Brilliant. In that case, Microsoft won't have any problem whatsoever when we all start downloading our copies of Office from Kazaa, etc.
Of course, the *real* difference is that everyone can have a copy of OpenOffice for free, but only those people whom Microsoft deem likely to cost them money if they lose the account get a free copy of Office.
That seems like a pretty significant difference to me.
Re:Monty's House of Lords
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Say what you want about the britsh parliment, but they got style.
Don't talk to me about parliamentary style.
Couple of weeks ago, I was invited to lunch at the House of Lords. Not something that happens to me often. In fact, not something that's ever happened to me before.
I actually thought about wearing a suit, and had intended to, but at the very last minute, there was a local train strike and so I decided that I couldn't be bothered as I knew I'd be travelling for ages.
It wasn't until I get through the peers entrance that it immediately strikes me that I've screwed up. This is the oldest gentleman's club in the world, and I'm wearing a polo shirt and chinos!
Anyway, the peer that I'm dining with shows up, and -- as is normal with British etiquette, she does her best to make light of it, telling people do this all the time, etc. and she hands me over to the usher to have him sort me out with the spare jacket and tie that they keep for these occasions.
Anyway, as soon as I'm out of her site, the usher starts to explain his philosophy on the world. This is a guy who dresses all day in a tailcoat and bow-tie. He tells me that when it comes to ties, he's something of a rebel. He believes that gentlemen should wear a tie at all times, and when he comes across sleazy little shits like me who don't bother with good grooming, he makes them pay.
So, when I'm finally escorted into the peers dining room, I'm wearing a dark blue shirt, a yellow paisley tie that should have been destroyed circa 1970, and an military-style blazer.
I've never really understood how it must feel to be a homeless person, but it all became clear to me that day.
Now, you demand that an entire operating system be cut off from IRC
No need to cut them off completely. What's clearly needed is some irc apartheid, where Macs can only talk to Macs, Linux boxes to their siblings, and Windows machines have to remain in their own Tribal Trustlands, far, far away from everyone else. Anyone found guilty of OS miscegenation will be publicly flogged and then outcast from their own OS community.
After ten years or so in this irc wilderness, songs will be written to Biko-like martyrs, people who had their computers thrown out of second-story windows by IRC netcops, and eventually a Microsoft-using Nelson Mandela figure will emerge and Windows will become cool for the first time ever.
And I don't try to run DNS, AD, Exhange, SQL and IIS all on the same box with 2000 people connected.
OK, I'll admit that I'm running DNS and a couple of other minor services on a file and print server. (Nothing major. Filemaker server, VPN, IIS. etc. but under very low loads - 30 to 40 people at most.)
But the linux server easily handles the same loads and runs sendmail, pop3, apache, mysql, samba, etc. -- all without a peep.
This isn't my experience at all. I maintain two servers. One is a Windows 2000 server, the other runs the standard RedHat offering (not the enterprise version.)
The Redhat server just works. I never have any downtime, it's never crashed, I've never lost any data -- the thing just sits there, ticking away in the background, doing what it's supposed to do.
The Win2k server, in contrast, is a continuous pain in the arse. Administration isn't at all transparent -- you fill in a few tick boxes, and pray that it's going to do what the manual says it will do. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes things just stop working, with no apparent reason. (File replication was the last thing that just 'broke'.)
With regard to the learning curve, I found that it was slightly more difficult at the beginning for Linux, but once I'd grasped the basic concepts, they pretty well applied everywhere. This isn't true for Windows 2000.
The last big problem is interoperability. With the linux server, connectivity just works. With the Windows server, it's forever disappearing from view.
Both OSes do have certain strengths and weaknesses, but I don't see that Windows has any advantage in either stability or ease of maintenance.
That's simply more evidence of their gayness. They run around all day, fighting bad guys, righting wrongs, etc. Then, after a hard day's work, they slip out of the spandex into something more comfortable while Alfred the Butler serves them a heroicly elegant supper.
It is also "beside the point" to ask the actual law abiding citizens to change their development and/or computing habits in order to accomodate the crackers
I agree. It's good to find such open-mindedness and respect for the old internet traditions.
Incidentally, what was the IP of your mail relay again?
Of course we're serious about it. But we're serious about getting it right as well. We tend to think that it's better to leave ten guilty people alive than to mistakenly kill one guilty person, and that in the main, Americans are rather like the Arabs in their approach to criminal justice. If you're poor, you'll get your hand lopped off, but if you're OJ or a Sheik, you can always buy yourself out of trouble.
