You seem to ignore the large overlap between those who use it because it's free and those who use it because it works better thatn Win2k. It's possible to be both. (Especially when you recognize that the openness of free software is a major reason why it got to be better than Win2k.) They aren't two seperate "camps", as you characterize.
So which is it, people assume that it's a troll because they can't tell the difference, or they can tell the difference because a troll can't hold a candle to the real thing?
It's not an either-or. The tool you use to tell that something is a troll is that it sounds like a comical extreme mock-up of the real thing. But no matter how hard you try to exaggerate things, there will still exist people with real opinions that are that bad. You can't exaggerate beyond the threshold where the viewer can tell, "That's obviously fake", because no such threshold. exists.
There is nothing wrong with making people laugh. There is something wrong with deriding those who "fall for it" when trolled, however. THAT sets up a situation where people are afraid to rebut the real genuine spreaders of disinformation. Without knowing the potential troller's past opinions, you can't tell he's a troller. Real people exist who are either ignorant enough to spread the worst kind of misinformation believing it to be genuine, or are evil enough to do it deliberately. Either way, letting the mis-information stand unrebutted in a public forum is a bad thing.
Why the hell do people keep praising a successful troll and assuming the one who got trolled was suckered? More often than not, a successful troll doesn't prove a damn thing about the gullibility of the one who got trolled, because there really are people rude and stupid enough to say something exceptionally brain-dead and really mean it. So no matter how hard a troll tries to fake it, he can't hold a candle to the real thing. So of course people end up assuming the troll is genuine. To do otherwise will end up making you err in the opposite direction by assuming that people with genuinely offensive positions are just trolling.
Some sci-fi material is about how much better things would be if NASA would step out of the way and let everyone who wants to (private firms or universities) have a go at space projects themselves. While I don't entirely agree that that makes sense (I'm a fence-sitter on that issue), I do think it's wrong to make the sales of such anti-NASA material end up subsidizing NASA simply because it is in the same genre as books read by people who do like NASA.
Being in the same genre as NASA does not necessarily equate to being in support of NASA.
You are in violation of the DMCA for decoding and dissemating what was obviously meant to be an encrypted post with protected contents.
Re:Ironic twist was Re:More Info
on
e-Denounce
·
· Score: 2
Do these people know what the word "webcam" means? Hint- the word they were looking for was "screenshot". What they are proposing is disturbing enough, but what I though they said the first time I saw the word "webcam" was "Oh, my - they're going to take a picture of the user who's doing the reporting?
You're forgetting the One Microsoft Way of thinking - Nobody needs to have enough machine to run more than one app at a time. If you buy more memory or CPU speed clearly the only possible reason you could have for doing so is to run a bigger application, never to run multiple applications - running more than one thing at a time? What, are you some kind of Unix propeller-head?
Re:Silly people *tsk,tsk,tsk*
on
Unix Isn't Dead
·
· Score: 2
But when MS really IS being evil, it is perfectly correct to bring emotion into the discussion.
And it's not my fault that you are too blind to notice how impossible it is to enter the marketplace with the stranglehold MS has, and how that stranglehold has nothing to do with quality of product and everything to do with distribution of that product. You call it emotional. I call it not pussyfooting around about what I actually see. Being unemotional about an issue shouldn't have to include distorting the facts when you observe something unpleasant and trying to pretend it's not true.
Re:Silly people *tsk,tsk,tsk*
on
Unix Isn't Dead
·
· Score: 2
It's very much like any other industry. Automobiles today... Go try to build something as complex as a BMW 740i in your garage without substantial financial resources. It's that complexity and technological advancement which creates a barrier of entry into the marketplace.
NO. The fact that it's NOT the technologicial advancement, but the marketplace chokehold, that makes the barrier of entry into the market, the OS situation is nothing like the automobile situation.
So what happens when a clause of a license contains
a falsehood as a given premise? Does it invaldate that clause and make it unenforceable?
When MS says that a restriction applies to "Foo, and all other Bars", when Foos aren't Bars in the first place, does that restriction still legally hold up in court?
