I don't know whether YOU are a Microsoft employee, Mr Anonymous Coward, and I never said you were. You did link to the homepage of someone claiming to be a Microsoft employee called Johnny Lee. See http://www.geocities.com/typopl if you don't believe me. Maybe he isn't a Microsoft employee,but anyone who'd fraudulently claim to be one is even less trustworthy on this subject, methinks.
"But that doesn't explain why AbiWord is still at least 3x slower than MSWord or OOWriter for this given test."
My point is that the given test could not be more Microsoft-centric if it tried. I don't dispute the results of the test itself.
"I fixed a perf bug in AbiWord. Would a Microsoft employee do that?"
So what? Raymond Chen contributes to the Linux kernel, and works for Microsoft. Go figure.
You neglect to mention that the comparison was a test devised by Microsoft, and involved importing a Microsoft-format file written by Microsoft about another Microsoft spec into a number of word processors. And appears on the homepage of a Microsoft employee. I think this may have some bearing on the result.
Oh, and the bug the test complains about doesn't appear on my copy of Abiword either, but I'm using a later version of Abiword on Linux. Perhaps it's just Windows at fault:)
You must not have been reading the same article I did.
What part of
"The kernel is a badly patched copy of the Enhanced DR-DOS kernel old version 7.01.06 without any credit to its author Udo Kuhn..."
and
"The other programs and drivers included are old versions of some popular open source, freeware and shareware products without licenses, documentation or even credit to their authors, namely..."
and
"I understand these are provided in BINARY FORM ONLY without source code provided. To my knowledge, DRDOS does NOT include a copy of the GNU GPL for these 2 programs, nor does it state that the GNU GPL applies to these 2 programs. In addition, source code for SYS & FDXXMS is not included, nor is a written offer made to provide source code upon request."
One of the author's suggestions on farmers - use your character as a sort of security deposit box for them- would actively support farmers themselves (by allowing them to 'steal' from their boss, if that's the word), and help eradicate farming (by pissing off their boss and making sure they only receive a minimal income). If I played these overpriced subscription games, I'd try that, and enjoy sticking it to someone else's man...
The major innovation of Ubuntu is that it has pictures of bright-eyed bushy-tailed cute young things holding hands and smiling at the camera on the homepage, after a few refreshing glasses of kool-aid, no doubt. Most Linux-based companies are very reticent about putting pictures of their userbase on the advertising propaganda, for very good reasons
The Ubuntu folks seem to have have a similar corporate attitude to that Reiser dude or perhaps the MySQL people in their more touchy-feely moments, which may appeal to you, if you're the type of person who falls for bland and meaningless corporate platitudes written on glossy corporate brochures. Each to their own, I suppose
Otherwise, it's just a friendly debian-based distro...
That's just a daft spin on the fact that BSD had a head start, in that it was largely written in 1991. If the 'bored developer' factor was significant then you'd expect Linux devs to have migrated en masse to some cool new OS like those free software BeOS and VMS clones that are in development by now, and correct me if I'm wrong, but that's not really happened.
What's more likely is that Linux thrived for three reasons - 1) The open development model, where any passing geek could contribute to the codebase. Probably that was the most significant - remember that in some instances, BSD forked because of stupid squabbles over who got the ability to make changes to the codebase. 2) The GPL, which meant that the likes of IBM and SGI and RedHat and Caldera were all willing to contribute to the codebase. Contrast the BSDs where, out of all the evil planetraping corporations out there, only Apple is putting in any significant code and any other company adding to the FreeBSD codebase now is just doing free work for Apple. 3) Since the previous two imply that the Linux people were doing something better than the BSD people, you'll find a lot of BSDers wittering on about how the AT&T versus USL lawsuit crippled BSD uptake or something. I suppose there may be a little bit of truth in it, but Linux was still considered both technically inferior to BSD and just a hobbyist project after the lawsuit had been settled. I suppose BSD weenies need to soothe their egos somehow....
