"No, not the same thing with the DeCSS source. We allow people to have knives because knives have significant legitimate uses. We ban assault rifles because they have NO significant legitimate uses. DeCSS had no significant legitimate uses, so it was entirely proper that those who created and distributed it should be stopped from doing so."
This is an opinion. And whether or not your opinion in this matter happens to be shared by the DVD-CCA, by a lawyer, by a judge, or by the President of the United States, it remains an opinion. My opinion differs, and my opinion is that DeCSS did have a "significant legitimate use"-- actually, two of them.
USE 1: To decrypt DVDs to the hard drive under Windows on a "dual-boot" system; the user can then reboot into Linux to play them using whatever MPEG player they wish.
USE 2: As a proof of concept, a useful font of critical decryption source code, and an inspiration for creating a Linux DVD player by showing that decryption of the CSS algorithm is not only possible, not only feasible, but trivial.. The instant I laid eyes on DeCSS, I knew that if anything would lead to a Linux DVD player (legal or otherwise; my only wish was to play my legally purchased DVDs, and any question of "is the MPAA happy with the particular player software I am forced by lack of alternatives to use" is moot), it was DeCSS itself. Ultimately, I was correct; numerous DVD player packages for Linux/Unix were released based, in part, on the DeCSS source. Had Jon Johansen not created DeCSS in the first place, none of this would have been possible. Instead of having a number of illegal, unlicensed ways to play one's legally owned DVDs under Linux/Unix, there would be no way at all. I consider the current situation preferable to this unfavorable alternative, albeit still highly odious.
You also said "Use one of the HUNDREDS (maybe even thousands) of software DVD players out there.". Here, I must again question whether or not you are a MPAA (or DVD-CCA) "astroturfer" or another sort of cretinous troll. Are you deaf, or simply not listening? THERE ARE NO LEGALLY LICENSED DVD PLAYER SOFTWARE PRODUCTS FOR LINUX, with the sole exception being products for EMBEDDED SYSTEMS ONLY, which my computers are not, and licensable to EMBEDDED SYSTEMS MANUFACTURERS ONLY, which I am not, and licensed IN BULK ONLY, which would render the whole rot completely moot as for the cost of licensing LinDVD for the 1,000,000 embedded Linux boxes I don't own, I could just as easily buy 10,000 brand new set-top DVD devices.
The only person in the past who has ever told me (incorrectly) that there is a product I could buy, right now, legally, with a DVD-CCA-approved license, to play my DVDs under Linux... was a DVD-CCA member himself, attempting to convince me that, in a great many words, "There's no problem here... move along." Needless to say, he was incorrect, as are you.
Again, repeat after me: There is no legally licensed DVD player for Linux desktops (or laptops or servers or "workstations" or whatever you choose to call "computers that are not embedded systems and are actually used by Ordinary Joes and Ordinary Janes to do their Ordinary Work in the Real World"). Period. End of story. So please stop spreading this nonsense about legal DVD players being available for Linux. They are not. I have already done my homework and came away dejected, disgusted and depressed.
Am I "selfish" to desire the ability to play a legally purchased DVD on the operating system of my choice? Perhaps, though again, that is your opinion. Certainly it would not be hard to argue that, since the Constitution and the United Nations both fail to guarantee my right to choose whatever operating system I wish to utilize my legally purchased products with, I have no such right. In a legal sense, I suppose you are right. Nevertheless, this is the real world, and in the real world, people don't give a
I've not bought into any sort of propaganda. When I first became acquainted with DeCSS, I saw it as precisely what it was-- a program written for Windows which decrypted a DVD. A "proof of concept", if you would, demonstrating how to decrypt a DVD, and providing the code (small, neat and efficient) to do so. It obviously was not going to help any real "pirate" much, since the "pirates" already had many other ways of duplicating a DVD (and the really serious ones, I've heard, actually have the technology to simply duplicate the entire disc, using the same "stamping" technology the movie companies do to make "the real thing".
