You simply can not legislate prosperity (and jobs) into existence. If people are willing to work for free and produce quality output, that is a force you cannot stop.
Maybe you weren't paying attention, but that's exactly what the western world went and did. Before such legislation, people were working for peanuts, living in poverty and there was huge unemployment. If you want to go back there, fine. If you don't, keep voting for minimum wage laws and paid holidays.
Personally if you run s/video games/soap operas/g , then I pretty much agree with just about the whole thing. I guess this goes to show that.... well that........ahh forget it. Nothing short of an abusive parent is going to stand any real chance of screwing anyone up.
Eighty percent of the most popular video games feature aggressiveness or violence as the primary themes, and in twenty percent of these games the aggressiveness or violence is directed toward women.
Yeah this is a pretty stupid statement. I mean, what the hell is someone supposed to think? That the games are sexist because a dispropotionatly small amount of time is directed towards women? Or that games are sexist because a dispropotionatly high amount of violence is directed towards women?
I mean what the hell is the authors point? Is this fact a good or a bad thing?
The big problem is that this changes the GPL into a EULA. Right now, the GPL doesn't attempt to restrict anything, it merely grants privileges that would not usually be in effect. That's why it's such a strong license.
To change the GPL to include restrictions on how you use the software would seem to run counter to the ideals of Free Software; namely that you are free to use the software as you please.
I would disagree with this interpretation.
The GPLv2 has never said anything nor placed restriction on how you use the software. In effect, the GPL only comes into play when you some to redistriute the software, and says that you must redistribute the source code when you distribute the binaries to others.
The GPLv3 again will not say anything or place restriction on how you, you use the software. You're still free to tinker as you please privately and keep the changes to yourself. Again on distribution you must include those changes.
However the GPLv3, in response to potential or actual shenannegans with web deployment, will specify that when you also come to offer your software as a service to users, you must also include the changes to your code, and make them and the original code visible to those users.
This makes a lot of sense. When I run a web app for users acting as thin clients, I'm effectively distributing my program to them. Albiet now the licence is for an extremely limited time, and the calculations are taking place on my machine. However, in effect, a binary of my program has been, however temporarily, placed at the disposal of that one user. They are a user after all. they are "using" the program.
In a way the GPLv3 is a lot better than GPLv2. The GPLv2 only covered the distribution of the binary of the program. GPLv3 covers the service of the program, or more succinctly, the program itself. If you offer the service of the program to someone else, directly, in whatever way, then you must show them your source code. You can see that binaries fall under this definition as well.
Of course companies will try to write wrapper programs to get around this, so that users are not directly using their app, etc, etc, etc. However, I think most won't go to the bother and will just publish their code. After all, how many trade secrets are going to be in your average php/asp page anyway.
It's all about making sure that users are empowered, and that software is both transparent and modifyable to everyone. Stallman originally argued on the grounds of modifyability, which of course is critical to the whole process. But the transparency conferred by this has benefits for the public at large which outweight even the benefits of modifyability. But you need modifyability in order for software to be free. Just having transparency would be like am autocracy having transparency in its government offices. You might be able to see what's going on, but you still can't do anything about it.
Maybe ScuttleMonkey and Zonk are having some kind of feud where each is determined to outdo the others posting on a certain story and Taco is too tied up with personal issues to sort them out.
That kind of rubbish happens in a lot of organisations.
I can imagine Taco being driven to distraction by thoughts of the impending BellSouth representatives knocking on his door looking for their protection money. Cash Only.
1. You can't find your GameBoy and think I have it.
2. You go to my best friend's house, who has had permission from me to be in my home and take pictures of my things.
3. You say to my friend, "Hey, I think Layman took my GameBoy. Did you get a picture of it when you were at his house yesterday?"
4. My friend confirms he has a picture of it in my house.
5. Federal law explicitly defines this as legal.
It was all OK until you switch "GameBoy" for "MP3", and "my friend" for "my ISP", "picture" for "system scan" and house for "computer" You see, your ISP isn't actually allowed to come into your computer("house") to take system scans("pictures"). That's not legal. You didn't even invite them in.
