"Guessing" at the beginning and end of the universe is not nearly as important as the human genome because YOU CAN'T DO ANYTHING WITH THE KNOWLEDGE.
We could put off trying to learn that particular piece of info for the next hundred years and not be any worse off. Whereas there are a lot of things it would be very advantageous to know right now.
Not to mention the fact that the size of the universe seems to double every time somebody decides his "publish or perish" syndrome needs treatment.
Pardon me for being cynical but these guys haven't proven a goddam thing - and I don't even need to know anything about their science to make that statement. I just need to know human nature.
"Counterfeiters have forced the price of a fake CD down to about $4"
This says all you need to know about the benefits of "unauthorized reproduction" (fuck the term "piracy" - that's just cute) and why it should be legal.
This is TRUE COMPETITION. If you make a product and unauthorized reproduction can drive you out of business, then you shouldn't be in the business. You make your money on added value - JUST LIKE THE "PIRATES" DO. Trying to make money off an easily reproduced commodity product is just not smart in business. Look at Gateway versus Dell.
And don't give me any moral baloney about how artists will stop making music if their record labels stop making money.
First, the record labels will NOT "stop making money" - they will stop pissing it away and become more streamlined and effective at production and promotion until they are little more than "pirates" themselves. (Some would say they already are but they "pirate" their artists instead of other labels.)
Second, both the business model and the industry itself will change. Artists will be the blue-collar workers they always were under the labels, but they will do it for themselves. They will make a living wage, but not the millions they dream of. Some WILL make millions because they are better marketing people than they are musicians (and probably should go into marketing INSTEAD OF music). A few will make millions because they have big tits. The WAY in which the money is made will change from CDs to direct Internet broadcast or downloads or some other model not even thought up yet.
Music is great but it's not the most important thing in life. Conversely, no matter what happens to the industry, it's not going away either.
So who cares?
Better spend your time worrying about what happens when Georgie Porgie starts a war with North Korea next year and we get a nuke popped off on our soil for the first time in history. Kinda makes CD sales a non-issue, doesn't it?
Novell is not a desktop OS company and to try to be is a complete and utter waste of time and money when Microsoft owns that space (and the REAL Linux OS companies are moving in). For Novell to play catchup is just stupid.
Now if all they want to do is put a nice front end on their networking stuff, I could see it. They might be buying Ximian for the quality of their GUI technical developers and for not much more. This in itself does not mean Ximian will go away but it's not particularly beneficial for Ximian IMHO.
Otherwise, the whole thing sounds like a random purchase by management that really does not know where Novell's next customer is coming from (other than their directory services - which is doomed against Active Directory anyway, simply because of Microsoft's monopoly).
No, this deal is not good for anyone, despite all the/. Pollyannas who want to see good times ahead every time somebody throws a million bucks at Linux.
IBM needed to do SOMETHING to stop SCO from "winning" this case in the media and hurting Linux in the process.
However, the referenced article indicates that IBM merely reiterated the "they sold Linux under the GPL" argument which SCO had already responded to and that is repeated in the article.
So IBM STILL has not adequately attacked SCO in the media sufficiently to lessen the FUD that SCO is spreading around.
While IBM clearly does not want to make public statements which will come back to haunt them in court, IBM needs to reiterate EVERY TIME SCO opens its mouth that it feels that SCO has NO legal basis for its claims, that SCO's claims are ludicrous and they expect to prevail in court. They should also hint EVERY TIME (without saying so outright) that SCO has a history of lawsuits and are nothing more than the software equivalent of ambulance chasers. Nobody likes people who do nothing but sue and if that label is hung on SCO by IBM, people will start to ignore SCO's claims and interpret their constant expansion of those claims as just more evidence of their greed.
THAT is how you fight a court case in the media. IBM needs to hire Garregos or whatever his name is - the guy that did Condit and Winona Ryder's spin. Lousy trial attorney (he got poor Winona convicted) but a great spin-meister.
Or maybe Alistair Campbell (Tony Blair's spin-meister) will be available soon...heh, heh.
