This case highlights a huge difference between the corporate world and the open-source world.
If you write software for the sake of writing software, as is generally the case with Open-Source, then it's perfectly alright for the emphasis to be on software quality. You're not really on a deadline - no one expects you to cough up code quickly and if it breaks, well, it will get fixed, but anyone bitching about it - they got what they paid for.
If you write for consumers, as in the corporate world, then the emphasis has to be on speed and getting the code out there. Otherwise you lose potential customers and mindshare, all of which is vitally important to a company. If it's broken, you fix the stuff that people are bitching about the most because if you don't it could really screw you in the short or long run through bad reputation and lost sales.
This dichotomy to be addressed by both sides when corps start working with Open Source projects. When one side can't be rushed and the other side is all about rushing, you need an arbitration procedure.
This action brings up the question: does this put LinuxWorld in the same category as every other partisan hack? While O'Gara's latest column appears to have been over the line (the world will never be able to judge after this), is full removal of all her material necessary?
From this, I gather that claims of censorship only apply when it's someone you agree with.
So, all those Kurds who died were what, victims of mass hysteria? The scuds he lobbed at Israel were filled with what, popcorn?
Those incidents occurred prior to or during the 1991 action. There was no proof that he tried to reconstitute the development programs after that. Here's the report.
There were a lot of trucks leaving town before we got there; it's not too far a leap to speculate what they contained.
Speculation is not proof, and certainly not a justification for war.
As I said, he's a horrible man, and certainly deserves to be put on trial for his crimes against his own people. But, there are better ways of handling that process than the one we undertook, which decimated an entire country and left us with a bill in lives and money that we can ill afford.
Ultimately, my belief is that the ends do not justify the means.
Now, for your extraneous flibbering regarding WMD. You can try to rewrite history there, too, but some of us remember that Saddam did, indeed, have WMD, which he freely used against his own people (e.g., the Kurds in northern Iraq), and against neighbors (e.g., scud missles with chemical warheads lobbed into Isreal). Further, WMD were found by the troops after they entered Iraq, namely a large cache of chemical rockets. So, pretending that he did NOT have WMD is simply ridiculous, and just another example of attempts to rewrite history.
The latest reports from the United States government state that the balance of probability is that Saddam most likely did not have WMD's in the sense of NBC weapons at the time we invaded in 2002 and that the majority of those weapons were destroyed or degraded by the beginning the 1991 war.
Our investigators could not find conclusive evidence that he had them. He may have had them at one time, quite a while ago, but nothing as of recently (past 10 years). That is not to say that he didn't wish to obtain them, just that he hasn't as of yet.
He may be a horrible man, but he is innocent of the WMD charges until proven guilty. The only ones trying to rewrite history are the ones who claim that he possessed WMDs as unequivocal justification for going to war this time around.
Was the war effective? Probably - more time is needed to determine that. Was the war justified? Given that our administration didn't mention "freedom and democracy" in any meaningful way until it was pretty clear that other rationales had fallen through, no.
In the end, it doesn't matter if Bush or anyone in the administration lied or not - this is a political issue now, the Republicans have the upper hand, and people have short memories.
Me? I think we screwed up and someone needs to answer for it. But wish in one hand, crap in the other and see which one fills up first.
This all comes down to the nature of crime and punishment.
This GPS tracking system sets up a system in which punishment for a given crime never ends and thus an offender has no way to repay their crimes against society.
If this is the case, then why let them go in the first place? Why not just execute them and get it over with? The thing is, punishment ends. This doesn't. It ceases being punishment and become retribution. Perhaps not eye-for-an-eye retribution, but retribution all the same.
And it is the first step down a slippery slope, because there is nothing that stops this from being used for other or lesser crimes. We are a long way from tagging jaywalkers, but any step in that direction is not a good thing.
And lest you think I want offenders to get off scot-free, that is most certainly not the case. Punishment should be fair and humane, for any offense, but it should end at some point. Otherwise, we are unable to judge the effectiveness of a given punishment over the long term and make changes accordingly.
As a RIAA hater, I reject your organizations rejection of his acception of that other guys rejection of the US rejection of the Canadian rejection of the lame-ass DMCA.