At the time I found this code, I did not have any Windows machines. As such, it was useless to me as a program. I only found its source useful-- useful as a possible future source of a DVD player application for Linux. At the time, I was using an ancient cabinet-mounted television and a set-top DVD player to play my DVDs; nevertheless, I had installed a DVD-ROM drive in my computer prior to going all-Linux, and I wanted to be able to use it.
So I posted the thing on my Web site, in the hopes that some hacker, more clever than I am in the ways of multimedia and device I/O, would use the DeCSS source as the core of a nice new DVD player program for Linux.
Fast forward perhaps a month. I received an emailed nastygram from the DVD-CCA's lawyers. Not only did it tell me to take down the mirror (which I did), but it told me (in overwrought legalese, of course) that they were particularly miffed at me, since I had disregarded a previous notice which they had sent me in the past.
A previous notice which I never received. And searching through my inbox (which typically holds several dozen THOUSAND messages, as I'm one of those ditzes who never deletes anything until I run out of RAM to hold the spool in), I could not find it.
I eventually signed a consent injunction to get out of the suit. Which in and of itself was an exercise in frustration. They wouldn't take me seriously over the phone until I had my boyfriend take the phone and demand the attention of someone who could actually help me obtain and sign the "chickening out" forms.
Then I got to take a nice visit to the DVD-CCA's lawyers in Manhattan, where I sat in their ridiculously outsized lobby for what must have been an hour. Finally, as I was finishing counting the number of tiles in their floor (well, just about), I hear "Hello, Ms. (lastname)?" I answer; great! Someone's ready to talk to me.
And of course it's an assistant to an assistant to an assistant of the understudy to some secretary who does part-time work for one of the lawyers' brothers on alternate Tuesdays. He takes the forms, repeatedly tells me he isn't involved in the case, can't answer any questions, etc. etc. etc.
I leave, disgusted, and thankfully have not heard any more from them.
I suppose the moral of all of this is thus: The DVD-CCA, the people who turned "DeCSS" into a dirty word and "legal Linux DVD player for desktops" into a myth (and incidentally, the legally licensed Linux DVD player you mentioned DOES exist... however, it's only available to embedded device manufacturers. Not terribly useful to, say, an end user. So, yes, it exists, but no, you can't have it! Great.), are an immensely powerful organization, and think nothing of threatening and frightening small individual citizens like myself to obtain their goals. They are much like a larger version of these spammers-- using their considerable money and power to frighten people and organizations much smaller and weaker than themselves. Where I come from, we call such behavior "bullying".
But I digressed a bit from my story about DeCSS. Perhaps some summary is in order, so as I'm already tired from all this typing (and need a Tums as I'm getting a bit of indigestion from recounting this whole unpleasant experience), I'll bullet-point what I have to say.
Gee, AC, you sound an awful lot like a lawyer for the MPAA. Nice try. Come out and show yourself please. The DeCSS source was eventually adapted into precisely what many (including myself) had hoped it would end up in-- A Linux DVD player. Yes, player. Not ripper. Not pirates' tool. A player. That's all anyone wanted.
It's mighty easy for someone (an American or otherwise) to throw that idea around, and terribly difficult to actually make it a reality.
The sad fact of the matter is that there hasn't been an effective widespread protest movement since the '60s here in the US. And there won't be any time soon.
The apathy of the American population is growing, not shrinking. Attempting to motivate them to protest anything at all is an exercise in futility.
Not to be a pessimist, but... that's how I see it. YMMV.
Heh, I love how negativistic SlashDot's moderation system was on this one. Almost as bad as pessimistic lil' ol' me.
The post started at 2 (cuz I have nice karma), and got a bunch of mod-ups and ONE mod-down ("Offtopic"). So the Slash code did the math and dutifully reported the score as 5 (correct)... and of course focused solely on the fact that my post was modded "Offtopic". Of all the modding done to my post, it only noted the ONE NEGATIVE MOD in the Score line.
And I thought I saw the world through blue-tinted glasses...
Not to be dismissive or offensive, but this sounds like a polite way of covering up their shame at their (PERFECTLY RATIONAL) fear of a lawsuit. The fact of the matter is that spammers, as a group, have lots of money; TechDirt (I think) does not. You don't have to be an Einstein to be afraid of the spam-scums, when they routinely buy those fancy big houses in Florida with the pools with their ill-gotten money...
