The big difference being that you are not tied to your distro for support. If RedHat grow to the point where they become unresponsive, you can always ditch them in favour of a smaller third party support outfit.
Hell, if you have the expertese, you can even fix it in-house.
That simply isn't supported by the article because the movie infringed was a Screener copy
I believe that's what's known as quoting out of context. What I said was:
you could take tke view (as I expect the studios do) that even a loss of a single cent is unacceptable
So yeah, the article doesn't support that viewpoint - and I never said it did. But I expect that's what they'd say, in the context of price points and justification.
If the MPAA can't even get their insiders to stop pirateing, they're totaly screwed with the general public
I'm not clear on what your point is. Do you mean that the RIAA is screwed, and that the proof is that they can't control
their insiders, or did you mean to suggest that the bad example set by movie insiders justifies the severity of the possible sentence?
Er, it doesn't. Their profit margin has no reflection upon whether copyright infringement is good or bad.
Personally, I didn't read the GP as advocating copyright infringement; the opposite, if anything.
All the same, there is the matter of "let the punishment fit the crime". It's difficult to see how to do that without some way to judge the harm caused.
Interesting. If you consider the matter in that light, how can you then determine the magnitude of any losses?
SW:ROTS would seem to be the seventh highest US box office takings ever. By any standard, the film was a massive success.
I suppose you could take tke view (as I expect the studios do) that even a loss of a single cent is unacceptable.
Even so, there is no evidence that even that amount of harm was caused. So this probably isn't the most useful analysis
of the situation.
Even so, given that one of the defendant is facing a three year jail term, I'm finding it hard to summon up much sympathy for the movie people.
Re:What sort of "original" game do you propose?
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
But I was asking for original idea suggestions. Do you have any? If you can't come up with any original ideas, then perhaps the game developers can't either.
Pardon me, but that seems a little silly. The game designers are being paid for their creativity. It's one thing for A. Random Slashdotter not to have any creative ideas for games; for a designer, it is a serious problem.
For an entire industry, such creative bankrupcy would be a disgrace.
But really, as far as I can see, the problem is not a lack of originality in the industry. The problem seems to be that the game studios are increasingly unwilling to fund anything but sequels and remakes.
And I think that's a legitmate cause for complaint.
That depends where you live. Certainly in the UK, if you buy a CD and it falls in the fire and is destroyed and go to a shop with the receipt and ask for a replacement they'll just laugh at you and suggest you buy another.
I think that misses a subtle distinction: The record shop may sell plastic and mylar, but the thing that induces me to part with my money is the music on the disc. They sell plastic, but I pay for music.
It's similar to Microsoft: they sell licences, but the thing that makes me pay is the software.
Of course, shortly after I found out about that subtle distinction I switched to Linux. It's better value for money.
I don't listen to much in the way of new music either, come to think of it...
Without signatures on binaries, there's no way of knowing if the binary you download is the one that the author intended it to be.
Well, they do offer MD5 and SHA1 checksums, but you really have to dig on the ftp site to find them. All part of the
process of de-geeking the firefox experience, I suppose; hide those ugly checksum fils so they don't scare the non-tech users.
How secure are digital signatures anyway? I seem to recall a case when someone created malicious ActiveX controls that seemed to be digitally signed by Microsoft. MS's workaround at the time was to disable active scripting or not to trust
microsoft components. I don't recall if that was a problem with the signatures though, or an exploit in IE.
I also have to suppose that others have opposing interests of approximately equal strength, and that they also have no regard for the will of the people (who are going to be split about the same as me and my hypothetical opposition)
mmm... why? It's a viable scenario,
but there's no logical necessity for an equal-and-opposite countering force.
Similarly I find it unlikely that the political
priorities of the wealthy and powerful are
representative of those who lack similar
advantages. In particular, the they are
apt to find common ground
in preserving that wealth and power,
and in making it harder for outsiders
to compete with them.
all of that has been occurring for generations, and is well understood by politicians great and small.... That particular arms race is already well understood
Which is rather my point. The system is
vulnerable to being gamed in this manner.
