Bull, the Citroen DS was the finest thing on four wheels since the Bugatti. You just don't take enough acid to appreciate great engineering, mon vieux. Yours W. KIERNAN
Look in a search engine for NTFSDOS. It is freeware by a company called Winternals or NTInternals or something like that. NTFSDOS is a relaively small MS-DOS driver (fits on a bootable floppy) that allows you to mount and read all the files on an NTFS volume with none of this nonsense about file permissions. It's really useful if your NT system gets so screwed up that you can't even boot yet you want to copy files off an NTFS volume. Of course you have to have physical access to the NT machine to reboot it with your MS-DOS floppy and use NTFSDOS. Also if I remember right NTFSDOS doesn't work with compressed volumes.
> So for the 150th time, if the majority of > people want it that way, what's the big deal?
Because first and foremost, filterware is a ripoff scam. It doesn't block what it is supposed to censor, and it blocks things that no sane person would want to censor. See www.peacefire.com for details. The only beneficiaries of filterware are the sleazy con men who promote and sell it; among them the lying dirtbag with whom jamie was having that public argument. As a taxpayer I would obviously prefer not to be mulcted for software that doesn't work.
Then, even if you could overcome that first fatal objection, even if you could make filter software that would actually work properly, the next question is, "Do we want to rigidly censor the material in public libraries?" By "rigidly" I mean that the degree of censorship that is normal in internet filterware is much higher (much more restrictive) than that which public libraries customarily apply concerning traditional library materials, that is, books.
Finally, you say "if the majority" but it's perfectly clear that "the majority" has neither any knowledge nor any opinion on these issues at all, and in their ignorance they are being shamelessly demagogued and bamboozled by scam artists such as this repellent Kimberley Fraser character jamie describes.
But I'm not even going to address those last two issues any further; those are arguments which only bear consideration after someone makes filterware which actually works the way it should - which may be a technically impossible AI problem anyway.
> In this case, marketing took the front seat to common sense.
In what way does it enhance marketing to make one's site inaccessible to a fraction of the target audience? You can make a site so graphic it practically pokes your eyes out and yet add tags so it is fully accessible to Lynx users too; it just requires a little tiny bit more work. Hardly any more work either, when compared with the effort that goes into all those graphic images.
No, if this decision is the work of the University's marketing staff, either you've got some incompetents who don't even know how to read raw HTML, who the only way they can make a page at all is using one of those awful canned web-site-builder programs like FrontPage, or the staff is just plain slack. Somebody's screwing off, and management should call them on it, if they're paying any attention at all that is. Hey management! Wake up, management!
Aw no use let em sleep, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
In order for this one incident to prove that marijuana impairs one's judgment, you would either have to assert that no person not under the influence of marijuana has ever made a similar fatal mistake, which is absurd - unintoxicated people crash airplanes, wreck buses, blow up nuclear power plants, etc., on a pretty regular schedule, as you read in the daily news - or else you would have to demonstrate that the statistical likelihood of wrecking a train is significantly higher if one is full of marijuana fumes - and that may be an arguable proposition, but you can't do that on the basis of one sample.
drugs == bad, eh? But I owe my life to drugs. Penicillin cured my heart infection when I was three years old.
Oooooh, you don't mean drugs, you mean heroin. Well why the heck don't you be a little more specific? Penicillin != heroin. Drugs != heroin. Yeah, heroin's pretty dangerous. Addictive too, so they say. Good for terminal cancer patients, though.
Say, did you know that six hundred thousand American citizens were arrested last year for possesion of marijuana? That's marijuana, not heroin. Just as penicillin != heroin, marijuana != heroin. I can think a few more productive ways to spend ten billion dollars of the taxes we Americans paid last year than on hounding six hundred thousand of my fellow citizens into jail over a nearly perfectly harmless vice.
Reality's a bitch ain't it? Here's something make you feel better; go take a phenothiazine tranquilizer. Calm ya down plus it's the best for nausea... Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> I think that when people start saying things like "I respect > sensible laws" we are headed for trouble.
You are sure as Hell in a lot more trouble when people start saying things like "I respect all laws, sensible or nonsensical." Think Auschwitz, sister.