A net connected computer is not all of a sudden cast out into the public sphere for all the world to see. It is still, in a very real sense, in your house, on your private property, and people are still not entitled to break into it and do as they please. The computer might be in correspondance with another, but that does not entitle the other computer to instigate a complete takeover/scan of yours. If you doubt this, try hacking to a banks server while it is in correspondance with you and see how long that argument holds water.
Yup. "Shall have the power to...". Congress is under no paticular obligation to provide any such rights at all. It's entirely at their discretion whether copyright is a right or not. Of course, their discretion can be sweetened with a few bribes.
PLus, here's another interesting point.
Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Congress can pass laws giving Authors copyright over their work. This may be said to apply to songwriters, but does it apply to the vocal recording of a song? Perhaps.
But even more striking about this paragraph is the fact that congress is only given the power to grant exclusive rights to Authors and Inventors! Not third parties. There's nothing in this article that in any way states that congress has the ability to pass "work for hire" laws. Technically speaking, according to this document, it looks like corporations can't hold copyright, unless they are considered the authors of a work. Which of course, RIAA members are not.
As a search engine, why on earth would I buy priority on your network knowing that either A) it almost never gets used or B) your network is piss slow either way? Answer: I wouldn't.
Well, if it's the only network there is, then you'd better pony up, else you won't be getting any search queries at all!
It's silly that one efficient company can't claw and muscle its competators out of existance and then restrict supply to increase the price. I mean, it's clearly a higher power directing the evolution of the market. BellSouth has been chosen by GOD to be the only network there is, and as Gods anointed we can do as we danm well please!
So Preatheth The Church Of The New Global Capitalism! Hail Satan!
I don't think it is hard to imagine that sometime between now and 2010 there will be a financial year where several big publishers release several anticipated games, that had massive budgets, that absolutely flop.
I think this is a practical impossibility. With enough money spent on marketing, consumers will buy anything. With magazines accepting bribes left right an dcenter, and combined with the fact that joe gamer really can't tell a good game from a bad one, it seem highly unlikely that the industry will bomb due to lack of consumer demand. You would have to burn a lot of people really, really hard, by releasing a big budget title that genuinely utterly and completely sucked, with absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever. For Joe average however, shiny graphics are a redeeming features, so as long as you've got those, you'll never flop.
Likewise, please consider the case of Mexicans and Blacks. Mexicans are infamous for killing their girlfriends when they get in disputes. Blacks are famous for carjackings. But if you read what they think of as their holy book (The Holy Bible), it is clear that stealing and killing girlfriends (or just premarital sex) are forbidden. And if a black or Mexican were to do those things, he'd have to do a great deal of penance.
Wow. Just wow. Have you any idea what you've just said? I am at a loss for words. Truely breathtaking ignorence. I mean, have you ever even met a black or hispanic person in your entire life? I tell you; you've got to get up early in the morning to be this ignorent. No really. It takes effort. You might not like this guy's comments, but you have to admire his dogged determination to be as big an asshole as he can possibly be.
However, as you may or may not know, Hasidim have different standards for cheating Jews vs. cheating gentiles. It is part of their religion. A hasid published a book on this recently, and it is a big deal, because he lays it all out: http://www.rense.com/general48/newbook.htm -- where Orthodox Jews recommend to other Orthodox that the gentiles are evil and a different species. And that a Jew should deceive them about their true feelings -- e.g. don't tell the gentiles that you think they are evil, and of a different species.
Yeah, maybe this guy did write such a book, and maybe he does think its OK to rip people off because they're not a member of [insert clique here]. If he does, then he's an asshole. If anyone does things like that then they're an asshole too. I have no doubt that there's at least one Hasidist out there who rips people off; because Hasidists are human beings, and there are rotten apples in every batch. But on the main, I know that Hasidist are by and large OK guys. I know this because statistics tell me so. And statistics is mathematically and scientifically verifiable. Which is of course, something you're opinions can never be.
