"You don't have to be old and retired to be seduced by people promising you 500% returns on $50,000 investments. Twenty-somethings will fall for it if you use enough marketspeak."
If you do it once and lose your $50,000, you could be a victim of bad luck and market fluctuations. If you do it six times with money you can't afford to lose, you're just dumb.
I do feel sorry for this guy, though. He worked (probably hard) all his life to accumulate his nest egg. He seems like a genuinely caring and overall good guy except for his astronomically sized greed.
The fact that he was monumentally greedy does not mitigate the fact that his money was taken under fraudulent circumstances. Being greedy does not make him any less a victim.
It would be like blaming a retarded virgin girl for being a rape victim on the grounds that she should have known that the rapist was lying to her when he told her that good things would happen to her if she would just put out. The whole point is that she can't make that kind of informed decision without a guardian.
Granted, the man is not medically retarded and is fully capable of making his own decisions. However, his trust was still abused by the scammers. They are about 80% to blame, while he is about 20% to blame for failing to apply common sense due to extraordinary greed.
If SCO hadn't filed the lawsuit to pump up its stock price, neither Microsoft nor SUN would have given SCO money. In that case, SCO would not have had that 10 million dollars in revenue.
Seeing that Linux had been eating SCO's lunch prior to this, it's reasonable to think that SCO would not have had brought in any new business and hence no new revenue.
So without the lawsuit, SCO would probably have posted a quarterly loss of 11 million dollars.
Then we have Baystar's 50 million dollars. Again, without the lawsuit, Baystar most likely would not have given SCO the money. Without this, SCO's quarterly losses would have topped 61 million dollars.
The bottom line is that, as we all knew, without the phoney lawsuit against IBM, SCO would no longer exist as an organization. It would be bankrupt now.
SCO can only exist as long as it can delay court proceedings. Once IBM gets into full gear, SCO will vaporize.
"Why can't trials in the US (especially regarding technology) be overseen by judges with relevant expertise? Doesn't that seem like an obvious component of having a fair, just ruling?"
Not only that, but a jury of your peers as applied to white collar charges should require experience and knowledge in the white collar field. Only people in the field will have an adequate perspective to apply to the case.
After all, Joe Blow McDonald's cashier does not have adequate perspective to weigh such issues as decryption, and is far too vulnerable to prosecutorial nonsense.
"Also, no plea bargains, no jury (only laypersons that sit for a longer term), no bail, and the state pays for your lawyer of choice who can claim according to a set (fairly generous) standard (there are no criminal attorneys that operate outside of that system)."
So far I like this system much better than our (American) system. Can the State drown the defendant in prosecuting lawyers whereas the defendant is only entitled to one lawyer, or it is one prosecutor and one defender?
Although it should have happened long ago, SCO's stock price should hopefully begin freefall. It's been fluctuating slightly since the court decision, but it's somehow held it's value.
"I've been a member for a long time, and the content seems to be degenerating into a groupthink zealot factory with its own set of dogmas and censors."
Have you considered the possibility that we have each thought about this particular farce and have come to the same (or at least largely similar) conclusion?
Is it dogma if we all agree that the sky typically appears in a shade of blue after having watched the sky for a number of years and noted its appearance on numerous occasions? Is it censorship if we filter out useless snide remarks about the sky really being composed of pink polkadots?
Perhaps you are mistaking thought out consensus for groupthink. Just because we generally agree on the issues doesn't mean we're zealots. It could possibly mean that nobody has yet brought any evidence whatsoever in rational support of SCO's ridiculous arguments.
In fact, when this nonsense began, many of us made a fevered attempt to think of some way that SCO's accusations could have merit. We posited suppositions, various possible scenerios which were at some point discredited, and played devil's advocate from SCO's perspective. Over time, all possibilities we visited were either soundly rejected as false or were seen to be extremely unlikely.
Every time SCO made a remark in the case, we became increasingly aware that none of it reconciled with reality. In fact, several of SCO's key assertions were shown to be patently false.
Now we are in a phase where everything SCO has said has been shot down. There is nothing left to do but wait for the courts to formalize SCO's loss.
It still amazes me how some people can write so many words and not even touch upon the actual issues in the case. McBride's letter is one of these cases. I kept skipping the nonsense to get to an actual argument, but I ended up at the end of the letter instead.
The install process for these devices on Windows could start with a popup box that says something like:
"A recent Microsoft licensing decision prohibits device manufacturers from working with Windows in customary ways. We have included device driver software that will allow you to continue to use our products on Windows despite Microsoft's decision.
Once this is completed, you will be able to use the device normally. You are free to redistribute this device driver under the terms detailed in the [LGPL] license that is contained within the product packaging.
Click the Continue button to install the [ext2 filesystem] driver."
"Also, as Bruce Perens pointed out in another comment, the GPL requires that you offer to provide the source code to anyone, not just people who own the DVD player."
Bruce was only partly correct. That particular section of the GPL says that you must do only one of three things, one of which Bruce pointed out, and another being what the original posted pointed out (giving the source to whomever receives the binaries).