And yet, if you say "the problem is apathy",
then what people are apt ot hear is "they system
works - the problem is just that everyone-except-me is doing it wrong".
If voter apathy has been recognised as a problem for generations, then clearly complaining about
it isn't a workable solution.
Isn't it time we started looking for a patch to
the system?
I appreciate your insight. I disagree, but I appreciate it anyway.
"Infected binary or source code files aren't anything new. And sometimes they are found on public servers. Mozilla.org is the latest example.
mmm... So do you not think the phrase
"Mozilla.org is the latest example" is
a just the teeniest bit
misleading in this context? You know,
what with most people taking "latest"
to mean "happened very recently" as opposed to
"even so, there hasn't been one for simply ages so I wouldn't get too worried".
Not that anyone would
do such a thing deliberately, of course... Except I can't help wondering how many people
pondering a change away from Windows/IE will
read that and form a false impression of
Mozilla and Linux.
The L's won't, can't and never will win, ever, under any realistic circumstances
Sure. Just like Internet Explorer's strnaglehold on the market means
we'll never see widespread adoption of an open source web browser... errm...
Seriously, if anything legitimises the system, it is not voting.
I do sympathise with the point of view. It's be nice to suppose that if 66% of the electorate refused to take part in an election, the message this would convey would be:
Two thirds of the electorate disapprove of the system, therefore we should fix it.
In practice, by the time the spin doctors get done, what comes across is more like:
Two thirds of the population don't care enough to place a vote. Therefore there can't
be any serious problems with the system,
otherwise people would vote to put a stop
to it.
I will conceed that the game is rigged,
and that the odds are against us.
But I don't think it's yet rigged so badly that
it can't be won.
And even if I'm wrong about that, the only way we'll ever find out is by voting.
The "voting only legitimizes it" argument is great for legitimizing laziness, apathy and corrupt political systems. As a way of protesting a broken
system, it's a bit self defeating, as far as I can see.
So maybe we're all overthinking this. We assume an e-book reader needs to cost hundreds of dollars and be rather complicated. We assume it needs to be backlit and hold hundreds of books. Make them $20-$25 devides with a prev/next button that displays only text in an easy-to-read font adn we're set.
Hurm. I have a laptop, a PDA, a desktop computer, a phone... I have no shortage of devices (potentially) capable of displaying an e-book.
I don't want to pay $25 for another device, especially if it's $25 per book.
Of course, if it's the book I'm paying for and not the reader, then it's overpriced and I don't want it - which is one reason I dislike ebooks in the first place.
It should concern us. If the noise to signal ratio gets too high, no one will be able to make out the signal.
And yet the good stuff seems to get
identified fairly quickly. Firefox, for example.
It's just a lot harder to push adoption of
rubbish by means of aggressive marketing.
Word of mouth and easy evaluation seem to
provide an adequate filter mechanism.
This isn't to say there aren't some
gems out there deserving of wider recognition.
But that's a problem with proprietary software
too.
And for software, design might be better than evolution.
It might. And it might not. Happily, OSS lets us try both and then see which works best under which circumstances. Life is good:)
Otherwise programs end up with a lot of cruft, the sofware equivalent of an appendix - doesn't do anything useful, and occasionally leads to fatal errors.
Again, this isn't a probem that is solved by using proprietary licence. You can pick a Microsoft product more or less at random and find the same problems.
So I guess the question is, what would you propose? Any evaluation board is likely to be
subverted by industry.
Interesting analysis. Let's turn it on its head for a moment:
Suppose you have a vested interest in seeing certain policies maintained in a democracy regardless of the will of the people.
The trick then is persuading people not to vote.
From this perspective, apathy is not the problem - apathy becomes the solution.
So how would you foster apathy in an electorate? Spreading the meme (prevalent in this debate)
that your vote makes no difference would be one
approach; broken election promises without consequence, gerrymandered electoral boundaries... there are a lot of ways to persuade an electorate that their votes make no difference.
