enjoyable and informative?
Don't like their writing? Submit your own stories. Stop coming. Whatever. Just quit bitching already. It's not funny, it's not insightful, it's not on topic and it is of no value.
Since my cable modem lines are the property of AOL-TimeWarner, do they have the right to do with as they please?
Sigh. Let's try this again.
"Since computers, networks, etc at work at taken to be the property of the company--it's theirs to do with as they please."
If you work at your ISP, then yes, what you do at work and with their equipment is theirs. They can read your email, they can ruffle through your desk drawers, and they can monitor your IMs.
Yes, there are wiretap laws. They also don't apply to the situation I described. I searched Google for the phrase, "do wiretap laws apply to employers?". One of the results says, quote, "With the federal and state wiretapping statutes permitting employers' monitoring e-mail communications, and with courts holding that common law intrusion into seclusion privacy claims don't apply since there is no reasonable expectation of privacy when e-mail is sent over an employer's system, employees should understand that employers may monitor electronic communications even without reserving the right to do so in their e-mail policies." The emphasis is mine.
For another matter, courts have ruled that employers may monitor phone calls in an effort to determine if the content is business or personal. There is usually a time limit they can listen. Another quote, related to both matters, from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, reads: "Workers of the world are exposed to many types of privacy-invasive monitoring while earning a living. These include [. ..] Internet monitoring and filtering, E-mail monitoring, instant message monitoring, phone monitoring [. ..] and keystroke logging." You'll note that while the article lists all sorts of reasons employers might not want to monitor such communications, it makes no mention that they can't. It does go on to mention restrictions on how and when they can, according to legislation, but has a massive piece dedicated to all the loopholes and instances where employers can still do it.
In short, one last quote, from this page, which just about sums it up: "The second exemption is that the ECPA [the legislation that provides what few restrictions there are] exempts from liability the person or entity providing the communication service. Where this service is provided by the employer, the ECPA has been interpreted as permitting the employers broad discretion to read and disclose the contents of e-mail communications, without the employee's consent."
It sucks. I will be the first to admit it. But it's a legal reality.
If you monitored them with consent, couldn't that introduce a bias?
Why? That's like saying that conducting a research study introduces a bias into whether or not somet hingreally works. They're just observing to see what goes on.
If they were monitored without consent, wouldn't that be a breech of privacy?
You have no privacy at work. Your employer can rummage through your desk drawers or read your email and there's nothing you can do about it. I don't know if you're in the US, but the Constitution is written to limit government not the citizen. Since computers, networks, etc at work at taken to be the property of the company--it's theirs to do with as they please.
I liked it when Clark said "We'll take away any incentives for companies that want to outsource or leave the country. And we'll have incentives for companies to create jobs in here" but I don't believe it.
I thought it was a good plan. But I do have a question: Why don't you believe it? I completely believe your story that you were being shadowed by people who would ultimately you and that is the problem. But Clark isn't president, so I don't see why you don't believe the statement.
If what you didn't believe is that such a plan would work, I think it would. In part because such jobs are already starting to come back and if people get a bit of extra money in their stockings for doing what they're already being pressured to do, so much the better.
As for the original quote from Clark (which was taken completely out of context), let me simply remind people: Clark is not a politician. Up until a few months ago, Clark was a retired four-star general and a military commentator for CNN. The last line was a blunder. He did not mean that he doesn't care about software jobs in the US, he simply meant that there are other important technologies to pursue. I believe what the grandparent's more complete version of the quote left out was the beginning, which read something on the order of "I am very concerned with jobs leaving America." He continued on, as quoted in the grandparent, with what he would do to keep jobs here and bring them back.
ADDITIONALLY, NOT exclusively, he stated that we needed a national goals program to direct science projects and that we needed to pour more money into research.
As I said, Clark is not a politican. I, for one, find that refreshing. More importantly in my mind, he can challenge Bush on every area of strength Bush has and best him (gee, a pilot lieutenant who did a fantastic job of guarding Texas during Vietnam, or a commander who was shot three times in combat in the jungles and later rose to be the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe for NATO?). He can also challenge him on issues Bush is weak on, such as the economy: Clark's master's degree from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar, was in part in economics, and he taught economics at West Point. So as to the great-grandparent (god that's awkward), let's not bastardize the man's statements for a political point. I advise everybody to check out Clark's position of issues at http://clark04.com/issues/ and make up their minds with all the information.
Yee wants harmful matter to include violent video games that "depict serious injury to human beings in a manner that is especially heinous, atrocious or cruel," particularly those that use the "first-person shooter" perspective.
Two things jump out about me.
1. I don't think they are going to be able to separate a "first-person shooter" game from other games and apply laws differently to each. Something being a first person shooter does not necessarily make it any more violent than any other game. GTA isn't an FPS and it is high atop everybody's hate list.
2. More importantly, until they define "serious injury to human beings" and "heinus, atrocious or cruel" specifically I think they would have enforcement issues. When there is no legal definition of these terms, a store that might be in violation of the law would undoubtedly argue in court that they made every reasonable attempt to comply but that the law was so vague they couldn't comply.
Now I know what you're thinking. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse," but courts are meant, at their core, to serve justice. Unjust, vague, unenforceable or unconstitutional laws are meant to be scrapped.
Then again, they shouldn't be written either, but here we are. *eyeroll*
If there are GPL violations, we can sit around here and complain forever. The real question is, is there somebody out there who is DOING something about it?
It might not seem worth it in a lot of ways, particularly legal costs -- but the danger of not dealing with violations of the license is that it is going to make more companies assume that GPL authors/supporters can not or will not enforce the license. And that is a dangerous precedent.
The publishers make good money if the game sells appropriately.. the content creators, true to western economy form, get fleeced.
That depends on what you consider getting fleeced. Most programmers make a fairly good pay, well above the average in the US at least.
Do they get their share of the millions a game company can make? No. If they want to make a huge per-copy chunk of the profits, they can start their own company and share the profits amongst themselves. But I can hear people saying right now, "that's hardly possible! It would cost too much money to produce/market the game." And that's precisely why they don't make those huge chunks of money: They don't have the capital and they can't take the risk, so they ask some game company--through their contract--to absorb the risk for them and give them a paycheck that they can bring home whether the game is a massive success or a huge flop. (In truth it usually works backwards, with the companies finding the programmers, but the principle works the same: Game companies take the risks of the programmer.)
