Sweden, though a whole ocean apart from the nearest U.S. federal court, is right next to Norway, where - Quisling lives! - at the behest of foreigners, the police arrested a Norwegian citizen, Mr. Johansen. Capital knows no borders. So all I can say is "good luck" to Mr. Jansson and Mr. Skala.
> It's a naked couple engaged in sexual activity. Of course it's pornographic!
The deep problem is, as you know, that decent persons who share your wholesome heartfelt thorough revulsion to the horrible act of fornication, for technical reasons I'm sure we'd rather not elaborate in detail out here in public, end up childless. Whereas conversely, moral-less sensualists, career fornicators, by a perversity of the Universe, often end up parents even without intending to in the first place.
That such is the case in our contigent and accidental world is dreadful enough; the further fact that it is a veritable law of nature that such a state of affairs must necessarily be, is sad and awful proof that the Manichaeans were right, and that ours is indeed the worst of all possible worlds.
> Sokal's experiment with Social Text was a terribly important > event -- that's why virtually all knowledge of it has been supressed.
Pure rubbish; it was not suppressed, but publicly trumpted in such obscure journals as Time Magazine and the Wall Street Journal. In fact, it got about a thousand times more press than such a childish stunt deserved.
> It proves irrefutably, once and for all, that so-called "academia" is a scam.
Basically Sokal's argument boils down to the hogpen notion that, "These here manuscripts is too durn hard for me to understand a word of em, so's they's got to be a bunch a crap!" Well, the terminology of sociology is complex and recondite, as what intellectual specialty's is not? But because a text in computer science, for example, looks like an explosion in an alphabet-soup factory, it doesn't necessarily follow that computer science is nothing but hot air, does it?
All Sokal's contemptible hoax proves is that social scientists can't trust a physicist to act in a collegial manner. Social scientists aren't supposed to know physics, any more than physicists are expected to know sociology, or psychology, or economics. The editors of Social Texttrusted Sokal, who proceeded to take advantage of their trust to humiliate them in public for his own inane self-aggrandisement.
Well, they learned one thing, and that's not to trust one of those ill-dressed, ill-mannered, semi-illiterate geeks from the so-called "hard sciences" departments ever again. ("Hard science," by the way, is seriously mislabeled. Think about it, what's harder to model, the physical actions of inanimate objects or the behavior of masses of thinking persons?)
> For the past fifty years, the radical left had exerted something close > to absolute dictator power in this country
Which country are you posting from? Which planet? Good God, what a load of shit. I swear, that's the stupidest thing I've read all week. How can you present an utter imbecility like this with a straight face?
> If every member in a community decides to freely believe the > promiscous sex is immoral, then, they are still 'free'. Your post would > imply that this is not the case.
As far as the idea that "every member" of our community disdains nude dancing goes, well, that just can't possibly be so, as the "Mons Venus" parking lot is packed every evening. In fact, if "Mons Venus" and its competitors were truly universally unpopular in Tampa, there wouldn't have been any need for legislation at all, would there? And certainly the "Mons Venus" does not force unwilling passers-by to look upon its unclad dancers. Far from it! in fact, one has to pay to get in.
No, what you have in this law, on the face of it, is an effort of one group of citizens, who hate sex and who would assumedly never visit the "Mons" themselves whether or not it were legal, to impose their anti-sex ideals upon a second, clearly defined group, the customers of "Mons Venus", who have utterly different ideals. But even that is a false face, because the highest-ranking politician who signed this law, our Mayor Greco, is himself a wholly unrepentant ex-customer of "Mons Venus"; from which we can only conclude that the entire business is an exercise in naked hypocrisy.
As far as the well-known licentiousness of American politicians, why, haven't you been paying any attention to the news at all these last few years? These are not mere baseless allegations; we taxpayers have recently spent tens of millions of dollars to prove them absolutely irrefutably in mind-bogglingly minute detail. Here, now; what do these names have in common:
Bill Clinton Newt Gingrich Henry Hyde Bob Barr Bob Livingston Helen Chenowith
I'm sure I forgot a few, and I invite other readers to help me, ah how should I put this, flesh out this list.
