I'm curious how the adoption of GPLv3 will play out. The kernel is going to stay at v2 for the foreseeable future, so the new version will mostly apply to the GNU tool chain. There are enough companies out there who like the loopholes of v2 (TiVo, SuSE, etc.), will they maintain a fork of the code that stays licensed under v2, perhaps individually, perhaps as a collective effort amongst those with reason to balk at v3? Another possibility is to just keep on using versions of the code that were released under v2. Some things, like/bin/ls, really don't change enough that everyone will feel compelled to step up to the latest version. On the other hand, if the GNU software the company depends on is gcc, staying at a particular release and not having support for new processor technologies in your compiler would start to become problematic after a while.
So, how do you guys think the companies for whom adopting GPLv3 would eliminate loopholes will react to the new license? Somehow, I don't think they will just all go, "Oh, so that's how you intended Free Software to be used. We will play nicely from now on."
Sure, it would be sad if someone innocent was mixed up in a case of mistaken identity, but something has to be done to stop these guys... some of the entries read like a demon's resume:
NEAL, COWBOY (a.k.a. COWBOYNEAL; a.k.a. PATER, Johnathan); DOB 30 Jul 57; POB Moscow, Soviet Russia; (individual); citizen Iran; alt. citizen Libya; arrested 1 Apr 2003; escaped 2 Apr 2003; Slashdot number 4 (United States); wanted for small arms trafficking, conspiracy to commit nuclear terrorism, attempted presidential assassination, indecency with a goat [SDT] [SDGT]
While Haliburton wasn't able to topple the RIAA, notice that they were the only company to make the list whom the people voting in the poll have never personally done business with. Almost everyone has been personally screwed by at least one of the other companies, but the ire against Haliburton really only comes into play if you are a left-leaning political activist. Given the choice of whether "company moves its leadership to region where it does most of its business, but remains incorporated in the USA" or "trade association manipulates prices to rip ME off on CD's, while trying to infect MY computer with a DRM rootkit", I'd have to vote for what affects me.
What I'm wondering is why DeBeers didn't even make the list. They have both the "people have been ripped off by them personally" and "corporation does evil things to make profit" angles covered quite nicely.
Is about as exciting as watching Bobby Fischer put away his chess sets at the end of the day
I disagree... when RIAA litigation starts to show unexpected financial consequences is when it really begins to get interesting. The "seeing who wins" portion of most of these cases are nice and all, but in the end, the RIAA spends whatever their budget says they should spend on litigating, and the defendant goes broke. Maybe they settle and go broke that way, maybe they lose and have to pay the RIAA, maybe they win a Pyhrric victory but spent their life savings on legal bills. When all is said and done, the RIAA manages to send the message that once they come after you, you are in for financial ruin.
Where things get interesting is when they begin not to go according the the RIAA's plan. You get situations like the Santangelo case (the case is no longer furthering their interests, but they don't have the option to fold) and this one. There could be a lot more light shed on the financing of these RIAA witch hunts than they would like to see. They would much rather leave things at "We have enough money to drive you into bankruptcy if you cross us, that is all you need to know". They might not get to do that this time, which makes it more interesting to follow.
Please, do look up the difference between "begging the question" and "raising a/the question".
Okay, I did:
- beg the question
1 : to pass over or ignore a question by assuming it to be established or settled
2 : to elicit a question logically as a reaction or response
While the former definition, used in logical arguments, is regarded as more correct in an academic context, the raise-the-question definition "has nevertheless become very common", as Wikipedia puts it.
Words and expressions take on new meanings as people use them in different ways. Your post is a bit like the "hacker vs. cracker" pedant, the "Linux means a kernel when speaking of the OS you must say GNU/Linux" argument, and so on.
In the long run, this move by the RIAA is hurt its own interests. The current situation is actually pretty good for them. They're getting paid (though perhaps not as much as they would like), their music is reaching the ears of potential customers, and the broadcasts are at bitrates good enough to expose people to music while low enough nobody wants to fill their hard drive up with an archive of it.
