I know this is an old thread, but I thought I'd warn you that you're a fucking idiot. I never said I had a problem with shortening copyright, I said the argument was crappy. It was crappy.
Likely because we don't have so many good distros.
RedHat is really bad, at least in all my experience. Debian has a lot going for it, but I find it very counterintuitive. I like SuSE, but it's proprietary, so that's a no-go. Mandrake's organization is so bad, it's painful, and I've had severe errors with every install I've done of theirs. I like Slackware, because I know how it works and it has never fucked me over. On the other hand, it does very little for me, which is likely why it doesn't blow it.
Can't speak of many others, but I've liked Ark so far. It needs work, but that's what the alpha tag is for (In all truth, alpha Ark is more stable than the last release version of Mandrake I tried, which I think was 9.something).
English has fairly free grammar. Unfortunately, the instance I refered to broke (semi-permanently) a rule which, when used as it is now, makes many sentences completely unintelligible, and makes it impossible to make a list of pairs or a list with sub-listing involved, without doing some grammatical acrobatics.
What's more, the imbecile who printed the error, then publicly defended it as being correct with misguided explanations as to why. An editor directly changed the English language for the worse.
"Geek culture" has had shitty grammar and spelling since long before Slashdot. At most, Slashdot is adhering to a legacy of pain. Also, nobody models their speech after Slashdot intentionally.
Most of humanity doesn't primarily speak English, but a goodly portion of humanity runs into English on a semi-regular basis, and every bit of damage to the English grammar system hurts them all. Likewise, damage to other languages hurts those who are primarily English speakers.
The purpose of society is not to force smart people to work. If the man is a genius, he can write another. Society should give some motivation, but not by giving no rewards.
Now, I do agree that the parent was dumb, I just think your argument sucks as well.
They were in no copyright trouble to begin with. No re-phrasing was needed, The problem was the lawsuit scared the ISP.
Here's a really good question. Were those e-mails creative? I sure as hell don't consider my e-mails creative works (well, a couple times I've e-mailed poems or story excerpts). If they do not have creative value, they don't get copyright, so the students were fine with what they did.
Now, taking my e-mails and posting them is a privacy violation, but that's another matter.
As for what I just wrote, it's a little iffy. It is a position piece, and does have original phrasing and political value. I think it is well within fair use to repost it freely, so long as due credit is given.
More specifically, it created the first COST FREE productive leisure activities.
The costs of computer hardware and software are already absorbed, as they are neccessary for other portions of geek life, so it is essentially cost free.
And, this is what many current megacorps are scared of, because Open Source isn't the FIRST productive leisure activity.
I write for leisure. Many musicians play music for leisure. Lots of people write poetry in their leisure time. Some people do stand-up comedy for free.
The dark secret is, people enjoy entertaining people, and they even find that entertainment fun in its own right, even if the audience is lost. (In fact, jokes that go over the heads of the audience are often the best ones).
In the current society, much of entertainment is free to make. My word-processor and a site to host a story? Some instruments and a garage for a band? A napkin to jot poetry and internet distribution? The overhead is gone, and now all hell will break loose (but in a good way).
Were not NYT writers and editors the imbeciles responsible for irreparably damaging the English language by convincing millions of people that a comma was not needed before the and in a series?
Seeing as Slashdot has kepts its errors rather internal, rather than damaging most of humanity, I'd say they can comment just fine.
Again, I request a way for society to function without a government.
Saying it worked before is bullshit. Plenty of things have worked in the past that don't work now. People once could win wars with swords. Now, I'd have to recommend a gun/tank/bomb/battleship for that endeavor.
Also, the corporations are dangerous in large part due to subtelty. They are subverting people by giving them things they think they want.
Because the government is currently placing no restrictions on corporations. We attempt to fight the battle on both fronts: give power to ourselves and remove it from corporations.
While we already have some restrictions on the government (they've been slipping lately) we've got jack on the corps.
Hence, the reason to fight.
Also, there is no way for society to function without a government. If you can find a way, do tell. I do not see it, not in the world we live in. Corporations are a slightly different matter, so we can fight them all out (fighting governments must be reformation, fighting corporations can be eradication)
I do not disagree, but I believe you are overly harsh.