You need to get out more and visit your local bazzar. That or read Roots or something.
And then they brought out 60Hz mode in games, which makes them look a little smoother, but cranks the whine up to an even more annoying level. Danm my ears!!
This *is* discrimination. If the guys are annoying, call the cops on the fuckers.
This isn't a very useful solution as, in the main, minors typically are not held accountable for all but the most henious of acts. In other words, as a minor, you can get away with just about anything short of rape and manslaughter and there's not a danm thing the cops can do about it.
OK, I'm not really sure whether you're being sarcastic or just doing a Dvorak on the whole current DNS debate.
You're suggesting we all dump DNS and just use search engines for everything. Let me ask you this. When everyone has done this, How the hell will search engines work?!
Consider Google pagerank. It searches you page, finds links to other pages.... but wait! These links are now not direct links. They are search engine terms which may or may not return the desired site, and by clicking on the link, you change its value on the search engines rank.
You'd turn the whole internet in some kind of quantum mechanical system where you're never quite sure where a link points to until you click on it, and once you've done so you've changed the state of the link. I'm sure we'll all get around just fine.
Not to mention the increased bandwidth and overhead. The net would quickly become primarily a system of passing around search engine queries rather than actual end user data.
Your idea sucks. Turn back on your DNS and svae the world some extra bandwidth.
I believe the Global Thermonuclear War package lists tic-tac-toe among its dependencies
Most people know this, but what most people don't know is that one of the other dependancies of Global Thermonuclear War was sendmail. How else would the wardial hack work?
There is frequently an assumption that the physical (brain chemistry, electrical activity) causes the behavior (introspection), as opposed to the other way around, or some other, independent cause.
No. That was the old way of thinking.
The new, modern outlook is that your behaviour, like your height, weight, driving ability, sex drive, food preferences, psychology, ulcer count, job, status, sexuality, favourite color, pet, health, wealth, smell, car, hair, SAT scores, political party and number of pokemon captured are all predetermined at birth from your genes, and these factors are immutable and unchangable by any process whatsoever short of chaging your "faulty" genes.
Hava a nicer life, by paying private companies to change your genes for you.
In fact, a lot of time was spent by professors that did real work deprogramming brainwashed students who were taught that global variables should never EVER be used, goto is Satan, dynamic memory is for terrorists and all kinds of god awful ideas.
I'm not so much against telling learner students not to use these things as I am against teaching learner students that these things even exist at all. All these techniques are advanced, and students should be comfortable wit hthe basics before they are even exposed to the tricky concepts. A lot of misuse of these language feature comes from people who don't really understand what they're for.
I can bet you most universities don't even teach "goto" logic and if they said anything about it, it was: don't use GOTO statements.
I was told this, unconditionally. I was told why as well, and had the matter illustrated with a mere 12 line example of horrific readability. I still use them though, when the call of the dark side is just too strong for me to resist.
Could I go get the electronic copy of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation magazine? Sure, since my university subscribes to the IEEE Xplore electronic depository. Is it easier for me to grab a copy off the bookshelf withing arm's reach? Without a doubt.
Are you insane?! After you've amassed journals it will take ten times as long to reef through the bulk of paper and find the article in question. With an electronic database you could potentially have a search engine do most of the work for you.
I've read dozens of papers in the last wee alone, but I've only printed one of them. Electronic copies are the way to go. You only really need paper versions of about 5% of the papers you read.
I started my Linux Forays with Fedora Core 2. Since then it has given me not a small portion of grief. Yum in paticular is a huge letdown. It is SLOW. Some kind of ipv6 trouble combined with regular operating procedure means even a search will take ~5 minutes on my 3GHz machine. I've since witnessed others like apt and portage and I have to say yum is not a great package.