So what are Internet radio listeners going to do if this succeeds? Sure, some might switch to a more RIAA-encouraged form of entertainment, but a lot will just change the station. Once the RIAA wipes out the stations promoting their music, that leaves the ones playing independent and international music. "Drive your customers to discover competitor's product" is generally not the missing "2. ???" step that leads to profit.
Whenever I set up a classified net, one of the last things I do before I get certified is to yank the internet connection. All classified nets should be physically isolated.
The Internet connection, yeah, but think of all the fun you could have running BitTorrent over SIPRnet... Speaking of which could whoever has MissileLaunchCodes.tar.gz and cowboyneal_fbi_dossier.pdf please re-seed them?
That would be what the "other" box on the list of distributions is for... voting for a distribution not on the list, like Debian, Gentoo, etc. As for the "It's obvious you Dellosers don't even know the history of GNU/Linux because Debian was the FIRST GNU/Linux distribution", Wikipedia seems to disagree, with Slackware having been out a month before Debian was even announced.
That is a good counterpoint. The instance I was mainly thinking of was how when Lindows Click-N-Run was announced, the reaction from Slashdot types was largely that it was stupid to pay for such a service when yum/apt/up2date let you get the same open source packages for free.
Many of the reasons people pay for software that can be had for free don't apply to geeks. We aren't readily fooled by scams like the one the other reply to yours mentioned. We tend not to need software support, don't want a dumbed down yet premium cost interface for acquiring software, and don't usually have the kind of limited Internet connections that lead people to order CDs of software that can legally be downloaded instead. As Slashdot types have fewer reasons to pay for software that can be had for free, and tend to prefer software free in both the speech and beer senses, communities like this one look upon paying for free software with skepticism.
I stand by my comment to the extent that if Dell did offer a $50 OpenOffice option, there would definitely be posts in the ensuing Slashdot article griping that that it wasn't free. Giving the matter more thought in light of your post, however, this might be more of an isolated reaction than an overall consensus like I initially supposed.
If Dell charged for OpenOffice, open-source advocates would scream bloody murder (OMG it's supposed to be free, why does choosing OpenOffice add $50 to the price of a PC?) On the other hand, customers expect whatever comes with their computer to be supported, which costs money. There's also the opportunity cost from OpenOffice cannibalizing sales of the much more profitable MS-Office. Also, they would hurt their relationship with Microsoft. So they can either give it away and lose money, or sell it for whatever it costs them to offer, but continue to take lots of flak for it not being free. I would expect them to avoid the issue unless a competitor manages to eat into sales by offering systems with OpenOffice.
It isn't as if the French have ever made a major correct decision...
INVADE IRAQ? [Y/N] _
While it's an interesting example, Iraq is ultimately a decision that doesn't have a "correct" answer...
The first George Bush attacked Iraq but left Saddam Hussein in power. He was widely criticized for not finishing the job.
Bill Clinton pretty much much ignored Iraq, even though he believed them to be pursuing nuclear and other WMD programs. He was widely criticized for doing nothing.
George W. Bush attacked Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein, but without Hussein's brutal yet stabilizing regime, the place plunged into chaos, with countless terror attacks and near civil war. Bush was widely criticized for this, even by many who supported the invasion when it was launched.
France were quite content to look the other way on Saddam Hussein's atrocities because they had a nice trade relationship with him. They were widely criticized for this "cheese eating surrender monkey" approach.
It seems like coming up with a "correct" way to deal with Iraq isn't so simple after all.
1. Is Linux a Myth?
There is no "Linux", talk about Red Hat or SuSE or whatever, not Linux in general.
2. Is Linux Secure?
Despite what I just said, talking about general Linux is convenient, so I'll now do it myself. Then go into a rant about "spies" with an off-topic swipe at PJ of Groklaw, while not saying anything at all about security in the OS sense.