You really need to clarify your objection; to me at least it is simply incoherent.
> What I find amusing is how/. community
But I am not "the/. community". I am a single individual. I would even go so far as to say that my political opinions are not shared by the majority of posters to slashdot.
> pretends that they really support the idea of 'freedom' when in reality > they really support their ideals.
But which freedom does the so-called "/. community" fail to support, opting instead to support their own anti-freedom "ideals"?
> What's even more amusing is that in their arguments they use the > same weak reasoning methods that the targets of their attacks use, > e.g. analogies. Carry on hypocrites.
In what way are analogies an especially "weak" reasoning method? Admittedly arguments based in analogies do not display the same rigidity as the rock-hard proofs of mathematics (that is to say, tautologies.) But the deductive methods of mathematics can't be applied anywhere in the real world. In fact, whenever one "mathematizes," a problem in even a "hard science" like physics, one is applying an analogy. A physicist reasons: "By experiment, we have determined that certain aspects of this stuff in the real world appear to behave analogously to mathematical variables, that is to say, purely imaginary abstractions, in equations 'A' and 'B'. Now in mathematics, equations 'A' and 'B' in combination yield equation 'C'. Therefore it is at least worth testing as a hypothesis, that those quantifiable aspect of matter in the material world will also act similarly to those numerical variablesin equation 'C'."
But in fact I presented no analogies anyway. Perhaps where you wrote "analogies" you meant "anecdotes" instead? I'd be the first to admit that an anecdote does not constitute a proof. But I also don't feel obliged to prove yet again the self-evident fact that American politicians, as a class, are both hypocritical and notoriously sexually profligate.
Probably Chinese culture isn't so deranged as U.S. culture over the issue of sex, it's difficult to imagine another country with a culture as guiltily obsessed as this one (but then there's Afghanistan, of course) but whether or not that happens to be the case, the main reason they don't block porn is because they don't have politicians running for office who think they can get elected by making a big noisy fuss over porn.
In Tampa, Florida where I live, there is a well-known nude-dancing club with the absurd name "Mons Venus". The Mayor of Tampa, Dick Greco, used to take his business associates and clients to the "Mons Venus" in person. Despite that fact, he recently signed a bill criminlaizing nude dancing, such as that which he himself used to pay to see, in the city limits. Why? This jerk Greco is plainly grubbing for votes by presenting the public with a transparently phony display of outraged morality, of course. Votes from whom? I think William Gibson put it well in his novel "Idoru":
"...Do it and you've got yourself a job."
Laney looked at the tweaked Hillman on his screen. "You haven't told me what I'm looking for."
"Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, Laney, anything that might be of interest to Slitscan's audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections."
What do you expect from Rupert Murdoch's Fox News? All the major U.S. news media companies are biased but Murdoch's stuff is so nakedly and vertiginously biased it leaves you dizzy and disoriented. Fox News should not be used while driving or operating heavy machinery.
If you're a troll, then you're not very funny, and if you're serious, you're a moron.
No, that's merely an insult, it would be better to be perfectly literal, you're an idiot. Look it up in a dictionary with etymologies. An idiot is precisely what you are.
Who said technical people have no artistic sensibilities? Who said there couldn't possibly be a poet on slashdot? God what a wonderful, superb troll! U R truelie the greatest!!!1! - Gratefully yours WDK
> The right of free assocation shall not be infringed.
Not in Il Duce Giuliani's New York! Go to Central Park and attempt to address more than twenty of your fellow citizens. If the tenor of your discussion pleases Il Duce, then you'll be all right, no official will lift a finger to infringe upon that "right" of yours; on the other hand, if you are so injudicious as to displease his majesty he cries out to his Brown Shirts, "Avanti!" and it's a vigorous thrashing with nightsticks and then off to the Tombs for you, you anarchist scum!