Mega-Corps, yes they are such.
The government, likewise.
However, much of the media does genuinely try to give accurate reporting. Have you ever tried to give accurate reporting? It isn't easy.
Also, reporters must be wary. If they step on the wrong toes, they'll be tossed. Then, they can't get out any information. Thus, they are cautious about when they cross the line. Yes, many of them are bad. However, many of them are not.
The media is mostly controlled by the corporations. I feel that the corporations are the problem, not the media.
I often got asked who my hero was, and I never had an answer.
This man is one of my heroes.
He is pushing what America once was about, shedding the bonds of control on people. The original constitution and Bill of Rights were about removing the bonds government put on people, giving people the freedoms they deserved.
However, the government stopped being the threat: corporations took that over.
Justin Frankel is a new patriot, fighting in the true spirit of America, and battling against the corporations who are trying to dominate humanity. It has happened in the past. Monarchies ruled men. They were broken. Corporations replaced them. Now, they need to be broken.
We need more people fighting for human empowerment.
As is commonly the case in modern society, people focus on success at the expense of principle.
Certainly, the average joe not having access to the internet would make the internet secure, so that would appear to be successful.
The only issue is that this would be in violation of principles about freedom, principles which many people may not care about.
It's the same reason that having a corporate systems with owners removed from responsibility is problematic: only successfulness is considered, not right and wrong.
...so I find this a little disappointing. However, I'm not much of a fan of Microsoft's style of competition.
Fortunately, there still is a form of competition: If AOL jacks prices up, broadband providers will be able to come in competitively, even in more rural areas.
A survey of the US determined that the point furthest from any roads west of the Mississippi is slightly under 15 miles from a road. East of the mississippi it is under 5 miles from a road.
I believe the place furthest from a road was in Montana, but don't quote me on that.
And, yes, I lived in Texas for two years. You can't get too far from a road, although you can get damn far from a town.
You're completely missing the reasons that trains don't take off in the US. Part of it is subsidies to the auto industry which keep that really affordable, and part of it is the American 'We Love Cars' mindset, but you don't seem to get how hard a full train-system is to get working in the US. It can work in big cities, which usually have pretty good public transportation (although not near as good as many places).
The issue is, too many Americans live in other areas and are too widely spaced. You can't put a nice stopping place within walking distance of very many people.
Where I live right now is considered near campus, and I'm three miles distant. Most people at my school commute twenty-minutes every day from a wide area. There is no single place that a train-station could go that would make it even slightly useable.
As such, you end up with people needing cars to drive to the train station, at which point they might as well just drive wherever they want to go.
Also, the US already has an excellent road system in place, and that only needs maitenance. The roads in the US have coverage like nothing most people would believe.
Inside of the the continental US, you cannot get 15 miles from a road, period. There is no location, anywhere outside of Alaska, which is 15 miles from a road in the USA. Putting down that much in the way of train tracks isn't even slightly possible.
And, as trains cannot solve all the problems, they are generally unused in the US.
Say 'sex' in most any classroom and everyone will look at you. There's quite a few other words that work, but that one's my favorite, because its not at all inappropriate. Sometimes, it even causes dead silence.
Oh, the fun of having nearly infinite social-experiment guinea-pigs in the general public.
> Indeed, there is material which virtually everyone would agree should be kept out. Sadistic pornography, incitement to violence against racial or ethnic minorities are just two examples.
I didn't read the article, but this jumped at me while reading your post.
How blatantly false.
If virtually everyone agrees it should be kept out, why it so common and easy to find? Does he, possibly, mean that virtually all people would agree it should be kept out if they were asked directly in public with lots of people listening, or that they would agree in private where no-one is looking.
> Want information? Ask RedHat. Ask Linus. Ask the folks at SuSE.
Yes. I mean, God knows those people won't be biased. It's only Linus' most famous accomplishment. He's a good guy, so he'll not have the slightest bias what-so-ever in any way. And RedHat's not supporting their business model on this stuff, are they? And SuSE, well, they're Germans! That alone should tell you that they'll have no bias for something that their income depends on.
It wouldn't be a virus. It would just be straight hacking.
Why would anyone make some fancy virus for a one-time job? It might involve using a virus, or not, but I'd think it would be more just direct work on security holes.