What would happen if a license said, "This applies to people born after 1980, and other octogenarians", when there exist no octogenarians born after 1980? Does it apply to all people born after 1980 because they are explicitly mentioned?
I guess what I'm asking is, legally, what is the boolean representation for the phrase "Foo, and other Bars":
The set of all things satisfying the
condition: (Foo) or (Bar)
The set of all things satisfying the
condition: (Foo and Bar)
Seeing as how Bar is a null set in this case, it's an important queestion to ask, because the set reduces to either just FOO, or the null set, depending on whether it's ORed or ANDed.
Well, maybe it's not so important after all, since this would hinge upon getting a lawyer to understand not only the licenses involved, but also the technical jargon of what is "linking" a program and so on. Since I have my doubts about that ever happening, the MS license will probably stand, and idiots will continue to spread the myth that the GPL is viral, and the implicit lie contained in this MS license will help that along a little bit.
If they release this kind of information to the public in THIS way, then them not releasing it is precisely what I want to see happen.
Because once the information is there, MS can then claim that anyone working on Samba who happened to see it has done something illegal by doing so.
Especially with the DMCA now making reverse engineering illegal in cases where a copyright is somehow involved (which is pretty much all the time) - If MS accuses someone of using this released information to make Samba, the only defense that person has is to say that they reverse engineered it themselves, which now that MS has released this spec with a copyright on it and a license to view it, will count as a DMCA violation. So they've just screwed anyone who makes Samba work, no matter if they figured it out on their own or not.
And even though they can't prove if the information was used or not, in the US court system, he with the deepest pockets scares the other guy into settling out of court.
Except of course if you are a corporation. Then you can admit to guilt and wrongdoings all the live long day and never have it affect your credit rating. I'm all for capitalism, but NOT corpration. Corporation is the practice of giving large faceless entities some of the privilieges of a person under the law, but none of the responsibilities a real person under the law has to deal with. You can't send a corporation to jail. You can't make its life miserable. You can't ruin it's livelyhood. The most you can do is fine it, and then never for more than it can actually afford (unlike when a settlement fines an individual). The *people* behind the corporation, who might actually be intimidated by such things, are under no personal threat from the wrongdoings that they carry out through the corporation. The worst that can happen to them is that they lose that job because the corporation goes away. That's *IT* - that's as bad as it gets.
When a corporation and an individual go to court, they aren't putting the same risk up on the block. And they *can't*, because the corporations aren't really people - get rid of their ledgers and money and they cease to exist as an entity.
If a corporation's software gathers information off your home computer without asking you, they might face a fine at the most. If an individual views information on a corporation's computer without asking, his whole life's pursuit is over - his entire career, not just his one job he holds at the time, is over and he's never allowed to touch a computer again.
You can't punish a corporation as severely as you can a person. This is what makes them not be accountable for their actions.
What's the solution? Stop treating corporations like people who can be found guilty or innocent. If the people in a corporation do something wrong, then go after the PEOPLE. Keep the corporation as a convenient tool for consolodating funds and organising the business, but stop letting it be used as a sheild against personal responsibility.
Let the people at the top know that if they engage in illegal activities that *THEY* are the ones who will be responsible for it if they get caught, NOT the imaginary person called "The company". Get them to treat their lives with the same sense of responsibility and personal risk the rest of us have to deal with, and then maybe for once they'd get some semblance of fair play.
But with "loser pays" then you get the same problem in the opposite direction, I would think. You keep big companies from suiing the little guy frivoulously, but at the expense of making the little guy too afraid to sue a big company.
Would you bring up a suit against a company, even if you were in the right and thought you had a reasonable chance (say, 85%) of winning, if doing so incurred a 15% chance of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars if you lose?
"Loser pays" *MUST* come with an attached reasonable max cap on how much one can expect to incur, otherwise you can intimidate the other side into not going to court by hiring an expensive defense team and mentioning that the other guy might end up having to pay for them.
I didn't put words into your mouth. You kept calling the fire "normal". No. It was not. The conditions that caused the fire to start led to the creation of a quite abnormal fire.
