I am not sure this is so funny. Not so long ago this sort of a joke would be something told with a tone of moral superiority about the old USSR, where the tourists were told, half-in-jest, to speak into the flower arrangements on the hotel table.
Why reach that far back? Didn't the Metro police just execute someone, gangland style, on the Subway for mere being suspected a "terrorist"? What happened to that? Was anyone held accountable for putting 6 bullets in the unarmed, held down on the ground by 4 "officers" guy's head? Me thinks not.
But... look, look at your telly! There is an Osama Bin Laden under every bed in London! Quick, more cameras! More draconian laws! More power to the "anti-terrorist" squads! More rank stupidity! Before its too late and the sheeple notice what we are doing!
Step 3: Try to figure out why the fuck Linux keeps deciding randomly (on reboot) that/dev/sda1,/sdb1,/sdc1 are different fucking drives. I'd set my data drives the way I wanted them thanks, I don't need Linux deciding that for some reason/media/Video1 should now map to THE FUCKING WINDOWS PARTITION. After two hours of hunting, I find the barely-documented "UUID" setup... why the fuck does
Linux not use that by default?
Welcome to "hotplug" (plus udev etc). Thanks to endless whining from users about "auto-detecting" stuff ("Look Windows does it!") we now too have the Plug-and-Pray subsystem, behaving pretty much like its Windows counterpart, i.e. randomly.
Why, you ask? Simple: various pieces of hardware have (for all practical purposes - randomly) changing times required for them to initialize. Which changes the order of detection depending on if you are warm booting, cold booting, if you turned some unrelated piece of hardware off, etc and so on, which combined with "dynamic"/dev subsystems cause the effects you described.
The UUID hack is an attempt to bring some sanity back into the Plug-and-Pray process, but it is just that, an after-thought hack. Desperate measures really.
Wait wait wait... this man's GOVERNMENT is making him use the same dish to eat and shit, and GOOGLE is the bad guy?!?
The fact that the man's government is composed of a bunch of a religious fuckwits and general imbeciles (as sadly are governments everywhere to varying degrees) is given.
But it is Google who is prancing around and posturing in a certain way while shoveling heaps of corporate PR image-polishing bullshit and slick "mottos" like "Do no evil" or some such nonsense on to the public. And some silly people actually fall for it, rather then realizing that Google like all the other mega-corporations is an amoral entity concerned solely with acquisition of money by any means they can get away with, period. The rest is just smiley-faced corporate bullshit salesmanship. And occasional examples, such as this one, show the falsehood of the corporate propaganda with crystal clarity, exposing corporations for what they really are: modern feudal fiefdoms.
Coercion does not have to be physical, in fact most coercion that people experience in relationships and the like is based on manipulating someone's priorities or goals to more closely match your own. It is not typically abusive and it is common enough that most people would recognize themselves doing it at times to make relationships work more in their favor.
Accepting this as a legal definition of "coercion" would result in legal wonders such as me claiming that Coca-cola advertising combined with social engineering by this corporation coerced me to drink Coke. I'll sue for $10 Bazillion.
Or are you perhaps going to apply some creative double standards and define your "coercion" as only applicable against children? You can't have it both ways you know, if such subtle coercion exists as a valid "abuse" to be prosecuted, then all of the worlds advertising companies, high-schools (peer pressure), Internet and pretty much anything that can be construed as "manipulating someone's priorities" is fair game.
Abusive relationships do not use simple manipulation to achieve their goals. They do not simply guilt someone into doing something. They systematically debase the individual, make them believe that they are not capable of choosing to do things without first consulting them and cut off any supportive relationships they might have.
Again, this is so nebulous as to be used as a mumbo-jumbo excuse for pretty much everything that a person does you do not agree with. "Oh, sure, she swears up and down that it was her choice but she is out of her mind, clearly she had to be 'systematically debased', poor thing, let's ignore all she says because we just know better...."
This very dangerous line of illogic has lead to persecutions of whole bunch of people for "satanic abuse" of poor-little-children back in the 80s. With a wee help from "therapists" looking for "systematic debasement"....
I hope you realize that this nonsense you are trying to conjure here has only one purpose: to be the "silly putty of prosecution" whereby one can custom shape the "abuse" to whatever "perpetrator" happens to be the hapless target of the prosecutors zeal. It is the equivalent of reading tea-leaves and chicken entrails and making life-and-death judicial decisions upon them.
I agree with the current idea of a strict age limit that assures that the vast majority of the individuals involved will be able to make decisions about their sexual partners and activities. 18 seems like a reasonable age.
Which leads to marvelously imbecilic conundrums like having 17 year old kids rotting in jail for making "child porn" (of themselves) and "child abuse" (the child being the "perpetrator"), complete with life-long listing in a "child molester" databases. I assume you also wholeheartedly agree with these because they are a straightforward logical outcome of these insane laws. Not to mention that the "child", oh so abused sexually, is quite old enough to enlist in the Army and go meet exciting people abroad and kill them. Brainless religious nitwits who make these laws will be the end of us all.
Reading all your replies makes me wonder if you are trying to justify something. I mean...
Sure, once your arguments are shown as illogical, why not move onto trying some personal attacks? Pedophile? Anti-Semite? "Islamofascist"? Terrorist? I have been accused of all of these and many more. You would have to get creative not to bore me.
For your information, I defend these hated by the frothing-at-their-snouts mob positions precisely because other people are intimidated by this sort of thuggery. I am not. Do not bother trying it.
