"If you've been avoiding KDE because of who owns their stock, then you're a jackass."
And if you are calling someone a jackass because they are sticking to their principles on some issue, you're no better!
Just because there's something worse, or it's happening elsewhere, is no reason to abandon his beliefs or suddenly embrace something he rejected on ethical grounds.
Calling him names will probably do nothing but further cement his opinions. Persecuting people for their beliefs won't make them modify their behavior. Maybe it helps you feel better to call people names. I don't think it does anything else though.
The only thing I'm questioning is the statement by a Best Buy employee that bestbuy.com and the Best Buy store are so disconnected as to actually be *competitors*.
Obviously, a commissioned salesperson might see it that way, but that's as far as it goes.
"I know some of you don't like the idea of Tablet PC but I think they are terrific personally."
If more people could see them being used effectively, they might be received better.
I had my doubts, but, I've seen students using them with great success -- although they have been Asian students. It's clear that the tablet form factor is much more effective for writers of Asian calligraphic languages, than any typewriter.
The other area where tablet PCs are a big win, is in the space occupied by tablet controllers, like photo editing. It's much more cost-effective to get a tablet pc for photoshop, than to get a pc and a graphics tablet.
A couple of my old bosses had Newtons. I used to go to meetings with a legal pad, and called it my Newton. It had a stylus interface, a delete function, it did vector graphics, it worked in landscape and portrait modes, etc....
"They would send out the same catalog to the same address but would have different prices for the same items depending on how much you had previously bought or were male or female . People began to figure this out and complained."
Ah, but that is something very different from what's being reported in the paper from Annenberg! Gender discrimination in the sale of personal property, in every state and territory, is illegal, plain and simple, there's not much gray area, and it really doesn't matter whether the customer or the merchant believes it is illegal. It does not require a very broad interpretation of 42 USC ss 1981-1982, to find an actionable item with exposure to federal fines for noncompliance here.
"How can it be illegal to change prices based on what type of customer you are?"
There are a few expressly defined "types" that you really are not allowed to base it on. But other than that, it's not illegal, unless you've previously made some agreement with the customer that he was getting the lowest, or only , price. Then it would be illegal, because you've made a contract and breached it.
Looking at the paper, it appears that Annenberg has pretty low standards for research methods. But these are PhD students in commo, so I guess fluffy research papers are acceptable there.
"the cashier said that the website was no longer an online representation of the brick-n-mortar stores, but now competes with them. Of course Best Buy is not so dumb as to make you buy something from the site and have it shipped, you can get the price on the website by selecting Store Pickup as your shipping option."
I find it very interesting that they are willing to be the delivery point for their competitor. More likely the cashier doesn't know what he or she was talking about. I'll bet you could have pressed the issue with a manager and gotten the online price. I would have simply walked away, unless I *really* needed DVD-R's that day.
>More than two-thirds of people surveyed also said >they believed online travel sites are required by >law to offer the lowest airline prices possible. > >WTF?
When I first read that, I wondered if it's giving all the details. In particular, I wonder if the site in question, in the survey, has somehow made a representation that it *did* offer the lowest airline prices possible. If you make that representation explicitly enough, it might very well get into illegal territory to fail to perform as promised.
The GPL is no easier or harder to apply in a legal sense, than any other software license which is based on copyright. Any evidence that the GPL is legally weak, should be applied to any other software license; I am sure you will find any significant weakness to be shared with it.
Copyright law may be regarded as weak or strong, well or poorly tested, with light or with severe consequences for violations. Whatever the case, the GPL is an extension of rights that were guaranteed under copyright law. The doctrine of equal protection, and the strength of copyright law itself, must support the GPL, or else other licenses will also fail by the same criteria, from any argument against the GPL.
No. "Draconian" would be, a $5M fine the first day of noncompliance, a $50M fine the second day of noncompliance, a life prison sentence for the highest level of authority responsible for noncompliance on the third day, and a death penalty for his replacement on the forth day of noncompliance.