They're afraid of the death penalty and of harsh sentences.
Pray you never get wrongly accused of murder, because if you do, you'll be snivelling with gratitude to those people who are 'afraid' of the death penalty.
The 'clean needle' approach basically involves making life easier for the criminal group (drug addicts) so that they don't need to commit so many troublesome crimes -- thus making life easier for everyone.
You're confusing needle exchange programmes with methadone programmes. Needle exchange is a public health response to blood borne viruses that is as much about protecting non-addicts as it is about protecting addicts. People who inject drugs have sexual partners who don't, you know. Just as you don't know someone's sexual history, you also don't know about their past drug consumption habits. By keeping those people safe and healthy, we keep you safe and healthy too.
while the 'clean needle' thing is hightly controversial and frequently shades into a program of government-subsidised drug abuse
Actually, it isn't controversial anywhere outside the War-on-Drugs obsessed USA. Canada and most European countries have had needle exchange since the WHO recommended it as a response to HIV back in 1986. The USA, in contrast, still insists on pulling *all* federal funding from your charitable organizations that distribute clean injecting equipment -- even in those states that have seen the sense of the arguments (which have long been supported by the CDC).
How you manage to translate any of that into 'government funded drug abuse' is a complete mystery to me.
Since I am morally opposed to paying book publishers...I was wondering if anyone knew where I could download a PDF copy of the book?
Can I suggest that you borrow a copy from your local library, scan it, run it through an OCR and create a pdf which you can then upload to Kazaa, or e-Donkey or your very own 'warez' FTP site.
That way, others who share your views can benefit from this sense of moral opposition that you feel, *and* you'll get an additional sense of smug superiority for doing your bit for the Coalition of the unWilling.
Of course, all this involves rather more time and effort than simply buying the book, but as yours is clearly a principled piece of moral opposition, I'm sure that's a price you'll gladly pay, along with the fines when the lawyers come a calling...
GSH may not see 2004 unless he repents of his drug problem...
Why not? He isn't ill. He's out of prison. He's been consuming drugs for a great many years now, and he hasn't gone yet. I see no reason to assume 2004 will be any different.
"home is where the hatred is" rings true
"The Bottle" as well. You know the bit,
'Look around on any corner,
If you see some body,
Looking like a goner,
It's gonna be me...'
I am a big fan of GSH, but he has proven as tragic as his writings
I rather think his life reflects the sensitivity and pain his writings express. You can't condemn him for the the former and applaud him for the latter. Well, you can, but I rather suspect that one is a direct result of the other.
Keep in mind what Tommy Lee Jones said in Under Siege.
Oh absolutely. Whenever I need astute political analysis, Hollywood is always the first place I turn.
If you want your political insights to be pithy, easily consumed with no intellectual effort, and absolutely content free and lacking any reference to complex reality, Hollywood will deliver.
Which actually explains a lot about US political life, if you think about it.
It's unlikely that you'll ever make it. Posting as an Anonymous Coward and obsessing about the social habits of geeks that you've never met are no way to achieve your goal.
fucken jag-off
So that's what you use *your* TV for? I realize that you're somewhat challenged, but I do think you could find more explicit pr0n on the net if you really put your mind to it.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't crash on cocaine
Bwahahahahahah. Come and talk to me again after you've done more than the occasional snort or two of the weak shit, sonny.
Or maybe, just maybe, they wanted to protect themselves from a lawsuit over their Services for UNIX product.
Really? And exactly what SCO code or IP has been accidentally embedded in that particular product?
Commas just don't get used enough.
Perhaps not, and I don't wanna get all grammar -nazi prescriptive here, but if I was writing that strapline, I would have used a colon.
Data Mining for Product Pricing: Is It Illegal?
Answer: there isn't any difference
Brilliant. In that case, Microsoft won't have any problem whatsoever when we all start downloading our copies of Office from Kazaa, etc.
Of course, the *real* difference is that everyone can have a copy of OpenOffice for free, but only those people whom Microsoft deem likely to cost them money if they lose the account get a free copy of Office.
That seems like a pretty significant difference to me.
Say what you want about the britsh parliment, but they got style.
Don't talk to me about parliamentary style.
Couple of weeks ago, I was invited to lunch at the House of Lords. Not something that happens to me often. In fact, not something that's ever happened to me before.
