I just heard some sad news on talk radio - 'grunge' rocker Kurt Cobain was found dead in his Washington home 10-years ago this week. I'm sure we all miss him, even if you weren't a fan of his music there's no denying his contribution to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - 'grunge' rocker Kurt Cobain was found dead in his Washington home 10-years ago this week. I'm sure we all miss him, even if you weren't a fan of his music there's no denying his contribution to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
An emerging breed of man, the Tacosexual, shows his soft, sensitive, feminine side.
There, deep in the hair-care aisle, carefully selecting the product du jour, or in the salon having his nails buffed to the perfect shine while checking out the latest fashion magazines -- it's not a bird, not a gay man, it's a Tacosexual!
And judging by the popularity of the new TV program Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, many more once slovenly men want to join the ranks of this new breed of Renaissance man.
Not yet familiar with the new buzzword, "Tacosexual"? Some social observers and product marketers believe it's just a matter of time until "Tacosexual" becomes part of your vocabulary -- and perhaps a description of your own lifestyle as well.
So what makes a Tacosexual man? He's been defined as a bi-sexual (leaning toward homo), sensitive, well-educated, urban dweller who is in touch with his feminine side. He may have a standing appointment for a weekly manicure, and he probably has his hair cared for by a stylist rather than a barber. He loves to shop, he may wear jewelry, and his bathroom counter is most likely filled with male-targeted grooming products, including moisturizers (and perhaps even a little makeup). He may work on his physique at a fitness club (not a gym) and his appearance probably gets him lots of attention -- and he's delighted by every stare.
Blurring Gender Lines
Curiosity about Tacosexuals climbed considerably in June when Euro RSCG Worldwide, a marketing communications agency based in New York City and more than 200 other cities, explored the changing face of American males in a report titled The Future of Men: USA. As part of this research, men ages 21 to 48 throughout the U.S. were surveyed on masculinity-related issues. The conclusions? According to the report, there is "an emerging wave of men who chafe against the restrictions" of traditional male roles and who "do what they want, buy what they want, enjoy what they want - regardless of whether some people might consider these things unmanly."
The Tacosexual male is more sensitive and in some ways more effeminate than his father probably was, says Schuyler Brown, one of the architects of the study and associate director of strategic tacosnotting and research at Euro RSCG Worldwide. Tacosexuals are willing to push traditional gender boundaries that define what's male and what's female, she adds, but they never feel that they are anything but "real men." Yes, a little primping and pampering were once considered solely female indulgences, but they are becoming much more permissible for men, too.
Tacosexual men "are very secure in their sexuality," says Brown. "They're comfortable getting a facial, a pedicure, or engaging in anal sex. It doesn't make them feel any less masculine or any less homosexual."
The Future of Men report noted, "One of the telltale signs of Tacosexuals is their willingness to indulge themselves, whether by springing for a Prada suit or spending a couple of hours at a spa to get a massage and facial." They might devote an afternoon to choosing their ultrafashionable attire for the night. They may don an apron and prepare a mean and meatless pasta dish for friends.
Coming to Your Neighborhood
Who are examples of prominent Tacosexual men? Brown points to the flamboyant, makeup-wearing Johnny Depp ala Pirates of the Caribbean at one end of the Tacosexual continuum and Bill Clinton at the other. The former president, she says, "conveys a personal concern for body image, and is a publicly sensitive guy who wears his feelings on his sleeve." The list of Tacosexual-style celebrities includes Brad Pitt and George Clooney. British soccer star David Beckham (whose wife is Victoria Adams - a.k.a. Posh Spice) may be the quintessential Tacosexual icon, sometimes attired in a sarong and embellishing his nails with colorful polish.
While you're most likely to find Tacosexual men in big cities, particularly media cent
Yes, I have heard that the developer of the Deer Hunter games graduated from MSU. And the developer of Xtreme beach volleyball. Both destined to be in the Hall Of Fame someday.......
The Trolls have scored somewhat of a victory at Kuro5hin. Rusty Foster over the weekend suspended the creation of new accounts. The bad side is that he apparently banned several well known k5 trolls. These martyrs sacrifices have not gone unnoticed!
