Also, I'm fairly confident that, in a representative democracy, my taxes are not likely to be used to finance kiddie porn.
No, but the US government has used taxes to fund terrorism (sorry, 'freedom fighters'), fascist coups, and let's not forget the current outsourcing of torturing suspected terrorists. I suspect the countries that interrogate captured Afganistan prisoners needed paying for their troubles. If anything, the electricity needed to zap through someones genitals must really rack up the quarterly bills. And that's not even mentioning the rather dubious war on Iraq. Tax money sometimes goes to some pretty immoral uses.
In the case of freenet, I could be fairly confident that the resources I contribute would be.
Likewise, it's unlikely that by using Freenet I'll contribute money to bomb people. It's a question of the good outweighing the bad. If everyone got together and banned computers, then kiddie porn would be considerably reduced, at least the availiability of it.
Freenet's designed for freedom of information. You cannot allow worthy people freedom of information (such as supporters of democracy in oppressive regimes) without allowing the less desirable elements. But if you don't consider freedom of information to be a desirable goal, then that's your choice.
What if this becomes a losing battle, where advances in encryption and anonymising technology make it impossible to tell who's downloaded what. Systems like Freenet are already quite secure. What will happen if encrypted hard-drives become the norm, and P2P becomes fully anonymised? Even if not 100% secure, is it worth stake-outs, bugs, telephone line taps and the like just to secure the conviction of one filesharer?
If conviction of filesharers becomes next to impossible due to technological innovations, do you foresee a change in copyright law? Would this law be something like an improved DMCA, where all computers must be monitored for illegal content? Or do you think that the current rights of copyright holders such as the RIAA and MPAA will be reduced?
If you want to call your personal OS KDE/XFree86/GNU/Linux, then go ahead. But no-one needs to use -- and many don't -- KDE or XFree86 for their FS OS. Everyone, however, uses the Linux kernel and the GNU toolset.
Yes, but KDE and X are just as much part of my OS as the GNU tools. Therefore I cannot refer to Linux as GNU/Linux without being hypocritical. Why should I recognise GNU and Linux and not the work put in KDE and X? Obviously it's impractical to refer to my OS as KDE/XFree86/GNU/Linux, and therefore I shorten the name to a simple "Linux", in a similar way how "XP" refers to Microsoft Windows XP Edition.
So whilst I don't mind people refering to GNU/Linux, I can't understand why people get irritated when I shorten the name for convinience. Indeed, unless a person has forgone X, or at least does not use it regularly, then they cannot themselves complain about my use of the word "Linux", when they themselves say "GNU/Linux" and not "X/GNU/Linux".
It is, in short, intellectually dishonest to say that anyone "created" what we think of as the OS. Many people worked together to create it.
Neither Linus nor anyone else working on the kernal would claim such a thing. It's just the interviewer getting confused. If you want to blame anyone, blame journalists, but realistically, it's silly to quibble over details. Especially with the dumbed-down press of today.
A truck full of harddrives may have some astronomical bandwidth, but the lag on that thing is murder. I tried a few experimental pings:
PING www.google.com (216.239.37.99) from 192.168.0.7 : 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 216.239.37.99: icmp_seq=1 ttl=51 time=87303012 ms 64 bytes from 216.239.37.99: icmp_seq=2 ttl=51 time=130256230 ms 64 bytes from 216.239.37.99: icmp_seq=3 ttl=51 time=110821205 ms 64 bytes from 216.239.37.99: icmp_seq=4 ttl=51 time=990602128 ms
Linus never clarified the difference between the kernel he started and the entire OS.
Isn't that what we have RMS for?
Personally, however, I entirely agree with you, but you don't go far enough. My OS is KDE/XFree86-X11/GNU/Linux, and I'll advocate the death of anyone who dares shorten such a prestigious name for matters of convinience. The XFree86 and KDE projects have done just as much for my OS as the GNU project, so they too should be honored in such a way.
The simpsons has approximately 300 episodes; 12 full length anime series would have about the same amount of episodes, and there are far more than 12 adult-orientated anime series about.
There's unarguably more diversity in the animated series over in Japan, but even counting the huge amount of Simpsons, there's still more non-child-orientated animation per hour from Japan then there is in the US.
