I call it a flip, since McCain's political opinion was, on 21 May 2008, "John McCain would not support immunity for the telecoms that aided the Bush administration's warrantless spying program, unless there were revealing Congressional hearings and heartfelt repentance from those telephone and internet companies"; but then on 23 May 2008 became, "The Senator still supports unconditional amnesty for telecoms that helped the government spy on Americans, without being given court orders" [emphasis added]. If it's unconditional, I suppose there's no need for hearings and tearful remorse.
You see, whether you like it or not, by taking an oath proscribed by that organization (church) one actually implicitly expresses ones support for that organization.
Just to avoid contradicting yourself in the future, you might want to look up the difference in meaning between proscribed and prescribed. They are almost opposites.
The Federalist Papers were written by just three (= not that many) Founding Fathers. Just 2 guys wrote most of them, Madison and Hamilton, although John Jay wrote a few.
"All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing," as they say, and that more or less characterizes my friends.
Working for Microsoft, at minimum, constitutes doing nothing. I'm not sure what your point is.
I agree they are doing nothing; that was my point. They aren't being "evil," they're being (as you also point out) kind of selfish and kind of oafish. Parent is painting them black, and I'm trying to paint them gray. To paraphrase the quote, non-evil people can assist evil without themselves being actively evil.
...if they're so smart...
I never said they were so smart. I said they are ordinary nerds. Some of them are kind of poor, kind of green. A lot of people out there do not know the bad things Microsoft does. Microsoft spreads the net wide; they actively recruit all over the nation. There are plenty of programmers who don't know about the scope of the company's ethical shenanigans. Recruiters don't mention THAT. So they take the job and work there.
I'm trying to unpack this point because properly abstracted it is very important to society at large. In America, even people without cars depend on petroleum because that's how food and most stuff gets transported. You and I depend on gas and we don't really like it, but by playing along AT ALL we are in a small way enabling a horrific, bloody, environment-destroying, war-mongering industry. And when millions of people do this in their own small way, the environment is slowly but surely ruined, multibillion dollar wars are funded, thousands of people die, and much evil takes place -- though most of the power behind this evil comes from people who can't accurately be called evil. Their hats (our hats) are gray, not black (*). There is blood on our hands, but just a few drops. Conrad explored this theme in Heart of Darkness and I think it's very important.
* sorry to use black as a metaphor for evil, I know that is tactless, I hope you can bear with me.
False. I have never worked for MS, but I have many friends who do, or have, and they are neither living under a rock, gullible, sociopathic, nor incompetent. They are ordinary, decent nerds who are not very concerned about Microsoft's business practices, and want a challenging job in software engineering working with other talented people. There's a lot of evil in the world and Microsoft does not make the top 20 list, and for some people, they're ethical enough. "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing," as they say, and that more or less characterizes my friends. If you call them evil, that's your business, but that is not the usual semantics. Not to flame, but do you buy gasoline or eat meat? That's arguably as evil if not more, with all the bloodshed and death associated with those commodities. Yet I don't call such consumers evil, and I myself eat meat.
It doesn't even make sense to hold the telecoms responsible for following orders from Uncle Sam.
It makes perfect sense because there were no orders and there is no Uncle Sam. "Orders" arise in a military context, and even soldiers are not required to obey illegal orders. AT&T is not subject to the "orders" of the NSA; they can consider requests -- but they have to obey the LAWS of the nation, such as the Telecom. Act of 1934 which makes unwarranted wiretapping criminal. No one is more aware of telecommunications law than the telecom companies, so they have no plea of ignorance, even if that were any defense. And a plea of "I was following orders" is moot.
There is no Uncle Sam, no single voice that embodies the authority of the federal government, and that's a good thing. No individual person gets to dictate laws, or their implementation, or their interpretation -- a weakness that is actually a strength, and surely the reason why the federal government has more or less worked for 200+ years. So the president, or McConnell, or whoever, has but limited power to say what ought to be done and what is legal. In particular, even the president cannot set aside the law. At least, that's what the federal constitution asserts.
But honestly, I can't make myself care about the hypocrisy anymore
At first I thought you meant Microsoft's hypocrisy: that they sell you their expensive software and then once it's installed, act like you need to pay them again. Or that with one hand they (anti-competitively) bundle Winodws Defender to keep crap off your computer and with the other hand they put crap back on your computer. Or that their software might be (on YOUR computer) the kernel you run and trust and hope is fair and disinterested; and then it turns out the same company's software has a great interest in an agenda that involves you spending money. There's lots of hypocrisy going on here.