...that all it takes to bring virtually any effort to a screeching halt is for somebody with more money than you to threaten a lawsuit. At that point, whammo, you have to stop what you're doing.
When you are a small site, or an individual person without a tremendous income (read: everyone short of a CEO), that basically means "any company, or even individual, can threaten to sue you, and there goes whatever you were working on."
This seems to be a rather disturbing new part of our market reality.
Recall the DeCSS case. Several dozen named defendants, and several hundred "Does", were threatened in court by the DVD-CCA, acting as a representative of the interests of some of the largest companies on Earth. Whammo, most of the people capitulated, the courts bowed to the pressure of the RIAA's fat pocketbooks, and the DVD-CCA's will became law-- DeCSS is now effectively "illegal". Cases like this spam one seem to be the result of "trickle-down" thinking-- or as Star Control 2 would have it, "dribble-down"-- whereby smaller and smaller companies begin to adopt the same nasty tactics.
Let's face it-- if you run a small and/or non-profit site, and if some company or businessperson with lots of money (or even a moderate amount of money) makes a credible threat to send in the lawyers, you're at least as likely as not to give in to their pressure. It's simple survival instinct-- no one wants to get sued, especially (A) in this economy and (B) by someone with much fatter coffers than themselves.
What this is leading to is a situation where the rich can effectively (and, as close to possible, directly-- about the only more direct way would be to put a gun to one's head!) force the poor to do whatever they want. No laws (legal, moral or otherwise) really seem to touch the really "big fish" (RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, etc.), and they get away with a slap on the wrist-analogue at worst; now, even smaller entities like these spammers can effectively throw their monetary weight around to silence dot-bomb-impoverished techies running innocent sites.
I fear that this trend will become far more pervasive, and will get far worse before it gets better. If it ever gets better... I personally do not believe that the current Powers That Be in the US really care that much about "the little guys" getting spurious lawsuit threats every time they do something someone Richer-Than-Thou happens to dislike...
I'm not sure that's such a hot idea. That would put even more pressure on the companies to pull Dirty Tricks(TM) to squash the free market (a la Microsoft) and/or cook the books (a la Enron)... It just seems to me like a rule like this would do little but encourage corruption. And that would be Bad(TM)...:/
"This is probably Microsoft's last chance to turn the tide and take mindset and market share from FOSS."
Where I live (NYC area), it seems like if anything, MS technologies are getting a BIGGER grip on things. Virtually every new job out there, it seems-- and this includes jobs whose titles include the word "Unix"-- demands experience with ASP/IIS/VB/VC++ and other MS programming and server-side products... Perhaps it's just my imagination, but I am not so confident any more in the rankings posted on www.netcraft.net... Sure, 2/3 of the Web sites out there are running on Apache, but are they the bottom 2/3 of the Web? Increasingly, it's looking like the companies Where The Money Is are requesting more and more MS stuff. And that scares me.
My boss, who before taking the helm of the little dot-com I work for used to work with "big money" firms all the time (and was the CEO of a national chain or three at one point), refers to the work I do with Linux and Unix as "your silly little programs". Her attitude towards MS is that it's "The Industry Standard(TM)" (you can almost hear the "(TM)" at the end) and therefore that we will use it wherever it is The Standard, case closed, no questions asked. I am lucky that in her case, she has not extended this groupthink to the server room... yet. You can bet that within a few years, we will migrate away from our current servers (Solaris on UltraSPARCs) to Windows at this rate. The sort of pro-MS dronery one hears nowadays from businesspeople is nothing short of alarming.
It's depressing; I've been looking for a job as a Unix SA, and I swear I've actually seen one or two job postings for "Unix SAs" where it says "MCSE is a plus"... and I might have been hallucinating, but I think I even saw one that said "MCSE required"... In NYC, it seems like all of the big-money companies (financials, telcos, etc.) are all gung-ho about Windows, and it's hard to find a "virgin" Unix SA job... that is, one where you can't find words like "MCSE", "ASP/IIS", "VB" or "VC++" in the "Required" and/or "Preferred" lists.