The GPL does not require both (or all three) items in that section of the license [section 3, btw]. If you give the source to whomever received your binaries, you do not have to personally provide it to all third parties.
"It is already illegal in the U.S. The ads autoplay, and you cannot stop them."
Both my PS2 and my el-cheapo $40 off the shelf DVD player let me press the menu button or the chapter advance (fast forward) to skip the autoplayed previews (on the rare DVD that actually has those annoyances) and FBI warning. It is not illegal and it is not enforced by the DVD player.
I have never encountered hostility such as you describe. I have also never been on IRC, so perhaps that is where you're trying to go for information. From everything I've read, that is a lost cause.
Having hung out in a couple programming chat groups, I've seen lots of people come in, scream at us for not instantly jumping to answer their caustically phrased demands for tech support, and then claiming innocently that they were just politely asking for help when those mean people in the room got so bent out of shape. So I tend to take such claims with a large chunk of salt (except for IRC).
I'll assume you mean Redhat 6.1 (as Linux-proper is only now approaching 2.6). Much documentation has improved since those now old distributions were new. Google rarely leads me to dead links (in fact, I can't remember the last time that happened). Linux newsgroups have been very helpful and generally polite (many questions still justifiably end with pointers to the documentation).
You have to filter out the "try another distro" responses as being unresponsive. With such a wide array of choices, people will always recommend their favorites. It's just line noise, and nothing to get upset about. If you had a choice of a dozen different versions of BeOS, you'd find the exact same issue.
Google, Google, Google. Google Groups is the single best resource available to you. Rest assured that 95+% of all problems you encounter with a mainstream Linux distribution have been thoroughly hashed and resolved (for better or worse) a dozen different ways.
When any population gains enough members, you're going to find all kinds of people within. You have access to the community's vast accumulated raw resources, much of which isn't filtered for you (you'll have to pay a distributor a sizable chunk of money if you want someone to do your filtering for you). The consequence of that raw access is not always pleasant. That doesn't excuse rudeness, but you'll have to accept it as a fact of life and learn to deal with it. The results are well worth it.
Linux -is- different from MS on many fronts, and many people whine about it extensively. The whining is greatly reduced when Linux provides something familiar to Windows users, so much effort is made to produce familiar interfaces (which tend to look quite Windowsish). This effort, however, is quite demanding and time consuming. MS has had a lot of lead time and vendor cooperation (something Linux is just now beginning to enjoy), so catching up has not been quick.
Reinventing the wheel is frequently necessary for a number of reasons, both technical and legal. It's part of the process of Free software, and frequently produces better software.
Being paid doesn't always motivate a programmer to remain within the established company norm. I tend to reproduce existing third-party software with new in-house software. It's an entirely lateral move in the short-term, but it will make us more self-reliant and flexible in the long term.
I was just digusted with the state of much of our third-party software and took it upon myself to produce replacements that are more fun and reliable to work with, in a couple cases in direct contrast to what I was being directly paid to do.
Management was against my proposal to change, when I first breached the subject, so I worked on it at home on my own time. After several months, I had a proof-of-concept implementation that I showed at work. My bosses were very interested in seeing the finished product (which is still in progress).
The end result, in every case I decided needed rewriting, was the eventual approval and delight of Management. I scratch personal itches for work, on my own time and sometimes at work. The end result has always been beneficial after the fact, even when it seems a costly misuse of my time in the short run.
After a few successes, I was able to be more open about my deviations from my assignments. Now these deviations are taken into account in the formal decision making process. In fact, one of my scratches currently in progress will be replacing the core system I was originally hired to help maintain two and half years ago. Everyone involved, especially the users and other programmers, is genuinely excited to see the replacement happen. This all started because I was unhappy with the way things were done here at work.
So naturally I don't buy the argument that duplicating existing work is bad per se. It's all a matter of choosing your projects well. Sometimes that duplication of effort is the only way to go.
At first I was going to label this post, "More right-wing brain damage", but this particular brand of idiocy seems to cross party lines.
I remember being a teenager when all the "Dungeons & Dragons makes people kill people" stupidity was all the political rage. My mom fell victim to it for a while, until I persuader her to sit in on a few sessions with me and my friends. Her eyes were opened, that much is sure. She finally realized how insane the mass media, parents' groups, and politicians were by blaming an intellectual exercise for some kids' twisted world perceptions.
It's now 20 years later, and the entire process is repeating itself. Different names, different games, same complete lack of comprehension and neural activity.
Read my lips: the kids doing these things want to do these things because these things are ingrained into these kids' personalities, not because of some stupid imagined connection with video games. These kids (and their willing adult accomplices in psuedo-scientific psychological fields and media) use what they think is the most likely excuse to deflect blame from themselves: violent video games made me do it.
Think back to your own childhood (and for many of us, our current adulthood where our jobs are concerned). When you got caught by your parents doing something you knew was bad, didn't you brainstorm for some excuse you thought your parents would buy to let you off the hook? Of course you did. It's exactly what these kids are doing now. Why do so many people think this is so different from the past?
