he doesn't really come across as the most intellectually advanced person I know
And yet the reasons you cite for this have nothing to do with failings of fact or logic, but rather a tendency to use the vernacular. None of the intellectually advanced people that I know would see that as relevant here -- as they tend to be able to seperate form from content and focus on the important part -- the content.
Personally, I thought his assessment was one of the smartest, most insightful pieces that I've read on the whole issue so far -- but hey, perhaps I'm not that intellectually advanced either?
It's all about context. He didn't say "here's how to make bombs, if you're interested", he said "let's overthrow the government, and a good way to do that is if you make your own bombs! Click here!"
I don't see how that isn't protected speech. Lets be clear here. He wasn't plotting with particular individuals to carry out an act of terror or violence. He was saying that this goverment sucks and should be overthrown -- by violent needs if necessary. And should anyone think that's a good idea, then here's some information on how you can forward those aims.
Now I don't think what he's proposing is a good idea by any stretch of the imagination. I'm a liberal democrat by persuasion, not a revolutionary anarchist. But the one thing I'd always admired about the USA was the way that political free speech is protected by the constitution and if anything counts as political speech, this guy's website does.
The effect is that he's not providing the information out of general interest but he's intending that the information be used to create tools overthrow the government. Big difference there.
Perhaps that's true, but it isn't a difference that I thought was prohibited by law. Americans in this forum often go on about how you need the right to bear arms in case of a tyrannical government. This case makes it pretty clear that even if you actually *had* a tyrannical government, the right to bear arms would be somewhat pointless because the ability to discuss with others the need to use them would render you liable to arrest and imprisonment.
"I am also disappointed that you have chosen litigation rather than good faith discussions with SCO about the problems inherent in Linux."
I'm sure RedHat would be only too happy to engage in good faith discussions on this issue, if Darl means the SCO variety of good faith discussions:
RedHat to SCO: "Give me a billion dollars. Now."
Check SCO's stock graph for the past 6 months and you will see the truth.
If by 'truth', you mean the fact that SCO have successfully persuaded a bunch of gamblers that their attempts to blackmail IBM are worth a punt, then I agree, the market does reflect that.
The stock market is ALWAYS right - by definition.
What do you mean, right? An accurate reflection of the true value of a company, or a snapshot of what public opinion thinks it's worth at any given time. I suppose the latter is true, but whether it is also equivalent to the first is another question.
Whiney little bitches on a computer nerd website are NOT.
Clearly there's no reason to take any of your points seriously then.
Who should I believe, teams of informed and intelligent analysts who get paid to break down big business for the billionaire clients, or some geek in his mom's basement amped up on mountain dew?
Do you mean those same 'informed and intelligent analysts' who were hyping dot com stocks throughout the nineties? Absolutely, you should believe everything that they say without question.
I, on the other hand, will continue to recognize that they don't know all the answers, and when it comes to technology, they are often extremely poorly informed, or just don't get it.
As a consequence, I'll continue to listen to information from all sources, and assess and evaluate that information myself -- and if a slashdot geek living in his mom's basement and drinking mountain dew has useful insights, hopefully I'll be open minded enough to recognize them for what they are while you continue to get shafted by the analysts who make their living by taking advantages of suckers like you.
Thanks for "allowing" us to use the software we slaved over for little or no fee and released to the world for free.
Well, as I've been saying repeatedly, the most sensible way to respond to this would be to modify the GPL to explicitly exclude it's use by SCO and any of it's customers or licensees.
Copyright holders would then have to reassign their software under the new license, but you'd see SCO's stock plummet like a stone -- and their customer base do likewise.
I'm not an American either (Like you, I'm also from the UK.) but I do know what a felony is.
Criminal charges in the USA seem to be divided into misdemeanours and felonies. Something like assault with a deadly weapon, or grand theft auto is a felony, whereas smoking weed in a public place used to be a misdemeanour in many states.
As you said, welcome to Orwell's 1984! Big Brother *is* watching you...
OK, now I understand why the Supreme Court recently legalized sodomy. Clearly, it was necessary to make it legal before the RIAA and the US government start systematically buggering the general public.