Even moving to apt isn't helpful because the Fedora packages are quite simply broken. I'm not even talking about the whole DVD/mp3 issue. Most apps requiring GTK2 won't install as Fedora has labeled it as gtk+. Great decision there guys. I've long since abandoned yum and have basically started compiling almost everything. As a result, I'm trying to move to Gentoo.
The complete lack of GUI admin tools was also a serious letdown. I do NOT want to mess around with config files, and in this day and age no one should really have to. On the upside, I've probably learned near as much as someone using Slackware.
I think Fedora will work of medium to large enterprises, as a static business OS. I've seen it working quite well on a network with a RHEL server, being administered by a qualified admin. I think this is really where Fedora is going. Essentially the free client OS on Red Hat networks, and to be fair, it will be well suited to this role. On top of that it is a big incentive for companies to go Red Hat if their client licences are free.
However, for the home Linux user, Fedora is not the way to go. Personally I don't think it is designed with the home hacker in mind. You'll get away with it, but you're simply asking the system for something it was never built to achieve.
Gentoo looks nice because of the portage system and I'm prepared to pay the cost in compile times. i'm already compiling most of my apps anyway. I would have picked debian after I saw a 3 floppy bootstrap system in action, but the glacial pace of the stable branch scared me away. Ubuntu? I'm still not sure about it, being Debian based, and I've had problems with one commerically sponsored distro already. I think I've gained, or survied, enough expierience in Fedora to manage Gentoo.... maybe.
So it's adieu Fedora. Hello Gentoo. We had some good time, it must be said. It's not you... well it is. But you see, we we never really meant to be mon amie!
Slashdot Mirror
you guys say that, but i doubt you could point out a single incident where a citizen was restrained from protesting the government.
Stepped right into the cut.
You simply can not legislate prosperity (and jobs) into existence. If people are willing to work for free and produce quality output, that is a force you cannot stop.
Maybe you weren't paying attention, but that's exactly what the western world went and did. Before such legislation, people were working for peanuts, living in poverty and there was huge unemployment. If you want to go back there, fine. If you don't, keep voting for minimum wage laws and paid holidays.
But not two hour luch breaks. That's just wrong.
Personally if you run s/video games/soap operas/g , then I pretty much agree with just about the whole thing. I guess this goes to show that.... well that..... ...ahh forget it. Nothing short of an abusive parent is going to stand any real chance of screwing anyone up.
Eighty percent of the most popular video games feature aggressiveness or violence as the primary themes, and in twenty percent of these games the aggressiveness or violence is directed toward women.
Yeah this is a pretty stupid statement. I mean, what the hell is someone supposed to think? That the games are sexist because a dispropotionatly small amount of time is directed towards women? Or that games are sexist because a dispropotionatly high amount of violence is directed towards women?
I mean what the hell is the authors point? Is this fact a good or a bad thing?
P.S.
Omnislashing is a terrible way to post.
The big problem is that this changes the GPL into a EULA. Right now, the GPL doesn't attempt to restrict anything, it merely grants privileges that would not usually be in effect. That's why it's such a strong license.
To change the GPL to include restrictions on how you use the software would seem to run counter to the ideals of Free Software; namely that you are free to use the software as you please.
I would disagree with this interpretation.
The GPLv2 has never said anything nor placed restriction on how you use the software. In effect, the GPL only comes into play when you some to redistriute the software, and says that you must redistribute the source code when you distribute the binaries to others.
The GPLv3 again will not say anything or place restriction on how you, you use the software. You're still free to tinker as you please privately and keep the changes to yourself. Again on distribution you must include those changes.
However the GPLv3, in response to potential or actual shenannegans with web deployment, will specify that when you also come to offer your software as a service to users, you must also include the changes to your code, and make them and the original code visible to those users.
This makes a lot of sense. When I run a web app for users acting as thin clients, I'm effectively distributing my program to them. Albiet now the licence is for an extremely limited time, and the calculations are taking place on my machine. However, in effect, a binary of my program has been, however temporarily, placed at the disposal of that one user. They are a user after all. they are "using" the program.
