There is a good chance it's more complicated than just this. Remember this is Cogent we are taking about here and they are famous for trying to get downstream isps to pay the entire cost of peering upgrades and have also been known to actively cut back on peering points with other providers.
Just how poorly must your company be run if you fuck up scrabble, that you bought.
Traditionally, the problem with computer versions of games like Scrabble is that companies had to find an excuse to sell new versions of the same concept every year (or whenever). This seems to have been the case with the PC versions of scrabble. Which generally resulted in contrived and pointless secondary features, or worse, their messing around with the basic game itself (and just as likely screwing it up). For example, the countless stupid variants of Tetris (like Tetris Worlds) even though the original didn't need all that rubbish, or pointless updates of "classic" games like Space Invaders with stupid gimmickry that appear on every console.
Of course, this shouldn't apply to online games. People can (or should) keep paying- or attract advertisable eyeballs- as long as they're playing. However, it might be that someone felt that there was a need to keep the game fresh and interesting for fickle casual players (whether that was true or not).
That said, my gut reaction is that it's not even at that level of cynical-but-in-good-faith... it's more plausible that someone in the company is doing this purely for the sake of being seen to be doing something, thus justifying their job. Doing nothing while the money rolls in might be fine, but then... why are they employing that manager and his team? Some guy telling his boss that what Mattel or the previous management did was fine, and they should keep doing that isn't really making himself look good, even if that's logically the best thing to do.
Doesn't matter much - Kodak's days in the film business seem numbered.
Is is true that Kodak has stopped making transparency film altogether?
They announced the discontinuation of Ektachrome in particular formats in early 2012, but never actually said "we're stopping making slide film". Yet some people seem to believe that this is effectively what's happened.
Go to their website, visit the "professional films" section (the "consumer" films bit only seems to contain a couple of print films) and click on "color reversal films". There's nothing there but the discontinuation notice.
Many people interpreted a press release from Kodak around a year ago as (effectively) signifiying they were discontinuing slide film (e.g. here). If this is the case, then Kodak managed to slip a *very* significant announcement through as just yet another downsizing of their film line.
So... has Kodak discontinued slide film, and if so, why didn't more people pick up on it?!
Who else has money that Kodak will go under first before they exhaust their stockpile?
Kodak *is* pretty much toast at this point, it's just a question of when. Unfortunately, they've really left it too late for the company to restructure and reorient in the way that the more far-sighted Fujifilm did over a decade ago, and ironically it's only bankruptcy proceedings that have (and will) give them the power to do what needs to be done.
Kodak's problem is that there's no real reason for them to exist in their old form- with many legacy operations, obligations and structures- at this stage, and thus no real reason for anyone to buy them whole. Looked at coldly, potential buyers would probably be more likely to buy them if they were split up along the lines of their operations, e.g. while operations relating to the chemical aspects of traditional photography might have some value elsewhere, they probably make little sense being part of a "photography" company in the digital world. (And, actually Kodak *had* spun off Eastman Chemical in 1994, *before* digital decimated their mass-market film-based business).
Kodak's other major problem is that they're now selling off the things (patents et al) that they really need to survive long-term, simply to survive in the short term.
The best case scenario is that the business will be radically transformed under bankruptcy protection with much of it being sold off and a *much* smaller core company remaining. The worst case scenario is that the company is totally liquidated, its intellectual and physical assets sold off piecemeal in a way that preserves nothing of the original structure and the "Kodak" name is bought up and whored out for use on arbitrary electronic tat.
Believe me, the name *will* survive if nothing else, used to trade off nostalgia and people's ignorance that the "Kodak" product they bought has nothing to do with the original company and was probably just licensed out by a rights holder. But that isn't "survival" in any meaningful sense.
All *I* (as opposed to the GP) actually said was that it required far more accurate temperature control- which *is* true of some stages. And while it's doable as you describe it, you have to admit that it's still more complicated than processing black and white, which is pretty straightforward for the amateur.