<RIAA spokesperson> Lube? What do you mean, lube? You're a thief, plain and simple, so you're going to be buggered in the exact manner that I specify. Which means no lube! </RIAA spokesperson>
That's the myth. The reality is somewhat different. Middle and upper-level dealers tend to only have one person above them. Not only is that person their connection to earning, at that level, people rarely are together with the money and the drugs in the same place. And the other thing is, the higher up the chain you go, the more dangerous the people you're dealing with.
So when dealers do give people up, its almost always the people below them in the chain and not the people above. Makes no difference to the cops, so long as they get bodies to arrest and property to seize, but for the snitch, it may mean the difference between life and death.
Look, I hate the RIAA as much as the other guy, but stealing is stealing, and there is no excuse for it.
Fuck me. If Slashdot is anything to go by, I'm astonished that there are any files to find on the P2P networks. Nobody here seems to admit to using them at all.
Clearly, the people who are doing all the sharing must be Muslim terrorists. Perhaps the US govermnent will announce a plan to launch a campaign of Shock and Awe against them any day now.
Sorry, but this just isn't how the War on Drugs actually works. There's a little thing called Zero Tolerance, which means that they target dealers *and* users. They arrest far more users than they ever do dealers, and the thing about being a dealer is, if you get arrested, you can always trade information to give up someone else for your freedom. And in the main, they trade the people below them in the supply chain, not the people above.
OK, so the users who actually tend to get arrested might not be the white, middle class Slashdot posters, do still get arrested, lose jobs and go to prison (for breaching parole, etc.) every single day of the week.
Pal, I hate to break this to you, but that Georgia that you've been seeing so much lately? From what I've been hearing, she was probably originally christened 'George'.
But I'd contend that the costs of R&D is for improvements to future machines, and by granting those spin-offs for free to existing customers, they build customer satisfaction with their brand and their product, and as a consequence, build customer loyalty.
The reason that I feel as though I'm always getting the shaft from Steve Jobs is because I feel as though he knows he has that customer loyalty and exploits it to the hilt.
Linus, FSF, RMS sueing is bad, because in the long run it validates the idea that GPL is problematic legally.
Well, any licence is problematic legally if you happen to violate it.
My preferred option is *still* an amendment to the GPL that specifically excludes use by SCO and its customers. I'd love to hear SCO trying to explain to their customers how they can no longer use any of that communist Open Source software while they continue to use SCO products.
OK, so I know that such a retroactive change, given the zillions of GPL contributors, would probably be impossible, but I can dream can't I?
Then why do you mind paying $129 every year and a half or so for truly innovative R&D?
Because I've already paid that premium when I bought the hardware in the first place. I resent having to pay it over and over again, in order to make the most of that hardware.
Don't get me wrong, I love Macs. I've owned at least one since my IIci back in 1988. I've currently got a TiBook, and I'll definitely buy a new G5. But I always feel as though Steve Jobs is buttfucking me over the price, and in charging for OS point upgrades, it feels like he's stopped bothering to even apply lube before he anally rapes me again.
Well, as I said, this has clearly gone way over my head. Perhaps it might have deflated the protesters sails in the eyes of a non-technical audience, but it isn't exactly the sort of thing that has me rolling in the aisles laughing.
And I don't think it's because of the way I feel about SCO either. I believe I'm capable of appreciating an attack from my enemies that's executed with style and wit and humour, but this just seemed to me to be an example of an organization that's happy to do and say anything to try and further their case, regardless of how nonsensical it might be, and worse, are happy to conscript their employees into that process.
The only way I can see it as funny is in the same way that the Jerry Springer show is funny. ie, you've got all these poor yokels who are prepared to do and say anything, even get their tits out in public, because that's the only way they have of deluding themselves into believing they aren't total losers. And another way that this is similar to Springer is that its hard to figure out which of the guests are actually professional whores.
Wrong. Kazaa won because, unlike Napster, it doesn't keep a central database of files and.or their locations.