In a way the GPLv3 is a lot better than GPLv2. The GPLv2 only covered the distribution of the binary of the program. GPLv3 covers the service of the program, or more succinctly, the program itself. If you offer the service of the program to someone else, directly, in whatever way, then you must show them your source code. You can see that binaries fall under this definition as well.
Of course companies will try to write wrapper programs to get around this, so that users are not directly using their app, etc, etc, etc. However, I think most won't go to the bother and will just publish their code. After all, how many trade secrets are going to be in your average php/asp page anyway.
It's all about making sure that users are empowered, and that software is both transparent and modifyable to everyone. Stallman originally argued on the grounds of modifyability, which of course is critical to the whole process. But the transparency conferred by this has benefits for the public at large which outweight even the benefits of modifyability. But you need modifyability in order for software to be free. Just having transparency would be like am autocracy having transparency in its government offices. You might be able to see what's going on, but you still can't do anything about it.
Maybe ScuttleMonkey and Zonk are having some kind of feud where each is determined to outdo the others posting on a certain story and Taco is too tied up with personal issues to sort them out.
That kind of rubbish happens in a lot of organisations.
I can imagine Taco being driven to distraction by thoughts of the impending BellSouth representatives knocking on his door looking for their protection money. Cash Only.
1. You can't find your GameBoy and think I have it.
2. You go to my best friend's house, who has had permission from me to be in my home and take pictures of my things.
3. You say to my friend, "Hey, I think Layman took my GameBoy. Did you get a picture of it when you were at his house yesterday?"
4. My friend confirms he has a picture of it in my house.
5. Federal law explicitly defines this as legal.
It was all OK until you switch "GameBoy" for "MP3", and "my friend" for "my ISP", "picture" for "system scan" and house for "computer" You see, your ISP isn't actually allowed to come into your computer("house") to take system scans("pictures"). That's not legal. You didn't even invite them in.
A net connected computer is not all of a sudden cast out into the public sphere for all the world to see. It is still, in a very real sense, in your house, on your private property, and people are still not entitled to break into it and do as they please. The computer might be in correspondance with another, but that does not entitle the other computer to instigate a complete takeover/scan of yours. If you doubt this, try hacking to a banks server while it is in correspondance with you and see how long that argument holds water.
Yup. "Shall have the power to...". Congress is under no paticular obligation to provide any such rights at all. It's entirely at their discretion whether copyright is a right or not. Of course, their discretion can be sweetened with a few bribes.
PLus, here's another interesting point.
Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Congress can pass laws giving Authors copyright over their work. This may be said to apply to songwriters, but does it apply to the vocal recording of a song? Perhaps.
But even more striking about this paragraph is the fact that congress is only given the power to grant exclusive rights to Authors and Inventors! Not third parties. There's nothing in this article that in any way states that congress has the ability to pass "work for hire" laws. Technically speaking, according to this document, it looks like corporations can't hold copyright, unless they are considered the authors of a work. Which of course, RIAA members are not.
As a search engine, why on earth would I buy priority on your network knowing that either A) it almost never gets used or B) your network is piss slow either way? Answer: I wouldn't.
Well, if it's the only network there is, then you'd better pony up, else you won't be getting any search queries at all!
It's silly that one efficient company can't claw and muscle its competators out of existance and then restrict supply to increase the price. I mean, it's clearly a higher power directing the evolution of the market. BellSouth has been chosen by GOD to be the only network there is, and as Gods anointed we can do as we danm well please!
So Preatheth The Church Of The New Global Capitalism! Hail Satan!
Define "art".
Something that the elite can appreciate but the masses can never hope to enjoy.
Financial companies in particular go with the mantra, if it works, don't touch it.
That's a good mantra. I'd swear by it!
I don't think it is hard to imagine that sometime between now and 2010 there will be a financial year where several big publishers release several anticipated games, that had massive budgets, that absolutely flop.