You do realise the consequences of letting Epic win this one, don't you? No more second hand bookstores. No more second hand record stores. No more giving your used games, or books, or records/CDs or any used device with software in it onto a third party. Say you have an Ipod. If 17 USC 109 (or your local equivalent) goes, then, at Apple's whim, you could be committing a breach of the license for giving it away or reselling it (and therefore the software inside it). That's a scary world that I don't want to live in, and even if it means that Epic goes out of business and there's no more Epic software to kick around anymore, it's a price well worth paying. Of course, Epic won't go out of business anyways, so it's moot.
As for the 200 people pirating UT2k4, well it's pretty easy to pirate it now anyways, the hard part being the CD key check. If people are still using their CD key after they sell the game on to Best Buy, I'm sure BB will be more than happy to point the Unreal people in the direction of the seller (or go after them themselves). There will likely be a bunch of people pirating UT no matter what, the massive loss to the consumer here outweighs any small benefits to the game companies that might ensue...
I suppose this whinging money-crazed fucktard is the first to go whinging about copyright law when some warez kid sticks his games up on a Bittorrent site. Well guess what, dude, copyright law works both ways. It gives the developers some rights, and it gives the consumers some rights. In the case of USIAN consumers, 17 USC 109 grants anyone the statutory right to alienate themselves of any physical copy of a copyrighted work, by giving it away, reselling it, selling it on Ebay or whatever. That's the law, and it's there precisely in order to stop money-crazed fucktards like Mark Rein from demanding that people pay two or three or four times for a product that is only being used once. So THERE. It's our hard-won fought-for legal right, fucktard. Deal with it.
Sigh. And I actually thought Epic were quite cool, too...
The trouble is, the people who aren't on the internet yet are likely to be complete newbies who are the people least likely to download and install and use firefox, so that's not really good news.
On the other hand, the IE monopoly might be offset by projects like the cheap linux PCs being dished out by the Brazilian government which will hopefully put non-IE using n00bs on the net for the first time.
Ahem, If you're using Linux, rather than solaris, then pounds to peanuts, some package manager like apt or emerge or yast or urpmi would sort out most of your dependencies for you.
Saying that Solaris is user-unfriendly, therefore Linux sucks is trollage worthy of adequacy.org, and I'd mod you down if I had the points.
"And does the GPL say that the source must be available to everyone, or does it say that the source must be available to the users of the software?"
Generally, you only need provide source to the people you distribute to. However if you're a commercial distributor of GPL software and you hand out a binary with no accompanying source code, then you have to also make an offer to provide source to any third party for the next three years.
This company might just be dishing out source CDs alongside their binaries, in which case they don't need to provide the rest of the world with source code.
Some of the eyewitnesses appear to have mistaken the plain clothes arresting officer for the victim, explaining why he ran onto the train, appeared panicky, had wires protruding from his jacket, grabbed a passerby (the actual victim) and was pushed to the ground by cops before the shots were fired.
The arresting officer, of course, was as surprised as anyone when the murdering officer started shooting the victim.
The later reports of what happened were based on CCTV footage which was leaked by people involved with the investigation - the leaker has been punished, presumably for not letting the Met control ALL of the tiny scraps of information we've been fed on this incident.
"Like it or not, there was some logical series of events which caused British anti-terror forces to really believe this guy was about to blow up a train" Not necessarily. The British police may have intended just to summarily execute a terror suspect out of hand. It's not unheard of, as in 1983, the RUC apparently conducted three such killings (google for the Stalker inquiry), and later on was involved (though the British Army had a bigger part to play) in actual support of loyalist death-squads. And things have been a tad hysterical here in London recently.
So it's okay to have innocent people put in jail by a totalitarian police state, as long as you're able to keep running your business and make a bit of a profit at the end of it?
That's one scary, fucked-up values system you've got yourself.