So I nodded and skimmed on --
The I realized you maybe meant Slashdot's "hypocrisy" for "talking shit about Microsoft Office," as if this is an Open Office advocacy site, which would be a very boring site. Good heavens, don't you even know what "talking shit" means? It means substanceless accusations. Feeding ads to a captive, paying audience is a substantial accusation. If you have some dirt on OO.o then out with it, we are interested. (And we'll fix it -- because we can, we have the source.) And hypocrisy means holding a double standard, or acting -- but criticizing expensive bloatware when free alternatives exist is a perfectly coherent, unified standard.
The Microsoft Shill factor on Slashdot is annoying. We should call it "astrocrabgrass" or something; I speculate you are part of it, AC. Then again maybe you're just a troll and I bit, in which case congratulations.
This is good news in an age where free speech is under attack from so many quarters. Let's all remember this famous quote:
"I may mod down what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
This has not always been the land of the free. Remember Eugene V. Debs:
"June 16, 1918 -- Debs made his famous anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, protesting World War I which was raging in Europe. For this speech he was arrested and convicted in federal court in Cleveland, Ohio under the war-time espionage law... [and] sentenced to serve 10 years in prison . . .." (from here)
These articles are interesting because they tell the story of the ongoing intersection/collision between big business, intellectual property law, free culture, and case law involving the internet. The subject touches on both technology and justice, and fits in very well to the Slashdot omelette.
IMHO, computer science is not about theoretical virtual machines, but the practical bla bla
Maybe you should read this paper, which arguably (1) established the discipline of computer science and (2) is about an idealized, theoretical machine.
First let me echo the mantra that Linux and FreeBSD are not in a fight, we don't need to declare one or the other a winner. Having said that, let me turn around and now say that you yourself are practically presenting an argument for the (IMHO) superior consistency and sensibility of FreeBSD's configuration:
I've never used a good distro that had Apache's configuration anywhere other than/etc/httpd or/etc/apache, or some variant thereof (like/etc/apache2)
unless I installed a really strange [DHCP server], it's going to be somewhere in/etc/dhcpd, or it's going to be named after the particular dhcp server (like/etc/dnsmasq)
So, these configuration files are going to be in a handful of plausible locations. Debian puts it here, Fedora here, etc. A n00b who needs help must ask the right community -- not just "Linux" but Ubuntu, or SuSE, or whatever. A friend of mine was just getting started and decided to go for SuSE. He eventually asked me for some help getting his Java browser plugin to work. I gave him some generic advice, but I didn't know the SuSE directory structure so I couldn't be specific. This is typical: because the distros do different things, the Linux knowledgebase is somewhat splintered.
As you say, FreeBSD is like a Linux distro in that it has a (self-consistent) scheme for where to put stuff. It's unlike a distro in that application software like Apache or KDE is not treated as part of the bundle. I remember one forum complaint of, "I tried to install FreeBSD on my machine, and I said install everything, but later it asked if I wanted to install X11 and KDE. That's so amateur hour!" The thing is, FreeBSD is not exactly a distro: "everything" in FreeBSD roughly corresponds to Linux kernel + GNU tools. Installing additional packages is easy though: the ports tree makes adding new software very easy. I love the ports tree.
FreeBSD incidentally has excellent documentation; I have found answers to my questions faster with the FreeBSD docs than with the Linux docs and HOWTOs. Also I find it easier to get FreeBSD help via email. Perhaps this is be changing now: the Ubuntu community is pretty huge and it might now be a better resource that the FreeBSD community. That is saying a lot: the FreeBSD-questions list is extremely helpful, n00b-respectful, and timely.
I am not trying to put down Linux, I like it too. My desktop machine dual-boots FreeBSD and Slackware. When I started programming in OpenGL I used Linux, and I never could port my programs to FreeBSD (and ran out of patience to figuring out why). Also, when I am forced to use Macromedia Flash I usually turn to Linux. But for the majority of setup and config problems I've faced in the past handful of years, I just have had more molar-grinding moments with Slackware and CentOS than I have had with FreeBSD -- and maybe it's my fault, I don't care. Life is not about operating systems anyway, it's about getting your stuff done.