Marx in London to Ludwig Kugelmann in Hanover, 12 Dec 1868:
"...But seriously speaking, the last Congress of the American Labor Union reveals very considerable progress by the fact, among others, that it treats women workers on completely equal terms, whereas the English, and to an even larger extent the chivalrous French, must be blamed for holding hidebound views in this respect. Anyone knowing a little about history knows that no great social transformation is possible without the feminine leaven. The social position of the fair sex - the ugly ones included - is an exact yardstick of social progress..."
So when, for crying out loud, are we going to catch up?
> If todays intellectual property laws were in force at the time of > Martin Luthar King
...bit of a slip-up, friend, you mean the original Martin Luther, not the twentieth-century American hero...
> the Catholic church would have been able to prevent the translation > of the Bible into local languages (German, later English, etc.) > and would have been able to prevent its being published at all.
Even without copyright laws, the Catholics tried pretty hard to prevent vernacular translations of the Bible. At one time, for example, it was an offense in England, punishable by execution, to distribute or even possess an English translation of the Scriptures. That's one of those little factoids that most modern religionists not only don't know but refuse to believe when told, but you can look it up in a history book.
No, it's real, that's the point, it's like therapy for programmers; see, legos are material. Material in discrete integral chunks with limited, highly specific functions, but it's a start. Soon after a gentle reorientation with these simple, bit-like material objects, they move on to stuffed dolls and swing-sets, things like that; and soon the detoxifying programmer can focus on and even grasp continuous natural phenomena, such as the flow of water, or aging and death.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Re:NOT entirely LEGOs! Uses Rubber Band for Power!
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> I could make a real gun out of LEGO's as long as I am willing to > use black powder as my power source.
Oh PLEASE make such a gun oh PLEASE and publish the plans and photos of it going off...really I just can't see how any machine made of legos (I mean Legos, wanna capitalise so as to respect the trademark) can stand any kind of exothermic reaction. But I could be wrong; I'll admit I never spent a tenth as long as I should have playing with black powder. So if you've got something in mind let's see it.
and lego crack pipe (little clear 1x1s represent rocks) and big green lego spleeeeef, but when some fiend stars publishing the plans for those, then it will be time to crack down on the youth-corrupting distributors, both small (the Kay-Bee at the mall) and big (the mysterious, shadowy "Claus Syndicate" centered, some say, in the Arctic...)
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Re:Right-wingers are censors, you moron.
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>...defends all of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, not just > the popular ones (ACLU, I'm looking at you).
Look, the ACLU does its job and it does it damn well. And it has done it for more than eighty years in the face of fierce opposition from all sides - not only from the oligarchs and thought police whose entire business consists of forcing you to shut the fuck up, which makes sense as the ACLU is directly opposed to their interests, but also opposition from misguided types like yourself, who fail to realize that the number one reason they can complain about the government so freely and openly is spelled "A-C-L-U".
So God damn what if the ACLU focuses on the First Amendment to the exclusion of supporting your gun hobby? They're plenty busy defending the First Amendment, without which you God damn gun nuts wouldn't even get a chance to publicly protest. Keep in mind that you're not going up against a pack of perfumed postmodernists here; you're taking on the U.S. government! Go read about A. Mitchell Palmer, circa 1918, sometime. Go read about Martin Dies and Joseph McCarthy. In case you forgot, the first principle of all governments throughout history is, "Stamp on your critics." I get so God damned tired of people putting the ACLU down because it doesn't do the NRA's job for them. That's bullshit; you want the ACLU lawyers to come over to your house and wash your car while they're at it?
Instead of knocking the ACLU, why don't you go join the ACLU instead? They really need your money, and if you want to continue to have the freedom to shoot your mouth off the way you (and I) seem to enjoy doing right here and now, you want to give them some money too. Also go sign up with the EFF too while you've got your credit card out.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
ps the first poster is wrong, you know; all the gun nuts I happen to know are libertarians, not theocrats. Or at least the bloodthirsty theocrat-terrorists, would-be Talibani, amongst my acquaintances keep quiet about their nefarious plots in my presence.
Re:Where is the chicken blood drool?