Yahoo doesn't HAVE to to business in China. Nor does google or MSN. None of them are based there, after all. They can all tell the Chinese government to fuck off, if they're willing to lose a bit of marketshare. A shareholder's right to profit doesn't trump a human being's right to not be tortured or jailed for speaking his or her mind.
In a sane world, a corporation would have any profits they make from violating someone's human rights (in this case all the money Yahoo is making for not being expelled from China) confiscated, as some sort of ill-gotten gain (the same way you don't get to keep a stolen car, even if you bought it in good faith). That'd fix this sort of bullshit, quite easily (all the corporations would be urging China to stop it's abuses, not turning a blind eye, or aiding them) IMO, of course.
"It's one thing to be able to tell a person what they can do with YOUR software; it's quite another to try to force your bullshit down their throat when it comes to THEIR software."
Now I don't think GPLv3 will look like the grandparent, (Everyone here seems to be duped by blatant spin from fucking MSNBC and Reuters) but where does the prospective GPL-snippet in the grandparent post say anything about telling someone what to do with his software?
It does tell people that they're not allowed to use patents, but a software patent is just a device for allowing the patent holder to force his license down a software developer's throat.
If you're against being told what to do with your software, you should support anti-patent devices like these.
So if I find out this is insecure and submit a bug report saying something like 'If you do X, then you can make a copy of Britney Spears' latest prog-rock triple album', what's to stop the authors of works that use this DRM system clobber me under the DMCA for publishing a description of a copyright-protection circumvention device? Or do all bug reports have to be PGP-mailed to Sun's top-secret clandestine open source labs in an old minuteman silo in Wyoming to make sure nobody sees them?
How open can the development of this stuff be, under those sorts of legal conditions?
Actually the Luddites had a rather bad press. The original Luddites weren't fanatical anti-progress thugs, they were actually rather discriminating in what they did and didn't smash up - their beef wasn't with machinery itself, but actually with the working practices associated with the machinery, which was replacing skilled manual labour with cheaper, less-skilled labour where people were being forced to work harder, to produce more goods for less pay.
There were occasions when Luddites smashed frames in one part of a mill, but left alone identical frames in the same building - because one set of frames was owned by a boss who was driving down workers wages and conditions, and the other wasn't.
What I'm trying to say was that Luddites were just picky and choosy about how they adopted new technology, rather like the way you imagine yourself to be...
I'd be rather proud if someone called me a neo-luddite.
I don't get this. Firefox and OpenOffice and the OpenCD and running Apache or MySQL or whatever from Windows are universally considered to be Good Things, because they encourage people to run free applications on an unfree platform, and hook people onto free software from the application end.
However, allowing people to run unfree software on a free platform using Wine or Winex or Crossover Office or whatever is Evil and Wrong and encourages people to forever be trapped by Bill Gates.
How come you guys think that people can only migrate from the applications downwards, rather than from the OS-up?
I'd have thought once you got people to switch the Operating System, your job's mostly done, and getting them to switch applications would be relatively easy - people install and uninstall applications all the time, compared to their OS, after all....
I totally dig the whole master-pupil, Perl-is-the-one-true-way, Zen enlightenment stuff, but when I'm around places like this on the net, I just get the feeling that Perl is just God's way of getting me to give all my money to the O'Reilly corporation - it strikes me that half the posts here are about which of O'Reilly's books are worth buying and which aren't. I just feel like I'm being a manipulated pawn in some sneaky corporate game with only one winner, or something (though I do admit that O'Reilly are quite nice and fluffy and cute, as evil corporate overlords go).
For the record, I learned Perl via perldoc on the NT4 command prompt at work because it was a damn sight more fun to do, and even sometimes did the job better, than the Excel spreadsheets I was being paid to write. If you have some adolescent hormonal urge to stick it to the man, that's the way to learn perl...
1) "based on what the article says, I agree with Telus's decision to ban access to the site."
Telus is full of shit. The union's site doesn't appear to contain pictures of scabs. I went through all the photos on the 'On the Line' site, and there were many pictures of smiling pickets, one picture had a picture of two managers watching smiling pickets, and none were of scabs crossing picket lines.