B&W darkrooms are easy to set up, but C-41 process color film or slide film are generally too much for the home hobbyist. Labs are accessible in most large cities but everyone else probably has to mail it in, or have some local reseller mail it for them.
The problem with colour film was that it required far more accurate temperature control to get the colour balance et al right.
However, given that the hipsters seem to be intentionally going for wonky, degraded-looking colour (the sort of film-type flaws that processors once tried to avoid like the plague and technologists tried to eliminate), I'd just say "f*** it", start up a hipster-oriented lab and make this some sort of selling point for the people that got into cheap, crappy cameras after a bunch of marketing students licensed the brand and ramped up the price.
Quality control? Not needed... the results of my lousy C41 processing will be "quirky", "charming" and "retro"!
I know that posts like this always get modded down by OSS-fanatics, but it is true. If I was to write a small piece of software and wanted people to actually use it, I would never release as GPL. [.. blah blah..] Release as BSD or similar with a warranty disclaimer and be done with it. [..blah blah..]
Or perhaps they're modded down because anyone outside the GPL vs. BSD zealotry sees them for what they are- the tedious and inevitable tendency of fanatics on either side to steer any vaguely license-related discussion into being yet another tedious identikit rehash of the GPL vs. BSD holy war.
Never mind that we've had this discussion countless times before and every possible debating point and issue has been raised and discussed exhaustively a million times. Never mind that the chances of any new insight coming out of the billionth tedious discussion of this long-established subject is next to nothing. Never mind that those involved on both sides feel the need to repeat the same entrenched positions- which mostly come down to personal philosophy and not an incomplete understanding of the issues (which everyone knows full well by now) and will therefore be unlikely to change in the face of the discussion... not that this was the point anyway.
No, the point is that those involved in every one of these pointless rehashes of the exact same to-ing and fro-ing and restatements of the same old facts and arguments on both sides know this damn well, but can't reign in their desire to indulge in the argument yet again.
Because I was replying to a post in which the OP said
But they can set the minimum sentence to zero.
Well, yes. "Up to" includes zero, that was my point.
"up to two years or more" means any number (some might say any number apart from exactly two).
While this is logically correct if one takes an intentionally pedantic view of what I said, it misses the point and in fact is misleading.
While a cap could (in theory) be set at any arbitrary value (provided X >= 2) in legislation, for the person in court, X will be a fixed maximum possible sentence. (Which is of course the point of a cap).
While it may be open to interpretation, the way you phrased things could (possibly) be taken to imply that a person in court for hacking could be facing a sentence of any length. Which wouldn't be the case.
Comprende?
You're from Barcelona?
No, I'm from Madrid.:-P
That explains it.
Explains what? How I correctly interpreted the summary and story when many people didn't manage to? I... really don't think it does, you know.:-)
Seriously, I understand exactly what insult-via-70s-sitcom-reference you're trying to make, it just seems that you wanted an excuse to imply I was stupid without having any concrete justification for doing so!
I thought we were talking about legislation on hacking, not buggery?
(Hint; watch out for ambiguity in the implied hyphen. And no, it wasn't this XKCD cartoon that made me think of that, but the other way around- still partly appropriate though!)
I suppose the summary doesn't actually lie because it's incoherent.
The summary is perfectly clear and comprehensible if you stop and read what it actually says. The problem is that most people didn't, they skimmed it and came to the wrong conclusion based on a kneejerk response.
Er... yeah. We *know* that. No-one claimed otherwise. What's your point?
The story had nothing to do with the minimum sentence; it had to do with the maximum possible sentence (i.e. the cap).
Specifically, EU countries could not set the maximum possible sentence (i.e. the cap) to less than two years. Hence a "hacker" could face up to two years (or more) in prison.
With the emphasis on the phrase "up to".
Comprende?
Which kills your entire perversion of truth.
I'm not sure how you think something I never claimed "kills" what I said.
Also, hysterically screeching phrases like "your entire perversion of truth" makes you sound like one of the kneejerk idiots I was referring to above.
