and when you tired of useless eye candy , you can finally install a Real OS
Can you, really ? Is SCO actually still selling anything, and more importantly, is anyone buying ? The chances of getting support in the future seem to be between null and zero due to SCO's inevitable bankrupty...
Judgement of good and evil is based on morals. You can say some things are good or evil, but that's just your view, based on your beliefs.
Calling something "barbaric" is based on your idea of what civilized behavior entails. It is just as much a value judgement as calling it evil. It is in fact more so, because most people tend to agree that a given behavior is evil or not when they're the victim of said behavior, while two people will quite likely disagree as to whether some treatment is "barbaric" or not.
Besides, we humans are moral creatures, in the sense that we assign moral values to actions. Can you show a single good reason why I should not make such judgements ?
When you say "X is evil", it's a very black and white statement, which almost never fits reality. In the case of rape, there are lots of actions which could be defined as rape:
I'm sure there are. And I'm equally sure that playing around with semantics and the inherent vagueness of language is a quite usefull way to avoid having to actually give a clear answer.
Widening the definition of "rape" to the point where it includes all possible and several impossible sexual acts and then using this definition to claim that the statement "rape is evil" is incorrect is a good example of both strawman- and sliding definition logical fallacies.
this is just off the top of my head, and I'm no lawyer. We all do things occassionally which hurt other people, some of us more often than others, and some of us more consciously than others. You can also help others to hurt people, either explicitly, through inaction, or providing an environment conducive to hurtful behaviour. (e.g. sell GHB).
Yes. We do. What has that got to do with how such activity is properly called ? Or are you trying to say that something can't be evil if you are doing it ?
What I'm getting at is this: rape is bad, and we should do what we can to stop it happening. To just call it 'evil' ignores the shades of grey.
Please explain how calling something "bad" avoids making moral judgements that calling it "evil" makes; or is this some misguided attempt to be politically correct to keep rapists feelings from being hurt ? And why, ignoring morality since we can't do moral judgements and can't therefore decide what is moral and what is not, should we stop it from happening - I'm a big strong man, so I'm not in any personal danger, so why should I care ?
And this "shades of grey" thing... It does not mean that black and white do not exist. It only means that a particular action can be less than perfectly good but still better than absolute evil. Like, say, walking on the grass: it is bad since if a lot of people do it then the grass will wear down, but it's certainly less bad than murder. However, it does not make murder any less bad.
Having said that, I agree that calling it barbaric might not be the best word. Rape is an example of our primal nature overcoming our social/civil tendencies, though of course it's a lot more complex than that.
I'd say it's more a matter of someone learning to suppress his empathy and conscience at will, and then doing so. It isn't a matter of being overcome by your primal instincts; it's a matter of letting them loose.
None of which has anything to do with the evilness of the act, unless you're willing to accept that no one can ever be held responsible for any of their actions, since they can all be explained by their personal psychology and mental makeup.
Moreover, a lot of people tend to throw around the terms 'good' and 'evil' quite lightly.
Star Trek tends to throw around scientific terms and concepts in absurd contexts, but that doesn't invalidate the terms, just the speaker.
I can think of a number of places where Black and White might be considered the most obscene game ever. Heck, the game lets you pretend to be god - what's shooting someone in the head compared to that?
Actually, no it doesn't. For that experience, I'd recommend SimLife.
You can't make a (good) game about godhood, for the same reason why you can't make a good game about sex: trying to apply rules and goals to either divinity or sex completely misses the point and turns the subject into a parody of itself.
Just look at all the "dating sim" games or the "Prince of Lies" AD&D book. The whole book's basically a farce, despite being apparently intended to be a "serious" adventure. Or read the "War of Souls" trilogy, and compare the limited gods there to the earlier versions (Dragonlance Legends and Chronicles).
