The SCO corporation announced today a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against the cleptomaniac Finnish code-thief named Linus Torvald (sic) over his public defaming of SCO corporation's good name.
The SCO corporation has in their possession irrefutable evidence that Mr. Torvald (sic) referred to our great American enterprise as manure of our great Nation's main foodstaple, thereby also directly attacking our Great Nation which was established and built by our great Forefathers. Compassionate neo-conservative newsletters immediately recognized Mr. Torvald (sic) as a terrorist and called for his immediate internment in the Guantanamo Bay Terrorist Care Facility. The tireless patriotic work of our 1.3 million brave men and women serving in the US Armed Forces across the globe under our glorious Commander-in-Chief must not be allowed to put in jeopardy by the defamatory schemes deployed by this terrorist leader.
Furthermore, Mr. Torvald (sic) must be convicted as an illegal combatant because his evil terrorist plot was carried out under false identity. We are therefore launching another multi-billion-dollar suit against Mr. Torvald (sic) over his illegal use of a copyrighted pseudonym on behalf of another great American enterprise. Mr. George Lucas, who has gracefully endorsed our great nation's military project known as Star Wars, is reportedly screaming murder over the terrorist's use of the good name "Maul", which is under his sole ownership, for evil purposes without appropriate royalty payments.
The DMCA Governing Council has already called for the ultimate penalty for anyone abusing or circumventing property belonging to campaign contributors. We are expecting to announce the capture of this slimy evil-doer shortly. The National Guard are said to be closing in on his rathole thanks to tearful confessions by numerous other OSDL terrorists already undergoing intensive interrogation at various Freedom Facilities in undisclosed locations.
God Bless America!
In Soviet Ru.... I mean Texas
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 1
"In the northern climate everything becomes light limiting and a reduction in solar radiation becomes a reduction in productivity".
What was the saying du jour (pardon my french, I mean my cheese-eating-surrender-monkeyese...) in the sunny, southern and neo-conservative Texas again? Oh yes, "Bring it on!"
But wait, there can't be anything to "bring on" in this particular "war" since bush just recently sent his neo-con gov't rep to a climate conference in Europe to enlighten everyone that the climate change is in reality just a silly conspiracy theory by some loony green meanies.
There's nothing here. Just go fill up the tank of your SUV and don't forget to support the Commander-in-Chief also through your votes and campaign donations. Thank you.
---cut--- Desktops and laptops may have more trouble at this time because of the much wider range of hardware and because of as-yet unimplemented fixes for the hardware and BIOS bugs from which these machines tend to suffer.
During the 2.6.0 stabilization period a significant number of less serious fixes have accumulated in various auxiliary kernel trees and these shall be merged into the 2.6 stream after the 2.6.0 release. Many of these fixes appear in Andrew Morton's "-mm" tree (...) ---cut---
I don't do windows, but wouldn't it be preferable to put the resources towards native solutions? Also, wasn't the HPFS (OS/2) file system support part of the native NTFS project? What's become of that effort?
If the "Captive" (?) NTFS project needs the original MS driver it might also be illegal, and plain useless when there's no ms-windows around but only data to be rescued.
Anyways, if this project scratches someone's itches then who cares - go for it. At least one can always try pulling stuff like this under the open source skies. Try retrofitting ms-windows with non-ms-sanctioned FS support... now there's a challenge!
What exists on the Moon that cannot be found or created at a price tag magnitudes lower on the Earth?
When we talk about going to the Moon, we're talking about Billions of dollars.
Spending tens of billions of US dollars on second generation Moon missions will quite probably generate more scientific advancement and pride for USians and the whole humanity than the hundreds of billions earmarked for Bush's illegal military adventures. In the end the USians must decide on the ballot box whether their society will choose the scientific or the militaristic path towards the future, although the two-party system might still fail to offer the masses genuine alternatives.
Like that would make any difference. After MS made their innocuous investment in Corel, the latter promptly dropped support for Linux, and a couple of years later Paul Allen and other ex-MS cronies brazenly stole the company from its shareholders and turned it into their private plaything. America has industry watchdogs in name only.
2) Lost market share does not a monopoly from a competitor make. They would have to prove in court that microsoft did something "unfair" to push them out of the market, and not just that MS Office was the more popular product. And, as it turns out, MS Office really is the more popular product, and had been for a long time (since Corel lost it's technical edge) not really due to any foul play.
