>people say steal when they get something illegally without paying.
But its annoying as fuck to have those people making actions they dont agree with sound worse than they are just by calling them something else. Copying stuff has already been called theft, piracy, France's madman Sarkozy recently even went so far to call it "murder of the creation" (yes, he actually really did), but none of this actually is enough of a description of whats going on: people just exchange information and ignore the fact that somebody they never heard of from hundreds of miles away declared a "property" on that information. Ignorance of a artificial, disputed, unsupported by wide, wide parts of the public, "censorship right" (you probably wont deny that copyright is for-profit censorship) is in no way comparable to stealing stuff from people. Its only comparable if you want it to be.
>Period.
If you dont want somebody to correct you every time you call copyright infringement theft, then stop it or live with it. Your period aint gonna impress anybody.
It is neither of those. The copyright to mein kampf and other Nazi works fell to the state of bavaria, which by copyright simply doesnt allow any copying of mein kampf and hasnt since the second world war. If you happen to have one of the old copies from the WW2, or you bought it a state that doesnt reckognize avarias copyright on it, youre perfectly fine to do anything you want with it. Of course, there are several anti-nazi-agitation laws and selling the book on ebay may invoke some of those laws, but theres nothing specific to this one book and applies to all nazi memorabilia.
>What right does anyone else have to tell them what they can and cannot load?
Why shouldn't some goverments be able to stop a raging monopolist from leveraging one product (operating system) in order to systematically destroy a market for other products (web browsers, media players, and so on).
>It's not like Microsoft is stopping you from doing it.
They are not stopping their users to use a competing product. They are leveraging their operating system monopoly in order to make the competition in other markets obsolete and thus prevent them from entering the market.
Example: Opera. Opera, a small browser maker is not being able to compete with Microsoft in the browser market, because after bundling IE with windows, for the most majority of people (you know, the ones calling IE "the internet") a browser market ceased to exist.
Laws against monopoly misuse protect the consumers not directly, by chosing whats the best for them, but indirectly by helping the market so the consumers have the ability to choose themselves whats best for them.
And by choosing I didnt mean to "just use what comes preinstalled with windows". IE may not have been bad for the people who used it because it was preinstalled, but it was bad for them in the long term because it destroyed the browser market so badly, that after major competitors vanished, those people _had_ to use the IE, however bad it was, because it was the only game left in town.
>Your statements are without argument; they are simply bald assertions.
So actually are yours. It actually boils down to a clash of two strongly opposing points of view: one is free flow of information, sharing of knowledge, building bridges, learning from each other, and so on. The other is the drm society: laws not based in any way on the common human behaviour but artificially created in order to maximize someones profits, but nonetheless fiercely enforced, informational road blocks and toll booths on every step, non-stop surveillance, mass persecution of "infringers", punishments several orders of magnitude bigger than the alleged "sharing crimes" in order to serve as a deterrence for the masses, and so on.
>from further discussion with you
With fundamental views so opposed, its no wonder you cant find anything to actually "discuss".
>No value can be gained
You seem to be kinda slow on the uptake, so its not your fault.
People have wants and needs and one of their natural wants and needs is to communicate share stuff with other people. Did you never ever shared anything with anybody so you cant even slightly understand how nice sharing might be?
> So is your argument an appeal to tradition?
Sharing is caring. Since the dawn of time, people shared stuff with other people and teached their kids to share stuff with other kids. Sharing is inherent to man. Legislation prohibiting information exchange and severely punishing sharing and caring is contrary to human nature and thus ignored in practice by almost everybody except greedy pricks who try to profit from censorship.
Every regime throughout history had a certain number of douches who were willing to supress their fellow men in order to make a profit. The pricks of our time are lawsuit wielding "rights holdres". Douches like you.
>No, he does not have the right to stop you. The police do.
You arent able to follow a conversation unless its worded the most literal way possible, are you? Do you actually have to simplify and write down every thought twice in order to understand whats meant?
>Thats censorship
According to the common definition.
>I have never seen a
Who cares?
>definition of "censorship" that would back up your claim
I dont have to provide any definition at all to you and your likes. You try to force your prohibition and censorship scheme called "copyright" upon us, you ruin our lives for daring to ignore your law and share stuff we like with people we like, and you will be the first one up the wall when the revolution comes.
>There are plenty of rights violations that can and do occur without profit in mind. This >is one of them.