Or, for a few years there in Chicago, you retained the right to free association, unless you happened to be young, male and black; then you and your four-or-more friends became, by definition, a "street gang" and were thus subject to immediate arrest and incarceration. As it happens, thanks to those wildeyed radicals at the ACLU that law got invalidated.
> Those. Days. Are. Over. Face it. Look it in the eye. Get used to it.
No. They're. Not.
> We have no need to maintain a vast archive of irrational political > nonsense, virus-infested "free" software, and pornography.
"We"? Who the fuck are you, you loser troll, and who the fuck are the "we" you claim to be part of? Who appointed you dictator?
Actually that was harsh and uncalled-for. You aren't a "loser troll," actually you are quite a successful troll, and you've done a fine trollish job. Two thumbs up! Up where, I'll discreetly decline to specify.
More Randite nonsense. Sounds as thrilling and makes as little sense as the lyrics on a heavy metal album. I hope you never have any children, or if you do that you have thought these issues out a little bit more thoroughly by then. Because, see, your two-week-old infant can't "pay as he goes." He's, like, too young to get a job, get it?
By the way, if Americans had adopted your attitude in, say, 1941, then today you and I would both know all the lyrics to the "Horst Wessel Lied" by heart.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Re:You may think you're joking, but you're not.
on
Master Of Your Domain
·
· Score: 1
>...public "education" (which isn't even education in any meaningful sense)...
Get serious! Where did you learn to read? OK, there's a slim chance that you learned at home, before you went to school (well, I did) but if so, where did you learn basic arithmetic and algebra? I'll bet your old Grandma didn't teach you trigonometry. Maybe you think teaching algebra isn't "education in any meaningful sense," in which case I've got to ask you, what is meaningful, anyway?
And it's obviously true that your public school didn't teach you any economics or politics or history, or else you wouldn't have posted what you did, but ultimately that really isn't the public school system's fault. The disgraceful utter lack of public knowledge in these fields is a result of political pressure from above - we certainly wouldn't want to conjure up the spectre of old Karl Marx anywhere within five hundred feet of the schoolyard, now would we?
The point is, only the guy who installs software has "assented" to the EULA. The next guy who sits down at the console would seem to be legally immune. This is a lapse, I suppose, on the part of those anal-compulsive types who dream up all that legal rubbish. The obvious response is that users would have to click through a EULA dialog box every time they load the program. Also, they'd have to include verbiage that would prohibit user "A", who started the program and clicked through the EULA, from leaving his desk to go to the rest room, during which lapse an unauthorized, non-EULA-assenting user "B" might sit down at the console and perform God only knows what kinds of nefarious, EULA-violating offenses. But even that wouldn't stop me from reporting on what I witnessed watching over the contractually-bound user's shoulder.
By the way, just last Friday I went through the install for Windows NT Server v.4.0 on my company's new Accounting server. Unlike probably 99%+ of the people who run the NT install program, and to the considerable annoyance of the head of Accounting who was eager to get it over with, I actually read the entire OEM EULA, rather than just holding down the "Page Down" key until it beeps and then hitting "F8". Well, here's yet another reason why the Microsoft lawyers all need to be hanged. Did you know that the NT Server EULA now prohibits benchmark testing without prior approval by the Microsoft Corporation? I guess it's Mindcraft or no craft at all.
> Under UCITA, a software company can make it an actionable breach > of contract to say anything they don't like about their product.
Maybe that holds for the dumb sucka that actually opened the shrinkwrap, or clicked on the "I agree" button in the EULA dialog box. But whoever they are, they can't stop me from publicly proclaiming that their shitty software sucks, because I didn't buy it, or install it, or agree to any contract. All I did was look over some other guy's shoulder while he muttered curses as he wrestled with that big bag of bugs. And I ain't gonna tell you whose shoulder either, and you can't make me.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
...another card-carrying ACLU member...The ACLU is your friend!