Read the judgement. The lack of a filtering mechanism blocks the RIAA from seeking this as a remedy against copyright protection, but it didn't prevent them from bringing an action to try and shut the network down. The judge allowed the network to continue because he said there were other legitimate uses besides the ability to trade in MP3's and warez. If the only possible use for Kazaa had been to distribute illegal files, the judge would have had no choice but to rule against it.
I hate SCO but there's no denying that what they did WAS hilarious.
Sorry, but I just don't get it. Which bit do you find hilarious? The amateurishly drawn, not at all funny signs, or the fact that the CEO of the company can direct his under-employed staff to go out and pretend to be participants in a demo against the company?
Perhaps it appeals to something about the American sense of humour that just slips we British by...
Really? Which ones did you think were funny? What did you think was funny about them?
Why is it that some people from the Linux camp are all about free speech... that is, when the free speech is not targeted against them.
Dunno, but thankfully a righteous supporter of free speech like yourself obviously won't object at all to my pointing out the possibility that you must be retarded if those posters were your idea of humorous?
These are all marketing issues. If you believe in the power of marketing and want to sell your future earnings to fund some advertising exec's cocaine habit, feel free to go ahead and do so.
Takes money, and lots of it to get it through the marketing noise.
I suppose it depends on who you see as your market. If you believe your product is sufficiently bland and superficial to sell to the drones who buy their product from Clear Channel and advertising, then you might well think that investing in the mass marketing roulette wheel is worth doing.
As someone who's actually worked in that end of the media that defined trends rather than followed them, I can tell you that whenever that sort of material landed on our desks, it went straight into the trash. Word of mouth recommendations are the only ones worth having, and they remain as free as they ever were.
Of course, its hard to get those if you're crap, so you could always go the Britney Spears route and perform to gullible kids at shopping malls from a flatbed truck.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd have to say that depends very much on the case in question.
Someone should mod this fucker up.
he doesn't really come across as the most intellectually advanced person I know
And yet the reasons you cite for this have nothing to do with failings of fact or logic, but rather a tendency to use the vernacular. None of the intellectually advanced people that I know would see that as relevant here -- as they tend to be able to seperate form from content and focus on the important part -- the content.
Personally, I thought his assessment was one of the smartest, most insightful pieces that I've read on the whole issue so far -- but hey, perhaps I'm not that intellectually advanced either?
It's all about context. He didn't say "here's how to make bombs, if you're interested", he said "let's overthrow the government, and a good way to do that is if you make your own bombs! Click here!"
I don't see how that isn't protected speech. Lets be clear here. He wasn't plotting with particular individuals to carry out an act of terror or violence. He was saying that this goverment sucks and should be overthrown -- by violent needs if necessary. And should anyone think that's a good idea, then here's some information on how you can forward those aims.
Now I don't think what he's proposing is a good idea by any stretch of the imagination. I'm a liberal democrat by persuasion, not a revolutionary anarchist. But the one thing I'd always admired about the USA was the way that political free speech is protected by the constitution and if anything counts as political speech, this guy's website does.
The effect is that he's not providing the information out of general interest but he's intending that the information be used to create tools overthrow the government. Big difference there.
Perhaps that's true, but it isn't a difference that I thought was prohibited by law. Americans in this forum often go on about how you need the right to bear arms in case of a tyrannical government. This case makes it pretty clear that even if you actually *had* a tyrannical government, the right to bear arms would be somewhat pointless because the ability to discuss with others the need to use them would render you liable to arrest and imprisonment.
"I am also disappointed that you have chosen litigation rather than good faith discussions with SCO about the problems inherent in Linux."
I'm sure RedHat would be only too happy to engage in good faith discussions on this issue, if Darl means the SCO variety of good faith discussions:
RedHat to SCO: "Give me a billion dollars. Now."
Check SCO's stock graph for the past 6 months and you will see the truth.
If by 'truth', you mean the fact that SCO have successfully persuaded a bunch of gamblers that their attempts to blackmail IBM are worth a punt, then I agree, the market does reflect that.
The stock market is ALWAYS right - by definition.
What do you mean, right? An accurate reflection of the true value of a company, or a snapshot of what public opinion thinks it's worth at any given time. I suppose the latter is true, but whether it is also equivalent to the first is another question.
