At trial, defendants repeated, as if it were a mantra, the refrain that plaintiffs, as they stipulated, have no direct evidence of a specific occasion on which any person decrypted a copyrighted motion picture with DeCSS and transmitted it over the Internet. But that is unpersuasive. Plaintiffs expert expended very little effort to find someone in an IRC chat room who exchanged a compressed, decrypted copy of The Matrix, one of plaintiffs copyrighted motion pictures, for a copy of Sleepless in Seattle. -Snip-
I'd call this a major weakness in the analysis. Very little effort does not describe the process (and this witness's testimony was under attack because of the methodology used.. the test was actually done by someone familiar with the movie-trading underground, not an 'average consumer') and this swap does not prove that anyone outside the MPAA has ever used DeCSS to pirate a movie. Why is this presented here?
And although the Court does not accept the list, which is hearsay, as proof of the truth of the matters asserted therein, it does note that advertisements for decrypted versions of copyrighted movies first appeared on the Internet in substantial numbers in late 1999, following the posting of DeCSS.
We all suspected this kind of logical analysis would happen, and sadly Kaplan too easily falls into this basic false analysis. Is this the kind of thing that makes for good appeals?
I continue to be amazed by Kaplan's reliance on the content of written words, from the various 'fuck the lawyers' rants on DeCSS mirrors to the articles in the print version of 2600 itself. I wonder just how far the First Amendment (and related case law) should block this kind of consideration. By exercising its 1st amendment right to publish pretty much whatever the hell it wants, it seems that 2600 has earned Kaplan's ire. Pages 15 to 17 of the opinion make mention of some articles, and I'm wondering how this is relevant if he's only exercising his rights. In court, Goldstein put these articles into context, but that's conspicuously absent here. Without any evidence to the contrary presented, how can Kaplan get away with passing this kind of judgement on 2600's content?
While many of us will claim to have some use for this (like one big 'ol emacs window, or lots of xterms), it's quite clear that we are nowhere near ready for this kind of resolution. This got me thinking about MacOS X again and how a pdf-like display layer could really help this technology take off, by providing a fully scalable desktop experience. Of course, the current implementation of MacOS X may be ill-suited for this kind of thing, but they would certainly have an easier time adapting. So the question to ponder is 'how are we planning for the display technologies of the future?', while glancing over your shoulder to see Roentgen catching up fast.
This has reminded me of your cheap garage CD, where the band (if memory serves) set a deliberately low price on it. Did that, in any way, make your product a commodity? Was that okay because it was mostly covers, or because you wanted to give back to the fans?
Basic Economics: Your demand curve is based on the quantity demanded at a given price. At a given price, everyone who was willing to pay the price or more will get units. The lower the price, the more units are sold. Now, as has been pointed out previously, the price set for CD's is way more than it needs to be, given costs. Someone arbitrarily decided that $16 should be the price and suddenly The Industry captures monopoly profits on CD's.
Here's the resulting question: Have you ever considered the possibility that many Napster users are at the low price end of the curve, and while they're not willing to pay the arbitrarily high price for a CD, they are willing to take a copy for free?
In such a scenario, which is just a simple application of basic economics, Metallica isn't losing anything, economically speaking. These people wouldn't pay for CD's anyway (and all costs have been absorbed by the users). Have you ever considered this fact, and how much of an effect has it had on you?
Don't know if anything worthwhile was said in the thread, but the duplicate of this story is here.
I do think that the/. crew could both be a little more aware of each others' postings AND admit to their mistakes whenever they do mess up (and perhaps express a desire to avoid doing it again, but this would purely be PR to me).
The same thing will also never come true for my other wish, that of mtv bring back all of it's 80's content to be shown late nights when they dont have anything on and could actually score some ad cash from all of us 'kids' remebering our "big hair" phase.
At the very least, bring back Remote Control! This was 70's nostalgia before it was cool (even back then, I loathed it. Freakin' Brady Channel...). You figure MTV would try this again in the wake of Millionare (why not? Everyone else is doing it). I guess it's because it doesn't appeal to 15 year old girls...
Maybe Comedy Central could revive this next to Win Ben Stein's Money. =)
I didn't say failure to re-create. Then again, I just wasn't specific at all... my bad. What I was referring to is the habit of many to pass judgement before it was even tried.
Writing in the journal Physica C, Dr Yevgeny Podkletnov claimed that a spinning, superconducting disc lost some of its weight. And, in an unpublished paper on the weak gravitation shielding properties of a superconductor, he argued that such a disc lost as much as 2% of its weight.