Slashdot light is great, I remember when I first found out how to make/. come up in the fast mode. But if you really want to enjoy the/. experience the best possible way, get yourself a free copy of Lynx. It loads up fast even on a slow machine, and in terms of downloading pages, it's so fast it makes your eyes pop. If you're running Linux your distro probably has Lynx already, or if you're on a Win9x or NT box, you can even get a version for Win32, and it's really great. I mean, it's not ideal for every web page; it isn't what I'd use to browse Playboy.com, but for a text-based site like this one, you just can't beat Lynx.
If you're into computer programming, you can also write new original software on PCs, which are available everywhere, using GNU development tools, which are free, all the way up to the point where the RIAA dispatches a goon squad to your house to kick your door down, seize your PC and your cell phone, and drag you off to jail. For that matter, you could also, technically speaking, grow a big crop of marijuana in your own back yard.
This isn't a technical problem. It's a legal problem.
Yeah, sure, whoop-de-doo, so the intellectual property crowd have managed to get that bullshit redefinition into a dictionary somewhere. It's still a load of crap and I refuse to buy it.
Argoff's original post was correct. A guy who copies a computer program or a pop songs is guilty, at worst, of a materially insignificant tort against a property owner. To label such a guy a "pirate" is like calling someone who jaywalks across a city street a "child-molester" or "rapist" or "murderer".
Go read or reread Orwell's Politics and the English Language. It dulls your wits and degrades our language to let common words be misused by these money-hungry propagandists this way.
Karl versus the "Young Hegelians," from the preface to The German Ideology:
...Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This honest fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.
> 1 Yes, I'm -$100 richer > 2 because > 3 deCSS allowed me to play DVDs on a Linux box > 4 and > 5 I'm unemployed.
Is (1) a consequence of both (3) and (5) either separately ((3) -> (1) AND (5) -> (1)) or in concert (perhaps neither ((3) -> (1)) nor ((5 -> (1)) but (((3) + (5)) -> (1))? Does (3) imply (5) and thus lead to (1)? and if so, why and how? Is (3) -> (1) sort of a humorous non-sequitur, which is then combined with (5) as two stand-alone assertions in ironic juxtaposition, kind of like one of Mark Leyner's thingies?
Let's not get into the double negative. In all computer languages the double negative is interpreted in the most tediously literal way, but when we speak at least, and that's what we're up to here, we're free from all the constricting logic, no no no don't never want to go that way nohow.
I see income is up twelve point three percent, I conclude that, contrary to Mr. Valenti's assertions, MP3s have not begun to drive the music business into bankruptcy.
Sir, this article is news with numbers. Highest-quality nerdish numbers with three active decimal places; numbers which are inarguable because they were supplied by the opposition. It is the kind of news that you can cite in debate if you are the sort who uses numbers in debate.
And these RIAA bastards have got so much pull that they have managed to get a hacker in Norway thrown in jail for distributing a few bits of source code, yet you're going to look me in the eye and tell me an editorial doesn't belong on the front page of this publication?
From reading some of the other posts here it seems what they offer is Redhat 6.1 plus pre-configured support for their UDMA66 and their dual-Celeron. It so happens I own a BP6 (dual C400s, $265, an impulse buy), and I like Redhat 6.1 (OK the graphic install kinda sux, but that picture of Alan Cox is cool) so for me this is just great.
Abit has really gone the extra mile to make its customers who are Linux users happy, and I really appreciate it. Thanks a million Abit!
H. Ross Perot, for the Reform Party, got eight million votes, Ralph Nader, for the Green Party, got about two-thirds of a million votes including mine (I just couldn't pull the lever for that worm Clinton a second time), Harry Browne of the Libertarian Party got about a half-million votes, and Earl F. Dodge of the Prohibition Party got 1,298 votes.
Slashdot Mirror
Sweden, though a whole ocean apart from the nearest U.S. federal court, is right next to Norway, where - Quisling lives! - at the behest of foreigners, the police arrested a Norwegian citizen, Mr. Johansen. Capital knows no borders. So all I can say is "good luck" to Mr. Jansson and Mr. Skala.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> It's a naked couple engaged in sexual activity. Of course it's pornographic!