That's debateable. What you need to debate is what else is doing what they are doing.
Mozilla: It's making a standards-compliant browser. It is clearly done faster, as it's the only one out there. Fairly self-evident.
Wine: It's reimplementing an OS without access to the internals. What are you comparing that to for purposes of determining its speed? I personally think it is occuring extremely fast, all things considered.
Linux: Seems to be developing fairly on-par with other kernels. Yes, it took a while to get to where it is now, and had some comparitive slumps, but where was everything else when Linux started? Unix was ahead. Windows was DOS, right? MacOS was an early classic one? I really don't know, but it seems fairly close. Consider this: It's ahead of Windows on most high-end stuff, now, and has been on-and-off for a while. MacOS had a speedy jump in progress with OS-10, but that was also open-source development (BSD base, partially open still) so that's just an agreeing argument. As for commercial Unixes, I haven't a clue, so I won't talk about them.
gcc: I haven't a clue. I really don't. Just noting it because you did.
For my own example, MPlayer: MPlayer started about the same time that media players got big on other systems. Without having any source information for codecs and so-such, it's stayed just as far along technically. Ever since it's been around, I've been able to watch things about equally well under any OS, except DVDs.
The main area I see OSS lacking is in interfaces, which is why MPlayer is such a good example. Good God, is that a bad interface. Not the worst, no, but it tries. I'd say that is a part of the 'better' thing.
OSS is good at doing most of stuff, just not at getting EVERYTHING together. For a lot of things they do the technical end while the interface lags, or they do the interface and it's got a buggy back-end, or they make something really good but it is so messy inside it needs a total re-write to add anything.
I don't know how that compares with the problems of closed source, as I've never worked on it, but those are just the way I see the issues.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is an old thread, but I thought I'd warn you that you're a fucking idiot. I never said I had a problem with shortening copyright, I said the argument was crappy. It was crappy.
Likely because we don't have so many good distros.
RedHat is really bad, at least in all my experience.
Debian has a lot going for it, but I find it very counterintuitive.
I like SuSE, but it's proprietary, so that's a no-go.
Mandrake's organization is so bad, it's painful, and I've had severe errors with every install I've done of theirs.
I like Slackware, because I know how it works and it has never fucked me over. On the other hand, it does very little for me, which is likely why it doesn't blow it.
Can't speak of many others, but I've liked Ark so far. It needs work, but that's what the alpha tag is for (In all truth, alpha Ark is more stable than the last release version of Mandrake I tried, which I think was 9.something).
English has fairly free grammar. Unfortunately, the instance I refered to broke (semi-permanently) a rule which, when used as it is now, makes many sentences completely unintelligible, and makes it impossible to make a list of pairs or a list with sub-listing involved, without doing some grammatical acrobatics.
What's more, the imbecile who printed the error, then publicly defended it as being correct with misguided explanations as to why. An editor directly changed the English language for the worse.
"Geek culture" has had shitty grammar and spelling since long before Slashdot. At most, Slashdot is adhering to a legacy of pain. Also, nobody models their speech after Slashdot intentionally.
Most of humanity doesn't primarily speak English, but a goodly portion of humanity runs into English on a semi-regular basis, and every bit of damage to the English grammar system hurts them all. Likewise, damage to other languages hurts those who are primarily English speakers.
That's just a really crappy argument.
The purpose of society is not to force smart people to work. If the man is a genius, he can write another. Society should give some motivation, but not by giving no rewards.
Now, I do agree that the parent was dumb, I just think your argument sucks as well.
I'm looking forward to this wide-open symbol. Maybe it's be something like (=) this. Hmmm...more spacing needed between the bars. Ah Well.
They were in no copyright trouble to begin with. No re-phrasing was needed, The problem was the lawsuit scared the ISP.
Here's a really good question. Were those e-mails creative? I sure as hell don't consider my e-mails creative works (well, a couple times I've e-mailed poems or story excerpts). If they do not have creative value, they don't get copyright, so the students were fine with what they did.
Now, taking my e-mails and posting them is a privacy violation, but that's another matter.
As for what I just wrote, it's a little iffy. It is a position piece, and does have original phrasing and political value. I think it is well within fair use to repost it freely, so long as due credit is given.