Since we do not accept a "right to censor" (which is what copyright is) our communication and culture in order for you to make a profit from enforced scarcity, we dont consider sharing (=caring) and communicatin as any kind of violation.
We outnumber you by several orders of magnitude. No amount of greed will empower you to stop us from freely sharing our culture, no matter how tirelessly you legislate around and how strictly you try to enforce your own fucked up censorship laws upon us.
You've lost, but don't despair. You will find out that there is a life beyond legislated scarcity.
>You make a mockery of freedom when you assert that there's no thing as intellectual >property rights.
Bullshit, man!
"intellectual property" exists only through restriction, since, you know, information wants to be free. People all around the world and since the beginning of time tend to share stuff they like. What you call "intellectual property" is a artificial restriction on their sharing habbits. It is like slaves were able to be someones "property" because their freedom was artificially restricted in order to benefit the slave businesses.
Copyright as we know it is a right that only one person has and everybody has _not_. If everybody had it, the "rights holder", even if he would perfectly be able to copy his works, wouldnt care about them since they werent exclusive, and thus not profitable.
> So an author has no right to the words in his book?
He doesnt have the right to stop me from using modern copying technology to copy the book and to give it to someone else. Thats censorship, you know? For-profit censorship.
>Should I be able to duplicate those words and sell them for my own profit? Of course not.
Nobody alleged you should be able to do a business based on someone elses work.
But:
>Should I be able to duplicate those words and give them somebody with no profit in mind?
>But until those policies are changed, it remains true that rights are being violated.
Exactly. It were my rights to use my computer and exchange information with other people that were extinguished in order to artificially create somebody else's so called "copyright" which he never ever would have gained in a free society. Instead, copyright was from the first days enforced undemocratically through govermental force, and only in recent times they started to use this force agains large masses of people in order to "protect" a scarcity-based business model from the people.
>The ends do not justify the means.
Exactly again. It may be true that copyright serves as a incentive for a number of people to create something, but I (and others like me, there are billions of us on this planet) am not willing to give up my natural stuff copying and information exchanging rights in order to faciliate a unnatural business model.
>the usability of Sage blows. It's pretty powerful sure, but when even Maple is easier to >use then you've got a problem
What do you actually mean by "easier to use", regarding a computer algebra system for doing heavy math? Clicketyclicking around without having to actually learn to use it? This easy to use mem may actually have some validity in desktop environments and generall consumer leisure apps, but I'm wondering to actually see such unwillingness to learn from people doing _MATH_, which are, by definition, required to be curious into how things work and not just clicking around and rotating colorful 3D surfaces the whole day.
The Pirate Bay verison of mathematica usually includes protection from copy protection.
>From what I hear, even legitimate owners often have trouble getting past it.
Legitimate owners of ANY copy protection system are generally having orders of magnitude more problems with those systems than users who just get clean copies at their Pirate Bay.
>This just seems like its got so bloated that it will likely be priced beyond the budget of most students.
It isnt aimed at students.
>what's wrong with small tools at low cost which work together?
Wolfram does not want you to work with any competitor's product. He wants you to raise a mortgage in order to be able to pay for his "complete solution".
>which isn't really what we want.
Except it really is what most of us want. Why shouldn't it?
>hence beyond the effective reach of at least German politicians and judges.
Actually, it isn't.
German admins, though knowing that de.wikipedia.org is just a german language wikipedia and not a _german_ wikipedia, still enforce every fucked up ruling that gets out from german courts. By doing this, they effectively force every german speaker on the internet, even people from other german speaking countries, to obey silly german laws and court rulings and censor information which may even be perfectly legal outside Germany. Its like Saudi-Arabian admins from Fuckupistan were allowed to censor the worldwide Arab language wikipedia just because it had "Arab" in its name. German nazi-Admins in their best tradition of "vorauseilender Gehorsam" (hurry-ahead obedience) censoring swiss authors on a server located in the USA, give me a break. Why is such a idiocy even allowed by the Wikimedia central??
What they were actually asked for is to prove that random two people, one of them being a Duke student, communicated over the net and that the content of that communication was file of which the RIAA claims "intellectual ownership". File sharing is, after all, as it's called, peer-2-peer, and is thus private, even if the initial offering negotiation took place in public.
I can't imagine how actually that should work without RIAA having a possibility to monitor _all_ actual communication, not only the offerings, going on on the whole net. In Europe, our oligarchs are already paving the way for such proof by mandating internet providers to log _all_ communication for several months, so that the copy industry has enough time to look through it and find the proofs it needs to fight "theft by communication".