The deep problem is, as you know, that decent persons who share your wholesome heartfelt thorough revulsion to the horrible act of fornication, for technical reasons I'm sure we'd rather not elaborate in detail out here in public, end up childless. Whereas conversely, moral-less sensualists, career fornicators, by a perversity of the Universe, often end up parents even without intending to in the first place.
That such is the case in our contigent and accidental world is dreadful enough; the further fact that it is a veritable law of nature that such a state of affairs must necessarily be, is sad and awful proof that the Manichaeans were right, and that ours is indeed the worst of all possible worlds.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Sokal's experiment with Social Text was a terribly important
> event -- that's why virtually all knowledge of it has been supressed.
Pure rubbish; it was not suppressed, but publicly trumpted in such obscure journals as Time Magazine and the Wall Street Journal. In fact, it got about a thousand times more press than such a childish stunt deserved.
> It proves irrefutably, once and for all, that so-called "academia" is a scam.
Basically Sokal's argument boils down to the hogpen notion that, "These here manuscripts is too durn hard for me to understand a word of em, so's they's got to be a bunch a crap!" Well, the terminology of sociology is complex and recondite, as what intellectual specialty's is not? But because a text in computer science, for example, looks like an explosion in an alphabet-soup factory, it doesn't necessarily follow that computer science is nothing but hot air, does it?
All Sokal's contemptible hoax proves is that social scientists can't trust a physicist to act in a collegial manner. Social scientists aren't supposed to know physics, any more than physicists are expected to know sociology, or psychology, or economics. The editors of Social Text trusted Sokal, who proceeded to take advantage of their trust to humiliate them in public for his own inane self-aggrandisement.
Well, they learned one thing, and that's not to trust one of those ill-dressed, ill-mannered, semi-illiterate geeks from the so-called "hard sciences" departments ever again. ("Hard science," by the way, is seriously mislabeled. Think about it, what's harder to model, the physical actions of inanimate objects or the behavior of masses of thinking persons?)
> For the past fifty years, the radical left had exerted something close
> to absolute dictator power in this country
Which country are you posting from? Which planet? Good God, what a load of shit. I swear, that's the stupidest thing I've read all week. How can you present an utter imbecility like this with a straight face?
Sincerely WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Windows is already at version 2000.
So what? I seem to remember reading somewhere about a 68000 version of Linux, which would be, like, 34 times cooler and more up-to-date.
But for really a unbeatable version number I don't see anybody anytime soon topping Google.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> If every member in a community decides to freely believe the
> promiscous sex is immoral, then, they are still 'free'. Your post would
> imply that this is not the case.
As far as the idea that "every member" of our community disdains nude dancing goes, well, that just can't possibly be so, as the "Mons Venus" parking lot is packed every evening. In fact, if "Mons Venus" and its competitors were truly universally unpopular in Tampa, there wouldn't have been any need for legislation at all, would there? And certainly the "Mons Venus" does not force unwilling passers-by to look upon its unclad dancers. Far from it! in fact, one has to pay to get in.
No, what you have in this law, on the face of it, is an effort of one group of citizens, who hate sex and who would assumedly never visit the "Mons" themselves whether or not it were legal, to impose their anti-sex ideals upon a second, clearly defined group, the customers of "Mons Venus", who have utterly different ideals. But even that is a false face, because the highest-ranking politician who signed this law, our Mayor Greco, is himself a wholly unrepentant ex-customer of "Mons Venus"; from which we can only conclude that the entire business is an exercise in naked hypocrisy.
As far as the well-known licentiousness of American politicians, why, haven't you been paying any attention to the news at all these last few years? These are not mere baseless allegations; we taxpayers have recently spent tens of millions of dollars to prove them absolutely irrefutably in mind-bogglingly minute detail. Here, now; what do these names have in common:
Bill Clinton
Newt Gingrich
Henry Hyde
Bob Barr
Bob Livingston
Helen Chenowith
I'm sure I forgot a few, and I invite other readers to help me, ah how should I put this, flesh out this list.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
You really need to clarify your objection; to me at least it is simply incoherent.