I try to convince people to switch because sometimes it's better software, or because it's more secure. This usually applies to Firefox and Thunderbird. It has to be something I use on a daily basis and it has to be at least as good as or better than the commercial alternatives in almost every way before I go trying to sell it to someone else. There have to be good, practical reasons to switch.
I certainly don't try to convince them on the basis of social policy or politics, because those are comparable to religion in argument-starting ability. I also have my own views which do not always coincide with the various OS/FS groups and so I do not attempt to take on their rationales for using various things.
All of which explains why I haven't even tried to get my mom to switch over to Linux. It's not worth the fight. On the other hand, she is willing to switch to OS X, which has it's problems, but fewer issues than Windows.
is to go after the people who are advertising through spammers. If you hold those businesses responsible for the spam, then they will stop seeing spam as a reasonable option.
There are a couple of foreseeable problems: 1. Someone is always going to hire a spammer (viagra merchants, member-enlargment firms, etc.). The problem won't ever completely go away. 2. It could be used as a means of forcing competition out of business (eg., Microsoft hires a spammer to create fake Linspire spam or vice-versa). 3. Pure accidents - some idiot clicks the wrong button in their mailing software and the the internal corporate viagra offer goes out to all the customers on the lawn-mower sales list. 4. Someone just decides to be an a-hole about things.
Of the problems listed above, #1 and #3 already exist. #2 and #4 are hypotheticals, but could actually happen.
The only thing we haven't done in the entire process of blocking spam, is to hold the original advertisers responsible. Instead, we go after the spammers, ignoring the fact that they have to get their money from somewhere.
individual persons would have the right to always put profit first within the law
We already have that right. One does not have to consider the social costs when making a decision if one does not wish to.
without it possibly adversely affecting legal penalties down the road
If one is within the law, then those legal issues do not arise; at least not in a prosecutable sense (one can still get sued for all kinds of stuff).
Codes of ethics are not legally binding outside of a given industry, unless one has signed a contract to follow them.
Another alternative is to call for strengthening it, until it completely locks up commerce. Basically, make it illegal to copy anything for any reason, or to break encryption for any reason.
The Word.doc format is a de facto standard, in that it is commonly requested and accepted. People who write word processors or other document processor probably have to deal with it in some manner, even if to just dismiss or ignore.
It is not, however, a de jure standard, in that it has not been approved by one of the commonly accepted standards bodies (eg., ISO).
When you get down to it, the only standards that matter are the ones that that the targeted body accepts, either through formal or traditional means. The red/yellow/green lights at intersections only work because society accepts that those lights have some meaning. We have ratified those meanings through tradition and law, and so now they are a standard (presumably worldwide, but definitely in the US).
But when you get right down to it, they're just colored lights.
But you really haven't solved the problem of complexity by using Citrix. You've added another layer, plus another layer or two of cost in time and support.
Essentially, you're not saving anything.
You don't understand amateur photography.
You got me there - I'm not a photographer. My work is mainly involved with print design, where we rarely use a photograph as the shooter may have originally intended.
On the the other hand, the comment you quoted was about GimpShop, which probably is sufficient. All of the tricks you mentioned were entirely possible in earlier versions of Photoshop, just not in the way we do them now. In fact, most of the features you mentioned are not necessary, since there are literally millions of ways to achieve the same effects using other methods.
No, it doesn't have all of the features, but it has enough for casual work (actually, it may be overpowered for a lot of people) and it can't do a lot of the print-centered stuff (CMYK) or specialty modes (LAB).
For all but professional designers and artists and the really picky, it is more than sufficient.
It is probably equivalent or better in power and capability than Photopaint, Corel Paint, and a host of other programs that are not free.
This will hopefully remove some of the complaints from users (myself included) about how much the interface sucks.
The problem is that Nimoy isn't that good of an actor.
We'll never know - being typecast doesn't just happen if a person is or isn't a good actor. It affects how casting directors and everyone else in a project sees you.
If an actor gets typecast, it's automatic denial for roles expand their range or demonstrate their talent, simply because no agency or producer will consider them for another role.
Slashdot Mirror
This case highlights a huge difference between the corporate world and the open-source world.