Simlife works because it is a program toy with no limits whatsoever placed on the player; Black & White has a disembodied hand that can pick up stuff, and even that only inside a certain area. Oh, and a bunch of whiners who complain that they have no wood while camping in the middle of a forest. Then again, that last point is propably closer to the authentic experience of godhood than I care to admit, judging by my own past conduct...
Ok so in the United States, porn is basically not legal to buy by a minor. The store can't sell it to you, and you can't rent it.
What kind of idiot would buy porn anyway when you can download it from the Net for free ? Completely legally too, I might add; the Internet is full of free (ad-funded) porn sites, and the newsgroups are full of it too. A Google picture search for $FETISH is likely to get you more that you'll need in your lifetime...
So how comes that the porn mags are still in business ? Is this an argument against the copyright - after all, the producers stay in business despite the free-for-all ?
The more we're exposed to something, the more familiar it becomes. It doesn't mean we'll all become serial rapists overnight, but it does we see rape as less barbaric than it is.
Being illiterate, eating with your fingers and wearing animal hides - or nothing at all - is barbaric. The word refers to a lack of civilization. Rape, on the other hand, is evil.
There's already a word for deliberately hurting and harming others, so there's no need to co-opt the word meaning uncivilized for this purpose.
not sure but the spam i can't seem to block is the kind that shows up as a picture. with all the nasty words / adds in a picture instead of text rendering my antispam absolutely useless. Both Spamassasin and Trends spam killer with their corperate program are failing to block these kind of spam.
Simply block everything with an attachment. The attachments which aren't spam are likely viruses anyway.
I consider them completely clueless. Any Korean should understand that their language is understood only by Koreans, and that it is a complete waste of time to send their spam all over the world. Apparently the dumbheads think they can get their message through by repeating it often enough.
More likely it's less bother to just send it to a list of random addresses than trying to filter out the non-Korean addresses.
Yes! I've been getting tons of spam in my Hotmail account! I even whipped up a few regexp's that would cut my spam by about 98% and sent them to the Hotmail Spam Filter Team, but I've yet to hear back.
I do agree with you, somewhat, but seriously, we're getting what we deserve. (I'm a white male.) Somehow, after generations of slavery and oppression, I think the (black|mexican|chinese|generic minority) deserve something.
An ethnic group, or any other kind of group, is not an entity. It cannot deserve anything as a whole. Only individuals can.
Those oppressed generations, as well as their oppressors, are long gone. One does not deserve either punishment or recompensation for their ancestors deeds or treatment. Which is a good thing, since otherwise we'd need to dig up such issues as human sacrifices, cannibalism, war crimes in tribal warfare (torturing, killing or enslaving the losers) and other such less than virtuous (by modern day standards) past activities.
Reparations may be asking a bit much, but they definitely deserve at least a couple of generations of it being fashionable to bash white males, and we deserve to be bashed.
Bullshit. I'm a white male and live in Finland, as did my ancestors before me. We didn't enslave anyone; we were the ones oppressed, first by Sweden and then by Russia, and only gained our freedom when Russia collapsed in the first World War. So even if guilt is somehow inherited through generations, which it is not, I haven't inherited any of it.
Furthermore, while Americans bought millions of black slaves, they didn't capture them. So who did ? Why, it was the other africans who did it. Yet I don't see anyone bashing the modern day africans, despite them being the direct descendants of slave traders - nay, the direct descendants of people who sold their own race and kin to slavery.
So take racial guilt and shove it where the Sun doesn't shine. I deserve none of it. Neither do you nor anyone else, no matter what you may believe. Nor do the modern day descendants of former slaves or otherwise oppressed minorities inherit any right to special treatment just because their ancestors were treated unjustly. The ancestors and their oppressors deserve compensation and punishment accordingly, but that is out of our hands.
It doesn't bother me much, because it's not bad enough yet to deny me any opportunity that I care about. It doesn't take much casual conversation to prove that I'm a decent human being, and I really don't care about people who don't even give me a chance. Bigots of any kind are not worth my time.