First I notice that "alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution" is ambiguous. If it said "illegal peer-to-peer distribution," I think it would be clearer. Arguably the statue as written slouches towards a blanket ban on peer to peer networking.
Second, "develop a plan" implies spending time, money, etc. for that development. Engineering is expensive. This is a waste of universities' resources. Students pay good money for tuition, not for engineering systems that offer them no benefit, but rather solely benefit the RIAA and MPAA. And it is no rebuttal to claim, "they aren't paying; it's federal scholarship money that pays." If a student wins federal scholarship money, that money should be spent to benefit the student, not spent on corporate welfare.
Third, this further turns university campuses into little nanny-societies -- which IMHO is not what universities exist for.
Fourth, this is a slippery slope. Once a plan has been federally mandated, it just takes one more act to command the universities, "Now implement your plans." Even stronger: there is no rational reason to make these plans unless someday they will be implemented. (If they aren't going to be implemented, why spend money developing these plans?) So there is no reason to accept this provision if (like me) you think that actually implementing such "deterrents" is intolerable.
TFA addresses precisely that point. On p. 6 of EFF's brief, they explain that the "and to authorize" phrase does not expand direct liability, but only secondary liability:
In other words, without a direct infringement of s. 106(3) -- an actual distribut[ion] of copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease or lending -- there can be no claim for "authorization" of distribution.
The way I would put it (IANAL) is that if Alice makes copies of her Metallica CD and hands them out on the street, and someone takes one, she has direct liability; and if Bob falsely claimed he owned the copyrights on those recordings and told Alice to go ahead, then Bob is also liable. But only because Alice went through with it and really did distribute. FTFA:
In the words of the First Circuit, "Mere authorization of an infringing act is an insufficient basis for copyright infringement. Infringement depends upon whether an infringing act, such as copying or performing, has occurred. Therefore, to prove infringement, a claimant must show "an infringing act after the authorization.'" Latin Amer. Music Co. v. Archdiocese of San Juan, 499 F.3d 32, 46 (1st Cir. 2007).
Note that there is more than one form for the plural.
Yeah... the right one and the wrong one.;-)
Proof by analogy: which is better, lensses or lenses? Of course! I rest my case!
Fact is, we have so few singular words ending in S (excluding the Latin-imported irregulars), we don't know what to do with them. So errors like "busses" for bus so inveigle themselves into common usage that they get end up compiled into the freakin' dictionary. Since both "bus" and "buss" are English words, what's a body to do?
Frankly, I know there's nothing anyone can do to stop the REAL-ID ball from rolling...
With that attitude, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think it can be stopped, it is just going to be very difficult (like many things in life). But please don't say it is impossible. At least go to the Real Nightmare action center and email your state legislators and ask them to refuse to implement REALID. The outcome is uncertain; all we know is that fatalism = guaranteed defeat.
Slashdot Mirror
I call it a flip, since McCain's political opinion was, on 21 May 2008, "John McCain would not support immunity for the telecoms that aided the Bush administration's warrantless spying program, unless there were revealing Congressional hearings and heartfelt repentance from those telephone and internet companies"; but then on 23 May 2008 became, "The Senator still supports unconditional amnesty for telecoms that helped the government spy on Americans, without being given court orders" [emphasis added]. If it's unconditional, I suppose there's no need for hearings and tearful remorse.
Those quotes are from a Wired blog: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/05/telecom-amnesty.html
No, actually he has flip-flopped.
Seven hours ought to be enough for anybody!
Heh, and Mao pwnz0r5 Stalin.
Just to avoid contradicting yourself in the future, you might want to look up the difference in meaning between proscribed and prescribed. They are almost opposites.
Maybe it's in the genes...
The Federalist Papers were written by just three (= not that many) Founding Fathers. Just 2 guys wrote most of them, Madison and Hamilton, although John Jay wrote a few.
Ah, those were the days.
I agree they are doing nothing; that was my point. They aren't being "evil," they're being (as you also point out) kind of selfish and kind of oafish. Parent is painting them black, and I'm trying to paint them gray. To paraphrase the quote, non-evil people can assist evil without themselves being actively evil.
I never said they were so smart. I said they are ordinary nerds. Some of them are kind of poor, kind of green. A lot of people out there do not know the bad things Microsoft does. Microsoft spreads the net wide; they actively recruit all over the nation. There are plenty of programmers who don't know about the scope of the company's ethical shenanigans. Recruiters don't mention THAT. So they take the job and work there.