Oh, and ok, if we're just counting *series*, Mononoke can be skipped, likewise with Blood, and a few others. Still, I was just listing them off from memory; if I could be bother to look about, they'd be a lot more I could quote. Unfortunately a google search for "adult anime" is likely to turn up the wrong sort of shows:)
As other people have mentioned, Japan releases far more "adult oriented animated shows" than the US does. What about Neon Genesis Evangeleon, FLCL (Furi Kuri), Ghost in the Shell, The Wings of Honneamise, Akira, Witchhunter Robin, Ninja Scroll, Princess Mononoke, Cowboy Bebop, Battle Angel, Blood or *gasps for breath* Macross Zero?
You can't really claim such shows are geared up for children, and that's just all I can think of off the top of my head. Japan's got a wide lead over the US, whose only "adult orientated animated shows" tend to be solely comedies (with the exception of Spawn, come to think of it).
Predictions like this are all fine and good, but we have a huge backlog of technology that needs to be developed. For instance, flying cars. We've been promised goddamn flying cars for years now. I want my flying car!
So before working on sentient offices, I suggest some extra time is devoted to such projects as flying cars, the paperless office, the helpful computer, and Duke Nukem Forever.
Which you won't have until you download it without prior permission.
No, because you're not explicitly downloading it. You're requesting a page, and you get given the copyright notice and page in return (or an error gets thrown). They're sending you the data after you request it.
Of course, I suppose you could argue that's what HTTP does anyway. You request the data, and get given the page. But an X-header might emphasise the fact you have copyright.
Or download the page and find the permission is missing.
eh?
Or as this is Sweden who's going to bother in the rest of the world to add a spurious header (or meta-tag)?
No-one:) - But hopefully, and probably, the law won't pass. It just has too much stupid crap in it.:)
Firebird on Linux a slow crashing mess? It crashes about once per month of almost continuous use for me. That's pretty darn stable, especially for something that hasn't reached version 1.0 yet.
Um, you did check the replies to your last comment on this topic, right? Or are you just trolling? The story you link to has absolutely nothing at all to do with the "robbery" of Windows ideas.
Yup, I do. There's a lot of dumb laws around, whether you're in the USA or the EU. Software patents are being debated in the EU at the moment, but I don't hold out much hope that the politicians actually understand the issues.
Wherever in the world you go, people are people, and politicians are morons. Just a fact of life.
1. That the US singlehandedly won WW2. 2. Something about France surrendering/giving up/smelling of cheese. 3. Europeans are communist/socialist/in decline. 4. The US is the only country with the balls to fight "Terra'ism!" 5. The EU would be nothing without the US. 6. etc. 7. ditto. 8. more of the same.
Oh, and for true trollishness, remember to lump in all Europeans into one entity. For example: In WW2 Europe killed millions of Jews and surrendered so easily whilst simultaniously begging the US to help them.
Remember to selectively ignore facts. For instance, even though Germany was on the retreat in both World Wars before the US sent troops in, the US solely won the wars. Remember that the EU are socialist cowards with no free speech who, for some reason, are hesitant at waging wars against countries that obviously threaten the world with WMDs (despite non being found).
Even though you'd advocated the use of gun control, remember to remain patriotic and argue against gun control whenever any lousy European suggests it might ease the death toll of automatic weapons.
Have I missed anything? In any case, good trolling!
The article notes: "Even today, Ireland, Portugal and the United Kingdom have not enacted a right of reply for traditional media, and it's a good bet that they won't for the Internet, either."
So the UK probably won't get this law, especially since if this proposal were passed, then it would be outright hypocritical not to apply it to traditional media. And the traditional media; tabloids, TV, etc, wouldn't be only too happy to crusade against such a law.
...Water is wet. Honestly, who didn't see this coming?
It's in line with the former Minister of Information (God bless his soul): "I will revoke IBM's license... IN ONE HOUR!" I doubt anyone seriously suspected Big Blue wouldn't just ignore SCO's demands.
SCO's spouted so much hot air over this I really fear for the effect this will have on global warming. They may have a case, maybe, but the way they're acting doesn't suggest they do.
Writing a web page for IE is fantastically frustrating. My typical design process goes:
1) Write standards compliant HTML 2) Find out IE doesn't even render CSS1 right on occassion. 3) Spend the next few hours trying to figure out a way of getting the code to render in IE properly, without making it invalid HTML.