This is the actual reference I wanted in my earlier post. The man claimed something Einstein said was impossible and was instantly branded an idiot and/or a crackpot. "He must have miscalculated!" and "He must have measured something else!" were two of the kindest responses. His employer (a University, I believe) fired him. Now you know why he never published that paper: he lost the support he needed, including the lab where the experiment took place (if my memory serves). He knew that he was claiming fantastic and he was willing to bet his reputation on being right. He lost big and this article indicates that we can't be sure he wasn't.
I'm not claiming either one was right, what I am claiming is that when you have your heads buried so far under the sand, you're bound to miss out on something important. Dismissing the fantastic as trickery or mistakes is one hole I wish the greater "scientific community" would avoid.
Your point is good and you deserve your positive moderation, but...
failures and cranks: phrenology, mediums as masters of the fourth dimension, any number of numerological schemes, orgone energy
Ouch. Orgone energy does not, IMHO, deserve to be put in that lineup. Especially here on/. Now, I'm not an expert on the subject but I do know that the others are either outright scams or were heard out. Wilhelm Reich never really had his day. In fact, the U.S. Government seized his books and papers and burned them back in 1957. Clearly a First Amendment issue, which is a favorite topic around here.
Granted, this is a poor argument for orgone energy, but it is my understanding that very few have recreated Reich's experiments before declaring him a crank or a failure. Peer review wasn't possible because nobody would take the time to hear him out. The same thing has happened in gravity research in the past (the exact reference eludes me) and we have adequate reason be concerned that the scientific community may be too ready to cry 'crank'.
Okay, can someone with real knowledge of the situation brief Slashdot on what the heck is going on with Mozilla? In particular: M14 was released while still listing something like 500 bugs in Bugzilla. What happened? Why? Bugzilla is still full of bugs in the M1? department, are these being addressed actively, or has all the recent effort gone into a different branch? Speaking of branching, how many different branches are there right now? And who is working on each?
Hence, "by clicking OK you agree" would fall back to "by using this software you agree," and the latter's perfectly fine, since plenty of reverse engineering can be done without ever running a piece of software.
Unfortunately, you'll just see them rewrite the EULA's to be more broad. It's already happening. Check out Loki's Quake III Arena EULA in the back of the manual and see what I mean.
I consider this on-topic since this story is about censorship and stuff... anyways, I didn't realize this until I heard it mentioned recently on the radio... John McCain is the guy who authored the CDA!
CDA2 to be exact. Details are available at http://www.aclu.org/news/w012698d.html.
CDA2, upon brief review, seemed to demand filters be put in pace in schools, or they lose school discounts. It attacked the issue from the provider side instead of gagging the public. Which is not to say it's any 'better', but it certainly came closer to 'enforceable'.
The premise seems to assume that geeks are the only vendors at the Open Source Bazaar. That's no longer true. Corel has done a hell of a job of improving KDE and Debian in the direction of user-friendliness. This premise is just another tired objection to Open Source that gets spit out every so often by people who either don't know any better, or should know better.
I'm still trying to understand what compels many of you to read Katz's articles and promptly reply with what amounts to nothing more than 'Katz sucks!'. Though they are well written, that doesn't truly improve the content of our discussion, as I don't find 'I rather dislike Katz and believe he's being sensationalist in this article' to be much better. Let's face facts, kids. You have the power to block him out of you dislike him. You further have the power to avoid commenting if you have nothing original to say. I, however, don't have the option of filtering out 'Katz sucks' replies that manage to make their way up to 5 without any real compelling content. Can we please try to raise the bar on the quality of discourse around here, or is that asking too much?
Yes, many people think he's sensationalist, wrong, bigoted, irresponsible, etc. etc. etc. In the absence of a Frequently Posted Comments List we'll have to rely on commentators and moderators to think, if only for a moment, about how to improve the quality of discourse on Slashdot, so we aren't wading through small variations on the standard replies everytime.
This has been a public cry of annoyance with a command Slashdot malady, also known as FPC #27.
This deal has the potential to break Hollywood's grip on what gets seen on TV. How's that, you ask? Read the frickin' article I tell you...
This is not South Park on Shockwave.com. That has been done already. This is a new Parker/Stone series, done in 2-5 minute bursts, created with Flash. Shockwave.com is willing to give these two pretty much total creative control in return for their names with an option to sell.