That doesn't mean that apathy is not a problem. However too many politicians use voter apathy to justify obviously unpopular policies for which they have nothing resembling a mandate.
I don't think making "apathy" the root concept in our analysis is particularly useful.
How exactly are you going to produce electoral reform when most of the apparatus needed to reform it is completely dominated by two parties who have no motivation to allow a 3rd party to gain viability.
And yet, it has happened before. Women's emancipation for example. There are many examples
throughout history of reforms[1] being enacted despite powerful vested interests.
I can't think of anything fundamental that has changed; similar reforms should be achievable now.
And since the alternative is to watch our societies change before our eyes into totalitarian police states, it would seem this is a project
deserving of our thoughts and efforts.
[1] I use the word "reform" to mean actually making things better, as opposed to the more recent usage of "making things worse and then telling people that it's an improvement"
I once met this armored knight on horseback. Boy did I hate him, so I fought 'em. Man, did I hammer my fists against his impenetrible armor untill the bones were broken, the skin was ragged and blood poued from my hands... Didn't scratch him, but damn did I fight!
The armoured knight is not however invincible.
It's just that you've picked a really dumb way to
oppose him.
The two party swindle worked because corporate
interests could control the information
channels, and becuase the barrier to entry to
the political arena was kept high.
But the internet sidesteps media control nicely,
and makes large scale organisation possible
without needing to be filthy rich.
All we need is the will, and that armoured knight
of yours is going to end up on his ass in the dust.
Ok you are technically mostly correct in your post, however you seem to overlook one thing.
In order to affect change via democracy at least 51% of the population must be intelligent enough to vote so as to actually affect that change.
My experience of my fellow human beings does *not* support this as a realistic possibility.
And yet the Women's Sufferage movement succeeded,
less than one hundred years ago.
And the group that stood to benefit didn't even
have a vote.
Similarly with the abolition of slavery.
It is possible to make things better as well as
worse. History shows this.
If the 'collective media' wanted to direct the vote one way or another, they could.
Less and less true, every day. Web pages, blogs,
podcasters, mailing lists; the number of avenues for dissemination of information grows daily. To the point that even non-geeks are joining in and
getting their info direct, rather than filtered
through Big Media.
It's getting harder and harder to pull the wool
over our collective eyes.
And when you have a choice between Dictator 1 and Dictator 2 then voting just says, "hey, I agreee with your repression of me!"
You're not wrong. However there are more than
two parties. Buy into the trap of binary thinking - that it's an either/or choice, and you're still
playing their game - only now they can dismiss
your discontent as "apathy".
The only political issue that should really
matter right now is electoral reform. We need to
change the system so that two parties
cannot dominate any election each through fear
of the other being elected.
Do you want to be a terrorist? A peasant? or a boss?
Well, that all presupposes I accept your
scenario, and I'm not convinced of the benefits
of such a worldview. If tyranny were
unopposable then we'd all still be serfs,
living in fear of our overlords. It hasn't
been like that for a while. We know this
both by the comparison with nations
genuinely repressive regimes (which
remind us how far we have come),
and by the continuing attempts to erode
our hard won liberties, which
demonstrate that we yet have much to lose.
So the "nothing you can do" argument hasn't been
true in the past, and unless the Orbital Mind Control Lasers really exist, it probably isn't
true now. I'm going to operate on that
assumption, tin foil helmets being something of
a fashion faux pas these days.
But assuming, for the sake of argument that you
have a point: You might want to ask yourself:
are those the only options on offer?
Because you may just find entry to the boss
class harder to obtain than you think.
Unless of course you were born into one of about a hundred or so old money families,
in which case you've probably got people to do
your trolling for you.
I don't suppose you're a Pink Floyd fan? I'm
reminded of a line from
Wish You Were Here:
And did you exchange
a walk on part in the war
for a lead role in a cage?