I'm trying to unpack this point because properly abstracted it is very important to society at large. In America, even people without cars depend on petroleum because that's how food and most stuff gets transported. You and I depend on gas and we don't really like it, but by playing along AT ALL we are in a small way enabling a horrific, bloody, environment-destroying, war-mongering industry. And when millions of people do this in their own small way, the environment is slowly but surely ruined, multibillion dollar wars are funded, thousands of people die, and much evil takes place -- though most of the power behind this evil comes from people who can't accurately be called evil. Their hats (our hats) are gray, not black (*). There is blood on our hands, but just a few drops. Conrad explored this theme in Heart of Darkness and I think it's very important.
* sorry to use black as a metaphor for evil, I know that is tactless, I hope you can bear with me.
False. I have never worked for MS, but I have many friends who do, or have, and they are neither living under a rock, gullible, sociopathic, nor incompetent. They are ordinary, decent nerds who are not very concerned about Microsoft's business practices, and want a challenging job in software engineering working with other talented people. There's a lot of evil in the world and Microsoft does not make the top 20 list, and for some people, they're ethical enough. "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing," as they say, and that more or less characterizes my friends. If you call them evil, that's your business, but that is not the usual semantics. Not to flame, but do you buy gasoline or eat meat? That's arguably as evil if not more, with all the bloodshed and death associated with those commodities. Yet I don't call such consumers evil, and I myself eat meat.
"You used disinterested correctly! Ow my heart! Nadine, get my pills! Gaaack!"
It makes perfect sense because there were no orders and there is no Uncle Sam. "Orders" arise in a military context, and even soldiers are not required to obey illegal orders. AT&T is not subject to the "orders" of the NSA; they can consider requests -- but they have to obey the LAWS of the nation, such as the Telecom. Act of 1934 which makes unwarranted wiretapping criminal. No one is more aware of telecommunications law than the telecom companies, so they have no plea of ignorance, even if that were any defense. And a plea of "I was following orders" is moot.
There is no Uncle Sam, no single voice that embodies the authority of the federal government, and that's a good thing. No individual person gets to dictate laws, or their implementation, or their interpretation -- a weakness that is actually a strength, and surely the reason why the federal government has more or less worked for 200+ years. So the president, or McConnell, or whoever, has but limited power to say what ought to be done and what is legal. In particular, even the president cannot set aside the law. At least, that's what the federal constitution asserts.
At first I thought you meant Microsoft's hypocrisy: that they sell you their expensive software and then once it's installed, act like you need to pay them again. Or that with one hand they (anti-competitively) bundle Winodws Defender to keep crap off your computer and with the other hand they put crap back on your computer. Or that their software might be (on YOUR computer) the kernel you run and trust and hope is fair and disinterested; and then it turns out the same company's software has a great interest in an agenda that involves you spending money. There's lots of hypocrisy going on here.
So I nodded and skimmed on --
The I realized you maybe meant Slashdot's "hypocrisy" for "talking shit about Microsoft Office," as if this is an Open Office advocacy site, which would be a very boring site. Good heavens, don't you even know what "talking shit" means? It means substanceless accusations. Feeding ads to a captive, paying audience is a substantial accusation. If you have some dirt on OO.o then out with it, we are interested. (And we'll fix it -- because we can, we have the source.) And hypocrisy means holding a double standard, or acting -- but criticizing expensive bloatware when free alternatives exist is a perfectly coherent, unified standard.
The Microsoft Shill factor on Slashdot is annoying. We should call it "astrocrabgrass" or something; I speculate you are part of it, AC. Then again maybe you're just a troll and I bit, in which case congratulations.
This is good news in an age where free speech is under attack from so many quarters. Let's all remember this famous quote:
... [and] sentenced to serve 10 years in prison . . . ."
... and the victims of the Montana sedition law.
"I may mod down what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it."
-- Voltaire
This has not always been the land of the free. Remember Eugene V. Debs:
"June 16, 1918 -- Debs made his famous anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, protesting World War I which was raging in Europe. For this speech he was arrested and convicted in federal court in Cleveland, Ohio under the war-time espionage law
(from here)
These articles are interesting because they tell the story of the ongoing intersection/collision between big business, intellectual property law, free culture, and case law involving the internet. The subject touches on both technology and justice, and fits in very well to the Slashdot omelette.
God bless you Lemmy Caution. That's exactly the quote I was waiting for.