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I went to your web site and I was tragically disappointed. The reason I find Ms. Portman so appealing, and I should think this goes for the rest of the geeks here on slashdot as well, is because of those wonderful photos of her all gothically white with that fetching stripe of blood in the middle of her lower lip. Alas I missed the movie (didn't play in the town where I live) but obviously that red stripe comes from biting chickens's heads off.
So here I rush to the web site on the other side of your link and there she is, breathtakingly undressed, yes all blessed, but then my blood runs cold as I realize, damn it all, where is the chicken blood!?!?
Life is a disappointment, nay, a cheat. (Arthur Schopenhauer said that.)
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Re:OFFTOPIC, just a question about a .sig
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G.W. Junior ("Shrub") said that in reference to gwbush.com, a satirical web site that broadly made fun of "Shrub's" vapidity, rumors about his "youthful" cocaine use, etc. "Shrub" doesn't believe that the First Amendment covers making fun of him on a web site. He feels political commentary is going too far. What an airhead.
No. of course I haven't seen NT 5 yet, since the release version won't appear on the general market for another two weeks yet, and I'll be damned if I'll do free beta testing for a commercial company. But what does it do so much better than Linux, to justify its immensely higher cost? I have NT 4 (both Workstation and Server) and as far as I'm concerned they do exactly two things better than Linux. One, which is not precisely a feature inherent in NT itself, is that you can run AutoCAD on NT. The other thing I think is really slick about NT is the transparent way you can print from an NT workstation to a printer installed on an NT server. On the down side, when I compare NT's GUI and Registry with Linux's CLI and text configuration files, it's easy for me to choose Linux. Linux is more stable, infinitely better documented, easier to back up, and did I mention the cost factor?
Active Directory sounds like it might be neat. What little I know about it makes it sound like a six-years-later clone of Novell's NDS, which is neat, but a.) NDS is really only of interest to companies with lots and lots of servers, and b.) unlike NDS, Active Directory is apparently limited to only Windows 2000 systems.
Finally, you have to realize that I don't really care if Linux runs some dumbass Mindcraft benchmark two percent slower than NT 5. I'm not trying to set any speed records. What's much more important to me is that Linux is fun to use. NT is no fun at all; too many things hidden away like an adventure game in a labyrinth, too many locked doors, way too many legal documents, too many suit-n-tie guys waiting around every corner with their hands out saying "Give me more money." So is this NT 5 something I'm going to enjoy using?
> But I can't, can I? Your so-called fucken "community" doesn't > provide anyone to deal with. A social club for long-haired bearded > dropouts (the FSF) and a social club for short-haired > gun nuts quoting Ayn Rand at each other (the OSI). Nothing in the way > of a unified body with the ability to make deals. Fuck-nothing.
Yep, it's too bad, so sad, that there is no fixed organization with binding powers, capable of signing checks, representing the free/open-source software community (hereinafter referred to as "suckas") that can make a big-$$$ deal with your professional and highly leet lawyerly ass (hereinafter referred to as "shyster"). My heart breaks to think of the opportunity we "suckas" are missing to get scammed by you, "shyster."
Anyway, why do you want to deal with the Linux community as a whole? Because obviously it isn't "the Linux community" which decides what license to apply to any particular program; it's that individual program's individual developer. Perhaps even at this moment, on the basis of this post, your email inbox is jam filled with requests for your services sent by anxious Linux developers. Maybe not, though; but at least there's one firm way out west Redmond way, heavy with the benjamins, that probably, no certainly, needs your leet services. Go rewrite their fucken EULA for 'em, hot-shot. There's gotta be a billion big bucks in it for ya.
Oh, by the way, those bearded dropouts in combination with the short-haired gun nuts have, in their spare time no less, created out of their own imaginations what may be the finest, definitely the coolest and most fun, computer operating system available in the world today. And what have you done lately? Nice tie.
Thanks for the laughs, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
At first glance it sounds like a argument but when I look a bit closer the whole subject disappears like fog. What's your problem? Do you want to write and sell a proprietary application that runs on a Linux box? Then go for it. Nobody is going to stop you. It's perfectly legal to produce and sell commercial for-profit software that runs on Linux. Lots of people and organizations, from little one-man shareware companies all the way up to multi-billion dollar software giants like Oracle, do just that. Some of them include the source code with their product, and others do not.