But hey, your bars will be shiny and you'll
get to kick the lesser slaves. If that's the
best you feel you can aspire to, fair enough I
suppose.
Times are changing, and civil liberties are dead, accept it or move to another country.
Well, that wasn't always the prevalent attitude
on your side of the atlantic. Elsewise,
you'd still be ruled from London.
And somehome I doubt it's the prevalent attitude
now.
Tell me, what is it with this corporate fataism?
You know the sort of thing:
The big money has already won. there is nothing you can do. best get used to it,
it'll be less painful in the long term
It's tempting to dismiss it as astroturf,
but that is too way easy.
So, what is it with posters like you that you're so keep to sacrifice your (and everyone else's) liberty? Is it some weird psychosexual kink?
Given that we already have a nanny state, it seems to me that not voting
is representing the nanny state - it says "go right ahead - I don't care
enough to oppose you".
And you know what? If the nanny state was the worst we had to worry about
I might even agree with you.
But we in the UK live in a country with more
surveilance cameras per square foot than any
other in the world. We have a a government
that has introduced curfews, travel restrictions, has done away with the
right to silence, wishes to remove the right to trial by jury, has instituted
detention without trial and without evidence, that lies to its people to
justify foreign wars of aggression, has no compuction in victimising
journalists that speak out against it,
that plans to force through expensive identity
card schemes in the face of both public
opposition, and a total lack of evidence that
thes scheme will benefit anyone at all.
And one that apparently
condones shooting commuters in the head at point blank range without evidence and with no warning.
So I think there's just a wee bit more at stake here than the Nanny bleeding State.
But they'll be the first to moan if they don't get driver support or software or anything.
I don't know about that. We're used to writing our own software. Device drivers too; all we ask is that people give us the information we need to write and maintain them. We do grumble a bit if manufacturers refuse to give us the necessary information for no good reason. I don't think that's entirely unreasonable, personally.
Just look at that article where that flood insurance site only supported Windows, there was plenty of moaning.
I don't remember that case, but there was a recent fuss about the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) having its emergency assistance request form only work with IE6. So if you were in trouble in Louisiana and you had power, a computer and a computer connection, you were still out of luck if you ran Linux, *BSD, a Mac or even heaven help us, Internet Explorer 5.
I don't know about your flood insurance case, but I think standards compliance is a reasonable expectation, especially where government agencies are concerned, doubly so when lives are on the line.
Yet in the next breath the same people are saying they don't want mainstream support.
Well, some people might be saying that, but that wasn't the GP's point. He was saying that they don't necessarily care if Linux doesn't have a dominant market share.
It's a reasonable attitude to take. Linuc may never be ready for the Great Aunt Tillys of this world. (Hell, Windows may never be ready for the Great Aunt Tillys either). In any case, I think recognising that
it's not necessary to ram your preferred OS down
the throat of everyone you meet is a sign of maturity.
As for "mainstream support", I'm not sure what
you mean by that. If you mean professional software support, most linux users who want that buy it from someone like redhat. If you mean standards compliance and the information we
need to interoperate and write and maintain
drivers, no one is saying we don't want them.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, if you have the expertese, you can even fix it in-house.
Try doing either of those with Windows :)
I'm not clear on what your point is. Do you mean that the RIAA is screwed, and that the proof is that they can't control their insiders, or did you mean to suggest that the bad example set by movie insiders justifies the severity of the possible sentence?
Personally, I didn't read the GP as advocating copyright infringement; the opposite, if anything.
All the same, there is the matter of "let the punishment fit the crime". It's difficult to see how to do that without some way to judge the harm caused.
SW:ROTS would seem to be the seventh highest US box office takings ever. By any standard, the film was a massive success.
I suppose you could take tke view (as I expect the studios do) that even a loss of a single cent is unacceptable. Even so, there is no evidence that even that amount of harm was caused. So this probably isn't the most useful analysis of the situation.
Even so, given that one of the defendant is facing a three year jail term, I'm finding it hard to summon up much sympathy for the movie people.