> What I find amusing is how /. community
But I am not "the /. community". I am a single individual. I would even go so far as to say that my political opinions are not shared by the majority of posters to slashdot.
> pretends that they really support the idea of 'freedom' when in reality
> they really support their ideals.
But which freedom does the so-called "/. community" fail to support, opting instead to support their own anti-freedom "ideals"?
> What's even more amusing is that in their arguments they use the
> same weak reasoning methods that the targets of their attacks use,
> e.g. analogies. Carry on hypocrites.
In what way are analogies an especially "weak" reasoning method? Admittedly arguments based in analogies do not display the same rigidity as the rock-hard proofs of mathematics (that is to say, tautologies.) But the deductive methods of mathematics can't be applied anywhere in the real world. In fact, whenever one "mathematizes," a problem in even a "hard science" like physics, one is applying an analogy. A physicist reasons: "By experiment, we have determined that certain aspects of this stuff in the real world appear to behave analogously to mathematical variables, that is to say, purely imaginary abstractions, in equations 'A' and 'B'. Now in mathematics, equations 'A' and 'B' in combination yield equation 'C'. Therefore it is at least worth testing as a hypothesis, that those quantifiable aspect of matter in the material world will also act similarly to those numerical variablesin equation 'C'."
But in fact I presented no analogies anyway. Perhaps where you wrote "analogies" you meant "anecdotes" instead? I'd be the first to admit that an anecdote does not constitute a proof. But I also don't feel obliged to prove yet again the self-evident fact that American politicians, as a class, are both hypocritical and notoriously sexually profligate.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Probably Chinese culture isn't so deranged as U.S. culture over the issue of sex, it's difficult to imagine another country with a culture as guiltily obsessed as this one (but then there's Afghanistan, of course) but whether or not that happens to be the case, the main reason they don't block porn is because they don't have politicians running for office who think they can get elected by making a big noisy fuss over porn.
In Tampa, Florida where I live, there is a well-known nude-dancing club with the absurd name "Mons Venus". The Mayor of Tampa, Dick Greco, used to take his business associates and clients to the "Mons Venus" in person. Despite that fact, he recently signed a bill criminlaizing nude dancing, such as that which he himself used to pay to see, in the city limits. Why? This jerk Greco is plainly grubbing for votes by presenting the public with a transparently phony display of outraged morality, of course. Votes from whom? I think William Gibson put it well in his novel "Idoru":
"...Do it and you've got yourself a job."
Laney looked at the tweaked Hillman on his screen. "You haven't told me what I'm looking for."
"Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, Laney, anything that might be of interest to Slitscan's audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections."
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
What do you expect from Rupert Murdoch's Fox News? All the major U.S. news media companies are biased but Murdoch's stuff is so nakedly and vertiginously biased it leaves you dizzy and disoriented. Fox News should not be used while driving or operating heavy machinery.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
If you're a troll, then you're not very funny, and if you're serious, you're a moron.
No, that's merely an insult, it would be better to be perfectly literal, you're an idiot. Look it up in a dictionary with etymologies. An idiot is precisely what you are.
Sincerely WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Who said technical people have no artistic sensibilities? Who said there couldn't possibly be a poet on slashdot? God what a wonderful, superb troll! U R truelie the greatest!!!1! - Gratefully yours WDK
> The right of free assocation shall not be infringed.
Not in Il Duce Giuliani's New York! Go to Central Park and attempt to address more than twenty of your fellow citizens. If the tenor of your discussion pleases Il Duce, then you'll be all right, no official will lift a finger to infringe upon that "right" of yours; on the other hand, if you are so injudicious as to displease his majesty he cries out to his Brown Shirts, "Avanti!" and it's a vigorous thrashing with nightsticks and then off to the Tombs for you, you anarchist scum!