I actually thought about wearing a suit, and had intended to, but at the very last minute, there was a local train strike and so I decided that I couldn't be bothered as I knew I'd be travelling for ages.
It wasn't until I get through the peers entrance that it immediately strikes me that I've screwed up. This is the oldest gentleman's club in the world, and I'm wearing a polo shirt and chinos!
Anyway, the peer that I'm dining with shows up, and -- as is normal with British etiquette, she does her best to make light of it, telling people do this all the time, etc. and she hands me over to the usher to have him sort me out with the spare jacket and tie that they keep for these occasions.
Anyway, as soon as I'm out of her site, the usher starts to explain his philosophy on the world. This is a guy who dresses all day in a tailcoat and bow-tie. He tells me that when it comes to ties, he's something of a rebel. He believes that gentlemen should wear a tie at all times, and when he comes across sleazy little shits like me who don't bother with good grooming, he makes them pay.
So, when I'm finally escorted into the peers dining room, I'm wearing a dark blue shirt, a yellow paisley tie that should have been destroyed circa 1970, and an military-style blazer.
I've never really understood how it must feel to be a homeless person, but it all became clear to me that day.
Now, you demand that an entire operating system be cut off from IRC
No need to cut them off completely. What's clearly needed is some irc apartheid, where Macs can only talk to Macs, Linux boxes to their siblings, and Windows machines have to remain in their own Tribal Trustlands, far, far away from everyone else. Anyone found guilty of OS miscegenation will be publicly flogged and then outcast from their own OS community.
After ten years or so in this irc wilderness, songs will be written to Biko-like martyrs, people who had their computers thrown out of second-story windows by IRC netcops, and eventually a Microsoft-using Nelson Mandela figure will emerge and Windows will become cool for the first time ever.
I like the equivalent Tallulah Bankhead quote:
"Cocaine isn't addictive. I should know, I've been using it for years."
What could you do with a subway car?
Convert it into a diner, perhaps?
And I don't try to run DNS, AD, Exhange, SQL and IIS all on the same box with 2000 people connected.
OK, I'll admit that I'm running DNS and a couple of other minor services on a file and print server. (Nothing major. Filemaker server, VPN, IIS. etc. but under very low loads - 30 to 40 people at most.)
But the linux server easily handles the same loads and runs sendmail, pop3, apache, mysql, samba, etc. -- all without a peep.
Identical hardware -- low end Dell servers.
And secondly, if you did, you would have to get rid of monkeyboy somehow.
Oooh. Can we make him dance until his heart explodes? Please? Pretty please?
This isn't my experience at all. I maintain two servers. One is a Windows 2000 server, the other runs the standard RedHat offering (not the enterprise version.)
The Redhat server just works. I never have any downtime, it's never crashed, I've never lost any data -- the thing just sits there, ticking away in the background, doing what it's supposed to do.
The Win2k server, in contrast, is a continuous pain in the arse. Administration isn't at all transparent -- you fill in a few tick boxes, and pray that it's going to do what the manual says it will do. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes things just stop working, with no apparent reason. (File replication was the last thing that just 'broke'.)
With regard to the learning curve, I found that it was slightly more difficult at the beginning for Linux, but once I'd grasped the basic concepts, they pretty well applied everywhere. This isn't true for Windows 2000.
The last big problem is interoperability. With the linux server, connectivity just works. With the Windows server, it's forever disappearing from view.
Both OSes do have certain strengths and weaknesses, but I don't see that Windows has any advantage in either stability or ease of maintenance.
Secondly, they're frigging supperheroes!
That's simply more evidence of their gayness. They run around all day, fighting bad guys, righting wrongs, etc. Then, after a hard day's work, they slip out of the spandex into something more comfortable while Alfred the Butler serves them a heroicly elegant supper.
Now, for 'ethical' things, artists should be retributed for their work
Oh absolutely. I can think of loads and loads of artists who should be 'retributed' for their work. The late, great, Bill Hicks had the right idea.
"M.C. Hammer? Come over here. Now suck Satan's cock... Vanilla Ice? Come over here..."
I think you meant to say they should have restitution, but the idea of retribution for the suffering they've imposed is just so much more appealing...
I wouldn't think she'd want to count on the Navy. Not after what the RIAA did to their brother cadets.
I believe the Revolutionary Guard are pretty good at that sort of thing though.