Pardon me, but that seems a little silly. The game designers are being paid for their creativity. It's one thing for A. Random Slashdotter not to have any creative ideas for games; for a designer, it is a serious problem.
For an entire industry, such creative bankrupcy would be a disgrace.
But really, as far as I can see, the problem is not a lack of originality in the industry. The problem seems to be that the game studios are increasingly unwilling to fund anything but sequels and remakes.
And I think that's a legitmate cause for complaint.
The author spent at least two paragraphs of that page talking about himself.
Do I take it the discussion moved on to Ubuntu thereafter?
There's a degree of debate as to whether El Reg's tariff is purely for laughs, or intended as a serious proposition.
But every time they regurgitate some idiot press release, I really do start to wonder.
I like the Register. It's funny. But some of their stories, I feel, are best run through the old Bullshit Detector before attempting to digest.
I think that misses a subtle distinction: The record shop may sell plastic and mylar, but the thing that induces me to part with my money is the music on the disc. They sell plastic, but I pay for music.
It's similar to Microsoft: they sell licences, but the thing that makes me pay is the software. Of course, shortly after I found out about that subtle distinction I switched to Linux. It's better value for money.
I don't listen to much in the way of new music either, come to think of it...
Well, they do offer MD5 and SHA1 checksums, but you really have to dig on the ftp site to find them. All part of the process of de-geeking the firefox experience, I suppose; hide those ugly checksum fils so they don't scare the non-tech users.
How secure are digital signatures anyway? I seem to recall a case when someone created malicious ActiveX controls that seemed to be digitally signed by Microsoft. MS's workaround at the time was to disable active scripting or not to trust microsoft components. I don't recall if that was a problem with the signatures though, or an exploit in IE.
mmm... why? It's a viable scenario, but there's no logical necessity for an equal-and-opposite countering force.
Similarly I find it unlikely that the political priorities of the wealthy and powerful are representative of those who lack similar advantages. In particular, the they are apt to find common ground in preserving that wealth and power, and in making it harder for outsiders to compete with them.
all of that has been occurring for generations, and is well understood by politicians great and small. ... That particular arms race is already well understood
Which is rather my point. The system is vulnerable to being gamed in this manner. And yet, if you say "the problem is apathy", then what people are apt ot hear is "they system works - the problem is just that everyone-except-me is doing it wrong".
If voter apathy has been recognised as a problem for generations, then clearly complaining about it isn't a workable solution.
Isn't it time we started looking for a patch to the system?
I appreciate your insight. I disagree, but I appreciate it anyway.
And thank you for your courtesy :)
It makes me wonder why people think Slashdot has such an pro-Linux bias - clearly Taco will publish FUD from anyone at all ;)
Seriously - where better to debunk crap like this?
The point is that I think the sentence is intended mislead the reader. It's quite possible to do that whilst remaining gramtically correct.
Specifically, there is an ambiguity in the use of the word "latest". It is quite correct to use the word to mean "most recent occurence".
However, a common usage in the media is "very recently occurence".
So, to my eye, that article reads as if the author intended us to think that this server compromise was something new
Unless you can show how this common use of the English language somehow is not relevant in this case, I don't get your point at all.
It's a semantic issue, not a syntactic one.
Hope that helps.
mmm... So do you not think the phrase "Mozilla.org is the latest example" is a just the teeniest bit misleading in this context? You know, what with most people taking "latest" to mean "happened very recently" as opposed to "even so, there hasn't been one for simply ages so I wouldn't get too worried".
Not that anyone would do such a thing deliberately, of course... Except I can't help wondering how many people pondering a change away from Windows/IE will read that and form a false impression of Mozilla and Linux.
Now who could that benefit, I wonder...
Sure. Just like Internet Explorer's strnaglehold on the market means we'll never see widespread adoption of an open source web browser ... errm...
Seriously, if anything legitimises the system, it is not voting.