1) Thanks for the compliment. English isn't among my native languages so your presumably self-explanatory quip is gratefully accepted as is.
2) You did know that even before the Netscape suit MS was bullying the rest of the industry e.g. by threatening to withdraw bundling offers from OEMs unless they stop shipping Microsoft alternatives, right? And how prior to the Netscape suit several US states were investigating Microsoft's Office monopoly and collusion with their Windows division, only to shelve that investigation to concentrate on the Netscape suit deemed more urgent, right? Despite achieving next to nothing in concrete terms and being too narrowly focused, that Netscape suit still proved that Microsoft routinely abused their Windows monopoly. That court ruling, upheld in appeals court, is what would've made things different for Corel.
When dealing with the mob, popularity or even much lower pricing have little to do with customers' behavior, only that they know how the mob will react to "disloyalty".
When Corel's clueless new CEO signed the investment and alliance deal, MS immediately demanded that they agree never to sue MS, just in time before the monopoly conviction and the "settlement" took effect. However since Corel's shareholders aren't tied by this agreement, taking Corel private would remove those pesky elements from the scene for good.
When Corel started winning some deals with big name OEMs MS suddenly decided to dump their Corel shares to a friendly party which wasted no time in launching this attempt to privatize Corel.
If you still can't put together a pattern of behavior after reading all the news about MS's anti-competitive behavior over the last 10+ years, including the Linux slash funds, sudden interest in SCO licences etc., you're either a MS flunky, or, probably in your case, you simply weren't trying hard enough to understand what history has to teach you.
If Netscape sued MS and received $800M over what was essentially a no-revenue market to start with, wonder what a company which held over 50% retail marketshare in the massively profitable Office suites market only couple of year before the Netscape suit could sue them for? In Corel's case the shareholders have long been asking for such a suit to materialize while the management is completely in Microsoft's pocket. Guess how to solve such a dilemma? Get rid of the shareholders of course!
In this case if Vector and MS win and they're allowed to take Corel under you can bet that for all purposes the company will truly disappear from public life.
I appreciate their work on WINE but other than that, good riddance, you danced with the devil and now you have to pay the price. Let this be a lesson to anybody would thinks MS is their white knight.
It's funny but the ones actually paying the price of Corel's expedited funeral are the users of Corel's products and especially the shareholders who have been trying to talk some sense into the blindly pro-MS management.
If there's a lesson here it's one where the management of a public company can be threatened and bribed to do Microsoft's bidding in order to keep their jobs a little longer while everybody else loses. Mr. G. W. Bush should be real proud of his appointee John Ashcroft's laissez-fair approach to antitrust violations.
It is exactly because of these opportunities that MS donated their venture capital friends the stock that enabled them to launch this hostile takeover. If MS had done the disposal directly themselves it might have been a little too obvious and even embarrassing to their friends at the US government.
Good to see that they lost their shirts on their Corel stock. Maybe that's why they never handed out dividends. Pricks.
MS lost, what, $120M when they dumped their Corel stock, but by dumping it to their venture capital friends they're making sure that Corel will never again erode the profitability or marketshare of another MS product, ever.
They also stopped all the Linux projects at Corel to their tracks and so forth so this little interlude probably earned them BILLIONS instead.
But why worry, this is alright as long as no American company is being taken under by a foreign monopoly.
It is sad to see such a turn of events. The only thing that can make it worse is if some SCO like low lifes buy the company for a few pennies and start suing people at OpenOffice.org or KOffice.org.
Ofcourse, M$FT and even SUN will pay money to those companies to make sure "they respect IP rights."
According to another post here a group of Corel people claim that Microsoft arranged this whole farce to bury the company so you weren't that far off the target. The only difference is that MS seems to have their lackeys buying the company to avoid being sued. And to protect Office marketshare of course.
I don't what Sun would do with Corel, although WP might have some useful code to contribute to StarOffice. But is Sun serious about StarOffice in the long run?
Whoa! Seems that Mircosoft doesn't feel any need to even try being discreet about their tactics these days, having gotten US Department of Justice's consent in the consent decree.
If this was a US company being ripped apart by a foreign monopoly the press would be all over this story! I must wonder if things were a bit different if Corel was based in Europe instead of Canada.