As I always said it, theres just no way to enforce copyright in private communication without a goebbelsian TOTAL SURVEILLANCE of private communication.
>People become obsessed with the scam. They are so desperate to recoup their losses with >the big payout, they descend into a vicious cycle of sending money in hopes the false >promises will turn out to be real.
The emotional trap these people are caught in immediately reminded me of religion. I'm sure many religious people, at least the more intelligent ones, have at some point in their religious lives thought about just getting out of the scam, but found it, as they get older, increasingly difficult to do so because all those years (decades) they've wasted time on religion (sunk costs) may result in momumental losses (life without a meaning) if they would simply give it up at a later point in their lives. So, like Spears, they just decide to stay in the cycle in hopes all they've imagined or being told, one day will turn to be true and that the "big payout" in the heavens will come.
Not even half a lifetime after getting rid of one sowiet union, we're getting another.
I dont know, every time I read how the EU managed to get away another piece of our rights I wonder, why do these oligarchist fucks cling on to calling their bueraucratic regime a "democracy" at all? Why dont they just proclaim a open dictatorship so I can move to Switzerland finally? How did the swiss manage to be the ONLY nation on earth where the people control their politicians and not vice versa and keep defending their rights from being taken away piece by piece like in all their neighbour states?
>You only get 18 months of support for those. >Debian stable will always give you more than that.
First, you can't get official commercial grade support Debian for stable at all. Second, even if you could, the LTS in the average lasts longer than Debian stable usually does.
Not only are Debians unpredictable releases a disadvantage compared to Ubuntu LTS, but even the community grade support you _can_ get for a stable does not last long enough to compare with Canonicals LTS.
Ubuntu beats Debian on polish, predictablity, support quality and suport longevity. Debian should just accept the fact that they've become some kind of a headless living organ donor for Ubuntu, which, although important regarding that single aspect, has little to none purpose of existance on their own merit any more.
Wikipedia, as I had to learn the hard way bevor I gave up working on it, does not actually require real verifiablity of the facts presented, but solely on the verifiability of the sources presented. You are not required to actually show that A+B=C, citing a source arguing that A+B=C often suffices.
So if I can source any kind of bullshit properly, regardles of any truthfullness of the actual content, it gets in. All you can do against it is find a competing source and cram it also in. If you cant, tough luck, the bullshit stays.
> This is also an argument in favor of using open source software.
No it isn't, since simply no OSS application matches the features Skype provides accross platforms.
Please correct me if I'm wrong. Which non obscure open source program can I use myself and recommend to my Windows using friends to be able to do text chat, VoIP and webcam, with a easy to use interface, without the need to compile anything and which is actively developed and provided in standard package repositories and will be available in the years to come?
Skype/MSN/ICQ/YIM (which all are able to do Chat/VoIP/Webcam and have been since the 90's) wouldnt be so prevalent if the OSS world would have _anything_ to match their features, or even be better than the proprietary alternatives. Getting a OSS app like firefox know in the CSS world worked because the app in question did its job well. OSS communication suites simply don't. I know half a dozen people who cant/wont leave windows solely for the fact that practically all the available Linux communication apps are scheiße and all lack at least one important feature practically their current Windows/proprietary communication app provides. Not only that, the fact that all leading Linux apps are scheiße, seriously (at least in my circle of friends) affects the linux uptake on netbooks. Whats the point on putting Linux on a mobile device when practically no app works as its mobile windows conuterpart and when yu practiclly cant do anythin besides browsing with firefox? Browsing becomes boring when you cant talk to anybody about it. Cant the "community" somehow team up together and at least get ONE FREAKING SINGLE MULTI PLATFORM COMMUNICATION APP right?
> Sounds like the FSF got this one right.
Then they should start paying developers to make it possible to communicate with other people. Otherwise nobody but IRC users will bother using free software.
Severe punishment of people who freely share information bites (1) which are deemed a threat to the functioning of the system (2) by the ruling classes is not only happening in China, you know...
So when is the Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC) going to offer tools to circumwent our own capitalistic censorship machine? Or do they count censorship as such only if somebody else does it?
The IOC without doubt would cooperate with western censorship in order to, lets say, prevent the athletes to share so called "intellectual property" freely, which is considered holy in the west. I dont see much difference with them now simply respecting Chinas weird laws protecting their fucked up "communist intellectual values" in order not to be prosecuted by the chinese.