I'm puttin' you in my will!
(Not actually.)
Maybe you should read this paper, which arguably (1) established the discipline of computer science and (2) is about an idealized, theoretical machine.
So, these configuration files are going to be in a handful of plausible locations. Debian puts it here, Fedora here, etc. A n00b who needs help must ask the right community -- not just "Linux" but Ubuntu, or SuSE, or whatever. A friend of mine was just getting started and decided to go for SuSE. He eventually asked me for some help getting his Java browser plugin to work. I gave him some generic advice, but I didn't know the SuSE directory structure so I couldn't be specific. This is typical: because the distros do different things, the Linux knowledgebase is somewhat splintered.
As you say, FreeBSD is like a Linux distro in that it has a (self-consistent) scheme for where to put stuff. It's unlike a distro in that application software like Apache or KDE is not treated as part of the bundle. I remember one forum complaint of, "I tried to install FreeBSD on my machine, and I said install everything, but later it asked if I wanted to install X11 and KDE. That's so amateur hour!" The thing is, FreeBSD is not exactly a distro: "everything" in FreeBSD roughly corresponds to Linux kernel + GNU tools. Installing additional packages is easy though: the ports tree makes adding new software very easy. I love the ports tree.
FreeBSD incidentally has excellent documentation; I have found answers to my questions faster with the FreeBSD docs than with the Linux docs and HOWTOs. Also I find it easier to get FreeBSD help via email. Perhaps this is be changing now: the Ubuntu community is pretty huge and it might now be a better resource that the FreeBSD community. That is saying a lot: the FreeBSD-questions list is extremely helpful, n00b-respectful, and timely.
I am not trying to put down Linux, I like it too. My desktop machine dual-boots FreeBSD and Slackware. When I started programming in OpenGL I used Linux, and I never could port my programs to FreeBSD (and ran out of patience to figuring out why). Also, when I am forced to use Macromedia Flash I usually turn to Linux. But for the majority of setup and config problems I've faced in the past handful of years, I just have had more molar-grinding moments with Slackware and CentOS than I have had with FreeBSD -- and maybe it's my fault, I don't care. Life is not about operating systems anyway, it's about getting your stuff done.
This is still bad.
First I notice that "alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution" is ambiguous. If it said "illegal peer-to-peer distribution," I think it would be clearer. Arguably the statue as written slouches towards a blanket ban on peer to peer networking.
Second, "develop a plan" implies spending time, money, etc. for that development. Engineering is expensive. This is a waste of universities' resources. Students pay good money for tuition, not for engineering systems that offer them no benefit, but rather solely benefit the RIAA and MPAA. And it is no rebuttal to claim, "they aren't paying; it's federal scholarship money that pays." If a student wins federal scholarship money, that money should be spent to benefit the student, not spent on corporate welfare.
Third, this further turns university campuses into little nanny-societies -- which IMHO is not what universities exist for.
Fourth, this is a slippery slope. Once a plan has been federally mandated, it just takes one more act to command the universities, "Now implement your plans." Even stronger: there is no rational reason to make these plans unless someday they will be implemented. (If they aren't going to be implemented, why spend money developing these plans?) So there is no reason to accept this provision if (like me) you think that actually implementing such "deterrents" is intolerable.
So, it's bad.
actually tetris is np-hard
Actually 1 Timothy 6:10 not Ecc.
The way I would put it (IANAL) is that if Alice makes copies of her Metallica CD and hands them out on the street, and someone takes one, she has direct liability; and if Bob falsely claimed he owned the copyrights on those recordings and told Alice to go ahead, then Bob is also liable. But only because Alice went through with it and really did distribute. FTFA:
Yeah
Proof by analogy: which is better, lensses or lenses? Of course! I rest my case!
Fact is, we have so few singular words ending in S (excluding the Latin-imported irregulars), we don't know what to do with them. So errors like "busses" for bus so inveigle themselves into common usage that they get end up compiled into the freakin' dictionary. Since both "bus" and "buss" are English words, what's a body to do?
Want to do something about this?
Go to the ACLU's website about REALID, go to the action center, and write your state legislators to reject implementing this act.
With that attitude, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think it can be stopped, it is just going to be very difficult (like many things in life). But please don't say it is impossible. At least go to the Real Nightmare action center and email your state legislators and ask them to refuse to implement REALID. The outcome is uncertain; all we know is that fatalism = guaranteed defeat.