Something new from Trey and Matt, with a guarantee of more vulgarity than South Park, is a way to pull in thousands if not millions of viewers to Shockwave.com. They can pretty much count on getting everyone who has watched South Park at Shockwave.com to check out the new series. South Park viewers have always been very net savvy. Remember South Park on Realplayer? Hell, a lot of you are probably still watching South Park that way. People who are willing to watch a 'pirate' copy of South Park in grainy Realplayer quality are probably going to be willing to watch this new series at least once.
And what if people keep coming back? Shockwave.com serves up more ads and makes more 'money'. The real cash here comes from Shockwave.com's option to sell the series to Hollywood if it takes off. Hollywood gets a proven series with a quantifiable following. Shockwave gets Hollywood Dollars. Trey and Matt get to swear as much as they want. Win-Win-Win
That said, I understand the need for these disclaimers; if they were actually chasing down minor violators, that would be quite annoying. A better idea is to protect a trademark by specifically allowing it to be used in certain ways, and having the lawyers chase down only the worst abusers.
This has always frustrated me about the legal system: Why is it that in order to get the Bad Guys, we have to make everyone a criminal? From speeding tickets to, apparently, copyright violation, this trend makes all of us guilty of some legal violation.
For me, this is a civil liberties issue. It's easier to pass laws worded to take away rights (like privacy, through wiretaps) from those branded a criminal, than taking away the same rights from everyone. But that's just my perspective on the issue, and now I'm wondering if there's any constitutional or legal precident that's declares such laws 'illegal'.
I know there are good intentions behind almost all of these laws, but I still believe there has to be a better way to accomplish the charitable goals behind the poorly written laws.
Personally, I think this is tasteless to put something like this on Slashdot. I mean, it is bad enough that we bash Microsoft as an entity, but now we have taken to bashing individual employees? Yea, sure, his name was changed, big deal. It just seems profoundly tasteless for a Loki employee to write an article on an incident which amounts to "look how dumb Microsoft employees are". The poor guy, I feel bad for him. Let's hope he doesn't read Slashdot and feel worse about it.
That's it... I've had enough of the/. PC Brigade. The story was funny. Maybe not hilarious, but definitely amusing. Let humor be your guide...
But no, you would rather bitch "If you can't say something nice...". I'm tired of it. Did you say the same thing when you read the one about the cup holder? How about the power outage? Did you send a message to the person who gave it to you whining that it's unfair to pick on the technically incompetent?
This is not victim humor, by my definition. He hasn't been injured in any real way, even if he does read this post. Yes, the story revolves around this guy's decision not to open the file called README. It's a classic newbie mistake but one that amuses. The author wanted us to see the punchline: Microsoft is paying this guy to play games and he can't even do that right. That's funny! But the humor stems from something very mundane and forgivable.
My opinion has always been that anyone who can't appreciate humor in the little things are really missing out. You PC assholes are not only missing out, but you try and drag the rest of us with you, down into that little hell.
Slashdotters get a tale about the Revenge of the Geeks. This last one is the most interesting. We all thought that we were so clever, spotting the real cause of the Columbine Massacre, while all the Media, Middle Americans and Christian Right had missed it. But exactly the same group dynamic was at work. The Christian Right saw teenagers driven to evil by bad music, bad films and bad games. Meanwhile we (yes, that includes me) saw teenagers driven to madness by the social exclusion and everyday violence we suffered at school. The Christian Right argued for more restrictions on films and games, while we argued for more restrictions on jocks and teachers.
I think this attitude misses the point. The most disturbing things in the Hellmouth series was not the thought that administrators might provoke another massacre with their crackdown on geeks and outcasts. I thought that the crackdown in and of itself was brutal. It was everything we experienced as kids, amplified by mob mentality. The desired restrictions on jocks and teachers were one of our solutions to this ongoing problem in American schools. Isn't enough to say that/.-ers as a whole are against the institutionalized system of outcast abuse?
After reading Salon's article, I still could not find solid evidence that constant taunting and abuse didn't push these two sickos over the edge. True, they wanted to kill everybody, not just the jocks... but did anyone stand up for them at any point? Do you think this had absolutely no effect on their perspective? Again, is it wrong for us to want to see the end of the system of outcast abuse just because it wasn't the sole cause of the massacre?
I hope this makes sense to somebody. I'm writing uncaffenated here...
One thing to remember is that Mettler has made a hobby of pissing off people in the Talkbacks on ZDNet. I can remember people fuming about him nine months back, here in the comments section of SlashDot. I've seen a few of his head-firmly-up-his-arse postings, and I refuse to be baited into reading this one.