Maybe it's the geeky culture at slashdot (of which I consider myself a part), but while I bet we want to see the game programmers make more money, it sounds a lot like professional sports to me. "I'm the star of this team! I bring the fans! I bring your profits! Therefore I'm worth $46 million dollars per year!" And the rest of us just sit here on the sidelines with our jaws sagging going, "how the fuck is that guy making $46 million dollars per year to play a game?" While I'm not comparing the relative difficulties of creating a video game versus playing a sport, aren't the sports players, who most people think are highly overpaid, doing only the same thing we want for our programmers? They're simply demanding their chunk of the profits they help bring in.
Well, let me first clarify it wasn't my theory, it was my professors.
But yes, it's circular. And the unfortunate reality of that means that just about any "politically correct" term will not stay politically correct long. So where can one draw the line to say, "okay, we've tried our best here, enough is enough?"
Hmm, in theorys that's a good guideline for naming conventions, don't use words which have other contextual meanings
It's a wonderful practice but I don't think it's practical. Even innocuous words can become insults and then what? Do we change the terminology again? For instance, look at some of our current "swear words." "Bastard" literally means a child born out of wedlock. We don't ever hear that used that way anymore; it is been relegated to purely an insult. Even more harmless, how about "gay?" It used to mean happy, but nobody uses it that way anymore. Now it is a reference to sexuality and receives giggles from school children when they read it in older books. It doesn't much matter whether the word is twisted into an insult or if it is adopted as a prefered adjective because the effect is essentially the same: The word is no longer acceptable in the contexts in which it originated.
I would also be more supportive of efforts to do it right the first time; ie, as you stated, to have made the terminology "in/out" or some other variation rather than "male/female." I object more strenuously to having it made "male/female," be that way with no issues for years, and suddenly arise as some sort of a problem. (Actually I don't really consider "male/female" a problem at all since there are both male and female counterparts. Seems like it's both a fair and apt term, but I understand your point about engendered speech in general.)
I also don't agree that it is necessarily all that simple to avoid contextual meanings even when they are "stable" and not going to change on you in a year or two. As an example, I don't know how old you are, but take an average 30+ year old parent, sit them in a room with a kid who is talking the way he would to his friends, and I bet they wouldn't have a clue what the kid was saying half of the time. I don't know half the slang being used by my own generation. If in 10 years I'm sitting on some committee someplace trying to come up with a name for something, I don't think it would be reasonable of people to expect me to 1) know all the different contexts--especially across different cultures--of a term I may choose, or to 2) invest the resources to figure them out.
An example of the latter, once again from my psych class: A good part of the lectures we get tend to involve differences between certain groups. Obviously, two groups that tend to come up a lot, for fairly obvious reasons, are race and gender. More specifically, white/black and male/female distinctions (seems a bit insensitive to other minority groups, eh?). Anyway, during the course of any given lecture, the professor probably spends an average of about five minutes per day disclaiming himself by inserting terms like "you may not agree, but that is the evidence" or "it's not true in all cases, but that's the general situation." In short, he spends five minutes a day being politically correct, ensuring, as best he can, not to offend anybody even with research that may itself be offensive. It's a noble gesture, especially in the classroom, but let's take it on a grander scale. Five minutes per class. I have two classes per week, about 20 weeks in a semester. So, 10 minutes a week, 20 weeks = 200 minutes of time spent in the course of a semester disclaiming research statistics and conclusions. Our class periods are 75 minutes twice per week, meaning over the course of a semester, almost three classes are wasted in disclaimers. And while I'm not bitter about it, I would understand a student who might thinking to him/herself, "what the hell? I'm paying money for this guy to avoid
Beleive it or not but use of gendered language is actually quite influencial on how we perceive attributes and sterotypes of technology to be.
I know this is slightly on tangent to your point about technology, but I think it may be worth mentioning.
I'm currently a computer science student at Illinois State University. Naturally I have to plug away at a bunch of stupid "general education" requirements first. So to pass the boredom with what I hoped was an interesting class, I picked Psychology.
It hasn't disappointed. Lots of interesting factoids. However, the one that applies here is one that particularly bothered me: There is a theory (perhaps that is the wrong word) that any negative term, no matter how apt or appropriate, will be turned into an insult and be inappropriate in a time after.
For instance, the word "retard" was originally the politically correct term for somebody with seriously low IQ and the problems that go with it. It's actually quite mild, really. "Retard" means "a slowing down or hindering of progress; a delay." And while it is patently untrue the connotation to the word was that the individual was simply delayed and that one day they would spring forward and be normal.
Today, if I called somebody afflicted by the exact same conditions (same IQ, same deficiencies, everything) a "retard" I would have people all over my ass about it. Now it is "developmentally disabled" or whatever else we can throw into the pot. In fact there are some pockets now that don't even like the word "disabled." "Differently abled" is cropping up. It's come to the point where the words are so diluted that it's going to require a PhD to figure out what was REALLY intended. "Developmentally differently abled." Please!
Let's just draw the line already. Our language isn't perfect. We're human beings: we're fallible, for one, and we're also highly likely to be offended by things even when they are not meant to offend. Rather than bitching and moaning about every term any group can twist to be insulting or demeaning, can't we simply view the intent of the statement? A master/slave hard drive configuration isn't racist, it isn't pro-slavery, and people who think it is are overreacting.
If people would be reasonable, problems like these wouldn't exist. Pick your fights, people! These fights aren't worth it. Even if one gets one's way on issues like this, it will only make the NEXT fight--hopefully a much more important one--much harder to get past all the people who are still pissed about the current one.
It seems almost grotesk that a nation that engaged so fully in the slave trade and still has the very people who have decended from that enslavement living within it's national boundries would except and use langauge that could so clearly salt wounds that, frankly, have never been properly dressed.
Okay, I'm probably going to come off as racist here I'm sure, but what the hell.