Or, for a few years there in Chicago, you retained the right to free association, unless you happened to be young, male and black; then you and your four-or-more friends became, by definition, a "street gang" and were thus subject to immediate arrest and incarceration. As it happens, thanks to those wildeyed radicals at the ACLU that law got invalidated.
Yours WKiernan@concentric.net
> Those. Days. Are. Over. Face it. Look it in the eye. Get used to it.
No. They're. Not.
> We have no need to maintain a vast archive of irrational political
> nonsense, virus-infested "free" software, and pornography.
"We"? Who the fuck are you, you loser troll, and who the fuck are the "we" you claim to be part of? Who appointed you dictator?
Actually that was harsh and uncalled-for. You aren't a "loser troll," actually you are quite a successful troll, and you've done a fine trollish job. Two thumbs up! Up where, I'll discreetly decline to specify.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Pay as you go. Any other arrangement is theft.
More Randite nonsense. Sounds as thrilling and makes as little sense as the lyrics on a heavy metal album. I hope you never have any children, or if you do that you have thought these issues out a little bit more thoroughly by then. Because, see, your two-week-old infant can't "pay as he goes." He's, like, too young to get a job, get it?
By the way, if Americans had adopted your attitude in, say, 1941, then today you and I would both know all the lyrics to the "Horst Wessel Lied" by heart.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> ...public "education" (which isn't even education in any meaningful sense)...
Get serious! Where did you learn to read? OK, there's a slim chance that you learned at home, before you went to school (well, I did) but if so, where did you learn basic arithmetic and algebra? I'll bet your old Grandma didn't teach you trigonometry. Maybe you think teaching algebra isn't "education in any meaningful sense," in which case I've got to ask you, what is meaningful, anyway?
And it's obviously true that your public school didn't teach you any economics or politics or history, or else you wouldn't have posted what you did, but ultimately that really isn't the public school system's fault. The disgraceful utter lack of public knowledge in these fields is a result of political pressure from above - we certainly wouldn't want to conjure up the spectre of old Karl Marx anywhere within five hundred feet of the schoolyard, now would we?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
The point is, only the guy who installs software has "assented" to the EULA. The next guy who sits down at the console would seem to be legally immune. This is a lapse, I suppose, on the part of those anal-compulsive types who dream up all that legal rubbish. The obvious response is that users would have to click through a EULA dialog box every time they load the program. Also, they'd have to include verbiage that would prohibit user "A", who started the program and clicked through the EULA, from leaving his desk to go to the rest room, during which lapse an unauthorized, non-EULA-assenting user "B" might sit down at the console and perform God only knows what kinds of nefarious, EULA-violating offenses. But even that wouldn't stop me from reporting on what I witnessed watching over the contractually-bound user's shoulder.
By the way, just last Friday I went through the install for Windows NT Server v.4.0 on my company's new Accounting server. Unlike probably 99%+ of the people who run the NT install program, and to the considerable annoyance of the head of Accounting who was eager to get it over with, I actually read the entire OEM EULA, rather than just holding down the "Page Down" key until it beeps and then hitting "F8". Well, here's yet another reason why the Microsoft lawyers all need to be hanged. Did you know that the NT Server EULA now prohibits benchmark testing without prior approval by the Microsoft Corporation? I guess it's Mindcraft or no craft at all.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Under UCITA, a software company can make it an actionable breach
> of contract to say anything they don't like about their product.
Maybe that holds for the dumb sucka that actually opened the shrinkwrap, or clicked on the "I agree" button in the EULA dialog box. But whoever they are, they can't stop me from publicly proclaiming that their shitty software sucks, because I didn't buy it, or install it, or agree to any contract. All I did was look over some other guy's shoulder while he muttered curses as he wrestled with that big bag of bugs. And I ain't gonna tell you whose shoulder either, and you can't make me.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
...another card-carrying ACLU member...The ACLU is your friend!