And yes, the guy is right. Next year Bush will start a war with North Korea, they will detonate a nuclear weapon on US soil, Bush will use a panicked (and stupid) US population to give him power enough to rip up what's left of the Constitution, and institute a fascist dictatorship which YES WILL BE WORSE THAN THE NAZIS!
next year or so we'll be at war with the North Koreans, they will lose and in desperation or spite detonate a nuclear weapon on US soil.
Bush will use the panick to get the public to give him all power to rip up what's left of the Constitution and start instituting a fascist dictatorship.
So this really won't matter in a year or two.
Think I'm paranoid? They're not preparing to draft eighty thousand medical personnel via the Selective Service because they think there MIGHT be a WMD problem "someday"... You heard it here first.
It's been pointed out repeatedly - including here on/., IIRC - that if IBM wanted to, they could shut down almost every other software company in existence by just abusing their patent portfolio. They don't because there's no real advantage to them to do that.
So Gates would be wise not to try it since Big Blue is still bigger than he is.
You forget that Clinton almost attacked North Korea in 1994.
While I agree that we PROBABLY wouldn't have attacked Iraq with Gore as President, that is not a certainly since the same crew of neocon phonies has been rattling around the administrations for twenty years and their influence would have been felt. Not to mention the Israeli influence.
Finally, you probably still would have had 9/11 and I have no doubt Gore would have been influenced to go for war as easily as Bush - except the target might have been Saudi Arabia directly.
Bush intends to invade Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, and worst of all and probably soonest, North Korea. This will be an absolute disaster for the US militarily and economically (when NK slips nukes into our West Coast ports via submarines). Bush wants this so he can allow a panicked US public to hand him all power to rip up what's left of the Constitution and start a more deliberate neocon dictatorship.
While Gore may not have been a follower of Leon Strauss, I doubt his philosophical background is any more grounds for happiness.
The State is the State. Period. It all works the same way, the only difference is in style. Saddam could personally shoot someone, Bush doesn't have the nerve or the culture around him to allow it. What Bush can do that Saddam couldn't is order the invasions of other countries and the annihilation of whole populations (Kuwait hardly counts). Gore has exactly the same capability and would not hesitate to use it if it suited his agenda.
The problem is not that Nader split the Democrats, it's the two-party system in itself. Until that's broken, as they say, no matter who you vote for, the government gets in power.
which is why I am posting this after just having taken a shower at 1 AM in the morning after sleeping until around 2 or 3 PM this afternoon after... Well, you get the picture.
Some pieces of advice:
1) If you don't want to do something, you should not be doing it. It's The Wrong Thing. And as Abbie Hoffman said, "Do Your Thing And Only Your Thing". Which is a restatement of the great English occultist Aleister Crowley's "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole of the Law. Do Thy Will And No Other Shall Say Thee Nay".
2) Secondly, Three Steps, No Fail: Figure out three things you can do to approach a goal. They must be three things that you absolutely CANNOT fail at and they must be able to be accomplished in one week tops. Do them. Then decide the next three things to be done based on your goal and what you have accomplished so far. Repeat until successful.
3) Yoda's Rule: "Try? No! Do - or do not. There is no try." This is basically a restatement of the samurai principle that everything must be done "whole-heartedly" - i.e., no holding back. The samurai also said that there should be no more than three things of importance to you in your life at any one time.
4) Abandon your hells. This is a principle from one of the Japanese religions as well. There are ten hells everyone goes through. They start from physical wants and go up to the last hell, which is success (that, too, is a hell). The only way to get through each hell is to drop them. Just abandon the thinking that produced them.
I could give you a lot more advice, but I'm late to accomplish ANYTHING today so....
If you're making millions per month (and that is translating into profits rather than just incoming cash that immediately goes back out again at expenses), then you are professional at SOMETHING.
Neither MySQL nor PostgreSQL will EVER beat Oracle, but if they work well enough to make somebody money (and I mean a company, not somebody working on one machine on their desk), they are professional. If they only work on someone's desktop, then they're not.
if IBM does not do something publicly and LOUDLY to stop SCO from winning this case in the media, Linux will only be hurt.