I really can if it is of their own free will, some of my friends growing up worked the sex industry I don't think less of them because of it. The thing is 90% of them did it t
yawn. guys like me aren't your problem. your future cellmate is
LOL. It is precisely because I lead a lifestyle which prevents your kind of cretins from framing me for anything children related (absolutely no contact with any children for many, many years now) that I speak out on these matters. You two-bit thugs are quite powerless against me no matter what you would try. Try intimidating someone else, you fascist tool, because you will find no luck here.
blah blah blah. we get it man, you're obsessed with the idea of fucking 12 year olds.
how about instead of posting this mental diarrhea, you just hop a plane to thailand and pedo it up?
Just as expected. Yet another Neanderthal drugs his knuckles into the discussion and belches his "opinion", consisting solely of "Yous be not thunking like me, Ugh! Yous be Pedophile! ugh! Ugh! UGH!"
I rank your kind of moron right behind the "Anti-semite!"-screaming harpies inhabiting the Likud party, the "Terrorists! Terrorists everywhere! You must be one!"-braying "homeland security" thugs and the "Thief! Thief!"-whining "Intellectual Property" peddlers. Also right after stale feces.
For sex, you can probably break it down into "knows what sex is", "knows what sex can lead to" (the informed part) and "still wants to have sex in light of that knowledge" (the consent). And you'll quickly find that these aren't things that require special insight or wisdom in order to grasp. If you can retain knowledge, make rational conclusions based on that knowledge, and form an opinion based on those conclusions, then you're capable of giving informed consent to just about anything.
Of which, of course, all the religious nuts and power hungry "Protect the Children!!!" hysteria mongers will have no part of. Clarity and reason are something both groups despise with passion, since their entire reason for being is exploitation of various base animalistic instincts... very much like those of sex... but dealing with inducing unthinking hate and rage against some scapegoats or activities their religions deem "forbidden". The real crime (but which even the bone-headed maniacs cannot dare officially openly proclaim) is in actuality not feeling guilty enough about sex.
That is why your, quite reasonable, approach is likely to encounter only bulging-eyed loathing by this group of "child defenders". The fact that there is a lot of money to be made by them on this and a lot of power to be had does not help either.
Expect to be labeled a "pedophile" and the like any minute now.
The hooker in question was, according to grandparent, 14 years old and had been pimped by her mother since she was 12. This strongly suggests that she was not a free-willed prostitute but rather forced to the job by her mother. Furthermore, it also sounds like a violation of child labor laws.
There is of course a glaring problem with this reasoning: a 14 year old locked up in some basement and abused is a world apart from a 14 year old who goes to hotels (i.e. places full of people and equipped with telephones) and makes no attempts whatsoever to call for help either to staff, patrons of the hotel or just by calling. That is why the "grandparent's" theory is shot full of holes. What did the mother use to stop her from calling for help? "Don't do it or your stuffed toys get it"?
The truth is likely that the grandparent cannot simply imagine that her own grand-daughter would like being a hooker (porn-star, pop singer, [insert some "icky" profession here]) instead of a grocery store clerk. "She is such a nice girl... She must have been forced to do such Un-Christian thing!!! Waaaah!"
I know that this is a distinct probability since recently police in Japan broke apart a prostitution ring of 12 year old school girls... run by the very same 12 year olds, complete with a website and a system of bookings based on cell phone SMS messages, which came as a great shock to their wealthy middle-class parents. Their reason: not enough money for expensive brand name designer stuff... and they liked doing it.
Also child labour laws are meant to protect children from being forced to work, not when they are coming up with a way to employ themselves.
Please do not confuse prostitutes - who work for themselves out of their free will - and slaves - who work for their masters due to coercion. There are already enough moral police types trying to make prostitution illegal (it isn't here in Finland) in the name of protecting women, who use exactly this kind of fallacious arguments.
If the 14 was found to be forced indeed (kept on a chain, threatened with violence, etc), you got a case... against her mother. Not the John, who had no means of finding out (maybe except in the case of the chain thing...)
How is a 14 year old a hooker? Would it be alright if she was 10 years old? What about 3? We have laws governing the age of consent for sex why do some states treat underage sex workers as adults, like they are the ones that committed the crime?
Then the issue is that of consent not of the prostitution. If you are going to make laws against "abuse" you must first determine that the "abused" is not a willing party to abuse. All the laws made simply based on some idiotic age test are demonstrably ridiculous as many people can be apparently incapable of coherent thought way after their supposed "maturity" and some others are fully capable of reason well before.
Therefore in your example, the issues are of a consent and of an ability to give a coherent consent. When such a test is applied, the odds of a 3 year old passing it are nil, 10 year old questionable, 13 year old a distinct possibility.
So the issue is, again, consent and an ability to reason, not some imbecilic, religiously motivated hysteria about "sex" and "think of the children!!" which is precisely what the present laws are all based on, with the inevitable and destructive to the very fabric of a democratic society side-effects of such numskull-drivel mounting daily.
I am sorry but neither one of these crimes are thought crimes. They both deserve prison terms and life long sex offender status.
As soon as you explain the reasoning behind your term "underage" in terms which are devoid of knee-jerk reactionism (that means, amongst other things, no circular arguments in the vain of "but there is a law against it!") and as soon as you explain why prostitution is illegal using the same method, I will agree with you. I am expecting this shortly after you provide a definitive Grand Theory Of Everything in physics which will be celebrated by bunnies and pink unicorns dancing in the streets and pigs forming the Porcine Aviation Association.