2) "think it's wrong to publicly post someones picture just because they crossed a picket line to support their family"
The people on the picket lines are trying to support their family too. Scabs are the fucking traitors who side with the bosses to make life more difficult for everyone.
A burglar only attacks you and your property once. A scab helps make each and every working day of your life worse than it was before. Hope this helps.
Mod me -1 Flamebait if you like, I've karma to burn:)
Windows might remain the dominant desktop, but the people I'm describing - the computer illiterates who bought windows in their droves because they knew no better and didn't care to know, and who made Bill as rich as he is today, and are the people plaguing the net with spyware-infested, unsecured, Windows boxen today- will die out eventually.
As for the DMCA - the mechanism by which I'm guessing you think that works - content providers DRM their files and then don't license open source developers to write programs that can read it - depends on a few things:
1)US judges ruling that cracking a DRMed media file for the purposes of fair use and/or interoperability is against the DMCA (though the DMCA explicitly says otherwise) 2)Proprietary Linux/Apple companies NOT being licensed to write DRM-capable media players 3)The Disneys and RIAAs of this world still retaining their stranglehold on the mass entertainment media in the face of competition from random people on the internet and/or piracy. 4)Consumers being sheeplike enough and malleable to upgrade all their DVDs and CDs to the digital video/audio format of the month, whenever the content providers demand. 5)The DMCA, or something like it, being extended to the 96% of the population of the world to which it doesn't currently apply
It's emininently possible that all of these things might occur, so you could well be right, but it's not a foregone conclusion - I reckon patent lockups on internet servers, clients and protocols, (making using Linux a jarring experience compared to Windows) is a bigger portion of the threat meself. But time will tell.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know whether YOU are a Microsoft employee, Mr Anonymous Coward, and I never said you were. You did link to the homepage of someone claiming to be a Microsoft employee called Johnny Lee. See http://www.geocities.com/typopl if you don't believe me. Maybe he isn't a Microsoft employee,but anyone who'd fraudulently claim to be one is even less trustworthy on this subject, methinks.
"But that doesn't explain why AbiWord is still at least 3x slower than MSWord or OOWriter for this given test."
My point is that the given test could not be more Microsoft-centric if it tried. I don't dispute the results of the test itself.
"I fixed a perf bug in AbiWord. Would a Microsoft employee do that?"
So what? Raymond Chen contributes to the Linux kernel, and works for Microsoft. Go figure.
You neglect to mention that the comparison was a test devised by Microsoft, and involved importing a Microsoft-format file written by Microsoft about another Microsoft spec into a number of word processors. And appears on the homepage of a Microsoft employee. I think this may have some bearing on the result.
:)
Oh, and the bug the test complains about doesn't appear on my copy of Abiword either, but I'm using a later version of Abiword on Linux. Perhaps it's just Windows at fault
You must not have been reading the same article I did.
What part of
"The kernel is a badly patched copy of the Enhanced DR-DOS kernel old version 7.01.06 without any credit to its author Udo Kuhn..."
and
"The other programs and drivers included are old versions of some popular open source, freeware and shareware products without licenses, documentation or even credit to their authors, namely..."
and
"I understand these are provided in BINARY FORM ONLY without source code provided. To my knowledge, DRDOS does NOT include a copy of the GNU GPL for these 2 programs, nor does it state that the GNU GPL applies to these 2 programs. In addition, source code for SYS & FDXXMS is not included, nor is a written offer made to provide source code upon request."
did you not understand, soldier?
One of the author's suggestions on farmers - use your character as a sort of security deposit box for them- would actively support farmers themselves (by allowing them to 'steal' from their boss, if that's the word), and help eradicate farming (by pissing off their boss and making sure they only receive a minimal income). If I played these overpriced subscription games, I'd try that, and enjoy sticking it to someone else's man...
Gah, I do indeed. Thanks for that.
