Of course, the user uproar would be like nothing we've ever seen before, because USEnet's main use is not only non-infringing, it's incredibly valuable to a lot of technical types out there.
Perhaps the Usenet community needs to become vigilant to save their forum, and kick all the binary attachment groups off into a seperate service. To save the 'valuable resource' that Usenet's text discussion groups are.
I don't see the connection between discussions of Linux, beekeeping, cats, foxes, or forestry, and the huge streams of illegal content and pornographic images that form 'the other side.'
Actually, if all the binary attachments went away, Usenet could get back to being a public forum for discussion.
I'd hate for Microsoft to take a role of 'moderating' the discussion, but I wouldn't mind the binary attachments being split off and made into a different service. As it stands, the piracy folks 'piggyback' on the 'open forum discussion' aspect as an excuse for their activities.
I remember logging onto CompuServe with a 300 baud modem, because if you logged on through the 'slow' modem pool it was only seven bucks an hour, whereas if I used the full capabilities of my 1200 baud modem it would have cost fourteen bucks an hour.
Those were the days. Put in a second phone line, put up a BBS, and you could own a little tiny plot of 'cyberspace' all your own. We sysops were sorta like kings of little city states.
So they are single-purpose machines running what amounts to a few specific tasks.
There are doubtless printer servers out there in userland running MS-DOS that have stayed up just as long. Robustness is a measure of stability under a varying and complex load.
I agree that Linux is very stable, I remember only one notable time when my desktop Linux box just 'bip' crashed on me. A box I run anything and everything interactively on. It was notable because it was a one-time incident. But let's not give credit where credit isn't necessarily due.
Just so you know: It's hazardous to only argue against your personal parodies of your opponents. One day somebody real happens along and you're not at all prepared.
And they were free to leave, taking with them their trust funds and/or inherited wealth. Debutantes and the like. Nobody stood at the border preventing them from leaving.
However, poor but ambitious people strive for years to get into this country. Boat people die trying. And some nations still close their borders to keep them in by force.
I worked at a place where the OS/2 Warp Server for the whole company (hundreds of developers) had a telnetd running. I had a shell script I needed to run for a build and it ran FAST when I ran it from the server. But then they didn't like me doing that. It had a commonly known password, and the password was in plaintext in the C:\config.sys file.
And the whole C:\ drive of the Warp server was available by ftp.
We in America are almost all immigrants. We like to think of ourselves as 'the 5% of the population who have made it here.' And we welcome in people from other parts of the world who want to be part of 'The American Experiment' as it's sometimes called. They become Americans. Many people from other parts of the world attend college in the United States and return to their own countries. These people also carry back with them 'the American value system' to a degree.
So there's the positive side of an 'American' rant.
And then there is a bunch of intellectuals bitter in their posts at colleges, people who've never ventured out into the world anywhere. They consider 'American' to be a bad thing, because they've formed an intellectual elite all their own.
And there's the negative side of an 'American' rant.
it becomes more of a misnomer to refer to China as "Communist", just because the government there is called the "Communist" party.
The government of China is dominated by the Communist party. The goverment is not the Communist party.
As an illustration of this, I (used) to know some American party members (not the Communist Party, USA- that is/was a patsy group for the old moribund Soviet CP). They would occasionally send delegations to China. Their delegations would engage in party-to-party activities. When a US head of state visits China, s/he engages in state-to-state activites.
Incidentally, the quasi-official US Communist organization that tows the 'Chinese Line' these days, and gets recognition by the Chinese part is what was one day called the 'Revolutionary Workers Headquarters' it was a split off the Revolutionary Communist party, who went nuts and sided with the 'Gang of Four', and now are a rabid Maoist bunch without 'official relations' with any Communist state.
The 'Revolutionary Workers Headquarters' have their website here. 'Freedom Road' is apparently the 'public friendly' front group they work under these days. Some here who were in college in the 80's and early 90's might remember the 'Progressive Student Organization', their student front group.
The 'Revolutionary Communist Party (USA)' have their website here. It's hard not to know who the RCP folks are at a demo. They're generally waving the red flags and trying to incite a riot.
The Chinese government has a habit of charging a 'royalty' that's not simply payable in dollars. Some people only hope it would be that easy.
Just a comment that has to be made, wether or not one approves of the political system they have established, let's be honest and agree that it's fairly authoritarian and makes the MPAA/RIAA look lightweight.
It seems ridiculous, but because there's often a fee associated with getting a drivers license or non-driving picture ID, requiring said ID is viewed as 'discrimination' and forbidden.
And let's not even get started with the big 'Get Out The Vote' drives conducted by a particular wing of the political establishment that target populations likely to have high percentages of illegal aliens....