MSAvatar: Where does Bill want you to go today? SolarisAvatar: You wanna go somewhere? "Go" isn't installed, build it from source. RMSAvatar: It's "GNU/Linux"! Dammit, "GNU/Linux!" ESRAvatar: Go somewhere before I get out one of my 32368 guns. AppleAvatar: Go Different. AmigaAvatar: Could not 'GO'. GURU MEDITATION A0DB863F:83FB SquareAvatar: KUPO KUPO! LET'S GO RESCUE TERRA AND SABIN! KUPOPPO! SbaitsoAvatar: Does it make you happy to know that Go to the store?
Wait, wait, WTF? Since when are/should "message boards" be banned from schools?! Isn't the whole point of school (supposedly) to facilitate intellectual conversations.. DISCUSSIONS, which of course is what said "message boards" are for?
So these schools using Bess/etc. are basically saying "Go to msnbc.com / aol.com / cnn.com all you want, since they're nice big corporations, but don't discuss things amongst yourselves?" What is the justification given? Or is none at all given (as is typical nowadays)?
I am confused.
My good friend works at an office using WebSense (which both of us now call WebSenseless). It has, in the past, blocked her from accessing many perfectly legitimate sites, including my own site-- when I was trying to use my site to send her a technical document. It was very annoying.
All these years, and censorware still hasn't gotten better? This is pathetic...
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, that's nice, why don't you try to get spammers to spam me. That's a great way to get someone to take your advice.
Wake up and smell the Clue.
Sure. Name one. My email address is jb (AT) twu )))DOT((( net. Mail me with a suggestion.
...what will the ping times to Mars be? ;)
You said:
"No, not the same thing with the DeCSS source. We allow people to have knives because knives have significant legitimate uses. We ban assault rifles because they have NO significant legitimate uses. DeCSS had no significant legitimate uses, so it was entirely proper that those who created and distributed it should be stopped from doing so."
This is an opinion. And whether or not your opinion in this matter happens to be shared by the DVD-CCA, by a lawyer, by a judge, or by the President of the United States, it remains an opinion. My opinion differs, and my opinion is that DeCSS did have a "significant legitimate use"-- actually, two of them.
USE 1: To decrypt DVDs to the hard drive under Windows on a "dual-boot" system; the user can then reboot into Linux to play them using whatever MPEG player they wish.
USE 2: As a proof of concept, a useful font of critical decryption source code, and an inspiration for creating a Linux DVD player by showing that decryption of the CSS algorithm is not only possible, not only feasible, but trivial.. The instant I laid eyes on DeCSS, I knew that if anything would lead to a Linux DVD player (legal or otherwise; my only wish was to play my legally purchased DVDs, and any question of "is the MPAA happy with the particular player software I am forced by lack of alternatives to use" is moot), it was DeCSS itself. Ultimately, I was correct; numerous DVD player packages for Linux/Unix were released based, in part, on the DeCSS source. Had Jon Johansen not created DeCSS in the first place, none of this would have been possible. Instead of having a number of illegal, unlicensed ways to play one's legally owned DVDs under Linux/Unix, there would be no way at all. I consider the current situation preferable to this unfavorable alternative, albeit still highly odious.
You also said "Use one of the HUNDREDS (maybe even thousands) of software DVD players out there.". Here, I must again question whether or not you are a MPAA (or DVD-CCA) "astroturfer" or another sort of cretinous troll. Are you deaf, or simply not listening? THERE ARE NO LEGALLY LICENSED DVD PLAYER SOFTWARE PRODUCTS FOR LINUX, with the sole exception being products for EMBEDDED SYSTEMS ONLY, which my computers are not, and licensable to EMBEDDED SYSTEMS MANUFACTURERS ONLY, which I am not, and licensed IN BULK ONLY, which would render the whole rot completely moot as for the cost of licensing LinDVD for the 1,000,000 embedded Linux boxes I don't own, I could just as easily buy 10,000 brand new set-top DVD devices.