Britain tried to promote the creation of a neutral Nordic (Norway, Sweden, Finland) zone to prevent the germans from gaining access the massive nickel deposits in the Finnish Lapland.
Stalin refused to allow this. What the world didn't know back then was that Stalin and Hitler already had a secret pact diving Europe between them, and Stalin considered Finland and her resources to be his.
Churchill was pissed when Stalin attacked Finland (having even the nerve to claim at the time that it was Finland who started the war LOL), giving Hitler his cue to start occupying Norway.
In what became known as the miracle of the winter war, an ad-hoc Finnish army with no modern weapons or even rifles for everyone, beat back a massive mechanized Soviet force and managed to sue for peace in spring '40 when even bullets were running out in many sectors of the front.
Until 1941 Churchill was praising Finland as the model for all nations fighting against tyranny but neither Britain nor US were prepared to offer Finland material assistance to keep any imminent threats (i.e. Stalin, who's purges the Finns had helplessly witnessed across the border for a decade) at bay. Out of ammo and any modern gear, Finland is approached by Germany who are prepared to sell them much of what is needed (in preparation of their own Operation Barbarossa, as it turned out).
Let's see what the choices were: 1) Refuse German material aid and subject the Finnish nation to Stalin's mass murder, or 2) Accept the material support (without political alliance), at least have a chance of defending yourself and unfortunately piss off Churchill who was offering no material support anyway.
Soviet bombers began bombing Finnish cities and air fields without declaring a war (nothing new there) a few days after Hitler had betrayed his friend Stalin by invading, and with the red army occupying the homes of some 400,000+ Finns after the winter war, those folks were soon to be back fixing their homes and resuming their lives.
After reaching the old borders, and even invading western parts of Soviet-held Karelia where ethnic Finns and Karelians had been suffering under the totalitarian communist rule and contemplated their own independence, the war became stationary until Stalin (using the latest weaponry Britain and US could provide them) started another massive attack in '44 and under the imminent threat of national extermination and genocide, the Finnish parliament agreed to some very harsh and unjust peace terms dictated by the Dear Leader himself.
In the final peace treaty in Paris '47, just before the Cold War began in full swing, the western allies watched approvingly as the Soviets pushed all their demands through, threatening to throw the Finnish delegation out if they were to as much as speak.
End result for Finland: hundreds of thousands of casualties, second largest city (Vyborg, now decayed beyond recognition) and the homes and lands of over 400,000 people surrendered to Stalin, massive war reparations to Stalin (uniquely paid in full, while many others were receiving Marshall aid) and, bitterly, declaration of accepting guilt for the whole madness. Oh, but Finland was never occupied so the civilian population was spared from the horrors in which tens of millions russians and their occupied neighbors died...
In a sense, therefore, one can argue that Hitler's desire to keep Stalin busy with Finland created the path of history in which Linus was born with appreciation for freedom and yet with ability to freely engage in modern western scientific cooperation that lead to the release of Linux and the subsequent SCaldera scam and yesterday's picketting...
(I was just trying to help you guys back on topic here!)
Actually, Caldera has approximately tripled since announcing this lawsuit.
What is the likelihood of Caldera/SCO bosses having dumped their shares en masse while the IP FUD iron was/is still hot?
If, no, when this libelous case has been thrown out of court as meritless some executives in-the-know just might be hit by a stock-manipulation suit by other small-time SCO speculat... oh, investors.
Of course, if you buy Mandrake, the tax monies may end up supporting France's rather peculiar foreign excursions that could be characterized as less than constructive.
Don't get all righteous on us now, France has plenty of skeletons in it's closet, as do most governments.
Sure they do. In fact the last protest march I took part in was actually targeted at the French nuclear tests near my corner of the world in the Pacific in mid-nineties and I boycotted French products for quite some time after that but I still have good French friends and now french wines and gauloises are back in vogue. And I guess Mandrake too (I've bought from them, and "sold" some to others too).;-)
Also, I know Tux is a different, globally shared animal, but since I can only vote in a place that is already benevolent (yet still partially invaded by militaristic neighbour!) my only other vote consists of a choice to transfer my purchasing power from an aggressive producing nation to a more deserving producer.