Racism is a threat that has a tendency to grow with time. It's best to snip it in the bud. Besides, why should I put up with such bullshit ? No, I'll answer to a bigot in such a way as to expose him as a malicious moron he is. That way he'll learn to keep his mouth shut and behave; while if I let him get away with it, he'll learn that he can get away with such behavior and has no reason to avoid it in the future.
Ignoring assholes only makes them go on being assholes.
Its mass and hence its momentum will not be others than on Earth.
Actually, its momentum will be less than on Earth, since it will be moving slower. Moon's gravitation gives less acceleration to falling objects, after all.
This breaks all sorts of technology, for instance spam filters that try to check if an originating domain actually exists. According to Cameroon, every possible.cm domain, no matter what the context, exists. That's wrong.
Luckily, it's also easy to fix: Assume no proper.cm domains exist, and consider anything coming from such a domain spam. Any complaints should be directed to the Cameroon government.
See, the bigger asshole someone's being, the easier target for a good solid kick they're making themselves >:).
Then we'd be right at home then. It's not hard to change "libel" to "trator". From reading a little about Cameroon, their government is as accountable as our own. Of course, we should just assume they are evil incarnate as they aren't white anglo-saxon Christians.
No, we should instead assume that they can do no wrong because they aren't anglo-saxon Christians.
The idea, implied in your post, that all anglo-saxon Christians are racists against all other people is racist in itself. But of course that is okay, since it is fashinable to bash anglo-saxon Christians right now, just as it was once fashionable to bash negros, judes, redskins, gooks, insert deragatory racial group term of your choice here.
After all, no one who isn't anglo-saxon Christian couldn't possibly do anything to deserve criticism. It's all just a plot of White Supremacists, fighting for control with the Elders of Zion and the Freemasons. Right ?
And for the record: I know nothing about Cameroon, besides a quick Wikipedia lookup, and can't say whether their government is dictatorial or not. I am simply commenting on your idiotic, racist assumption that any criticism is motivated by racism.
Someone thought it would be cool to teach network programming to sophmores. Great. We had to filter those and other known bad stuff, lest students gain control of the grading, scheduling, and payroll systems.
Not only can your grading, scheduling and payroll systems be accessed from the computer lab, but they are so badly protected that a sophomore programming student can break them ? You're fired.
Seriously, if you only implemented filtering and limited access to the payroll system when you got a specific threat, you are either incompetent, lazy or both, and deserve to get a nasty glare from everyone who's data you endangered and a boot-sized impression on your backside from your boss.
Oh, and filtering "known bad stuff" is dangerous. You'll need to whitelist known good stuff and filter out everything else.
it,s a challenge to outwit those who are motivated. They choose to spend their time attacking my defenses. I have many other duties.
And yet, despite this horrible burden of having to secure the computer systems that are your responsibility and contain important payroll data, you find the time to post to Slashdot. How do you manage ?
And just what the heck did you think that computer admins do when you became one ?
How is this news? People have been using proxies forever to get around blocks.
You see, when you are using proxies to get around the filters set by some authority - for your own good, of course - it's a victory for liberty. When your kid is using those same proxies to see material you don't want him to see - in all likelihood the very same material you used them to see when you were his age - they're the tool of the Devil for corrupting your offspring.
I guess this proves that this generation is no different from the past ones, and kids are as hopelessly corrupted as ever:). No matter, since they also seem to be as clever.
I wonder what would happen if the authors of some important part of the kernel suddenly change the license for their contributions to GPLv3. It is certainly in their power to do so (unless they transferred copyrights). This might effectively change the license of the entire kernel, since use of said part would require adherence to the new GPLv3 restrictions.