I do conceed that the XML interface in IE is very good though, but I'd rather they get a browser that can render HTML properly. To my knowledge IE's only standard's compliant with HTML 3.0. 5% or so of CSS1 gets messed up, and CSS2 support is almost non-existant. It's really annoying when you can't just design a page, instead having to fiddle about with it until IE renders it right.
In other words, XML is all well and good, but for God's sake, they should concentrate on getting the basics right, first!
Complaceny is a good way to lose that monopoly. You stated yourself that IE has "fallen way behind Opera and Mozilla." So Microsoft better not rest on its laurels?
Ideally, this would be the case, but there are two main problems to this. Firstly, that IE is bundled with Windows (yes, that old chestnut), and to a lesser extent, quite a few websites are IE-only.
Mozilla has been ahead of IE for quite some time. Maybe a year or so. In all that time MS's browser dominance hasn't shifted as much as it should have done if people were purely after the best product. If Joe Average already has a web browser on their system which works adequately, there's not much incentive to get something new.
Sensibly, this shouldn't happen. IE should have lost some major market share by now, considering the alternatives. But it clearly hasn't, so there must be something wrong.
Ok, seriously, Microsoft do have a habit of "innovating" only reluctantly. Development on Internet Explorer seems to have stopped now that it has the majority of the market, and has fallen way behind Opera and Mozilla in terms of features, speed and usability.
Likewise, Microsoft Word seems to have, if anything, gotten worse over these past few years. They seem to have ran out of good things to do to it, and instead are content to obfusicate their file formats to maintain dominance.
How many "innovations" has Microsoft actually completed that aren't blatent copies? I can't think of one.
Of course, from a purely capitalist point of view, this is a perfectly reasonable choice. Why bother improving stuff that you have a monopoly over, a monopoly that's likely to remain untouched for the next few years at least? Competition is capitalism's way of improving software, and with a monopoly, there's no incentive to improve.
Which is why there are laws concerning monopolies, and strict regulation of such entities. But with the DOJ in Microsoft's pocket, there isn't any enforcement of these laws, and thus Microsoft can get away with making a profit without expending any effort.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, I'm fairly confident that, in a representative democracy, my taxes are not likely to be used to finance kiddie porn.
No, but the US government has used taxes to fund terrorism (sorry, 'freedom fighters'), fascist coups, and let's not forget the current outsourcing of torturing suspected terrorists. I suspect the countries that interrogate captured Afganistan prisoners needed paying for their troubles. If anything, the electricity needed to zap through someones genitals must really rack up the quarterly bills. And that's not even mentioning the rather dubious war on Iraq. Tax money sometimes goes to some pretty immoral uses.
In the case of freenet, I could be fairly confident that the resources I contribute would be.
Likewise, it's unlikely that by using Freenet I'll contribute money to bomb people. It's a question of the good outweighing the bad. If everyone got together and banned computers, then kiddie porn would be considerably reduced, at least the availiability of it.
Freenet's designed for freedom of information. You cannot allow worthy people freedom of information (such as supporters of democracy in oppressive regimes) without allowing the less desirable elements. But if you don't consider freedom of information to be a desirable goal, then that's your choice.
Science does not deal with proofs. Only mathematics and alcoholism do. Science is about the disproving of ideas, not the other way around.
:)
That said, your argument would be perfectly valid if s/proof/the ability to be disproved/g.
What if this becomes a losing battle, where advances in encryption and anonymising technology make it impossible to tell who's downloaded what. Systems like Freenet are already quite secure. What will happen if encrypted hard-drives become the norm, and P2P becomes fully anonymised? Even if not 100% secure, is it worth stake-outs, bugs, telephone line taps and the like just to secure the conviction of one filesharer?
If conviction of filesharers becomes next to impossible due to technological innovations, do you foresee a change in copyright law? Would this law be something like an improved DMCA, where all computers must be monitored for illegal content? Or do you think that the current rights of copyright holders such as the RIAA and MPAA will be reduced?
If you want to call your personal OS KDE/XFree86/GNU/Linux, then go ahead. But no-one needs to use -- and many don't -- KDE or XFree86 for their FS OS. Everyone, however, uses the Linux kernel and the GNU toolset.
Yes, but KDE and X are just as much part of my OS as the GNU tools. Therefore I cannot refer to Linux as GNU/Linux without being hypocritical. Why should I recognise GNU and Linux and not the work put in KDE and X? Obviously it's impractical to refer to my OS as KDE/XFree86/GNU/Linux, and therefore I shorten the name to a simple "Linux", in a similar way how "XP" refers to Microsoft Windows XP Edition.