Like recycling, preferring GPL for an OS or investing through ethical funds, some can call it "righteous" and others "ethical" behaviour.
Maybe we should support an Icelandic distro... Icelanders haven't invaded anyone recently...
Hell why not. But seriously, ideally some money paid for products and services would trickle down to all local economies, from Albania to Zimbabwe. Would a franchise-based localized sales and support system work to that end?
We are not K-centric.. We are desktop agnostic.. But we always need to do a choice for newbies and currently, it is KDE..
Hehe. OK, not "K-centric" then, but "KDE-centric"...:-)
It's nice that Mandrake has a GNOME packager. Are there any others working on GNOME besides you?
Also, could you explain why new KDE environment releases are always quickly packaged for the last couple of the most recent Mandrake versions while new GNOME releases aren't even packaged for the very latest version of Mandrake? Or am I mistaken and GNOME v2.x and v2.2.x are available for Mandrake 8.2 and 9.0 respectively?
BTW, I still recommend Mandrake currently for newbies but would be interested in a distro with stronger GNOME commitment.
Let's face it, all the distros currently aimed at desktop users are K-centric. Red Hat still plays down the importance of the desktop market and, umm, their tax monies may end up supporting America's rather peculiar foreign excursions that could be characterized as less than constructive.
Would there be social demand for a new distro that concentrates on the G-experience in Mandrake style but with compatibility with the popular "plain Red Hat rpms"?
Right. Once you take that solemn military pledge you're suddenly free of all capacity and responsibility of thinking as an individual human being. "I didn't really enjoy invading that country and killing all those people defending it or just plain living there, but my politicians told me to go and do it so I did it..."
On a related note, the other day I read an article on the BBC website where an American soldier waiting for action outside Iraq was quoted as berating the non-Iraqis acting as peace shields as "extreme". I wonder if he'll ever fully appreciate the sad irony in his thinking.
As the old saying goes, you'll get to visit interesting foreign countries, meet interesting foreign people and KILL THEM.
Now, I only approve of any military action if it is purely for defensive purposes only, and even then with great hesitation and if all other means of peaceful solution have genuinely been exhausted. I used to find this saying as merely a silly joke of dubious taste, but considering the way the US government continues increasing its military spending one shouldn't be surprised to see the constructive development side of peaceful things to decline.
Unless, of course, the people of the United States decide to vote for a different set of values that emphasize building rather than destruction.
The US military may wage wars overseas relatively "successfully" but at the same time by going against the world opinion they're shooting their own nation in the foot in terms of public image. Peace and prosperity tend to go hand in hand. Unless you're in the military payroll, of course.
EU should require that file formats being used in software sold in Europe are publically documented in full to prevent the twisted (and existing) situation where customers are required to unnecessary buy upgrades for their software when other parts of the whole environment are made obsolete. Users should never be forced to pay just to continue accessing their own data. That would go a long way towards solving the root of the problem, instead of only chasing the ever-changing symptoms. Such requirement would also be totally fair since the real innovation lies in developing new features and ideas on manipulating the data and not in intentionally obscured ways of putting strings of data on a file.
Also, Microsoft's anti-competitive power and their ability to use it is not just about Windows and its ever-mutating versions. Having some government geeks take a peek at the OS "shared source" does nothing to guarantee a competitive marketplace. It's about the apps. Requiring standards compliance allows the all suitable, competitively priced and well-supported software to succeed yet without locking anyone out of the market.
Slashdot Mirror
The SCO corporation has in their possession irrefutable evidence that Mr. Torvald (sic) referred to our great American enterprise as manure of our great Nation's main foodstaple, thereby also directly attacking our Great Nation which was established and built by our great Forefathers. Compassionate neo-conservative newsletters immediately recognized Mr. Torvald (sic) as a terrorist and called for his immediate internment in the Guantanamo Bay Terrorist Care Facility. The tireless patriotic work of our 1.3 million brave men and women serving in the US Armed Forces across the globe under our glorious Commander-in-Chief must not be allowed to put in jeopardy by the defamatory schemes deployed by this terrorist leader.