3. Do Communes Work?
Community efforts never work. Just look at the debate over the GPL3, which by the way is "anti-business" and a threat to intellectual property everywhere.
4. Is Linux Pro-Developer, or Pro-You?
I'm not smart enough to understand open source business models, so I'll imply you can't make money giving away software, then throw out some FUD that Linux equals outsourcing. But I'll close the section by acknowledging that Google is making money using Linux, to pretend to lend some balance to my analysis.
5. Is Linux "Open"?
If you say Linux isn't ready for the desktop, you will be fired, receive death threats, and be sexually harassed.
Wow, what a brilliant article. We should stick this guy in a room with Katz and Dvorak and see who can come up with the most idiotic BS.
Copying software and using software are not the same thing.
True, but the post you were replying to refers to the GPL. The GPL does not deal with using software, it spells out terms under which the copyright holders give you permission to copy their software. By not agreeing with the GPL, all you manage to do is have permission to use, but not copy, the software (unless you negotiate a separate agreement with the creator).
Contrast this with a EULA, which tries to grab powers over and above what copyright law grants, and what you agreed to when you purchased the software. If you can avoid it, you again are only bound by the provisions of copyright law, but in this case that's better for you instead of worse.
One of the liberties Hollywood takes with physics that amuses me is how lasers and other energy weapons tend not to propagate at c, but rather at the speed of conventional projectile weapons or often slower. You can see the beam flying across the screen, and sometimes the hero even has time to dodge them. Since all guns in movies can be fired as many times as is convenient before reloading, it would seem the only advantage energy weapons offer is that their projectiles give off a pretty glow.
Programs loaded into the C64 with LOAD "*",8 loaded into the beginning of BASIC memory and had to be executed with RUN, but LOAD "*",8,1 loaded the program into a specific location in memory. This could be done for programs started up with SYS (execution jumps to a specific address in memory), as another reply mentions. The most popular use of ",1" however was to overwrite memory such that the address the system returned to after it finished loading would contain a run instruction, causing the program execute with no further intervention after the LOAD command. Or am I overanalyzing the joke and being pedantic?
Within 20 minutes of the plane going down, a dozen RIAA representatives, dressed in police-style raid jackets, were on site to offer their "assistance" to the FAA in locating the black box.
"Since black boxes are, by definition, black, and current iPod Nanos only come in black on the 8GB model, we knew we would have a lot of data to comb through." remarked the lead RIAA investigator, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We located the device, and analyzed it. Among the contents, we found Dave Matthew's 'Crash Into Me', Tom Petty's 'Free Falling', and Bruce Springsteen's 'I'm on Fire', and will basically be suing the airline for enough money that compensating relatives of the deceased and buying a new 747 just dropped to number two and three on their expenses from this incident. Another file on the black box, a recording of the pilot screaming "Oh my God we're going to DIE!', appears to not be the intellectual property of our organization, so we aren't suing over that one though we do frown on listening to non-RIAA-sanctioned recordings. Once our lawsuit over the pirated MP3's is concluded, we'll hand the unit over to the FAA for them to do their thing, but given the severity of the case, obviously our own examination of the black box comes first."
How bad does it have to be for people to Stop using windows?
The average consumer does not look at the situation and think, "Windows is a pain. I should switch to Mac OS X or GNU/Linux." They think, "Computers are a pain. I hate dealing with them." The concept that there are other operating systems and that they don't have the same issues with viruses, spyware, etc. is completely alien to Joe Six Pack.
Any scandal that erupts out of this is largely Ad Hominem. That doesn't mean it's hostile, but it is flawed.
Since you bring up logical fallacies, consider that Essjay's phony credentials were concocted to trap the Wikipedia community in one as well: argumentum ad verecundium, appeal to authority. Because the input of experts is given more weight by the listener, people try to come across as experts to make their arguments more authoritative than they really are. A common example is celebrity endorsements. This case, however, is more insidious in that the credentials are not obviously irrelevant, but rather appear genuine and can fool even a rational listener into believing the claims.