The major innovation of Ubuntu is that it has pictures of bright-eyed bushy-tailed cute young things holding hands and smiling at the camera on the homepage, after a few refreshing glasses of kool-aid, no doubt. Most Linux-based companies are very reticent about putting pictures of their userbase on the advertising propaganda, for very good reasons
The Ubuntu folks seem to have have a similar corporate attitude to that Reiser dude or perhaps the MySQL people in their more touchy-feely moments, which may appeal to you, if you're the type of person who falls for bland and meaningless corporate platitudes written on glossy corporate brochures. Each to their own, I suppose
Otherwise, it's just a friendly debian-based distro...
That's just a daft spin on the fact that BSD had a head start, in that it was largely written in 1991. If the 'bored developer' factor was significant then you'd expect Linux devs to have migrated en masse to some cool new OS like those free software BeOS and VMS clones that are in development by now, and correct me if I'm wrong, but that's not really happened.
What's more likely is that Linux thrived for three reasons -
1) The open development model, where any passing geek could contribute to the codebase. Probably that was the most significant - remember that in some instances, BSD forked because of stupid squabbles over who got the ability to make changes to the codebase.
2) The GPL, which meant that the likes of IBM and SGI and RedHat and Caldera were all willing to contribute to the codebase. Contrast the BSDs where, out of all the evil planetraping corporations out there, only Apple is putting in any significant code and any other company adding to the FreeBSD codebase now is just doing free work for Apple.
3) Since the previous two imply that the Linux people were doing something better than the BSD people, you'll find a lot of BSDers wittering on about how the AT&T versus USL lawsuit crippled BSD uptake or something. I suppose there may be a little bit of truth in it, but Linux was still considered both technically inferior to BSD and just a hobbyist project after the lawsuit had been settled. I suppose BSD weenies need to soothe their egos somehow....
You do realise the consequences of letting Epic win this one, don't you? No more second hand bookstores. No more second hand record stores. No more giving your used games, or books, or records/CDs or any used device with software in it onto a third party. Say you have an Ipod. If 17 USC 109 (or your local equivalent) goes, then, at Apple's whim, you could be committing a breach of the license for giving it away or reselling it (and therefore the software inside it). That's a scary world that I don't want to live in, and even if it means that Epic goes out of business and there's no more Epic software to kick around anymore, it's a price well worth paying. Of course, Epic won't go out of business anyways, so it's moot.
As for the 200 people pirating UT2k4, well it's pretty easy to pirate it now anyways, the hard part being the CD key check. If people are still using their CD key after they sell the game on to Best Buy, I'm sure BB will be more than happy to point the Unreal people in the direction of the seller (or go after them themselves). There will likely be a bunch of people pirating UT no matter what, the massive loss to the consumer here outweighs any small benefits to the game companies that might ensue...
I suppose this whinging money-crazed fucktard is the first to go whinging about copyright law when some warez kid sticks his games up on a Bittorrent site. Well guess what, dude, copyright law works both ways. It gives the developers some rights, and it gives the consumers some rights. In the case of USIAN consumers, 17 USC 109 grants anyone the statutory right to alienate themselves of any physical copy of a copyrighted work, by giving it away, reselling it, selling it on Ebay or whatever. That's the law, and it's there precisely in order to stop money-crazed fucktards like Mark Rein from demanding that people pay two or three or four times for a product that is only being used once. So THERE. It's our hard-won fought-for legal right, fucktard. Deal with it.
Sigh. And I actually thought Epic were quite cool, too...
The trouble is, the people who aren't on the internet yet are likely to be complete newbies who are the people least likely to download and install and use firefox, so that's not really good news.
On the other hand, the IE monopoly might be offset by projects like the cheap linux PCs being dished out by the Brazilian government which will hopefully put non-IE using n00bs on the net for the first time.
Ahem,
If you're using Linux, rather than solaris, then pounds to peanuts, some package manager like apt or emerge or yast or urpmi would sort out most of your dependencies for you.