Furthermore, Mr. Torvald (sic) must be convicted as an illegal combatant because his evil terrorist plot was carried out under false identity. We are therefore launching another multi-billion-dollar suit against Mr. Torvald (sic) over his illegal use of a copyrighted pseudonym on behalf of another great American enterprise. Mr. George Lucas, who has gracefully endorsed our great nation's military project known as Star Wars, is reportedly screaming murder over the terrorist's use of the good name "Maul", which is under his sole ownership, for evil purposes without appropriate royalty payments.
The DMCA Governing Council has already called for the ultimate penalty for anyone abusing or circumventing property belonging to campaign contributors. We are expecting to announce the capture of this slimy evil-doer shortly. The National Guard are said to be closing in on his rathole thanks to tearful confessions by numerous other OSDL terrorists already undergoing intensive interrogation at various Freedom Facilities in undisclosed locations.
God Bless America!
What was the saying du jour (pardon my french, I mean my cheese-eating-surrender-monkeyese...) in the sunny, southern and neo-conservative Texas again? Oh yes, "Bring it on!"
But wait, there can't be anything to "bring on" in this particular "war" since bush just recently sent his neo-con gov't rep to a climate conference in Europe to enlighten everyone that the climate change is in reality just a silly conspiracy theory by some loony green meanies.
There's nothing here. Just go fill up the tank of your SUV and don't forget to support the Commander-in-Chief also through your votes and campaign donations. Thank you.
Date: Thu Dec 18 2003 - 00:15:50 EST
---cut---
Desktops and laptops may have more trouble at this time because of the much wider range of hardware and because of as-yet unimplemented fixes for the hardware and BIOS bugs from which these machines tend to suffer.
During the 2.6.0 stabilization period a significant number of less serious fixes have accumulated in various auxiliary kernel trees and these shall be merged into the 2.6 stream after the 2.6.0 release. Many of these fixes appear in Andrew Morton's "-mm" tree (...)
---cut---
If the "Captive" (?) NTFS project needs the original MS driver it might also be illegal, and plain useless when there's no ms-windows around but only data to be rescued.
Anyways, if this project scratches someone's itches then who cares - go for it. At least one can always try pulling stuff like this under the open source skies. Try retrofitting ms-windows with non-ms-sanctioned FS support... now there's a challenge!
Spending tens of billions of US dollars on second generation Moon missions will quite probably generate more scientific advancement and pride for USians and the whole humanity than the hundreds of billions earmarked for Bush's illegal military adventures. In the end the USians must decide on the ballot box whether their society will choose the scientific or the militaristic path towards the future, although the two-party system might still fail to offer the masses genuine alternatives.
Like that would make any difference. After MS made their innocuous investment in Corel, the latter promptly dropped support for Linux, and a couple of years later Paul Allen and other ex-MS cronies brazenly stole the company from its shareholders and turned it into their private plaything. America has industry watchdogs in name only.
2) You did know that even before the Netscape suit MS was bullying the rest of the industry e.g. by threatening to withdraw bundling offers from OEMs unless they stop shipping Microsoft alternatives, right? And how prior to the Netscape suit several US states were investigating Microsoft's Office monopoly and collusion with their Windows division, only to shelve that investigation to concentrate on the Netscape suit deemed more urgent, right? Despite achieving next to nothing in concrete terms and being too narrowly focused, that Netscape suit still proved that Microsoft routinely abused their Windows monopoly. That court ruling, upheld in appeals court, is what would've made things different for Corel.
When dealing with the mob, popularity or even much lower pricing have little to do with customers' behavior, only that they know how the mob will react to "disloyalty".
When Corel's clueless new CEO signed the investment and alliance deal, MS immediately demanded that they agree never to sue MS, just in time before the monopoly conviction and the "settlement" took effect. However since Corel's shareholders aren't tied by this agreement, taking Corel private would remove those pesky elements from the scene for good.
When Corel started winning some deals with big name OEMs MS suddenly decided to dump their Corel shares to a friendly party which wasted no time in launching this attempt to privatize Corel.
If you still can't put together a pattern of behavior after reading all the news about MS's anti-competitive behavior over the last 10+ years, including the Linux slash funds, sudden interest in SCO licences etc., you're either a MS flunky, or, probably in your case, you simply weren't trying hard enough to understand what history has to teach you.
What makes you think that this carefully orchestrated takeover attempt is really voluntary?