You're not being fed misinformation, at least not with this story. As I said, the summary *was* perfectly correct, and it wasn't even misleading... assuming you had a moderate level of intelligence and were paying attention to what it actually said, rather than hurriedly skimming and coming to a kneejerk conclusion based on what you'd *expected* it to say.
It's just that one gets the feeling that the editors ran this knowing how many people would fall into the latter category and get a well-posted discussion going before someone corrected the idiots.
If anything, that reflects more badly on the Slashdot readers than the editors. While Slashdot has undeniably been guilty of putting a sensationalist and misleading slant on some stories in recent times, if you think you were misinformed in this case, then perhaps you should take a look at your own reading comprehension.
I *did* read the topic- and the summary- which is more than most people bothered to do.
It clearly states "minimum sentence cap" instead of "minimum length of maximum sentence"
Yes- the "cap" referred to was a cap on the maximum length of the sentence. By requiring the cap to be at or above a certain length, they're forcing a minimum length on the maximum imposable sentence, e.g. no country can say "we'll set a cap on the *maximum* sentence for hacking at 18 months".
Perhaps you misunderstood my intention, as I was paraphrasing what the summary said for those who had already misinterpreted the original wording. The meaning is the same, even if the summary is better English... for people who bothered to read it, that is!
Why, because of clickbait lie? Read the damn story.
To be fair, the summary *doesn't* actually lie.
Even without having checked the comments, it's undeniably obvious that many Slashdotters would skim the summary, see the "two year" figure with respect to "hacking" and "sentences" and jump to the wrong conclusion. And my suspicion is that the editors knew this very well, so yeah, it's probably "clickbait" in that sense.
But if you're paying attention to what the summary actually says, it never claims that there's a minimum two year sentence for "hacking"; it says that there's a minimum limit on the maximum sentence.
You put your finger on it. I'd just add what I had planned on saying- that, in general, it's not always obvious what's going to be "useful" and "of interest" to future generations when it isn't practical to keep everything.
In fact, a lot of things that would be of interest to us- i.e. everyday, mundane life- was never recorded at all, back when film and equipment were quite expensive and the effort and cost would have been saved for documenting "important" occasions. Even at a personal level, if I'd known that something like the Internet would become as important as it has, and that there'd be projects like Wikimedia Commons and the like, I might have photographed more of the things around me in my relatively mundane home town while growing up in the 1980s.
If this is true, it stands to reason we are creating cultural artifacts at such an increased rate that even if only a small percentage survive, future generations will have a more detailed picture of now than has existed in the past.
You hit the nail *right on the head*. I've said exactly the same thing myself in response to the "OMG the present-day is going to be a digital dark age in centuries to come!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111" stories.
Yeah, we're losing more because we're creating and storing ludicrous amounts of information compared to what we used to. Even if we lose a much higher percentage of that than we did with hardcopied information, and even if only a tiny percentage overall survives, we'll still have way more than we have compared to previous ages.
Of course, if you're attached to a *specific* (e.g.) photograph, then yes, there are problems associated with digital storage that mean it might be lost, and you may still have to take steps to preserve it- but that's a different issue. There's so much out there- in general- that enough of it *will* survive to provide a representative portrait of our society.
IMHO we're already at the stage where we're storing too much information (i.e. random crap on Facebook that will be around forever and may bite you on the arse in future rather than being able to healthily move on and leave the past behind like people were able to do in previous generations).
You got a good point there; an invalid file will cause a typical MP3 player to explode. Apple is the only company that makes a music device that doesn't kill the user when there is an error.
This is transparently untrue, and you're obviously making it up for humorous purposes.
The truth is everyone knows that several dozen users are killed every year because they upload invalid file formats to their Apple devices. I've never been that unlucky, but I was once stabbed in the face by an iPod because it didn't like my fashion sense.
"OMG no Linux" isn't nearly as scary as it sounds [..] it wouldn't be the calamity it sounds like
Note that I said that "It's open to question whether Linux would have been released under something like the GPL if Stallman hadn't created that in the first place", not in the scaremongering manner you presented it as.