Of course, AFTER the case is OVER, Linux will regain the ground it lost, but it might significantly prolong the time it takes to rise in the enterprise market. And that's where money is to be made (eventually) for some people anyway. The longer Linux is delayed in getting there by this sort of FUD, the longer you'll have to wait to retire with the big bucks from implementing Linux enterprise solutions.
these fucks are being allowed to try this case in the media.
Where the fuck is IBM? It issues one fucking statement, then shuts up. I realize it's not a good idea to be babbling about the case in public, but IBM needs to AT LEAST REITERATE its position whenever these SCO assholes run their mouth.
And the Slashdot headline misses the point. SCO in its press release is saying that UNLESS ALL LINUX USERS BUY LICENSES THEY WILL BE SUED. At least that's the way the rest of the IT trade press is putting it. One of Microsoft's tame research organizations is claiming that users are confused and starting to think about dumping Linux.
This crap is going to hurt Linux in the market and it is going to hurt IBM's Linux business if it keeps up, so IBM needs to SAY SOMETHING.
This is obviously a bogus concept for any number of reasons:
1) Since they don't videotape the johns, anybody can can do anything in there - including nookie between the pilots/stewardesses/passengers (make up your own combination!), terrorists preparing weapons, criminals smoking dope, etc. So there's no advantage.
2) As someone pointed out, keeping it for ten years is braindead. It's extremely unlikely that any liability or security concerns - or even marketing concerns - could justify that time span.
3) As for processing the video, keep in mind that this stuff is probably going to be digitized and stored where pattern recognization software might be able to process it - if not now, then ten years from now. This means a vast store of videos for Homeland Security to look at and analyze - at taxpayer expense - to no good ends. Or for the airlines - and whoever else they sell the data to - to use for marketing purposes.
4) They ADMIT that the purpose is to enable law enforcement to keep track of criminals! THIS MEANS YOU! This means the tapes WILL BE PROVIDED TO LAW ENFORCEMENT ROUTINELY! Read the fraggim' article!
5) As someone in the article points out, what's the point of keeping tapes of flights where nothing happens? It is obvious that there are ulterior motives here.
6) As for why THEY are doing it, the article says Homeland Security WILL eventually mandate it, so they are starting now. This means the ball comes from Homeland Security's court, but the airline sees a marketing advantage from analyzing all those videos for marketing purposes. This also means that once Homeland Security has mandated it, the notion "if you don't like it, don't fly with this specific airline" is not a viable option for business travelers who MUST fly on business.
While it is obviously true that you have no privacy in public places and should not particularly expect any, there is a difference betweem being inspected by your fellow asshole citizen and being inspected by some marketing asshole or some security asshole you don't know and who may have an agenda and the authority to put your ass in jail based on misinterpretation of some grainy vidcap.
One hopes all the stupid, right-wing, patriotic American dolts on/. who support this sort of thing for "security" reasons will wake up and smell the ruminant evacuation, but I'm not holding my breath.
You don't buy all thes fancy fraggin' blades. We have TWO-blade razors forever, then suddenly they discover THREE blades are better. What about next year (or next decade?) Will they discover FOUR blades are better?
Just buy a vibrating head razor and use the cheaper two-blade razors. A vibrating head razor allows you to cut closer than any electric razor and almost never cut youtself. And you can extend the blade life this way.
Slashdot Mirror
"Guessing" at the beginning and end of the universe is not nearly as important as the human genome because YOU CAN'T DO ANYTHING WITH THE KNOWLEDGE.
We could put off trying to learn that particular piece of info for the next hundred years and not be any worse off. Whereas there are a lot of things it would be very advantageous to know right now.
Not to mention the fact that the size of the universe seems to double every time somebody decides his "publish or perish" syndrome needs treatment.
Pardon me for being cynical but these guys haven't proven a goddam thing - and I don't even need to know anything about their science to make that statement. I just need to know human nature.
"Counterfeiters have forced the price of a fake CD down to about $4"
This says all you need to know about the benefits of "unauthorized reproduction" (fuck the term "piracy" - that's just cute) and why it should be legal.