If they couldn't blame video games today, they would blame it on movies again. When they can't blame it on movies, they blame it on the parents (which at least has a kernel of truth in some, but not many, cases).
This artificial distinction between childhood and adulthood provides a false sense of control and understanding for too many people. To say that a teenager's mind isn't developed enough to understand death and that killing people is wrong represents a dangerous plateau of irresponsibility.
Again, I only have to think back to when I was a teenager. I knew right and wrong fully well back then, and this stupendously moronic notion that I was too young to understand the consequences of my actions was implicit permission for me to break all those rules I was being made to follow.
I got punished for the small things like shoplifting candy bars, but I was completely off the hook for big things (I won't go into the details, except to say I never crossed the line into hurting people) because adults were so easy to manipulate into blaming everything but the real problem: my bad attitude and lack of respect.
The real irony here is that Dungeons & Dragons was the key to igniting my creative desires, and changed my direction from thief and vandal to productive member of society. Had these stupid laws been in place then, taking my focus away from insighful creativity, I would likely have ended up becoming a criminal instead of writing software.
How poetic that my career ended up with me writing software to help manage the criminal justice system.
Of course, Dungeons & Dragons wasn't any more responsible for my positive behavior than Grand Theft Auto 3/Vice City are for shooting sprees. It was merely the lense through which my personality was focused. My creative desires and motivations were already there. D&D just helped expose them. It also introduced me to mythology and religious history, two things in which I would otherwise never have shown an interest (and one of which I still think is absurd).
People proposing these laws almost show almost as much intellectual damage as the people committing the crimes.
I was 13 or 14 when I saw my first computer on a TV commercial (it was for the Amiga), and something clicked. I begged my parents to get me the (incredibly expensive) Amiga.
When Christmas rolled around, I opened up a computer cassette drive present. Thriled, I next opened up a box that had a stupid looking keyboard with something about Radio Shack Color Computer stenciled on the front. I was let down, but I went with the flow of the moment. I later learned that Consumer Reports had rated the CoCo 2 as the best home computer value of 1985, and that was why my parents bought it for me.
After a quick setup, I found that thick "Color Computer Extended BASIC" programming book and started learning BASIC. I had finished the book a few days later, and had become the holiest of holy, a legend in my own mind: a small-time punk who knew BASIC!
I was happy writing BASIC programs in that boundless 32K of RAM, and reading/writing data to and from that lovely little tape drive.
A couple years later, though, BASIC had become too contraining, so I bought the EDTASM cartridge and William Barden Jr.'s CoCo assembly language programming book (you know that silver bound paperback bible). It was a fantastic assembly language book, and the 6809 was a fantastic little processor with an elegant instruction set.
Then I had outgrown RSDOS, and bought OS9 Level 2. I was impressed to say the least. Real pre-emptive multitasking with multiple on-screen (but non-overlapping) windows. I learned how to write assembly modules for OS9 and had already learned BASIC09 (I still miss subroutine modules).
That machine ran at less than 1 Mhz, but it easily kept pace with the 10 Mhz XT my dad was using. For a machine that was designed from spare parts Tandy had lying around, it was a top-notch piece of consumer engineering.
I was very sad the day I had to accept that the move to the IBM PC compatible world was unavoidable. I can't tell you how primitive and backwater slimey MS-DOS was after having worked with what was many times its superior. Talk about a huge step back in design and performance. And that Intel processor...what on Earth were they thinking?! The 6809's design was also many times the 808x superior on the instruction set level. The 6809's position independent addressing modes were incredible for the time. PIC programming on the Intel processors were horrendous and limited by comparison.
"I imagine this is what Stallman wanted, a chance to prove the GPL in court. And involvement in the case may give him legal room to see 'evidence' without signing non-disclosures."
This has the potential to be really funny with Stallman and Torvalds on the stand.
SCO lawyer: "And here we have exhibit [x] that clearly shows infringing code in Linux."
Stallman: "That's BSD code. It worked for a while, but someone else came up with a much better algorithm. That code hasn't been in GNU/Linux for quite some time."
SCO lawyer (clears his throat in embarrassment): "Moving on to exhibit [x], here is a flagrant example of more infringement."
Stallman: "I wrote that code myself in the early nineties. I know that for a fact because you didn't even bother removing my copyright notice."
(the courtroom comes alive in murmurs from the spectators, requiring the judge to silence the room)
The SCO lawyer finishes with Stallman and calls Torvalds:
SCO lawyer: "Exhibit [x] shows a Caldera copyright. It also shows that you personally modified it and included the code in Linux. We've got you now, you Finnish smartass!"
Torvalds: "Your own exhibit [y] shows that Caldera released the original code into the public domain on many different occasions. I originally tried retrofitting it into Linux, and it stayed for a few revisions, but it was so badly written that I was compelled to rip it out. It was replaced by a far superior version written by an Italian contributor on his 12th birthday."
(the courtroom spectators start to giggle)
SCO lawyer: "Moving on to our crown jewels, we see that the core of SCO Unix is nearly line-by-line identical to the core of Linux. Try explaining that one, hotshot."