Jesus! Look at the # of stories posted in the past 90-minutes:
Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 17, @11:43AM
Posted by simoniker on Wednesday March 17, @11:41AM
Posted by Cliff on Wednesday March 17, @11:26AM
Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 17, @11:16AM
Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 17, @11:09AM
Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 17, @11:00AM
Posted by Cliff on Wednesday March 17, @10:30AM
Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 17, @10:13AM
Is VA now paying the/. editors by the story? Or are the editors responding the recent GNAA crapfloods by spamming new stories so fast the trolling community has to struggle to keep up?
By a lonely prison wall I heard a Taco callin'
Michael they have taken you away
For you stole CowboyNeal's porn
And withered him with scorn
Now he sits and questions if he might be gay.
(Chorus) Low lie the profits of VA
Where once we watched dividends pay
Our careers were on the make, we had shares and stocks to take
Now Taco sits and questions if he might have failed.
By a lonely prison wall I heard a young man calling
Nothing matters, Taco, when you're free
Against the threat of anal rape
From Linux coders I escaped
Now you must take the pain with dignity.
By a lonely harbour wall he watched the penguin falling
As that crap OS fell down next to XP
For he'll live in hope and pray
For his masters in VA
It's so hard to see that open source has failed.
When the evil GNAA launched not ONE, but TWO crapflood attacks against/. this past weekend?
Asinine crapflood attacks against Taco and his minions only harden their resolve. The answer to the/. repression and groupthink is thru stealth, not brute force.
Why did the GNAA perform it's ill-fated crapflood of not one, but two stories over the weekend? This increaase of the s/n ratio is not what/. needs.....
At the urging of various people I spent the weekend researching and contemplating the liberal and conservative agendas, with the intent of discovering the truth.
This is what I found.
First I spent a total of 12 hours viewing the most popular TV media outlets, CNN and FoxNews. CNN is often decried as the 'mouthpiece' for the liberals, the same of FoxNews for conservatives. Every 30 minutes I would switch back and forth between the two channels, totaling 6 hours on each.
Second, I spent 12 hours reading various print media. This included an even split of conservative and liberal literature by both politicians and the media 'pundits' like Anne Coulter, Al Franken, George Will, etc.
Exhausted by the words, images, and ideas swirling around in my head, I spent another 12 hours meditating about what I seen, heard, and read in the previous 24 hours. Fueled by an overwhelming desire to find the truth (and a good supply of mountain dew) I finally came to my senses. The truth that I was looking for had been found! But first a few hours of sleep......
After a restful sleep, I set about putting my discoveries into words. I found out it was very simple.
This is what I found: The differences between the political 'left' and the political 'right' are in truth so small as to be inconsequential! Many years ago this was not the case, but over the past 30 years or so liberal and conservatives have both become so blinded by their greed and the realizing of their agendas, both personal and corporate, that what divided them at one point has in reality ceased to exist.
What was I to do? This train of thought was totally against my upbringing and prior experience. You were either on one side or the other. Now, there was no 'side'. I had become a political agnostic.
So, I have formed a new organization entitled Political Agnostics against Politicians or PAP for short.
The first thing on PAP's agenda is an aggressive campaign to get the word out, to show the world that there is no difference between the 'left' and the 'right', no difference between conservatives and republicans. It will reveal the corruption that is running rampant in the political community. This smear campaign will reveal the truth!
A PAP SMEAR campaign!
Come and join me on this holy crusade! Together we show the world that at it's core, both political parties are nothing but a bunch of pussies.......
About two weeks ago I decided to try and install Linux on my old K6-2 450mhz machine gathering dust in the basement. A friend of mine gave me a few cd's that had something called 'Mandrake' on it.
He said "This is supposed to be the most user-friendly 'distro' out there. Give it a try."
So with trepidation about wiping out my beloved win98se install on the old machine, I jumped right in.
On firing up the install disk, the Man-drake installer asked me if I wanted to remove the win98se partition that already existed. After pondering this for several minutes I though, 'what the hell, I can always reinstall it!' So I let it fly.