This is TRUE COMPETITION. If you make a product and unauthorized reproduction can drive you out of business, then you shouldn't be in the business. You make your money on added value - JUST LIKE THE "PIRATES" DO. Trying to make money off an easily reproduced commodity product is just not smart in business. Look at Gateway versus Dell.
And don't give me any moral baloney about how artists will stop making music if their record labels stop making money.
First, the record labels will NOT "stop making money" - they will stop pissing it away and become more streamlined and effective at production and promotion until they are little more than "pirates" themselves. (Some would say they already are but they "pirate" their artists instead of other labels.)
Second, both the business model and the industry itself will change. Artists will be the blue-collar workers they always were under the labels, but they will do it for themselves. They will make a living wage, but not the millions they dream of. Some WILL make millions because they are better marketing people than they are musicians (and probably should go into marketing INSTEAD OF music). A few will make millions because they have big tits. The WAY in which the money is made will change from CDs to direct Internet broadcast or downloads or some other model not even thought up yet.
Music is great but it's not the most important thing in life. Conversely, no matter what happens to the industry, it's not going away either.
So who cares?
Better spend your time worrying about what happens when Georgie Porgie starts a war with North Korea next year and we get a nuke popped off on our soil for the first time in history. Kinda makes CD sales a non-issue, doesn't it?
This deal makes NO sense to me at all.
/. Pollyannas who want to see good times ahead every time somebody throws a million bucks at Linux.
Novell is not a desktop OS company and to try to be is a complete and utter waste of time and money when Microsoft owns that space (and the REAL Linux OS companies are moving in). For Novell to play catchup is just stupid.
Now if all they want to do is put a nice front end on their networking stuff, I could see it. They might be buying Ximian for the quality of their GUI technical developers and for not much more. This in itself does not mean Ximian will go away but it's not particularly beneficial for Ximian IMHO.
Otherwise, the whole thing sounds like a random purchase by management that really does not know where Novell's next customer is coming from (other than their directory services - which is doomed against Active Directory anyway, simply because of Microsoft's monopoly).
No, this deal is not good for anyone, despite all the
I would have made much worse jokes in that case.
IBM needed to do SOMETHING to stop SCO from "winning" this case in the media and hurting Linux in the process.
However, the referenced article indicates that IBM merely reiterated the "they sold Linux under the GPL" argument which SCO had already responded to and that is repeated in the article.
So IBM STILL has not adequately attacked SCO in the media sufficiently to lessen the FUD that SCO is spreading around.
While IBM clearly does not want to make public statements which will come back to haunt them in court, IBM needs to reiterate EVERY TIME SCO opens its mouth that it feels that SCO has NO legal basis for its claims, that SCO's claims are ludicrous and they expect to prevail in court. They should also hint EVERY TIME (without saying so outright) that SCO has a history of lawsuits and are nothing more than the software equivalent of ambulance chasers. Nobody likes people who do nothing but sue and if that label is hung on SCO by IBM, people will start to ignore SCO's claims and interpret their constant expansion of those claims as just more evidence of their greed.
THAT is how you fight a court case in the media. IBM needs to hire Garregos or whatever his name is - the guy that did Condit and Winona Ryder's spin. Lousy trial attorney (he got poor Winona convicted) but a great spin-meister.
Or maybe Alistair Campbell (Tony Blair's spin-meister) will be available soon...heh, heh.
Well, the thread continues, so HAH!
I just love breaking the law.
And yes, the guy is right. Next year Bush will start a war with North Korea, they will detonate a nuclear weapon on US soil, Bush will use a panicked (and stupid) US population to give him power enough to rip up what's left of the Constitution, and institute a fascist dictatorship which YES WILL BE WORSE THAN THE NAZIS!
Hah! The thread continues!
Godwin's Law is broken!
Take that, Godwin!
next year or so we'll be at war with the North Koreans, they will lose and in desperation or spite detonate a nuclear weapon on US soil.
Bush will use the panick to get the public to give him all power to rip up what's left of the Constitution and start instituting a fascist dictatorship.
So this really won't matter in a year or two.
Think I'm paranoid? They're not preparing to draft eighty thousand medical personnel via the Selective Service because they think there MIGHT be a WMD problem "someday"... You heard it here first.
the brassiere problem.