Isn't it a bit egotistical to assume that "slave" must refer to a black person? The term "slave" existed long before the United States did and many of them were white. A half step back would be indentured servitude, also a situation in which many white people found themselves in.
The bottom line is that "master" refers to something in charge and "slave" refers to one who has no say in the matter, but most obey it. Or if you don't prefer my paraphrasing, master is "one that has control over another or others" and slave is "one who is abjectly subservient to a specified person or influence." (Note that under "slave" there actually was a definition that referred specifically to "machine[s] or machine components" but I refrained from using it.)
The bottom line is that the terms are apt and I simply don't see the great need to change them. Are they offensive to some people? Obviously so. Almost everything is offensive to somebody. The word "God" is offensive to athiests; shall we mandate that anybody doing business with the United States must be irreligious? If "master/slave" is offensive because the word slave somehow offends some black people, we have to strike it from the dictionary too, right? No talking about slavery or slaves in the classroom because a listener might be offended.
There's an old one-liner floating around that goes, "I'm not short, I'm vertically challenged." Humans are emotional creatures and WILL be offended by something in their lives even if the intent is not to do so. The line has to be drawn someplace. I see nothing in the term "master/slave" that says it was created to be prejudiced or anything else that tells me it needs to be removed. Slavery was a nasty situation that should never have occurred, least of all in the United States, but that doesn't mean the words used to describe it need to be abandoned.
I don't think "primary/secondary" properly describes the relationship, at least not for all situations in which the term is used. For instance, it might be okay to describe hard drive configuration (arguments can be made on both side), but how about master/slave processing? One processor isn't simply "secondary," it is downright subservient to the demands of the master. Can we come up with another term that DOES work in all situations? Probably. But my view is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Too much power in one person's hands has the potential to be an exceptionally bad thing. It breeds dictatorships and dictatorial attitudes. Everybody should be accountable to somebody. (For the record I disagree about the comments about the US, but I digress.)
However, too little power in one person's hands, in this case, is equally awful. "Too many hands in the pot ruins the soup."
I'll avoid the Iraq situation since it is so hot-button still and instead move back to the situation of ethnic cleansing at the hands of Milosevic (apologies if it is misspelled). Clinton was going to go to the UN for a resolution to authorize the operation, but Russia and China threatened vetos. Russia, of course, had political ties to Milosevic and originally, at least, supported his government. So seeing that route was closed by yet another "too many hands" situation, Clinton instead moved to NATO--perhaps the epitomy of "too many hands" syndrome.
NATO eventually agreed to undertake its first combat role ever, except the "war by committee" approach in NATO barred the US from bombing targets in the capital. The US continued its bombing campaigns according to NATO's bar but found it to be ineffective and that it only increased the speed and desperation of the slaughters taking place. Eventually we did win permission to bomb targets in the capital and soon after, Russia withdrew their support for Milosevic. The surrender came days later.
All in all, it was a success -- but at what cost, in terms of human lives and other assets? And how close did it come to a failure because everybody had an equal say?
In this case, let's not be naive and assume that any international body would be less a political institution than the UN or NATO is. How much would get done if everybody had to be appeased before a project moved forward? It would become a massive political wrangling.
At least as it stands today, ICANN is far less political. Oh, sure, I'm sure it looks after the interests of the United States, but it is at least not being tugged this way and that but eighteen different countries who all want it to look out for their interests. Things get done. Bad decisions are made, of course. Bad decisions are made in nearly every situation, but that doesn't mean the situation is broke. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I've had good experiences with MyRealBox and Softhome.net. Softhome is a bit more restrictive about what you can send and how often; MyRealBox is technically a test server for some Novell software, but the downtimes haven't inconveinienced me. Both are free and have POP access.
Yahoo requires you to sign in to your Yahoo account in order to delete that account. Since I don't know what username or password or birthdate they have on file for me, it is impossible for me to sign in and impossible to cancel the spam or delete the account. [. ..] The design is thoroughly irresponsible, yet they've had it this way for years.
It is irresponsible to assume you must be able to prove you own an account before you can have them delete it?
Okay, if they DON'T require your username and password before permitting you to delete an account, and failing that your DOB to retreive your password, how are they supposed to do it? "Enter the username you want deleted here. Don't worry, we won't ask you to verify it's your account!"
If you lied on the registration information and don't remember which lie you used, they also provide a way of getting a new password mailed to you.
It is as responsible and accessible a way of doing things as can be expected, unless of course you think that you should be able to call up Yahoo, give them exactly none of the information on file for your account, and have them tell you the info.
You could also argue that Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians are NOT acts of terrorism, on the grounds that they are not really civilians so much as an `occupying force`.
Specifically targeting civilians is most certainly an act of terrorism. I'm not talking collateral damage here; that happens, and it sucks, but it is not intentional. When you walk into a cafe with the intent of blowing up people to use as a bargaining chip in a dispute with their government, that is an act of terrorism.
Besides, I would take exception to calling civilians an "occupying force." Their government may be an occupying force--and for the record, I am not making specific comments on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here, nor taking sides in it--but civilians are not agents of their government.
George Bush is a very dangerous man. I agree. What disturbs me most is that he may have plans on also changing or toppling the governments of Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Iran and Sudan. The article I derive this from is right here. It is primarily an article about democratic presidential candidate (and former NATO SACEUR) Wesley Clark. The pertinent quote reads:
He [Clark] then told me--as he has told others--how he came to learn of a secret war scheme within the Bush Administration, of which Iraq was just one piece.
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Clark said, he visited the Pentagon, where an old colleague, a three-star general, confided to him that the civilian authorities running the Pentagon--Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team--planned to use the September 11th attacks as a pretext for going to war against Iraq. "They made the decision to attack Iraq sometime soon after 9/11," Clark said. "So, rather than searching for a solution to a problem, they had the solution, and their difficulty was to make it appear as though it were in response to a problem." Clark visited the Pentagon a couple of months later, and the same general told him that the Bush team, unable or unwilling to fight the actual terrorists responsible for the attacks, had devised a five-year plan to topple the regimes in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Iran, and Sudan.
Very little specific detail is given as to their plan and Clark later admits that he is "not sure [he] can prove this yet." True or untrue, it's a scary thought.