What's wrong with this picture is that both men went to jail at all, one for doing it with the hooker and the other for looking at dirty pictures. The laws against prostitution are illogical, unjustifiable, unenforceable, laws against "icky" pictures and "incorrect thoughts" are illogical, unjustifiable and unenforceable and laws against "child abuse" where the "child" in question gets about all over town to pick up Johns are equally illogical, unjustifiable and unenforceable in the long run. It is a classic example of the results of allowing religious, "moral" and other kinds of brainless blowhard nuts to write "laws" based on their "gut feelings" and with no provision for reason or practicability.
My counter-argument would be that just because you use Windows or develop on Windows doesn't mean that you don't support open-source or openness in general.
But it is counter-productive in the light of the supposed goals of the project. The Windows (or OS X) platforms do remove to a large degree an ability of a kid to examine how things work under the hood and also decrease the amount of space available for all the other tools. Also the development tools themselves for Windows are far from free and also gigantic when it comes to storage. Microsoft Visual C++ or.NET tool-chains are around 500MB in size!
There are educational tools, graphics editing applications, and any number of things that can be included with Windows for the OLPC, and the solutions can be open source.
But they will not be the dominant tools for the platform, all of which are super-commercial, hyper-expensive and again, gigantic in size. Windows + OpenOffice or GIMP are not a "natural" combination run by 90% of users, Windows + MS Office + Photoshop are. So you have gained nothing again at all, but only lost disk space, flexibility and openness.
Additionally, since dual-booting appears to be an option, kids can have the best of both worlds.
That gets you even less. A dual booted system would have to contain something useful on both OSes. That means that Linux will come with everything the kid needs and Windows with... either copies of what the Linux has or the proverbial bupkis, or even worse, crippled ad-ware "trial" versions of US corporato-crapware, full versions of which the kids could never even dream to afford. What is the gain again? And do you really believe that Microsoft, having in effect taken over the OLPC project, will now allow a situation where Windows will be put in such a comparative dis-advantage? No way. They will force the removal of dual-boot and push for inclusion of commercial cripple-ware instead of open tools. And now they will succeed.
I understand that XP doesn't come with these tools preinstalled, but I believe that would be more cause for concern over Microsoft's monopolistic power. Even if they endorsed GIMP and distributed it as part of their OS, Adobe would go bonkers.
That is why all of these companies will be pushing for crippleware to be pre-loaded and thus taking all the available space. There will be no "dual boot" (other then on paper and in theory - an option no bribed governmental official from the developing world will opt for) and no gain for the kids. The purpose of the project has now been hijacked by Microsoft (and through them by the other US corps) to become an advertising/indoctrination platform with next to zero "educational" value.
It is a complete fiasco now because Negroponte in essence is offering an aura of "legitimacy" to a base, naked attempt at essentially spamming the schools of the developed world with US corporate "culture" (at the taxpayers expense no less - as they will all take "educational" and "foreign aid" tax exemptions and what not) and thus ensuring that US corporations, Microsoft particularly, get to dominate any future these kids have. Expansion of their horizons or freedom to learn have been sacrificed at the altar of limitless corporate greed and imperial ambitions of the US corporations.
Do I think the world needs to use Linux more? Absolutely. Do I think that the OLPC is the best way to do it? No.
I think the point whizzed above your head at orbital altitude and velocity.
Linux has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with this, it is the openness which Linux simply represents.
The whole point of the project was supposed to be enabling kids to learn to use/program computers and so the whole environment was supposed to provide them with a complete set of tools for such tasks. Putting XP on this thing adds nothing whatsoever to the value of such a laptop as XP not only takes away a degree of openness but it offers none of the other elements which are part of pretty much every Linux distribution: educational tools, text and graphics editing applications, development tools etc etc etc all in the storage space in which XP can barely fit itself.
So by essentially totally selling out, Negroponte has in effect killed the project and turned it into a glorified advertising campaign for Microsoft while at the same time dropping all the core objectives the project was supposed to stand for. The winners are: Microsoft, the corrupt, retarded governmental official in the developed countries who are taking kickbacks from Microsoft to push for Windows, regardless of what it actually means for the project and the losers are: the kids.
Also note that by doing this the OLPC now has become simply yet another low cost low power laptop vendor and as ongoing commoditization of hardware progresses apace, they will soon find themselves competing with the likes of ASUS who will be able to deliver more features for less money. The only thing of course ASUS and other low-cost brands won't do is to offer all the other aspects of the project, which Negroponte himself no longer gives a fuck about, and which were what made OLPC different.
Microsoft wins, some crooks get richer, all the kids in the developing world (and probably some in the Western world) lose. Simple as that.
Yeah... damn that first Congress of the United States for passing border search provisions for import/export duties enforcement. They spat all over the intent of the founding fathers for their own dictatorial purposes!
You mean... that even the people who founded this country thought there were legitimate exceptions to rules? Gasp! Say it aint so!
This would probably be a good time to remind you that all of those dictators/juntas/oligarchies of the past have used the very institutions of the democracies they took over to pass their laws. It was done that way in order to give the laws an aura of "legitimacy". Even Saddam Hussein pretended to be a head of a republic, complete with a law making congress-like assembly, which passed laws with 99-100% consensus... in favor of whatever he wanted. The US Congress, by a mere virtue of being set up based on the principles of the US Constitution, is in no way automatically in alignment with the ideas behind the Republic itself and is as corruptible as people of the republic and those who they elect are.