GPL is non-revocable. This means that if you licensed out some code under GPL v2, it will forever stay licensed under GPL v2. You may, of course, also license the same code under GPL v3, but users may still stick to GPL v2 if they want to. Or you could license any new versions under GPL v3, but the users can take the old version and start developing for it themselves under GPL v2 - a process known as forking, which happened to XFree86.
All the elegance, stability, security and network-savviness of the work computer now available at home. Very nice. And the GNU tools made that possible, yes. But the free kernel was the keystone to that arch, I think. Linux could have squeaked by with few less GNU tools (albeit not without GCC), but I think all the GNU tools would have remained curiosities without the free kernel.
The GNU project was trying to create a free version of Unix - the GNU system - and was going about it in a systematic fashion, one tool at the time. The kernel was left until last, and Linux simply happened to come at the right moment, when most of the system was already up and running but the kernel wasn't.
As it happens, the GNU project does have a working kernel of their own, HURD. HURD never really took off, mainly because Linux got the snowball effect going - it got some users, some of whom began co-developing it, making it better, which in turn gained it more users and more developers and so on. Linux has almost all the developers, so HURD has almost none.
But thinking that Linux is the true success story and the GNU project just a less important side path is absurd. It's the GNU project that made Linux possible, not the other way around.
What I'm saying is that I think the future belongs more to people like Linus -- that they will have more lasting influence -- because, as the OP said, they seems more focussed on getting stuff out the door, and the FSF (and RMS in particular) seem more focussed on making sure it's the right stuff, built with the right moral philosophy, isn't going to exploit the masses or give you karma, et cetera.
You think that Linux - a single operating system kernel - is going to have more lasting influence than the whole free software movement, of which the Linux kernel is just a part of ? Especially when what allowed Linux to grow in the first place was the development model made possible by the GPL ?
In Soviet Russia... people used to do just that...
And now that the Soviet Union is gone and the West no longer has any reason to keep up its image, the West is fast becoming the new Soviet block, at least as far as legal system and people's rights are concerned. Isn't historical irony wonderfull ?
Well sure, you could do it that way. What you don't HAVE any plutonium? I guess I'm just a traditionalist.
What do you need plutonium for ? The inductor loop is made of copper, and the explosive only needs to be strong enough to blow it apart, not vaporize it utterly.
Altought, now that I think of it, hiding some plutonium on the guys property and reporting him for being a suspected terrorist might also work. It's even accurate, since he is terrorizing his neighborhood.
Or just report him and then call him from a payphone, say "We'll strike now !", hang up, and let the wiretappers draw their own conclusions >:]...
Cops also have to pass rifle (Well, 9 millimeter pistol anyway) proficiency tests. A lot of cops will probably have their hearing somewhat damaged due to this and will probably be unable to hear the mosquito device.
Using double ear protection (the kind of plugs you stick inside your ears, and wearing "cups" over them) makes an automatic rifle sound no louder than someone saying "pang". And you can still hear speech just fine.
So if the cops have their ears damaged in the firing range, then they were either extremely unlucky or just plain stupid.
FFS. Don't ever cut mains power cables. It is inevitable that the blade will short the live and the neutral at some point during the cut, which will cause everything to get very hot and some fuses to blow in a louder and more fun fashion than is normal. This could really really not be done undetected.
Hmm... So, what you're saying is that, with a very simple modification, this device will blow his fuses every time it is turned on >?-)
Sadly slashdot is the geek's lawyer, and I think the question is more "where do I buy an EMP" then "how do I sue an old man" anyway...
Can't you build one yourself ? From what I've understood, you can generate an electromagnetic pulse simply by turning an electromagnet off rapidly - the collapsing magnetic field will generate the pulse. So get a very thick copper coil, pump low-voltage high-current electricity to it until it glows cherry red, then cut the the power. Bam, instant EMP.
The main problems are the speed of field collapse - the standard method involves wrapping the coil around explosives and detonating them, but that's dangerous and explosives are pretty hard to get, and besides you can only fire it once - and aiming; the pulse will be omnidirectional, while in this case we want it to travel to a single direction so it only frys stuff in the old bastards home.