More specifically, it created the first COST FREE productive leisure activities.
The costs of computer hardware and software are already absorbed, as they are neccessary for other portions of geek life, so it is essentially cost free.
And, this is what many current megacorps are scared of, because Open Source isn't the FIRST productive leisure activity.
I write for leisure. Many musicians play music for leisure. Lots of people write poetry in their leisure time. Some people do stand-up comedy for free.
The dark secret is, people enjoy entertaining people, and they even find that entertainment fun in its own right, even if the audience is lost. (In fact, jokes that go over the heads of the audience are often the best ones).
In the current society, much of entertainment is free to make. My word-processor and a site to host a story? Some instruments and a garage for a band? A napkin to jot poetry and internet distribution? The overhead is gone, and now all hell will break loose (but in a good way).
Were not NYT writers and editors the imbeciles responsible for irreparably damaging the English language by convincing millions of people that a comma was not needed before the and in a series?
Seeing as Slashdot has kepts its errors rather internal, rather than damaging most of humanity, I'd say they can comment just fine.
Again, I request a way for society to function without a government.
Saying it worked before is bullshit. Plenty of things have worked in the past that don't work now. People once could win wars with swords. Now, I'd have to recommend a gun/tank/bomb/battleship for that endeavor.
Also, the corporations are dangerous in large part due to subtelty. They are subverting people by giving them things they think they want.
Because the government is currently placing no restrictions on corporations. We attempt to fight the battle on both fronts: give power to ourselves and remove it from corporations.
While we already have some restrictions on the government (they've been slipping lately) we've got jack on the corps.
Hence, the reason to fight.
Also, there is no way for society to function without a government. If you can find a way, do tell. I do not see it, not in the world we live in. Corporations are a slightly different matter, so we can fight them all out (fighting governments must be reformation, fighting corporations can be eradication)
I do not disagree, but I believe you are overly harsh.
Mega-Corps, yes they are such.
The government, likewise.
However, much of the media does genuinely try to give accurate reporting. Have you ever tried to give accurate reporting? It isn't easy.
Also, reporters must be wary. If they step on the wrong toes, they'll be tossed. Then, they can't get out any information. Thus, they are cautious about when they cross the line. Yes, many of them are bad. However, many of them are not.
The media is mostly controlled by the corporations. I feel that the corporations are the problem, not the media.
I often got asked who my hero was, and I never had an answer.
This man is one of my heroes.
He is pushing what America once was about, shedding the bonds of control on people. The original constitution and Bill of Rights were about removing the bonds government put on people, giving people the freedoms they deserved.
However, the government stopped being the threat: corporations took that over.
Justin Frankel is a new patriot, fighting in the true spirit of America, and battling against the corporations who are trying to dominate humanity. It has happened in the past. Monarchies ruled men. They were broken. Corporations replaced them. Now, they need to be broken.
We need more people fighting for human empowerment.
As is commonly the case in modern society, people focus on success at the expense of principle.
Certainly, the average joe not having access to the internet would make the internet secure, so that would appear to be successful.
The only issue is that this would be in violation of principles about freedom, principles which many people may not care about.
It's the same reason that having a corporate systems with owners removed from responsibility is problematic: only successfulness is considered, not right and wrong.
...so I find this a little disappointing. However, I'm not much of a fan of Microsoft's style of competition.
Fortunately, there still is a form of competition: If AOL jacks prices up, broadband providers will be able to come in competitively, even in more rural areas.
Actually, no.
A survey of the US determined that the point furthest from any roads west of the Mississippi is slightly under 15 miles from a road. East of the mississippi it is under 5 miles from a road.
I believe the place furthest from a road was in Montana, but don't quote me on that.
And, yes, I lived in Texas for two years. You can't get too far from a road, although you can get damn far from a town.
You're completely missing the reasons that trains don't take off in the US. Part of it is subsidies to the auto industry which keep that really affordable, and part of it is the American 'We Love Cars' mindset, but you don't seem to get how hard a full train-system is to get working in the US. It can work in big cities, which usually have pretty good public transportation (although not near as good as many places).