I'm really sorry to hear you were a professional killer. That's sad.
You know what's sad? Idiotic statements like that.
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. -- John Stuart Mill
I, for one, thank you for your service bigjnsa500. No matter whether or not I agree with the motives of the combat I always appreciate the troops and their sacrifice--and I'm not only talking about the sacrifice of those who died.
All the "big guys" are out to get SCO? What a shame!
Or could it be that "all the big guys" understand that pissing people off is a bad business model and would prefer to defend them and gain their good will?
God, I am tired of these whackjobs at SCO spouting off.
Actually, they may try a contributory copyright infringement suit.
The basic suit that established contributory infringement was somebody running a sort of flea-market. That person paid for advertising, provided tents for people, rented the space, etc. And somebody there was selling pirated movies. The owner of the market was found liable for the other person's selling the DVDs because the petitioners argued that he had to have known.
Would it fly in a case of WiFi? Who knows. That's for the courts to decide.
Does anyone but a geek or a girlfriend of a geek know what, exactly, free, opensource software is?
Girlfriend of a geek? Whaa?
No, seriously. Businesses do. Governments are beginning to come around. It doesn't really matter (to me, at least,) if they are learning about open-source themselves or are simply hearing about it from their geeks-on-staff and going "free is good." Bottom line is it's happening and Microsoft sees it happening or they wouldn't be dedicating so much press and other resources against the movement to open-source.
I wouldn't say open-source is, as yet, a real threat to Microsoft: But it does expose some nasty chinks in their armor that, over time and with some improvements, linux and other such products can turn into a gaping hole that makes Microsoft vulnerable. (You know, kind of like MS's OS does to users.)
The average Joe User probably won't like linux and probably won't migrate. That's fine, I'm not sure I want them to. But if businesses do, and take their hundred, or thousand, or ten thousand seat licenses with them... well, Microsoft is going to be even grumpier than they already are. As for non-OS components of free software, they are already spreading like wildfire. I'm surprised lately how many I can find even for my laptop, which still runs Windows.
Well, I based my information on an article I once read at The Guardian's (a British paper) website. Whether or not it is entirely correct, I don't know; I can only hope they did their journalistic research. So, my reply will be constrained to commenting on what I said and giving the context of the quotes that led me to say them:
I don't believe that was offered as one of the reasons why we chose not to sign it.
What I said was that we didn't want a court to be over the US Supreme Court. Here's the quote I based that on: "The US had argued previously that any court interference in the case would effectively turn it into a 'general criminal court of appeal' and claimed that its own sovereignty would be infringed."
No, the Security Council is specifically not involved in the process.
Again, the quote I based my comment on: "Court officials said they expected America to comply. If it did not, a spokeswoman said, it could complain to the UN security council which could impose sanctions on America."
Again, whether or not these quotes are accurate, I can not say. I would at least hope the latter one is accurate since it purportedly quotes a court spokeswoman. But I honestly don't know and am not really interested enough to investigate it myself right now. Anybody who has done the leg work on the issue who wants to chime in, please do.
Besides, the ICC is supposed to be for trying individuals, not governments. The penalties would be jail terms and the like, not embargos and such.
I didn't intend to imply otherwise. My statements referred to a situation in which the United States refused to obey a decision reached by the court and what recourse the court would have to see its decision enforced. (In this case, next to none.)
Slashdot Mirror
This is a Commercial News Outlet [. . .] it should be subjected to the same criticism that CNN, Fox News, or any other influential news outlet should be subject to
Come now. First of all, I hardly consider a few banners and the ability to buy your way out of them "commerical news." I don't consider somebody else paying for everything "commercial news." And even if the editors are pulling in salaries--and I don't know if they are or not--the two groups still can not be compared for several reasons.
1) Slashdot is a niche site. How many pro-Windows articles have you seen lately? How many great submissions applauding Microsoft's successful business ventures? A handful? None? The site is not meant to apply to everybody and it is not meant to be bias-free. In fact it lives largely on bias. I see no reasons the editors or submitters should be expected to rein in their bias if the commenters don't have to rein in theirs. (See #2.) Besides, if you're telling me Fox News reins in their biases, you're out of your mind.
2) The main appeal of Slashdot is the comments, not the news. A quick search of Yahoo or Google can find most of the news stories. The value is in coming here and reading the reactions of people. The value is the community that has surfaced around the site. The best thing here is that there is some sort of expert on just about any topic that comes up here; there are always some people who have experienced what is reported on or can add other insights to them. When Fox News or CNN lets every Joe Citizen off the street who wants to talk about a subject into the studio, then perhaps I'll buy the comparison.
3. Even if the editors were made multi-millionaires for dedicating their day to Slashdot--and again, I do not know one way or another (minus the exaggeration)--their work on stories is minimal. The average submitter is not an editor, they are readers like you or I. So even in the event that editors might deserve to be held to higher standards as a "commercial news source," we damn sure shouldn't be bitching about the volunteers submitting articles for us to read.
I personally VALUE comments like these as indicators of how people feel about Slashdot insofar as I'm concerned that Slashdot maintains an acceptable reputation for a serious forum of discussion.
Insofar as Slashdot maintains an acceptable reputation for a serious forum of discussion. Yes. Where does "has anyone noticed that most of the 'submitter's' writeups fall into the poor category?" fall in to serious discussion? What does it add to the article? What does slamming the submitter for "his slant and myriad questions" help to provide? And what the hell is wrong for a submitter to provide those myriad questions to provoke discussion? Why is that a capital offense around here?
If you don't like the criticism, don't read them
Preface your nonsense with a title of "USELESS CRITICISM - DON'T READ" and I will oblige. And yes, it is useless. The sheer volume of it should tell you that even if you really are concerned about it, it's not doing a damn bit of good. So save the breath and save those of us who don't want to read it the headache.
Bitch! (Sorry, name calling seemed appropriate.)
You're ever so funny. Really.
What's wrong with what's happening here ?
I think the article had it just about right: people simply don't understand open-source. It used to be that unless they researched themselves, or were personally involved, that they probably knew nothing about it. But now, as companies such as Microsoft are beginning to see products such as Linux as increasing threats on their market share, the average consumer is hearing something--and it's coming from Microsoft. Needless to say, that's not going to be positive! And when even open-source's most respected people step up and say something, they get responses like, "Linus who?"