Slashdot Mirror
At trial, defendants repeated, as if it were a mantra, the refrain that plaintiffs, as they stipulated, have no direct evidence of a specific occasion on which any person decrypted a copyrighted motion picture with DeCSS and transmitted it over the Internet. But that is unpersuasive. Plaintiffs expert expended very little effort to find someone in an IRC chat room who exchanged a compressed, decrypted copy of The Matrix, one of plaintiffs copyrighted motion pictures, for a copy of Sleepless in Seattle.
-Snip-
I'd call this a major weakness in the analysis. Very little effort does not describe the process (and this witness's testimony was under attack because of the methodology used.. the test was actually done by someone familiar with the movie-trading underground, not an 'average consumer') and this swap does not prove that anyone outside the MPAA has ever used DeCSS to pirate a movie. Why is this presented here?
And although the Court does not accept the list, which is hearsay, as proof of the truth of the matters asserted therein, it does note that advertisements for decrypted versions of copyrighted movies first appeared on the Internet in substantial numbers in late 1999, following the posting of DeCSS.
We all suspected this kind of logical analysis would happen, and sadly Kaplan too easily falls into this basic false analysis. Is this the kind of thing that makes for good appeals?
I continue to be amazed by Kaplan's reliance on the content of written words, from the various 'fuck the lawyers' rants on DeCSS mirrors to the articles in the print version of 2600 itself. I wonder just how far the First Amendment (and related case law) should block this kind of consideration. By exercising its 1st amendment right to publish pretty much whatever the hell it wants, it seems that 2600 has earned Kaplan's ire. Pages 15 to 17 of the opinion make mention of some articles, and I'm wondering how this is relevant if he's only exercising his rights. In court, Goldstein put these articles into context, but that's conspicuously absent here. Without any evidence to the contrary presented, how can Kaplan get away with passing this kind of judgement on 2600's content?
Just curious.
While many of us will claim to have some use for this (like one big 'ol emacs window, or lots of xterms), it's quite clear that we are nowhere near ready for this kind of resolution. This got me thinking about MacOS X again and how a pdf-like display layer could really help this technology take off, by providing a fully scalable desktop experience. Of course, the current implementation of MacOS X may be ill-suited for this kind of thing, but they would certainly have an easier time adapting.
So the question to ponder is 'how are we planning for the display technologies of the future?', while glancing over your shoulder to see Roentgen catching up fast.
This has reminded me of your cheap garage CD, where the band (if memory serves) set a deliberately low price on it. Did that, in any way, make your product a commodity? Was that okay because it was mostly covers, or because you wanted to give back to the fans?
Basic Economics: Your demand curve is based on the quantity demanded at a given price. At a given price, everyone who was willing to pay the price or more will get units. The lower the price, the more units are sold. Now, as has been pointed out previously, the price set for CD's is way more than it needs to be, given costs. Someone arbitrarily decided that $16 should be the price and suddenly The Industry captures monopoly profits on CD's.
Here's the resulting question: Have you ever considered the possibility that many Napster users are at the low price end of the curve, and while they're not willing to pay the arbitrarily high price for a CD, they are willing to take a copy for free?
In such a scenario, which is just a simple application of basic economics, Metallica isn't losing anything, economically speaking. These people wouldn't pay for CD's anyway (and all costs have been absorbed by the users). Have you ever considered this fact, and how much of an effect has it had on you?
"We don't have to be mean. 'Cause, remember, no matter where you go..... there you are."
--Buckaroo Banzai
Yes, we all know Jon is about as clued up on the music scene as BillG is on Linux Kernel programming or a YRO poster is on the law (Sorry )...
But play nice. Just because he gets some facts wrong doesn't invalidate his point.
Yo Quiero Juiz Dredd en Espanol! Soy la ley!
(I can't believe I just said that.)
(And I really can't believe I trusted Babelfish to translate it for me...)
Don't know if anything worthwhile was said in the thread, but the duplicate of this story is here.
/. crew could both be a little more aware of each others' postings AND admit to their mistakes whenever they do mess up (and perhaps express a desire to avoid doing it again, but this would purely be PR to me).
I do think that the
The same thing will also never come true for my other wish, that of mtv bring back all of it's 80's content to be shown late nights when they dont have anything on and could actually score some ad cash from all of us 'kids' remebering our "big hair" phase.
At the very least, bring back Remote Control! This was 70's nostalgia before it was cool (even back then, I loathed it. Freakin' Brady Channel...). You figure MTV would try this again in the wake of Millionare (why not? Everyone else is doing it). I guess it's because it doesn't appeal to 15 year old girls...