The only person in the past who has ever told me (incorrectly) that there is a product I could buy, right now, legally, with a DVD-CCA-approved license, to play my DVDs under Linux... was a DVD-CCA member himself, attempting to convince me that, in a great many words, "There's no problem here... move along." Needless to say, he was incorrect, as are you.
Again, repeat after me: There is no legally licensed DVD player for Linux desktops (or laptops or servers or "workstations" or whatever you choose to call "computers that are not embedded systems and are actually used by Ordinary Joes and Ordinary Janes to do their Ordinary Work in the Real World"). Period. End of story. So please stop spreading this nonsense about legal DVD players being available for Linux. They are not. I have already done my homework and came away dejected, disgusted and depressed.
Am I "selfish" to desire the ability to play a legally purchased DVD on the operating system of my choice? Perhaps, though again, that is your opinion. Certainly it would not be hard to argue that, since the Constitution and the United Nations both fail to guarantee my right to choose whatever operating system I wish to utilize my legally purchased products with, I have no such right. In a legal sense, I suppose you are right. Nevertheless, this is the real world, and in the real world, people don't give a
I've not bought into any sort of propaganda. When I first became acquainted with DeCSS, I saw it as precisely what it was-- a program written for Windows which decrypted a DVD. A "proof of concept", if you would, demonstrating how to decrypt a DVD, and providing the code (small, neat and efficient) to do so. It obviously was not going to help any real "pirate" much, since the "pirates" already had many other ways of duplicating a DVD (and the really serious ones, I've heard, actually have the technology to simply duplicate the entire disc, using the same "stamping" technology the movie companies do to make "the real thing".
At the time I found this code, I did not have any Windows machines. As such, it was useless to me as a program. I only found its source useful-- useful as a possible future source of a DVD player application for Linux. At the time, I was using an ancient cabinet-mounted television and a set-top DVD player to play my DVDs; nevertheless, I had installed a DVD-ROM drive in my computer prior to going all-Linux, and I wanted to be able to use it.
So I posted the thing on my Web site, in the hopes that some hacker, more clever than I am in the ways of multimedia and device I/O, would use the DeCSS source as the core of a nice new DVD player program for Linux.
Fast forward perhaps a month. I received an emailed nastygram from the DVD-CCA's lawyers. Not only did it tell me to take down the mirror (which I did), but it told me (in overwrought legalese, of course) that they were particularly miffed at me, since I had disregarded a previous notice which they had sent me in the past.
A previous notice which I never received. And searching through my inbox (which typically holds several dozen THOUSAND messages, as I'm one of those ditzes who never deletes anything until I run out of RAM to hold the spool in), I could not find it.
I eventually signed a consent injunction to get out of the suit. Which in and of itself was an exercise in frustration. They wouldn't take me seriously over the phone until I had my boyfriend take the phone and demand the attention of someone who could actually help me obtain and sign the "chickening out" forms.
Then I got to take a nice visit to the DVD-CCA's lawyers in Manhattan, where I sat in their ridiculously outsized lobby for what must have been an hour. Finally, as I was finishing counting the number of tiles in their floor (well, just about), I hear "Hello, Ms. (lastname)?" I answer; great! Someone's ready to talk to me.
And of course it's an assistant to an assistant to an assistant of the understudy to some secretary who does part-time work for one of the lawyers' brothers on alternate Tuesdays. He takes the forms, repeatedly tells me he isn't involved in the case, can't answer any questions, etc. etc. etc.
I leave, disgusted, and thankfully have not heard any more from them.
I suppose the moral of all of this is thus: The DVD-CCA, the people who turned "DeCSS" into a dirty word and "legal Linux DVD player for desktops" into a myth (and incidentally, the legally licensed Linux DVD player you mentioned DOES exist... however, it's only available to embedded device manufacturers. Not terribly useful to, say, an end user. So, yes, it exists, but no, you can't have it! Great.), are an immensely powerful organization, and think nothing of threatening and frightening small individual citizens like myself to obtain their goals. They are much like a larger version of these spammers-- using their considerable money and power to frighten people and organizations much smaller and weaker than themselves. Where I come from, we call such behavior "bullying".