The appeal to Essjay's false authority has given his statements unmerited weight (listen to me, I'm a PhD!). Now they will be viewed with particular skepticism (don't listen to him, he's a known liar!). I can only hope that in the end, the effects will offset, with whatever falsehoods he managed to spread cleaned up and any worthwhile statements he made along the way standing on their own merit.
I think what you meant to say was "I for one welcome our new carbon transistor overloards". I don't know what makes you dumber, the fact that you tried recycling that tired joke or that you couldn't even get the simple equation for the joke right.
Here's the problem: Google, and all major corporations really ARE government players, they're all bought and controlled by the same New World Order power structure that runs the government. It's just all done under the cloak of secrecy so we, the "ignorant masses," don't figure out what's going on. The truth is that this is the covert means by which America's Constitutional system of government has been dismantled, and by which the whole world is being delivered into the hands of a global dictatorship run by European banking elite.
But if ALL major corporations are in on it, who can I and the other ignorant masses buy our tinfoil hats from?
Actually, once your contract finishes and you move to a month-to-month plan, the phone is legally yours. If you request it, the carrier is legally obligated to give you an unlock code.
Anyone have a source for this? It's intriguing, but I'd like something more authoritative than "unlock my phone please, some guy on the Internet named b0s0z0ku said you have to."
Per Wikipedia, it sounds like an argument has been made that this is customers' right, but nothing explicitly says networks have to do it:
...most network operators are reluctant to release these codes, since doing so is of no benefit to them. A few networks make these codes available, but often at high prices meant to deter customers. It would be beneficial if these codes were made available, for free, to legal owners of these phones. U.S. law provides protection for the consumer. Once the contract between the consumer and the mobile service operator has been fulfilled, whereas the consumer receives a discount for a cellular phone while signing up for a specified duration of service. Once the term of service has been completed, the consumer owns the cellular phone and all rights to it. It may constitute fraud if a cellular network provider does not willingly, and free of charge, provide any and all "codes" which "unlock" the cellular phones of all consumers who have fulfilled their service contract.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious how the adoption of GPLv3 will play out. The kernel is going to stay at v2 for the foreseeable future, so the new version will mostly apply to the GNU tool chain. There are enough companies out there who like the loopholes of v2 (TiVo, SuSE, etc.), will they maintain a fork of the code that stays licensed under v2, perhaps individually, perhaps as a collective effort amongst those with reason to balk at v3? Another possibility is to just keep on using versions of the code that were released under v2. Some things, like /bin/ls, really don't change enough that everyone will feel compelled to step up to the latest version. On the other hand, if the GNU software the company depends on is gcc, staying at a particular release and not having support for new processor technologies in your compiler would start to become problematic after a while.
So, how do you guys think the companies for whom adopting GPLv3 would eliminate loopholes will react to the new license? Somehow, I don't think they will just all go, "Oh, so that's how you intended Free Software to be used. We will play nicely from now on."
Sure, it would be sad if someone innocent was mixed up in a case of mistaken identity, but something has to be done to stop these guys... some of the entries read like a demon's resume:
NEAL, COWBOY (a.k.a. COWBOYNEAL; a.k.a. PATER, Johnathan); DOB 30 Jul 57; POB Moscow, Soviet Russia; (individual); citizen Iran; alt. citizen Libya; arrested 1 Apr 2003; escaped 2 Apr 2003; Slashdot number 4 (United States); wanted for small arms trafficking, conspiracy to commit nuclear terrorism, attempted presidential assassination, indecency with a goat [SDT] [SDGT]
IBM looked to find the best way to get the gooey stuff where it needs to be and in the right amount
I know some sites with plenty of AVIs that will show you how to do that...