And your point regarding OS X seems a little strange... you're saying the fact that OS X (based on Mach and BSD, the latter BSD-licensed) hasn't taken over the market from the GPL-licensed Linux proves something in favour of the former (i.e. BSD licensing) rather than the latter (i.e. the GPL)?
Some may argue that, but he's still the guy responsible for kicking off free software as a phenomenon.
It's open to question whether Linux would have been released under something like the GPL if Stallman hadn't created that in the first place. Bear in mind that it was originally distributed under its own license, which restricted commercial usage.
He wonders why Hurd will probably never make it
Does he, or are you putting words in his mouth?
My understanding is that Stallman is generally positive about the Linux kernel itself (even if he dislikes the use of "Linux" to refer to the whole OS and lack of acknowledgement given to the GNU components), and considers it to fulfil the need for a Free kernel that the Hurd was originally intended to meet.
and why people just call Linux by the name of the kernel rather than his insisted GNU/Linux
Possibly because it's shorter, or because they're lazy. Whatever the reason, I doubt it's got much to do with them being ideologically opposed to Stallman.
Does anyone else find it ironic that this was moderated to Score:5, Funny?:-)
(Er, but.... that's okay, because in this case only smart people get my humour. Modding up *any* of my posts is a sign of intelligence, though *true* geniuses mod them as "insightful" or "informative". Nothing to do with the fact that the latter two grant more karma, I swear...)
Slashdot Mirror
There is a good chance it's more complicated than just this. Remember this is Cogent we are taking about here and they are famous for trying to get downstream isps to pay the entire cost of peering upgrades and have also been known to actively cut back on peering points with other providers.
Also remember that Netflix themselves tried to use their dominance of the market to bully ISPs- and ultimately that ISP's customers (whether or not they used Netflix or ever intended to ever use it) into subsidising the bandwidth required for *their* HD service.
It's very definitely true that two wrongs don't make a right, but let's not shed any tears for the other guys who are just as bad.
Just how poorly must your company be run if you fuck up scrabble, that you bought.
Traditionally, the problem with computer versions of games like Scrabble is that companies had to find an excuse to sell new versions of the same concept every year (or whenever). This seems to have been the case with the PC versions of scrabble. Which generally resulted in contrived and pointless secondary features, or worse, their messing around with the basic game itself (and just as likely screwing it up). For example, the countless stupid variants of Tetris (like Tetris Worlds) even though the original didn't need all that rubbish, or pointless updates of "classic" games like Space Invaders with stupid gimmickry that appear on every console.
Of course, this shouldn't apply to online games. People can (or should) keep paying- or attract advertisable eyeballs- as long as they're playing. However, it might be that someone felt that there was a need to keep the game fresh and interesting for fickle casual players (whether that was true or not).
That said, my gut reaction is that it's not even at that level of cynical-but-in-good-faith... it's more plausible that someone in the company is doing this purely for the sake of being seen to be doing something, thus justifying their job. Doing nothing while the money rolls in might be fine, but then... why are they employing that manager and his team? Some guy telling his boss that what Mattel or the previous management did was fine, and they should keep doing that isn't really making himself look good, even if that's logically the best thing to do.
So they'll change for the sake of change.
Bite my shiny Electronic Arse!
He'll be back... for it.
I don't care why he's doing it, so long as he reprises the bit where that Freedom-Lovin' All-American Terminator stops that goddam commie Richard Stallman from hogging God's own telephone network. ;-)
Doesn't matter much - Kodak's days in the film business seem numbered.
Is is true that Kodak has stopped making transparency film altogether?
They announced the discontinuation of Ektachrome in particular formats in early 2012, but never actually said "we're stopping making slide film". Yet some people seem to believe that this is effectively what's happened.
Go to their website, visit the "professional films" section (the "consumer" films bit only seems to contain a couple of print films) and click on "color reversal films". There's nothing there but the discontinuation notice.
Many people interpreted a press release from Kodak around a year ago as (effectively) signifiying they were discontinuing slide film (e.g. here). If this is the case, then Kodak managed to slip a *very* significant announcement through as just yet another downsizing of their film line.