The issue is, too many Americans live in other areas and are too widely spaced. You can't put a nice stopping place within walking distance of very many people.
Where I live right now is considered near campus, and I'm three miles distant. Most people at my school commute twenty-minutes every day from a wide area. There is no single place that a train-station could go that would make it even slightly useable.
As such, you end up with people needing cars to drive to the train station, at which point they might as well just drive wherever they want to go.
Also, the US already has an excellent road system in place, and that only needs maitenance. The roads in the US have coverage like nothing most people would believe.
Inside of the the continental US, you cannot get 15 miles from a road, period. There is no location, anywhere outside of Alaska, which is 15 miles from a road in the USA. Putting down that much in the way of train tracks isn't even slightly possible.
And, as trains cannot solve all the problems, they are generally unused in the US.
Quite true.
I recommend the 'sex' test.
Say 'sex' in most any classroom and everyone will look at you. There's quite a few other words that work, but that one's my favorite, because its not at all inappropriate. Sometimes, it even causes dead silence.
Oh, the fun of having nearly infinite social-experiment guinea-pigs in the general public.
Whatever you do, whatever, you don't tell how a book ends.
Oh, and for that particular tidbit: Fuck you very much, I hadn't read 3001 yet.
> Indeed, there is material which virtually everyone would agree should be kept out. Sadistic pornography, incitement to violence against racial or ethnic minorities are just two examples.
I didn't read the article, but this jumped at me while reading your post.
How blatantly false.
If virtually everyone agrees it should be kept out, why it so common and easy to find? Does he, possibly, mean that virtually all people would agree it should be kept out if they were asked directly in public with lots of people listening, or that they would agree in private where no-one is looking.
Just a flat-out bad statement.
> Want information? Ask RedHat. Ask Linus. Ask the folks at SuSE.
Yes. I mean, God knows those people won't be biased. It's only Linus' most famous accomplishment. He's a good guy, so he'll not have the slightest bias what-so-ever in any way. And RedHat's not supporting their business model on this stuff, are they? And SuSE, well, they're Germans! That alone should tell you that they'll have no bias for something that their income depends on.
It wouldn't be a virus. It would just be straight hacking.
Why would anyone make some fancy virus for a one-time job? It might involve using a virus, or not, but I'd think it would be more just direct work on security holes.
Faster and Cheaper go hand-in-hand, but are always the bane of that 'Better'.
Oh well, two-out-of-three ain't so bad.
So, anyone want fast, cheap sex?
My number is, oh, hi honey...no I wasn't gonna...really......crap.
That's debateable. What you need to debate is what else is doing what they are doing.
Mozilla: It's making a standards-compliant browser. It is clearly done faster, as it's the only one out there. Fairly self-evident.
Wine: It's reimplementing an OS without access to the internals. What are you comparing that to for purposes of determining its speed? I personally think it is occuring extremely fast, all things considered.
Linux: Seems to be developing fairly on-par with other kernels. Yes, it took a while to get to where it is now, and had some comparitive slumps, but where was everything else when Linux started? Unix was ahead. Windows was DOS, right? MacOS was an early classic one? I really don't know, but it seems fairly close.
Consider this: It's ahead of Windows on most high-end stuff, now, and has been on-and-off for a while.
MacOS had a speedy jump in progress with OS-10, but that was also open-source development (BSD base, partially open still) so that's just an agreeing argument.
As for commercial Unixes, I haven't a clue, so I won't talk about them.
gcc: I haven't a clue. I really don't. Just noting it because you did.
For my own example, MPlayer: MPlayer started about the same time that media players got big on other systems. Without having any source information for codecs and so-such, it's stayed just as far along technically. Ever since it's been around, I've been able to watch things about equally well under any OS, except DVDs.
The main area I see OSS lacking is in interfaces, which is why MPlayer is such a good example. Good God, is that a bad interface. Not the worst, no, but it tries. I'd say that is a part of the 'better' thing.
OSS is good at doing most of stuff, just not at getting EVERYTHING together. For a lot of things they do the technical end while the interface lags, or they do the interface and it's got a buggy back-end, or they make something really good but it is so messy inside it needs a total re-write to add anything.
I don't know how that compares with the problems of closed source, as I've never worked on it, but those are just the way I see the issues.