While Haliburton wasn't able to topple the RIAA, notice that they were the only company to make the list whom the people voting in the poll have never personally done business with. Almost everyone has been personally screwed by at least one of the other companies, but the ire against Haliburton really only comes into play if you are a left-leaning political activist. Given the choice of whether "company moves its leadership to region where it does most of its business, but remains incorporated in the USA" or "trade association manipulates prices to rip ME off on CD's, while trying to infect MY computer with a DRM rootkit", I'd have to vote for what affects me.
What I'm wondering is why DeBeers didn't even make the list. They have both the "people have been ripped off by them personally" and "corporation does evil things to make profit" angles covered quite nicely.
Is about as exciting as watching Bobby Fischer put away his chess sets at the end of the day
I disagree... when RIAA litigation starts to show unexpected financial consequences is when it really begins to get interesting. The "seeing who wins" portion of most of these cases are nice and all, but in the end, the RIAA spends whatever their budget says they should spend on litigating, and the defendant goes broke. Maybe they settle and go broke that way, maybe they lose and have to pay the RIAA, maybe they win a Pyhrric victory but spent their life savings on legal bills. When all is said and done, the RIAA manages to send the message that once they come after you, you are in for financial ruin.
Where things get interesting is when they begin not to go according the the RIAA's plan. You get situations like the Santangelo case (the case is no longer furthering their interests, but they don't have the option to fold) and this one. There could be a lot more light shed on the financing of these RIAA witch hunts than they would like to see. They would much rather leave things at "We have enough money to drive you into bankruptcy if you cross us, that is all you need to know". They might not get to do that this time, which makes it more interesting to follow.
Please, do look up the difference between "begging the question" and "raising a/the question".
Okay, I did:
(source: Merriam Webster)While the former definition, used in logical arguments, is regarded as more correct in an academic context, the raise-the-question definition "has nevertheless become very common", as Wikipedia puts it.
Words and expressions take on new meanings as people use them in different ways. Your post is a bit like the "hacker vs. cracker" pedant, the "Linux means a kernel when speaking of the OS you must say GNU/Linux" argument, and so on.
In the long run, this move by the RIAA is hurt its own interests. The current situation is actually pretty good for them. They're getting paid (though perhaps not as much as they would like), their music is reaching the ears of potential customers, and the broadcasts are at bitrates good enough to expose people to music while low enough nobody wants to fill their hard drive up with an archive of it.
So what are Internet radio listeners going to do if this succeeds? Sure, some might switch to a more RIAA-encouraged form of entertainment, but a lot will just change the station. Once the RIAA wipes out the stations promoting their music, that leaves the ones playing independent and international music. "Drive your customers to discover competitor's product" is generally not the missing "2. ???" step that leads to profit.
Not only are server rooms windowless, freakishly cold, and with uncomfortable chairs, but now they asphyxiate you too.
Whenever I set up a classified net, one of the last things I do before I get certified is to yank the internet connection. All classified nets should be physically isolated.
The Internet connection, yeah, but think of all the fun you could have running BitTorrent over SIPRnet... Speaking of which could whoever has MissileLaunchCodes.tar.gz and cowboyneal_fbi_dossier.pdf please re-seed them?
That would be what the "other" box on the list of distributions is for... voting for a distribution not on the list, like Debian, Gentoo, etc. As for the "It's obvious you Dellosers don't even know the history of GNU/Linux because Debian was the FIRST GNU/Linux distribution", Wikipedia seems to disagree, with Slackware having been out a month before Debian was even announced.
That is a good counterpoint. The instance I was mainly thinking of was how when Lindows Click-N-Run was announced, the reaction from Slashdot types was largely that it was stupid to pay for such a service when yum/apt/up2date let you get the same open source packages for free.
Many of the reasons people pay for software that can be had for free don't apply to geeks. We aren't readily fooled by scams like the one the other reply to yours mentioned. We tend not to need software support, don't want a dumbed down yet premium cost interface for acquiring software, and don't usually have the kind of limited Internet connections that lead people to order CDs of software that can legally be downloaded instead. As Slashdot types have fewer reasons to pay for software that can be had for free, and tend to prefer software free in both the speech and beer senses, communities like this one look upon paying for free software with skepticism.