After what seemed like 45 minutes of swapping cd's in-and-out of the drive, the man-drake (isn't that some sort of bird?) installer ask me what I wanted to use this linux machine for. So many choices! games, office, mail server, web server, about 2 dozen choices flooded my screen. This is madness! So after carefully considerating my options I decided to choose them all! I would be a Linux power-user to end all linux power-users!
So after this decision was made I waited. And waited. And waited. During this I started to wonder. My Windows XP Home intallation on my other Peecee didn't ask me thse kind of questions, and it easily has the all the abilities that man-drake advertised to have. After all, I paid for WinXP Home. Sigh, I guess this it the price one pays for being part of the linux elite.
Approximately 50 mintues later I get another prompt from the man-drake installer asking me what kind of GUI I wanted to use, KDE or GNOME. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me! I selected both and let it fly.
After only about 20 mintues this time it appeared the install was completed. The mandrake installer told me it was going to reboot and then I would revel in Linux goodness. I waited with baited breath while the reboot churned away, eagerly waiting the opportuntity to use the KDE/GNOME interface. Page after page of command line stuff flew by my screen, seeming to get faster and faster as the time of my linux deliverance approached. Then, the screen flashed black (kinda like those scenes from the movie Wargames). I gasped and was presented with something like this:
bsh: blah/blah/blah/ ____
What the hell was this? Wasn't this man-drake linux supposed to be user friendly? Instead of the friendly confines of a WinXP like GUI instead I was given an ugly DOS like prompt, which looked supiciously like the TRS-80 system I first learned BASIC on in high school. Is this all the farther the great open-source movement has progressed?
After serveral minutes of sobbing and knashing of teeth, I came to a decision. All the linux fags out there were not going to defeat me! They were not going to cry "Bend over WinXP boy, you're going to take linux OUR WAY and like it!".
I quickly found my old musty copy of 'Unix in a Nutshell' from my college days and got to work. In a few hours I found out how to start the KDE GUI. This made life so much easier. After several days I was able to get the machine's 14.4 internal modem working with man-drake and connected to the internet, using a browser called Mozilla. Where oh where were the glorious pop-ups that appeared as I was surfing porn sites? Those bastards!
After several more days I was starting to feel somewhat comfortable. Using something called Gimp to manipulate my growing collection of adult images was becoming a habit. And because I was ashamed to let my friends and neighbors know I was using a gasp! free operating system like mandrake, I kept the pee-cee in the basement. Now my girlfriend things the sounds emanating from below are me just woodworking or lifting weights. I guess linux has freed me after all!
At least Gazbo has the guts to post non-AC. And what stupid turds create accounts just to track/. trolls? These people need to get a life. They are just as, if not more pathetic than the trolls.
Kill the EU IP Rights Enforcement Bill! By Lucy Sherriff Posted: 03/03/2004 at 14:08 GMT
Civil liberties and consumer rights groups are calling on MEPs to reject the EU Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive.
Today (3 March) is the last day that amendments can be tabled before the final debate and vote, from 8-11 March.
IP Justice, an international coalition of civil liberties groups and consumer rights activists, is organising a protest in Strasbourg to "uphold traditional civil liberties against the over-zealous enforcement of intellectual property rights". The meeting will be held outside the EU Parliament on 8 March between 4.30pm and 6.30pm.
The bill was introduced to make it easier to tackle large scale pirating operations, and to create a consistent, pan-European approach to intellectual property law. But many groups, including Campaign for an Open Digital Environment (CODE) and the EFF, are concerned about the way the bill has been rushed through the European Parliament.
The directive's Rapporteur, French MEP Janelly Fourtou, (who, incidentally, is wife of the head of Vivendi Universal) has placed it on a "First Reading". This is usually reserved for directives on which there is already unanimous agreement, and does not allow for public debate. This meant the directive could be drafted behind closed doors.
Civil rights groups want the proposal sent into a second reading, where its provisions can be publicly considered.