If Netscape sued MS and received $800M over what was essentially a no-revenue market to start with, wonder what a company which held over 50% retail marketshare in the massively profitable Office suites market only couple of year before the Netscape suit could sue them for? In Corel's case the shareholders have long been asking for such a suit to materialize while the management is completely in Microsoft's pocket. Guess how to solve such a dilemma? Get rid of the shareholders of course!
In this case if Vector and MS win and they're allowed to take Corel under you can bet that for all purposes the company will truly disappear from public life.
If there's a lesson here it's one where the management of a public company can be threatened and bribed to do Microsoft's bidding in order to keep their jobs a little longer while everybody else loses. Mr. G. W. Bush should be real proud of his appointee John Ashcroft's laissez-fair approach to antitrust violations.
It is exactly because of these opportunities that MS donated their venture capital friends the stock that enabled them to launch this hostile takeover. If MS had done the disposal directly themselves it might have been a little too obvious and even embarrassing to their friends at the US government.
MS lost, what, $120M when they dumped their Corel stock, but by dumping it to their venture capital friends they're making sure that Corel will never again erode the profitability or marketshare of another MS product, ever. They also stopped all the Linux projects at Corel to their tracks and so forth so this little interlude probably earned them BILLIONS instead. But why worry, this is alright as long as no American company is being taken under by a foreign monopoly.
According to another post here a group of Corel people claim that Microsoft arranged this whole farce to bury the company so you weren't that far off the target. The only difference is that MS seems to have their lackeys buying the company to avoid being sued. And to protect Office marketshare of course. I don't what Sun would do with Corel, although WP might have some useful code to contribute to StarOffice. But is Sun serious about StarOffice in the long run?
If this was a US company being ripped apart by a foreign monopoly the press would be all over this story! I must wonder if things were a bit different if Corel was based in Europe instead of Canada.
Stalin refused to allow this. What the world didn't know back then was that Stalin and Hitler already had a secret pact diving Europe between them, and Stalin considered Finland and her resources to be his.
Churchill was pissed when Stalin attacked Finland (having even the nerve to claim at the time that it was Finland who started the war LOL), giving Hitler his cue to start occupying Norway.
In what became known as the miracle of the winter war, an ad-hoc Finnish army with no modern weapons or even rifles for everyone, beat back a massive mechanized Soviet force and managed to sue for peace in spring '40 when even bullets were running out in many sectors of the front.
Until 1941 Churchill was praising Finland as the model for all nations fighting against tyranny but neither Britain nor US were prepared to offer Finland material assistance to keep any imminent threats (i.e. Stalin, who's purges the Finns had helplessly witnessed across the border for a decade) at bay. Out of ammo and any modern gear, Finland is approached by Germany who are prepared to sell them much of what is needed (in preparation of their own Operation Barbarossa, as it turned out).
Let's see what the choices were: 1) Refuse German material aid and subject the Finnish nation to Stalin's mass murder, or 2) Accept the material support (without political alliance), at least have a chance of defending yourself and unfortunately piss off Churchill who was offering no material support anyway.
Soviet bombers began bombing Finnish cities and air fields without declaring a war (nothing new there) a few days after Hitler had betrayed his friend Stalin by invading, and with the red army occupying the homes of some 400,000+ Finns after the winter war, those folks were soon to be back fixing their homes and resuming their lives.
After reaching the old borders, and even invading western parts of Soviet-held Karelia where ethnic Finns and Karelians had been suffering under the totalitarian communist rule and contemplated their own independence, the war became stationary until Stalin (using the latest weaponry Britain and US could provide them) started another massive attack in '44 and under the imminent threat of national extermination and genocide, the Finnish parliament agreed to some very harsh and unjust peace terms dictated by the Dear Leader himself.
In the final peace treaty in Paris '47, just before the Cold War began in full swing, the western allies watched approvingly as the Soviets pushed all their demands through, threatening to throw the Finnish delegation out if they were to as much as speak.
End result for Finland: hundreds of thousands of casualties, second largest city (Vyborg, now decayed beyond recognition) and the homes and lands of over 400,000 people surrendered to Stalin, massive war reparations to Stalin (uniquely paid in full, while many others were receiving Marshall aid) and, bitterly, declaration of accepting guilt for the whole madness. Oh, but Finland was never occupied so the civilian population was spared from the horrors in which tens of millions russians and their occupied neighbors died...