But its "on the iPhone!!!!". Just wait till they start patenting those things as novelties because you can do them "on the iPhone!!!". It worked for a slew of obvious so called "on the internet" inventions.
There will never gonna be only _ONE_ distribution to rule them all like the gleichschaltung nazis always untiringly call for. Let windows converts use distros with CSS, let gpl purists use their gnewsense, let apfel fanboys use whatever apple feeds them with. Diversity is good. Diversity is healthy. Diversity is a sign of free, uncensored evolution.
Forgive him. He just wants you to buy overpriced hardware from a company/cult he deeply worships (and jacks off to), to make really really sure it wont never ever die. Its just like a scientologist tries to sell you Dianetics as a solution to all your problems, no matter what problem you actually have. here, at Slashdot, the equivalent of a Dianetics book seems to be "Get a Mac".
Slashdot Mirror
>people say steal when they get something illegally without paying.
But its annoying as fuck to have those people making actions they dont agree with sound worse than they are just by calling them something else. Copying stuff has already been called theft, piracy, France's madman Sarkozy recently even went so far to call it "murder of the creation" (yes, he actually really did), but none of this actually is enough of a description of whats going on: people just exchange information and ignore the fact that somebody they never heard of from hundreds of miles away declared a "property" on that information. Ignorance of a artificial, disputed, unsupported by wide, wide parts of the public, "censorship right" (you probably wont deny that copyright is for-profit censorship) is in no way comparable to stealing stuff from people. Its only comparable if you want it to be.
>Period.
If you dont want somebody to correct you every time you call copyright infringement theft, then stop it or live with it. Your period aint gonna impress anybody.
It is neither of those. The copyright to mein kampf and other Nazi works fell to the state of bavaria, which by copyright simply doesnt allow any copying of mein kampf and hasnt since the second world war. If you happen to have one of the old copies from the WW2, or you bought it a state that doesnt reckognize avarias copyright on it, youre perfectly fine to do anything you want with it. Of course, there are several anti-nazi-agitation laws and selling the book on ebay may invoke some of those laws, but theres nothing specific to this one book and applies to all nazi memorabilia.
>What right does anyone else have to tell them what they can and cannot load?
Why shouldn't some goverments be able to stop a raging monopolist from leveraging one product (operating system) in order to systematically destroy a market for other products (web browsers, media players, and so on).
>It's not like Microsoft is stopping you from doing it.
They are not stopping their users to use a competing product. They are leveraging their operating system monopoly in order to make the competition in other markets obsolete and thus prevent them from entering the market.
Example: Opera. Opera, a small browser maker is not being able to compete with Microsoft in the browser market, because after bundling IE with windows, for the most majority of people (you know, the ones calling IE "the internet") a browser market ceased to exist.
Laws against monopoly misuse protect the consumers not directly, by chosing whats the best for them, but indirectly by helping the market so the consumers have the ability to choose themselves whats best for them.
And by choosing I didnt mean to "just use what comes preinstalled with windows". IE may not have been bad for the people who used it because it was preinstalled, but it was bad for them in the long term because it destroyed the browser market so badly, that after major competitors vanished, those people _had_ to use the IE, however bad it was, because it was the only game left in town.
>Your statements are without argument; they are simply bald assertions.
So actually are yours. It actually boils down to a clash of two strongly opposing points of view: one is free flow of information, sharing of knowledge, building bridges, learning from each other, and so on. The other is the drm society: laws not based in any way on the common human behaviour but artificially created in order to maximize someones profits, but nonetheless fiercely enforced, informational road blocks and toll booths on every step, non-stop surveillance, mass persecution of "infringers", punishments several orders of magnitude bigger than the alleged "sharing crimes" in order to serve as a deterrence for the masses, and so on.
>from further discussion with you
With fundamental views so opposed, its no wonder you cant find anything to actually "discuss".
>No value can be gained
You seem to be kinda slow on the uptake, so its not your fault.
> Information has no wants or needs.
People have wants and needs and one of their natural wants and needs is to communicate share stuff with other people. Did you never ever shared anything with anybody so you cant even slightly understand how nice sharing might be?
> So is your argument an appeal to tradition?
Sharing is caring. Since the dawn of time, people shared stuff with other people and teached their kids to share stuff with other kids. Sharing is inherent to man. Legislation prohibiting information exchange and severely punishing sharing and caring is contrary to human nature and thus ignored in practice by almost everybody except greedy pricks who try to profit from censorship.