The GPL won't hold you back one bit, because it will be wholly up to you whether or not you want to license your stuff under GPL. If you want to make a big profit selling your software, you're obviously going to want to choose a different license.
Despite your
> The GPL will prevent him from leveraging and improving upon > publicly available code to make money...
I won't insult you by suggesting that you might want to grab someone else's copyrighted work, modify or extend it in some trivial manner, and then try to sell it as all your own. You're perfectly aware that that's both illegal and wrong. You can't get away with stealing, hacking and reselling Microsoft's copyrighted property and "leveraging" it, nor can I get away with pirating your copyrighted InfoWorld column and republishing that, nor can you get away with stealing RMS's or Linus's or ESR's or de Icaza's copyrighted property either. It's their property. Unless you want to go all the way with M. Proudhon and declare "property is theft!" then I expect you to maintain the ordinary respect for their property rights that you expect and deserve others to maintain for your own property rights.
Let us ignore, for the purpose of this discussion, the unseemly haste in which this judge rushed the issue through his court before the defense lawyers could prepare a rebuttal, so reminiscent of one a them old-time Surn judges gettin that n----r boy convicted n hanged afore them damn Yankee NAACP basterds can even make it to town. Let us also ignore the judge's amazing, deliberate ignorance of the simplest technical facts about the issue, and his parroting of recording industry complaints that are based on pure naked fiction (specifically I am referring to his assertion, apparantly copied verbatim from the plaintiff's brief, that the primary purpose of DeCSS "clearly" is illegal copying, rather than playback). Let's just discuss your statement:
> You own the physical DVD disk but the copyright owner owns the data > on it (movie, audio, whatever). The copyright owner can decide how you > are permitted to access this data - it's the copyright owners right to do this.
By that logic a record company can make it illegal for me to take one of my music CDs and from it make a tape recording to play in my car. But there are firm precedents that interpret this action as "fair use." So if this judge's novel interpretation of copyright law and the concept of "fair use" is correct, then all the established precedents go out the window.
I would like to argue that these established precedents concerning the scope of "fair use" should not be overthrown as abruptly and arbitrarily as that.
A lousy writer with a great topic trumps a t-riffic writer with - uh, what were we talking about? - trumps one of those, every time.
Right down here at the bottom of this very page I see a little phrase in underlined blue: submit story. If you can crank out a rabble-rousing editorial any better than Katz, whip it out.
Yours WD "rah rah Katz" K - WKiernan@concentric.net
I would have just sent you an email to tell you how much I admired your smart and fast (first!) post, but you had to be an anonymous coward so now I have to waste space on/.'s server and post it here, ya schmuck.
> Microsoft and free software have fundamentally inconsistent > economic interests, so any accomodation between them has to > be unstable, and prone to collapse.
But I don't buy this, I don't think the interests of the corporations and the free-software people are so totally and irrevocably at odds as you claim. As Marx observed, these binary things are inherently unstable, like a chair with only two legs, but there are more players than just those two in this economic game.
It's absurd to deny that practically all laws in this country are written by and for corporations and the wealthy - and those few that weren't, such as the laws of FDR's New Deal, or the civil rights laws of the early sixties, were generally extorted from legislatures facing imminent violent revolution as the alternative. But even discounting ordinary citizens as beneath the consideration of the ruling class, there are the corporate customers, and the anti-trust division of the U.S. Department of Justice to be considered as well.
Of course it would benefit Microsoft to annihilate all their competitors, both open-source and proprietary. But the investing class has divisions of interest in itself as well; Microsoft isn't the only corporation there is. If one company has a chokehold on a valuable item of intellectual property, it faces opposition from all the other companies who would have to pay them to use that IP. Keep in mind that the Microsoft antitrust suit is not about a conflict between Microsoft and end users like me or you - if it were, it would never have made it to court - but about the conflict between Microsoft and Compaq, two multi-billion-dollar behemoths.