So whilst I don't mind people refering to GNU/Linux, I can't understand why people get irritated when I shorten the name for convinience. Indeed, unless a person has forgone X, or at least does not use it regularly, then they cannot themselves complain about my use of the word "Linux", when they themselves say "GNU/Linux" and not "X/GNU/Linux".
It is, in short, intellectually dishonest to say that anyone "created" what we think of as the OS. Many people worked together to create it.
Neither Linus nor anyone else working on the kernal would claim such a thing. It's just the interviewer getting confused. If you want to blame anyone, blame journalists, but realistically, it's silly to quibble over details. Especially with the dumbed-down press of today.
Uhuh. Dial up access isn't good for getting first post on predictable jokes, especially if you want your ping times to be accurate :)
Linus never clarified the difference between the kernel he started and the entire OS.
Isn't that what we have RMS for?
Personally, however, I entirely agree with you, but you don't go far enough. My OS is KDE/XFree86-X11/GNU/Linux, and I'll advocate the death of anyone who dares shorten such a prestigious name for matters of convinience. The XFree86 and KDE projects have done just as much for my OS as the GNU project, so they too should be honored in such a way.
The simpsons has approximately 300 episodes; 12 full length anime series would have about the same amount of episodes, and there are far more than 12 adult-orientated anime series about.
:)
There's unarguably more diversity in the animated series over in Japan, but even counting the huge amount of Simpsons, there's still more non-child-orientated animation per hour from Japan then there is in the US.
Oh, and ok, if we're just counting *series*, Mononoke can be skipped, likewise with Blood, and a few others. Still, I was just listing them off from memory; if I could be bother to look about, they'd be a lot more I could quote. Unfortunately a google search for "adult anime" is likely to turn up the wrong sort of shows
My, what a nice, pleasent, well adjusted person you are.
As other people have mentioned, Japan releases far more "adult oriented animated shows" than the US does. What about Neon Genesis Evangeleon, FLCL (Furi Kuri), Ghost in the Shell, The Wings of Honneamise, Akira, Witchhunter Robin, Ninja Scroll, Princess Mononoke, Cowboy Bebop, Battle Angel, Blood or *gasps for breath* Macross Zero?
You can't really claim such shows are geared up for children, and that's just all I can think of off the top of my head. Japan's got a wide lead over the US, whose only "adult orientated animated shows" tend to be solely comedies (with the exception of Spawn, come to think of it).
Predictions like this are all fine and good, but we have a huge backlog of technology that needs to be developed. For instance, flying cars. We've been promised goddamn flying cars for years now. I want my flying car!
So before working on sentient offices, I suggest some extra time is devoted to such projects as flying cars, the paperless office, the helpful computer, and Duke Nukem Forever.
I hold out hope for all but the last.
Which you won't have until you download it without prior permission.
:) - But hopefully, and probably, the law won't pass. It just has too much stupid crap in it. :)
No, because you're not explicitly downloading it. You're requesting a page, and you get given the copyright notice and page in return (or an error gets thrown). They're sending you the data after you request it.
Of course, I suppose you could argue that's what HTTP does anyway. You request the data, and get given the page. But an X-header might emphasise the fact you have copyright.
Or download the page and find the permission is missing.
eh?
Or as this is Sweden who's going to bother in the rest of the world to add a spurious header (or meta-tag)?
No-one
Firebird on Linux a slow crashing mess? It crashes about once per month of almost continuous use for me. That's pretty darn stable, especially for something that hasn't reached version 1.0 yet.
Um, you did check the replies to your last comment on this topic, right? Or are you just trolling? The story you link to has absolutely nothing at all to do with the "robbery" of Windows ideas.
X-Copyright: You are hereby authorised to download this material for your own personal, noncommercial use... blah blah blah lawyerspeak blah blah etc.
"Imagine the chilling effect" most /.ers would have if the editors actually stopped posting dupes :)
/. be without duplicated stories every few days?
Where would
Yup, I do. There's a lot of dumb laws around, whether you're in the USA or the EU. Software patents are being debated in the EU at the moment, but I don't hold out much hope that the politicians actually understand the issues.
Wherever in the world you go, people are people, and politicians are morons. Just a fact of life.