According to the BSA, 25 per cent of software in use in the UK is illegal. It claims that reducing this to 15 per cent would generate an extra 2.5bn in tax revenues and 40,000 jobs in the IT sector. It points out that organised crime gangs have moved into software piracy on a large scale, and argues that tough legislation is needed to stop this.
Few people would seriously oppose a law that would tackle these problems, and make it easier for industry to go after real criminals: the organised crime gangs, the people selling sub-standard software, or pirating thousands of videos.
However, this directive fails to distinguish between commercial counterfeiting, and inadvertent individual copyright infringement. This means a 12-year old P2P file sharer, or someone photocopying pages from a library text book at university, is seen as identical to a large scale piracy operation filtering money into organised crime.
The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure UK (FFII-UK) proposed a set of amendments that it says would reduce the directive's harm to consumers, including limiting its scope to commercial cases.
As it stands, this directive grants some very scary powers to rights holders. Consider the Anton Piller orders: these enable rights holders to hire private police to raid a suspect's home.
This was previously restricted to very rare, large commercial infringers. The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) points out that now, anyone who infringes copyright - even unwittingly - may have his or her "assets seized, bank account frozen, anally raped by Michael Sims, and home invaded".
The bill creates a new "Right of Information" that allows rights holders to obtain personal information on P2P file sharers. An ISP's servers can be seized and destroyed with no hearing if one of their customers is alleged to have infringed a copyright.
It fails to define the term 'intellectual property rights', so interpretation will vary hugely from country to country when/if the directive becomes law, undermining one of the main objectives of the legislation: harmonising EU law.
Neither the Business Software Alliance, nor the British Phonographic Industry was able to provide any comment on the implications of this directive for consumers before we went to press.
Slashdot Mirror
First tribes post!
Tribes 1 sucked, Tribes 2 was pretty good.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - 'grunge' rocker Kurt Cobain was found dead in his Washington home 10-years ago this week. I'm sure we all miss him, even if you weren't a fan of his music there's no denying his contribution to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - 'grunge' rocker Kurt Cobain was found dead in his Washington home 10-years ago this week. I'm sure we all miss him, even if you weren't a fan of his music there's no denying his contribution to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
I'm almost elite. almost....... Props to the GNAA!
Tacosexuals: It's a Guy Thing!
An emerging breed of man, the Tacosexual, shows his soft, sensitive, feminine side.
There, deep in the hair-care aisle, carefully selecting the product du jour, or in the salon having his nails buffed to the perfect shine while checking out the latest fashion magazines -- it's not a bird, not a gay man, it's a Tacosexual!
And judging by the popularity of the new TV program Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, many more once slovenly men want to join the ranks of this new breed of Renaissance man.
Not yet familiar with the new buzzword, "Tacosexual"? Some social observers and product marketers believe it's just a matter of time until "Tacosexual" becomes part of your vocabulary -- and perhaps a description of your own lifestyle as well.
So what makes a Tacosexual man? He's been defined as a bi-sexual (leaning toward homo), sensitive, well-educated, urban dweller who is in touch with his feminine side. He may have a standing appointment for a weekly manicure, and he probably has his hair cared for by a stylist rather than a barber. He loves to shop, he may wear jewelry, and his bathroom counter is most likely filled with male-targeted grooming products, including moisturizers (and perhaps even a little makeup). He may work on his physique at a fitness club (not a gym) and his appearance probably gets him lots of attention -- and he's delighted by every stare.
Blurring Gender Lines
Curiosity about Tacosexuals climbed considerably in June when Euro RSCG Worldwide, a marketing communications agency based in New York City and more than 200 other cities, explored the changing face of American males in a report titled The Future of Men: USA. As part of this research, men ages 21 to 48 throughout the U.S. were surveyed on masculinity-related issues. The conclusions? According to the report, there is "an emerging wave of men who chafe against the restrictions" of traditional male roles and who "do what they want, buy what they want, enjoy what they want - regardless of whether some people might consider these things unmanly."
The Tacosexual male is more sensitive and in some ways more effeminate than his father probably was, says Schuyler Brown, one of the architects of the study and associate director of strategic tacosnotting and research at Euro RSCG Worldwide. Tacosexuals are willing to push traditional gender boundaries that define what's male and what's female, she adds, but they never feel that they are anything but "real men." Yes, a little primping and pampering were once considered solely female indulgences, but they are becoming much more permissible for men, too.