Subsequently, the first Congress came immediately under pressure from the quarters of what we call today "special interests", in this case merchants wanting to keep foreign competitors out. And the merchants won (although their victory resembled nothing of the todays totalitarian border activities and was confined merely to trade and duties) thus chipping a bit out of the very republic itself, then still brand new and ideologically strong. A chink which others then diligently enlarged and deepened for their purposes. Some centuries later, a myriad of dents, chipped and gouged cavities, and outright holes right through later and the thing is a battered wreck which no one from that time of the first Congress would have even recognized, in many cases the very laws and amendments passed by the Congress directly contradicting and nullifying some of the core principles of the whole original notion.
It is however a testimony to the strength of these original ideas that it took so long to ruin it and that even in its pitiful state it still limps along, although its final days, most likely in some fascist explosion, are plain to see for anyone but the most die-hard believers with a particularly developed skill of self-delusion.
It's called the border search exception. Like it or not, it's been upheld by the Supreme and federal courts.
Gotta love them "exceptions"! I believe every dictator's in history entire reign was always one "exception" after another to the laws of the democracies they took over. Emergency and all that, you understand...
LOL. Do you actually read the stuff you link to? From your own link (the first line of the article): "The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL)..."
Using the GPL does not in any way mean you are using GNU derived work. You would be using a license created by the GNU project however. There is a not so subtle difference between the two.
Really? Skipping for the moment the whole ideology of the GPL, an actual text of the license is included in each GPL-licensed project (or is supposed to anyway).
The "subtle" difference is that you got caught in your own sophistry and are now attempting to slither from under it, complete with pretending that the links you post somehow support your argument while in fact they help demolish it. And that is neglecting the fact that the original poster I replied to correctly saw GPL as synonymous with GNU.
The very availability of a vast majority of GPL licensed code is a direct result of the existence of the GPL itself and thus the GNU project. In the absence of this project the code would have never been made public as the developers would never choose another license with less protections of their contributions (assuming no GNU-ideologically-alike project taking GNU's place)
Just because something is GPL doesn't automatically mean that GNU made it.
The GPL license is an integral part of the GNU project, it was specifically designed for it. All GPL code has a relationship (a license called the GNU Public License = GPL, you did notice the word GNU in it?) to the GNU project. If you are using GPL, you are using GNU derived, or inspired work. Period.
As I said, many embedded Linux systems contain _no_ GNU tools or libraries. This is nothing to do with BSD, but it _is_ a common misconception, even if it's not what you meant to say.
The GPL license itself is a product of FSF/GNU. The GNU project proper is only a fraction of a larger, GNU derived, body of GPL licensed code.
There are quite a number of embedded Linux systems (generally busybox based) which run with no GNU libraries or tools whatsoever, and plenty which run with only a few.
Err.... BusyBox is licensed under GPL and is either statically or dynamically linked against libc6 or one of its derivatives such as uLibc (also GPL). What was your point exactly?
If you have a GNU/Linux system, remove every project created or maintained by the GNU project. Then reboot. When you have it working, you can call it whatever you want, I suppose.
You forgot that these anti-GPL jerks are also compiling their stuff with GCC. You should add "compile with a non-GNU compiler" to your requirement list!
If Linus used the BSD licesnse then the BSD License would get all the press.
You got it completely backwards.
It is the GPL license which induced a lot of people to contribute to the Linux kernel instead of a BSD-licensed... BSD system, which predates Linux by decades.
The fact that because the BSD license did not guarantee that one's contribution will not end up being sold back to the contributor by some greedy fuck, is what turned a majority of contributors away from BSD and other similar licenses. It is why a vast majority of FOSS is licensed under the GPL.
Linux sucess was the fact that it was a free(as in beer)/stable Unix Clone with a good development support structure.
See above. If it were not for GPL, a "most recent" Linux kernel would be still a version 0.6 curiosum found in cob-web covered corners of Usenet and the most widely known Linux-alike system would be BSD with a fraction of a following of today's Linux. It is the GPL which made all the difference. And we have an empirical proof for that: BSD and its forks.
FSF just went and took credit and telling people to put GNU in front of Linux's name, just so they can get some creds off the Linus and other developers work.
Skipping for the moment the fact that the Linux kernel is developed using the GNU toolchain and that no Linux system can even boot without a whole core set of GNU libraries and tools, it is the GPL which allowed for the growth of Linux. If linux were to be re-licensed to MIT or BSD today, probably (judging by their words on LKML) 80% kernel developers would drop out of the project instantaneously.
Granted the GPL License did allow developers feel comfortable about writting code for Linux to expand it but for the most part giving money to the FSF is just paying people to Whine more vs. getting real jobs.
Yes! How dare these bastards stop you from taking their shit and selling it for your profit! I mean the chutzpa they have! Lazy unemployed beggars all!
Still, it all amounts to pidley-squat compared to what is going on in the US. There are many MPs out there in Ottawa who merely got on foot and went door to door campaigning, with next to zero campaign financing.
Where would we get the money needed for an election campaign? They only seem to be handing it out to shills, shysters and despots these days.
Thanks,
Association of Intelligent, Competent, and Caring People
Err. This sounds like a great plea... until you realize that in Canada the elections are publicly funded.
But you are absolutely wrong. Capitalism is how the "system" controls the most greedy unscrupulous sociopaths.