And the bottom line is, the average consumer just doesn't care. The common conceptions have become that OS crashes are to be expected and put up with. They don't see why they should they take on the admittedly somewhat steep learning curve of a transition from Windows to Linux even if they do understand the stability difference.
Another problem is support. It's nice and true that in open-source, you can often contact the developer directly. But any response you get is often at the developer's leisure and time-permitting. Many don't deal with support issues at all aside from, say, putting together a manual/FAQ. Community input is great, it's something I've always enjoyed, but it's not the end-all be-all, especially for the novice user.
So, what exactly is wrong with these sorts of articles? Yes, a lot of it is preaching to the choir. More of it is that people are not given a convincing reason to switch. The biggest problem is likely that it just doesn't reach enough people; not nearly as many as MS or other companies bent on keeping open-source down can. And open-source is fighting the uphill battle here. MS can just roll rocks down as we climb. The only real risks MS takes is letting us reach the summit.
One thing I've learned from working with Dell for the past few years is that they don't give a flip about the home users
I don't agree. I just purchased a Dell a few weeks ago. I did have a problem with it: When I got it, it began lagging to unusability (five minute boot times and about the same to load any program) about the second day. It would randomly alternate between terrible lag and perfectly fine. My guess was that the hard drive was on its way out.
Anyway, it was a new computer. I am quite capable of replacing a hard drive--and indeed, they offered to send a replacement--but I didn't care to do it for a computer I had just bought. They offered a new motherboard; again I refused. It didn't take long. They offered to replace the entire computer. To top it off, they got the new computer coming to me the day after my call and sent it Next Day Air. They, of course, provided free shipping for the broken computer back to them, so the two weeks of delay I was worried about was slashed to days and the potential hassle turned out to be minimal.
Now I'm not happy about getting a machine that started dying the minute I took it out of the box, but I was happy with their level of responsiveness and the speed with which they remedied the problem. Also, my brother bought a Dell about a year before about had absolutely no problems with them. (He also purchased several Dells for his workplace, with no complaints, and Dell showed their appreciation for his multitude of purchases--they were in his name, not the companies, by the way--by giving him a free PDA.) I know other people who have Dells as well and haven't heard them complain about the machine or the service.
Is the tech support good? No. It's the same thing you encounter at most places though: Somebody reading from a set of files. Sadly that is sufficient for most callers who forgot to plug their machine in but little beyond. We just saw an article on /. that Dell is moving their call centers back from India, so maybe that will help. I'm not holding my breath, but I'm not willing to complain about Dell's support when even companies as huge as Microsoft, with their sort of money they could be throwing around, have their techs reading from a document that I could have just read from the Internet. As far as their responsiveness to my issues and willingess to fix the problem, I have no absolutely no complaints. I pushed for the solution that would cause them the absolute worst headache and monetary cost and they agreed without incident.
*snickers* Damn! And I was going to post that smart-ass quip. Now what am I going to post?
Sigh. I'm so sick of this it's not even funny.
Why the hell is it that people continually feel the need to run down the submiters, the editors and everybody else here who is working for you to provide you a free service that, by your being here, I assume you find both enjoyable and informative?
Don't like their writing? Submit your own stories. Stop coming. Whatever. Just quit bitching already. It's not funny, it's not insightful, it's not on topic and it is of no value.
Since my cable modem lines are the property of AOL-TimeWarner, do they have the right to do with as they please?
Sigh. Let's try this again.
"Since computers, networks, etc at work at taken to be the property of the company--it's theirs to do with as they please."
If you work at your ISP, then yes, what you do at work and with their equipment is theirs. They can read your email, they can ruffle through your desk drawers, and they can monitor your IMs.
Yes, there are wiretap laws. They also don't apply to the situation I described. I searched Google for the phrase, "do wiretap laws apply to employers?". One of the results says, quote, "With the federal and state wiretapping statutes permitting employers' monitoring e-mail communications, and with courts holding that common law intrusion into seclusion privacy claims don't apply since there is no reasonable expectation of privacy when e-mail is sent over an employer's system, employees should understand that employers may monitor electronic communications even without reserving the right to do so in their e-mail policies." The emphasis is mine.
For another matter, courts have ruled that employers may monitor phone calls in an effort to determine if the content is business or personal. There is usually a time limit they can listen. Another quote, related to both matters, from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, reads: "Workers of the world are exposed to many types of privacy-invasive monitoring while earning a living. These include [. . .] Internet monitoring and filtering, E-mail monitoring, instant message monitoring, phone monitoring [. . .] and keystroke logging." You'll note that while the article lists all sorts of reasons employers might not want to monitor such communications, it makes no mention that they can't. It does go on to mention restrictions on how and when they can, according to legislation, but has a massive piece dedicated to all the loopholes and instances where employers can still do it.
In short, one last quote, from this page, which just about sums it up: "The second exemption is that the ECPA [the legislation that provides what few restrictions there are] exempts from liability the person or entity providing the communication service. Where this service is provided by the employer, the ECPA has been interpreted as permitting the employers broad discretion to read and disclose the contents of e-mail communications, without the employee's consent."
It sucks. I will be the first to admit it. But it's a legal reality.
Happy now, or can I expect a snooty response?
If you monitored them with consent, couldn't that introduce a bias?
Why? That's like saying that conducting a research study introduces a bias into whether or not somet hingreally works. They're just observing to see what goes on.
If they were monitored without consent, wouldn't that be a breech of privacy?
You have no privacy at work. Your employer can rummage through your desk drawers or read your email and there's nothing you can do about it. I don't know if you're in the US, but the Constitution is written to limit government not the citizen. Since computers, networks, etc at work at taken to be the property of the company--it's theirs to do with as they please.
I liked it when Clark said "We'll take away any incentives for companies that want to outsource or leave the country. And we'll have incentives for companies to create jobs in here" but I don't believe it.
I thought it was a good plan. But I do have a question: Why don't you believe it? I completely believe your story that you were being shadowed by people who would ultimately you and that is the problem. But Clark isn't president, so I don't see why you don't believe the statement.