I must be part Dragon, because I don't think a company or individual should, after being fined for a crime, be allowed to simply continue paying the fine as a cost of doing business looking forward. A fine is supposed to be more than compensation to the state for the damages of your crimes, it's supposed to also be so punititive as to make the proposition of repeating the crime utterly abhorrent.
"In Alaska we'll pay as much as $100/month for a meg of bandwidth."
I'd pay that much anywhere, and if I could deterimine with certainty in advance that it was avaialable at all, it would immensely broaden my choices of where I can buy property.
Even in the city, it's difficult to stipulate broadband availability as a condition to a real estate contract. For me, internet access makes or breaks my career.
You realize the same people who wanted you to buy the quite mainstream Meat Loaf and Frampton back then, want the current generation to buy whatever mainstream stuff is in the catalog today, don't you?
Now if you'd said "Tesco Vee" instead of "Meat Loaf" and "Captain Beefheart" instead of "Frampton", you might have an argument that goes somewher.
"I'm tired of being f*cked up when I buy a CD in a shop, and the CD doesn't play in my Discman or my DVD player."
It's happened often enough for you to get tired of it? As in "more than once?" Ok, or you got tired the first time (I would, sure).
What were the titles? What labels were they on? What retail shop sold them? What were the prices?
My argument against DRM is from the other direction. I don't want recording devices to abridge my rights or impede my access to material that I write, perform and record. And in order to preserve these rights, I must pay sustantially higher prices for recording media and recorders, because while consumer recorders would be good enough, they come at the cost of my rights to MY digital product, or impede my access to my product, or both.
"in order to hack on a drm scheme that's truly effective you would have to break compatibility with 99.99999% of all cd audio players in the world today."
You are assuming that it's inconceivable that the world would switch. But it was just yesterday that the world switched overnight from tapes and vinyl to CD. There's absolutely no reason it couldn't happen again, and why wouldn't Sony be the ones to drive the migration?
ATRAC is a fine format, and it works really well for the media for which it was created, streaming DAT. You might be thinking of SCMS, which is just a silly, contemptible thing. I consider SCMS to be a violation of my authorship rights. If I record a master on an SCMS-enabled medium, I should have the right to retreive it, since it's *my* creative content, not Sony's. (I literally believe I should be able to seek damages from Sony over this. The device abridges my rights...)
"For individuals who don't have anything major to loose or anything special to worry about, sure. But not for large organizations with a support structure (help desk, local docs, procedures, etc.) that needs to be ramped up to support new changes."
That organization too can benefit from, e.g., "apt-get dist-upgrade", but the source in the sources list should be a controlled repository, not a public debian server. The packaging system is excellent for this kind of scenario. My organization uses it, and not only for Linux (we deploy applications on Solaris using dpkg as well).
"I would even argue the Athlon64 is a little too hot compared to the Pentium M"
I had a very tough time finding Pentium M boards, so I went with a regular P4. No regrets. Certainly not reasonably characterized as "Yugo" performance. Very good price/performance ratio, and with a Zalman 7000cu, it's the quietest PC I've ever had, and runs very cool.
You call it "fragmentation", and I call it "diversity."
Playing DVD video has legal issues surrounding the implementation, and so it's still a huge problem. It's actually *illegal* in much of the world to distribute a turnkey system that will play commercial DVD's on Linux.
SP/DIF audio on my NForce board and my Delta cards is no problem at all -- and this is ALSA, something that is not dependent on your distribution at all.
I'd suggest that instead of waiting to get into linux, you'd just get a Knoppix or Ubuntu CD.
On the other hand, I'd also recommend Windows 2000 for a media PC.
You get into linux for A/V because you want to develop new stuff, or because you want to be involved in the development, or because you have requirements that are not met by other systems, not because you want the shortest path to an A/V system.
I'm into linux audio because I do my own synth software. I also do Windows.
I'm really happy that there are many, many different distributions. From business cards that can boot a machine and give you an ssh-enabled terminal, to user workstation installs, to systems optimized for audio, and lots more.