Andrew Carnegie, Jay Cooke, Charles Crocker, George Hearst, Andrew Mellon, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, George Mortimer Pullman, etc etc etc. And today Bill Gates and crew. And I am skipping of course Europe, where later Messieurs Krupp, Messerschmidt and buddies had so much fun. Read some history dude before spewing such horrid nonsense.
The libertarian form of capitalism that I advocate would be far more decentralized than what we currently have.
Which means that it would have been far less powerful in restraining such individuals. Decentralized means that a rich enough individual can overpower such a weak "state" in every of its decentralized localities one at a time, instead of having to contend with a strong central power. Dude, there are corporations and individuals out there who already challenge whole present nations in military power and wealth. You want to give them even bigger advantage?! Logic is not your strong suite, is it?
Unscrupulous sociopaths tend to prefer centralized forms of power, government, etc.
Which they create out of the ashes of weak, defenseless, decentralized utopias they have conquered one small bit at a time. As they always have. Again, read some history dude.
Libertarian socialism therefore is the exact opposite order, more similar to a tribal command order than a totally centralized world government with a king on top.
Oh yes! Because "tribal command order" had fared oooh-soo-well after coming in contact with the ruthless power of various European monarchies, all over the world! Hey, for a brilliant example, look at this thing called the North America! Ruled today by a bunch of Apache and Suix tribes, no?
Libertarian capitalism does not mean corporatism.
It is just a recent fad. One does not need the (presently convenient) vehicle of a corporation to build a kingdom on the ashes of some tribal fantasy.
Currently we have a corrupt corporate monarchy, but not because of libertarianism or capitalism, because in absence of either of these two systems you still have the scum rising to the top. This could happen just as easily under communism.
That is why the problem is prevention of corruption and the loss of control over governments, not how small and how decentralized they are. By weakening them, you simply create a stage for creation of alternative power structures controlled by the scum, which replace such weak governments in their function. See also under: Somalia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq etc etc.
The reason this happens is because of centralization of power, be it through corporate monopoly, duopoly, corporate welfare, or state run corporations, they all lead to centralized power in fewer and fewer hands.
Which without the government occurs simply by more direct means and way faster. Read some history dude, really. You are apparently totally ignorant of it and think yourself the first who ever came up with such claptrap. It has been already tried, repeatedly, and it blew chunks.
Even our federal reserve by design a private and extremely centralized power structure. It's centralization which is the problem, not ideology, not whether or not you use capitalism. It's the client/server, slave/master model, that is the source of all of these problems.
Sigh. What in the world is wrong with you "libertarian" types as to make you so blind to the illogic of your insane stance?! Centralization of power will occur! It is the natural consequence of the human animalistic psyche. The only choice you have is to as to who does the centralizing and how! What you apparently
Slashdot Mirror
I am not sure this is so funny. Not so long ago this sort of a joke would be something told with a tone of moral superiority about the old USSR, where the tourists were told, half-in-jest, to speak into the flower arrangements on the hotel table.
Oh how far the mighty have fallen....
And how quickly!
Why reach that far back? Didn't the Metro police just execute someone, gangland style, on the Subway for mere being suspected a "terrorist"? What happened to that? Was anyone held accountable for putting 6 bullets in the unarmed, held down on the ground by 4 "officers" guy's head? Me thinks not.
But ... look, look at your telly! There is an Osama Bin Laden under every bed in London! Quick, more cameras! More draconian laws! More power to the "anti-terrorist" squads! More rank stupidity! Before its too late and the sheeple notice what we are doing!
Mr.Orwell! A telephone call for Mr.Orwell ....
If only they made the metal handle easier to grasp and that wooden smashy end less prone to breaking ....
Welcome to "hotplug" (plus udev etc). Thanks to endless whining from users about "auto-detecting" stuff ("Look Windows does it!") we now too have the Plug-and-Pray subsystem, behaving pretty much like its Windows counterpart, i.e. randomly.
Why, you ask? Simple: various pieces of hardware have (for all practical purposes - randomly) changing times required for them to initialize. Which changes the order of detection depending on if you are warm booting, cold booting, if you turned some unrelated piece of hardware off, etc and so on, which combined with "dynamic" /dev subsystems cause the effects you described.
The UUID hack is an attempt to bring some sanity back into the Plug-and-Pray process, but it is just that, an after-thought hack. Desperate measures really.
The fact that the man's government is composed of a bunch of a religious fuckwits and general imbeciles (as sadly are governments everywhere to varying degrees) is given.
But it is Google who is prancing around and posturing in a certain way while shoveling heaps of corporate PR image-polishing bullshit and slick "mottos" like "Do no evil" or some such nonsense on to the public. And some silly people actually fall for it, rather then realizing that Google like all the other mega-corporations is an amoral entity concerned solely with acquisition of money by any means they can get away with, period. The rest is just smiley-faced corporate bullshit salesmanship. And occasional examples, such as this one, show the falsehood of the corporate propaganda with crystal clarity, exposing corporations for what they really are: modern feudal fiefdoms.
That is the point.
Accepting this as a legal definition of "coercion" would result in legal wonders such as me claiming that Coca-cola advertising combined with social engineering by this corporation coerced me to drink Coke. I'll sue for $10 Bazillion.