Doesn't Halon fire extinguishing work by ruining the oxygen supply in some way? (I don't know, this is just layman's hearsay.) Even if such a system would work, would you want to install it in a building full of human beings, when saving their lives is allegedly the whole reason for a firefighting system in the first place?
The jet fuel was absolutely the direct reason the fire brought the buildings down. The jet fuel caused everything it touched to ignite all together in one instant. There's no way in hell that I'm going to call a fire that goes from nothing to instant inferno "ordinary". You're trying to spin this like a normal fire could have brought the buildings down. No Way. A normal fire would have been suppressable because it wouldn't suddenly appear everywhere all at once.
The existence of the jet fuel, in the few seconds for which it existed in the fire, assured that the fire would be unstoppable and most definately not of the ordinary nature that one could expect a firefighting system to be able to stop.
It's not "Fuel fire -> ordinary fire -> collapse, as you claim. It's "Fuel fire-> really huge gigantic fire in an instant with every flammable material available in flame all at once, which would not normally happen in a normal fire -> collapse.
You cite temperature and ignore the *speed* of the ignition, which has everything to with with the fact that it was started by jet fuel. There's no way a normal accidental fire is going to go from zero flame to an entire floor aflame in a matter of a second or two. The system was overwhelmed by the fact that the fire was *everywhere* *all* *in* *one* *instant*. No firefighting system could cope with such an instantaneous fire, even if it is of a normal temperature. It will destroy the firefighting system itself before it can have any noticable effect.
Yes, the fuel *did* matter - it's the reason the fire got started in an instant rather than spreading slowly.
I never said there was no difference. But they should have used different terms to describe that difference, instead of doing it in a way that carries the implication that only proprietary unixen are Unix.
Yes, proprietary unix and open source unix are very different, and there's a need to have different terms to refer to them. But it's a lie to do it in a way that you call one unix and one not unix. It's insulting to linux, like saying "Would you like to buy a Ford or would you like to buy a truck?"
Consider this phrase from the article: [...] the argument that Linux can be used in place of more established technologies like Unix.
I get a bit annoyed at the way all the PHB rags keep using "Unix" to mean "Unixes other than open source ones". The whole notion of picking between "Linux and Unix" just sounds utterly silly from the outset. It's like asking someone if they use NT or do they use Windows.
I understand your sentiment, but I don't agree. What irks me the most about application proprietariness is not that I have to buy a specific app to use the feature. What irks me is that that specific app is only available on specific platforms, and as a result my need to get that one dinky feature dictates everything else about my OS choice. I can't stand using Windows. I resent the tie-in that makes it a necessary choice to run a lot of these proprietary apps. If the proprietary apps were cross-platform, I wouldn't care as much.
I would not mind living in a world where Office is proprietary if MS was an APPLICATION company producing Office for many platforms.
But the ONLY part of the system that would be that crashy and buggy would be Office on Wine. It would be walled off from the stuff that really *does* need to keep running without a crash, like the daemons and so on.
Re:Mmmm.. FUN! And a legal nightmare..
on
Spy v. Spy
·
· Score: 2
stick with this, the rest of your arguement is crap
The rest of my argument is the logical outcome of this. Take it all or take none of it.
His point wasn't that installing linux on a windows machine is hard, but that it gets recorded incorrectly by the vendor as "Here's a guy who uses Windows on his new machine he just bought from us." This is because there is often little choice in the matter, or because if you have to pay the Windows tax anyway whether you receive it or not, you might as well receive it so you don't totally waste that money in case you need a copy of Windows in the future for something.
The truly insidious thing about having to buy Windows no matter what is that it leads to false marketshare data that says hardly anybody ever owns anything but Windows, which leads other companies to support nothing but Windows.
Since the "normal" price is purely an arbitrary choice by Microsoft anyway, there is no functional difference between calling the punative expensive price a price hike, versus calling the lesser price a discount. It's all public relations what you want to call it. The fact of the matter is that there are two different rates - and the expensive one is for those who dare offer a choice.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to ignore the large overlap between those who use it because it's free and those who use it because it works better thatn Win2k. It's possible to be both. (Especially when you recognize that the openness of free software is a major reason why it got to be better than Win2k.) They aren't two seperate "camps", as you characterize.