If you write software for the sake of writing software, as is generally the case with Open-Source, then it's perfectly alright for the emphasis to be on software quality. You're not really on a deadline - no one expects you to cough up code quickly and if it breaks, well, it will get fixed, but anyone bitching about it - they got what they paid for.
If you write for consumers, as in the corporate world, then the emphasis has to be on speed and getting the code out there. Otherwise you lose potential customers and mindshare, all of which is vitally important to a company. If it's broken, you fix the stuff that people are bitching about the most because if you don't it could really screw you in the short or long run through bad reputation and lost sales.
This dichotomy to be addressed by both sides when corps start working with Open Source projects. When one side can't be rushed and the other side is all about rushing, you need an arbitration procedure.
So much for "don't be evil".
This action brings up the question: does this put LinuxWorld in the same category as every other partisan hack? While O'Gara's latest column appears to have been over the line (the world will never be able to judge after this), is full removal of all her material necessary?
From this, I gather that claims of censorship only apply when it's someone you agree with.
So, all those Kurds who died were what, victims of mass hysteria? The scuds he lobbed at Israel were filled with what, popcorn? Those incidents occurred prior to or during the 1991 action. There was no proof that he tried to reconstitute the development programs after that. Here's the report. There were a lot of trucks leaving town before we got there; it's not too far a leap to speculate what they contained. Speculation is not proof, and certainly not a justification for war. As I said, he's a horrible man, and certainly deserves to be put on trial for his crimes against his own people. But, there are better ways of handling that process than the one we undertook, which decimated an entire country and left us with a bill in lives and money that we can ill afford. Ultimately, my belief is that the ends do not justify the means.
I gotta call bullshit on this one.
Now, for your extraneous flibbering regarding WMD. You can try to rewrite history there, too, but some of us remember that Saddam did, indeed, have WMD, which he freely used against his own people (e.g., the Kurds in northern Iraq), and against neighbors (e.g., scud missles with chemical warheads lobbed into Isreal). Further, WMD were found by the troops after they entered Iraq, namely a large cache of chemical rockets. So, pretending that he did NOT have WMD is simply ridiculous, and just another example of attempts to rewrite history.
The latest reports from the United States government state that the balance of probability is that Saddam most likely did not have WMD's in the sense of NBC weapons at the time we invaded in 2002 and that the majority of those weapons were destroyed or degraded by the beginning the 1991 war.
Our investigators could not find conclusive evidence that he had them. He may have had them at one time, quite a while ago, but nothing as of recently (past 10 years). That is not to say that he didn't wish to obtain them, just that he hasn't as of yet.
He may be a horrible man, but he is innocent of the WMD charges until proven guilty. The only ones trying to rewrite history are the ones who claim that he possessed WMDs as unequivocal justification for going to war this time around.
Was the war effective? Probably - more time is needed to determine that. Was the war justified? Given that our administration didn't mention "freedom and democracy" in any meaningful way until it was pretty clear that other rationales had fallen through, no.
In the end, it doesn't matter if Bush or anyone in the administration lied or not - this is a political issue now, the Republicans have the upper hand, and people have short memories.
Me? I think we screwed up and someone needs to answer for it. But wish in one hand, crap in the other and see which one fills up first.
They probably won't tell your mom about the porn stash on your computer, so stop worrying.
This all comes down to the nature of crime and punishment.
This GPS tracking system sets up a system in which punishment for a given crime never ends and thus an offender has no way to repay their crimes against society.
If this is the case, then why let them go in the first place? Why not just execute them and get it over with? The thing is, punishment ends. This doesn't. It ceases being punishment and become retribution. Perhaps not eye-for-an-eye retribution, but retribution all the same.
And it is the first step down a slippery slope, because there is nothing that stops this from being used for other or lesser crimes. We are a long way from tagging jaywalkers, but any step in that direction is not a good thing.
And lest you think I want offenders to get off scot-free, that is most certainly not the case. Punishment should be fair and humane, for any offense, but it should end at some point. Otherwise, we are unable to judge the effectiveness of a given punishment over the long term and make changes accordingly.
As a RIAA hater, I reject your organizations rejection of his acception of that other guys rejection of the US rejection of the Canadian rejection of the lame-ass DMCA.