Slashdot light is great, I remember when I first found out how to make /. come up in the fast mode. But if you really want to enjoy the /. experience the best possible way, get yourself a free copy of Lynx. It loads up fast even on a slow machine, and in terms of downloading pages, it's so fast it makes your eyes pop. If you're running Linux your distro probably has Lynx already, or if you're on a Win9x or NT box, you can even get a version for Win32, and it's really great. I mean, it's not ideal for every web page; it isn't what I'd use to browse Playboy.com, but for a text-based site like this one, you just can't beat Lynx.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> They're going to put me in the same category as rapists and murderers?
Rapists, maybe, not murderers. Don't you read the news? Didn't you hear? You don't go to jail for murder any more.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
If you're into computer programming, you can also write new original software on PCs, which are available everywhere, using GNU development tools, which are free, all the way up to the point where the RIAA dispatches a goon squad to your house to kick your door down, seize your PC and your cell phone, and drag you off to jail. For that matter, you could also, technically speaking, grow a big crop of marijuana in your own back yard.
This isn't a technical problem. It's a legal problem.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Yeah, sure, whoop-de-doo, so the intellectual property crowd have managed to get that bullshit redefinition into a dictionary somewhere. It's still a load of crap and I refuse to buy it.
Argoff's original post was correct. A guy who copies a computer program or a pop songs is guilty, at worst, of a materially insignificant tort against a property owner. To label such a guy a "pirate" is like calling someone who jaywalks across a city street a "child-molester" or "rapist" or "murderer".
Go read or reread Orwell's Politics and the English Language. It dulls your wits and degrades our language to let common words be misused by these money-hungry propagandists this way.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Karl versus the "Young Hegelians," from the preface to The German Ideology:
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I'm totally confused.
> 1 Yes, I'm -$100 richer
> 2 because
> 3 deCSS allowed me to play DVDs on a Linux box
> 4 and
> 5 I'm unemployed.
Is (1) a consequence of both (3) and (5) either separately ((3) -> (1) AND (5) -> (1)) or in concert (perhaps neither ((3) -> (1)) nor ((5 -> (1)) but (((3) + (5)) -> (1))? Does (3) imply (5) and thus lead to (1)? and if so, why and how? Is (3) -> (1) sort of a humorous non-sequitur, which is then combined with (5) as two stand-alone assertions in ironic juxtaposition, kind of like one of Mark Leyner's thingies?
Let's not get into the double negative. In all computer languages the double negative is interpreted in the most tediously literal way, but when we speak at least, and that's what we're up to here, we're free from all the constricting logic, no no no don't never want to go that way nohow.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> ...Thus no conclusion can be drawn.
I see income is up twelve point three percent, I conclude that, contrary to Mr. Valenti's assertions, MP3s have not begun to drive the music business into bankruptcy.
Sir, this article is news with numbers. Highest-quality nerdish numbers with three active decimal places; numbers which are inarguable because they were supplied by the opposition. It is the kind of news that you can cite in debate if you are the sort who uses numbers in debate.
And these RIAA bastards have got so much pull that they have managed to get a hacker in Norway thrown in jail for distributing a few bits of source code, yet you're going to look me in the eye and tell me an editorial doesn't belong on the front page of this publication?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
From reading some of the other posts here it seems what they offer is Redhat 6.1 plus pre-configured support for their UDMA66 and their dual-Celeron. It so happens I own a BP6 (dual C400s, $265, an impulse buy), and I like Redhat 6.1 (OK the graphic install kinda sux, but that picture of Alan Cox is cool) so for me this is just great.
Abit has really gone the extra mile to make its customers who are Linux users happy, and I really appreciate it. Thanks a million Abit!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
H. Ross Perot, for the Reform Party, got eight million votes, Ralph Nader, for the Green Party, got about two-thirds of a million votes including mine (I just couldn't pull the lever for that worm Clinton a second time), Harry Browne of the Libertarian Party got about a half-million votes, and Earl F. Dodge of the Prohibition Party got 1,298 votes.
See http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/summ.htm for exact figures.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net