If you're the only person seeing walls, is that why people call you crazy?
Perhaps when you've made as big a contribution to the world as Stallman, and you've got something as interesting to say as he has, global media will be seeking your views out too.
OK, mine's about an eight-foot L shape. What do I see?
A book: Tom Standage, The Mechanical Turk.
Four or five sample CD's.
A Beige G3 Mac and Mitsubishi Monitor
Magazine: Sound on Sound.
Pile of assorted papers.
Book: Alan Bennett, Beyond the Fringe.
A Uniball pen
Hypermood mouse pad
Brother HL-1270N laser printer.
Canon Ixus3 user manual
Assorted back-up CD's.
Yellow Pages.
Address book.
Adaptec 2940UW Scsi card.
Box of 15 Memorex CD-RW.
Copy of Baldurs Gate II
A stack of Bill Laswell music CDs.
Four empty glasses. (Remnants of coke and OJ)
One empty mug. (Remnants of tea.)
Half filled ashtray.
One Sony MiniDisc recorder.
One power lead.
Two empty packets that once contained biscuits. (Sainsbury's Chocolate Malted Milk)
One empty cigarette packet.
One Altec Lansing speaker.
Surfboard cable modem.
Dell Power Edge server (below desk)
Microsoft Natural Keyboard.
Dell 17inch Monitor.
Microsoft optical mouse.
Macromedia mouse mat
Second Altec Lansing speaker.
Pilot CD marker.
SCSI Zip drive
Mo'Phatt Sound Module
Akai S3000XL Sampler.
Oxygen 8 midi keyboard.
Assortment of application and driver CD's
Packet of Nicorette lozenges (4mg.)
Lid from a pint of Sainsbury's Handmade Farmhouse Toffee Crunch Icecream
Torn remnants of a Rizla packet
2mhz Pentium IV in Coolermaster case (below desk)
And somewhere amongst all that, there *should* be a couple of grams of White Widow, but I've been searching for it for days now, and I've had no luck so far.
At the very least, one of those iDesks would make it harder for me to lose the pot.
Its called the gayDesk, and it has a similiar gay and fruity design as the iMacs
You're missing the point entirely (though this isn't at all surprising.)
Guys who use Macs on desks like the one in the picture, get to go out with girls like the one on the picture.
Guys who use an overclocked Athlon in an aluminum Lian Li or Coolermaster, stuck on top of an old door on bricks get to stay at home Saturday night and surf pr0n.
Boies: "Have you ever read Slashdot?"
Juror: uh.......yeah
Boies: Then you'll know that in Soviet Russia, intellectual property steals YOU. By stealing other people's intellectual property, SCO are simply engaged in the sort of anti-communist activity that's necessary to protect our way of life.
Judge (who is a Microsoft troll): Somebody mod that sucker UP!
I wasn't claiming NT and it's derivatives are rock stable, I was just saying that I don't think it's typical for the OS to crash due to a crappy application.
Try running a couple of audio apps sometime. Cubase SX, for example. Whether its the VST plug-ins, or the way that ASIO drivers talk to your sound card, I've no idea, but most of my audio apps crash Win2k Pro and XP on a regular basis.
It's easily remedied though. The FSF should simply announce that they'll definitely doing this. That way, all of the uncertainty and doubt are completely removed, leaving nothing but Darl McBride's naked fear of losing the tiny number of customers that they still have left.
Actually, sales tax would be the ultimate tax relief for the poor. Like other posters have said, if essential things, like food and clothing, are tax-free, then the poor are off the hook.
Unfortunately, this just isn't the case. When I say 'the poor', I'm really talking about low to moderate income families. These people have the same needs as everybody else. So they need transportation to get to work. They need a home and that needs to be maintained. Their refrigerator and their washing machine will break down from time to time.
Because these people don't have a great deal of excess income, all of their income goes towards meeting their household bills. At the moment (in Europe at least), most of those bills are subject to sales tax in the form of value added tax. So if your roof starts to leak, you'll pay 18% of the repair costs on top in tax.
As a result, those on low incomes give over a much larger proportion of that income to the taxman than those who can afford to stash it away.
If you were talking about a tax on luxury goods, then I'd agree with you, but in practice, very few of the necessities of life are exempted from sales taxes which is why they have the reputation for being a regressive form of taxation.
Thanks for your response. Although I am angry with SCO, and that anger tends to translate into a desire to hurt the company, their customers and anyone who works for them, your response to my concerns is extremely persuasive.