So... has Kodak discontinued slide film, and if so, why didn't more people pick up on it?!
Who else has money that Kodak will go under first before they exhaust their stockpile?
Kodak *is* pretty much toast at this point, it's just a question of when. Unfortunately, they've really left it too late for the company to restructure and reorient in the way that the more far-sighted Fujifilm did over a decade ago, and ironically it's only bankruptcy proceedings that have (and will) give them the power to do what needs to be done.
Kodak's problem is that there's no real reason for them to exist in their old form- with many legacy operations, obligations and structures- at this stage, and thus no real reason for anyone to buy them whole. Looked at coldly, potential buyers would probably be more likely to buy them if they were split up along the lines of their operations, e.g. while operations relating to the chemical aspects of traditional photography might have some value elsewhere, they probably make little sense being part of a "photography" company in the digital world. (And, actually Kodak *had* spun off Eastman Chemical in 1994, *before* digital decimated their mass-market film-based business).
Kodak's other major problem is that they're now selling off the things (patents et al) that they really need to survive long-term, simply to survive in the short term.
The best case scenario is that the business will be radically transformed under bankruptcy protection with much of it being sold off and a *much* smaller core company remaining. The worst case scenario is that the company is totally liquidated, its intellectual and physical assets sold off piecemeal in a way that preserves nothing of the original structure and the "Kodak" name is bought up and whored out for use on arbitrary electronic tat.
Believe me, the name *will* survive if nothing else, used to trade off nostalgia and people's ignorance that the "Kodak" product they bought has nothing to do with the original company and was probably just licensed out by a rights holder. But that isn't "survival" in any meaningful sense.
it is nowhere as hard as you say
All *I* (as opposed to the GP) actually said was that it required far more accurate temperature control- which *is* true of some stages. And while it's doable as you describe it, you have to admit that it's still more complicated than processing black and white, which is pretty straightforward for the amateur.
B&W darkrooms are easy to set up, but C-41 process color film or slide film are generally too much for the home hobbyist. Labs are accessible in most large cities but everyone else probably has to mail it in, or have some local reseller mail it for them.
The problem with colour film was that it required far more accurate temperature control to get the colour balance et al right.
However, given that the hipsters seem to be intentionally going for wonky, degraded-looking colour (the sort of film-type flaws that processors once tried to avoid like the plague and technologists tried to eliminate), I'd just say "f*** it", start up a hipster-oriented lab and make this some sort of selling point for the people that got into cheap, crappy cameras after a bunch of marketing students licensed the brand and ramped up the price.
Quality control? Not needed... the results of my lousy C41 processing will be "quirky", "charming" and "retro"!
I know that posts like this always get modded down by OSS-fanatics, but it is true. If I was to write a small piece of software and wanted people to actually use it, I would never release as GPL. [.. blah blah..] Release as BSD or similar with a warranty disclaimer and be done with it. [..blah blah..]
Or perhaps they're modded down because anyone outside the GPL vs. BSD zealotry sees them for what they are- the tedious and inevitable tendency of fanatics on either side to steer any vaguely license-related discussion into being yet another tedious identikit rehash of the GPL vs. BSD holy war.
As I already said
Never mind that we've had this discussion countless times before and every possible debating point and issue has been raised and discussed exhaustively a million times. Never mind that the chances of any new insight coming out of the billionth tedious discussion of this long-established subject is next to nothing. Never mind that those involved on both sides feel the need to repeat the same entrenched positions- which mostly come down to personal philosophy and not an incomplete understanding of the issues (which everyone knows full well by now) and will therefore be unlikely to change in the face of the discussion... not that this was the point anyway.
No, the point is that those involved in every one of these pointless rehashes of the exact same to-ing and fro-ing and restatements of the same old facts and arguments on both sides know this damn well, but can't reign in their desire to indulge in the argument yet again.
"My nuts are made of GOOOOOOLD! Isn't that weird?"
Nah, they're getting Jasper Carrot to advertise this technique.
