> Mary had a little lamb, > it's fleece was white as snow,
Dearie me, I can't parse this sentence at all, it seems to have too many verbs. "It is fleece was white as snow"? That makes no sense. Yet if the writer intended to use the homophonic possesive "its" he surely would not have inserted that apostrophe which represents, as everyone knows, the elided letters in a contraction.
> and everywhere that Mary went, > the lamb would surely go.
You may think that's absurd and funny, but how do you think the U.S.A. got electric power and telephone out of the built-up cities and into the rural countryside? It sure wasn't as a result of any "free-market" capitalist initiative. It took big-government effort on a national scale to achieve that goal. (And it's worth noting that, while the private power companies, in their typically petty-minded manner, fought rural electrification tooth and nail, they together with the rest of big business ended up making a nice profit as a result of it.) Go read a history of the Tennessee Valley Authority, or of the Rural Elctrification Administration. Robert Caro has a couple of interesting chapters on the REA in his biography of Lyndon Johnson.
>As far as intimidation goes, there is nothing illegal about it unless > there is a face to face confrontation that is likely to create an > immediate breach of the peace (a.k.a. "fighting words") or if > you are a captive audience.
If by "intimidation" you mean the deployment of verbiage so that the target of those words would reasonably believe himself to be materially endangered, then it certainly is illegal. Go look up the definition of the legal term "assault." It doesn't mean hitting someone; the legal term for that is "battery." Now I myself have received explicit death threats by email as a result of posting unpopular minority opinions on Usenet. If I gave a shit whether I live or die (to be more exact, whether I die sooner or later) I might have considered filing criminal charges against my email assailant.
>A white woman walking down the street with her Latino sweetie is > exposed to narstiness. A straight white man walking down the street > is equally exposed to narstiness. The point is, we have reached > equality -- we are all equally likely to be harassed by idiots.
Where you use the word "equally" in the sentences I quoted above, you are dead wrong. Please read my post entitled "Minority squared" elsewhere on this thread.
Imagine there are two "races," whites and blacks, in a city, and the whites outnumber the blacks seven to one; there are seven hundred thousand whites and one hundred thousand blacks. Imagine also that in any given year a certain percentage of those whites, let's say one in a thousand, decide, for whatever twisted reason racists make the decisions, to commit a racially motivated crime against a black person chosen at random; and conversely one out of a thousand of the blacks decide to commit a racially motivated crime against a randomly selected white person. These are, of course, entirely made-up numbers which I have pulled out of thin air for the sake of this hypothetical discussion.
Keep in mind that while individuals are so various that it is virtually impossible to predict what any specific person is going to do, nevertheless it is a fact that large bodies of people behave according to regular tatistical laws. This fact was Durkheim's seminal discovery in his book "Suicide," and it lies at the base of the science of sociology.
Well, this is slashdot so at least here I assume the readers can handle arithmetic, thank heaven. The majority whites will commit a total of 700,000 x (1 / 1000) = 700 race crimes a year against a target population of 100,000, and the minority blacks will commit 100,000 x (1 / 1000) = 100 race crimes against a target population of 700,000 whites. This means that the likelihood of any individual black being a victim is 700 / 100,000 per year whereas the victimization rate amongst whites will be 100 / 700,000 per year. That means that the blacks who are outnumbered 7 to 1 are victimized at a ratio of 49 to 1; in other words, of being a minority makes you vulnerable not by the ratio of minority by by that ratio squared. Most people here are educated well enough that they can work it out with x and y rather than these arbitrary numbers I made up for this example and they'll see the same effect.
And that's why, until that far-off happy day arrives, centuries from now, when we in the U.S.A. have all intermarried so much that everyone's beige in color and racism - in fact, the whole inane concept of "race" - is an incomprehensible mystery existing only in the pages of history books, until then, justice demands that members of visible minorities shall get extra protection against hostile subgroups of the majority, and therefore "hate crime" laws are necessary.
> Typed text will not pull your emotions the same way verbal contact will. > You just can NOT put a menacing or threatening tone into an e-mail.
Maybe not exactly the same but I know at least two women on mailing lists or Usenet who have been <Time_Speak> cyber-stalked </Time_Speak> by really nasty foulmouthed dudes and they did consider it an immediate, personal threat. I think they were right, too; some of the crap they received in their email was pretty damned twisted. If I were they I'd have gone and got a handgun, no kidding. You want to to see it from their point of view; ain't nobody gonna hunt you or me down and try to rape us, but that kind of ugly stuff occasionally does happen to women.
> 'Emotionally Driven' is not a 'most women' thing, it's a weak minded thing.
It may be a delusion but a lot of women (and a lot of men too) think women are more 'emotionally driven' than men. Now, we're talking about a purely subjective self-image here, so if they believe it it becomes true. Furthermore a lot of women (and a lot of men too) consider this difference to be a particularly valuable quality in women's characters. In fact I've read some people who claim that that difference, rather than something more biological in nature, is the major reason why women's life expectancy is so much longer than men's in our society.
> Yes. I've even done it once. Congrats, dude! Cool was it not? That's something we've got in common, because I have too.
> Slashdot would be better off with a journalist that at > least knew how to install Linux, don't you think?
Well, they've already got a bunch of those. As a matter of fact, Slashdot could use a resident newbie, because people who are deep into hardcore programming sometimes miss being aware of important things that newbies see at once. Like as one trivial example I once had a Linux book which nowhere in it told you the deep secret of "mount -t iso9660/dev/hdc/mnt/cdrom". I suppose I could have found the answer myself if I went to the directory where the man pages are and read every last one of them, sooner or later I'd have found the one for "mount". (Instead I got the answer off Usenet, bless you guys.) Of course Slashdot would have to either cycle the newbies (they'd rapidly learn too much and become useless in their lack of ignorance) or issue amnesia pills. But the point I'm trying to make is:
>... The point is that he COULDN'T figure it out. He had months to do > it and COULD NOT figure it out. But he's a tech writer?!?
No, he's not! He's a sociological writer (let's back off from the academic sound of that and say "a pop writer whose specialty is sociology") whose subject (at this moment at least) is the society of computer techs. By the way, I'm really getting tired of the word "geek". "Nerd" is tolerable but bad enough, but I'm old enough that I think "geek" is downright insulting.