I knew I should have become an electrical engineer, then I could design this weapon easily:(.
They're free to fork the project any time they wish. The would NEVER be held hostage by an outside team. The worst that would ever happen is that someone else would no longer be maintaing it for them for free. (Oh the horror!)
No. The worst that could happen is that porting Windows applications to other operating systems would become easier. IE is a component used by many Windows programs; if Microsoft switched to Firefox, not only would it need to leave IE there to support those programs, but any new programs would use Firefox instead of IE, making them easier to port to Linux, BSD or whatever.
Windows is an inferior product compared to almost anything; what keeps it alive is the host of programs that only work on Windows. Even it being pre-installed is not sufficient anymore, since newer Linux distributions are very easy to install - put the CD in the drive and turn on the computer, in the case of LiveCDs. Hardware support is also very good nowadays - 3D cards are the only problems, but NVIDIAs drivers are pretty much "run me and answer yes to everything" to install.
For Microsoft to lose its lock-in means death. No one uses it for its own merits, since it doesn't have any. Even games generally work better under Linux, presumably due to more efficient memory management and better scheduler. Embracing any kind of standards is a death sentence for Microsoft.
Sadly the published RPG is dying an agonizing death.
Ironically, this reminds me of Prince of Lies, a Forgotten Realms book: "The world was doomed, but it kept going anyway".
Nobody wants to pay $30-$40 for a hardcover rulebook when they can pay that for a full-function CRPG (computer or console, take your pick). Add to this the unending supply of "optional" supplimental books and the industry just cannot survive the same glut that TSR produced in the 2nd Edition AD&D days. The promise of OpenGaming and d20 can't save an industry that relies on an ever-shrinking market of buyers and an ever-increasing price of entry.
The solution is easy: release as PDFs.
More specifically, sell PDFs cheap - and that means good PDFs with the text included as text, not just a set of scanned pages. With laptops more and more common nowadays, people can simply read them from the screen - with text included as text, blurring won't be a problem, and they can always print them themselves - and carry their collection with them everywhere.
And it gives you wonderfull legitimate options of reselling the same product - you bought a PDF and now want a hardcover quality-printed version, but don't want to bother looking for a print shop yourself ? Coming right up through postal mail ! Or just get it from your local game shop.
There's already several publishers selling their PDFs on the Web, and some of them have stuck around for years, so obviously the business model is viable.
As to what they will announce at the WWDC, apparently there is going to be an amazing and dramatic innovation which will affect computer ease of use: its called virtual desktops. Yes, in the latest version of OSX it appears you can have more than one desktop. This will drive them wild! The stock price will soar on this one!
Especially after they'll sue Gnome, which has had this feature for years now, and has therefore been infringing on Apple's intellectual property long before Apple even invented it !
Slashdot Mirror
Can you, really ? Is SCO actually still selling anything, and more importantly, is anyone buying ? The chances of getting support in the future seem to be between null and zero due to SCO's inevitable bankrupty...
Calling something "barbaric" is based on your idea of what civilized behavior entails. It is just as much a value judgement as calling it evil. It is in fact more so, because most people tend to agree that a given behavior is evil or not when they're the victim of said behavior, while two people will quite likely disagree as to whether some treatment is "barbaric" or not.
Besides, we humans are moral creatures, in the sense that we assign moral values to actions. Can you show a single good reason why I should not make such judgements ?
I'm sure there are. And I'm equally sure that playing around with semantics and the inherent vagueness of language is a quite usefull way to avoid having to actually give a clear answer.
Widening the definition of "rape" to the point where it includes all possible and several impossible sexual acts and then using this definition to claim that the statement "rape is evil" is incorrect is a good example of both strawman- and sliding definition logical fallacies.
Yes. We do. What has that got to do with how such activity is properly called ? Or are you trying to say that something can't be evil if you are doing it ?