If what you didn't believe is that such a plan would work, I think it would. In part because such jobs are already starting to come back and if people get a bit of extra money in their stockings for doing what they're already being pressured to do, so much the better.
As for the original quote from Clark (which was taken completely out of context), let me simply remind people: Clark is not a politician. Up until a few months ago, Clark was a retired four-star general and a military commentator for CNN. The last line was a blunder. He did not mean that he doesn't care about software jobs in the US, he simply meant that there are other important technologies to pursue. I believe what the grandparent's more complete version of the quote left out was the beginning, which read something on the order of "I am very concerned with jobs leaving America." He continued on, as quoted in the grandparent, with what he would do to keep jobs here and bring them back.
ADDITIONALLY, NOT exclusively, he stated that we needed a national goals program to direct science projects and that we needed to pour more money into research.
As I said, Clark is not a politican. I, for one, find that refreshing. More importantly in my mind, he can challenge Bush on every area of strength Bush has and best him (gee, a pilot lieutenant who did a fantastic job of guarding Texas during Vietnam, or a commander who was shot three times in combat in the jungles and later rose to be the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe for NATO?). He can also challenge him on issues Bush is weak on, such as the economy: Clark's master's degree from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar, was in part in economics, and he taught economics at West Point. So as to the great-grandparent (god that's awkward), let's not bastardize the man's statements for a political point. I advise everybody to check out Clark's position of issues at http://clark04.com/issues/ and make up their minds with all the information.
Here's another thing that came to my mind:
Yee wants harmful matter to include violent video games that "depict serious injury to human beings in a manner that is especially heinous, atrocious or cruel," particularly those that use the "first-person shooter" perspective.
Two things jump out about me.
1. I don't think they are going to be able to separate a "first-person shooter" game from other games and apply laws differently to each. Something being a first person shooter does not necessarily make it any more violent than any other game. GTA isn't an FPS and it is high atop everybody's hate list.
2. More importantly, until they define "serious injury to human beings" and "heinus, atrocious or cruel" specifically I think they would have enforcement issues. When there is no legal definition of these terms, a store that might be in violation of the law would undoubtedly argue in court that they made every reasonable attempt to comply but that the law was so vague they couldn't comply.
Now I know what you're thinking. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse," but courts are meant, at their core, to serve justice. Unjust, vague, unenforceable or unconstitutional laws are meant to be scrapped.
Then again, they shouldn't be written either, but here we are. *eyeroll*
If there are GPL violations, we can sit around here and complain forever. The real question is, is there somebody out there who is DOING something about it?
It might not seem worth it in a lot of ways, particularly legal costs -- but the danger of not dealing with violations of the license is that it is going to make more companies assume that GPL authors/supporters can not or will not enforce the license. And that is a dangerous precedent.
The publishers make good money if the game sells appropriately .. the content creators, true to western economy form, get fleeced.
That depends on what you consider getting fleeced. Most programmers make a fairly good pay, well above the average in the US at least.
Do they get their share of the millions a game company can make? No. If they want to make a huge per-copy chunk of the profits, they can start their own company and share the profits amongst themselves. But I can hear people saying right now, "that's hardly possible! It would cost too much money to produce/market the game." And that's precisely why they don't make those huge chunks of money: They don't have the capital and they can't take the risk, so they ask some game company--through their contract--to absorb the risk for them and give them a paycheck that they can bring home whether the game is a massive success or a huge flop. (In truth it usually works backwards, with the companies finding the programmers, but the principle works the same: Game companies take the risks of the programmer.)
Maybe it's the geeky culture at slashdot (of which I consider myself a part), but while I bet we want to see the game programmers make more money, it sounds a lot like professional sports to me. "I'm the star of this team! I bring the fans! I bring your profits! Therefore I'm worth $46 million dollars per year!" And the rest of us just sit here on the sidelines with our jaws sagging going, "how the fuck is that guy making $46 million dollars per year to play a game?" While I'm not comparing the relative difficulties of creating a video game versus playing a sport, aren't the sports players, who most people think are highly overpaid, doing only the same thing we want for our programmers? They're simply demanding their chunk of the profits they help bring in.
As for your theory... It sounds circular.
Well, let me first clarify it wasn't my theory, it was my professors.
But yes, it's circular. And the unfortunate reality of that means that just about any "politically correct" term will not stay politically correct long. So where can one draw the line to say, "okay, we've tried our best here, enough is enough?"
Hmm, in theorys that's a good guideline for naming conventions, don't use words which have other contextual meanings
It's a wonderful practice but I don't think it's practical. Even innocuous words can become insults and then what? Do we change the terminology again? For instance, look at some of our current "swear words." "Bastard" literally means a child born out of wedlock. We don't ever hear that used that way anymore; it is been relegated to purely an insult. Even more harmless, how about "gay?" It used to mean happy, but nobody uses it that way anymore. Now it is a reference to sexuality and receives giggles from school children when they read it in older books. It doesn't much matter whether the word is twisted into an insult or if it is adopted as a prefered adjective because the effect is essentially the same: The word is no longer acceptable in the contexts in which it originated.
I would also be more supportive of efforts to do it right the first time; ie, as you stated, to have made the terminology "in/out" or some other variation rather than "male/female." I object more strenuously to having it made "male/female," be that way with no issues for years, and suddenly arise as some sort of a problem. (Actually I don't really consider "male/female" a problem at all since there are both male and female counterparts. Seems like it's both a fair and apt term, but I understand your point about engendered speech in general.)
I also don't agree that it is necessarily all that simple to avoid contextual meanings even when they are "stable" and not going to change on you in a year or two. As an example, I don't know how old you are, but take an average 30+ year old parent, sit them in a room with a kid who is talking the way he would to his friends, and I bet they wouldn't have a clue what the kid was saying half of the time. I don't know half the slang being used by my own generation. If in 10 years I'm sitting on some committee someplace trying to come up with a name for something, I don't think it would be reasonable of people to expect me to 1) know all the different contexts--especially across different cultures--of a term I may choose, or to 2) invest the resources to figure them out.