Torvalds: "Hey! That's MY code! Rather, it's a very early and buggy version of my code. It looks very similar to Linux 0.2. Come on, guys. If you're gonna steal from Linux, at least steal the good stuff. No wonder SCO Unix sucks so bad."
Granted this is Slashdot, but a lot of people are overreacting even more than usual. It's just a parental control feature that was designed to give the purchaser ample opportunities to activate the parental controls. It can be easily turned off by just clicking the "No Thanks" button or going into the router's user interface and disabling the feature from there.
I've been using mod_php on Apache 2 on our governmental web server since Redhat first provided RPMs for both, and I haven't had a single problem with it. If there are any problems with this combination, they have yet to appear.
The problem with your suggestion is that spammers will then use the accept/reject mechanism as a means of verifying email addresses, something equally bad.
"What if this shell actually knocks the socks off *sh?"
Then I would finally be able to give Microsoft credit for creating something that doesn't suck. However, if history is any guide, I doubt we are in any danger of such an occurance. Microsoft always finds a way to take the best ideas and really screw them up.
"What if Longhorn does indeed provide more security, not only in default settings, but more inherently in the OpenSource?"
Again, I don't think this is something to worry about. In the same sense that Windows 98 was supposed to solve all the problems of Windows 95, and that Windows 2000 was supposed to solve all the problems of Windows 98, I'm reasonably certain that Longhorn is going to continue the tradition of massive insecurity.
When Microsoft talks about Longhorn security, it is not intended to make you secure from outside attacks. It is intended to make Microsoft's revenue stream secure from degredation. As always, Longhorn will look good for a little while (long enough to part you and your cash) but will then start to fall apart. You can bank on it.
I will, for the sake of argument, assume that MacOS X 10.3 is far and away, across the board, the best user environment ever created. Having never seen it, used it, or cared about it in any direction, I'll stipulate to that point.
I still wouldn't willingly spend any serious time with it. I would play with it, I would wow over it, and I would commend Apple for doing a fantastic job with it, but I wouldn't do anything that would make me depend on it.
I have been the victim of the same pattern over the years with proprietary operating systems, proprietary applications, and proprietary hardware. The [OS/application/hardware] is compelling, so I invest heavily (time, data, and money) in it. I have a great time using it, it is indeed the answer to my computng dreams. Then the vendor either:
1) Goes out of business. All my work is gone. Start over, with excrutiating pain, with a new product.
2) Discontinues the product. While not always painful, this is too unpredictable for my comfort. Sometimes the transition to the new product is seamless, and sometimes not. And sometimes no new product is forthcoming. I have experienced all of these eventualities, and I can't take it anymore.
3) Sells out to a competitor. This tends to lead to very similar conditions as number 2 above.
No matter how good a proprietary product is, it inevitably leads to a dependence on the sole supplier of that product. Having been victimized by the lack of control this requires, I decided to never go down that route again.
There are a great many cases where Free software does not compare favorably in feature count or usability with proprietary software. However, if the Free software gets the job done, even if it requires extra work on my part to get the job done, I will always prefer it over a proprietary counterpart.
The GIMP may or may not hold a candle to Photoshop, but it does the jobs I need it to do (both at home and at work). KDE's UI may or may not hold a candle to MacOS X, but it does the jobs I want it to do (and does them admirably). MacOS X hardware support may be better than Linux (given that all the Mac drivers are written by the Mac vendor, I would certainly hope the support is perfect), but all my hardware works.
But the single most important reason I will continue to base all my important work on Linux and Free software is that my work will not (and cannot, short of Congressional stupidity) be pulled out from under me. I don't care if I have to work a little harder per job (which, incidentally, I usually don't). The peace of mind I get by not having to worry about the goodwill of a vendor is an order of magnitude more important to me that having a flashier tool.
There are, though, times where a proprietary vendor is the only solution, such as accessing our [horribly pathetic] UniVerse database via ODBC within Linux. We had to buy middleware from a proprietary company as an immediate solution.
However, this illustrated serious problems with UniVerse which, among many other UniVerse and IBM non-support issues, is prompting us to run trials with PostgreSQL (which are going very well).
I'm digressing too much, though. The bottom line is that vendor abuses have driven me to use, like, and prefer Free environments over even the most featureful proprietary ones.
The 24th Amendment doesn't just prohibit the collection of money at the polling place as a prerequisite to voting in Presidential elections. The 24th applies to a wide array of mechanisms that prevent citizens from exercising their right to cast a ballot in any election. Literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting violate this amendment, as would licensing requirements.
The Constitution spells out the requirements for voting (in national or local procedings), and that is the end of the discussion. Any law/statute/practice which attempts to contravene what is detailed in the Constitution is illegal and void.
>But I sort of like the parent's idea, with the stipulation that you should only be able to vote on subjects you are competent on and have a license for.
Slashdot Mirror
"You don't have to be old and retired to be seduced by people promising you 500% returns on $50,000 investments. Twenty-somethings will fall for it if you use enough marketspeak."