Please explain how calling something "bad" avoids making moral judgements that calling it "evil" makes; or is this some misguided attempt to be politically correct to keep rapists feelings from being hurt ? And why, ignoring morality since we can't do moral judgements and can't therefore decide what is moral and what is not, should we stop it from happening - I'm a big strong man, so I'm not in any personal danger, so why should I care ?
And this "shades of grey" thing... It does not mean that black and white do not exist. It only means that a particular action can be less than perfectly good but still better than absolute evil. Like, say, walking on the grass: it is bad since if a lot of people do it then the grass will wear down, but it's certainly less bad than murder. However, it does not make murder any less bad.
I'd say it's more a matter of someone learning to suppress his empathy and conscience at will, and then doing so. It isn't a matter of being overcome by your primal instincts; it's a matter of letting them loose.
None of which has anything to do with the evilness of the act, unless you're willing to accept that no one can ever be held responsible for any of their actions, since they can all be explained by their personal psychology and mental makeup.
Star Trek tends to throw around scientific terms and concepts in absurd contexts, but that doesn't invalidate the terms, just the speaker.
Actually, no it doesn't. For that experience, I'd recommend SimLife.
You can't make a (good) game about godhood, for the same reason why you can't make a good game about sex: trying to apply rules and goals to either divinity or sex completely misses the point and turns the subject into a parody of itself.
Just look at all the "dating sim" games or the "Prince of Lies" AD&D book. The whole book's basically a farce, despite being apparently intended to be a "serious" adventure. Or read the "War of Souls" trilogy, and compare the limited gods there to the earlier versions (Dragonlance Legends and Chronicles).
Simlife works because it is a program toy with no limits whatsoever placed on the player; Black & White has a disembodied hand that can pick up stuff, and even that only inside a certain area. Oh, and a bunch of whiners who complain that they have no wood while camping in the middle of a forest. Then again, that last point is propably closer to the authentic experience of godhood than I care to admit, judging by my own past conduct...
What kind of idiot would buy porn anyway when you can download it from the Net for free ? Completely legally too, I might add; the Internet is full of free (ad-funded) porn sites, and the newsgroups are full of it too. A Google picture search for $FETISH is likely to get you more that you'll need in your lifetime...
So how comes that the porn mags are still in business ? Is this an argument against the copyright - after all, the producers stay in business despite the free-for-all ?
Being illiterate, eating with your fingers and wearing animal hides - or nothing at all - is barbaric. The word refers to a lack of civilization. Rape, on the other hand, is evil.
There's already a word for deliberately hurting and harming others, so there's no need to co-opt the word meaning uncivilized for this purpose.
Simply block everything with an attachment. The attachments which aren't spam are likely viruses anyway.
More likely it's less bother to just send it to a list of random addresses than trying to filter out the non-Korean addresses.
The spam filter must have deleted them.
An ethnic group, or any other kind of group, is not an entity. It cannot deserve anything as a whole. Only individuals can.
Those oppressed generations, as well as their oppressors, are long gone. One does not deserve either punishment or recompensation for their ancestors deeds or treatment. Which is a good thing, since otherwise we'd need to dig up such issues as human sacrifices, cannibalism, war crimes in tribal warfare (torturing, killing or enslaving the losers) and other such less than virtuous (by modern day standards) past activities.
Bullshit. I'm a white male and live in Finland, as did my ancestors before me. We didn't enslave anyone; we were the ones oppressed, first by Sweden and then by Russia, and only gained our freedom when Russia collapsed in the first World War. So even if guilt is somehow inherited through generations, which it is not, I haven't inherited any of it.
Furthermore, while Americans bought millions of black slaves, they didn't capture them. So who did ? Why, it was the other africans who did it. Yet I don't see anyone bashing the modern day africans, despite them being the direct descendants of slave traders - nay, the direct descendants of people who sold their own race and kin to slavery.