I don't think it is all that difficult to educate yourself on the differences, and you will quickly find that they are not so different.
I found Debian to be the most streamlined, easiest to maintain and by *far* the easiest to create and maintain the packages you develop or build yourself.
I'm more than sold on dpkg; my workplace uses dpkg to deploy everything, on all kinds of systems, not just Linux (mostly Solaris, in fact).
I just don't see how you could go wrong with a Debian-based system, to begin with. Although audio and video may be a pain regardless of what system you start with. Sometimes, a minor pain, and sometimes impossible, depending on your hardware.
With your Nforce2 chipset, you're in a pretty good situation, since it's one of the few audio devices that's expressly, actively supported by the manufacturer. http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux.html
Nethack is on the short list of games that can actually deliver in the immersion department. Relatively few seem to be willing to invest the sort of playing time required in order to comprehend that, or else their imagination isn't functional enough to be able to immerse themselves in the character's situation, without graphics to spell it out explicitly. But the immersion is there, and there are many different scenarios in every game, even if the overall quest is always the same.
I actually wish for something like a Squad Leader implementation based on something very close to the nethack engine.
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"Would you refuse to use the software that I wrote or contributed to?"
I wouldn't even give you the time of day after calling me a jackass. That's really the main thing I'm responding to here.
"Not using a piece of Free software because someone you don't like used to own a bit of the company that released it to the world?"
Makes sense to me. Your choice of who you take funding from may very well indeed reflect on your integrity. Why not?
Could you explain why it justifies name calling?
"If you've been avoiding KDE because of who owns their stock, then you're a jackass."
And if you are calling someone a jackass because they are sticking to their principles on some issue, you're no better!
Just because there's something worse, or it's happening elsewhere, is no reason to abandon his beliefs or suddenly embrace something he rejected on ethical grounds.
Calling him names will probably do nothing but further cement his opinions. Persecuting people for their beliefs won't make them modify their behavior. Maybe it helps you feel better to call people names. I don't think it does anything else though.
The only thing I'm questioning is the statement by a Best Buy employee that bestbuy.com and the Best Buy store are so disconnected as to actually be *competitors*.
Obviously, a commissioned salesperson might see it that way, but that's as far as it goes.
"I know some of you don't like the idea of Tablet PC but I think they are terrific personally."
If more people could see them being used effectively, they might be received better.
I had my doubts, but, I've seen students using them with great success -- although they have been Asian students. It's clear that the tablet form factor is much more effective for writers of Asian calligraphic languages, than any typewriter.
The other area where tablet PCs are a big win, is in the space occupied by tablet controllers, like photo editing. It's much more cost-effective to get a tablet pc for photoshop, than to get a pc and a graphics tablet.
A couple of my old bosses had Newtons. I used to go to meetings with a legal pad, and called it my Newton. It had a stylus interface, a delete function, it did vector graphics, it worked in landscape and portrait modes, etc.
Nobody thought it was funny then, either.
>You don't enforce the GPL, you enforce COPYRIGHT!
>The GPL (like "fair use") is a defense!
It's rarely said, because it's so widely misunderstood.
"They would send out the same catalog to the same address but would have different prices for the same items depending on how much you had previously bought or were male or female . People began to figure this out and complained."
Ah, but that is something very different from what's being reported in the paper from Annenberg! Gender discrimination in the sale of personal property, in every state and territory, is illegal, plain and simple, there's not much gray area, and it really doesn't matter whether the customer or the merchant believes it is illegal. It does not require a very broad interpretation of 42 USC ss 1981-1982, to find an actionable item with exposure to federal fines for noncompliance here.
"How can it be illegal to change prices based on what type of customer you are?"
There are a few expressly defined "types" that you really are not allowed to base it on. But other than that, it's not illegal, unless you've previously made some agreement with the customer that he was getting the lowest, or only , price. Then it would be illegal, because you've made a contract and breached it.