Or are you perhaps going to apply some creative double standards and define your "coercion" as only applicable against children? You can't have it both ways you know, if such subtle coercion exists as a valid "abuse" to be prosecuted, then all of the worlds advertising companies, high-schools (peer pressure), Internet and pretty much anything that can be construed as "manipulating someone's priorities" is fair game.
Again, this is so nebulous as to be used as a mumbo-jumbo excuse for pretty much everything that a person does you do not agree with. "Oh, sure, she swears up and down that it was her choice but she is out of her mind, clearly she had to be 'systematically debased', poor thing, let's ignore all she says because we just know better ...."
This very dangerous line of illogic has lead to persecutions of whole bunch of people for "satanic abuse" of poor-little-children back in the 80s. With a wee help from "therapists" looking for "systematic debasement"....
I hope you realize that this nonsense you are trying to conjure here has only one purpose: to be the "silly putty of prosecution" whereby one can custom shape the "abuse" to whatever "perpetrator" happens to be the hapless target of the prosecutors zeal. It is the equivalent of reading tea-leaves and chicken entrails and making life-and-death judicial decisions upon them.
Which leads to marvelously imbecilic conundrums like having 17 year old kids rotting in jail for making "child porn" (of themselves) and "child abuse" (the child being the "perpetrator"), complete with life-long listing in a "child molester" databases. I assume you also wholeheartedly agree with these because they are a straightforward logical outcome of these insane laws. Not to mention that the "child", oh so abused sexually, is quite old enough to enlist in the Army and go meet exciting people abroad and kill them. Brainless religious nitwits who make these laws will be the end of us all.
Sure, once your arguments are shown as illogical, why not move onto trying some personal attacks? Pedophile? Anti-Semite? "Islamofascist"? Terrorist? I have been accused of all of these and many more. You would have to get creative not to bore me.
For your information, I defend these hated by the frothing-at-their-snouts mob positions precisely because other people are intimidated by this sort of thuggery. I am not. Do not bother trying it.
LOL. It is precisely because I lead a lifestyle which prevents your kind of cretins from framing me for anything children related (absolutely no contact with any children for many, many years now) that I speak out on these matters. You two-bit thugs are quite powerless against me no matter what you would try. Try intimidating someone else, you fascist tool, because you will find no luck here.
Just as expected. Yet another Neanderthal drugs his knuckles into the discussion and belches his "opinion", consisting solely of "Yous be not thunking like me, Ugh! Yous be Pedophile! ugh! Ugh! UGH!"
I rank your kind of moron right behind the "Anti-semite!"-screaming harpies inhabiting the Likud party, the "Terrorists! Terrorists everywhere! You must be one!"-braying "homeland security" thugs and the "Thief! Thief!"-whining "Intellectual Property" peddlers. Also right after stale feces.
Of which, of course, all the religious nuts and power hungry "Protect the Children!!!" hysteria mongers will have no part of. Clarity and reason are something both groups despise with passion, since their entire reason for being is exploitation of various base animalistic instincts ... very much like those of sex ... but dealing with inducing unthinking hate and rage against some scapegoats or activities their religions deem "forbidden". The real crime (but which even the bone-headed maniacs cannot dare officially openly proclaim) is in actuality not feeling guilty enough about sex.
That is why your, quite reasonable, approach is likely to encounter only bulging-eyed loathing by this group of "child defenders". The fact that there is a lot of money to be made by them on this and a lot of power to be had does not help either.
Expect to be labeled a "pedophile" and the like any minute now.
There is of course a glaring problem with this reasoning: a 14 year old locked up in some basement and abused is a world apart from a 14 year old who goes to hotels (i.e. places full of people and equipped with telephones) and makes no attempts whatsoever to call for help either to staff, patrons of the hotel or just by calling. That is why the "grandparent's" theory is shot full of holes. What did the mother use to stop her from calling for help? "Don't do it or your stuffed toys get it"?
The truth is likely that the grandparent cannot simply imagine that her own grand-daughter would like being a hooker (porn-star, pop singer, [insert some "icky" profession here]) instead of a grocery store clerk. "She is such a nice girl... She must have been forced to do such Un-Christian thing!!! Waaaah!"
I know that this is a distinct probability since recently police in Japan broke apart a prostitution ring of 12 year old school girls ... run by the very same 12 year olds, complete with a website and a system of bookings based on cell phone SMS messages, which came as a great shock to their wealthy middle-class parents. Their reason: not enough money for expensive brand name designer stuff ... and they liked doing it.
Also child labour laws are meant to protect children from being forced to work, not when they are coming up with a way to employ themselves.
If the 14 was found to be forced indeed (kept on a chain, threatened with violence, etc), you got a case ... against her mother. Not the John, who had no means of finding out (maybe except in the case of the chain thing ...)
Guess who they locked up first?
Then the issue is that of consent not of the prostitution. If you are going to make laws against "abuse" you must first determine that the "abused" is not a willing party to abuse. All the laws made simply based on some idiotic age test are demonstrably ridiculous as many people can be apparently incapable of coherent thought way after their supposed "maturity" and some others are fully capable of reason well before.
Therefore in your example, the issues are of a consent and of an ability to give a coherent consent. When such a test is applied, the odds of a 3 year old passing it are nil, 10 year old questionable, 13 year old a distinct possibility.
So the issue is, again, consent and an ability to reason, not some imbecilic, religiously motivated hysteria about "sex" and "think of the children!!" which is precisely what the present laws are all based on, with the inevitable and destructive to the very fabric of a democratic society side-effects of such numskull-drivel mounting daily.