But I digressed a bit from my story about DeCSS. Perhaps some summary is in order, so as I'm already tired from all this typing (and need a Tums as I'm getting a bit of indigestion from recounting this whole unpleasant experience), I'll bullet-point what I have to say.
Gee, AC, you sound an awful lot like a lawyer for the MPAA. Nice try. Come out and show yourself please. The DeCSS source was eventually adapted into precisely what many (including myself) had hoped it would end up in-- A Linux DVD player. Yes, player. Not ripper. Not pirates' tool. A player. That's all anyone wanted.
It's mighty easy for someone (an American or otherwise) to throw that idea around, and terribly difficult to actually make it a reality.
The sad fact of the matter is that there hasn't been an effective widespread protest movement since the '60s here in the US. And there won't be any time soon.
The apathy of the American population is growing, not shrinking. Attempting to motivate them to protest anything at all is an exercise in futility.
Not to be a pessimist, but... that's how I see it. YMMV.
Heh, I love how negativistic SlashDot's moderation system was on this one. Almost as bad as pessimistic lil' ol' me.
The post started at 2 (cuz I have nice karma), and got a bunch of mod-ups and ONE mod-down ("Offtopic"). So the Slash code did the math and dutifully reported the score as 5 (correct)... and of course focused solely on the fact that my post was modded "Offtopic". Of all the modding done to my post, it only noted the ONE NEGATIVE MOD in the Score line.
And I thought I saw the world through blue-tinted glasses...
Not to be dismissive or offensive, but this sounds like a polite way of covering up their shame at their (PERFECTLY RATIONAL) fear of a lawsuit. The fact of the matter is that spammers, as a group, have lots of money; TechDirt (I think) does not. You don't have to be an Einstein to be afraid of the spam-scums, when they routinely buy those fancy big houses in Florida with the pools with their ill-gotten money...
...that all it takes to bring virtually any effort to a screeching halt is for somebody with more money than you to threaten a lawsuit. At that point, whammo, you have to stop what you're doing.
When you are a small site, or an individual person without a tremendous income (read: everyone short of a CEO), that basically means "any company, or even individual, can threaten to sue you, and there goes whatever you were working on."
This seems to be a rather disturbing new part of our market reality.
Recall the DeCSS case. Several dozen named defendants, and several hundred "Does", were threatened in court by the DVD-CCA, acting as a representative of the interests of some of the largest companies on Earth. Whammo, most of the people capitulated, the courts bowed to the pressure of the RIAA's fat pocketbooks, and the DVD-CCA's will became law-- DeCSS is now effectively "illegal". Cases like this spam one seem to be the result of "trickle-down" thinking-- or as Star Control 2 would have it, "dribble-down"-- whereby smaller and smaller companies begin to adopt the same nasty tactics.
Let's face it-- if you run a small and/or non-profit site, and if some company or businessperson with lots of money (or even a moderate amount of money) makes a credible threat to send in the lawyers, you're at least as likely as not to give in to their pressure. It's simple survival instinct-- no one wants to get sued, especially (A) in this economy and (B) by someone with much fatter coffers than themselves.
What this is leading to is a situation where the rich can effectively (and, as close to possible, directly-- about the only more direct way would be to put a gun to one's head!) force the poor to do whatever they want. No laws (legal, moral or otherwise) really seem to touch the really "big fish" (RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, etc.), and they get away with a slap on the wrist-analogue at worst; now, even smaller entities like these spammers can effectively throw their monetary weight around to silence dot-bomb-impoverished techies running innocent sites.
I fear that this trend will become far more pervasive, and will get far worse before it gets better. If it ever gets better... I personally do not believe that the current Powers That Be in the US really care that much about "the little guys" getting spurious lawsuit threats every time they do something someone Richer-Than-Thou happens to dislike...
If Mog does the Money Dance, does he start tossing GP at enemies? And what does it change the background to? O_o
...they could have hosted it in Redmond...
;)
(DUCKS!)
I'm not sure that's such a hot idea. That would put even more pressure on the companies to pull Dirty Tricks(TM) to squash the free market (a la Microsoft) and/or cook the books (a la Enron)... It just seems to me like a rule like this would do little but encourage corruption. And that would be Bad(TM)... :/
Not funny.