The first decent (i.e. non-minimum-wage) job I ever got in my life, which, incidentally, was fourteen years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I got by meeting the following two qualifications:
Slashdot Mirror
Bull, the Citroen DS was the finest thing on four wheels since the Bugatti. You just don't take enough acid to appreciate great engineering, mon vieux. Yours W. KIERNAN
Look in a search engine for NTFSDOS. It is freeware by a company called Winternals or NTInternals or something like that. NTFSDOS is a relaively small MS-DOS driver (fits on a bootable floppy) that allows you to mount and read all the files on an NTFS volume with none of this nonsense about file permissions. It's really useful if your NT system gets so screwed up that you can't even boot yet you want to copy files off an NTFS volume. Of course you have to have physical access to the NT machine to reboot it with your MS-DOS floppy and use NTFSDOS. Also if I remember right NTFSDOS doesn't work with compressed volumes.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> So for the 150th time, if the majority of
> people want it that way, what's the big deal?
Because first and foremost, filterware is a ripoff scam. It doesn't block what it is supposed to censor, and it blocks things that no sane person would want to censor. See www.peacefire.com for details. The only beneficiaries of filterware are the sleazy con men who promote and sell it; among them the lying dirtbag with whom jamie was having that public argument. As a taxpayer I would obviously prefer not to be mulcted for software that doesn't work.
Then, even if you could overcome that first fatal objection, even if you could make filter software that would actually work properly, the next question is, "Do we want to rigidly censor the material in public libraries?" By "rigidly" I mean that the degree of censorship that is normal in internet filterware is much higher (much more restrictive) than that which public libraries customarily apply concerning traditional library materials, that is, books.
Finally, you say "if the majority" but it's perfectly clear that "the majority" has neither any knowledge nor any opinion on these issues at all, and in their ignorance they are being shamelessly demagogued and bamboozled by scam artists such as this repellent Kimberley Fraser character jamie describes.
But I'm not even going to address those last two issues any further; those are arguments which only bear consideration after someone makes filterware which actually works the way it should - which may be a technically impossible AI problem anyway.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> In this case, marketing took the front seat to common sense.
In what way does it enhance marketing to make one's site inaccessible to a fraction of the target audience? You can make a site so graphic it practically pokes your eyes out and yet add tags so it is fully accessible to Lynx users too; it just requires a little tiny bit more work. Hardly any more work either, when compared with the effort that goes into all those graphic images.
No, if this decision is the work of the University's marketing staff, either you've got some incompetents who don't even know how to read raw HTML, who the only way they can make a page at all is using one of those awful canned web-site-builder programs like FrontPage, or the staff is just plain slack. Somebody's screwing off, and management should call them on it, if they're paying any attention at all that is. Hey management! Wake up, management!
Aw no use let em sleep, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Christ sake, you can die of insulin shock. Dead. If this is a troll it's a particularly obnoxious one.
In order for this one incident to prove that marijuana impairs one's judgment, you would either have to assert that no person not under the influence of marijuana has ever made a similar fatal mistake, which is absurd - unintoxicated people crash airplanes, wreck buses, blow up nuclear power plants, etc., on a pretty regular schedule, as you read in the daily news - or else you would have to demonstrate that the statistical likelihood of wrecking a train is significantly higher if one is full of marijuana fumes - and that may be an arguable proposition, but you can't do that on the basis of one sample.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
drugs == bad, eh? But I owe my life to drugs. Penicillin cured my heart infection when I was three years old.
Oooooh, you don't mean drugs, you mean heroin. Well why the heck don't you be a little more specific? Penicillin != heroin. Drugs != heroin. Yeah, heroin's pretty dangerous. Addictive too, so they say. Good for terminal cancer patients, though.
Say, did you know that six hundred thousand American citizens were arrested last year for possesion of marijuana? That's marijuana, not heroin. Just as penicillin != heroin, marijuana != heroin. I can think a few more productive ways to spend ten billion dollars of the taxes we Americans paid last year than on hounding six hundred thousand of my fellow citizens into jail over a nearly perfectly harmless vice.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Reality's a bitch ain't it? Here's something make you feel better; go take a phenothiazine tranquilizer. Calm ya down plus it's the best for nausea... Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> I think that when people start saying things like "I respect
> sensible laws" we are headed for trouble.