Maybe Comedy Central could revive this next to Win Ben Stein's Money. =)
I didn't say failure to re-create. Then again, I just wasn't specific at all... my bad. What I was referring to is the habit of many to pass judgement before it was even tried.
Writing in the journal Physica C, Dr Yevgeny Podkletnov claimed that a spinning, superconducting disc lost some of its weight. And, in an unpublished paper on the weak gravitation shielding properties of a superconductor, he argued that such a disc lost as much as 2% of its weight.
This is the actual reference I wanted in my earlier post. The man claimed something Einstein said was impossible and was instantly branded an idiot and/or a crackpot. "He must have miscalculated!" and "He must have measured something else!" were two of the kindest responses. His employer (a University, I believe) fired him. Now you know why he never published that paper: he lost the support he needed, including the lab where the experiment took place (if my memory serves). He knew that he was claiming fantastic and he was willing to bet his reputation on being right. He lost big and this article indicates that we can't be sure he wasn't.
I'm not claiming either one was right, what I am claiming is that when you have your heads buried so far under the sand, you're bound to miss out on something important. Dismissing the fantastic as trickery or mistakes is one hole I wish the greater "scientific community" would avoid.
Your point is good and you deserve your positive moderation, but...
/. Now, I'm not an expert on the subject but I do know that the others are either outright scams or were heard out. Wilhelm Reich never really had his day. In fact, the U.S. Government seized his books and papers and burned them back in 1957. Clearly a First Amendment issue, which is a favorite topic around here.
failures and cranks: phrenology, mediums as masters of the fourth dimension, any number of numerological schemes, orgone energy
Ouch. Orgone energy does not, IMHO, deserve to be put in that lineup. Especially here on
Granted, this is a poor argument for orgone energy, but it is my understanding that very few have recreated Reich's experiments before declaring him a crank or a failure. Peer review wasn't possible because nobody would take the time to hear him out. The same thing has happened in gravity research in the past (the exact reference eludes me) and we have adequate reason be concerned that the scientific community may be too ready to cry 'crank'.
For more information (including an interesting discussion about arguments), read this excerpt from Wilhelm Reich in Hell by Robert Anton Wilson
Okay, can someone with real knowledge of the situation brief Slashdot on what the heck is going on with Mozilla? In particular:
M14 was released while still listing something like 500 bugs in Bugzilla. What happened? Why?
Bugzilla is still full of bugs in the M1? department, are these being addressed actively, or has all the recent effort gone into a different branch?
Speaking of branching, how many different branches are there right now? And who is working on each?
This is the kind of PR I would most appreciate.
Hence, "by clicking OK you agree" would fall back to "by using this software you agree," and the latter's perfectly fine, since plenty of reverse engineering can be done without ever running a piece of software.
Unfortunately, you'll just see them rewrite the EULA's to be more broad. It's already happening. Check out Loki's Quake III Arena EULA in the back of the manual and see what I mean.
Here's what it's going to take to rid myself of the foul taste the Gibson episodes of X-Files left in my mouth...
Neal Stephenson writing an episode for the (announced and upcoming) Lone Gunman series.
Anyone else think this would rock?
Disclaimer: I have not heard anything indicating that this will happen. This is just what I want to see. Desperately.
I consider this on-topic since this story is about censorship and stuff... anyways, I didn't realize this until I heard it mentioned recently on the radio... John McCain is the guy who authored the CDA!
CDA2 to be exact. Details are available at http://www.aclu.org/news/w012698d.html.
CDA2, upon brief review, seemed to demand filters be put in pace in schools, or they lose school discounts. It attacked the issue from the provider side instead of gagging the public. Which is not to say it's any 'better', but it certainly came closer to 'enforceable'.
The premise seems to assume that geeks are the only vendors at the Open Source Bazaar. That's no longer true. Corel has done a hell of a job of improving KDE and Debian in the direction of user-friendliness. This premise is just another tired objection to Open Source that gets spit out every so often by people who either don't know any better, or should know better.
I'm still trying to understand what compels many of you to read Katz's articles and promptly reply with what amounts to nothing more than 'Katz sucks!'. Though they are well written, that doesn't truly improve the content of our discussion, as I don't find 'I rather dislike Katz and believe he's being sensationalist in this article' to be much better. Let's face facts, kids. You have the power to block him out of you dislike him. You further have the power to avoid commenting if you have nothing original to say. I, however, don't have the option of filtering out 'Katz sucks' replies that manage to make their way up to 5 without any real compelling content. Can we please try to raise the bar on the quality of discourse around here, or is that asking too much?