China wants IPv6 because then they can assign an IP address to each new comrade at birth, and easily program that comrade's implant (which runs Linux, not that you get to see the source for their changes) with a permanent IP address.
Well, if I can serve as a counter example, I cut and paste primarily from Mozilla's browser to Mozilla's composer to work with and manipulate web content. The Moz composer is very adequate for said purpose.
And I am talking about doing so on a Windows desktop. I have IE (of course) and Word available and could use that to save and manipulate HTML content. I used to make that mistake. Problem is, Windows/Word fucks with said web content to no end. I want it clean and I want it to remain about the same as it was on the original site. Not a Word-inflicted bastardization of the html.
So, you're saying 'Don't use Windows. Try this desktop OS instead. Oh, and by the way you'll also need to spend more money on training and administration, because this isn't an OS that any dummy can just use.'
I am still searching for somebody who has reverse engineered the Actimates Teletubbies, a related product.
The Teletubbies are available really cheap now on eBay and the junk market, if you find one that's soiled and unsuitable for a child.
The Actimates Teletubbies have an 8x10 matrix of dual color (infinite colors if you use PWM to mix the two) LEDs in it. I've gutted one and the LED matrix is proprietary but seems simple enough. The Teletubby runs on an H8 processor. I'd like to reverse engineer the display board, which has a low-pins connector, and figure out how to drive the thing with a PIC. The display board has no 'smarts' on it, nothing more than a few drive transistors, so it should be a fairly easy task. But I haven't seen a 'dissecting Actimates Teletubbies' page yet describing it all.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, the user uproar would be like nothing we've ever seen before, because USEnet's main use is not only non-infringing, it's incredibly valuable to a lot of technical types out there.
Perhaps the Usenet community needs to become vigilant to save their forum, and kick all the binary attachment groups off into a seperate service. To save the 'valuable resource' that Usenet's text discussion groups are.
I don't see the connection between discussions of Linux, beekeeping, cats, foxes, or forestry, and the huge streams of illegal content and pornographic images that form 'the other side.'
Actually, if all the binary attachments went away, Usenet could get back to being a public forum for discussion.
I'd hate for Microsoft to take a role of 'moderating' the discussion, but I wouldn't mind the binary attachments being split off and made into a different service. As it stands, the piracy folks 'piggyback' on the 'open forum discussion' aspect as an excuse for their activities.
There, I said something horrible. Flame away.
My ancient Altos 5-user box (based on the 8086) had Microsoft Xenix on it, and the primary networking transport was UUCP.
I remember logging onto CompuServe with a 300 baud modem, because if you logged on through the 'slow' modem pool it was only seven bucks an hour, whereas if I used the full capabilities of my 1200 baud modem it would have cost fourteen bucks an hour.
Those were the days. Put in a second phone line, put up a BBS, and you could own a little tiny plot of 'cyberspace' all your own. We sysops were sorta like kings of little city states.
So they are single-purpose machines running what amounts to a few specific tasks.
There are doubtless printer servers out there in userland running MS-DOS that have stayed up just as long. Robustness is a measure of stability under a varying and complex load.
I agree that Linux is very stable, I remember only one notable time when my desktop Linux box just 'bip' crashed on me. A box I run anything and everything interactively on. It was notable because it was a one-time incident. But let's not give credit where credit isn't necessarily due.
Uncle Raymond has some Kool-aide that you've simply got to try. Here, have a big swig of it!
What does a tool that looks for 'security problems' in a program have to do with interoperability?
Greg Hoglund demonstrated a product for sale by his new company
Yes. But is it safe to run this 'product for sale' on your system? Has anybody scanned it to look for security problems?
And where do we download the source code for it?
Just so you know: It's hazardous to only argue against your personal parodies of your opponents. One day somebody real happens along and you're not at all prepared.
And we might add, what are you doing with your boxes?
Just logging uptime?
AOL and Compuserv also started as competitors to the Internet.
AOL is far more successful than the other two at winning at that contest.
There is still a lot of CompuServ content that people like me can't get because we're not part of their service. I.e. obscure file libraries.
I would rate MSN a distant third to the two above at 'embrace and extend' as far as the Internet is concerned.
Moving toward being more open, by doing an end-run around the MPEG standard? It's a standard, you know.
And they were free to leave, taking with them their trust funds and/or inherited wealth. Debutantes and the like. Nobody stood at the border preventing them from leaving.
However, poor but ambitious people strive for years to get into this country. Boat people die trying. And some nations still close their borders to keep them in by force.