Also, if I was going to inject my balls, I'd do it with heroin instead...
With the emphasis on the phrase "up to".
How about emphasising "or more" too?
Because I was replying to a post in which the OP said
But they can set the minimum sentence to zero.
Well, yes. "Up to" includes zero, that was my point.
"up to two years or more" means any number (some might say any number apart from exactly two).
While this is logically correct if one takes an intentionally pedantic view of what I said, it misses the point and in fact is misleading.
While a cap could (in theory) be set at any arbitrary value (provided X >= 2) in legislation, for the person in court, X will be a fixed maximum possible sentence. (Which is of course the point of a cap).
While it may be open to interpretation, the way you phrased things could (possibly) be taken to imply that a person in court for hacking could be facing a sentence of any length. Which wouldn't be the case.
Comprende?
You're from Barcelona?
No, I'm from Madrid. :-P
That explains it.
Explains what? How I correctly interpreted the summary and story when many people didn't manage to? I... really don't think it does, you know. :-)
Seriously, I understand exactly what insult-via-70s-sitcom-reference you're trying to make, it just seems that you wanted an excuse to imply I was stupid without having any concrete justification for doing so!
we're going to end up with dumb ass fucking laws
I thought we were talking about legislation on hacking, not buggery?
(Hint; watch out for ambiguity in the implied hyphen. And no, it wasn't this XKCD cartoon that made me think of that, but the other way around- still partly appropriate though!)
I suppose the summary doesn't actually lie because it's incoherent.
The summary is perfectly clear and comprehensible if you stop and read what it actually says. The problem is that most people didn't, they skimmed it and came to the wrong conclusion based on a kneejerk response.
But they can set the minimum sentence to zero.
Er... yeah. We *know* that. No-one claimed otherwise. What's your point?
The story had nothing to do with the minimum sentence; it had to do with the maximum possible sentence (i.e. the cap).
Specifically, EU countries could not set the maximum possible sentence (i.e. the cap) to less than two years. Hence a "hacker" could face up to two years (or more) in prison.
With the emphasis on the phrase "up to".
Comprende?
Which kills your entire perversion of truth.
I'm not sure how you think something I never claimed "kills" what I said.
Also, hysterically screeching phrases like "your entire perversion of truth" makes you sound like one of the kneejerk idiots I was referring to above.
You're not being fed misinformation, at least not with this story. As I said, the summary *was* perfectly correct, and it wasn't even misleading... assuming you had a moderate level of intelligence and were paying attention to what it actually said, rather than hurriedly skimming and coming to a kneejerk conclusion based on what you'd *expected* it to say.
It's just that one gets the feeling that the editors ran this knowing how many people would fall into the latter category and get a well-posted discussion going before someone corrected the idiots.
If anything, that reflects more badly on the Slashdot readers than the editors. While Slashdot has undeniably been guilty of putting a sensationalist and misleading slant on some stories in recent times, if you think you were misinformed in this case, then perhaps you should take a look at your own reading comprehension.
Read the topic.
I *did* read the topic- and the summary- which is more than most people bothered to do.
It clearly states "minimum sentence cap" instead of "minimum length of maximum sentence"
Yes- the "cap" referred to was a cap on the maximum length of the sentence. By requiring the cap to be at or above a certain length, they're forcing a minimum length on the maximum imposable sentence, e.g. no country can say "we'll set a cap on the *maximum* sentence for hacking at 18 months".
Perhaps you misunderstood my intention, as I was paraphrasing what the summary said for those who had already misinterpreted the original wording. The meaning is the same, even if the summary is better English... for people who bothered to read it, that is!
Why, because of clickbait lie? Read the damn story.
To be fair, the summary *doesn't* actually lie.
Even without having checked the comments, it's undeniably obvious that many Slashdotters would skim the summary, see the "two year" figure with respect to "hacking" and "sentences" and jump to the wrong conclusion. And my suspicion is that the editors knew this very well, so yeah, it's probably "clickbait" in that sense.