If you do it once and lose your $50,000, you could be a victim of bad luck and market fluctuations. If you do it six times with money you can't afford to lose, you're just dumb.
I do feel sorry for this guy, though. He worked (probably hard) all his life to accumulate his nest egg. He seems like a genuinely caring and overall good guy except for his astronomically sized greed.
The fact that he was monumentally greedy does not mitigate the fact that his money was taken under fraudulent circumstances. Being greedy does not make him any less a victim.
It would be like blaming a retarded virgin girl for being a rape victim on the grounds that she should have known that the rapist was lying to her when he told her that good things would happen to her if she would just put out. The whole point is that she can't make that kind of informed decision without a guardian.
Granted, the man is not medically retarded and is fully capable of making his own decisions. However, his trust was still abused by the scammers. They are about 80% to blame, while he is about 20% to blame for failing to apply common sense due to extraordinary greed.
If SCO hadn't filed the lawsuit to pump up its stock price, neither Microsoft nor SUN would have given SCO money. In that case, SCO would not have had that 10 million dollars in revenue.
Seeing that Linux had been eating SCO's lunch prior to this, it's reasonable to think that SCO would not have had brought in any new business and hence no new revenue.
So without the lawsuit, SCO would probably have posted a quarterly loss of 11 million dollars.
Then we have Baystar's 50 million dollars. Again, without the lawsuit, Baystar most likely would not have given SCO the money. Without this, SCO's quarterly losses would have topped 61 million dollars.
The bottom line is that, as we all knew, without the phoney lawsuit against IBM, SCO would no longer exist as an organization. It would be bankrupt now.
SCO can only exist as long as it can delay court proceedings. Once IBM gets into full gear, SCO will vaporize.
"Why can't trials in the US (especially regarding technology) be overseen by judges with relevant expertise? Doesn't that seem like an obvious component of having a fair, just ruling?"
Not only that, but a jury of your peers as applied to white collar charges should require experience and knowledge in the white collar field. Only people in the field will have an adequate perspective to apply to the case.
After all, Joe Blow McDonald's cashier does not have adequate perspective to weigh such issues as decryption, and is far too vulnerable to prosecutorial nonsense.
"Also, no plea bargains, no jury (only laypersons that sit for a longer term), no bail, and the state pays for your lawyer of choice who can claim according to a set (fairly generous) standard (there are no criminal attorneys that operate outside of that system)."
So far I like this system much better than our (American) system. Can the State drown the defendant in prosecuting lawyers whereas the defendant is only entitled to one lawyer, or it is one prosecutor and one defender?
The DMCA also specifically allows defeating copy protection for purposes of interoperability in cases where it doesn't already exist.
"Or perhaps shorting the stock."
Although it should have happened long ago, SCO's stock price should hopefully begin freefall. It's been fluctuating slightly since the court decision, but it's somehow held it's value.
"I've been a member for a long time, and the content seems to be degenerating into a groupthink zealot factory with its own set of dogmas and censors."
Have you considered the possibility that we have each thought about this particular farce and have come to the same (or at least largely similar) conclusion?
Is it dogma if we all agree that the sky typically appears in a shade of blue after having watched the sky for a number of years and noted its appearance on numerous occasions? Is it censorship if we filter out useless snide remarks about the sky really being composed of pink polkadots?
Perhaps you are mistaking thought out consensus for groupthink. Just because we generally agree on the issues doesn't mean we're zealots. It could possibly mean that nobody has yet brought any evidence whatsoever in rational support of SCO's ridiculous arguments.
In fact, when this nonsense began, many of us made a fevered attempt to think of some way that SCO's accusations could have merit. We posited suppositions, various possible scenerios which were at some point discredited, and played devil's advocate from SCO's perspective. Over time, all possibilities we visited were either soundly rejected as false or were seen to be extremely unlikely.
Every time SCO made a remark in the case, we became increasingly aware that none of it reconciled with reality. In fact, several of SCO's key assertions were shown to be patently false.
Now we are in a phase where everything SCO has said has been shot down. There is nothing left to do but wait for the courts to formalize SCO's loss.
It still amazes me how some people can write so many words and not even touch upon the actual issues in the case. McBride's letter is one of these cases. I kept skipping the nonsense to get to an actual argument, but I ended up at the end of the letter instead.
Can memory cards not be arbitrarily formatted by users in the same way as floppies and hard drives?
The install process for these devices on Windows could start with a popup box that says something like:
"A recent Microsoft licensing decision prohibits device manufacturers from working with Windows in customary ways. We have included device driver software that will allow you to continue to use our products on Windows despite Microsoft's decision.
Once this is completed, you will be able to use the device normally. You are free to redistribute this device driver under the terms detailed in the [LGPL] license that is contained within the product packaging.
Click the Continue button to install the [ext2 filesystem] driver."
"Also, as Bruce Perens pointed out in another comment, the GPL requires that you offer to provide the source code to anyone, not just people who own the DVD player."
Bruce was only partly correct. That particular section of the GPL says that you must do only one of three things, one of which Bruce pointed out, and another being what the original posted pointed out (giving the source to whomever receives the binaries).