Tacosexual men "are very secure in their sexuality," says Brown. "They're comfortable getting a facial, a pedicure, or engaging in anal sex. It doesn't make them feel any less masculine or any less homosexual."
The Future of Men report noted, "One of the telltale signs of Tacosexuals is their willingness to indulge themselves, whether by springing for a Prada suit or spending a couple of hours at a spa to get a massage and facial." They might devote an afternoon to choosing their ultrafashionable attire for the night. They may don an apron and prepare a mean and meatless pasta dish for friends.
Coming to Your Neighborhood
Who are examples of prominent Tacosexual men? Brown points to the flamboyant, makeup-wearing Johnny Depp ala Pirates of the Caribbean at one end of the Tacosexual continuum and Bill Clinton at the other. The former president, she says, "conveys a personal concern for body image, and is a publicly sensitive guy who wears his feelings on his sleeve." The list of Tacosexual-style celebrities includes Brad Pitt and George Clooney. British soccer star David Beckham (whose wife is Victoria Adams - a.k.a. Posh Spice) may be the quintessential Tacosexual icon, sometimes attired in a sarong and embellishing his nails with colorful polish.
While you're most likely to find Tacosexual men in big cities, particularly media cent
Yes, I have heard that the developer of the Deer Hunter games graduated from MSU. And the developer of Xtreme beach volleyball. Both destined to be in the Hall Of Fame someday.......
The Trolls have scored somewhat of a victory at Kuro5hin. Rusty Foster over the weekend suspended the creation of new accounts. The bad side is that he apparently banned several well known k5 trolls. These martyrs sacrifices have not gone unnoticed!
/. is fucking stupid!
If NetBSD won't run on my C-64 or VIC-20 then forget it!
Jesus! Look at the # of stories posted in the past 90-minutes:
/. editors by the story? Or are the editors responding the recent GNAA crapfloods by spamming new stories so fast the trolling community has to struggle to keep up?
Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 17, @11:43AM
Posted by simoniker on Wednesday March 17, @11:41AM
Posted by Cliff on Wednesday March 17, @11:26AM
Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 17, @11:16AM
Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 17, @11:09AM
Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 17, @11:00AM
Posted by Cliff on Wednesday March 17, @10:30AM
Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 17, @10:13AM
Is VA now paying the
Fields of Athenry
By a lonely prison wall I heard a Taco callin'
Michael they have taken you away
For you stole CowboyNeal's porn
And withered him with scorn
Now he sits and questions if he might be gay.
(Chorus) Low lie the profits of VA
Where once we watched dividends pay
Our careers were on the make, we had shares and stocks to take
Now Taco sits and questions if he might have failed.
By a lonely prison wall I heard a young man calling
Nothing matters, Taco, when you're free
Against the threat of anal rape
From Linux coders I escaped
Now you must take the pain with dignity.
By a lonely harbour wall he watched the penguin falling
As that crap OS fell down next to XP
For he'll live in hope and pray
For his masters in VA
It's so hard to see that open source has failed.
Asinine crapflood attacks against Taco and his minions only harden their resolve. The answer to the /. repression and groupthink is thru stealth, not brute force.
These turds must be STOPPED!!!!!!!
props to anti-slash, slops to GNAA!
Why did the GNAA perform it's ill-fated crapflood of not one, but two stories over the weekend? This increaase of the s/n ratio is not what /. needs.....
Oh, and Linux for games rawks!!!
Stop posting AC, Michael Sims! And CmdrTaco, please keep you anal urges to yourself.
fo'shizzle my nizzle!
Props to anti-slash.org!
slops to GNAA!
Oh wait, Steve Jobs is an apple-up-the-butt guy.....
I thought bigfoot was CmdrTaco's dad! This really disapoints me.......
Oh, and fp?
Frist Pist?
Shout out to anti-slash.org!
so I won't touch it with a 10-foot pole........