I worked at a place where the OS/2 Warp Server for the whole company (hundreds of developers) had a telnetd running. I had a shell script I needed to run for a build and it ran FAST when I ran it from the server. But then they didn't like me doing that. It had a commonly known password, and the password was in plaintext in the C:\config.sys file.
And the whole C:\ drive of the Warp server was available by ftp.
We in America are almost all immigrants. We like to think of ourselves as 'the 5% of the population who have made it here.' And we welcome in people from other parts of the world who want to be part of 'The American Experiment' as it's sometimes called. They become Americans. Many people from other parts of the world attend college in the United States and return to their own countries. These people also carry back with them 'the American value system' to a degree.
So there's the positive side of an 'American' rant.
And then there is a bunch of intellectuals bitter in their posts at colleges, people who've never ventured out into the world anywhere. They consider 'American' to be a bad thing, because they've formed an intellectual elite all their own.
And there's the negative side of an 'American' rant.
Wave the flags, or whatever...
it becomes more of a misnomer to refer to China as "Communist", just because the government there is called the "Communist" party.
The government of China is dominated by the Communist party. The goverment is not the Communist party.
As an illustration of this, I (used) to know some American party members (not the Communist Party, USA- that is/was a patsy group for the old moribund Soviet CP). They would occasionally send delegations to China. Their delegations would engage in party-to-party activities. When a US head of state visits China, s/he engages in state-to-state activites.
Incidentally, the quasi-official US Communist organization that tows the 'Chinese Line' these days, and gets recognition by the Chinese part is what was one day called the 'Revolutionary Workers Headquarters' it was a split off the Revolutionary Communist party, who went nuts and sided with the 'Gang of Four', and now are a rabid Maoist bunch without 'official relations' with any Communist state.
The 'Revolutionary Workers Headquarters' have their website here. 'Freedom Road' is apparently the 'public friendly' front group they work under these days. Some here who were in college in the 80's and early 90's might remember the 'Progressive Student Organization', their student front group.
The 'Revolutionary Communist Party (USA)' have their website here. It's hard not to know who the RCP folks are at a demo. They're generally waving the red flags and trying to incite a riot.
(and fwiw, anything linux will still have to deal with US copyright law)
Some people hope so, anyway.
Do you think Target and WalMart are going to jeapordize their deals that get them cheap quality Chinese goods, to uphold the GPL in China?
The Chinese government has a habit of charging a 'royalty' that's not simply payable in dollars. Some people only hope it would be that easy.
Just a comment that has to be made, wether or not one approves of the political system they have established, let's be honest and agree that it's fairly authoritarian and makes the MPAA/RIAA look lightweight.
They aren't allowed to ask you for ID.
It seems ridiculous, but because there's often a fee associated with getting a drivers license or non-driving picture ID, requiring said ID is viewed as 'discrimination' and forbidden.
And let's not even get started with the big 'Get Out The Vote' drives conducted by a particular wing of the political establishment that target populations likely to have high percentages of illegal aliens....
It seems a little like the Simpsons episode where Homer decides to let it all go and wear a mu-mu.
China wants IPv6 because then they can assign an IP address to each new comrade at birth, and easily program that comrade's implant (which runs Linux, not that you get to see the source for their changes) with a permanent IP address.
Well, if I can serve as a counter example, I cut and paste primarily from Mozilla's browser to Mozilla's composer to work with and manipulate web content. The Moz composer is very adequate for said purpose.
And I am talking about doing so on a Windows desktop. I have IE (of course) and Word available and could use that to save and manipulate HTML content. I used to make that mistake. Problem is, Windows/Word fucks with said web content to no end. I want it clean and I want it to remain about the same as it was on the original site. Not a Word-inflicted bastardization of the html.
So, you're saying 'Don't use Windows. Try this desktop OS instead. Oh, and by the way you'll also need to spend more money on training and administration, because this isn't an OS that any dummy can just use.'
Wow. That's quite a sales pitch.
I am still searching for somebody who has reverse engineered the Actimates Teletubbies, a related product.
The Teletubbies are available really cheap now on eBay and the junk market, if you find one that's soiled and unsuitable for a child.
The Actimates Teletubbies have an 8x10 matrix of dual color (infinite colors if you use PWM to mix the two) LEDs in it. I've gutted one and the LED matrix is proprietary but seems simple enough. The Teletubby runs on an H8 processor. I'd like to reverse engineer the display board, which has a low-pins connector, and figure out how to drive the thing with a PIC. The display board has no 'smarts' on it, nothing more than a few drive transistors, so it should be a fairly easy task. But I haven't seen a 'dissecting Actimates Teletubbies' page yet describing it all.
Larry Ellision and Oracle make Microsoft look like a squeaky clean eagle scout.
Of course, Oracle isn't anywhere near the size of Microsoft...