Yes, many people think he's sensationalist, wrong, bigoted, irresponsible, etc. etc. etc. In the absence of a Frequently Posted Comments List we'll have to rely on commentators and moderators to think, if only for a moment, about how to improve the quality of discourse on Slashdot, so we aren't wading through small variations on the standard replies everytime.
This has been a public cry of annoyance with a command Slashdot malady, also known as FPC #27.
This deal has the potential to break Hollywood's grip on what gets seen on TV. How's that, you ask? Read the frickin' article I tell you...
This is not South Park on Shockwave.com. That has been done already. This is a new Parker/Stone series, done in 2-5 minute bursts, created with Flash. Shockwave.com is willing to give these two pretty much total creative control in return for their names with an option to sell.
Something new from Trey and Matt, with a guarantee of more vulgarity than South Park, is a way to pull in thousands if not millions of viewers to Shockwave.com. They can pretty much count on getting everyone who has watched South Park at Shockwave.com to check out the new series. South Park viewers have always been very net savvy. Remember South Park on Realplayer? Hell, a lot of you are probably still watching South Park that way. People who are willing to watch a 'pirate' copy of South Park in grainy Realplayer quality are probably going to be willing to watch this new series at least once.
And what if people keep coming back? Shockwave.com serves up more ads and makes more 'money'. The real cash here comes from Shockwave.com's option to sell the series to Hollywood if it takes off. Hollywood gets a proven series with a quantifiable following. Shockwave gets Hollywood Dollars. Trey and Matt get to swear as much as they want. Win-Win-Win
This has always frustrated me about the legal system: Why is it that in order to get the Bad Guys, we have to make everyone a criminal? From speeding tickets to, apparently, copyright violation, this trend makes all of us guilty of some legal violation.
For me, this is a civil liberties issue. It's easier to pass laws worded to take away rights (like privacy, through wiretaps) from those branded a criminal, than taking away the same rights from everyone. But that's just my perspective on the issue, and now I'm wondering if there's any constitutional or legal precident that's declares such laws 'illegal'.
I know there are good intentions behind almost all of these laws, but I still believe there has to be a better way to accomplish the charitable goals behind the poorly written laws.
That's it... I've had enough of the /. PC Brigade. The story was funny. Maybe not hilarious, but definitely amusing. Let humor be your guide...
But no, you would rather bitch "If you can't say something nice...". I'm tired of it. Did you say the same thing when you read the one about the cup holder? How about the power outage? Did you send a message to the person who gave it to you whining that it's unfair to pick on the technically incompetent?
This is not victim humor, by my definition. He hasn't been injured in any real way, even if he does read this post. Yes, the story revolves around this guy's decision not to open the file called README. It's a classic newbie mistake but one that amuses. The author wanted us to see the punchline: Microsoft is paying this guy to play games and he can't even do that right. That's funny! But the humor stems from something very mundane and forgivable.
My opinion has always been that anyone who can't appreciate humor in the little things are really missing out. You PC assholes are not only missing out, but you try and drag the rest of us with you, down into that little hell.
I think this attitude misses the point. The most disturbing things in the Hellmouth series was not the thought that administrators might provoke another massacre with their crackdown on geeks and outcasts. I thought that the crackdown in and of itself was brutal. It was everything we experienced as kids, amplified by mob mentality. The desired restrictions on jocks and teachers were one of our solutions to this ongoing problem in American schools. Isn't enough to say that /.-ers as a whole are against the institutionalized system of outcast abuse?
After reading Salon's article, I still could not find solid evidence that constant taunting and abuse didn't push these two sickos over the edge. True, they wanted to kill everybody, not just the jocks... but did anyone stand up for them at any point? Do you think this had absolutely no effect on their perspective? Again, is it wrong for us to want to see the end of the system of outcast abuse just because it wasn't the sole cause of the massacre?
I hope this makes sense to somebody. I'm writing uncaffenated here...
Only 75 copies? Excuse me, but could it really cost over $2,625,000 to do the Linux port? If not, that's a 3 month ROI.
And isn't anyone else comforted by the idea that there are 75 more CPUs out there being used for really high end stuff on Linux?
One thing to remember is that Mettler has made a hobby of pissing off people in the Talkbacks on ZDNet. I can remember people fuming about him nine months back, here in the comments section of SlashDot. I've seen a few of his head-firmly-up-his-arse postings, and I refuse to be baited into reading this one.