In a sense, therefore, one can argue that Hitler's desire to keep Stalin busy with Finland created the path of history in which Linus was born with appreciation for freedom and yet with ability to freely engage in modern western scientific cooperation that lead to the release of Linux and the subsequent SCaldera scam and yesterday's picketting...
(I was just trying to help you guys back on topic here!)
These days the hooded (to cover his balding head) Robbin is frantically trying to sort out his flight schedule...
Last but not least, conquering the genuine moonscape will remove the need to keep the Tibetan imitation of moonscape under Chinese occupation...
Sure they do. In fact the last protest march I took part in was actually targeted at the French nuclear tests near my corner of the world in the Pacific in mid-nineties and I boycotted French products for quite some time after that but I still have good French friends and now french wines and gauloises are back in vogue. And I guess Mandrake too (I've bought from them, and "sold" some to others too). ;-)
Also, I know Tux is a different, globally shared animal, but since I can only vote in a place that is already benevolent (yet still partially invaded by militaristic neighbour!) my only other vote consists of a choice to transfer my purchasing power from an aggressive producing nation to a more deserving producer.
Like recycling, preferring GPL for an OS or investing through ethical funds, some can call it "righteous" and others "ethical" behaviour.
Hell why not. But seriously, ideally some money paid for products and services would trickle down to all local economies, from Albania to Zimbabwe. Would a franchise-based localized sales and support system work to that end?
Hehe. OK, not "K-centric" then, but "KDE-centric"... :-)
It's nice that Mandrake has a GNOME packager. Are there any others working on GNOME besides you?
Also, could you explain why new KDE environment releases are always quickly packaged for the last couple of the most recent Mandrake versions while new GNOME releases aren't even packaged for the very latest version of Mandrake? Or am I mistaken and GNOME v2.x and v2.2.x are available for Mandrake 8.2 and 9.0 respectively?
BTW, I still recommend Mandrake currently for newbies but would be interested in a distro with stronger GNOME commitment.
Let's face it, all the distros currently aimed at desktop users are K-centric. Red Hat still plays down the importance of the desktop market and, umm, their tax monies may end up supporting America's rather peculiar foreign excursions that could be characterized as less than constructive. Would there be social demand for a new distro that concentrates on the G-experience in Mandrake style but with compatibility with the popular "plain Red Hat rpms"?
Right. Once you take that solemn military pledge you're suddenly free of all capacity and responsibility of thinking as an individual human being. "I didn't really enjoy invading that country and killing all those people defending it or just plain living there, but my politicians told me to go and do it so I did it..."
On a related note, the other day I read an article on the BBC website where an American soldier waiting for action outside Iraq was quoted as berating the non-Iraqis acting as peace shields as "extreme". I wonder if he'll ever fully appreciate the sad irony in his thinking.
Now, I only approve of any military action if it is purely for defensive purposes only, and even then with great hesitation and if all other means of peaceful solution have genuinely been exhausted. I used to find this saying as merely a silly joke of dubious taste, but considering the way the US government continues increasing its military spending one shouldn't be surprised to see the constructive development side of peaceful things to decline.
Unless, of course, the people of the United States decide to vote for a different set of values that emphasize building rather than destruction.
The US military may wage wars overseas relatively "successfully" but at the same time by going against the world opinion they're shooting their own nation in the foot in terms of public image. Peace and prosperity tend to go hand in hand. Unless you're in the military payroll, of course.
EU should require that file formats being used in software sold in Europe are publically documented in full to prevent the twisted (and existing) situation where customers are required to unnecessary buy upgrades for their software when other parts of the whole environment are made obsolete. Users should never be forced to pay just to continue accessing their own data. That would go a long way towards solving the root of the problem, instead of only chasing the ever-changing symptoms. Such requirement would also be totally fair since the real innovation lies in developing new features and ideas on manipulating the data and not in intentionally obscured ways of putting strings of data on a file.
Also, Microsoft's anti-competitive power and their ability to use it is not just about Windows and its ever-mutating versions. Having some government geeks take a peek at the OS "shared source" does nothing to guarantee a competitive marketplace. It's about the apps. Requiring standards compliance allows the all suitable, competitively priced and well-supported software to succeed yet without locking anyone out of the market.