So take racial guilt and shove it where the Sun doesn't shine. I deserve none of it. Neither do you nor anyone else, no matter what you may believe. Nor do the modern day descendants of former slaves or otherwise oppressed minorities inherit any right to special treatment just because their ancestors were treated unjustly. The ancestors and their oppressors deserve compensation and punishment accordingly, but that is out of our hands.
Racism is a threat that has a tendency to grow with time. It's best to snip it in the bud. Besides, why should I put up with such bullshit ? No, I'll answer to a bigot in such a way as to expose him as a malicious moron he is. That way he'll learn to keep his mouth shut and behave; while if I let him get away with it, he'll learn that he can get away with such behavior and has no reason to avoid it in the future.
Ignoring assholes only makes them go on being assholes.
Actually, its momentum will be less than on Earth, since it will be moving slower. Moon's gravitation gives less acceleration to falling objects, after all.
But it exists, I just checked !
Luckily, it's also easy to fix: Assume no proper .cm domains exist, and consider anything coming from such a domain spam. Any complaints should be directed to the Cameroon government.
See, the bigger asshole someone's being, the easier target for a good solid kick they're making themselves >:).
No, we should instead assume that they can do no wrong because they aren't anglo-saxon Christians.
The idea, implied in your post, that all anglo-saxon Christians are racists against all other people is racist in itself. But of course that is okay, since it is fashinable to bash anglo-saxon Christians right now, just as it was once fashionable to bash negros, judes, redskins, gooks, insert deragatory racial group term of your choice here.
After all, no one who isn't anglo-saxon Christian couldn't possibly do anything to deserve criticism. It's all just a plot of White Supremacists, fighting for control with the Elders of Zion and the Freemasons. Right ?
And for the record: I know nothing about Cameroon, besides a quick Wikipedia lookup, and can't say whether their government is dictatorial or not. I am simply commenting on your idiotic, racist assumption that any criticism is motivated by racism.
Not only can your grading, scheduling and payroll systems be accessed from the computer lab, but they are so badly protected that a sophomore programming student can break them ? You're fired.
Seriously, if you only implemented filtering and limited access to the payroll system when you got a specific threat, you are either incompetent, lazy or both, and deserve to get a nasty glare from everyone who's data you endangered and a boot-sized impression on your backside from your boss.
Oh, and filtering "known bad stuff" is dangerous. You'll need to whitelist known good stuff and filter out everything else.
And yet, despite this horrible burden of having to secure the computer systems that are your responsibility and contain important payroll data, you find the time to post to Slashdot. How do you manage ?
And just what the heck did you think that computer admins do when you became one ?
You see, when you are using proxies to get around the filters set by some authority - for your own good, of course - it's a victory for liberty. When your kid is using those same proxies to see material you don't want him to see - in all likelihood the very same material you used them to see when you were his age - they're the tool of the Devil for corrupting your offspring.
I guess this proves that this generation is no different from the past ones, and kids are as hopelessly corrupted as ever :). No matter, since they also seem to be as clever.
GPL is non-revocable. This means that if you licensed out some code under GPL v2, it will forever stay licensed under GPL v2. You may, of course, also license the same code under GPL v3, but users may still stick to GPL v2 if they want to. Or you could license any new versions under GPL v3, but the users can take the old version and start developing for it themselves under GPL v2 - a process known as forking, which happened to XFree86.
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.
The GNU project was trying to create a free version of Unix - the GNU system - and was going about it in a systematic fashion, one tool at the time. The kernel was left until last, and Linux simply happened to come at the right moment, when most of the system was already up and running but the kernel wasn't.
As it happens, the GNU project does have a working kernel of their own, HURD. HURD never really took off, mainly because Linux got the snowball effect going - it got some users, some of whom began co-developing it, making it better, which in turn gained it more users and more developers and so on. Linux has almost all the developers, so HURD has almost none.