And clearly one that's more important to the US government and it's citizens than any nebulous, wishy-washy concept like democracy.
your mama has a VCR at home and she's taped at least one movie or TV show
Psh. Yo' mama such a pirate she wears an eyepatch and has *every single episode* of the Jerry Springer show on tape.
No matter how many drugs a user puts in their arm, it doesn't affect my health.
Unless you happen to have sex with one. Or have sex with someone who once had sex with one.
Are you getting my drift here? Governments fund harm reduction because it protects us *all*.
It is also "beside the point" to ask the actual law abiding citizens to change their development and/or computing habits in order to accomodate the crackers
I agree. It's good to find such open-mindedness and respect for the old internet traditions.
Incidentally, what was the IP of your mail relay again?
Europeans just aren't serious about crime.
Of course we're serious about it. But we're serious about getting it right as well. We tend to think that it's better to leave ten guilty people alive than to mistakenly kill one guilty person, and that in the main, Americans are rather like the Arabs in their approach to criminal justice. If you're poor, you'll get your hand lopped off, but if you're OJ or a Sheik, you can always buy yourself out of trouble.
They're afraid of the death penalty and of harsh sentences.
Pray you never get wrongly accused of murder, because if you do, you'll be snivelling with gratitude to those people who are 'afraid' of the death penalty.
The 'clean needle' approach basically involves making life easier for the criminal group (drug addicts) so that they don't need to commit so many troublesome crimes -- thus making life easier for everyone.
You're confusing needle exchange programmes with methadone programmes. Needle exchange is a public health response to blood borne viruses that is as much about protecting non-addicts as it is about protecting addicts. People who inject drugs have sexual partners who don't, you know. Just as you don't know someone's sexual history, you also don't know about their past drug consumption habits. By keeping those people safe and healthy, we keep you safe and healthy too.
while the 'clean needle' thing is hightly controversial and frequently shades into a program of government-subsidised drug abuse
Actually, it isn't controversial anywhere outside the War-on-Drugs obsessed USA. Canada and most European countries have had needle exchange since the WHO recommended it as a response to HIV back in 1986. The USA, in contrast, still insists on pulling *all* federal funding from your charitable organizations that distribute clean injecting equipment -- even in those states that have seen the sense of the arguments (which have long been supported by the CDC).
How you manage to translate any of that into 'government funded drug abuse' is a complete mystery to me.
Yes, but he'd know the specs on the latest line of BMW's, if only to find them wanting when measured against his Lexus.
Since I am morally opposed to paying book publishers...I was wondering if anyone knew where I could download a PDF copy of the book?
Can I suggest that you borrow a copy from your local library, scan it, run it through an OCR and create a pdf which you can then upload to Kazaa, or e-Donkey or your very own 'warez' FTP site.
That way, others who share your views can benefit from this sense of moral opposition that you feel, *and* you'll get an additional sense of smug superiority for doing your bit for the Coalition of the unWilling.
Of course, all this involves rather more time and effort than simply buying the book, but as yours is clearly a principled piece of moral opposition, I'm sure that's a price you'll gladly pay, along with the fines when the lawyers come a calling...
GSH may not see 2004 unless he repents of his drug problem ...
Why not? He isn't ill. He's out of prison. He's been consuming drugs for a great many years now, and he hasn't gone yet. I see no reason to assume 2004 will be any different.
"home is where the hatred is" rings true
"The Bottle" as well. You know the bit,
'Look around on any corner,
If you see some body,
Looking like a goner,
It's gonna be me...'
I am a big fan of GSH, but he has proven as tragic as his writings
I rather think his life reflects the sensitivity and pain his writings express. You can't condemn him for the the former and applaud him for the latter. Well, you can, but I rather suspect that one is a direct result of the other.
Keep in mind what Tommy Lee Jones said in Under Siege.
Oh absolutely. Whenever I need astute political analysis, Hollywood is always the first place I turn.
If you want your political insights to be pithy, easily consumed with no intellectual effort, and absolutely content free and lacking any reference to complex reality, Hollywood will deliver.
Which actually explains a lot about US political life, if you think about it.
Wow! I want to be as cool as you someday
It's unlikely that you'll ever make it. Posting as an Anonymous Coward and obsessing about the social habits of geeks that you've never met are no way to achieve your goal.
fucken jag-off
So that's what you use *your* TV for? I realize that you're somewhat challenged, but I do think you could find more explicit pr0n on the net if you really put your mind to it.
Just a word to the none-too-wise.