There is nothing wrong with making people laugh. There is something wrong with deriding those who "fall for it" when trolled, however. THAT sets up a situation where people are afraid to rebut the real genuine spreaders of disinformation. Without knowing the potential troller's past opinions, you can't tell he's a troller. Real people exist who are either ignorant enough to spread the worst kind of misinformation believing it to be genuine, or are evil enough to do it deliberately. Either way, letting the mis-information stand unrebutted in a public forum is a bad thing.
Why the hell do people keep praising a successful troll and assuming the one who got trolled was suckered? More often than not, a successful troll doesn't prove a damn thing about the gullibility of the one who got trolled, because there really are people rude and stupid enough to say something exceptionally brain-dead and really mean it. So no matter how hard a troll tries to fake it, he can't hold a candle to the real thing. So of course people end up assuming the troll is genuine. To do otherwise will end up making you err in the opposite direction by assuming that people with genuinely offensive positions are just trolling.
Some sci-fi material is about how much better things would be if NASA would step out of the way and let everyone who wants to (private firms or universities) have a go at space projects themselves. While I don't entirely agree that that makes sense (I'm a fence-sitter on that issue), I do think it's wrong to make the sales of such anti-NASA material end up subsidizing NASA simply because it is in the same genre as books read by people who do like NASA.
Being in the same genre as NASA does not necessarily equate to being in support of NASA.
You are in violation of the DMCA for decoding and dissemating what was obviously meant to be an encrypted post with protected contents.
Do these people know what the word "webcam" means? Hint- the word they were looking for was "screenshot". What they are proposing is disturbing enough, but what I though they said the first time I saw the word "webcam" was "Oh, my - they're going to take a picture of the user who's doing the reporting?
You're forgetting the One Microsoft Way of thinking - Nobody needs to have enough machine to run more than one app at a time. If you buy more memory or CPU speed clearly the only possible reason you could have for doing so is to run a bigger application, never to run multiple applications - running more than one thing at a time? What, are you some kind of Unix propeller-head?
And it's not my fault that you are too blind to notice how impossible it is to enter the marketplace with the stranglehold MS has, and how that stranglehold has nothing to do with quality of product and everything to do with distribution of that product. You call it emotional. I call it not pussyfooting around about what I actually see. Being unemotional about an issue shouldn't have to include distorting the facts when you observe something unpleasant and trying to pretend it's not true.
NO. The fact that it's NOT the technologicial advancement, but the marketplace chokehold, that makes the barrier of entry into the market, the OS situation is nothing like the automobile situation.
When MS says that a restriction applies to "Foo, and all other Bars", when Foos aren't Bars in the first place, does that restriction still legally hold up in court?
What would happen if a license said, "This applies to people born after 1980, and other octogenarians", when there exist no octogenarians born after 1980? Does it apply to all people born after 1980 because they are explicitly mentioned?
I guess what I'm asking is, legally, what is the boolean representation for the phrase "Foo, and other Bars":
- The set of all things satisfying the
condition: (Foo) or (Bar)
- The set of all things satisfying the
condition: (Foo and Bar)
Seeing as how Bar is a null set in this case, it's an important queestion to ask, because the set reduces to either just FOO, or the null set, depending on whether it's ORed or ANDed.Well, maybe it's not so important after all, since this would hinge upon getting a lawyer to understand not only the licenses involved, but also the technical jargon of what is "linking" a program and so on. Since I have my doubts about that ever happening, the MS license will probably stand, and idiots will continue to spread the myth that the GPL is viral, and the implicit lie contained in this MS license will help that along a little bit.
Because once the information is there, MS can then claim that anyone working on Samba who happened to see it has done something illegal by doing so. Especially with the DMCA now making reverse engineering illegal in cases where a copyright is somehow involved (which is pretty much all the time) - If MS accuses someone of using this released information to make Samba, the only defense that person has is to say that they reverse engineered it themselves, which now that MS has released this spec with a copyright on it and a license to view it, will count as a DMCA violation. So they've just screwed anyone who makes Samba work, no matter if they figured it out on their own or not.