I try to convince people to switch because sometimes it's better software, or because it's more secure. This usually applies to Firefox and Thunderbird. It has to be something I use on a daily basis and it has to be at least as good as or better than the commercial alternatives in almost every way before I go trying to sell it to someone else. There have to be good, practical reasons to switch.
I certainly don't try to convince them on the basis of social policy or politics, because those are comparable to religion in argument-starting ability. I also have my own views which do not always coincide with the various OS/FS groups and so I do not attempt to take on their rationales for using various things.
All of which explains why I haven't even tried to get my mom to switch over to Linux. It's not worth the fight. On the other hand, she is willing to switch to OS X, which has it's problems, but fewer issues than Windows.
In the end, it's all about practicality.
is to go after the people who are advertising through spammers. If you hold those businesses responsible for the spam, then they will stop seeing spam as a reasonable option.
There are a couple of foreseeable problems:
1. Someone is always going to hire a spammer (viagra merchants, member-enlargment firms, etc.). The problem won't ever completely go away.
2. It could be used as a means of forcing competition out of business (eg., Microsoft hires a spammer to create fake Linspire spam or vice-versa).
3. Pure accidents - some idiot clicks the wrong button in their mailing software and the the internal corporate viagra offer goes out to all the customers on the lawn-mower sales list.
4. Someone just decides to be an a-hole about things.
Of the problems listed above, #1 and #3 already exist. #2 and #4 are hypotheticals, but could actually happen.
The only thing we haven't done in the entire process of blocking spam, is to hold the original advertisers responsible. Instead, we go after the spammers, ignoring the fact that they have to get their money from somewhere.
Better quote:
"RMS is a madman. Unfortunately, he's our madman."
individual persons would have the right to always put profit first within the law We already have that right. One does not have to consider the social costs when making a decision if one does not wish to. without it possibly adversely affecting legal penalties down the road If one is within the law, then those legal issues do not arise; at least not in a prosecutable sense (one can still get sued for all kinds of stuff). Codes of ethics are not legally binding outside of a given industry, unless one has signed a contract to follow them.
Another alternative is to call for strengthening it, until it completely locks up commerce. Basically, make it illegal to copy anything for any reason, or to break encryption for any reason.
The Word .doc format is a de facto standard, in that it is commonly requested and accepted. People who write word processors or other document processor probably have to deal with it in some manner, even if to just dismiss or ignore.
It is not, however, a de jure standard, in that it has not been approved by one of the commonly accepted standards bodies (eg., ISO).
When you get down to it, the only standards that matter are the ones that that the targeted body accepts, either through formal or traditional means. The red/yellow/green lights at intersections only work because society accepts that those lights have some meaning. We have ratified those meanings through tradition and law, and so now they are a standard (presumably worldwide, but definitely in the US).
But when you get right down to it, they're just colored lights.
Because open source is "good" and closed source is "evil". It's a religion. Get used to it. Me? I'm all for the buffet.
But you really haven't solved the problem of complexity by using Citrix. You've added another layer, plus another layer or two of cost in time and support. Essentially, you're not saving anything.
You don't understand amateur photography. You got me there - I'm not a photographer. My work is mainly involved with print design, where we rarely use a photograph as the shooter may have originally intended. On the the other hand, the comment you quoted was about GimpShop, which probably is sufficient. All of the tricks you mentioned were entirely possible in earlier versions of Photoshop, just not in the way we do them now. In fact, most of the features you mentioned are not necessary, since there are literally millions of ways to achieve the same effects using other methods.
No, it doesn't have all of the features, but it has enough for casual work (actually, it may be overpowered for a lot of people) and it can't do a lot of the print-centered stuff (CMYK) or specialty modes (LAB). For all but professional designers and artists and the really picky, it is more than sufficient. It is probably equivalent or better in power and capability than Photopaint, Corel Paint, and a host of other programs that are not free. This will hopefully remove some of the complaints from users (myself included) about how much the interface sucks.
The problem is that Nimoy isn't that good of an actor. We'll never know - being typecast doesn't just happen if a person is or isn't a good actor. It affects how casting directors and everyone else in a project sees you. If an actor gets typecast, it's automatic denial for roles expand their range or demonstrate their talent, simply because no agency or producer will consider them for another role.