An example of the latter, once again from my psych class: A good part of the lectures we get tend to involve differences between certain groups. Obviously, two groups that tend to come up a lot, for fairly obvious reasons, are race and gender. More specifically, white/black and male/female distinctions (seems a bit insensitive to other minority groups, eh?). Anyway, during the course of any given lecture, the professor probably spends an average of about five minutes per day disclaiming himself by inserting terms like "you may not agree, but that is the evidence" or "it's not true in all cases, but that's the general situation." In short, he spends five minutes a day being politically correct, ensuring, as best he can, not to offend anybody even with research that may itself be offensive. It's a noble gesture, especially in the classroom, but let's take it on a grander scale. Five minutes per class. I have two classes per week, about 20 weeks in a semester. So, 10 minutes a week, 20 weeks = 200 minutes of time spent in the course of a semester disclaiming research statistics and conclusions. Our class periods are 75 minutes twice per week, meaning over the course of a semester, almost three classes are wasted in disclaimers. And while I'm not bitter about it, I would understand a student who might thinking to him/herself, "what the hell? I'm paying money for this guy to avoid
Beleive it or not but use of gendered language is actually quite influencial on how we perceive attributes and sterotypes of technology to be.
I know this is slightly on tangent to your point about technology, but I think it may be worth mentioning.
I'm currently a computer science student at Illinois State University. Naturally I have to plug away at a bunch of stupid "general education" requirements first. So to pass the boredom with what I hoped was an interesting class, I picked Psychology.
It hasn't disappointed. Lots of interesting factoids. However, the one that applies here is one that particularly bothered me: There is a theory (perhaps that is the wrong word) that any negative term, no matter how apt or appropriate, will be turned into an insult and be inappropriate in a time after.
For instance, the word "retard" was originally the politically correct term for somebody with seriously low IQ and the problems that go with it. It's actually quite mild, really. "Retard" means "a slowing down or hindering of progress; a delay." And while it is patently untrue the connotation to the word was that the individual was simply delayed and that one day they would spring forward and be normal.
Today, if I called somebody afflicted by the exact same conditions (same IQ, same deficiencies, everything) a "retard" I would have people all over my ass about it. Now it is "developmentally disabled" or whatever else we can throw into the pot. In fact there are some pockets now that don't even like the word "disabled." "Differently abled" is cropping up. It's come to the point where the words are so diluted that it's going to require a PhD to figure out what was REALLY intended. "Developmentally differently abled." Please!
Let's just draw the line already. Our language isn't perfect. We're human beings: we're fallible, for one, and we're also highly likely to be offended by things even when they are not meant to offend. Rather than bitching and moaning about every term any group can twist to be insulting or demeaning, can't we simply view the intent of the statement? A master/slave hard drive configuration isn't racist, it isn't pro-slavery, and people who think it is are overreacting.
If people would be reasonable, problems like these wouldn't exist. Pick your fights, people! These fights aren't worth it. Even if one gets one's way on issues like this, it will only make the NEXT fight--hopefully a much more important one--much harder to get past all the people who are still pissed about the current one.
It seems almost grotesk that a nation that engaged so fully in the slave trade and still has the very people who have decended from that enslavement living within it's national boundries would except and use langauge that could so clearly salt wounds that, frankly, have never been properly dressed.
Okay, I'm probably going to come off as racist here I'm sure, but what the hell.
Isn't it a bit egotistical to assume that "slave" must refer to a black person? The term "slave" existed long before the United States did and many of them were white. A half step back would be indentured servitude, also a situation in which many white people found themselves in.
The bottom line is that "master" refers to something in charge and "slave" refers to one who has no say in the matter, but most obey it. Or if you don't prefer my paraphrasing, master is "one that has control over another or others" and slave is "one who is abjectly subservient to a specified person or influence." (Note that under "slave" there actually was a definition that referred specifically to "machine[s] or machine components" but I refrained from using it.)
The bottom line is that the terms are apt and I simply don't see the great need to change them. Are they offensive to some people? Obviously so. Almost everything is offensive to somebody. The word "God" is offensive to athiests; shall we mandate that anybody doing business with the United States must be irreligious? If "master/slave" is offensive because the word slave somehow offends some black people, we have to strike it from the dictionary too, right? No talking about slavery or slaves in the classroom because a listener might be offended.
There's an old one-liner floating around that goes, "I'm not short, I'm vertically challenged." Humans are emotional creatures and WILL be offended by something in their lives even if the intent is not to do so. The line has to be drawn someplace. I see nothing in the term "master/slave" that says it was created to be prejudiced or anything else that tells me it needs to be removed. Slavery was a nasty situation that should never have occurred, least of all in the United States, but that doesn't mean the words used to describe it need to be abandoned.
I don't think "primary/secondary" properly describes the relationship, at least not for all situations in which the term is used. For instance, it might be okay to describe hard drive configuration (arguments can be made on both side), but how about master/slave processing? One processor isn't simply "secondary," it is downright subservient to the demands of the master. Can we come up with another term that DOES work in all situations? Probably. But my view is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Too much power in one person's hands has the potential to be an exceptionally bad thing. It breeds dictatorships and dictatorial attitudes. Everybody should be accountable to somebody. (For the record I disagree about the comments about the US, but I digress.)
However, too little power in one person's hands, in this case, is equally awful. "Too many hands in the pot ruins the soup."
I'll avoid the Iraq situation since it is so hot-button still and instead move back to the situation of ethnic cleansing at the hands of Milosevic (apologies if it is misspelled). Clinton was going to go to the UN for a resolution to authorize the operation, but Russia and China threatened vetos. Russia, of course, had political ties to Milosevic and originally, at least, supported his government. So seeing that route was closed by yet another "too many hands" situation, Clinton instead moved to NATO--perhaps the epitomy of "too many hands" syndrome.
NATO eventually agreed to undertake its first combat role ever, except the "war by committee" approach in NATO barred the US from bombing targets in the capital. The US continued its bombing campaigns according to NATO's bar but found it to be ineffective and that it only increased the speed and desperation of the slaughters taking place. Eventually we did win permission to bomb targets in the capital and soon after, Russia withdrew their support for Milosevic. The surrender came days later.