And even though they can't prove if the information was used or not, in the US court system, he with the deepest pockets scares the other guy into settling out of court.
When a corporation and an individual go to court, they aren't putting the same risk up on the block. And they *can't*, because the corporations aren't really people - get rid of their ledgers and money and they cease to exist as an entity.
If a corporation's software gathers information off your home computer without asking you, they might face a fine at the most. If an individual views information on a corporation's computer without asking, his whole life's pursuit is over - his entire career, not just his one job he holds at the time, is over and he's never allowed to touch a computer again.
You can't punish a corporation as severely as you can a person. This is what makes them not be accountable for their actions.
What's the solution? Stop treating corporations like people who can be found guilty or innocent. If the people in a corporation do something wrong, then go after the PEOPLE. Keep the corporation as a convenient tool for consolodating funds and organising the business, but stop letting it be used as a sheild against personal responsibility. Let the people at the top know that if they engage in illegal activities that *THEY* are the ones who will be responsible for it if they get caught, NOT the imaginary person called "The company". Get them to treat their lives with the same sense of responsibility and personal risk the rest of us have to deal with, and then maybe for once they'd get some semblance of fair play.
Would you bring up a suit against a company, even if you were in the right and thought you had a reasonable chance (say, 85%) of winning, if doing so incurred a 15% chance of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars if you lose?
"Loser pays" *MUST* come with an attached reasonable max cap on how much one can expect to incur, otherwise you can intimidate the other side into not going to court by hiring an expensive defense team and mentioning that the other guy might end up having to pay for them.
I didn't put words into your mouth. You kept calling the fire "normal". No. It was not. The conditions that caused the fire to start led to the creation of a quite abnormal fire.
Doesn't Halon fire extinguishing work by ruining the oxygen supply in some way? (I don't know, this is just layman's hearsay.) Even if such a system would work, would you want to install it in a building full of human beings, when saving their lives is allegedly the whole reason for a firefighting system in the first place?
The existence of the jet fuel, in the few seconds for which it existed in the fire, assured that the fire would be unstoppable and most definately not of the ordinary nature that one could expect a firefighting system to be able to stop.
It's not "Fuel fire -> ordinary fire -> collapse, as you claim. It's "Fuel fire-> really huge gigantic fire in an instant with every flammable material available in flame all at once, which would not normally happen in a normal fire -> collapse.
Yes, the fuel *did* matter - it's the reason the fire got started in an instant rather than spreading slowly.
I never said there was no difference. But they should have used different terms to describe that difference, instead of doing it in a way that carries the implication that only proprietary unixen are Unix.
Yes, proprietary unix and open source unix are very different, and there's a need to have different terms to refer to them. But it's a lie to do it in a way that you call one unix and one not unix. It's insulting to linux, like saying "Would you like to buy a Ford or would you like to buy a truck?"
the argument that Linux can be used in place of more established technologies like Unix.
I get a bit annoyed at the way all the PHB rags keep using "Unix" to mean "Unixes other than open source ones". The whole notion of picking between "Linux and Unix" just sounds utterly silly from the outset. It's like asking someone if they use NT or do they use Windows.
I would not mind living in a world where Office is proprietary if MS was an APPLICATION company producing Office for many platforms.
But the ONLY part of the system that would be that crashy and buggy would be Office on Wine. It would be walled off from the stuff that really *does* need to keep running without a crash, like the daemons and so on.
The rest of my argument is the logical outcome of this. Take it all or take none of it.
The truly insidious thing about having to buy Windows no matter what is that it leads to false marketshare data that says hardly anybody ever owns anything but Windows, which leads other companies to support nothing but Windows.
Since the "normal" price is purely an arbitrary choice by Microsoft anyway, there is no functional difference between calling the punative expensive price a price hike, versus calling the lesser price a discount. It's all public relations what you want to call it. The fact of the matter is that there are two different rates - and the expensive one is for those who dare offer a choice.