I stand by my comment to the extent that if Dell did offer a $50 OpenOffice option, there would definitely be posts in the ensuing Slashdot article griping that that it wasn't free. Giving the matter more thought in light of your post, however, this might be more of an isolated reaction than an overall consensus like I initially supposed.
If Dell charged for OpenOffice, open-source advocates would scream bloody murder (OMG it's supposed to be free, why does choosing OpenOffice add $50 to the price of a PC?) On the other hand, customers expect whatever comes with their computer to be supported, which costs money. There's also the opportunity cost from OpenOffice cannibalizing sales of the much more profitable MS-Office. Also, they would hurt their relationship with Microsoft. So they can either give it away and lose money, or sell it for whatever it costs them to offer, but continue to take lots of flak for it not being free. I would expect them to avoid the issue unless a competitor manages to eat into sales by offering systems with OpenOffice.
It isn't as if the French have ever made a major correct decision...
INVADE IRAQ? [Y/N] _
While it's an interesting example, Iraq is ultimately a decision that doesn't have a "correct" answer...
The first George Bush attacked Iraq but left Saddam Hussein in power. He was widely criticized for not finishing the job.
Bill Clinton pretty much much ignored Iraq, even though he believed them to be pursuing nuclear and other WMD programs. He was widely criticized for doing nothing.
George W. Bush attacked Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein, but without Hussein's brutal yet stabilizing regime, the place plunged into chaos, with countless terror attacks and near civil war. Bush was widely criticized for this, even by many who supported the invasion when it was launched.
France were quite content to look the other way on Saddam Hussein's atrocities because they had a nice trade relationship with him. They were widely criticized for this "cheese eating surrender monkey" approach.
It seems like coming up with a "correct" way to deal with Iraq isn't so simple after all.
1. Is Linux a Myth?
There is no "Linux", talk about Red Hat or SuSE or whatever, not Linux in general.
2. Is Linux Secure?
Despite what I just said, talking about general Linux is convenient, so I'll now do it myself. Then go into a rant about "spies" with an off-topic swipe at PJ of Groklaw, while not saying anything at all about security in the OS sense.
3. Do Communes Work?
Community efforts never work. Just look at the debate over the GPL3, which by the way is "anti-business" and a threat to intellectual property everywhere.
4. Is Linux Pro-Developer, or Pro-You?
I'm not smart enough to understand open source business models, so I'll imply you can't make money giving away software, then throw out some FUD that Linux equals outsourcing. But I'll close the section by acknowledging that Google is making money using Linux, to pretend to lend some balance to my analysis.
5. Is Linux "Open"?
If you say Linux isn't ready for the desktop, you will be fired, receive death threats, and be sexually harassed.
Wow, what a brilliant article. We should stick this guy in a room with Katz and Dvorak and see who can come up with the most idiotic BS.
I guess it's hard to market a character so closely identified with the most hated nation since Nazi Germany.
Because the Soviet Union was oh-so-popular.
Copying software and using software are not the same thing.
True, but the post you were replying to refers to the GPL. The GPL does not deal with using software, it spells out terms under which the copyright holders give you permission to copy their software. By not agreeing with the GPL, all you manage to do is have permission to use, but not copy, the software (unless you negotiate a separate agreement with the creator).
Contrast this with a EULA, which tries to grab powers over and above what copyright law grants, and what you agreed to when you purchased the software. If you can avoid it, you again are only bound by the provisions of copyright law, but in this case that's better for you instead of worse.
One of the liberties Hollywood takes with physics that amuses me is how lasers and other energy weapons tend not to propagate at c, but rather at the speed of conventional projectile weapons or often slower. You can see the beam flying across the screen, and sometimes the hero even has time to dodge them. Since all guns in movies can be fired as many times as is convenient before reloading, it would seem the only advantage energy weapons offer is that their projectiles give off a pretty glow.