The GPL does not require both (or all three) items in that section of the license [section 3, btw]. If you give the source to whomever received your binaries, you do not have to personally provide it to all third parties.
"It is already illegal in the U.S. The ads autoplay, and you cannot stop them."
Both my PS2 and my el-cheapo $40 off the shelf DVD player let me press the menu button or the chapter advance (fast forward) to skip the autoplayed previews (on the rare DVD that actually has those annoyances) and FBI warning. It is not illegal and it is not enforced by the DVD player.
I have never encountered hostility such as you describe. I have also never been on IRC, so perhaps that is where you're trying to go for information. From everything I've read, that is a lost cause.
Having hung out in a couple programming chat groups, I've seen lots of people come in, scream at us for not instantly jumping to answer their caustically phrased demands for tech support, and then claiming innocently that they were just politely asking for help when those mean people in the room got so bent out of shape. So I tend to take such claims with a large chunk of salt (except for IRC).
I'll assume you mean Redhat 6.1 (as Linux-proper is only now approaching 2.6). Much documentation has improved since those now old distributions were new. Google rarely leads me to dead links (in fact, I can't remember the last time that happened). Linux newsgroups have been very helpful and generally polite (many questions still justifiably end with pointers to the documentation).
You have to filter out the "try another distro" responses as being unresponsive. With such a wide array of choices, people will always recommend their favorites. It's just line noise, and nothing to get upset about. If you had a choice of a dozen different versions of BeOS, you'd find the exact same issue.
Google, Google, Google. Google Groups is the single best resource available to you. Rest assured that 95+% of all problems you encounter with a mainstream Linux distribution have been thoroughly hashed and resolved (for better or worse) a dozen different ways.
When any population gains enough members, you're going to find all kinds of people within. You have access to the community's vast accumulated raw resources, much of which isn't filtered for you (you'll have to pay a distributor a sizable chunk of money if you want someone to do your filtering for you). The consequence of that raw access is not always pleasant. That doesn't excuse rudeness, but you'll have to accept it as a fact of life and learn to deal with it. The results are well worth it.
Linux -is- different from MS on many fronts, and many people whine about it extensively. The whining is greatly reduced when Linux provides something familiar to Windows users, so much effort is made to produce familiar interfaces (which tend to look quite Windowsish). This effort, however, is quite demanding and time consuming. MS has had a lot of lead time and vendor cooperation (something Linux is just now beginning to enjoy), so catching up has not been quick.
Reinventing the wheel is frequently necessary for a number of reasons, both technical and legal. It's part of the process of Free software, and frequently produces better software.
Being paid doesn't always motivate a programmer to remain within the established company norm. I tend to reproduce existing third-party software with new in-house software. It's an entirely lateral move in the short-term, but it will make us more self-reliant and flexible in the long term.
I was just digusted with the state of much of our third-party software and took it upon myself to produce replacements that are more fun and reliable to work with, in a couple cases in direct contrast to what I was being directly paid to do.
Management was against my proposal to change, when I first breached the subject, so I worked on it at home on my own time. After several months, I had a proof-of-concept implementation that I showed at work. My bosses were very interested in seeing the finished product (which is still in progress).
The end result, in every case I decided needed rewriting, was the eventual approval and delight of Management. I scratch personal itches for work, on my own time and sometimes at work. The end result has always been beneficial after the fact, even when it seems a costly misuse of my time in the short run.
After a few successes, I was able to be more open about my deviations from my assignments. Now these deviations are taken into account in the formal decision making process. In fact, one of my scratches currently in progress will be replacing the core system I was originally hired to help maintain two and half years ago. Everyone involved, especially the users and other programmers, is genuinely excited to see the replacement happen. This all started because I was unhappy with the way things were done here at work.
So naturally I don't buy the argument that duplicating existing work is bad per se. It's all a matter of choosing your projects well. Sometimes that duplication of effort is the only way to go.
At first I was going to label this post, "More right-wing brain damage", but this particular brand of idiocy seems to cross party lines.
I remember being a teenager when all the "Dungeons & Dragons makes people kill people" stupidity was all the political rage. My mom fell victim to it for a while, until I persuader her to sit in on a few sessions with me and my friends. Her eyes were opened, that much is sure. She finally realized how insane the mass media, parents' groups, and politicians were by blaming an intellectual exercise for some kids' twisted world perceptions.
It's now 20 years later, and the entire process is repeating itself. Different names, different games, same complete lack of comprehension and neural activity.
Read my lips: the kids doing these things want to do these things because these things are ingrained into these kids' personalities, not because of some stupid imagined connection with video games. These kids (and their willing adult accomplices in psuedo-scientific psychological fields and media) use what they think is the most likely excuse to deflect blame from themselves: violent video games made me do it.
Think back to your own childhood (and for many of us, our current adulthood where our jobs are concerned). When you got caught by your parents doing something you knew was bad, didn't you brainstorm for some excuse you thought your parents would buy to let you off the hook? Of course you did. It's exactly what these kids are doing now. Why do so many people think this is so different from the past?
If they couldn't blame video games today, they would blame it on movies again. When they can't blame it on movies, they blame it on the parents (which at least has a kernel of truth in some, but not many, cases).
This artificial distinction between childhood and adulthood provides a false sense of control and understanding for too many people. To say that a teenager's mind isn't developed enough to understand death and that killing people is wrong represents a dangerous plateau of irresponsibility.
Again, I only have to think back to when I was a teenager. I knew right and wrong fully well back then, and this stupendously moronic notion that I was too young to understand the consequences of my actions was implicit permission for me to break all those rules I was being made to follow.
I got punished for the small things like shoplifting candy bars, but I was completely off the hook for big things (I won't go into the details, except to say I never crossed the line into hurting people) because adults were so easy to manipulate into blaming everything but the real problem: my bad attitude and lack of respect.
The real irony here is that Dungeons & Dragons was the key to igniting my creative desires, and changed my direction from thief and vandal to productive member of society. Had these stupid laws been in place then, taking my focus away from insighful creativity, I would likely have ended up becoming a criminal instead of writing software.
How poetic that my career ended up with me writing software to help manage the criminal justice system.
Of course, Dungeons & Dragons wasn't any more responsible for my positive behavior than Grand Theft Auto 3/Vice City are for shooting sprees. It was merely the lense through which my personality was focused. My creative desires and motivations were already there. D&D just helped expose them. It also introduced me to mythology and religious history, two things in which I would otherwise never have shown an interest (and one of which I still think is absurd).
People proposing these laws almost show almost as much intellectual damage as the people committing the crimes.
I was 13 or 14 when I saw my first computer on a TV commercial (it was for the Amiga), and something clicked. I begged my parents to get me the (incredibly expensive) Amiga.
When Christmas rolled around, I opened up a computer cassette drive present. Thriled, I next opened up a box that had a stupid looking keyboard with something about Radio Shack Color Computer stenciled on the front. I was let down, but I went with the flow of the moment. I later learned that Consumer Reports had rated the CoCo 2 as the best home computer value of 1985, and that was why my parents bought it for me.
After a quick setup, I found that thick "Color Computer Extended BASIC" programming book and started learning BASIC. I had finished the book a few days later, and had become the holiest of holy, a legend in my own mind: a small-time punk who knew BASIC!
I was happy writing BASIC programs in that boundless 32K of RAM, and reading/writing data to and from that lovely little tape drive.
A couple years later, though, BASIC had become too contraining, so I bought the EDTASM cartridge and William Barden Jr.'s CoCo assembly language programming book (you know that silver bound paperback bible). It was a fantastic assembly language book, and the 6809 was a fantastic little processor with an elegant instruction set.
Then I had outgrown RSDOS, and bought OS9 Level 2. I was impressed to say the least. Real pre-emptive multitasking with multiple on-screen (but non-overlapping) windows. I learned how to write assembly modules for OS9 and had already learned BASIC09 (I still miss subroutine modules).
That machine ran at less than 1 Mhz, but it easily kept pace with the 10 Mhz XT my dad was using. For a machine that was designed from spare parts Tandy had lying around, it was a top-notch piece of consumer engineering.
I was very sad the day I had to accept that the move to the IBM PC compatible world was unavoidable. I can't tell you how primitive and backwater slimey MS-DOS was after having worked with what was many times its superior. Talk about a huge step back in design and performance. And that Intel processor...what on Earth were they thinking?! The 6809's design was also many times the 808x superior on the instruction set level. The 6809's position independent addressing modes were incredible for the time. PIC programming on the Intel processors were horrendous and limited by comparison.
"I imagine this is what Stallman wanted, a chance to prove the GPL in court. And involvement in the case may give him legal room to see 'evidence' without signing non-disclosures."
This has the potential to be really funny with Stallman and Torvalds on the stand.
SCO lawyer: "And here we have exhibit [x] that clearly shows infringing code in Linux."
Stallman: "That's BSD code. It worked for a while, but someone else came up with a much better algorithm. That code hasn't been in GNU/Linux for quite some time."
SCO lawyer (clears his throat in embarrassment): "Moving on to exhibit [x], here is a flagrant example of more infringement."
Stallman: "I wrote that code myself in the early nineties. I know that for a fact because you didn't even bother removing my copyright notice."
(the courtroom comes alive in murmurs from the spectators, requiring the judge to silence the room)
The SCO lawyer finishes with Stallman and calls Torvalds:
SCO lawyer: "Exhibit [x] shows a Caldera copyright. It also shows that you personally modified it and included the code in Linux. We've got you now, you Finnish smartass!"
Torvalds: "Your own exhibit [y] shows that Caldera released the original code into the public domain on many different occasions. I originally tried retrofitting it into Linux, and it stayed for a few revisions, but it was so badly written that I was compelled to rip it out. It was replaced by a far superior version written by an Italian contributor on his 12th birthday."
(the courtroom spectators start to giggle)
SCO lawyer: "Moving on to our crown jewels, we see that the core of SCO Unix is nearly line-by-line identical to the core of Linux. Try explaining that one, hotshot."