As soon as you explain the reasoning behind your term "underage" in terms which are devoid of knee-jerk reactionism (that means, amongst other things, no circular arguments in the vain of "but there is a law against it!") and as soon as you explain why prostitution is illegal using the same method, I will agree with you. I am expecting this shortly after you provide a definitive Grand Theory Of Everything in physics which will be celebrated by bunnies and pink unicorns dancing in the streets and pigs forming the Porcine Aviation Association.
What's wrong with this picture is that both men went to jail at all, one for doing it with the hooker and the other for looking at dirty pictures. The laws against prostitution are illogical, unjustifiable, unenforceable, laws against "icky" pictures and "incorrect thoughts" are illogical, unjustifiable and unenforceable and laws against "child abuse" where the "child" in question gets about all over town to pick up Johns are equally illogical, unjustifiable and unenforceable in the long run. It is a classic example of the results of allowing religious, "moral" and other kinds of brainless blowhard nuts to write "laws" based on their "gut feelings" and with no provision for reason or practicability.
That is what is wrong with the picture.
But it is counter-productive in the light of the supposed goals of the project. The Windows (or OS X) platforms do remove to a large degree an ability of a kid to examine how things work under the hood and also decrease the amount of space available for all the other tools. Also the development tools themselves for Windows are far from free and also gigantic when it comes to storage. Microsoft Visual C++ or .NET tool-chains are around 500MB in size!
But they will not be the dominant tools for the platform, all of which are super-commercial, hyper-expensive and again, gigantic in size. Windows + OpenOffice or GIMP are not a "natural" combination run by 90% of users, Windows + MS Office + Photoshop are. So you have gained nothing again at all, but only lost disk space, flexibility and openness.
That gets you even less. A dual booted system would have to contain something useful on both OSes. That means that Linux will come with everything the kid needs and Windows with ... either copies of what the Linux has or the proverbial bupkis, or even worse, crippled ad-ware "trial" versions of US corporato-crapware, full versions of which the kids could never even dream to afford. What is the gain again? And do you really believe that Microsoft, having in effect taken over the OLPC project, will now allow a situation where Windows will be put in such a comparative dis-advantage? No way. They will force the removal of dual-boot and push for inclusion of commercial cripple-ware instead of open tools. And now they will succeed.
That is why all of these companies will be pushing for crippleware to be pre-loaded and thus taking all the available space. There will be no "dual boot" (other then on paper and in theory - an option no bribed governmental official from the developing world will opt for) and no gain for the kids. The purpose of the project has now been hijacked by Microsoft (and through them by the other US corps) to become an advertising/indoctrination platform with next to zero "educational" value.
It is a complete fiasco now because Negroponte in essence is offering an aura of "legitimacy" to a base, naked attempt at essentially spamming the schools of the developed world with US corporate "culture" (at the taxpayers expense no less - as they will all take "educational" and "foreign aid" tax exemptions and what not) and thus ensuring that US corporations, Microsoft particularly, get to dominate any future these kids have. Expansion of their horizons or freedom to learn have been sacrificed at the altar of limitless corporate greed and imperial ambitions of the US corporations.
I think the point whizzed above your head at orbital altitude and velocity.
Linux has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with this, it is the openness which Linux simply represents.
The whole point of the project was supposed to be enabling kids to learn to use/program computers and so the whole environment was supposed to provide them with a complete set of tools for such tasks. Putting XP on this thing adds nothing whatsoever to the value of such a laptop as XP not only takes away a degree of openness but it offers none of the other elements which are part of pretty much every Linux distribution: educational tools, text and graphics editing applications, development tools etc etc etc all in the storage space in which XP can barely fit itself.
So by essentially totally selling out, Negroponte has in effect killed the project and turned it into a glorified advertising campaign for Microsoft while at the same time dropping all the core objectives the project was supposed to stand for. The winners are: Microsoft, the corrupt, retarded governmental official in the developed countries who are taking kickbacks from Microsoft to push for Windows, regardless of what it actually means for the project and the losers are: the kids.
Also note that by doing this the OLPC now has become simply yet another low cost low power laptop vendor and as ongoing commoditization of hardware progresses apace, they will soon find themselves competing with the likes of ASUS who will be able to deliver more features for less money. The only thing of course ASUS and other low-cost brands won't do is to offer all the other aspects of the project, which Negroponte himself no longer gives a fuck about, and which were what made OLPC different.
Microsoft wins, some crooks get richer, all the kids in the developing world (and probably some in the Western world) lose. Simple as that.
This would probably be a good time to remind you that all of those dictators/juntas/oligarchies of the past have used the very institutions of the democracies they took over to pass their laws. It was done that way in order to give the laws an aura of "legitimacy". Even Saddam Hussein pretended to be a head of a republic, complete with a law making congress-like assembly, which passed laws with 99-100% consensus ... in favor of whatever he wanted. The US Congress, by a mere virtue of being set up based on the principles of the US Constitution, is in no way automatically in alignment with the ideas behind the Republic itself and is as corruptible as people of the republic and those who they elect are.
Subsequently, the first Congress came immediately under pressure from the quarters of what we call today "special interests", in this case merchants wanting to keep foreign competitors out. And the merchants won (although their victory resembled nothing of the todays totalitarian border activities and was confined merely to trade and duties) thus chipping a bit out of the very republic itself, then still brand new and ideologically strong. A chink which others then diligently enlarged and deepened for their purposes. Some centuries later, a myriad of dents, chipped and gouged cavities, and outright holes right through later and the thing is a battered wreck which no one from that time of the first Congress would have even recognized, in many cases the very laws and amendments passed by the Congress directly contradicting and nullifying some of the core principles of the whole original notion.