But if you're paying attention to what the summary actually says, it never claims that there's a minimum two year sentence for "hacking"; it says that there's a minimum limit on the maximum sentence.
You put your finger on it. I'd just add what I had planned on saying- that, in general, it's not always obvious what's going to be "useful" and "of interest" to future generations when it isn't practical to keep everything.
In fact, a lot of things that would be of interest to us- i.e. everyday, mundane life- was never recorded at all, back when film and equipment were quite expensive and the effort and cost would have been saved for documenting "important" occasions. Even at a personal level, if I'd known that something like the Internet would become as important as it has, and that there'd be projects like Wikimedia Commons and the like, I might have photographed more of the things around me in my relatively mundane home town while growing up in the 1980s.
If this is true, it stands to reason we are creating cultural artifacts at such an increased rate that even if only a small percentage survive, future generations will have a more detailed picture of now than has existed in the past.
You hit the nail *right on the head*. I've said exactly the same thing myself in response to the "OMG the present-day is going to be a digital dark age in centuries to come!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111" stories.
Yeah, we're losing more because we're creating and storing ludicrous amounts of information compared to what we used to. Even if we lose a much higher percentage of that than we did with hardcopied information, and even if only a tiny percentage overall survives, we'll still have way more than we have compared to previous ages.
Of course, if you're attached to a *specific* (e.g.) photograph, then yes, there are problems associated with digital storage that mean it might be lost, and you may still have to take steps to preserve it- but that's a different issue. There's so much out there- in general- that enough of it *will* survive to provide a representative portrait of our society.
IMHO we're already at the stage where we're storing too much information (i.e. random crap on Facebook that will be around forever and may bite you on the arse in future rather than being able to healthily move on and leave the past behind like people were able to do in previous generations).
You got a good point there; an invalid file will cause a typical MP3 player to explode. Apple is the only company that makes a music device that doesn't kill the user when there is an error.
This is transparently untrue, and you're obviously making it up for humorous purposes.
The truth is everyone knows that several dozen users are killed every year because they upload invalid file formats to their Apple devices. I've never been that unlucky, but I was once stabbed in the face by an iPod because it didn't like my fashion sense.
"OMG no Linux" isn't nearly as scary as it sounds [..] it wouldn't be the calamity it sounds like
Note that I said that "It's open to question whether Linux would have been released under something like the GPL if Stallman hadn't created that in the first place", not in the scaremongering manner you presented it as.
And your point regarding OS X seems a little strange... you're saying the fact that OS X (based on Mach and BSD, the latter BSD-licensed) hasn't taken over the market from the GPL-licensed Linux proves something in favour of the former (i.e. BSD licensing) rather than the latter (i.e. the GPL)?
It's a pity there are no free economises then.
I hate those free economises to pieces!
To me, RMS is by and large a nutcase.
Some may argue that, but he's still the guy responsible for kicking off free software as a phenomenon.
It's open to question whether Linux would have been released under something like the GPL if Stallman hadn't created that in the first place. Bear in mind that it was originally distributed under its own license, which restricted commercial usage.
He wonders why Hurd will probably never make it
Does he, or are you putting words in his mouth?
My understanding is that Stallman is generally positive about the Linux kernel itself (even if he dislikes the use of "Linux" to refer to the whole OS and lack of acknowledgement given to the GNU components), and considers it to fulfil the need for a Free kernel that the Hurd was originally intended to meet.
and why people just call Linux by the name of the kernel rather than his insisted GNU/Linux
Possibly because it's shorter, or because they're lazy. Whatever the reason, I doubt it's got much to do with them being ideologically opposed to Stallman.
For the record, it would all be so much simpler if everyone just started speaking Finnish.
Just as long as they didn't *write* it, else there'd be a world shortage of those double-dot umlaut things. :-/
Does anyone else find it ironic that this was moderated to Score:5, Funny? :-)
(Er, but.... that's okay, because in this case only smart people get my humour. Modding up *any* of my posts is a sign of intelligence, though *true* geniuses mod them as "insightful" or "informative". Nothing to do with the fact that the latter two grant more karma, I swear...)