Saying that Solaris is user-unfriendly, therefore Linux sucks is trollage worthy of adequacy.org, and I'd mod you down if I had the points.
Hope this helps.
"And does the GPL say that the source must be available to everyone, or does it say that the source must be available to the users of the software?"
Generally, you only need provide source to the people you distribute to. However if you're a commercial distributor of GPL software and you hand out a binary with no accompanying source code, then you have to also make an offer to provide source to any third party for the next three years.
This company might just be dishing out source CDs alongside their binaries, in which case they don't need to provide the rest of the world with source code.
Some of the eyewitnesses appear to have mistaken the plain clothes arresting officer for the victim, explaining why he ran onto the train, appeared panicky, had wires protruding from his jacket, grabbed a passerby (the actual victim) and was pushed to the ground by cops before the shots were fired.
The arresting officer, of course, was as surprised as anyone when the murdering officer started shooting the victim.
The later reports of what happened were based on CCTV footage which was leaked by people involved with the investigation - the leaker has been punished, presumably for not letting the Met control ALL of the tiny scraps of information we've been fed on this incident.
"Like it or not, there was some logical series of events which caused British anti-terror forces to really believe this guy was about to blow up a train"
Not necessarily. The British police may have intended just to summarily execute a terror suspect out of hand. It's not unheard of, as in 1983, the RUC apparently conducted three such killings (google for the Stalker inquiry), and later on was involved (though the British Army had a bigger part to play) in actual support of loyalist death-squads. And things have been a tad hysterical here in London recently.
So it's okay to have innocent people put in jail by a totalitarian police state, as long as you're able to keep running your business and make a bit of a profit at the end of it?
That's one scary, fucked-up values system you've got yourself.
Yahoo doesn't HAVE to to business in China. Nor does google or MSN. None of them are based there, after all. They can all tell the Chinese government to fuck off, if they're willing to lose a bit of marketshare. A shareholder's right to profit doesn't trump a human being's right to not be tortured or jailed for speaking his or her mind.
In a sane world, a corporation would have any profits they make from violating someone's human rights (in this case all the money Yahoo is making for not being expelled from China) confiscated, as some sort of ill-gotten gain (the same way you don't get to keep a stolen car, even if you bought it in good faith). That'd fix this sort of bullshit, quite easily (all the corporations would be urging China to stop it's abuses, not turning a blind eye, or aiding them)
IMO, of course.
"It's one thing to be able to tell a person what they can do with YOUR software; it's quite another to try to force your bullshit down their throat when it comes to THEIR software."
Now I don't think GPLv3 will look like the grandparent, (Everyone here seems to be duped by blatant spin from fucking MSNBC and Reuters) but where does the prospective GPL-snippet in the grandparent post say anything about telling someone what to do with his software?
It does tell people that they're not allowed to use patents, but a software patent is just a device for allowing the patent holder to force his license down a software developer's throat.
If you're against being told what to do with your software, you should support anti-patent devices like these.
Sworn testimony in a court case is usually considered 'evidence'.
Hope this helps.
So if I find out this is insecure and submit a bug report saying something like 'If you do X, then you can make a copy of Britney Spears' latest prog-rock triple album', what's to stop the authors of works that use this DRM system clobber me under the DMCA for publishing a description of a copyright-protection circumvention device?
Or do all bug reports have to be PGP-mailed to Sun's top-secret clandestine open source labs in an old minuteman silo in Wyoming to make sure nobody sees them?
How open can the development of this stuff be, under those sorts of legal conditions?
It looks like you're badly in need of one yourself.
It's not a dupe, it's a followup. If you'd Read The Fucking Blurb, you'd see a link to the very same article (different URL though, admittedly).
It wasn't. Telus lied.
Hope this helps.