> C'mon man. You must admit there have got to be better choices than Katz.
I wouldn't mind a little more variety, but Slashdot would be nutz to get rid of Katz. Nobody gets the natives worked up so fast as he does. How long has this article been up and how mmany hundreds of posts already? If Slashdot gets revenue-per-hit from the guys who sponsor those banner ads at the top of the page, then Katz is the mother lode. Somewhere on the main page I read him called "resident gasbag" but I think a better title would be "official troll in residence".
One more thing. You seem to imply that one can not legitimately write a book about "geeks," that is to say, technically proficient computer users, without being a highly skilled "geek" himself. By an extension of that logic, no one should be allowed to write about music unless he is skilled at singing or playing a musical instrument, and no one should be allowed to write about U.S. national politics until he has been elected to Congress or the Presidency.
Also, William Gibson should never have written his novel "Neuromancer" until he had a.) become proficient at assembly language, C, and networking protocols, b.) spent some time as a practicing professional criminal, and c.) nearly died of an overdose of meth.
Like wow. Let's see. You can install Linux, and Katz evidently can't. If installing Linux was the one and only thing that human beings do in their lives, you would definitely come out as the better man. But as a matter of fact, people do a wide variety of tasks, some easy and general in nature, others specialties which only a tiny minority can be expected to master.
I can think of a couple socially useful and praiseworthy tasks besides installing Linux on a PC. For example, building roads and houses and sewers. I did that professionally for a decade or so, or rather, I've done a part of that, I've laid out these important utilities as a land survey party chief. While this is unquestionably a useful thing to have done, I don't run around telling people that they are "lamers" and they "need to die" just because they too have not participated in the construction surveying trade.
Here's another important one: writing books. At least I hope you will agree with me that writing books is a very important part of human culture, world-wide. Now Katz has successfully written at least one book and what's more he got it professionally published and distributed by a real live publishing company. That's his specialty, and to all appearances he's pretty successful at it. I haven't ever written a book. By that one criterion, Katz is a better man than I.
Have you ever written a book? Do you know how to deliver a baby, or cut out a burst appendix? Can you maintain a high-tension electric power line? Do you know how to grow and harvest a field full of corn or wheat? How are your metallurgical skills; can you manufacture a sheet of stainless steel? Etc., etc., etc.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Re:Why not just use BSD license?
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
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· Score: 3
> There's no reason why a company shouldn't be able to take Linux, > add some nice commercial proprietary binary only stuff into it and > then sell it.
No reason?! Well, take for example the shell program mc. According to its help page, mc was written by Miguel de Icaza, Janne Kukonlehto, and ten other programmers. Since they wrote it, they had the privilege of copyrighting it, ANY WAY THEY PLEASE. As the creators and owners of the program, it was not yours, not mine, but theirs and only theirs to dispose of.
That means that they could come up with any licensing terms that satisfy their whims. They could have offered it as a commercial product, to be paid for on either a per-user, or per-CPU, or per-site basis. They could have released it under the terms that it could only be used on Tuesdays, and then only by left-handed Zoroastrians. Or they could have given it away absolutely for free, as you suggest.
Mr. de Icaza and Co. chose not to give mc away for free. They chose, instead, to restrict its redistribution by placing it under the GPL. In terms of the profits that the developers made from this program, the results are the same as if they had given it away for free: zero. From the point of view of us in the general public, for them to choose the more restrictive GPL rather than placing their code in the public domain may well have resulted, paradoxically, in more access for us; in exchange for us losing the right to trivially modify mc and then drag it into the proprietary domain, we are guaranteed free access not only to the code as it exists today but to all future versions as well.
But it doesn't matter whether Mr. de Icaza & Co. had good or bad intentions when they chose to license mc as they did, nor did they have to consider whether the license they chose was good or bad for society in general (except of course they would have to live with their consciences). mc is their code and they were free to license it however they liked.
Besides, why do you imagine that one can't add proprietary stuff to a Linux distribution? An example of this is a shrinkwrapped deluxe Redhat distribution that's sitting on my bookshelf. It came with at least two proprietary products (BRU backup software and a commercial accelerated X server) right in the same box with the GPL'd Linux kernel and GNU tool set.
> It is called the free market.
I may be in a minority here, but I at least don't get all swoony over the phrase "free market," and I have to laugh at the notion embedded in the phrase "invisible hand." (What do you mean "invisible"? I can see it right there, coming out of Alan Greenspan's sleeve.) The so-called "free market," a propagndistic misnomer if I ever heard one, isn't some a priori ideal, neither is it some kind of miraculous automatically-thriving, self-regulating socio-economic powerhouse; instead it is a delicate, probably inherently unstable system which requires constant effort just to keep it afloat. Please have a look at Karl Polanyi's book, The Great Transformnation for details of its antecedents, its early history and its weaknesses.
> Less than 10% of people would be able to compile anything.
Maybe compiling something in Linux is a wee bit hard but in Win2K (or NT or Win9x) it's pretty much impossible! Unless you buy the $500+ add-in, of course.
WINx comes without a compiler, without any programming language at all in fact, not even QBasic any more, yet despite that Microsoft has the nerve to call it a complete operating system. Hmph.
Metcalfe's that way about Linux because it isn't capitalistic enough. No kidding, he really uses that as a criterion (the criterion, pretty often) by which he makes technical judgments. Some of the things he writes make me gape in wonder. Like so many Randites, he has retreated to his own little world, where market ideology is all and mere facts don't count.
As I type this I have gotten 293 MB of the iso image for 2.1r3 using rsync. Actually I already got the entire 599 MB of files from another ftp site, and rsync is verifying them and getting diffs. Oh well, I learned how to use rsync at least.
I learned, for example, that if you make a spelling error with the name of the target iso file (e.g. "bianry-i386-1.iso" instead of "binary-i386-1.iso") before you start rsync, it pulls down the entire file, all 610MB of it, from the rsync server, so when you look in the directory you find two 610 MB files. I think that kind of defeats the purpose of using rsync, which is to conserve bandwidth on the rsync server...oops duh sorry guys.
> Funny, I've never had any problems with IE 4 or 5.
You never had any problems with IE4?! I wish I could say that. I work for a civil engineering company with about 75 computers or so, and I've seen some really sh*tty software come and go in the last ten years, but I've got to tell you, for supremely sh*tty software, IE4 takes the prize. Not only was it a flaky program itself, but half the time when someone installed it on a Win9x or NT PC it booglarized that PC so damn bad that the only practical cure was fdisk. Don't get me started about that fscking "Active Desktop," also known as "Spastic Desktop." Not only did that evil IE4 screw up several machines in my office, when my daughter downloaded it and installed it on her PC it tangled it up so bad she couldn't even get the system to boot at all.
In contrast IE5 doesn't seem half bad. After my miserable experiences with IE4 I was afraid to touch IE5 with a ten foot pole. It didn't make me any more enthusiastic that in order to download it, you couldn't just go to ftp.microsoft.com and download one big fat file you could drop in a network directory or burn onto a CD, no-oo!
Instead to get IE5 you had to go through this preposterous rigamarole. First of all you wade through Microsoft's webpage haystack - using an earlier IE, I couldn't even get to the download page at all using Netscape. That's one Hell of a way to dissuade people from that (anti-)competitive upgrade, that is. Next you have to fill in a registration page (actually several pages, one after the other!) with roughly as much personal information as you'd expect to have to supply the FBI to get a top-secret clearance. Next, having plumped up MS's marketing database, you download a 5 or 6 MB downloader, which you then have to install (and reboot, of course.) Then you run the downloader, which brings over the IE installer itself, another download of many tens of megabytes. Then you run the IE installer (guess what! another reboot).
Now, finally, you can run IE5, but by this time you've as probably as not been transformed by this experience into an embittered Luddite whose only interest in the Internet might be to search for bomb-making formulas. And suppose you want to install IE5 on two machines? Why, simply go through all that crap twice.
But then I bought Adaptec Easy-CD Creator v.4, which comes with IE5 on the CD. In fact, if you want to run Easy-CD Creator, you have to install IE5 (I think). So I crossed my fingers and installed it, and to my surprise and relief, IE5 seems to work reasonably well, quite nicely really, and more importantly, it didn't break half the other software on my system like installing IE4 did.
I did have one entertaining experience with IE5, though. A while back I wanted to look at Microsoft's advertising pages for Windows 2000 Server, so I could see what this "Active Directory" business was all about. So I fired up IE5 and waded in. When I got to this one ad page, IE5 told me I was supposed to download some kind of Dynamic HTML add-in so it could render the page. Well, I did that, and I even rebooted the PC after I installed the plug-in, but when I went back to MS's web site to read the page, IE5 promptly (and repeatedly) crashed all over the place. I laughed my ass off!
Jeez, MS! I can dig the part about "eating your own dog food," but don't you think you could try out your flaky new HTML extensions somewhere else besides on the pages where you're trying to sell your corporate customers the latest version of your flagship product? I bet your marketing people would appreciate that.
The Hell you say! I've got a program here (I wrote it myself a few years back in Turbo C v.2) which says it's the year 100.
Jeez, guy, sometimes you just want text and nothing but text. Like if you're reading a HOWTO or a magazine article or some other kind of text file. A graphics browser is a must when reading alt.mag.playboy, but what use is it in comp.os.linux.setup? Yes, I know it's hard to believe when you've grown up forcefed on television, but some people actually spend a good deal of time reading non-pictorial content on the Internet!
To my tired old eyes an 80x25 text mode screen is pure luxurious comfort compared with squinting at a glaring GUI. And (especially over a slow modem connection) I really appreciate like the way so many pages load in Lynx in about a half a second flat, as opposed to waiting 30 to 60 seconds in a GUI browser as it downloads twenty or thirty stupid bitmaps. By "stupid" I mean, for example, those little rectangles with single words in the middle of them - why anyone would prefer to send ten separate little bitmaps over ten separate HTTP connections totalling 20 to 40 KB in ten extra files, rather than 200 bytes of ASCII in line with the main document, has always puzzled me!
Finally, why do you automatically associate Lynx with Linux, as though either a.) Linux users don't have GUI web browsers at their disposal, or b.) Windows users can only use GUI browsers, not text mode ones? I use Lynx from Windows NT quite often, and I use Netscape in Linux practically every day.
> The internet thing so far is a lot like westward expansion > in the 19th century, which could never have happened if the > western states had been created by private enterprise. Had > that been the case, the Oregon Trail would have been compatible > with only one kind of wagon (available only at a premium from one > vendor -- ROI, baby!), and they'd never have thought to implement > gold in California. They'd also have charged high admission fees to > users, again because they'd have had a massive capital investment > to recoup.
I think you're being kind of facetious here, but it is worth keeping in mind that the existence of a broad middle class in the U.S.A. (especially the midwest and west) is to a great part due to the Homestead Act. Yep, another one of those big-government socialistic programs, the kind which Libertarians constantly tell us are ineffective per axiom and sure to result in nothing but disappointment and failure, like the big-government ICBMs / space flight program that created the microcircuit and the big-government DOD project which invented and refined the Internet.
The fundamental idea of this legislation, and of a hundred similar laws, is not to stop piracy or any other crime which might hurt society; it is to ensure that at any moment any ordinary citizen is in violation of a large number of laws, and that the penalties for violating these laws are high enough that any cop or any court has the right to arbitrarily abuse unruly citizens to any degree they like. That way, whenever a cop gets pissed off at you, there will always be plenty of pretexts to fine you as much or jail you as long as he desires.
Consider the ordinary, mundane highway speed limit. On every open road in your town and mine, the speed limit is set way too low, and as a result better than ninety percent of drivers are constantly in violation. Practically everybody breaks the speed laws daily and usually nothing happens to them. But any time the cops need to generate a little extra revenue, they can park a couple radar cars in the bushes along the highway of their choice and pick off whomever they please, as easily as shooting fish in a barrel. Or if a cop sees something he personally finds offensive, like for example if one of our internationally infamous Suthrin racist cops sees a car go zipping by (in traffic with dozens of other cars, all going the same illegal speed) and there's a black guy and a white girl in it, and that Suthrin racist cop decides he don't like that no how, boom! that n----r's busted, that'll teach him who's boss.
Sure, you may have certain legal rights under the Constitution, but every day the law-n-order crowd strives either to repeal those rights or to make them irrelevant. What good is the right to free speech going to do you when, if you say something unpopular with the cops, your house, your car, and all your property can be arbitrarily confiscated with the legal presumption that you are guilty, and if you want your property back you have to prove to a heavily-biased court that you are innocent? (Actually, under seizure laws, the legal presumption is that your property is guilty; insanely, it's the property, not the owner, which is charged with the crime! That makes no sense at all, how can inanimate property violate a law? but that's the preposterous legal pretext championed by Rehnquist and Scalia and widely employed by drug-warrior judges to evade the fourth through eighth Amendments.)
> Gotta a problem with the spammers? Go after THEM, you lazy > bastards. Don't fuck everyone else over on the premise that > the site is responsible for all traffic it forwards.
HOW? My ISP has rules against spamming built right into the contract by which I get my service from them. If I violate their anti-spam rules they charge me a whole bunch of money and then cancel my account. There's not a whole lot I can do about it if they do, because those are the terms of my contract, and they're right there in black and white, and if I don't like it I can find another ISP. So far so good.
But what happens if a guy who subscribes to another ISP spams me or mail bombs me? One time I got mail bombed by some ass with an account at Southwest Nell. So I emailed SWBell's abuse department and sent them copies of all the emails with which he jammed up my pop in-box. Since SWBell is a reputable company and my bomber was in violation of their terms of service, they cancelled his account. But keep in mind that MY ISP couldn't do a damn thing to this guy, since what he did, while obnoxious, is not illegal.
Now there were spammers running out of @Home accounts, right? People from all over were complaining to @Home, but @Home took no action. Again, since there was no violation of the law, @Home was not exactly required to do anything to the spammers. If @Home values the spammers's business more than it values the cooperation that is necessary to make Usenet work, or if they are too understaffed or lazy to enforce their terms of service, that's their privilege. It is also MY ISP's privilege to not copy posts from their news server into my ISP's news server.
You say "Go after THEM," "THEM" being the spammers, but unless they do something legally actionable (such as broadcasting death threats, etc.) no one can touch them. The only people who could restrain spammers with @Home accounts are the management of @Home, and the one and only reason @Home can do anything to stop the spammers is because those spammers are in a contractual relationship with @Home.
This Salon article is about money, lots of money, heaps and piles and stacks and windrows of cash, money like most people (that includes even really talented geeks) will never ever see in their lives. Just like all "tech" articles in Salon. Money to desire, money to envy, money all anyone really needs to know about "Silicon Valley," that wondrous West coast city-sized blackbox which extrudes so miraculously much money! Money, money, money, one and all kneel and worship almighty money.
> Yes, adults are responsible for their own children. Yes, this > INCLUDES regulating access to information the the adult simply > KNOWS BETTER how to keep in context.
I beg to differ. I have three children, 18, 12 and 7 now, and I have never found it necessary to inflict censorship on any of them. And they have turned out just fine.
Evidently you have never read Karl Marx. Evidently you have gained your impression of his critical thought from some variety of deeply dishonest, nonsensical Cold War propaganda. Why don't you try reading Marx sometime? Don't worry, I guarantee that a pair of ghostly hands won't come leaping off the page and grab you round the neck.
Almost certainly you will be surprised and impressed. At the very worst you will still profit in the sense of the old maxim, "Know your enemy." Keep in mind that you can profit from reading a book, even if you find the philosophy propounded by that book wrong or vile. For example, I entirely despise Nazism, but I still think every citizen in a democracy, and anyone who wants to understand contemporary history, owes it to himself to read Mein Kampf.
In fact I believe no one should be allowed to vote unless he can pass an elementary test on world history. That would probably disenfranchise George W. "Shrub" Bush, I suppose, but no loss.
> If viewing such pictures is allowed, then what happened to that > poor little girl could be seen as condonable, or at least tolerable.
Though I feel that photographs of infant-rape would certainly be obscene, to make an exact moral equivalence, between the obscene picture and the profoundly more vicious act it depicts, is logically and morally dubious at best.
I've got a book on my bookshelf entitled "The Pol Pot Regime." There are even a few photos in it, stacks of skulls and the like. Neither of us are supporters of the Pol Pot regime; no one is. (I once met a guy, an American, who claimed he admired Pol Pot's policies, but I assumed he was joking. There was, however Zbigniew Brezinski...) Nevertheless by an extension of your reasoning, then if I have that book it follows, ipso facto, that both I and the author must judge what the book describes - the butchery of about 1,600,000 Cambodians, a fifth of the nation's population - is "condonable, or at least tolerable."
"But," you reply, "that book is a work of history, and one reads it in order to learn history, not to glory vicariously in the limitless mad bloodthirst of the Democratic Kampuchea regime." That's correct; contemplate, then, the average TV detective show, in each episode of which at least one and usually several innocent victims are brutally, criminally killed. We are also morally opposed to murder. Now, do the tens of millions of couch potatoes soaking in that TV fiction show watch it to learn the techniques of detective work, or for any other ulterior "decent" purpose? No, hardly, they watch these blood-drenched shows for nothing but pure entertainment. No one accuses them of reveling in the pornography of violence; even less do people find either these viewers or the TV producers morally equivalent to the characters in the shows.
The traditional Hays Office reply would be that "these TV detective dramas are wholesome tales which convey a moral lesson, as each episode invariably ends with the miscreants being either arrested or shot dead." That's even more laughable; by an extension of THAT reasoning, one could produce "wholesome" infant porn movies, just so long as in the screenplay the infant-molesters are arrested or killed by police agents at the end of the show.
For example, when uranium fission was discovered, the news was rapidly spread all over the world, and that was in 1938, when all the nations in the world were poised to lunge at one another's throats. If physicists in an American laboratory today discovered a phenomemon with obvious military or commercial potential comparable to that of uranium fission, would they publish it? Could they?
Slashdot Mirror
> Mary had a little lamb,
> it's fleece was white as snow,
Dearie me, I can't parse this sentence at all, it seems to have too many verbs. "It is fleece was white as snow"? That makes no sense. Yet if the writer intended to use the homophonic possesive "its" he surely would not have inserted that apostrophe which represents, as everyone knows, the elided letters in a contraction.
> and everywhere that Mary went,
> the lamb would surely go.
Dearie me, dearie me, I'm all in a flutter.
Yours, Mr. Pedantic - WKiernan@concentric.net
You may think that's absurd and funny, but how do you think the U.S.A. got electric power and telephone out of the built-up cities and into the rural countryside? It sure wasn't as a result of any "free-market" capitalist initiative. It took big-government effort on a national scale to achieve that goal. (And it's worth noting that, while the private power companies, in their typically petty-minded manner, fought rural electrification tooth and nail, they together with the rest of big business ended up making a nice profit as a result of it.) Go read a history of the Tennessee Valley Authority, or of the Rural Elctrification Administration. Robert Caro has a couple of interesting chapters on the REA in his biography of Lyndon Johnson.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
>As far as intimidation goes, there is nothing illegal about it unless
> there is a face to face confrontation that is likely to create an
> immediate breach of the peace (a.k.a. "fighting words") or if
> you are a captive audience.
If by "intimidation" you mean the deployment of verbiage so that the target of those words would reasonably believe himself to be materially endangered, then it certainly is illegal. Go look up the definition of the legal term "assault." It doesn't mean hitting someone; the legal term for that is "battery." Now I myself have received explicit death threats by email as a result of posting unpopular minority opinions on Usenet. If I gave a shit whether I live or die (to be more exact, whether I die sooner or later) I might have considered filing criminal charges against my email assailant.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
>A white woman walking down the street with her Latino sweetie is
> exposed to narstiness. A straight white man walking down the street
> is equally exposed to narstiness. The point is, we have reached
> equality -- we are all equally likely to be harassed by idiots.
Where you use the word "equally" in the sentences I quoted above, you are dead wrong. Please read my post entitled "Minority squared" elsewhere on this thread.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Imagine there are two "races," whites and blacks, in a city, and the whites outnumber the blacks seven to one; there are seven hundred thousand whites and one hundred thousand blacks. Imagine also that in any given year a certain percentage of those whites, let's say one in a thousand, decide, for whatever twisted reason racists make the decisions, to commit a racially motivated crime against a black person chosen at random; and conversely one out of a thousand of the blacks decide to commit a racially motivated crime against a randomly selected white person. These are, of course, entirely made-up numbers which I have pulled out of thin air for the sake of this hypothetical discussion.
Keep in mind that while individuals are so various that it is virtually impossible to predict what any specific person is going to do, nevertheless it is a fact that large bodies of people behave according to regular tatistical laws. This fact was Durkheim's seminal discovery in his book "Suicide," and it lies at the base of the science of sociology.
Well, this is slashdot so at least here I assume the readers can handle arithmetic, thank heaven. The majority whites will commit a total of 700,000 x (1 / 1000) = 700 race crimes a year against a target population of 100,000, and the minority blacks will commit 100,000 x (1 / 1000) = 100 race crimes against a target population of 700,000 whites. This means that the likelihood of any individual black being a victim is 700 / 100,000 per year whereas the victimization rate amongst whites will be 100 / 700,000 per year. That means that the blacks who are outnumbered 7 to 1 are victimized at a ratio of 49 to 1; in other words, of being a minority makes you vulnerable not by the ratio of minority by by that ratio squared. Most people here are educated well enough that they can work it out with x and y rather than these arbitrary numbers I made up for this example and they'll see the same effect.
And that's why, until that far-off happy day arrives, centuries from now, when we in the U.S.A. have all intermarried so much that everyone's beige in color and racism - in fact, the whole inane concept of "race" - is an incomprehensible mystery existing only in the pages of history books, until then, justice demands that members of visible minorities shall get extra protection against hostile subgroups of the majority, and therefore "hate crime" laws are necessary.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Typed text will not pull your emotions the same way verbal contact will.
> You just can NOT put a menacing or threatening tone into an e-mail.
Maybe not exactly the same but I know at least two women on mailing lists or Usenet who have been <Time_Speak> cyber-stalked </Time_Speak> by really nasty foulmouthed dudes and they did consider it an immediate, personal threat. I think they were right, too; some of the crap they received in their email was pretty damned twisted. If I were they I'd have gone and got a handgun, no kidding. You want to to see it from their point of view; ain't nobody gonna hunt you or me down and try to rape us, but that kind of ugly stuff occasionally does happen to women.
> 'Emotionally Driven' is not a 'most women' thing, it's a weak minded thing.
It may be a delusion but a lot of women (and a lot of men too) think women are more 'emotionally driven' than men. Now, we're talking about a purely subjective self-image here, so if they believe it it becomes true. Furthermore a lot of women (and a lot of men too) consider this difference to be a particularly valuable quality in women's characters. In fact I've read some people who claim that that difference, rather than something more biological in nature, is the major reason why women's life expectancy is so much longer than men's in our society.
Yours WDK - Wkiernan@concentric.net
> > Do you know how to deliver a baby..."
> Yes. I've even done it once. Congrats, dude! Cool was it not? That's something we've got in common, because I have too.
> Slashdot would be better off with a journalist that at
> least knew how to install Linux, don't you think?
Well, they've already got a bunch of those. As a matter of fact, Slashdot could use a resident newbie, because people who are deep into hardcore programming sometimes miss being aware of important things that newbies see at once. Like as one trivial example I once had a Linux book which nowhere in it told you the deep secret of "mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom". I suppose I could have found the answer myself if I went to the directory where the man pages are and read every last one of them, sooner or later I'd have found the one for "mount". (Instead I got the answer off Usenet, bless you guys.) Of course Slashdot would have to either cycle the newbies (they'd rapidly learn too much and become useless in their lack of ignorance) or issue amnesia pills. But the point I'm trying to make is:
> ... The point is that he COULDN'T figure it out. He had months to do
> it and COULD NOT figure it out. But he's a tech writer?!?
No, he's not! He's a sociological writer (let's back off from the academic sound of that and say "a pop writer whose specialty is sociology") whose subject (at this moment at least) is the society of computer techs. By the way, I'm really getting tired of the word "geek". "Nerd" is tolerable but bad enough, but I'm old enough that I think "geek" is downright insulting.
> C'mon man. You must admit there have got to be better choices than Katz.
I wouldn't mind a little more variety, but Slashdot would be nutz to get rid of Katz. Nobody gets the natives worked up so fast as he does. How long has this article been up and how mmany hundreds of posts already? If Slashdot gets revenue-per-hit from the guys who sponsor those banner ads at the top of the page, then Katz is the mother lode. Somewhere on the main page I read him called "resident gasbag" but I think a better title would be "official troll in residence".
Nice talking with ya, Dad.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
One more thing. You seem to imply that one can not legitimately write a book about "geeks," that is to say, technically proficient computer users, without being a highly skilled "geek" himself. By an extension of that logic, no one should be allowed to write about music unless he is skilled at singing or playing a musical instrument, and no one should be allowed to write about U.S. national politics until he has been elected to Congress or the Presidency.
Also, William Gibson should never have written his novel "Neuromancer" until he had a.) become proficient at assembly language, C, and networking protocols, b.) spent some time as a practicing professional criminal, and c.) nearly died of an overdose of meth.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> It took me 9 hours to build my first Linux box.
Like wow. Let's see. You can install Linux, and Katz evidently can't. If installing Linux was the one and only thing that human beings do in their lives, you would definitely come out as the better man. But as a matter of fact, people do a wide variety of tasks, some easy and general in nature, others specialties which only a tiny minority can be expected to master.
I can think of a couple socially useful and praiseworthy tasks besides installing Linux on a PC. For example, building roads and houses and sewers. I did that professionally for a decade or so, or rather, I've done a part of that, I've laid out these important utilities as a land survey party chief. While this is unquestionably a useful thing to have done, I don't run around telling people that they are "lamers" and they "need to die" just because they too have not participated in the construction surveying trade.
Here's another important one: writing books. At least I hope you will agree with me that writing books is a very important part of human culture, world-wide. Now Katz has successfully written at least one book and what's more he got it professionally published and distributed by a real live publishing company. That's his specialty, and to all appearances he's pretty successful at it. I haven't ever written a book. By that one criterion, Katz is a better man than I.
Have you ever written a book? Do you know how to deliver a baby, or cut out a burst appendix? Can you maintain a high-tension electric power line? Do you know how to grow and harvest a field full of corn or wheat? How are your metallurgical skills; can you manufacture a sheet of stainless steel? Etc., etc., etc.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> There's no reason why a company shouldn't be able to take Linux,
> add some nice commercial proprietary binary only stuff into it and
> then sell it.
No reason?! Well, take for example the shell program mc. According to its help page, mc was written by Miguel de Icaza, Janne Kukonlehto, and ten other programmers. Since they wrote it, they had the privilege of copyrighting it, ANY WAY THEY PLEASE. As the creators and owners of the program, it was not yours, not mine, but theirs and only theirs to dispose of.
That means that they could come up with any licensing terms that satisfy their whims. They could have offered it as a commercial product, to be paid for on either a per-user, or per-CPU, or per-site basis. They could have released it under the terms that it could only be used on Tuesdays, and then only by left-handed Zoroastrians. Or they could have given it away absolutely for free, as you suggest.
Mr. de Icaza and Co. chose not to give mc away for free. They chose, instead, to restrict its redistribution by placing it under the GPL. In terms of the profits that the developers made from this program, the results are the same as if they had given it away for free: zero. From the point of view of us in the general public, for them to choose the more restrictive GPL rather than placing their code in the public domain may well have resulted, paradoxically, in more access for us; in exchange for us losing the right to trivially modify mc and then drag it into the proprietary domain, we are guaranteed free access not only to the code as it exists today but to all future versions as well.
But it doesn't matter whether Mr. de Icaza & Co. had good or bad intentions when they chose to license mc as they did, nor did they have to consider whether the license they chose was good or bad for society in general (except of course they would have to live with their consciences). mc is their code and they were free to license it however they liked.
Besides, why do you imagine that one can't add proprietary stuff to a Linux distribution? An example of this is a shrinkwrapped deluxe Redhat distribution that's sitting on my bookshelf. It came with at least two proprietary products (BRU backup software and a commercial accelerated X server) right in the same box with the GPL'd Linux kernel and GNU tool set.
> It is called the free market.
I may be in a minority here, but I at least don't get all swoony over the phrase "free market," and I have to laugh at the notion embedded in the phrase "invisible hand." (What do you mean "invisible"? I can see it right there, coming out of Alan Greenspan's sleeve.) The so-called "free market," a propagndistic misnomer if I ever heard one, isn't some a priori ideal, neither is it some kind of miraculous automatically-thriving, self-regulating socio-economic powerhouse; instead it is a delicate, probably inherently unstable system which requires constant effort just to keep it afloat. Please have a look at Karl Polanyi's book, The Great Transformnation for details of its antecedents, its early history and its weaknesses.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Yeah you're right and all, but when I went out shopping yesterday they were the only store in town that had a copy of the Mothers's Uncle Meat.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Fuzzy dice, bongos in the back, my ship of love is ready to attack
> Less than 10% of people would be able to compile anything.
Maybe compiling something in Linux is a wee bit hard but in Win2K (or NT or Win9x) it's pretty much impossible! Unless you buy the $500+ add-in, of course.
WINx comes without a compiler, without any programming language at all in fact, not even QBasic any more, yet despite that Microsoft has the nerve to call it a complete operating system. Hmph.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Metcalfe's that way about Linux because it isn't capitalistic enough. No kidding, he really uses that as a criterion (the criterion, pretty often) by which he makes technical judgments. Some of the things he writes make me gape in wonder. Like so many Randites, he has retreated to his own little world, where market ideology is all and mere facts don't count.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
As I type this I have gotten 293 MB of the iso image for 2.1r3 using rsync. Actually I already got the entire 599 MB of files from another ftp site, and rsync is verifying them and getting diffs. Oh well, I learned how to use rsync at least.
I learned, for example, that if you make a spelling error with the name of the target iso file (e.g. "bianry-i386-1.iso" instead of "binary-i386-1.iso") before you start rsync, it pulls down the entire file, all 610MB of it, from the rsync server, so when you look in the directory you find two 610 MB files. I think that kind of defeats the purpose of using rsync, which is to conserve bandwidth on the rsync server...oops duh sorry guys.
Yrous, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Funny, I've never had any problems with IE 4 or 5.
You never had any problems with IE4?! I wish I could say that. I work for a civil engineering company with about 75 computers or so, and I've seen some really sh*tty software come and go in the last ten years, but I've got to tell you, for supremely sh*tty software, IE4 takes the prize. Not only was it a flaky program itself, but half the time when someone installed it on a Win9x or NT PC it booglarized that PC so damn bad that the only practical cure was fdisk. Don't get me started about that fscking "Active Desktop," also known as "Spastic Desktop." Not only did that evil IE4 screw up several machines in my office, when my daughter downloaded it and installed it on her PC it tangled it up so bad she couldn't even get the system to boot at all.
In contrast IE5 doesn't seem half bad. After my miserable experiences with IE4 I was afraid to touch IE5 with a ten foot pole. It didn't make me any more enthusiastic that in order to download it, you couldn't just go to ftp.microsoft.com and download one big fat file you could drop in a network directory or burn onto a CD, no-oo!
Instead to get IE5 you had to go through this preposterous rigamarole. First of all you wade through Microsoft's webpage haystack - using an earlier IE, I couldn't even get to the download page at all using Netscape. That's one Hell of a way to dissuade people from that (anti-)competitive upgrade, that is. Next you have to fill in a registration page (actually several pages, one after the other!) with roughly as much personal information as you'd expect to have to supply the FBI to get a top-secret clearance. Next, having plumped up MS's marketing database, you download a 5 or 6 MB downloader, which you then have to install (and reboot, of course.) Then you run the downloader, which brings over the IE installer itself, another download of many tens of megabytes. Then you run the IE installer (guess what! another reboot).
Now, finally, you can run IE5, but by this time you've as probably as not been transformed by this experience into an embittered Luddite whose only interest in the Internet might be to search for bomb-making formulas. And suppose you want to install IE5 on two machines? Why, simply go through all that crap twice.
But then I bought Adaptec Easy-CD Creator v.4, which comes with IE5 on the CD. In fact, if you want to run Easy-CD Creator, you have to install IE5 (I think). So I crossed my fingers and installed it, and to my surprise and relief, IE5 seems to work reasonably well, quite nicely really, and more importantly, it didn't break half the other software on my system like installing IE4 did.
I did have one entertaining experience with IE5, though. A while back I wanted to look at Microsoft's advertising pages for Windows 2000 Server, so I could see what this "Active Directory" business was all about. So I fired up IE5 and waded in. When I got to this one ad page, IE5 told me I was supposed to download some kind of Dynamic HTML add-in so it could render the page. Well, I did that, and I even rebooted the PC after I installed the plug-in, but when I went back to MS's web site to read the page, IE5 promptly (and repeatedly) crashed all over the place. I laughed my ass off!
Jeez, MS! I can dig the part about "eating your own dog food," but don't you think you could try out your flaky new HTML extensions somewhere else besides on the pages where you're trying to sell your corporate customers the latest version of your flagship product? I bet your marketing people would appreciate that.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Listen buddy: wake up; it's the year 2000.
The Hell you say! I've got a program here (I wrote it myself a few years back in Turbo C v.2) which says it's the year 100.
Jeez, guy, sometimes you just want text and nothing but text. Like if you're reading a HOWTO or a magazine article or some other kind of text file. A graphics browser is a must when reading alt.mag.playboy, but what use is it in comp.os.linux.setup? Yes, I know it's hard to believe when you've grown up forcefed on television, but some people actually spend a good deal of time reading non-pictorial content on the Internet!
To my tired old eyes an 80x25 text mode screen is pure luxurious comfort compared with squinting at a glaring GUI. And (especially over a slow modem connection) I really appreciate like the way so many pages load in Lynx in about a half a second flat, as opposed to waiting 30 to 60 seconds in a GUI browser as it downloads twenty or thirty stupid bitmaps. By "stupid" I mean, for example, those little rectangles with single words in the middle of them - why anyone would prefer to send ten separate little bitmaps over ten separate HTTP connections totalling 20 to 40 KB in ten extra files, rather than 200 bytes of ASCII in line with the main document, has always puzzled me!
Finally, why do you automatically associate Lynx with Linux, as though either a.) Linux users don't have GUI web browsers at their disposal, or b.) Windows users can only use GUI browsers, not text mode ones? I use Lynx from Windows NT quite often, and I use Netscape in Linux practically every day.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> The internet thing so far is a lot like westward expansion
> in the 19th century, which could never have happened if the
> western states had been created by private enterprise. Had
> that been the case, the Oregon Trail would have been compatible
> with only one kind of wagon (available only at a premium from one
> vendor -- ROI, baby!), and they'd never have thought to implement
> gold in California. They'd also have charged high admission fees to
> users, again because they'd have had a massive capital investment
> to recoup.
I think you're being kind of facetious here, but it is worth keeping in mind that the existence of a broad middle class in the U.S.A. (especially the midwest and west) is to a great part due to the Homestead Act. Yep, another one of those big-government socialistic programs, the kind which Libertarians constantly tell us are ineffective per axiom and sure to result in nothing but disappointment and failure, like the big-government ICBMs / space flight program that created the microcircuit and the big-government DOD project which invented and refined the Internet.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
The fundamental idea of this legislation, and of a hundred similar laws, is not to stop piracy or any other crime which might hurt society; it is to ensure that at any moment any ordinary citizen is in violation of a large number of laws, and that the penalties for violating these laws are high enough that any cop or any court has the right to arbitrarily abuse unruly citizens to any degree they like. That way, whenever a cop gets pissed off at you, there will always be plenty of pretexts to fine you as much or jail you as long as he desires.
Consider the ordinary, mundane highway speed limit. On every open road in your town and mine, the speed limit is set way too low, and as a result better than ninety percent of drivers are constantly in violation. Practically everybody breaks the speed laws daily and usually nothing happens to them. But any time the cops need to generate a little extra revenue, they can park a couple radar cars in the bushes along the highway of their choice and pick off whomever they please, as easily as shooting fish in a barrel. Or if a cop sees something he personally finds offensive, like for example if one of our internationally infamous Suthrin racist cops sees a car go zipping by (in traffic with dozens of other cars, all going the same illegal speed) and there's a black guy and a white girl in it, and that Suthrin racist cop decides he don't like that no how, boom! that n----r's busted, that'll teach him who's boss.
Sure, you may have certain legal rights under the Constitution, but every day the law-n-order crowd strives either to repeal those rights or to make them irrelevant. What good is the right to free speech going to do you when, if you say something unpopular with the cops, your house, your car, and all your property can be arbitrarily confiscated with the legal presumption that you are guilty, and if you want your property back you have to prove to a heavily-biased court that you are innocent? (Actually, under seizure laws, the legal presumption is that your property is guilty; insanely, it's the property, not the owner, which is charged with the crime! That makes no sense at all, how can inanimate property violate a law? but that's the preposterous legal pretext championed by Rehnquist and Scalia and widely employed by drug-warrior judges to evade the fourth through eighth Amendments.)
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Gotta a problem with the spammers? Go after THEM, you lazy
> bastards. Don't fuck everyone else over on the premise that
> the site is responsible for all traffic it forwards.
HOW? My ISP has rules against spamming built right into the contract by which I get my service from them. If I violate their anti-spam rules they charge me a whole bunch of money and then cancel my account. There's not a whole lot I can do about it if they do, because those are the terms of my contract, and they're right there in black and white, and if I don't like it I can find another ISP. So far so good.
But what happens if a guy who subscribes to another ISP spams me or mail bombs me? One time I got mail bombed by some ass with an account at Southwest Nell. So I emailed SWBell's abuse department and sent them copies of all the emails with which he jammed up my pop in-box. Since SWBell is a reputable company and my bomber was in violation of their terms of service, they cancelled his account. But keep in mind that MY ISP couldn't do a damn thing to this guy, since what he did, while obnoxious, is not illegal.
Now there were spammers running out of @Home accounts, right? People from all over were complaining to @Home, but @Home took no action. Again, since there was no violation of the law, @Home was not exactly required to do anything to the spammers. If @Home values the spammers's business more than it values the cooperation that is necessary to make Usenet work, or if they are too understaffed or lazy to enforce their terms of service, that's their privilege. It is also MY ISP's privilege to not copy posts from their news server into my ISP's news server.
You say "Go after THEM," "THEM" being the spammers, but unless they do something legally actionable (such as broadcasting death threats, etc.) no one can touch them. The only people who could restrain spammers with @Home accounts are the management of @Home, and the one and only reason @Home can do anything to stop the spammers is because those spammers are in a contractual relationship with @Home.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
This Salon article is about money, lots of money, heaps and piles and stacks and windrows of cash, money like most people (that includes even really talented geeks) will never ever see in their lives. Just like all "tech" articles in Salon. Money to desire, money to envy, money all anyone really needs to know about "Silicon Valley," that wondrous West coast city-sized blackbox which extrudes so miraculously much money! Money, money, money, one and all kneel and worship almighty money.
bleh, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Yes, adults are responsible for their own children. Yes, this
> INCLUDES regulating access to information the the adult simply
> KNOWS BETTER how to keep in context.
I beg to differ. I have three children, 18, 12 and 7 now, and I have never found it necessary to inflict censorship on any of them. And they have turned out just fine.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> That comment about Jews wasn't bigotry or "hate speech", it was sarcasm.
At least we hope so!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Evidently you have never read Karl Marx. Evidently you have gained your impression of his critical thought from some variety of deeply dishonest, nonsensical Cold War propaganda. Why don't you try reading Marx sometime? Don't worry, I guarantee that a pair of ghostly hands won't come leaping off the page and grab you round the neck.
Almost certainly you will be surprised and impressed. At the very worst you will still profit in the sense of the old maxim, "Know your enemy." Keep in mind that you can profit from reading a book, even if you find the philosophy propounded by that book wrong or vile. For example, I entirely despise Nazism, but I still think every citizen in a democracy, and anyone who wants to understand contemporary history, owes it to himself to read Mein Kampf.
In fact I believe no one should be allowed to vote unless he can pass an elementary test on world history. That would probably disenfranchise George W. "Shrub" Bush, I suppose, but no loss.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> If viewing such pictures is allowed, then what happened to that
> poor little girl could be seen as condonable, or at least tolerable.
Though I feel that photographs of infant-rape would certainly be obscene, to make an exact moral equivalence, between the obscene picture and the profoundly more vicious act it depicts, is logically and morally dubious at best.
I've got a book on my bookshelf entitled "The Pol Pot Regime." There are even a few photos in it, stacks of skulls and the like. Neither of us are supporters of the Pol Pot regime; no one is. (I once met a guy, an American, who claimed he admired Pol Pot's policies, but I assumed he was joking. There was, however Zbigniew Brezinski...) Nevertheless by an extension of your reasoning, then if I have that book it follows, ipso facto, that both I and the author must judge what the book describes - the butchery of about 1,600,000 Cambodians, a fifth of the nation's population - is "condonable, or at least tolerable."
"But," you reply, "that book is a work of history, and one reads it in order to learn history, not to glory vicariously in the limitless mad bloodthirst of the Democratic Kampuchea regime." That's correct; contemplate, then, the average TV detective show, in each episode of which at least one and usually several innocent victims are brutally, criminally killed. We are also morally opposed to murder. Now, do the tens of millions of couch potatoes soaking in that TV fiction show watch it to learn the techniques of detective work, or for any other ulterior "decent" purpose? No, hardly, they watch these blood-drenched shows for nothing but pure entertainment. No one accuses them of reveling in the pornography of violence; even less do people find either these viewers or the TV producers morally equivalent to the characters in the shows.
The traditional Hays Office reply would be that "these TV detective dramas are wholesome tales which convey a moral lesson, as each episode invariably ends with the miscreants being either arrested or shot dead." That's even more laughable; by an extension of THAT reasoning, one could produce "wholesome" infant porn movies, just so long as in the screenplay the infant-molesters are arrested or killed by police agents at the end of the show.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
For example, when uranium fission was discovered, the news was rapidly spread all over the world, and that was in 1938, when all the nations in the world were poised to lunge at one another's throats. If physicists in an American laboratory today discovered a phenomemon with obvious military or commercial potential comparable to that of uranium fission, would they publish it? Could they?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net