I think this is a practical impossibility. With enough money spent on marketing, consumers will buy anything. With magazines accepting bribes left right an dcenter, and combined with the fact that joe gamer really can't tell a good game from a bad one, it seem highly unlikely that the industry will bomb due to lack of consumer demand. You would have to burn a lot of people really, really hard, by releasing a big budget title that genuinely utterly and completely sucked, with absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever. For Joe average however, shiny graphics are a redeeming features, so as long as you've got those, you'll never flop.
Likewise, please consider the case of Mexicans and Blacks. Mexicans are infamous for killing their girlfriends when they get in disputes. Blacks are famous for carjackings. But if you read what they think of as their holy book (The Holy Bible), it is clear that stealing and killing girlfriends (or just premarital sex) are forbidden. And if a black or Mexican were to do those things, he'd have to do a great deal of penance.
Wow. Just wow. Have you any idea what you've just said? I am at a loss for words. Truely breathtaking ignorence. I mean, have you ever even met a black or hispanic person in your entire life? I tell you; you've got to get up early in the morning to be this ignorent. No really. It takes effort. You might not like this guy's comments, but you have to admire his dogged determination to be as big an asshole as he can possibly be.
However, as you may or may not know, Hasidim have different standards for cheating Jews vs. cheating gentiles. It is part of their religion. A hasid published a book on this recently, and it is a big deal, because he lays it all out: http://www.rense.com/general48/newbook.htm -- where Orthodox Jews recommend to other Orthodox that the gentiles are evil and a different species. And that a Jew should deceive them about their true feelings -- e.g. don't tell the gentiles that you think they are evil, and of a different species.
Yeah, maybe this guy did write such a book, and maybe he does think its OK to rip people off because they're not a member of [insert clique here]. If he does, then he's an asshole. If anyone does things like that then they're an asshole too. I have no doubt that there's at least one Hasidist out there who rips people off; because Hasidists are human beings, and there are rotten apples in every batch. But on the main, I know that Hasidist are by and large OK guys. I know this because statistics tell me so. And statistics is mathematically and scientifically verifiable. Which is of course, something you're opinions can never be.
You need to get out more and visit your local bazzar. That or read Roots or something.
Honestly, and this is in no way a troll, there are so many acronyms in your post that I'm not quite sure whether you're serious or just poking fun.
And then they brought out 60Hz mode in games, which makes them look a little smoother, but cranks the whine up to an even more annoying level. Danm my ears!!
This *is* discrimination. If the guys are annoying, call the cops on the fuckers.
This isn't a very useful solution as, in the main, minors typically are not held accountable for all but the most henious of acts. In other words, as a minor, you can get away with just about anything short of rape and manslaughter and there's not a danm thing the cops can do about it.
OK, I'm not really sure whether you're being sarcastic or just doing a Dvorak on the whole current DNS debate.
You're suggesting we all dump DNS and just use search engines for everything. Let me ask you this. When everyone has done this, How the hell will search engines work?!
Consider Google pagerank. It searches you page, finds links to other pages.... but wait! These links are now not direct links. They are search engine terms which may or may not return the desired site, and by clicking on the link, you change its value on the search engines rank.
You'd turn the whole internet in some kind of quantum mechanical system where you're never quite sure where a link points to until you click on it, and once you've done so you've changed the state of the link. I'm sure we'll all get around just fine.
Not to mention the increased bandwidth and overhead. The net would quickly become primarily a system of passing around search engine queries rather than actual end user data.
Your idea sucks. Turn back on your DNS and svae the world some extra bandwidth.
Just like patriot, they shoot stuff out of the sky.
....If and when it actually works
Pretty freaking amazing.
I believe the Global Thermonuclear War package lists tic-tac-toe among its dependencies
Most people know this, but what most people don't know is that one of the other dependancies of Global Thermonuclear War was sendmail. How else would the wardial hack work?
Huh ? I always thought genes were determined about nine months before birth, a few hours after, um, ....