Programs loaded into the C64 with LOAD "*",8 loaded into the beginning of BASIC memory and had to be executed with RUN, but LOAD "*",8,1 loaded the program into a specific location in memory. This could be done for programs started up with SYS (execution jumps to a specific address in memory), as another reply mentions. The most popular use of ",1" however was to overwrite memory such that the address the system returned to after it finished loading would contain a run instruction, causing the program execute with no further intervention after the LOAD command. Or am I overanalyzing the joke and being pedantic?
i snot the "get out of jail free" card
And now you know why nobody wants to play Monopoly with you...
Within 20 minutes of the plane going down, a dozen RIAA representatives, dressed in police-style raid jackets, were on site to offer their "assistance" to the FAA in locating the black box.
"Since black boxes are, by definition, black, and current iPod Nanos only come in black on the 8GB model, we knew we would have a lot of data to comb through." remarked the lead RIAA investigator, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We located the device, and analyzed it. Among the contents, we found Dave Matthew's 'Crash Into Me', Tom Petty's 'Free Falling', and Bruce Springsteen's 'I'm on Fire', and will basically be suing the airline for enough money that compensating relatives of the deceased and buying a new 747 just dropped to number two and three on their expenses from this incident. Another file on the black box, a recording of the pilot screaming "Oh my God we're going to DIE!', appears to not be the intellectual property of our organization, so we aren't suing over that one though we do frown on listening to non-RIAA-sanctioned recordings. Once our lawsuit over the pirated MP3's is concluded, we'll hand the unit over to the FAA for them to do their thing, but given the severity of the case, obviously our own examination of the black box comes first."
How bad does it have to be for people to Stop using windows?
The average consumer does not look at the situation and think, "Windows is a pain. I should switch to Mac OS X or GNU/Linux." They think, "Computers are a pain. I hate dealing with them." The concept that there are other operating systems and that they don't have the same issues with viruses, spyware, etc. is completely alien to Joe Six Pack.
Any scandal that erupts out of this is largely Ad Hominem. That doesn't mean it's hostile, but it is flawed.
Since you bring up logical fallacies, consider that Essjay's phony credentials were concocted to trap the Wikipedia community in one as well: argumentum ad verecundium, appeal to authority. Because the input of experts is given more weight by the listener, people try to come across as experts to make their arguments more authoritative than they really are. A common example is celebrity endorsements. This case, however, is more insidious in that the credentials are not obviously irrelevant, but rather appear genuine and can fool even a rational listener into believing the claims.
The appeal to Essjay's false authority has given his statements unmerited weight (listen to me, I'm a PhD!). Now they will be viewed with particular skepticism (don't listen to him, he's a known liar!). I can only hope that in the end, the effects will offset, with whatever falsehoods he managed to spread cleaned up and any worthwhile statements he made along the way standing on their own merit.
I think what you meant to say was "I for one welcome our new carbon transistor overloards". I don't know what makes you dumber, the fact that you tried recycling that tired joke or that you couldn't even get the simple equation for the joke right.
In Soviet Russia, tired joke recycles YOU!
Here's the problem: Google, and all major corporations really ARE government players, they're all bought and controlled by the same New World Order power structure that runs the government. It's just all done under the cloak of secrecy so we, the "ignorant masses," don't figure out what's going on. The truth is that this is the covert means by which America's Constitutional system of government has been dismantled, and by which the whole world is being delivered into the hands of a global dictatorship run by European banking elite.
But if ALL major corporations are in on it, who can I and the other ignorant masses buy our tinfoil hats from?
Actually, once your contract finishes and you move to a month-to-month plan, the phone is legally yours. If you request it, the carrier is legally obligated to give you an unlock code.
Anyone have a source for this? It's intriguing, but I'd like something more authoritative than "unlock my phone please, some guy on the Internet named b0s0z0ku said you have to."
Per Wikipedia, it sounds like an argument has been made that this is customers' right, but nothing explicitly says networks have to do it: