Re:lawyers rule the 'Western' world - or is it mon
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 2
But do you think if the guy was in Sri Lanka that US laws would effect him? or Pakistan? or Indonesia? or China?
Great, so if I ever get to the point where I can program my way out of a wet paper sack, and it comes into my mind to write a computer program, what you're saying is I've got to move to Pakistan? I don't even know what language they speak there much less do I speak it myself.
What if the Chinese government decided to copy and crack everything, put it on their servers, and offer it to the world... just for fun.
Let us ignore the fantastic unlikelihood of America's good business partners the Chinese, who fill our store shelves with goods in shrinkwrap for far less than we could charge and stay afloat if we manufactured them here in the U.S., or else let's imagine that you specified another country with less to lose by offending the U.S. business community. In the case any country accepts your advice, then that country will be quickly isolated off from the internet as cleanly and thoroughly as you would be if I sliced the telephone or TV cables leading into your house.
There's this stuff called IP, that's short for intellectual property, it's just a coincidence that it's also one a then internet acronyms, which in the literature subconsciously ties investors into this big 'net thing I guess...that IP, the heart of all the worth of Disney, Parke-Davis and Microsoft, is immensely valuable now; and stockholders's proxies dream of a soon day when by Congressional fiat, should you innocently jerk off whilst daydreaming about Natalie P. dressed in Naboo garb, then by statute George Lucas's film company has the rights to all the information encoded in your sperm. No kidding, lobbyists delivered the draft legislation to your Congressional Representative just this afternoon, together with a nice check for his re-election campaign.
Anyway that fabulously valuable IP you picture "China" or whatever blithely warez-ifying vastly dwarfs in dollars all those Havana hotels and latifundia the Cuban government nationalized in their revolution, yet for no other reason beside that appropriation the U.S. has been flogging Cuba unremittingly for four decades now. With a provocation like what you suggest you don't think Washington/Wall Street/Hollywood Inc. could bring themselves to slice a few wires?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Re:Someone beat this guy with a clue stick
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 2
While we're on the subject of clue-stick beatings, consider that your third-party vote has ZERO impact on the political process.
Wrong. Consider Democratic politics in the 2004 primary if it turns out that the six percent of voters for Nader cost Gore the election. Maybe there'd be at least one "serious" (i.e. demopublican) candidate who wasn't a third-generation Congressman and an oil millionaire. Maybe they wouldn't offer us a Social Security bandito^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hprivatizer and a sex cop for VP then. Maybe health care would be on the platform that time.
Sorry for boring you with our internal squabbles, you foriegners I mean non-USians.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Re:The mark of the Devil
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 2
God damn Jon, that one's one of the best, it's got an edge on it. You're so good at this and it takes such big balls to fire off so wild-eyed, evil a notion as that with your face so straight. What bland words, and the base idea split in two across two different voices! And I'll bet you even mispelt suprising on purpose!
Still best you watch out honey, you bad man, Morris Dees come down the mountain, take away all your house and goods...
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Re:Who really needs a lesson
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 2
Sometimes you actually have to move out of your seat to find something out...
Here I am complaining about moderation. I don't know what's got into me, as the whole subject of/. moderation is beneath my dignity even to take into account.
But it so happens that the above comment, which is both interesting and insightful, not to mention intelligently and amusingly written, happens to be completely on-topic for the discussion at hand. It obviously has a connection to Mr. Knauss's commentary in Suck, which, I guess I should remind readers, is the subject of this particular slashdot article. If readers are too God damn lazy to read that Suck article, let me at least quote the pertinent part (for which flagrant violation of a dozen "intellectual property" rights belonging to various multinational corporations, I nevertheless hope I won't be sentenced to jail). Quoth Mr. Knauss:
...And there are plenty of beatings to come. Except for the under-funded Electronic Frontier Foundation, the embryonic efforts of the ACLU, and the occasional self-interested corporate lobbyist, the Internet's collective response to one well-nigh apocalyptic decision after another has unfortunately been the same as the Internet's collective response to just about everything: posts, lots and lots of posts. Discussions and cries of hypocrisy and malformed analogies have consumed megabyte upon megabyte of masturbatory rage and self-indulgent self-righteousness.
Which, of course, accomplishes exactly nothing. For all the endless caterwauling that each addle-headed legal decision generates, the impact extends only as far as the smallish communities that spawn it. Even ignoring the significant percentage of the population that remains stubbornly off-line -- including the vast majority of Congress and the judiciary -- the
cage-rattlers have failed even to involve those who might actually care. Millions use the Internet without the slightest idea that their rights are being stripped away, blissfully unaware of what's going on because they don't happen to be members of the choir. The tempest not only fits in a teapot, it doesn't even rattle the lid. In this age of omnipresent email and mainstream technology news, pictures of ribbons don't cut it as tools of
moral suasion anymore...
Italics mine. Now you with moderator points, reread the above post, the one that got moderated down to virtual invisibilty as "offtopic," and ask yourselves if it doesn't say something important about the nature of this chasing-your-own-tail "community" you inhabit "here" within slashdot.
That one's the favorite of these guys. It's rather unnerving, especially the tenth or twentieth time it pops up on you. If you read/. a lot you may want to append the line
127.0.0.1 goatse.cx
or maybe the IP address of a server you know and prefer, to your hosts file.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Re:Stop moderating "Jon Erikson" troll account up
on
Mage The Ascension
·
· Score: 2
Why should that matter? If what "Jon Erikson" posts is "insightful" or "informative" or whatever, then why should a reader with points to spare spare him one? Do you have some reasion to pick on "Jon Erikson," or (if you insist on the distinction) his "parent," "real-life" identity, where his comments become automatically dismissable, though they might be praiseworthy if uttered by a non-troll, that is, someone with a less well-developed sense of humor?
Hell, the other day I myself bopped up one of those "Anonymous Emily Dickinson" posts with a point for "insightful." (Of course some kneejerk illiterates promptly moderated it right back down. Too damn bad they couldn't be bothered to read the thing first.) Why? Because the poem actually was intelligent, on-topic, and closely pertinent to the question at hand (how hard it is to get the attention of the Kernel hackers). In fact, I'm grateful and I feel lucky to enjoy the "company" here of someone literate enough and clever enough to have picked out so felicitously apposite a poem.
Don't let your patellar tendon do all your reading for you, OK? that's your cerebrum's job.
All right, I give up. You've obviously got me out-lawyered. So you get ten percent of the profits I make on this and all subsequent/. posts. If that's not good enough I'll even let you have twenty percent. But not one penny more!
Have fun cavorting with all them super-duper-models on your new yacht!
But you said you had no presence in 20% of the states, so where does the money collected from those residents go? Their state governments aren't accepting it.
I don't know about other states, but the law in Florida is, any Florida resident must pay sales tax on anything he buys which would be taxable if he bought it in a store in Florida. Florida law levies the sales tax against the buyer, not the seller. If you buy something in a bricks-n-mortar store here, of course the store collects the sales tax and forwards it to the state Dept. of Revenue. If you buy something via the mail, telephone or the internet from a company which has a physical presence in Florida, and that can be as little as one tech support guy in state, then the seller is required to collect the sales tax just as though it were selling its products over the counter here.
But suppose I buy something from a company in California, with no offices or employees here in Florida? The state of Florida has no hook by which it can force the vendor to collect the sales tax I owe them. But that doesn't mean that that purchase is non-taxable. No, in that case it is my obligation as a Florida resident to keep a record of my untaxed out-of-state purchases and send that record along with a check for the appropriate sales tax to the state Dept. of Revenue. If I fail to do that then I am in violation of state law.
Needless to say, not only do ninety-nine-plus percent of private Florida residents neglect to follow through on this, but also probably ninety-nine percent of Floridians aren't even aware that such a law exists. But the accounting departments of businesses are generally aware of this law, they often get audited, and so they make it a point to pay the sales tax and stay out of trouble. This has the advantage, for Floridian businesses, that they do not suffer a disadvantage when competing with out-of-state firms to sell to customers in-state, where the cost of the sales tax might well be more than the cost of interstate shipping.
So where you say that states "aren't accepting" sales tax from out-of-state firms, I suspect you are probably wrong in Florida. Our Dept. of Revenue is eager to collect all the sales tax it can get, surprise, surprise!
Gee Ben, does it make you the least bit nervous that the IMF's austerity regime in Russia is the 1990 equivalent of the Versailles treaty et seq., and that World history's next National Socialist government will inaugurate their new post-revolutionary regime possessing, what is it, 3,500 strategic nuclear weapons atop a wide range of decades-tested delivery vehicles?
But unlike the lifespan-robbed Russian masses who will sooner or later furiously overthrow the Yeltsin/Chubais/Putin clique, all these jokers here in/. prefer to quibble over whether or not the current Russkie kleptocracy is or isn't really a "true" capitalist economy. It may be, it may not be, that's a pointless dispute over an arbitrary semantic usage, but you can be sure that the rhetoricians of the second Russian Revolution will label their nation's destroyers and exploiters as "capitalists."
Thanks for your comment, good to know that at least someone was paying attention.
Go read Alighieri's Inferno. Hell is divided into concentric sections; the ones toward the periphery are relatively painless, as you get deeper and closer to the radius point the sins that got you there and the corresponding punishments get harsher. Virtuous pagans are on the outside, "without pain but without hope"; sensualists, who drank and fornicated too blithely in life, are tossed about by endless whirlwinds the next ring in; then further down come the wrathful, the beaters and torturers and murderers, in their lake of fire; and at the center, at the very center, that's where Divine justice puts the narcs.
The GPL is a legal document. This discussion is not about law. It is about ethics, good taste, stuff like that which falls outside the ambit of lawyers, judges, and financiers. If it were about law, then the tagline would have read something like "VA Linux SUES hobbes.resnet.tamu.edu" or something ugly, stupid and pointless like that.
Of course it could be, emburdened as you are with your own procapitalist slant (hey whyncha sue me for appropriating your phrase, your innalechshul propitty, without proper attribution and royalties?) maybe you can't even imagine anything in the universe of human actions which is not strictly gagged and bound by money relations and police enforcement of the same. Capitalism has blinkered out the horizon of your thought. Too bad for you!
Maybe the U.S. isn't planning to invade with its Army, but even as I type the hellish, demonic IMF sits upon the neck of the Russian citizen.
Don't take my word for it. Just look at the real bottom line, national mortality rates. First read the RAND institute on mortality in Russia after the "free market" set bomb on the Russian population; in particular, examine table 4.1, which shows male life expectancy in Russia declined from 64.9 years in 1987 to 59.0 in 1993. Then to be assured that the fatal trend of capitalism versus the Russian working man has not abated, much less reversed, here's the World Health Organization documenting how male life expectancy has continued to drop still further to 56.1 years in 2000! How would you feel, guy, were eight years delibertely axed off your life solely for the benefit of speculators and profiteers?
The fact is that the accursed U.S.A. and the capitaliism for which it stands have achieved a leap in the mortality rate in Russia of which even Hitler would be proud, and jealous.
And capitalism would cheerfully do exactly the same thing to you and all the members of your family and everyone you love, right here at home (wherever your home is), tomorrow, if this week's scheme seemed the slightest bit likely to increase the overall net wealth of the profit gluttons.
Sorry, reader, if I've insulted your intelligence by explicating the blatantly obvious at such tedious length.
...the Noriega situation had zero to do with Communism.
Nonsense, the CIA kissed Noriega's ass despite all they knew about his dope-dealing sideline, in order that they could use Panama as a forward base against the dread Communist Sandinistas, who threatened the stock value of the American Fruit Company. They didn't give a damn about Noriega's dope-dealing business any more than they cared about his rampant dictatorial abuse of human rights in Panama, any more than they cared about Saddam's maniac tyranny in Iraq during the seventeen years Saddam was on the CIA payroll. The U.S.A. turned on Noriega only when they began to suspect that he was supplying the Sandinistas with intelligence information he had snagged from the CIA communication stations in Panama.
Y'all better get down to your local public library pretty quick and read up about things like this, before the RIAA and the MPAA and that lot of "intellectual proprty" capitalists manage to get the public libraries all shut down. Capitalism is winding up the Enlightenment even as I type; the lust of the rich to own slaves must be satisfied. Meanwhile, this year, the prime issue in the U.S. presidential election is Slick Willie (who's not even running!) and the blow jobs he got. Here come the Dark Ages again.
> > Your account may be revoked and disciplinary action > > may be taken if you are running an unsupported OS.
God damned police everywhere. The most insignificant details of one's personal actions constantly monitored like the gold vaults at Fort Knox. Do the school regulations specify which hand you're to use to hold your dick when you take a piss? For all the hot air about "freedom" being a uniquely Amerikan ideal, a panoptic police state fits the TV-watching morons (cf. "Survivor," "Big Brother," "Cops," etc.) who infest this country like a tailored glove.
Just wondering, unless he tells them, how the Hell would those bought-off idiots running "ResNet" at your son's university know that he's running Linux on his computer in his dorm room instead of their beloved Windows?
Hell yeah sure, those ABM clowns, they'd have orbit after orbit to get locked in on the damn things, and there are powerful radio transmitters on board the Iridium satellites to which the ABMs can home in. That way, the $50-billion ABM fraud^H^H^H^H^Hproject can maybe enjoy a second "success," which, like the first, requires cheating - the use of a transponder on the target. Which, gee, a "rogue state" isn't too likely to install on their ICBM.
Anyway, any "rogue state" Hell-bent on committing national suicide by nuking a city in the U.S.A. would probably not use an ICBM to deliver the bomb, but would instead transport their warhead (most likely bought, incidentally, from America's good free-market friends in the formerly socialist and now thoroughly kleptocratic Russia) on a boat or a commercial plane. (A couple fun facts! there are some nuclear bombs which weigh as little as 60 lbs.! and drug dealers smuggled over two hundred and fifty tons of cocaine into the U.S.A. last year!) Then once they got the weapon over the border, they'd simply drive it to its target in the U.S.A. via a Ryder truck...
Yeah but what's with this libertarian-wishful-thinking nonsense that governments will simply up and evaporate in the immediate near future? It's a neat SF idea and it does simplify the plot somewhat but still it's as much a baseless fantasy as Frodo or something.
Preinstalled linux isn't exactly the same thing because linux is harder to configure: text files versus gui checkboxes most of the time.
It may be marginally easier to enter, for example, your ISP's DNS server IP address into a Win9x dialog box than it is to place it into a text file in/etc, but the real barrier is that it takes a hundred times more work on the user's part than either of those to learn what the phrase "DNS server IP address" means.
As Peter keeps saying and saying, the average home-user - Hell, the average office user too - seems to be incapable of configuring any OS, Linux, Windows 9x or you name it, with either text files or GUI checkboxes. Better documentation wouldn't help, because home users refuse to read computer documentation - in fact, half the time, they throw it all away the very first thing. Seriously. I know people who have bought new computers just because their Win9x systems have come down, as they so often seem to do, with bit-rot or registry leprosy or whatever you want to call it, so they don't boot right any more. Users like that never will learn how to do any configuration, GUI- or text-based.
For example, how hard is it to set up a modem and a "Dial-up Networking" icon in Windows9x, GUI and all? If you are the computer nerd in a small business, then you already know the answer: way too damn hard for the average home user! That's the reason that it was important to the point of federal lawsuit for AOL to have their AOL icon pre-installed on Win9x boxes; the presumption being that if users had to run the deep and abstruse AOL "setup.exe" program off the CD instead of having the icon already present front and center when the user turns on his new PC, AOL would probably lose half of their potential customers.
So if configuring anything on a PC is so difficult for home users, then how does it ever get done? For example, assuming that an ISP connection is not already preinstalled by the PC vendor, how do home users ever set one up? Well, either a.) some patient cubicle-slave at a help desk at AOL, EarthLink, etc., a human being talking over a 1930s-technology telephone, walks the home user, step by step, through the process of clicking all those checkboxes, or b.) some friend who has some notion what an IP address is comes over to the house and does it for the home user, or c.) the home user brings his box into work and has the office nerd do it all for him. And when the office nerd tries to explain what he's done and how to change all those little clickboxes or whatever in case the home user needs to switch to a different ISP or the ISP changes its DNS address, the home user turns away with his eyes glazed right over. I know; until last month I was that nerd. I've had guys turn glassy and spacey and dial out on their cell phones right in the middle of my explanation, which is quite offensively rude, I think. I can't tell you how much hardware I have installed thanks to my esoteric knowledge of hi-tek procedures such as putting the floppy disc in and double-clicking a:\setup.exe. If you can do this, and if on top of that you are 1337 enough to sniff around on driver CDs for a README.TXT, then these people refer to you as a "guru."
...but i don't think it would be a good idea for any newbie unless they have someone to help them climb the curve
The point to the above being that at least eighty percent of users don't ever "climb the curve" at all, any more than they ever set the time-of-day clocks on their VCRs and coffee makers. For them, if you preinstall Linux, it is pretty much the same as if you preinstall Windows9x; except, of course, if they call Mindspring for help connecting or HP for help plugging in their new printer, and they say they're using Linux, then the tech support guy is likely to say "We don't support that OS.".
The obvious solution, then, is to promote the notion that any stranger, even (especially) your next door neighbor, is not your friend but your enemy. That way you'll close your eyes to Luke 18:23 etc. and keep your goods close to your side and gripped tight, which will benefit trade and investments. To sell this idea hypnotic-wise to the TV-watching public, we have for a while enjoyed "cinema verite" cop shows where you can thrill to vicariously grinding some handcuffed minority kid's face against a concrete walk, bringing into focus that big difference between you and him, and now, also, "Survivor".
Plus God damn it you f*ckers CAN'T ADD! All you guys went to college, right? So I know you must have at some time passed some kind of college entrance exam. And they teach people how to add by the third grade at the latest! Why the Hell can't you guys ADD?
I have been a land surveyor, specializing in construction layout, for over twenty years, with a temporary, and now mercifully terminated, side-trip as a small-business network admin - a job which I have lately found so disgusting, between Microsoft's perverted customers-be-damned lust-for-gelt and the recent systematic capitalist crack-down of hacking in general, that I threw it all up and went back to the field. Best career move I ever made too; I even got a raise out of it!
Now I KNOW that an architect is an artiste and can't be bothered with mere technicalities like making their damn grid lines add up the same up one side of the plan as they do down the other. But for the last decade or so, almost all the architectural drawings I have used were produced on CAD systems, and damn it all, they STILL don't add up! Do you have any idea how difficult it is to create a CAD drawing with inaccurate dimensions? It is twice as hard to produce a dimensionally-wrong CAD drawing as it is to just do it right. Yet at least half - and I'm being very conservative here, the correct number is closer to 80% - of these foundation plans off which I'm supposed to lay out the design in the field, are literally impossible to stake, at least in a Euclidean universe, because they don't add up!
So I have to assume that you bastards are doing it on purpose!
Damn, that sunburn must have stung. There's this new kind of sunblock lotion I saw at the store with benzocaine in it, makes the sting go away, you just rub it in, rub it in, mmm um bub mmf, mind wandered and I got distracted there for a moment...
Think it's time to go to the beach!
Yours from Florida WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
on the other hand... :...about two years ago, a magazine offered me a tempting sum to fly : out to Hollywood and do a profile of Sharon Stone. This is, of : course, the drift these days -- the religious adulation of celebrities. : But I don't give a flying fuck about Sharon Stone, so, for purely : practical and writerly reasons, I had
to pass. - Barbara Ehrenreich
It's less of a "waste" if two people vote for Nader, even less if three, and so on. So feel better about voting Green, 'cause I'm going for Ralph too. Yes I know he won't win, yes I know, corporate knee-puppet George "duh-byuh" Bush and the ghastly pro-corporate robots he'll appoint to the Supreme Court, etc., etc.. But I'll be God damned if I'll vote for a Democratic candidate who picks a VP who has come out in favor of destroy^H^H^H^H^H^H^H"privatizing" Social Security.
Enough, DNC, basta!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
: It was the 1980s and I was pitching a column on how middle class : women could
solve the fabled man shortage by marrying blue collar : men. The editor screwed up her expensively maintained face and : said, "But can they talk?" - Barbara Ehrenreich
> I like Robert Heinlein's suggestion: you should not be allowed > to vote unless you can find the roots of y=9x^2+12x+4.
To tell you the truth, I think I agree with the concept at the base of your thought, which is that voting is so important, and requires such serious reflection, that it's not just pointless but actually deleterious to make the physical process of voting trivially easy as though it were pulling up to the McD's drive-thru window or surfing TV channels with the remote.
You may be thinking of Heinlein's often-quoted "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
I get itchy when I read that, because I've never in my life met the paragon who could do each and every one of these things at all, much less well. It seems to me that Heinlein's nitpicky educational elitism basically boils down to this: "Are you fit for the voter's franchise? If and only if you would have been an A+ student at a high school in the mid-western U.S.A in 1924, then you should be allowed to run the entire world. Any loser who doesn't measure up to this criterion is fit only to be a serf to those of us who do."
It so happens I too know how to work a quadratic equation. After all, I went to high school in the U.S.A., and I was in that tiny minority who paid attention in math class. But neither Virgil nor Dante Alighieri, nor Archimedes, or Pythagoras or Plato could have solved that problem; they wouldn't recognize the notation, which hadn't been invented yet. They wouldn't even recognize the number "zero," which hadn't been imported from India yet! The terminology of algebra existed by Shakespeare's day yet I doubt he could have passed the high school Algebra 2 exam Heinlein puts up as only one of the barriers before the ballot. Probably Gibbon, Macaulay and Marx could have found the zeroes of your quadratic, probably Beethoven and Napoleon would not have, and so on, but you get the point.
I don't suppose Gore actually attempts to take credit for inventing TCP/IP or the FTP protocol or anything like that. At least I hope not; that would be as pathologically delusional as Reagan "remembering" being there in person, in uniform, when U.S. soldiers liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945.
I have a old book published in 1990, Dvorak's guide to PC Telecommunications (John Dvorak & Nick Anis). It's full of quaint tips on how you can hook up your 2400 baud modem to connect to a variety of BBSs. It came with two 5-1/4 discs with PKZip, Qedit, and Telix SE, a terminal program for DOS. Recently I was dusting my bookcases and I took a glance at it for nostalgia's sake, where I found this comment. In the first chapter, Introduction to Telecomputing (page 9), Dvorak & Anis write the following - I quote the entire paragraph for context and flavor:
The current horizon in communication speeds is linked to the development of the Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) currently just coming to market via the local Bell operating companies. These essentially digital telephone links, capable of 64000bps communication, elimante the need to modulate data into tones (see the ISDN discussion in Chapter 19). At 64Kbps (kilobits-per-second) PC communication should become nearly effortless. Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee is advocating the development of a national data communications highway connecting universities, laboratories, and educational facilities, transmitting at a rate of 3 gigabits (10 to the ninth power) per second. That's fast enough to send the Encyclopedia Britannica over the telephone from one computer to another in less than a minute!
That's the way two professional tech writers saw it back in 1990 or so. Evidently they considered Gore's political sponsorship of that yet-unnamed "data communications highway" was significant enough that they mentioned his name, and no one else's, when they alluded to it.
Slashdot Mirror
But do you think if the guy was in Sri Lanka that US laws would effect him? or Pakistan? or Indonesia? or China?
Great, so if I ever get to the point where I can program my way out of a wet paper sack, and it comes into my mind to write a computer program, what you're saying is I've got to move to Pakistan? I don't even know what language they speak there much less do I speak it myself.
What if the Chinese government decided to copy and crack everything, put it on their servers, and offer it to the world... just for fun.
Let us ignore the fantastic unlikelihood of America's good business partners the Chinese, who fill our store shelves with goods in shrinkwrap for far less than we could charge and stay afloat if we manufactured them here in the U.S., or else let's imagine that you specified another country with less to lose by offending the U.S. business community. In the case any country accepts your advice, then that country will be quickly isolated off from the internet as cleanly and thoroughly as you would be if I sliced the telephone or TV cables leading into your house.
There's this stuff called IP, that's short for intellectual property, it's just a coincidence that it's also one a then internet acronyms, which in the literature subconsciously ties investors into this big 'net thing I guess...that IP, the heart of all the worth of Disney, Parke-Davis and Microsoft, is immensely valuable now; and stockholders's proxies dream of a soon day when by Congressional fiat, should you innocently jerk off whilst daydreaming about Natalie P. dressed in Naboo garb, then by statute George Lucas's film company has the rights to all the information encoded in your sperm. No kidding, lobbyists delivered the draft legislation to your Congressional Representative just this afternoon, together with a nice check for his re-election campaign.
Anyway that fabulously valuable IP you picture "China" or whatever blithely warez-ifying vastly dwarfs in dollars all those Havana hotels and latifundia the Cuban government nationalized in their revolution, yet for no other reason beside that appropriation the U.S. has been flogging Cuba unremittingly for four decades now. With a provocation like what you suggest you don't think Washington/Wall Street/Hollywood Inc. could bring themselves to slice a few wires?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
While we're on the subject of clue-stick beatings, consider that your third-party vote has ZERO impact on the political process.
Wrong. Consider Democratic politics in the 2004 primary if it turns out that the six percent of voters for Nader cost Gore the election. Maybe there'd be at least one "serious" (i.e. demopublican) candidate who wasn't a third-generation Congressman and an oil millionaire. Maybe they wouldn't offer us a Social Security bandito^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hprivatizer and a sex cop for VP then. Maybe health care would be on the platform that time.
Sorry for boring you with our internal squabbles, you foriegners I mean non-USians.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
God damn Jon, that one's one of the best, it's got an edge on it. You're so good at this and it takes such big balls to fire off so wild-eyed, evil a notion as that with your face so straight. What bland words, and the base idea split in two across two different voices! And I'll bet you even mispelt suprising on purpose!
Still best you watch out honey, you bad man, Morris Dees come down the mountain, take away all your house and goods...
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Sometimes you actually have to move out of your seat to find something out...
And sometimes you don't.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Here I am complaining about moderation. I don't know what's got into me, as the whole subject of /. moderation is beneath my dignity even to take into account.
But it so happens that the above comment, which is both interesting and insightful, not to mention intelligently and amusingly written, happens to be completely on-topic for the discussion at hand. It obviously has a connection to Mr. Knauss's commentary in Suck, which, I guess I should remind readers, is the subject of this particular slashdot article. If readers are too God damn lazy to read that Suck article, let me at least quote the pertinent part (for which flagrant violation of a dozen "intellectual property" rights belonging to various multinational corporations, I nevertheless hope I won't be sentenced to jail). Quoth Mr. Knauss:
Which, of course, accomplishes exactly nothing . For all the endless caterwauling that each addle-headed legal decision generates, the impact extends only as far as the smallish communities that spawn it. Even ignoring the significant percentage of the population that remains stubbornly off-line -- including the vast majority of Congress and the judiciary -- the cage-rattlers have failed even to involve those who might actually care. Millions use the Internet without the slightest idea that their rights are being stripped away, blissfully unaware of what's going on because they don't happen to be members of the choir. The tempest not only fits in a teapot, it doesn't even rattle the lid. In this age of omnipresent email and mainstream technology news, pictures of ribbons don't cut it as tools of moral suasion anymore...
Italics mine. Now you with moderator points, reread the above post, the one that got moderated down to virtual invisibilty as "offtopic," and ask yourselves if it doesn't say something important about the nature of this chasing-your-own-tail "community" you inhabit "here" within slashdot.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
That one's the favorite of these guys. It's rather unnerving, especially the tenth or twentieth time it pops up on you. If you read /. a lot you may want to append the line
127.0.0.1 goatse.cx
or maybe the IP address of a server you know and prefer, to your hosts file.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Why should that matter? If what "Jon Erikson" posts is "insightful" or "informative" or whatever, then why should a reader with points to spare spare him one? Do you have some reasion to pick on "Jon Erikson," or (if you insist on the distinction) his "parent," "real-life" identity, where his comments become automatically dismissable, though they might be praiseworthy if uttered by a non-troll, that is, someone with a less well-developed sense of humor?
Hell, the other day I myself bopped up one of those "Anonymous Emily Dickinson" posts with a point for "insightful." (Of course some kneejerk illiterates promptly moderated it right back down. Too damn bad they couldn't be bothered to read the thing first.) Why? Because the poem actually was intelligent, on-topic, and closely pertinent to the question at hand (how hard it is to get the attention of the Kernel hackers). In fact, I'm grateful and I feel lucky to enjoy the "company" here of someone literate enough and clever enough to have picked out so felicitously apposite a poem.
Don't let your patellar tendon do all your reading for you, OK? that's your cerebrum's job.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
All right, I give up. You've obviously got me out-lawyered. So you get ten percent of the profits I make on this and all subsequent /. posts. If that's not good enough I'll even let you have twenty percent. But not one penny more!
Have fun cavorting with all them super-duper-models on your new yacht!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
But you said you had no presence in 20% of the states, so where does the money collected from those residents go? Their state governments aren't accepting it.
I don't know about other states, but the law in Florida is, any Florida resident must pay sales tax on anything he buys which would be taxable if he bought it in a store in Florida. Florida law levies the sales tax against the buyer, not the seller. If you buy something in a bricks-n-mortar store here, of course the store collects the sales tax and forwards it to the state Dept. of Revenue. If you buy something via the mail, telephone or the internet from a company which has a physical presence in Florida, and that can be as little as one tech support guy in state, then the seller is required to collect the sales tax just as though it were selling its products over the counter here.
But suppose I buy something from a company in California, with no offices or employees here in Florida? The state of Florida has no hook by which it can force the vendor to collect the sales tax I owe them. But that doesn't mean that that purchase is non-taxable. No, in that case it is my obligation as a Florida resident to keep a record of my untaxed out-of-state purchases and send that record along with a check for the appropriate sales tax to the state Dept. of Revenue. If I fail to do that then I am in violation of state law.
Needless to say, not only do ninety-nine-plus percent of private Florida residents neglect to follow through on this, but also probably ninety-nine percent of Floridians aren't even aware that such a law exists. But the accounting departments of businesses are generally aware of this law, they often get audited, and so they make it a point to pay the sales tax and stay out of trouble. This has the advantage, for Floridian businesses, that they do not suffer a disadvantage when competing with out-of-state firms to sell to customers in-state, where the cost of the sales tax might well be more than the cost of interstate shipping.
So where you say that states "aren't accepting" sales tax from out-of-state firms, I suspect you are probably wrong in Florida. Our Dept. of Revenue is eager to collect all the sales tax it can get, surprise, surprise!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Gee Ben, does it make you the least bit nervous that the IMF's austerity regime in Russia is the 1990 equivalent of the Versailles treaty et seq., and that World history's next National Socialist government will inaugurate their new post-revolutionary regime possessing, what is it, 3,500 strategic nuclear weapons atop a wide range of decades-tested delivery vehicles?
But unlike the lifespan-robbed Russian masses who will sooner or later furiously overthrow the Yeltsin/Chubais/Putin clique, all these jokers here in /. prefer to quibble over whether or not the current Russkie kleptocracy is or isn't really a "true" capitalist economy. It may be, it may not be, that's a pointless dispute over an arbitrary semantic usage, but you can be sure that the rhetoricians of the second Russian Revolution will label their nation's destroyers and exploiters as "capitalists."
Thanks for your comment, good to know that at least someone was paying attention.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Go read Alighieri's Inferno. Hell is divided into concentric sections; the ones toward the periphery are relatively painless, as you get deeper and closer to the radius point the sins that got you there and the corresponding punishments get harsher. Virtuous pagans are on the outside, "without pain but without hope"; sensualists, who drank and fornicated too blithely in life, are tossed about by endless whirlwinds the next ring in; then further down come the wrathful, the beaters and torturers and murderers, in their lake of fire; and at the center, at the very center, that's where Divine justice puts the narcs.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
The GPL is a legal document. This discussion is not about law. It is about ethics, good taste, stuff like that which falls outside the ambit of lawyers, judges, and financiers. If it were about law, then the tagline would have read something like "VA Linux SUES hobbes.resnet.tamu.edu" or something ugly, stupid and pointless like that.
Of course it could be, emburdened as you are with your own procapitalist slant (hey whyncha sue me for appropriating your phrase, your innalechshul propitty, without proper attribution and royalties?) maybe you can't even imagine anything in the universe of human actions which is not strictly gagged and bound by money relations and police enforcement of the same. Capitalism has blinkered out the horizon of your thought. Too bad for you!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
My Jehovah...My Jehovah
Your Jehovah? You mean there's more than one, you polytheist, you pagan, you? Sheesh, these blasphemers, these days!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
...measuring my Earth under my Sun...
Maybe the U.S. isn't planning to invade with its Army, but even as I type the hellish, demonic IMF sits upon the neck of the Russian citizen.
Don't take my word for it. Just look at the real bottom line, national mortality rates. First read the RAND institute on mortality in Russia after the "free market" set bomb on the Russian population; in particular, examine table 4.1, which shows male life expectancy in Russia declined from 64.9 years in 1987 to 59.0 in 1993. Then to be assured that the fatal trend of capitalism versus the Russian working man has not abated, much less reversed, here's the World Health Organization documenting how male life expectancy has continued to drop still further to 56.1 years in 2000! How would you feel, guy, were eight years delibertely axed off your life solely for the benefit of speculators and profiteers?
The fact is that the accursed U.S.A. and the capitaliism for which it stands have achieved a leap in the mortality rate in Russia of which even Hitler would be proud, and jealous.
And capitalism would cheerfully do exactly the same thing to you and all the members of your family and everyone you love, right here at home (wherever your home is), tomorrow, if this week's scheme seemed the slightest bit likely to increase the overall net wealth of the profit gluttons.
Sorry, reader, if I've insulted your intelligence by explicating the blatantly obvious at such tedious length.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Nonsense, the CIA kissed Noriega's ass despite all they knew about his dope-dealing sideline, in order that they could use Panama as a forward base against the dread Communist Sandinistas, who threatened the stock value of the American Fruit Company. They didn't give a damn about Noriega's dope-dealing business any more than they cared about his rampant dictatorial abuse of human rights in Panama, any more than they cared about Saddam's maniac tyranny in Iraq during the seventeen years Saddam was on the CIA payroll. The U.S.A. turned on Noriega only when they began to suspect that he was supplying the Sandinistas with intelligence information he had snagged from the CIA communication stations in Panama.
Y'all better get down to your local public library pretty quick and read up about things like this, before the RIAA and the MPAA and that lot of "intellectual proprty" capitalists manage to get the public libraries all shut down. Capitalism is winding up the Enlightenment even as I type; the lust of the rich to own slaves must be satisfied. Meanwhile, this year, the prime issue in the U.S. presidential election is Slick Willie (who's not even running!) and the blow jobs he got. Here come the Dark Ages again.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> > Your account may be revoked and disciplinary action
> > may be taken if you are running an unsupported OS.
God damned police everywhere. The most insignificant details of one's personal actions constantly monitored like the gold vaults at Fort Knox. Do the school regulations specify which hand you're to use to hold your dick when you take a piss? For all the hot air about "freedom" being a uniquely Amerikan ideal, a panoptic police state fits the TV-watching morons (cf. "Survivor," "Big Brother," "Cops," etc.) who infest this country like a tailored glove.
Just wondering, unless he tells them, how the Hell would those bought-off idiots running "ResNet" at your son's university know that he's running Linux on his computer in his dorm room instead of their beloved Windows?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Hell yeah sure, those ABM clowns, they'd have orbit after orbit to get locked in on the damn things, and there are powerful radio transmitters on board the Iridium satellites to which the ABMs can home in. That way, the $50-billion ABM fraud^H^H^H^H^Hproject can maybe enjoy a second "success," which, like the first, requires cheating - the use of a transponder on the target. Which, gee, a "rogue state" isn't too likely to install on their ICBM.
Anyway, any "rogue state" Hell-bent on committing national suicide by nuking a city in the U.S.A. would probably not use an ICBM to deliver the bomb, but would instead transport their warhead (most likely bought, incidentally, from America's good free-market friends in the formerly socialist and now thoroughly kleptocratic Russia) on a boat or a commercial plane. (A couple fun facts! there are some nuclear bombs which weigh as little as 60 lbs.! and drug dealers smuggled over two hundred and fifty tons of cocaine into the U.S.A. last year!) Then once they got the weapon over the border, they'd simply drive it to its target in the U.S.A. via a Ryder truck...
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Yeah but what's with this libertarian-wishful-thinking nonsense that governments will simply up and evaporate in the immediate near future? It's a neat SF idea and it does simplify the plot somewhat but still it's as much a baseless fantasy as Frodo or something.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Preinstalled linux isn't exactly the same thing because linux is harder to configure: text files versus gui checkboxes most of the time.
It may be marginally easier to enter, for example, your ISP's DNS server IP address into a Win9x dialog box than it is to place it into a text file in /etc, but the real barrier is that it takes a hundred times more work on the user's part than either of those to learn what the phrase "DNS server IP address" means.
As Peter keeps saying and saying, the average home-user - Hell, the average office user too - seems to be incapable of configuring any OS, Linux, Windows 9x or you name it, with either text files or GUI checkboxes. Better documentation wouldn't help, because home users refuse to read computer documentation - in fact, half the time, they throw it all away the very first thing. Seriously. I know people who have bought new computers just because their Win9x systems have come down, as they so often seem to do, with bit-rot or registry leprosy or whatever you want to call it, so they don't boot right any more. Users like that never will learn how to do any configuration, GUI- or text-based.
For example, how hard is it to set up a modem and a "Dial-up Networking" icon in Windows9x, GUI and all? If you are the computer nerd in a small business, then you already know the answer: way too damn hard for the average home user! That's the reason that it was important to the point of federal lawsuit for AOL to have their AOL icon pre-installed on Win9x boxes; the presumption being that if users had to run the deep and abstruse AOL "setup.exe" program off the CD instead of having the icon already present front and center when the user turns on his new PC, AOL would probably lose half of their potential customers.
So if configuring anything on a PC is so difficult for home users, then how does it ever get done? For example, assuming that an ISP connection is not already preinstalled by the PC vendor, how do home users ever set one up? Well, either a.) some patient cubicle-slave at a help desk at AOL, EarthLink, etc., a human being talking over a 1930s-technology telephone, walks the home user, step by step, through the process of clicking all those checkboxes, or b.) some friend who has some notion what an IP address is comes over to the house and does it for the home user, or c.) the home user brings his box into work and has the office nerd do it all for him. And when the office nerd tries to explain what he's done and how to change all those little clickboxes or whatever in case the home user needs to switch to a different ISP or the ISP changes its DNS address, the home user turns away with his eyes glazed right over. I know; until last month I was that nerd. I've had guys turn glassy and spacey and dial out on their cell phones right in the middle of my explanation, which is quite offensively rude, I think. I can't tell you how much hardware I have installed thanks to my esoteric knowledge of hi-tek procedures such as putting the floppy disc in and double-clicking a:\setup.exe. If you can do this, and if on top of that you are 1337 enough to sniff around on driver CDs for a README.TXT, then these people refer to you as a "guru."
The point to the above being that at least eighty percent of users don't ever "climb the curve" at all, any more than they ever set the time-of-day clocks on their VCRs and coffee makers. For them, if you preinstall Linux, it is pretty much the same as if you preinstall Windows9x; except, of course, if they call Mindspring for help connecting or HP for help plugging in their new printer, and they say they're using Linux, then the tech support guy is likely to say "We don't support that OS.".
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
The obvious solution, then, is to promote the notion that any stranger, even (especially) your next door neighbor, is not your friend but your enemy. That way you'll close your eyes to Luke 18:23 etc. and keep your goods close to your side and gripped tight, which will benefit trade and investments. To sell this idea hypnotic-wise to the TV-watching public, we have for a while enjoyed "cinema verite" cop shows where you can thrill to vicariously grinding some handcuffed minority kid's face against a concrete walk, bringing into focus that big difference between you and him, and now, also, "Survivor".
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Plus God damn it you f*ckers CAN'T ADD! All you guys went to college, right? So I know you must have at some time passed some kind of college entrance exam. And they teach people how to add by the third grade at the latest! Why the Hell can't you guys ADD?
I have been a land surveyor, specializing in construction layout, for over twenty years, with a temporary, and now mercifully terminated, side-trip as a small-business network admin - a job which I have lately found so disgusting, between Microsoft's perverted customers-be-damned lust-for-gelt and the recent systematic capitalist crack-down of hacking in general, that I threw it all up and went back to the field. Best career move I ever made too; I even got a raise out of it!
Now I KNOW that an architect is an artiste and can't be bothered with mere technicalities like making their damn grid lines add up the same up one side of the plan as they do down the other. But for the last decade or so, almost all the architectural drawings I have used were produced on CAD systems, and damn it all, they STILL don't add up! Do you have any idea how difficult it is to create a CAD drawing with inaccurate dimensions? It is twice as hard to produce a dimensionally-wrong CAD drawing as it is to just do it right. Yet at least half - and I'm being very conservative here, the correct number is closer to 80% - of these foundation plans off which I'm supposed to lay out the design in the field, are literally impossible to stake, at least in a Euclidean universe, because they don't add up!
So I have to assume that you bastards are doing it on purpose!
Indignantly yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Damn, that sunburn must have stung. There's this new kind of sunblock lotion I saw at the store with benzocaine in it, makes the sting go away, you just rub it in, rub it in, mmm um bub mmf, mind wandered and I got distracted there for a moment...
Think it's time to go to the beach!
Yours from Florida WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
on the other hand... ...about two years ago, a magazine offered me a tempting sum to fly
:
: out to Hollywood and do a profile of Sharon Stone. This is, of
: course, the drift these days -- the religious adulation of celebrities.
: But I don't give a flying fuck about Sharon Stone, so, for purely
: practical and writerly reasons, I had to pass. - Barbara Ehrenreich
It's less of a "waste" if two people vote for Nader, even less if three, and so on. So feel better about voting Green, 'cause I'm going for Ralph too. Yes I know he won't win, yes I know, corporate knee-puppet George "duh-byuh" Bush and the ghastly pro-corporate robots he'll appoint to the Supreme Court, etc., etc.. But I'll be God damned if I'll vote for a Democratic candidate who picks a VP who has come out in favor of destroy^H^H^H^H^H^H^H"privatizing" Social Security.
Enough, DNC, basta!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
: It was the 1980s and I was pitching a column on how middle class
: women could solve the fabled man shortage by marrying blue collar
: men. The editor screwed up her expensively maintained face and
: said, "But can they talk?" - Barbara Ehrenreich
> I like Robert Heinlein's suggestion: you should not be allowed
> to vote unless you can find the roots of y=9x^2+12x+4.
To tell you the truth, I think I agree with the concept at the base of your thought, which is that voting is so important, and requires such serious reflection, that it's not just pointless but actually deleterious to make the physical process of voting trivially easy as though it were pulling up to the McD's drive-thru window or surfing TV channels with the remote.
You may be thinking of Heinlein's often-quoted "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
I get itchy when I read that, because I've never in my life met the paragon who could do each and every one of these things at all, much less well. It seems to me that Heinlein's nitpicky educational elitism basically boils down to this: "Are you fit for the voter's franchise? If and only if you would have been an A+ student at a high school in the mid-western U.S.A in 1924, then you should be allowed to run the entire world. Any loser who doesn't measure up to this criterion is fit only to be a serf to those of us who do."
It so happens I too know how to work a quadratic equation. After all, I went to high school in the U.S.A., and I was in that tiny minority who paid attention in math class. But neither Virgil nor Dante Alighieri, nor Archimedes, or Pythagoras or Plato could have solved that problem; they wouldn't recognize the notation, which hadn't been invented yet. They wouldn't even recognize the number "zero," which hadn't been imported from India yet! The terminology of algebra existed by Shakespeare's day yet I doubt he could have passed the high school Algebra 2 exam Heinlein puts up as only one of the barriers before the ballot. Probably Gibbon, Macaulay and Marx could have found the zeroes of your quadratic, probably Beethoven and Napoleon would not have, and so on, but you get the point.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I don't suppose Gore actually attempts to take credit for inventing TCP/IP or the FTP protocol or anything like that. At least I hope not; that would be as pathologically delusional as Reagan "remembering" being there in person, in uniform, when U.S. soldiers liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945.
I have a old book published in 1990, Dvorak's guide to PC Telecommunications (John Dvorak & Nick Anis). It's full of quaint tips on how you can hook up your 2400 baud modem to connect to a variety of BBSs. It came with two 5-1/4 discs with PKZip, Qedit, and Telix SE, a terminal program for DOS. Recently I was dusting my bookcases and I took a glance at it for nostalgia's sake, where I found this comment. In the first chapter, Introduction to Telecomputing (page 9), Dvorak & Anis write the following - I quote the entire paragraph for context and flavor:
The current horizon in communication speeds is linked
to the development of the Integrated Services Digital
Network (ISDN) currently just coming to market via the
local Bell operating companies. These essentially
digital telephone links, capable of 64000bps
communication, elimante the need to modulate
data into tones (see the ISDN discussion in Chapter 19).
At 64Kbps (kilobits-per-second) PC communication
should become nearly effortless. Senator Albert Gore of
Tennessee is advocating the development of a national
data communications highway connecting universities,
laboratories, and educational facilities, transmitting
at a rate of 3 gigabits (10 to the ninth power) per
second. That's fast enough to send the Encyclopedia
Britannica over the telephone from one computer to
another in less than a minute!
That's the way two professional tech writers saw it back in 1990 or so. Evidently they considered Gore's political sponsorship of that yet-unnamed "data communications highway" was significant enough that they mentioned his name, and no one else's, when they alluded to it.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net