Torvalds: "Hey! That's MY code! Rather, it's a very early and buggy version of my code. It looks very similar to Linux 0.2. Come on, guys. If you're gonna steal from Linux, at least steal the good stuff. No wonder SCO Unix sucks so bad."
"The best job in science? We nominate the pig."
Hmm...the next time an attractive woman calls you a pig, she may actually be hitting on you...
Granted this is Slashdot, but a lot of people are overreacting even more than usual. It's just a parental control feature that was designed to give the purchaser ample opportunities to activate the parental controls. It can be easily turned off by just clicking the "No Thanks" button or going into the router's user interface and disabling the feature from there.
This is a non-story, so you can unclench now.
I've been using mod_php on Apache 2 on our governmental web server since Redhat first provided RPMs for both, and I haven't had a single problem with it. If there are any problems with this combination, they have yet to appear.
The problem with your suggestion is that spammers will then use the accept/reject mechanism as a means of verifying email addresses, something equally bad.
"What if this shell actually knocks the socks off *sh?"
Then I would finally be able to give Microsoft credit for creating something that doesn't suck. However, if history is any guide, I doubt we are in any danger of such an occurance. Microsoft always finds a way to take the best ideas and really screw them up.
"What if Longhorn does indeed provide more security, not only in default settings, but more inherently in the OpenSource?"
Again, I don't think this is something to worry about. In the same sense that Windows 98 was supposed to solve all the problems of Windows 95, and that Windows 2000 was supposed to solve all the problems of Windows 98, I'm reasonably certain that Longhorn is going to continue the tradition of massive insecurity.
When Microsoft talks about Longhorn security, it is not intended to make you secure from outside attacks. It is intended to make Microsoft's revenue stream secure from degredation. As always, Longhorn will look good for a little while (long enough to part you and your cash) but will then start to fall apart. You can bank on it.
I will, for the sake of argument, assume that MacOS X 10.3 is far and away, across the board, the best user environment ever created. Having never seen it, used it, or cared about it in any direction, I'll stipulate to that point.
I still wouldn't willingly spend any serious time with it. I would play with it, I would wow over it, and I would commend Apple for doing a fantastic job with it, but I wouldn't do anything that would make me depend on it.
I have been the victim of the same pattern over the years with proprietary operating systems, proprietary applications, and proprietary hardware. The [OS/application/hardware] is compelling, so I invest heavily (time, data, and money) in it. I have a great time using it, it is indeed the answer to my computng dreams. Then the vendor either:
1) Goes out of business. All my work is gone. Start over, with excrutiating pain, with a new product.
2) Discontinues the product. While not always painful, this is too unpredictable for my comfort. Sometimes the transition to the new product is seamless, and sometimes not. And sometimes no new product is forthcoming. I have experienced all of these eventualities, and I can't take it anymore.
3) Sells out to a competitor. This tends to lead to very similar conditions as number 2 above.
No matter how good a proprietary product is, it inevitably leads to a dependence on the sole supplier of that product. Having been victimized by the lack of control this requires, I decided to never go down that route again.
There are a great many cases where Free software does not compare favorably in feature count or usability with proprietary software. However, if the Free software gets the job done, even if it requires extra work on my part to get the job done, I will always prefer it over a proprietary counterpart.
The GIMP may or may not hold a candle to Photoshop, but it does the jobs I need it to do (both at home and at work). KDE's UI may or may not hold a candle to MacOS X, but it does the jobs I want it to do (and does them admirably). MacOS X hardware support may be better than Linux (given that all the Mac drivers are written by the Mac vendor, I would certainly hope the support is perfect), but all my hardware works.
But the single most important reason I will continue to base all my important work on Linux and Free software is that my work will not (and cannot, short of Congressional stupidity) be pulled out from under me. I don't care if I have to work a little harder per job (which, incidentally, I usually don't). The peace of mind I get by not having to worry about the goodwill of a vendor is an order of magnitude more important to me that having a flashier tool.
There are, though, times where a proprietary vendor is the only solution, such as accessing our [horribly pathetic] UniVerse database via ODBC within Linux. We had to buy middleware from a proprietary company as an immediate solution.
However, this illustrated serious problems with UniVerse which, among many other UniVerse and IBM non-support issues, is prompting us to run trials with PostgreSQL (which are going very well).
I'm digressing too much, though. The bottom line is that vendor abuses have driven me to use, like, and prefer Free environments over even the most featureful proprietary ones.
The 24th Amendment doesn't just prohibit the collection of money at the polling place as a prerequisite to voting in Presidential elections. The 24th applies to a wide array of mechanisms that prevent citizens from exercising their right to cast a ballot in any election. Literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting violate this amendment, as would licensing requirements.
The Constitution spells out the requirements for voting (in national or local procedings), and that is the end of the discussion. Any law/statute/practice which attempts to contravene what is detailed in the Constitution is illegal and void.
>But I sort of like the parent's idea, with the stipulation that you should only be able to vote on subjects you are competent on and have a license for.
First you'd have to get rid of that pesky 24th Amendment ot the U.S. Consitution.