And you posted this as an Anonymous Coward... why? :)
Don't we all want our very own Dust Puppy? ;)
"This is probably Microsoft's last chance to turn the tide and take mindset and market share from FOSS."
... Sure, 2/3 of the Web sites out there are running on Apache, but are they the bottom 2/3 of the Web? Increasingly, it's looking like the companies Where The Money Is are requesting more and more MS stuff. And that scares me.
Where I live (NYC area), it seems like if anything, MS technologies are getting a BIGGER grip on things. Virtually every new job out there, it seems-- and this includes jobs whose titles include the word "Unix"-- demands experience with ASP/IIS/VB/VC++ and other MS programming and server-side products... Perhaps it's just my imagination, but I am not so confident any more in the rankings posted on www.netcraft.net
My boss, who before taking the helm of the little dot-com I work for used to work with "big money" firms all the time (and was the CEO of a national chain or three at one point), refers to the work I do with Linux and Unix as "your silly little programs". Her attitude towards MS is that it's "The Industry Standard(TM)" (you can almost hear the "(TM)" at the end) and therefore that we will use it wherever it is The Standard, case closed, no questions asked. I am lucky that in her case, she has not extended this groupthink to the server room... yet. You can bet that within a few years, we will migrate away from our current servers (Solaris on UltraSPARCs) to Windows at this rate. The sort of pro-MS dronery one hears nowadays from businesspeople is nothing short of alarming.
It's depressing; I've been looking for a job as a Unix SA, and I swear I've actually seen one or two job postings for "Unix SAs" where it says "MCSE is a plus"... and I might have been hallucinating, but I think I even saw one that said "MCSE required"... In NYC, it seems like all of the big-money companies (financials, telcos, etc.) are all gung-ho about Windows, and it's hard to find a "virgin" Unix SA job... that is, one where you can't find words like "MCSE", "ASP/IIS", "VB" or "VC++" in the "Required" and/or "Preferred" lists.
Hmmm... or it could be more like:
MSAvatar: Where does Bill want you to go today?
SolarisAvatar: You wanna go somewhere? "Go" isn't installed, build it from source.
RMSAvatar: It's "GNU/Linux"! Dammit, "GNU/Linux!"
ESRAvatar: Go somewhere before I get out one of my 32368 guns.
AppleAvatar: Go Different.
AmigaAvatar: Could not 'GO'. GURU MEDITATION A0DB863F:83FB
SquareAvatar: KUPO KUPO! LET'S GO RESCUE TERRA AND SABIN! KUPOPPO!
SbaitsoAvatar: Does it make you happy to know that Go to the store?
Wait, wait, WTF? Since when are/should "message boards" be banned from schools?! Isn't the whole point of school (supposedly) to facilitate intellectual conversations.. DISCUSSIONS, which of course is what said "message boards" are for?
So these schools using Bess/etc. are basically saying "Go to msnbc.com / aol.com / cnn.com all you want, since they're nice big corporations, but don't discuss things amongst yourselves?" What is the justification given? Or is none at all given (as is typical nowadays)?
I am confused.
My good friend works at an office using WebSense (which both of us now call WebSenseless). It has, in the past, blocked her from accessing many perfectly legitimate sites, including my own site-- when I was trying to use my site to send her a technical document. It was very annoying.
All these years, and censorware still hasn't gotten better? This is pathetic...
Just make it run around shooting stuff and saying things like "lol u camping fagot!!!!" ;)
Oh, and "my new vidcadr r0x ur world".
...sounds an AWFUL lot like Richard Stallman... ;)
...the sky has been nominated for the prestigious "Big Blue Thing" award...
...that I have precisely TWO 4x burners, for a total of 8x, so I must declare that I own "2/3 of a burner". Ahhahhah.
;)
But I use the Evil Commie P1-r4t OS Linux... maybe the RIAA will come get me for that one
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics."
;)
C'mon, such a huge percentage of all statistics out there are dubious. Did you really think the RIAA is above a little "data cooking"?
...I'd like you to try my new Extra Juicy Roasting Chickens, now open sourced for your cooking pleasure..."