I do sympathise with the point of view. It's be nice to suppose that if 66% of the electorate refused to take part in an election, the message this would convey would be:
In practice, by the time the spin doctors get done, what comes across is more like:I will conceed that the game is rigged, and that the odds are against us. But I don't think it's yet rigged so badly that it can't be won. And even if I'm wrong about that, the only way we'll ever find out is by voting.
The "voting only legitimizes it" argument is great for legitimizing laziness, apathy and corrupt political systems. As a way of protesting a broken system, it's a bit self defeating, as far as I can see.
Hurm. I have a laptop, a PDA, a desktop computer, a phone... I have no shortage of devices (potentially) capable of displaying an e-book. I don't want to pay $25 for another device, especially if it's $25 per book.
Of course, if it's the book I'm paying for and not the reader, then it's overpriced and I don't want it - which is one reason I dislike ebooks in the first place.
And yet the good stuff seems to get identified fairly quickly. Firefox, for example. It's just a lot harder to push adoption of rubbish by means of aggressive marketing. Word of mouth and easy evaluation seem to provide an adequate filter mechanism.
This isn't to say there aren't some gems out there deserving of wider recognition. But that's a problem with proprietary software too.
And for software, design might be better than evolution.
It might. And it might not. Happily, OSS lets us try both and then see which works best under which circumstances. Life is good :)
Otherwise programs end up with a lot of cruft, the sofware equivalent of an appendix - doesn't do anything useful, and occasionally leads to fatal errors.
Again, this isn't a probem that is solved by using proprietary licence. You can pick a Microsoft product more or less at random and find the same problems.
So I guess the question is, what would you propose? Any evaluation board is likely to be subverted by industry.
And the current model harms no one.
Interesting analysis. Let's turn it on its head for a moment:
Suppose you have a vested interest in seeing certain policies maintained in a democracy regardless of the will of the people.
The trick then is persuading people not to vote. From this perspective, apathy is not the problem - apathy becomes the solution.
So how would you foster apathy in an electorate? Spreading the meme (prevalent in this debate) that your vote makes no difference would be one approach; broken election promises without consequence, gerrymandered electoral boundaries... there are a lot of ways to persuade an electorate that their votes make no difference.
That doesn't mean that apathy is not a problem. However too many politicians use voter apathy to justify obviously unpopular policies for which they have nothing resembling a mandate.
I don't think making "apathy" the root concept in our analysis is particularly useful.
And yet, it has happened before. Women's emancipation for example. There are many examples throughout history of reforms[1] being enacted despite powerful vested interests.
I can't think of anything fundamental that has changed; similar reforms should be achievable now.
And since the alternative is to watch our societies change before our eyes into totalitarian police states, it would seem this is a project deserving of our thoughts and efforts.
[1] I use the word "reform" to mean actually making things better, as opposed to the more recent usage of "making things worse and then telling people that it's an improvement"
The armoured knight is not however invincible. It's just that you've picked a really dumb way to oppose him.
The two party swindle worked because corporate interests could control the information channels, and becuase the barrier to entry to the political arena was kept high.
But the internet sidesteps media control nicely, and makes large scale organisation possible without needing to be filthy rich.
All we need is the will, and that armoured knight of yours is going to end up on his ass in the dust.
And yet the Women's Sufferage movement succeeded, less than one hundred years ago.
And the group that stood to benefit didn't even have a vote.
Similarly with the abolition of slavery. It is possible to make things better as well as worse. History shows this.
Less and less true, every day. Web pages, blogs, podcasters, mailing lists; the number of avenues for dissemination of information grows daily. To the point that even non-geeks are joining in and getting their info direct, rather than filtered through Big Media.It's getting harder and harder to pull the wool over our collective eyes.
You're not wrong. However there are more than two parties. Buy into the trap of binary thinking - that it's an either/or choice, and you're still playing their game - only now they can dismiss your discontent as "apathy".
The only political issue that should really matter right now is electoral reform. We need to change the system so that two parties cannot dominate any election each through fear of the other being elected.
http://www.electionmethods.org/ is a good place to start.