In this particular case, IMHO it's more like : "I'm against the death-penalty, but I'll defend your right to have me executed".
I think its more like this:
"In theory, I'm totally opposed to rape, but please do go ahead and keep repeatedly sodomizing my wife. My philosophy of passive resistance means that I absolutely refuse to do anything that may prevent you from acting in this manner.
What? You propose to charge rent to let all your pals do her as well? Fine, but I insist you register my objection in the strongest possible terms."
Well sir, if you had ever actually contributed to the GCC project you would know that they have very strict rules regarding copyright assignment.
Unfortunately, you seem to find yourself in the employ of a company who wants to take advantage open source software, but doesn't appear to feel that it has any obligations to the other people who have contributed to that software in return.
Not only are they trying to charge licensing fees for other people's IP -- without any authority to do so, but they clearly have no respect at all for the GPL, and claim that it is fatally flawed.
I'm sure that as an individual, you're a person of enormous ability and integrity. However, you work for a company that has proven themselves time after time to be little better than whoremasters.
In light of that fact, how can you feel secure about the prospect that SCO won't treat your copyright in the same way as it does that of all of those people who contribute to linux and start demanding license fees for it?
And can you, in all conscience, argue that open source coders are making a rational decision if they voluntarily allow any of their efforts to be used by SCO, their employees, their customers or their developers?
The GPL is flawed - if you want code to be free, you should release it under a licence that says 'this is free. do what you want with it', and leave whoever uses it to make their choices with their code.
Such licenses exist. If you wish to release *your* code under such a license, you're perfectly free to do so.
Coders who wish to ensure that those people who derive benefit from their code are obligated to give something back in return, on the other hand, should use the GPL. That doesn't make it flawed, that makes it fit for the purpose it was designed for.
If those aren't your purposes, use the license you prefer.
If you copy a GPL program in a way not permitted in the GPL, you are violating the copyright. That's it. That's all. You are not agreeing to a contract.
Are you sure? From reading the GPL, it looks to me that there's a very clear contract involved. The license grants the user the right to modify and distribute the code, in return for certain obligations on their part, ie, their agreement to distribute the source of any amendments.
Now IANAL, but that very definitely looks like a contract to me. You're granted the right to use that license under certain conditions. Breach those conditions and you've violated the terms of your license. How is that *not* a contract dispute?
Given that sales tax imposes an unreasonable burden on the poor, I can't begin to imagine why anyone would believe this. If you only earn $15,000 a year, sales tax is likely to take up a much higher proportion of your income than it is on someone who earns $150,000 a year.
Of course, if you earn $150,000 a year I can see how you might consider this 'better'. What it isn't though, is fairer.
The only way to know for sure is to become a lawyer and even then laws aren't static.
As you point out, today even that isn't enough. The law is just such a large, ever changing area, that lawyers have to specialize because they can't hope to cover it all. So there's little point asking a criminal lawyer about commercial law, or a civil lawyer about family law.
We live in a world of specialisms. We master the areas that we need to know about, and pay others to take care of those areas that we only need information about infrequently.
That seems like a sensible arrangement to me. Without it, most of the people who post here would still be posting from mom's basement.
This is odd because if the GPL is invalidated, standard copyright law applies and SCO is likely to end-up liable for astronomical damages for willfull unauthorised distribution of Linux.
Um. Not usually. In a normal copyright case, damages would be assessed on the financial (or equivalent) damage to the copyright holder. What's the damage incurred by distributing a piece of free software?
I'm not sure how this is changed by the USA's peculiar laws where breach of copyright is somehow transformed into a criminal offence, but as far as I can see, nobody has invoked the DMCA yet against SCO.
Slashdot Mirror
The term 'spammer' is as accusatory, and often as false, as 'criminal'.
Perhaps so. However, I know quite a few convicted criminals that I'd be only to happy to socialize with or to invite around to my home for dinner.
I don't believe there's anyone who sends out uninvited commercial email that I'd extend those privileges to.
Give me an honest mugger or burglar over a spammer, any day of the week. At least the former will do their time without whining when they get caught.
spammers get to have sex while UNIX using geeks don't?
Why do you assume that spammers aren't also unix using geeks?
If you're the only person seeing walls, is that why people call you crazy?
Perhaps when you've made as big a contribution to the world as Stallman, and you've got something as interesting to say as he has, global media will be seeking your views out too.
Until then, you'll always have Slashdot...
you're aunt is a fucking idiot, and should not have passed down her idiot genes.
You wouldn't the poster's cousin, by any chance?