Whiney little bitches on a computer nerd website are NOT.
Clearly there's no reason to take any of your points seriously then.
Who should I believe, teams of informed and intelligent analysts who get paid to break down big business for the billionaire clients, or some geek in his mom's basement amped up on mountain dew?
Do you mean those same 'informed and intelligent analysts' who were hyping dot com stocks throughout the nineties? Absolutely, you should believe everything that they say without question.
I, on the other hand, will continue to recognize that they don't know all the answers, and when it comes to technology, they are often extremely poorly informed, or just don't get it.
As a consequence, I'll continue to listen to information from all sources, and assess and evaluate that information myself -- and if a slashdot geek living in his mom's basement and drinking mountain dew has useful insights, hopefully I'll be open minded enough to recognize them for what they are while you continue to get shafted by the analysts who make their living by taking advantages of suckers like you.
Thanks for "allowing" us to use the software we slaved over for little or no fee and released to the world for free.
Well, as I've been saying repeatedly, the most sensible way to respond to this would be to modify the GPL to explicitly exclude it's use by SCO and any of it's customers or licensees.
Copyright holders would then have to reassign their software under the new license, but you'd see SCO's stock plummet like a stone -- and their customer base do likewise.
If you're for nuts with guns, I suggest you put a sign on your lawn that says "I think all nuts should own guns!"
Or displaying an NRA poster should suffice in a pinch.
I'm not an American either (Like you, I'm also from the UK.) but I do know what a felony is.
Criminal charges in the USA seem to be divided into misdemeanours and felonies. Something like assault with a deadly weapon, or grand theft auto is a felony, whereas smoking weed in a public place used to be a misdemeanour in many states.
As you said, welcome to Orwell's 1984! Big Brother *is* watching you...
OK, now I understand why the Supreme Court recently legalized sodomy. Clearly, it was necessary to make it legal before the RIAA and the US government start systematically buggering the general public.
<RIAA spokesperson>
Lube? What do you mean, lube? You're a thief, plain and simple, so you're going to be buggered in the exact manner that I specify. Which means no lube!
</RIAA spokesperson>
That's the myth. The reality is somewhat different. Middle and upper-level dealers tend to only have one person above them. Not only is that person their connection to earning, at that level, people rarely are together with the money and the drugs in the same place. And the other thing is, the higher up the chain you go, the more dangerous the people you're dealing with.
So when dealers do give people up, its almost always the people below them in the chain and not the people above. Makes no difference to the cops, so long as they get bodies to arrest and property to seize, but for the snitch, it may mean the difference between life and death.
Look, I hate the RIAA as much as the other guy, but stealing is stealing, and there is no excuse for it.
Fuck me. If Slashdot is anything to go by, I'm astonished that there are any files to find on the P2P networks. Nobody here seems to admit to using them at all.
Clearly, the people who are doing all the sharing must be Muslim terrorists. Perhaps the US govermnent will announce a plan to launch a campaign of Shock and Awe against them any day now.
You target the dealers...
Sorry, but this just isn't how the War on Drugs actually works. There's a little thing called Zero Tolerance, which means that they target dealers *and* users. They arrest far more users than they ever do dealers, and the thing about being a dealer is, if you get arrested, you can always trade information to give up someone else for your freedom. And in the main, they trade the people below them in the supply chain, not the people above.
OK, so the users who actually tend to get arrested might not be the white, middle class Slashdot posters, do still get arrested, lose jobs and go to prison (for breaching parole, etc.) every single day of the week.
Alternatively, you could have: FORD SCUMS
Marketing execs get a hard on the size of Georgia
Pal, I hate to break this to you, but that Georgia that you've been seeing so much lately? From what I've been hearing, she was probably originally christened 'George'.
But I'd contend that the costs of R&D is for improvements to future machines, and by granting those spin-offs for free to existing customers, they build customer satisfaction with their brand and their product, and as a consequence, build customer loyalty.
The reason that I feel as though I'm always getting the shaft from Steve Jobs is because I feel as though he knows he has that customer loyalty and exploits it to the hilt.
Linus, FSF, RMS sueing is bad, because in the long run it validates the idea that GPL is problematic legally.