Well, that all presupposes I accept your scenario, and I'm not convinced of the benefits of such a worldview. If tyranny were unopposable then we'd all still be serfs, living in fear of our overlords. It hasn't been like that for a while. We know this both by the comparison with nations genuinely repressive regimes (which remind us how far we have come), and by the continuing attempts to erode our hard won liberties, which demonstrate that we yet have much to lose.
So the "nothing you can do" argument hasn't been true in the past, and unless the Orbital Mind Control Lasers really exist, it probably isn't true now. I'm going to operate on that assumption, tin foil helmets being something of a fashion faux pas these days.
But assuming, for the sake of argument that you have a point: You might want to ask yourself: are those the only options on offer? Because you may just find entry to the boss class harder to obtain than you think. Unless of course you were born into one of about a hundred or so old money families, in which case you've probably got people to do your trolling for you.
I don't suppose you're a Pink Floyd fan? I'm reminded of a line from Wish You Were Here:
But hey, your bars will be shiny and you'll get to kick the lesser slaves. If that's the best you feel you can aspire to, fair enough I suppose.Personally, I think we can do better than that.
Well, that wasn't always the prevalent attitude on your side of the atlantic. Elsewise, you'd still be ruled from London.
And somehome I doubt it's the prevalent attitude now.
Tell me, what is it with this corporate fataism? You know the sort of thing:
It's tempting to dismiss it as astroturf, but that is too way easy. So, what is it with posters like you that you're so keep to sacrifice your (and everyone else's) liberty? Is it some weird psychosexual kink?I really want to know.
Given that we already have a nanny state, it seems to me that not voting is representing the nanny state - it says "go right ahead - I don't care enough to oppose you".
And you know what? If the nanny state was the worst we had to worry about I might even agree with you.
But we in the UK live in a country with more surveilance cameras per square foot than any other in the world. We have a a government that has introduced curfews, travel restrictions, has done away with the right to silence, wishes to remove the right to trial by jury, has instituted detention without trial and without evidence, that lies to its people to justify foreign wars of aggression, has no compuction in victimising journalists that speak out against it, that plans to force through expensive identity card schemes in the face of both public opposition, and a total lack of evidence that thes scheme will benefit anyone at all.
And one that apparently condones shooting commuters in the head at point blank range without evidence and with no warning.
So I think there's just a wee bit more at stake here than the Nanny bleeding State.
Don't you?
I don't know about that. We're used to writing our own software. Device drivers too; all we ask is that people give us the information we need to write and maintain them. We do grumble a bit if manufacturers refuse to give us the necessary information for no good reason. I don't think that's entirely unreasonable, personally.
Just look at that article where that flood insurance site only supported Windows, there was plenty of moaning.
I don't remember that case, but there was a recent fuss about the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) having its emergency assistance request form only work with IE6. So if you were in trouble in Louisiana and you had power, a computer and a computer connection, you were still out of luck if you ran Linux, *BSD, a Mac or even heaven help us, Internet Explorer 5.
I don't know about your flood insurance case, but I think standards compliance is a reasonable expectation, especially where government agencies are concerned, doubly so when lives are on the line.
Yet in the next breath the same people are saying they don't want mainstream support.
Well, some people might be saying that, but that wasn't the GP's point. He was saying that they don't necessarily care if Linux doesn't have a dominant market share.
It's a reasonable attitude to take. Linuc may never be ready for the Great Aunt Tillys of this world. (Hell, Windows may never be ready for the Great Aunt Tillys either). In any case, I think recognising that it's not necessary to ram your preferred OS down the throat of everyone you meet is a sign of maturity.
As for "mainstream support", I'm not sure what you mean by that. If you mean professional software support, most linux users who want that buy it from someone like redhat. If you mean standards compliance and the information we need to interoperate and write and maintain drivers, no one is saying we don't want them.
Make your minds up!
In fact, I see no inconsistency.