At the urging of various people I spent the weekend researching and contemplating the liberal and conservative agendas, with the intent of discovering the truth.
This is what I found.
First I spent a total of 12 hours viewing the most popular TV media outlets, CNN and FoxNews. CNN is often decried as the 'mouthpiece' for the liberals, the same of FoxNews for conservatives. Every 30 minutes I would switch back and forth between the two channels, totaling 6 hours on each.
Second, I spent 12 hours reading various print media. This included an even split of conservative and liberal literature by both politicians and the media 'pundits' like Anne Coulter, Al Franken, George Will, etc.
Exhausted by the words, images, and ideas swirling around in my head, I spent another 12 hours meditating about what I seen, heard, and read in the previous 24 hours. Fueled by an overwhelming desire to find the truth (and a good supply of mountain dew) I finally came to my senses. The truth that I was looking for had been found! But first a few hours of sleep......
After a restful sleep, I set about putting my discoveries into words. I found out it was very simple.
This is what I found: The differences between the political 'left' and the political 'right' are in truth so small as to be inconsequential! Many years ago this was not the case, but over the past 30 years or so liberal and conservatives have both become so blinded by their greed and the realizing of their agendas, both personal and corporate, that what divided them at one point has in reality ceased to exist.
What was I to do? This train of thought was totally against my upbringing and prior experience. You were either on one side or the other. Now, there was no 'side'. I had become a political agnostic.
So, I have formed a new organization entitled Political Agnostics against Politicians or PAP for short.
The first thing on PAP's agenda is an aggressive campaign to get the word out, to show the world that there is no difference between the 'left' and the 'right', no difference between conservatives and republicans. It will reveal the corruption that is running rampant in the political community. This smear campaign will reveal the truth!
A PAP SMEAR campaign!
Come and join me on this holy crusade! Together we show the world that at it's core, both political parties are nothing but a bunch of pussies.......
and FP!
shout out to anti-slash!
slops to the GNAA
About two weeks ago I decided to try and install Linux on my old K6-2 450mhz machine gathering dust in the basement. A friend of mine gave me a few cd's that had something called 'Mandrake' on it.
He said "This is supposed to be the most user-friendly 'distro' out there. Give it a try."
So with trepidation about wiping out my beloved win98se install on the old machine, I jumped right in.
On firing up the install disk, the Man-drake installer asked me if I wanted to remove the win98se partition that already existed. After pondering this for several minutes I though, 'what the hell, I can always reinstall it!' So I let it fly.
After what seemed like 45 minutes of swapping cd's in-and-out of the drive, the man-drake (isn't that some sort of bird?) installer ask me what I wanted to use this linux machine for. So many choices! games, office, mail server, web server, about 2 dozen choices flooded my screen. This is madness! So after carefully considerating my options
I decided to choose them all! I would be a Linux power-user to end all linux power-users!
So after this decision was made I waited. And waited. And waited. During this I started to wonder. My Windows XP Home intallation on my other Peecee didn't ask me thse kind of questions, and it easily has the all the abilities that man-drake advertised to have. After all, I paid for WinXP Home. Sigh, I guess this it the price one pays
for being part of the linux elite.
Approximately 50 mintues later I get another prompt from the man-drake installer asking me what kind of GUI I wanted to use, KDE or GNOME. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me! I selected both and let it fly.
After only about 20 mintues this time it appeared the install was completed. The mandrake installer told me it was going to reboot and then I would revel in Linux goodness. I waited with baited breath while the reboot churned away, eagerly waiting the opportuntity to use the KDE/GNOME interface. Page after page of command line
stuff flew by my screen, seeming to get faster and faster as the time of my linux deliverance approached. Then, the screen flashed black (kinda like those scenes from the movie Wargames). I gasped and was presented with something like this:
bsh: blah/blah/blah/ ____
What the hell was this? Wasn't this man-drake linux supposed to be user friendly? Instead of the friendly confines of a WinXP like GUI instead I was given an ugly DOS like prompt, which looked supiciously like the TRS-80 system I first learned BASIC on in high school. Is this all the farther the great open-source movement has progressed?