- A book: Tom Standage, The Mechanical Turk.
- Four or five sample CD's.
- A Beige G3 Mac and Mitsubishi Monitor
- Magazine: Sound on Sound.
- Pile of assorted papers.
- Book: Alan Bennett, Beyond the Fringe.
- A Uniball pen
- Hypermood mouse pad
- Brother HL-1270N laser printer.
- Canon Ixus3 user manual
- Assorted back-up CD's.
- Yellow Pages.
- Address book.
- Adaptec 2940UW Scsi card.
- Box of 15 Memorex CD-RW.
- Copy of Baldurs Gate II
- A stack of Bill Laswell music CDs.
- Four empty glasses. (Remnants of coke and OJ)
- One empty mug. (Remnants of tea.)
- Half filled ashtray.
- One Sony MiniDisc recorder.
- One power lead.
- Two empty packets that once contained biscuits. (Sainsbury's Chocolate Malted Milk)
- One empty cigarette packet.
- One Altec Lansing speaker.
- Surfboard cable modem.
- Dell Power Edge server (below desk)
- Microsoft Natural Keyboard.
- Dell 17inch Monitor.
- Microsoft optical mouse.
- Macromedia mouse mat
- Second Altec Lansing speaker.
- Pilot CD marker.
- SCSI Zip drive
- Mo'Phatt Sound Module
- Akai S3000XL Sampler.
- Oxygen 8 midi keyboard.
- Assortment of application and driver CD's
- Packet of Nicorette lozenges (4mg.)
- Lid from a pint of Sainsbury's Handmade Farmhouse Toffee Crunch Icecream
- Torn remnants of a Rizla packet
- 2mhz Pentium IV in Coolermaster case (below desk)
And somewhere amongst all that, there *should* be a couple of grams of White Widow, but I've been searching for it for days now, and I've had no luck so far.At the very least, one of those iDesks would make it harder for me to lose the pot.
Same difference.
Its called the gayDesk, and it has a similiar gay and fruity design as the iMacs
You're missing the point entirely (though this isn't at all surprising.)
Guys who use Macs on desks like the one in the picture, get to go out with girls like the one on the picture.
Guys who use an overclocked Athlon in an aluminum Lian Li or Coolermaster, stuck on top of an old door on bricks get to stay at home Saturday night and surf pr0n.
For some reason, a sturdy table with 4 legs costs more than the home computer desk with a drawer
You need to discover your local branch of Ikea
We had people wear shoes we'd never heard of because the company coughed up $5k.
But you're a Slashdot reader! I bet the shoe salesman could have been Prada or Maholo Blahnik and you still wouldn't have heard of them.
Just build yourself a slick new PC
Yeah, right. One that looks just like this.
Mom's basement dwellers the world over will be green with envy!
can see Boies during voire dire.
Boies: "Have you ever read Slashdot?"
Juror: uh.......yeah
Boies: Then you'll know that in Soviet Russia, intellectual property steals YOU. By stealing other people's intellectual property, SCO are simply engaged in the sort of anti-communist activity that's necessary to protect our way of life.
Judge (who is a Microsoft troll): Somebody mod that sucker UP!
I wasn't claiming NT and it's derivatives are rock stable, I was just saying that I don't think it's typical for the OS to crash due to a crappy application.
Try running a couple of audio apps sometime. Cubase SX, for example. Whether its the VST plug-ins, or the way that ASIO drivers talk to your sound card, I've no idea, but most of my audio apps crash Win2k Pro and XP on a regular basis.
It's easily remedied though. The FSF should simply announce that they'll definitely doing this. That way, all of the uncertainty and doubt are completely removed, leaving nothing but Darl McBride's naked fear of losing the tiny number of customers that they still have left.
Actually, sales tax would be the ultimate tax relief for the poor. Like other posters have said, if essential things, like food and clothing, are tax-free, then the poor are off the hook.
Unfortunately, this just isn't the case. When I say 'the poor', I'm really talking about low to moderate income families. These people have the same needs as everybody else. So they need transportation to get to work. They need a home and that needs to be maintained. Their refrigerator and their washing machine will break down from time to time.
Because these people don't have a great deal of excess income, all of their income goes towards meeting their household bills. At the moment (in Europe at least), most of those bills are subject to sales tax in the form of value added tax. So if your roof starts to leak, you'll pay 18% of the repair costs on top in tax.
As a result, those on low incomes give over a much larger proportion of that income to the taxman than those who can afford to stash it away.