You are sure as Hell in a lot more trouble when people start saying things like "I respect all laws, sensible or nonsensical." Think Auschwitz, sister.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> I'm yet to meet anyone who could spell with any competance while high...
You mean "competence," don't you?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Marx in London to Ludwig Kugelmann in Hanover, 12 Dec 1868:
"...But seriously speaking, the last Congress of the American Labor Union reveals very considerable progress by the fact, among others, that it treats women workers on completely equal terms, whereas the English, and to an even larger extent the chivalrous French, must be blamed for holding hidebound views in this respect. Anyone knowing a little about history knows that no great social transformation is possible without the feminine leaven. The social position of the fair sex - the ugly ones included - is an exact yardstick of social progress..."
So when, for crying out loud, are we going to catch up?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> If todays intellectual property laws were in force at the time of
> Martin Luthar King
> the Catholic church would have been able to prevent the translation
> of the Bible into local languages (German, later English, etc.)
> and would have been able to prevent its being published at all.
Even without copyright laws, the Catholics tried pretty hard to prevent vernacular translations of the Bible. At one time, for example, it was an offense in England, punishable by execution, to distribute or even possess an English translation of the Scriptures. That's one of those little factoids that most modern religionists not only don't know but refuse to believe when told, but you can look it up in a history book.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
No, it's real, that's the point, it's like therapy for programmers; see, legos are material. Material in discrete integral chunks with limited, highly specific functions, but it's a start. Soon after a gentle reorientation with these simple, bit-like material objects, they move on to stuffed dolls and swing-sets, things like that; and soon the detoxifying programmer can focus on and even grasp continuous natural phenomena, such as the flow of water, or aging and death.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> I could make a real gun out of LEGO's as long as I am willing to
> use black powder as my power source.
Oh PLEASE make such a gun oh PLEASE and publish the plans and photos of it going off...really I just can't see how any machine made of legos (I mean Legos, wanna capitalise so as to respect the trademark) can stand any kind of exothermic reaction. But I could be wrong; I'll admit I never spent a tenth as long as I should have playing with black powder. So if you've got something in mind let's see it.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
and lego crack pipe (little clear 1x1s represent rocks) and big green lego spleeeeef, but when some fiend stars publishing the plans for those, then it will be time to crack down on the youth-corrupting distributors, both small (the Kay-Bee at the mall) and big (the mysterious, shadowy "Claus Syndicate" centered, some say, in the Arctic...)
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> ...defends all of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, not just
> the popular ones (ACLU, I'm looking at you).
Look, the ACLU does its job and it does it damn well. And it has done it for more than eighty years in the face of fierce opposition from all sides - not only from the oligarchs and thought police whose entire business consists of forcing you to shut the fuck up, which makes sense as the ACLU is directly opposed to their interests, but also opposition from misguided types like yourself, who fail to realize that the number one reason they can complain about the government so freely and openly is spelled "A-C-L-U".
So God damn what if the ACLU focuses on the First Amendment to the exclusion of supporting your gun hobby? They're plenty busy defending the First Amendment, without which you God damn gun nuts wouldn't even get a chance to publicly protest. Keep in mind that you're not going up against a pack of perfumed postmodernists here; you're taking on the U.S. government! Go read about A. Mitchell Palmer, circa 1918, sometime. Go read about Martin Dies and Joseph McCarthy. In case you forgot, the first principle of all governments throughout history is, "Stamp on your critics." I get so God damned tired of people putting the ACLU down because it doesn't do the NRA's job for them. That's bullshit; you want the ACLU lawyers to come over to your house and wash your car while they're at it?
Instead of knocking the ACLU, why don't you go join the ACLU instead? They really need your money, and if you want to continue to have the freedom to shoot your mouth off the way you (and I) seem to enjoy doing right here and now, you want to give them some money too. Also go sign up with the EFF too while you've got your credit card out.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
ps the first poster is wrong, you know; all the gun nuts I happen to know are libertarians, not theocrats. Or at least the bloodthirsty theocrat-terrorists, would-be Talibani, amongst my acquaintances keep quiet about their nefarious plots in my presence.