Looking at the paper, it appears that Annenberg has pretty low standards for research methods. But these are PhD students in commo, so I guess fluffy research papers are acceptable there.
"the cashier said that the website was no longer an online representation of the brick-n-mortar stores, but now competes with them. Of course Best Buy is not so dumb as to make you buy something from the site and have it shipped, you can get the price on the website by selecting Store Pickup as your shipping option."
I find it very interesting that they are willing to be the delivery point for their competitor. More likely the cashier doesn't know what he or she was talking about. I'll bet you could have pressed the issue with a manager and gotten the online price. I would have simply walked away, unless I *really* needed DVD-R's that day.
>For example, 8 ounces of something might cost $.99
> and 16 ounces might cost $1.99.
I'm not really seeing the problem, unless you're saying the one cent roundup is arbitrary.
>More than two-thirds of people surveyed also said
>they believed online travel sites are required by
>law to offer the lowest airline prices possible.
>
>WTF?
When I first read that, I wondered if it's giving all the details. In particular, I wonder if the site in question, in the survey, has somehow made a representation that it *did* offer the lowest airline prices possible. If you make that representation explicitly enough, it might very well get into illegal territory to fail to perform as promised.
The GPL is no easier or harder to apply in a legal sense, than any other software license which is based on copyright. Any evidence that the GPL is legally weak, should be applied to any other software license; I am sure you will find any significant weakness to be shared with it.
Copyright law may be regarded as weak or strong, well or poorly tested, with light or with severe consequences for violations. Whatever the case, the GPL is an extension of rights that were guaranteed under copyright law. The doctrine of equal protection, and the strength of copyright law itself, must support the GPL, or else other licenses will also fail by the same criteria, from any argument against the GPL.
>The fine is pretty draconian in my opinion.
No. "Draconian" would be, a $5M fine the first day of noncompliance, a $50M fine the second day of noncompliance, a life prison sentence for the highest level of authority responsible for noncompliance on the third day, and a death penalty for his replacement on the forth day of noncompliance.
I must be part Dragon, because I don't think a company or individual should, after being fined for a crime, be allowed to simply continue paying the fine as a cost of doing business looking forward. A fine is supposed to be more than compensation to the state for the damages of your crimes, it's supposed to also be so punititive as to make the proposition of repeating the crime utterly abhorrent.
"That act would be in violation of WIPO copyright treaty."
The consequences of that would be what? Angry talk in the UN? Hollow threats? Boycotts and trade embargos? Military coups?
"The only way to tell if you will be satisfied with the wireless connectivity and whether it will work in your home is to try it out first."
Sort of a chicken and egg problem, if you're trying to find this out before deciding whether to buy the property.
"In Alaska we'll pay as much as $100/month for a meg of bandwidth."
I'd pay that much anywhere, and if I could deterimine with certainty in advance that it was avaialable at all, it would immensely broaden my choices of where I can buy property.
Even in the city, it's difficult to stipulate broadband availability as a condition to a real estate contract. For me, internet access makes or breaks my career.
You realize the same people who wanted you to buy the quite mainstream Meat Loaf and Frampton back then, want the current generation to buy whatever mainstream stuff is in the catalog today, don't you?
Now if you'd said "Tesco Vee" instead of "Meat Loaf" and "Captain Beefheart" instead of "Frampton", you might have an argument that goes somewher.
"I'm tired of being f*cked up when I buy a CD in a shop, and the CD doesn't play in my Discman or my DVD player."
It's happened often enough for you to get tired of it? As in "more than once?" Ok, or you got tired the first time (I would, sure).
What were the titles? What labels were they on? What retail shop sold them? What were the prices?
My argument against DRM is from the other direction. I don't want recording devices to abridge my rights or impede my access to material that I write, perform and record. And in order to preserve these rights, I must pay sustantially higher prices for recording media and recorders, because while consumer recorders would be good enough, they come at the cost of my rights to MY digital product, or impede my access to my product, or both.