(No, not me, THEM!)
forwarded to Robert Fisk, the journalist/commentator for The Independent, his editor said he doesn't have email?
I'm like, what fraggin' reporter these days doesn't have email? Maybe she meant since he was in Baghdad, he didn't have ready access to email.
on writing the IP laws for Iraq (which she allegedly was hired to do).
Too bad we can't send her there. I'm sure there's a bullet with her name on it, too.
In fact, the more the RIAA goes after their own customers, maybe she should start wearing kevlar in this country.
because they have been around longer.
/., IIRC - that if IBM wanted to, they could shut down almost every other software company in existence by just abusing their patent portfolio. They don't because there's no real advantage to them to do that.
It's been pointed out repeatedly - including here on
So Gates would be wise not to try it since Big Blue is still bigger than he is.
You forget that Clinton almost attacked North Korea in 1994.
While I agree that we PROBABLY wouldn't have attacked Iraq with Gore as President, that is not a certainly since the same crew of neocon phonies has been rattling around the administrations for twenty years and their influence would have been felt. Not to mention the Israeli influence.
Finally, you probably still would have had 9/11 and I have no doubt Gore would have been influenced to go for war as easily as Bush - except the target might have been Saudi Arabia directly.
Bush intends to invade Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, and worst of all and probably soonest, North Korea. This will be an absolute disaster for the US militarily and economically (when NK slips nukes into our West Coast ports via submarines). Bush wants this so he can allow a panicked US public to hand him all power to rip up what's left of the Constitution and start a more deliberate neocon dictatorship.
While Gore may not have been a follower of Leon Strauss, I doubt his philosophical background is any more grounds for happiness.
The State is the State. Period. It all works the same way, the only difference is in style. Saddam could personally shoot someone, Bush doesn't have the nerve or the culture around him to allow it. What Bush can do that Saddam couldn't is order the invasions of other countries and the annihilation of whole populations (Kuwait hardly counts). Gore has exactly the same capability and would not hesitate to use it if it suited his agenda.
The problem is not that Nader split the Democrats, it's the two-party system in itself. Until that's broken, as they say, no matter who you vote for, the government gets in power.
which is why I am posting this after just having taken a shower at 1 AM in the morning after sleeping until around 2 or 3 PM this afternoon after... Well, you get the picture.
Some pieces of advice:
1) If you don't want to do something, you should not be doing it. It's The Wrong Thing. And as Abbie Hoffman said, "Do Your Thing And Only Your Thing". Which is a restatement of the great English occultist Aleister Crowley's "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole of the Law. Do Thy Will And No Other Shall Say Thee Nay".
2) Secondly, Three Steps, No Fail: Figure out three things you can do to approach a goal. They must be three things that you absolutely CANNOT fail at and they must be able to be accomplished in one week tops. Do them. Then decide the next three things to be done based on your goal and what you have accomplished so far. Repeat until successful.
3) Yoda's Rule: "Try? No! Do - or do not. There is no try." This is basically a restatement of the samurai principle that everything must be done "whole-heartedly" - i.e., no holding back. The samurai also said that there should be no more than three things of importance to you in your life at any one time.
4) Abandon your hells. This is a principle from one of the Japanese religions as well. There are ten hells everyone goes through. They start from physical wants and go up to the last hell, which is success (that, too, is a hell). The only way to get through each hell is to drop them. Just abandon the thinking that produced them.
I could give you a lot more advice, but I'm late to accomplish ANYTHING today so....
If you're making millions per month (and that is translating into profits rather than just incoming cash that immediately goes back out again at expenses), then you are professional at SOMETHING.
Neither MySQL nor PostgreSQL will EVER beat Oracle, but if they work well enough to make somebody money (and I mean a company, not somebody working on one machine on their desk), they are professional. If they only work on someone's desktop, then they're not.
That simple.
since I'm unemployed.
I checked out Craigslist and found about 150 ads from people doing the same thing.
This means two things:
1) There's a lot of competition.
2) There's a lot of business.
Which is what the article said.
INSLAW case question I asked to them.