I went to your web site and I was tragically disappointed. The reason I find Ms. Portman so appealing, and I should think this goes for the rest of the geeks here on slashdot as well, is because of those wonderful photos of her all gothically white with that fetching stripe of blood in the middle of her lower lip. Alas I missed the movie (didn't play in the town where I live) but obviously that red stripe comes from biting chickens's heads off.
So here I rush to the web site on the other side of your link and there she is, breathtakingly undressed, yes all blessed, but then my blood runs cold as I realize, damn it all, where is the chicken blood!?!?
Life is a disappointment, nay, a cheat. (Arthur Schopenhauer said that.)
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
G.W. Junior ("Shrub") said that in reference to gwbush.com, a satirical web site that broadly made fun of "Shrub's" vapidity, rumors about his "youthful" cocaine use, etc. "Shrub" doesn't believe that the First Amendment covers making fun of him on a web site. He feels political commentary is going too far. What an airhead.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
No. of course I haven't seen NT 5 yet, since the release version won't appear on the general market for another two weeks yet, and I'll be damned if I'll do free beta testing for a commercial company. But what does it do so much better than Linux, to justify its immensely higher cost? I have NT 4 (both Workstation and Server) and as far as I'm concerned they do exactly two things better than Linux. One, which is not precisely a feature inherent in NT itself, is that you can run AutoCAD on NT. The other thing I think is really slick about NT is the transparent way you can print from an NT workstation to a printer installed on an NT server. On the down side, when I compare NT's GUI and Registry with Linux's CLI and text configuration files, it's easy for me to choose Linux. Linux is more stable, infinitely better documented, easier to back up, and did I mention the cost factor?
Active Directory sounds like it might be neat. What little I know about it makes it sound like a six-years-later clone of Novell's NDS, which is neat, but a.) NDS is really only of interest to companies with lots and lots of servers, and b.) unlike NDS, Active Directory is apparently limited to only Windows 2000 systems.
Finally, you have to realize that I don't really care if Linux runs some dumbass Mindcraft benchmark two percent slower than NT 5. I'm not trying to set any speed records. What's much more important to me is that Linux is fun to use. NT is no fun at all; too many things hidden away like an adventure game in a labyrinth, too many locked doors, way too many legal documents, too many suit-n-tie guys waiting around every corner with their hands out saying "Give me more money." So is this NT 5 something I'm going to enjoy using?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> But I can't, can I? Your so-called fucken "community" doesn't
> provide anyone to deal with. A social club for long-haired bearded
> dropouts (the FSF) and a social club for short-haired
> gun nuts quoting Ayn Rand at each other (the OSI). Nothing in the way
> of a unified body with the ability to make deals. Fuck-nothing.
Yep, it's too bad, so sad, that there is no fixed organization with binding powers, capable of signing checks, representing the free/open-source software community (hereinafter referred to as "suckas") that can make a big-$$$ deal with your professional and highly leet lawyerly ass (hereinafter referred to as "shyster"). My heart breaks to think of the opportunity we "suckas" are missing to get scammed by you, "shyster."
Anyway, why do you want to deal with the Linux community as a whole? Because obviously it isn't "the Linux community" which decides what license to apply to any particular program; it's that individual program's individual developer. Perhaps even at this moment, on the basis of this post, your email inbox is jam filled with requests for your services sent by anxious Linux developers. Maybe not, though; but at least there's one firm way out west Redmond way, heavy with the benjamins, that probably, no certainly, needs your leet services. Go rewrite their fucken EULA for 'em, hot-shot. There's gotta be a billion big bucks in it for ya.
Oh, by the way, those bearded dropouts in combination with the short-haired gun nuts have, in their spare time no less, created out of their own imaginations what may be the finest, definitely the coolest and most fun, computer operating system available in the world today. And what have you done lately? Nice tie.
Thanks for the laughs, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
At first glance it sounds like a argument but when I look a bit closer the whole subject disappears like fog. What's your problem? Do you want to write and sell a proprietary application that runs on a Linux box? Then go for it. Nobody is going to stop you. It's perfectly legal to produce and sell commercial for-profit software that runs on Linux. Lots of people and organizations, from little one-man shareware companies all the way up to multi-billion dollar software giants like Oracle, do just that. Some of them include the source code with their product, and others do not.