You forgot to mention:
1. That the US singlehandedly won WW2.
2. Something about France surrendering/giving up/smelling of cheese.
3. Europeans are communist/socialist/in decline.
4. The US is the only country with the balls to fight "Terra'ism!"
5. The EU would be nothing without the US.
6. etc.
7. ditto.
8. more of the same.
Oh, and for true trollishness, remember to lump in all Europeans into one entity. For example: In WW2 Europe killed millions of Jews and surrendered so easily whilst simultaniously begging the US to help them.
Remember to selectively ignore facts. For instance, even though Germany was on the retreat in both World Wars before the US sent troops in, the US solely won the wars. Remember that the EU are socialist cowards with no free speech who, for some reason, are hesitant at waging wars against countries that obviously threaten the world with WMDs (despite non being found).
Even though you'd advocated the use of gun control, remember to remain patriotic and argue against gun control whenever any lousy European suggests it might ease the death toll of automatic weapons.
Have I missed anything? In any case, good trolling!
The article notes:
"Even today, Ireland, Portugal and the United Kingdom have not enacted a right of reply for traditional media, and it's a good bet that they won't for the Internet, either."
So the UK probably won't get this law, especially since if this proposal were passed, then it would be outright hypocritical not to apply it to traditional media. And the traditional media; tabloids, TV, etc, wouldn't be only too happy to crusade against such a law.
...Water is wet.
Honestly, who didn't see this coming?
It's in line with the former Minister of Information (God bless his soul): "I will revoke IBM's license... IN ONE HOUR!"
I doubt anyone seriously suspected Big Blue wouldn't just ignore SCO's demands.
SCO's spouted so much hot air over this I really fear for the effect this will have on global warming. They may have a case, maybe, but the way they're acting doesn't suggest they do.
Targetting developers? To annoy them you mean? :)
Writing a web page for IE is fantastically frustrating. My typical design process goes:
1) Write standards compliant HTML
2) Find out IE doesn't even render CSS1 right on occassion.
3) Spend the next few hours trying to figure out a way of getting the code to render in IE properly, without making it invalid HTML.
I do conceed that the XML interface in IE is very good though, but I'd rather they get a browser that can render HTML properly. To my knowledge IE's only standard's compliant with HTML 3.0. 5% or so of CSS1 gets messed up, and CSS2 support is almost non-existant. It's really annoying when you can't just design a page, instead having to fiddle about with it until IE renders it right.
In other words, XML is all well and good, but for God's sake, they should concentrate on getting the basics right, first!
Complaceny is a good way to lose that monopoly. You stated yourself that IE has "fallen way behind Opera and Mozilla." So Microsoft better not rest on its laurels?
Ideally, this would be the case, but there are two main problems to this. Firstly, that IE is bundled with Windows (yes, that old chestnut), and to a lesser extent, quite a few websites are IE-only.
Mozilla has been ahead of IE for quite some time. Maybe a year or so. In all that time MS's browser dominance hasn't shifted as much as it should have done if people were purely after the best product. If Joe Average already has a web browser on their system which works adequately, there's not much incentive to get something new.
Sensibly, this shouldn't happen. IE should have lost some major market share by now, considering the alternatives. But it clearly hasn't, so there must be something wrong.
I'm sure a lot of /.ers would cheer then :)
Ok, seriously, Microsoft do have a habit of "innovating" only reluctantly. Development on Internet Explorer seems to have stopped now that it has the majority of the market, and has fallen way behind Opera and Mozilla in terms of features, speed and usability.
Likewise, Microsoft Word seems to have, if anything, gotten worse over these past few years. They seem to have ran out of good things to do to it, and instead are content to obfusicate their file formats to maintain dominance.
How many "innovations" has Microsoft actually completed that aren't blatent copies? I can't think of one.
Of course, from a purely capitalist point of view, this is a perfectly reasonable choice. Why bother improving stuff that you have a monopoly over, a monopoly that's likely to remain untouched for the next few years at least? Competition is capitalism's way of improving software, and with a monopoly, there's no incentive to improve.
Which is why there are laws concerning monopolies, and strict regulation of such entities. But with the DOJ in Microsoft's pocket, there isn't any enforcement of these laws, and thus Microsoft can get away with making a profit without expending any effort.
BASIC is to programming as SQL is to databases.
Reallly? Everyone I know uses MSN.
:)
I use Jabber, though