/. punks out again.
No surprise, there.
take all your lives by 2050 - well, okay, maybe 2075 - tops.
And they won't be "humanoid robots" - they will be Transhumans.
Have a nice day, primates.
"Sue All The World" was right on!
if IBM does not do something publicly and LOUDLY to stop SCO from winning this case in the media, Linux will only be hurt.
Of course, AFTER the case is OVER, Linux will regain the ground it lost, but it might significantly prolong the time it takes to rise in the enterprise market. And that's where money is to be made (eventually) for some people anyway. The longer Linux is delayed in getting there by this sort of FUD, the longer you'll have to wait to retire with the big bucks from implementing Linux enterprise solutions.
And if you can find Saddam, you get another $25 million!
Wow, things are really looking for you!
Since I told you about the Saddam fee, I expect 50% when you find him!
And since I agree with you about the MPAA, I expect 50% of your Nigerian payoff, too!
these fucks are being allowed to try this case in the media.
Where the fuck is IBM? It issues one fucking statement, then shuts up. I realize it's not a good idea to be babbling about the case in public, but IBM needs to AT LEAST REITERATE its position whenever these SCO assholes run their mouth.
And the Slashdot headline misses the point. SCO in its press release is saying that UNLESS ALL LINUX USERS BUY LICENSES THEY WILL BE SUED. At least that's the way the rest of the IT trade press is putting it. One of Microsoft's tame research organizations is claiming that users are confused and starting to think about dumping Linux.
This crap is going to hurt Linux in the market and it is going to hurt IBM's Linux business if it keeps up, so IBM needs to SAY SOMETHING.
This is obviously a bogus concept for any number of reasons:
/. who support this sort of thing for "security" reasons will wake up and smell the ruminant evacuation, but I'm not holding my breath.
1) Since they don't videotape the johns, anybody can can do anything in there - including nookie between the pilots/stewardesses/passengers (make up your own combination!), terrorists preparing weapons, criminals smoking dope, etc. So there's no advantage.
2) As someone pointed out, keeping it for ten years is braindead. It's extremely unlikely that any liability or security concerns - or even marketing concerns - could justify that time span.
3) As for processing the video, keep in mind that this stuff is probably going to be digitized and stored where pattern recognization software might be able to process it - if not now, then ten years from now. This means a vast store of videos for Homeland Security to look at and analyze - at taxpayer expense - to no good ends. Or for the airlines - and whoever else they sell the data to - to use for marketing purposes.
4) They ADMIT that the purpose is to enable law enforcement to keep track of criminals! THIS MEANS YOU! This means the tapes WILL BE PROVIDED TO LAW ENFORCEMENT ROUTINELY! Read the fraggim' article!
5) As someone in the article points out, what's the point of keeping tapes of flights where nothing happens? It is obvious that there are ulterior motives here.
6) As for why THEY are doing it, the article says Homeland Security WILL eventually mandate it, so they are starting now. This means the ball comes from Homeland Security's court, but the airline sees a marketing advantage from analyzing all those videos for marketing purposes. This also means that once Homeland Security has mandated it, the notion "if you don't like it, don't fly with this specific airline" is not a viable option for business travelers who MUST fly on business.
While it is obviously true that you have no privacy in public places and should not particularly expect any, there is a difference betweem being inspected by your fellow asshole citizen and being inspected by some marketing asshole or some security asshole you don't know and who may have an agenda and the authority to put your ass in jail based on misinterpretation of some grainy vidcap.
One hopes all the stupid, right-wing, patriotic American dolts on
Morons...
They're called "bike messengers"...
Oh, wait, maybe I'm thinking "courier"...never mind...
You don't buy all thes fancy fraggin' blades. We have TWO-blade razors forever, then suddenly they discover THREE blades are better. What about next year (or next decade?) Will they discover FOUR blades are better?
/.'rs, yeah, right...
Just buy a vibrating head razor and use the cheaper two-blade razors. A vibrating head razor allows you to cut closer than any electric razor and almost never cut youtself. And you can extend the blade life this way.
Jeez.... High-tech
You forgot:
4) ?????
5) PROFIT!!!