Actually the Luddites had a rather bad press. The original Luddites weren't fanatical anti-progress thugs, they were actually rather discriminating in what they did and didn't smash up - their beef wasn't with machinery itself, but actually with the working practices associated with the machinery, which was replacing skilled manual labour with cheaper, less-skilled labour where people were being forced to work harder, to produce more goods for less pay.
There were occasions when Luddites smashed frames in one part of a mill, but left alone identical frames in the same building - because one set of frames was owned by a boss who was driving down workers wages and conditions, and the other wasn't.
What I'm trying to say was that Luddites were just picky and choosy about how they adopted new technology, rather like the way you imagine yourself to be...
I'd be rather proud if someone called me a neo-luddite.
I don't get this. Firefox and OpenOffice and the OpenCD and running Apache or MySQL or whatever from Windows are universally considered to be Good Things, because they encourage people to run free applications on an unfree platform, and hook people onto free software from the application end.
However, allowing people to run unfree software on a free platform using Wine or Winex or Crossover Office or whatever is Evil and Wrong and encourages people to forever be trapped by Bill Gates.
How come you guys think that people can only migrate from the applications downwards, rather than from the OS-up?
I'd have thought once you got people to switch the Operating System, your job's mostly done, and getting them to switch applications would be relatively easy - people install and uninstall applications all the time, compared to their OS, after all....
I totally dig the whole master-pupil, Perl-is-the-one-true-way, Zen enlightenment stuff, but when I'm around places like this on the net, I just get the feeling that Perl is just God's way of getting me to give all my money to the O'Reilly corporation - it strikes me that half the posts here are about which of O'Reilly's books are worth buying and which aren't. I just feel like I'm being a manipulated pawn in some sneaky corporate game with only one winner, or something (though I do admit that O'Reilly are quite nice and fluffy and cute, as evil corporate overlords go).
For the record, I learned Perl via perldoc on the NT4 command prompt at work because it was a damn sight more fun to do, and even sometimes did the job better, than the Excel spreadsheets I was being paid to write. If you have some adolescent hormonal urge to stick it to the man, that's the way to learn perl...
1) "based on what the article says, I agree with Telus's decision to ban access to the site."
:)
Telus is full of shit. The union's site doesn't appear to contain pictures of scabs. I went through all the photos on the 'On the Line' site, and there were many pictures of smiling pickets, one picture had a picture of two managers watching smiling pickets, and none were of scabs crossing picket lines.
2) "think it's wrong to publicly post someones picture just because they crossed a picket line to support their family"
The people on the picket lines are trying to support their family too. Scabs are the fucking traitors who side with the bosses to make life more difficult for everyone.
A burglar only attacks you and your property once. A scab helps make each and every working day of your life worse than it was before.
Hope this helps.
Mod me -1 Flamebait if you like, I've karma to burn
Windows might remain the dominant desktop, but the people I'm describing - the computer illiterates who bought windows in their droves because they knew no better and didn't care to know, and who made Bill as rich as he is today, and are the people plaguing the net with spyware-infested, unsecured, Windows boxen today- will die out eventually.
As for the DMCA - the mechanism by which I'm guessing you think that works - content providers DRM their files and then don't license open source developers to write programs that can read it - depends on a few things:
1)US judges ruling that cracking a DRMed media file for the purposes of fair use and/or interoperability is against the DMCA (though the DMCA explicitly says otherwise)
2)Proprietary Linux/Apple companies NOT being licensed to write DRM-capable media players
3)The Disneys and RIAAs of this world still retaining their stranglehold on the mass entertainment media in the face of competition from random people on the internet and/or piracy.
4)Consumers being sheeplike enough and malleable to upgrade all their DVDs and CDs to the digital video/audio format of the month, whenever the content providers demand.
5)The DMCA, or something like it, being extended to the 96% of the population of the world to which it doesn't currently apply
It's emininently possible that all of these things might occur, so you could well be right, but it's not a foregone conclusion - I reckon patent lockups on internet servers, clients and protocols, (making using Linux a jarring experience compared to Windows) is a bigger portion of the threat meself.
But time will tell.