Silly rabbit! How can you determine what someones genes are while they're still in the womb. Didn't you ever see GATTACA?
There is frequently an assumption that the physical (brain chemistry, electrical activity) causes the behavior (introspection), as opposed to the other way around, or some other, independent cause.
No. That was the old way of thinking.
The new, modern outlook is that your behaviour, like your height, weight, driving ability, sex drive, food preferences, psychology, ulcer count, job, status, sexuality, favourite color, pet, health, wealth, smell, car, hair, SAT scores, political party and number of pokemon captured are all predetermined at birth from your genes, and these factors are immutable and unchangable by any process whatsoever short of chaging your "faulty" genes.
Hava a nicer life, by paying private companies to change your genes for you.
In fact, a lot of time was spent by professors that did real work deprogramming brainwashed students who were taught that global variables should never EVER be used, goto is Satan, dynamic memory is for terrorists and all kinds of god awful ideas.
I'm not so much against telling learner students not to use these things as I am against teaching learner students that these things even exist at all. All these techniques are advanced, and students should be comfortable wit hthe basics before they are even exposed to the tricky concepts. A lot of misuse of these language feature comes from people who don't really understand what they're for.
I can bet you most universities don't even teach "goto" logic and if they said anything about it, it was: don't use GOTO statements.
I was told this, unconditionally. I was told why as well, and had the matter illustrated with a mere 12 line example of horrific readability. I still use them though, when the call of the dark side is just too strong for me to resist.
Could I go get the electronic copy of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation magazine? Sure, since my university subscribes to the IEEE Xplore electronic depository. Is it easier for me to grab a copy off the bookshelf withing arm's reach? Without a doubt.
Are you insane?! After you've amassed journals it will take ten times as long to reef through the bulk of paper and find the article in question. With an electronic database you could potentially have a search engine do most of the work for you.
I've read dozens of papers in the last wee alone, but I've only printed one of them. Electronic copies are the way to go. You only really need paper versions of about 5% of the papers you read.
I started my Linux Forays with Fedora Core 2. Since then it has given me not a small portion of grief. Yum in paticular is a huge letdown. It is SLOW. Some kind of ipv6 trouble combined with regular operating procedure means even a search will take ~5 minutes on my 3GHz machine. I've since witnessed others like apt and portage and I have to say yum is not a great package.
Even moving to apt isn't helpful because the Fedora packages are quite simply broken. I'm not even talking about the whole DVD/mp3 issue. Most apps requiring GTK2 won't install as Fedora has labeled it as gtk+. Great decision there guys. I've long since abandoned yum and have basically started compiling almost everything. As a result, I'm trying to move to Gentoo.
The complete lack of GUI admin tools was also a serious letdown. I do NOT want to mess around with config files, and in this day and age no one should really have to. On the upside, I've probably learned near as much as someone using Slackware.
I think Fedora will work of medium to large enterprises, as a static business OS. I've seen it working quite well on a network with a RHEL server, being administered by a qualified admin. I think this is really where Fedora is going. Essentially the free client OS on Red Hat networks, and to be fair, it will be well suited to this role. On top of that it is a big incentive for companies to go Red Hat if their client licences are free.
However, for the home Linux user, Fedora is not the way to go. Personally I don't think it is designed with the home hacker in mind. You'll get away with it, but you're simply asking the system for something it was never built to achieve.
Gentoo looks nice because of the portage system and I'm prepared to pay the cost in compile times. i'm already compiling most of my apps anyway. I would have picked debian after I saw a 3 floppy bootstrap system in action, but the glacial pace of the stable branch scared me away. Ubuntu? I'm still not sure about it, being Debian based, and I've had problems with one commerically sponsored distro already. I think I've gained, or survied, enough expierience in Fedora to manage Gentoo.... maybe.
So it's adieu Fedora. Hello Gentoo. We had some good time, it must be said. It's not you... well it is. But you see, we we never really meant to be mon amie!