But thinking that Linux is the true success story and the GNU project just a less important side path is absurd. It's the GNU project that made Linux possible, not the other way around.
You think that Linux - a single operating system kernel - is going to have more lasting influence than the whole free software movement, of which the Linux kernel is just a part of ? Especially when what allowed Linux to grow in the first place was the development model made possible by the GPL ?
I beg to differ.
And now that the Soviet Union is gone and the West no longer has any reason to keep up its image, the West is fast becoming the new Soviet block, at least as far as legal system and people's rights are concerned. Isn't historical irony wonderfull ?
What do you need plutonium for ? The inductor loop is made of copper, and the explosive only needs to be strong enough to blow it apart, not vaporize it utterly.
Altought, now that I think of it, hiding some plutonium on the guys property and reporting him for being a suspected terrorist might also work. It's even accurate, since he is terrorizing his neighborhood.
Or just report him and then call him from a payphone, say "We'll strike now !", hang up, and let the wiretappers draw their own conclusions >:]...
Using double ear protection (the kind of plugs you stick inside your ears, and wearing "cups" over them) makes an automatic rifle sound no louder than someone saying "pang". And you can still hear speech just fine.
So if the cops have their ears damaged in the firing range, then they were either extremely unlucky or just plain stupid.
Hmm... So, what you're saying is that, with a very simple modification, this device will blow his fuses every time it is turned on >?-)
Can't you build one yourself ? From what I've understood, you can generate an electromagnetic pulse simply by turning an electromagnet off rapidly - the collapsing magnetic field will generate the pulse. So get a very thick copper coil, pump low-voltage high-current electricity to it until it glows cherry red, then cut the the power. Bam, instant EMP.
The main problems are the speed of field collapse - the standard method involves wrapping the coil around explosives and detonating them, but that's dangerous and explosives are pretty hard to get, and besides you can only fire it once - and aiming; the pulse will be omnidirectional, while in this case we want it to travel to a single direction so it only frys stuff in the old bastards home.
I knew I should have become an electrical engineer, then I could design this weapon easily :(.
No. The worst that could happen is that porting Windows applications to other operating systems would become easier. IE is a component used by many Windows programs; if Microsoft switched to Firefox, not only would it need to leave IE there to support those programs, but any new programs would use Firefox instead of IE, making them easier to port to Linux, BSD or whatever.
Windows is an inferior product compared to almost anything; what keeps it alive is the host of programs that only work on Windows. Even it being pre-installed is not sufficient anymore, since newer Linux distributions are very easy to install - put the CD in the drive and turn on the computer, in the case of LiveCDs. Hardware support is also very good nowadays - 3D cards are the only problems, but NVIDIAs drivers are pretty much "run me and answer yes to everything" to install.
For Microsoft to lose its lock-in means death. No one uses it for its own merits, since it doesn't have any. Even games generally work better under Linux, presumably due to more efficient memory management and better scheduler. Embracing any kind of standards is a death sentence for Microsoft.
Ironically, this reminds me of Prince of Lies, a Forgotten Realms book: "The world was doomed, but it kept going anyway".
The solution is easy: release as PDFs.
More specifically, sell PDFs cheap - and that means good PDFs with the text included as text, not just a set of scanned pages. With laptops more and more common nowadays, people can simply read them from the screen - with text included as text, blurring won't be a problem, and they can always print them themselves - and carry their collection with them everywhere.
And it gives you wonderfull legitimate options of reselling the same product - you bought a PDF and now want a hardcover quality-printed version, but don't want to bother looking for a print shop yourself ? Coming right up through postal mail ! Or just get it from your local game shop.
There's already several publishers selling their PDFs on the Web, and some of them have stuck around for years, so obviously the business model is viable.
Especially after they'll sue Gnome, which has had this feature for years now, and has therefore been infringing on Apple's intellectual property long before Apple even invented it !