After serveral minutes of sobbing and knashing of teeth, I came to a decision. All the linux fags out there were not going to defeat me! They were not going to cry "Bend over WinXP boy, you're going to take linux OUR WAY and like it!".
I quickly found my old musty copy of 'Unix in a Nutshell' from my college days and got to work. In a few hours I found out how to start the KDE GUI. This made life so much easier. After several days I was able to get the machine's 14.4 internal modem working with man-drake and connected to the internet, using a browser called Mozilla. Where oh where were the glorious pop-ups that appeared as I was surfing porn sites? Those bastards!
After several more days I was starting to feel somewhat comfortable. Using something called Gimp to manipulate my growing collection of adult images was becoming a habit. And because I was ashamed to let my friends and neighbors know I was using a gasp! free operating system like mandrake, I kept the pee-cee in the basement. Now my girlfriend things the sounds emanating from below are me just woodworking or lifting weights. I guess linux has freed me after all!
At least Gazbo has the guts to post non-AC. And what stupid turds create accounts just to track /. trolls? These people need to get a life. They are just as, if not more pathetic than the trolls.
Kill the EU IP Rights Enforcement Bill!
By Lucy Sherriff
Posted: 03/03/2004 at 14:08 GMT
Civil liberties and consumer rights groups are calling on MEPs to reject the EU Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive.
Today (3 March) is the last day that amendments can be tabled before the final debate and vote, from 8-11 March.
IP Justice, an international coalition of civil liberties groups and consumer rights activists, is organising a protest in Strasbourg to "uphold traditional civil liberties against the over-zealous enforcement of intellectual property rights". The meeting will be held outside the EU Parliament on 8 March between 4.30pm and 6.30pm.
The bill was introduced to make it easier to tackle large scale pirating operations, and to create a consistent, pan-European approach to intellectual property law. But many groups, including Campaign for an Open Digital Environment (CODE) and the EFF, are concerned about the way the bill has been rushed through the European Parliament.
The directive's Rapporteur, French MEP Janelly Fourtou, (who, incidentally, is wife of the head of Vivendi Universal) has placed it on a "First Reading". This is usually reserved for directives on which there is already unanimous agreement, and does not allow for public debate. This meant the directive could be drafted behind closed doors.
Civil rights groups want the proposal sent into a second reading, where its provisions can be publicly considered.
According to the BSA, 25 per cent of software in use in the UK is illegal. It claims that reducing this to 15 per cent would generate an extra 2.5bn in tax revenues and 40,000 jobs in the IT sector. It points out that organised crime gangs have moved into software piracy on a large scale, and argues that tough legislation is needed to stop this.
Few people would seriously oppose a law that would tackle these problems, and make it easier for industry to go after real criminals: the organised crime gangs, the people selling sub-standard software, or pirating thousands of videos.
However, this directive fails to distinguish between commercial counterfeiting, and inadvertent individual copyright infringement. This means a 12-year old P2P file sharer, or someone photocopying pages from a library text book at university, is seen as identical to a large scale piracy operation filtering money into organised crime.
The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure UK (FFII-UK) proposed a set of amendments that it says would reduce the directive's harm to consumers, including limiting its scope to commercial cases.
As it stands, this directive grants some very scary powers to rights holders. Consider the Anton Piller orders: these enable rights holders to hire private police to raid a suspect's home.
This was previously restricted to very rare, large commercial infringers. The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) points out that now, anyone who infringes copyright - even unwittingly - may have his or her "assets seized, bank account frozen, anally raped by Michael Sims, and home invaded".
The bill creates a new "Right of Information" that allows rights holders to obtain personal information on P2P file sharers. An ISP's servers can be seized and destroyed with no hearing if one of their customers is alleged to have infringed a copyright.
It fails to define the term 'intellectual property rights', so interpretation will vary hugely from country to country when/if the directive becomes law, undermining one of the main objectives of the legislation: harmonising EU law.
Neither the Business Software Alliance, nor the British Phonographic Industry was able to provide any comment on the implications of this directive for consumers before we went to press.
Can't we just give the astronauts nose plugs and be done with it?