Well, any licence is problematic legally if you happen to violate it.
My preferred option is *still* an amendment to the GPL that specifically excludes use by SCO and its customers. I'd love to hear SCO trying to explain to their customers how they can no longer use any of that communist Open Source software while they continue to use SCO products.
OK, so I know that such a retroactive change, given the zillions of GPL contributors, would probably be impossible, but I can dream can't I?
Do you like how OS X works?
Yes.
Would you like it to keep getting better?
Yes.
Then why do you mind paying $129 every year and a half or so for truly innovative R&D?
Because I've already paid that premium when I bought the hardware in the first place. I resent having to pay it over and over again, in order to make the most of that hardware.
Don't get me wrong, I love Macs. I've owned at least one since my IIci back in 1988. I've currently got a TiBook, and I'll definitely buy a new G5. But I always feel as though Steve Jobs is buttfucking me over the price, and in charging for OS point upgrades, it feels like he's stopped bothering to even apply lube before he anally rapes me again.
Well, as I said, this has clearly gone way over my head. Perhaps it might have deflated the protesters sails in the eyes of a non-technical audience, but it isn't exactly the sort of thing that has me rolling in the aisles laughing. And I don't think it's because of the way I feel about SCO either. I believe I'm capable of appreciating an attack from my enemies that's executed with style and wit and humour, but this just seemed to me to be an example of an organization that's happy to do and say anything to try and further their case, regardless of how nonsensical it might be, and worse, are happy to conscript their employees into that process. The only way I can see it as funny is in the same way that the Jerry Springer show is funny. ie, you've got all these poor yokels who are prepared to do and say anything, even get their tits out in public, because that's the only way they have of deluding themselves into believing they aren't total losers. And another way that this is similar to Springer is that its hard to figure out which of the guests are actually professional whores.
Wrong. Kazaa won because, unlike Napster, it doesn't keep a central database of files and.or their locations.
Read the judgement. The lack of a filtering mechanism blocks the RIAA from seeking this as a remedy against copyright protection, but it didn't prevent them from bringing an action to try and shut the network down. The judge allowed the network to continue because he said there were other legitimate uses besides the ability to trade in MP3's and warez. If the only possible use for Kazaa had been to distribute illegal files, the judge would have had no choice but to rule against it.
I hate SCO but there's no denying that what they did WAS hilarious.
Sorry, but I just don't get it. Which bit do you find hilarious? The amateurishly drawn, not at all funny signs, or the fact that the CEO of the company can direct his under-employed staff to go out and pretend to be participants in a demo against the company?
Perhaps it appeals to something about the American sense of humour that just slips we British by...
Look, just don't come knocking on my door when you're doing your missionary service or you'll get a bucket of water over you. OK?
Some of these are just downright funny.
Really? Which ones did you think were funny? What did you think was funny about them?
Why is it that some people from the Linux camp are all about free speech... that is, when the free speech is not targeted against them.
Dunno, but thankfully a righteous supporter of free speech like yourself obviously won't object at all to my pointing out the possibility that you must be retarded if those posters were your idea of humorous?
The Internal Revenue Service has recognized the religious nature of the Church of SCOentology.
I just wanna know how many wives Darl McBride actually has...
How do you get your record on Clear Channel?...
These are all marketing issues. If you believe in the power of marketing and want to sell your future earnings to fund some advertising exec's cocaine habit, feel free to go ahead and do so.
Takes money, and lots of it to get it through the marketing noise.
I suppose it depends on who you see as your market. If you believe your product is sufficiently bland and superficial to sell to the drones who buy their product from Clear Channel and advertising, then you might well think that investing in the mass marketing roulette wheel is worth doing.
As someone who's actually worked in that end of the media that defined trends rather than followed them, I can tell you that whenever that sort of material landed on our desks, it went straight into the trash. Word of mouth recommendations are the only ones worth having, and they remain as free as they ever were.
Of course, its hard to get those if you're crap, so you could always go the Britney Spears route and perform to gullible kids at shopping malls from a flatbed truck.
This is a big whig lawyer.
Somebody who wears one of these is a big wig lawyer.