If you were talking about a tax on luxury goods, then I'd agree with you, but in practice, very few of the necessities of life are exempted from sales taxes which is why they have the reputation for being a regressive form of taxation.
Thanks for your response. Although I am angry with SCO, and that anger tends to translate into a desire to hurt the company, their customers and anyone who works for them, your response to my concerns is extremely persuasive.
In this particular case, IMHO it's more like : "I'm against the death-penalty, but I'll defend your right to have me executed".
I think its more like this:
"In theory, I'm totally opposed to rape, but please do go ahead and keep repeatedly sodomizing my wife. My philosophy of passive resistance means that I absolutely refuse to do anything that may prevent you from acting in this manner.
What? You propose to charge rent to let all your pals do her as well? Fine, but I insist you register my objection in the strongest possible terms."
Well sir, if you had ever actually contributed to the GCC project you would know that they have very strict rules regarding copyright assignment.
Unfortunately, you seem to find yourself in the employ of a company who wants to take advantage open source software, but doesn't appear to feel that it has any obligations to the other people who have contributed to that software in return.
Not only are they trying to charge licensing fees for other people's IP -- without any authority to do so, but they clearly have no respect at all for the GPL, and claim that it is fatally flawed.
I'm sure that as an individual, you're a person of enormous ability and integrity. However, you work for a company that has proven themselves time after time to be little better than whoremasters.
In light of that fact, how can you feel secure about the prospect that SCO won't treat your copyright in the same way as it does that of all of those people who contribute to linux and start demanding license fees for it?
And can you, in all conscience, argue that open source coders are making a rational decision if they voluntarily allow any of their efforts to be used by SCO, their employees, their customers or their developers?
The GPL is flawed - if you want code to be free, you should release it under a licence that says 'this is free. do what you want with it', and leave whoever uses it to make their choices with their code.
Such licenses exist. If you wish to release *your* code under such a license, you're perfectly free to do so.
Coders who wish to ensure that those people who derive benefit from their code are obligated to give something back in return, on the other hand, should use the GPL. That doesn't make it flawed, that makes it fit for the purpose it was designed for.
If those aren't your purposes, use the license you prefer.
If you copy a GPL program in a way not permitted in the GPL, you are violating the copyright. That's it. That's all. You are not agreeing to a contract.
Are you sure? From reading the GPL, it looks to me that there's a very clear contract involved. The license grants the user the right to modify and distribute the code, in return for certain obligations on their part, ie, their agreement to distribute the source of any amendments.
Now IANAL, but that very definitely looks like a contract to me. You're granted the right to use that license under certain conditions. Breach those conditions and you've violated the terms of your license. How is that *not* a contract dispute?
especially on /. where the average IQ is probably higher than the tabloid reading masses
I've never seen any evidence to persuade me that this might be true. What makes you say this?
Sales tax is marginally better than income tax
Given that sales tax imposes an unreasonable burden on the poor, I can't begin to imagine why anyone would believe this. If you only earn $15,000 a year, sales tax is likely to take up a much higher proportion of your income than it is on someone who earns $150,000 a year.
Of course, if you earn $150,000 a year I can see how you might consider this 'better'. What it isn't though, is fairer.
The only way to know for sure is to become a lawyer and even then laws aren't static.
;-)
As you point out, today even that isn't enough. The law is just such a large, ever changing area, that lawyers have to specialize because they can't hope to cover it all. So there's little point asking a criminal lawyer about commercial law, or a civil lawyer about family law.
We live in a world of specialisms. We master the areas that we need to know about, and pay others to take care of those areas that we only need information about infrequently.
That seems like a sensible arrangement to me. Without it, most of the people who post here would still be posting from mom's basement.
Ooops.
How is the GPL obnoxious? And making everything proprietary isn't?
I could hazard a guess? Ayn Rand would have approved of proprietary licenses, whereas the dessicated old fraud would have hated the GPL.
This is odd because if the GPL is invalidated, standard copyright law applies and SCO is likely to end-up liable for astronomical damages for willfull unauthorised distribution of Linux.
Um. Not usually. In a normal copyright case, damages would be assessed on the financial (or equivalent) damage to the copyright holder. What's the damage incurred by distributing a piece of free software?
I'm not sure how this is changed by the USA's peculiar laws where breach of copyright is somehow transformed into a criminal offence, but as far as I can see, nobody has invoked the DMCA yet against SCO.
Perhaps that's a thought though?
A bint is a woman, but God knows what moistened means in this context. Drunk? Horny?