"in order to hack on a drm scheme that's truly effective you would have to break compatibility with 99.99999% of all cd audio players in the world today."
You are assuming that it's inconceivable that the world would switch. But it was just yesterday that the world switched overnight from tapes and vinyl to CD. There's absolutely no reason it couldn't happen again, and why wouldn't Sony be the ones to drive the migration?
It doesn't seem far-fetched to me, at all.
> their ATARC thingy didnt work the first time..
ATRAC is a fine format, and it works really well for the media for which it was created, streaming DAT. You might be thinking of SCMS, which is just a silly, contemptible thing. I consider SCMS to be a violation of my authorship rights. If I record a master on an SCMS-enabled medium, I should have the right to retreive it, since it's *my* creative content, not Sony's. (I literally believe I should be able to seek damages from Sony over this. The device abridges my rights...)
"For individuals who don't have anything major to loose or anything special to worry about, sure. But not for large organizations with a support structure (help desk, local docs, procedures, etc.) that needs to be ramped up to support new changes."
That organization too can benefit from, e.g., "apt-get dist-upgrade", but the source in the sources list should be a controlled repository, not a public debian server. The packaging system is excellent for this kind of scenario. My organization uses it, and not only for Linux (we deploy applications on Solaris using dpkg as well).
"I would even argue the Athlon64 is a little too hot compared to the Pentium M"
I had a very tough time finding Pentium M boards, so I went with a regular P4. No regrets. Certainly not reasonably characterized as "Yugo" performance.
Very good price/performance ratio, and with a Zalman 7000cu, it's the quietest PC I've ever had, and runs very cool.
You call it "fragmentation", and I call it "diversity."
Playing DVD video has legal issues surrounding the implementation, and so it's still a huge problem. It's actually *illegal* in much of the world to distribute a turnkey system that will play commercial DVD's on Linux.
SP/DIF audio on my NForce board and my Delta cards is no problem at all -- and this is ALSA, something that is not dependent on your distribution at all.
I'd suggest that instead of waiting to get into linux, you'd just get a Knoppix or Ubuntu CD.
On the other hand, I'd also recommend Windows 2000 for a media PC.
You get into linux for A/V because you want to develop new stuff, or because you want to be involved in the development, or because you have requirements that are not met by other systems, not because you want the shortest path to an A/V system.
I'm into linux audio because I do my own synth software. I also do Windows.
I'm really happy that there are many, many different distributions. From business cards that can boot a machine and give you an ssh-enabled terminal, to user workstation installs, to systems optimized for audio, and lots more.
I don't think it is all that difficult to educate yourself on the differences, and you will quickly find that they are not so different.
I found Debian to be the most streamlined, easiest to maintain and by *far* the easiest to create and maintain the packages you develop or build yourself.
I'm more than sold on dpkg; my workplace uses dpkg to deploy everything, on all kinds of systems, not just Linux (mostly Solaris, in fact).
I just don't see how you could go wrong with a Debian-based system, to begin with. Although audio and video may be a pain regardless of what system you start with. Sometimes, a minor pain, and sometimes impossible, depending on your hardware.
With your Nforce2 chipset, you're in a pretty good situation, since it's one of the few audio devices that's expressly, actively supported by the manufacturer. http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux.html
Nethack is on the short list of games that can actually deliver in the immersion department. Relatively few seem to be willing to invest the sort of playing time required in order to comprehend that, or else their imagination isn't functional enough to be able to immerse themselves in the character's situation, without graphics to spell it out explicitly. But the immersion is there, and there are many different scenarios in every game, even if the overall quest is always the same.
I actually wish for something like a Squad Leader implementation based on something very close to the nethack engine.
You have not made the case that multiple distributions of Linux is a problem that impedes its adoption.
And your suggestion that KDE and Gnome are mutually exclusive options, does not make any sense at all.
It's okay to be cautious and slow to pick up something new, but I fear your reasons are based on some misconceptions.
On the other hand, if audio production is your goal, you are definitely still in the early adopter period, if not, "early developer".