All in all, it was a success -- but at what cost, in terms of human lives and other assets? And how close did it come to a failure because everybody had an equal say?
In this case, let's not be naive and assume that any international body would be less a political institution than the UN or NATO is. How much would get done if everybody had to be appeased before a project moved forward? It would become a massive political wrangling.
At least as it stands today, ICANN is far less political. Oh, sure, I'm sure it looks after the interests of the United States, but it is at least not being tugged this way and that but eighteen different countries who all want it to look out for their interests. Things get done. Bad decisions are made, of course. Bad decisions are made in nearly every situation, but that doesn't mean the situation is broke. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I've had good experiences with MyRealBox and Softhome.net. Softhome is a bit more restrictive about what you can send and how often; MyRealBox is technically a test server for some Novell software, but the downtimes haven't inconveinienced me. Both are free and have POP access.
Yahoo requires you to sign in to your Yahoo account in order to delete that account. Since I don't know what username or password or birthdate they have on file for me, it is impossible for me to sign in and impossible to cancel the spam or delete the account. [. . .] The design is thoroughly irresponsible, yet they've had it this way for years.
It is irresponsible to assume you must be able to prove you own an account before you can have them delete it?
Okay, if they DON'T require your username and password before permitting you to delete an account, and failing that your DOB to retreive your password, how are they supposed to do it? "Enter the username you want deleted here. Don't worry, we won't ask you to verify it's your account!"
If you lied on the registration information and don't remember which lie you used, they also provide a way of getting a new password mailed to you.
It is as responsible and accessible a way of doing things as can be expected, unless of course you think that you should be able to call up Yahoo, give them exactly none of the information on file for your account, and have them tell you the info.
What is the problem here?
You could also argue that Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians are NOT acts of terrorism, on the grounds that they are not really civilians so much as an `occupying force`.
Specifically targeting civilians is most certainly an act of terrorism. I'm not talking collateral damage here; that happens, and it sucks, but it is not intentional. When you walk into a cafe with the intent of blowing up people to use as a bargaining chip in a dispute with their government, that is an act of terrorism.
Besides, I would take exception to calling civilians an "occupying force." Their government may be an occupying force--and for the record, I am not making specific comments on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here, nor taking sides in it--but civilians are not agents of their government.
George Bush is a very dangerous man. I agree. What disturbs me most is that he may have plans on also changing or toppling the governments of Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Iran and Sudan. The article I derive this from is right here. It is primarily an article about democratic presidential candidate (and former NATO SACEUR) Wesley Clark. The pertinent quote reads:
Very little specific detail is given as to their plan and Clark later admits that he is "not sure [he] can prove this yet." True or untrue, it's a scary thought.
I'm really sorry to hear you were a professional killer. That's sad.
You know what's sad? Idiotic statements like that.
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
-- John Stuart Mill
I, for one, thank you for your service bigjnsa500. No matter whether or not I agree with the motives of the combat I always appreciate the troops and their sacrifice--and I'm not only talking about the sacrifice of those who died.
One bullet, one rifle, one headshot.
All the "big guys" are out to get SCO? What a shame!
Or could it be that "all the big guys" understand that pissing people off is a bad business model and would prefer to defend them and gain their good will?
God, I am tired of these whackjobs at SCO spouting off.
Is Washington even aware of this?
Of course. And their response has been to sponsor legislation to put movie swappers in jail.
Actually, they may try a contributory copyright infringement suit.
The basic suit that established contributory infringement was somebody running a sort of flea-market. That person paid for advertising, provided tents for people, rented the space, etc. And somebody there was selling pirated movies. The owner of the market was found liable for the other person's selling the DVDs because the petitioners argued that he had to have known.
Would it fly in a case of WiFi? Who knows. That's for the courts to decide.
Does anyone but a geek or a girlfriend of a geek know what, exactly, free, opensource software is?
Girlfriend of a geek? Whaa?
No, seriously. Businesses do. Governments are beginning to come around. It doesn't really matter (to me, at least,) if they are learning about open-source themselves or are simply hearing about it from their geeks-on-staff and going "free is good." Bottom line is it's happening and Microsoft sees it happening or they wouldn't be dedicating so much press and other resources against the movement to open-source.
I wouldn't say open-source is, as yet, a real threat to Microsoft: But it does expose some nasty chinks in their armor that, over time and with some improvements, linux and other such products can turn into a gaping hole that makes Microsoft vulnerable. (You know, kind of like MS's OS does to users.)
The average Joe User probably won't like linux and probably won't migrate. That's fine, I'm not sure I want them to. But if businesses do, and take their hundred, or thousand, or ten thousand seat licenses with them... well, Microsoft is going to be even grumpier than they already are. As for non-OS components of free software, they are already spreading like wildfire. I'm surprised lately how many I can find even for my laptop, which still runs Windows.
Well, I based my information on an article I once read at The Guardian's (a British paper) website. Whether or not it is entirely correct, I don't know; I can only hope they did their journalistic research. So, my reply will be constrained to commenting on what I said and giving the context of the quotes that led me to say them:
I don't believe that was offered as one of the reasons why we chose not to sign it.
What I said was that we didn't want a court to be over the US Supreme Court. Here's the quote I based that on: "The US had argued previously that any court interference in the case would effectively turn it into a 'general criminal court of appeal' and claimed that its own sovereignty would be infringed."
No, the Security Council is specifically not involved in the process.
Again, the quote I based my comment on: "Court officials said they expected America to comply. If it did not, a spokeswoman said, it could complain to the UN security council which could impose sanctions on America."
Again, whether or not these quotes are accurate, I can not say. I would at least hope the latter one is accurate since it purportedly quotes a court spokeswoman. But I honestly don't know and am not really interested enough to investigate it myself right now. Anybody who has done the leg work on the issue who wants to chime in, please do.
Incidentally, the quotes came from this article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,36 04,889602,00.html.
One more non-quote-related comment:
Besides, the ICC is supposed to be for trying individuals, not governments. The penalties would be jail terms and the like, not embargos and such.
I didn't intend to imply otherwise. My statements referred to a situation in which the United States refused to obey a decision reached by the court and what recourse the court would have to see its decision enforced. (In this case, next to none.)