It is however a testimony to the strength of these original ideas that it took so long to ruin it and that even in its pitiful state it still limps along, although its final days, most likely in some fascist explosion, are plain to see for anyone but the most die-hard believers with a particularly developed skill of self-delusion.
Gotta love them "exceptions"! I believe every dictator's in history entire reign was always one "exception" after another to the laws of the democracies they took over. Emergency and all that, you understand...
LOL. Do you actually read the stuff you link to? From your own link (the first line of the article): "The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) ..."
Really? Skipping for the moment the whole ideology of the GPL, an actual text of the license is included in each GPL-licensed project (or is supposed to anyway).
The "subtle" difference is that you got caught in your own sophistry and are now attempting to slither from under it, complete with pretending that the links you post somehow support your argument while in fact they help demolish it. And that is neglecting the fact that the original poster I replied to correctly saw GPL as synonymous with GNU.
The very availability of a vast majority of GPL licensed code is a direct result of the existence of the GPL itself and thus the GNU project. In the absence of this project the code would have never been made public as the developers would never choose another license with less protections of their contributions (assuming no GNU-ideologically-alike project taking GNU's place)
The GPL license is an integral part of the GNU project, it was specifically designed for it. All GPL code has a relationship (a license called the GNU Public License = GPL, you did notice the word GNU in it?) to the GNU project. If you are using GPL, you are using GNU derived, or inspired work. Period.
The GPL license itself is a product of FSF/GNU. The GNU project proper is only a fraction of a larger, GNU derived, body of GPL licensed code.
Err.... BusyBox is licensed under GPL and is either statically or dynamically linked against libc6 or one of its derivatives such as uLibc (also GPL). What was your point exactly?
You forgot that these anti-GPL jerks are also compiling their stuff with GCC. You should add "compile with a non-GNU compiler" to your requirement list!
You got it completely backwards.
It is the GPL license which induced a lot of people to contribute to the Linux kernel instead of a BSD-licensed ... BSD system, which predates Linux by decades.
The fact that because the BSD license did not guarantee that one's contribution will not end up being sold back to the contributor by some greedy fuck, is what turned a majority of contributors away from BSD and other similar licenses. It is why a vast majority of FOSS is licensed under the GPL.
See above. If it were not for GPL, a "most recent" Linux kernel would be still a version 0.6 curiosum found in cob-web covered corners of Usenet and the most widely known Linux-alike system would be BSD with a fraction of a following of today's Linux. It is the GPL which made all the difference. And we have an empirical proof for that: BSD and its forks.
Skipping for the moment the fact that the Linux kernel is developed using the GNU toolchain and that no Linux system can even boot without a whole core set of GNU libraries and tools, it is the GPL which allowed for the growth of Linux. If linux were to be re-licensed to MIT or BSD today, probably (judging by their words on LKML) 80% kernel developers would drop out of the project instantaneously.
Yes! How dare these bastards stop you from taking their shit and selling it for your profit! I mean the chutzpa they have! Lazy unemployed beggars all!
Still, it all amounts to pidley-squat compared to what is going on in the US. There are many MPs out there in Ottawa who merely got on foot and went door to door campaigning, with next to zero campaign financing.
Err. This sounds like a great plea ... until you realize that in Canada the elections are publicly funded.
Ooops.
We have no excuses here, really.
Andrew Carnegie, Jay Cooke, Charles Crocker, George Hearst, Andrew Mellon, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, George Mortimer Pullman, etc etc etc. And today Bill Gates and crew. And I am skipping of course Europe, where later Messieurs Krupp, Messerschmidt and buddies had so much fun. Read some history dude before spewing such horrid nonsense.
Which means that it would have been far less powerful in restraining such individuals. Decentralized means that a rich enough individual can overpower such a weak "state" in every of its decentralized localities one at a time, instead of having to contend with a strong central power. Dude, there are corporations and individuals out there who already challenge whole present nations in military power and wealth. You want to give them even bigger advantage?! Logic is not your strong suite, is it?
Which they create out of the ashes of weak, defenseless, decentralized utopias they have conquered one small bit at a time. As they always have. Again, read some history dude.
Oh yes! Because "tribal command order" had fared oooh-soo-well after coming in contact with the ruthless power of various European monarchies, all over the world! Hey, for a brilliant example, look at this thing called the North America! Ruled today by a bunch of Apache and Suix tribes, no?
It is just a recent fad. One does not need the (presently convenient) vehicle of a corporation to build a kingdom on the ashes of some tribal fantasy.
That is why the problem is prevention of corruption and the loss of control over governments, not how small and how decentralized they are. By weakening them, you simply create a stage for creation of alternative power structures controlled by the scum, which replace such weak governments in their function. See also under: Somalia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq etc etc.
Which without the government occurs simply by more direct means and way faster. Read some history dude, really. You are apparently totally ignorant of it and think yourself the first who ever came up with such claptrap. It has been already tried, repeatedly, and it blew chunks.
Sigh. What in the world is wrong with you "libertarian" types as to make you so blind to the illogic of your insane stance?! Centralization of power will occur! It is the natural consequence of the human animalistic psyche. The only choice you have is to as to who does the centralizing and how! What you apparently