The GPL won't hold you back one bit, because it will be wholly up to you whether or not you want to license your stuff under GPL. If you want to make a big profit selling your software, you're obviously going to want to choose a different license.
Despite your
> The GPL will prevent him from leveraging and improving upon
> publicly available code to make money...
I won't insult you by suggesting that you might want to grab someone else's copyrighted work, modify or extend it in some trivial manner, and then try to sell it as all your own. You're perfectly aware that that's both illegal and wrong. You can't get away with stealing, hacking and reselling Microsoft's copyrighted property and "leveraging" it, nor can I get away with pirating your copyrighted InfoWorld column and republishing that, nor can you get away with stealing RMS's or Linus's or ESR's or de Icaza's copyrighted property either. It's their property. Unless you want to go all the way with M. Proudhon and declare "property is theft!" then I expect you to maintain the ordinary respect for their property rights that you expect and deserve others to maintain for your own property rights.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Let us ignore, for the purpose of this discussion, the unseemly haste in which this judge rushed the issue through his court before the defense lawyers could prepare a rebuttal, so reminiscent of one a them old-time Surn judges gettin that n----r boy convicted n hanged afore them damn Yankee NAACP basterds can even make it to town. Let us also ignore the judge's amazing, deliberate ignorance of the simplest technical facts about the issue, and his parroting of recording industry complaints that are based on pure naked fiction (specifically I am referring to his assertion, apparantly copied verbatim from the plaintiff's brief, that the primary purpose of DeCSS "clearly" is illegal copying, rather than playback). Let's just discuss your statement:
> You own the physical DVD disk but the copyright owner owns the data
> on it (movie, audio, whatever). The copyright owner can decide how you
> are permitted to access this data - it's the copyright owners right to do this.
By that logic a record company can make it illegal for me to take one of my music CDs and from it make a tape recording to play in my car. But there are firm precedents that interpret this action as "fair use." So if this judge's novel interpretation of copyright law and the concept of "fair use" is correct, then all the established precedents go out the window.
I would like to argue that these established precedents concerning the scope of "fair use" should not be overthrown as abruptly and arbitrarily as that.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
A lousy writer with a great topic trumps a t-riffic writer with - uh, what were we talking about? - trumps one of those, every time.
Right down here at the bottom of this very page I see a little phrase in underlined blue: submit story. If you can crank out a rabble-rousing editorial any better than Katz, whip it out.
Yours WD "rah rah Katz" K - WKiernan@concentric.net
I would have just sent you an email to tell you how much I admired your smart and fast (first!) post, but you had to be an anonymous coward so now I have to waste space on /.'s server and post it here, ya schmuck.
> Microsoft and free software have fundamentally inconsistent
> economic interests, so any accomodation between them has to
> be unstable, and prone to collapse.
But I don't buy this, I don't think the interests of the corporations and the free-software people are so totally and irrevocably at odds as you claim. As Marx observed, these binary things are inherently unstable, like a chair with only two legs, but there are more players than just those two in this economic game.
It's absurd to deny that practically all laws in this country are written by and for corporations and the wealthy - and those few that weren't, such as the laws of FDR's New Deal, or the civil rights laws of the early sixties, were generally extorted from legislatures facing imminent violent revolution as the alternative. But even discounting ordinary citizens as beneath the consideration of the ruling class, there are the corporate customers, and the anti-trust division of the U.S. Department of Justice to be considered as well.
Of course it would benefit Microsoft to annihilate all their competitors, both open-source and proprietary. But the investing class has divisions of interest in itself as well; Microsoft isn't the only corporation there is. If one company has a chokehold on a valuable item of intellectual property, it faces opposition from all the other companies who would have to pay them to use that IP. Keep in mind that the Microsoft antitrust suit is not about a conflict between Microsoft and end users like me or you - if it were, it would never have made it to court - but about the conflict between Microsoft and Compaq, two multi-billion-dollar behemoths.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
The first decent (i.e. non-minimum-wage) job I ever got in my life, which, incidentally, was fourteen years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I got by meeting the following two qualifications:
Future boss: Can he hold the end of a chain?
My buddy who already worked there: Yep.
Future boss: Is he white?
My buddy: Yep.
Future boss: Tell him to show up Monday morning.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net