Every regime throughout history had a certain number of douches who were willing to supress their fellow men in order to make a profit. The pricks of our time are lawsuit wielding "rights holdres". Douches like you.
>No, he does not have the right to stop you. The police do.
You arent able to follow a conversation unless its worded the most literal way possible, are you? Do you actually have to simplify and write down every thought twice in order to understand whats meant?
>Thats censorship
According to the common definition.
>I have never seen a
Who cares?
>definition of "censorship" that would back up your claim
I dont have to provide any definition at all to you and your likes. You try to force your prohibition and censorship scheme called "copyright" upon us, you ruin our lives for daring to ignore your law and share stuff we like with people we like, and you will be the first one up the wall when the revolution comes.
>There are plenty of rights violations that can and do occur without profit in mind. This
>is one of them.
Since we do not accept a "right to censor" (which is what copyright is) our communication and culture in order for you to make a profit from enforced scarcity, we dont consider sharing (=caring) and communicatin as any kind of violation.
We outnumber you by several orders of magnitude. No amount of greed will empower you to stop us from freely sharing our culture, no matter how tirelessly you legislate around and how strictly you try to enforce your own fucked up censorship laws upon us.
You've lost, but don't despair. You will find out that there is a life beyond legislated scarcity.
Have a nice day.
>You make a mockery of freedom when you assert that there's no thing as intellectual
>property rights.
Bullshit, man!
"intellectual property" exists only through restriction, since, you know, information wants to be free. People all around the world and since the beginning of time tend to share stuff they like. What you call "intellectual property" is a artificial restriction on their sharing habbits. It is like slaves were able to be someones "property" because their freedom was artificially restricted in order to benefit the slave businesses.
Copyright as we know it is a right that only one person has and everybody has _not_. If everybody had it, the "rights holder", even if he would perfectly be able to copy his works, wouldnt care about them since they werent exclusive, and thus not profitable.
> So an author has no right to the words in his book?
He doesnt have the right to stop me from using modern copying technology to copy the book and to give it to someone else. Thats censorship, you know? For-profit censorship.
>Should I be able to duplicate those words and sell them for my own profit? Of course not.
Nobody alleged you should be able to do a business based on someone elses work.
But:
>Should I be able to duplicate those words and give them somebody with no profit in mind?
Absolutely.
>But until those policies are changed, it remains true that rights are being violated.
Exactly. It were my rights to use my computer and exchange information with other people that were extinguished in order to artificially create somebody else's so called "copyright" which he never ever would have gained in a free society. Instead, copyright was from the first days enforced undemocratically through govermental force, and only in recent times they started to use this force agains large masses of people in order to "protect" a scarcity-based business model from the people.
>The ends do not justify the means.
Exactly again. It may be true that copyright serves as a incentive for a number of people to create something, but I (and others like me, there are billions of us on this planet) am not willing to give up my natural stuff copying and information exchanging rights in order to faciliate a unnatural business model.
>the usability of Sage blows. It's pretty powerful sure, but when even Maple is easier to
>use then you've got a problem
What do you actually mean by "easier to use", regarding a computer algebra system for doing heavy math? Clicketyclicking around without having to actually learn to use it? This easy to use mem may actually have some validity in desktop environments and generall consumer leisure apps, but I'm wondering to actually see such unwillingness to learn from people doing _MATH_, which are, by definition, required to be curious into how things work and not just clicking around and rotating colorful 3D surfaces the whole day.
>The amount of skill and programming know how to make a program like Mathematica is amazing.
You mean, as amazing as the amount of skill and know how required for practically every large scale application?
>I would love to see the code on how they do things.
You can any time start looking at and learning from completely free systems like GNU Octave, Sage or SciLab.
>That would be nice,
It is.
>but doesn't solve the problem
It will.
>of Mathemitca's notorious copy protection.
The Pirate Bay verison of mathematica usually includes protection from copy protection.
>From what I hear, even legitimate owners often have trouble getting past it.
Legitimate owners of ANY copy protection system are generally having orders of magnitude more problems with those systems than users who just get clean copies at their Pirate Bay.
>This just seems like its got so bloated that it will likely be priced beyond the budget of most students.
It isnt aimed at students.
>what's wrong with small tools at low cost which work together?
Wolfram does not want you to work with any competitor's product. He wants you to raise a mortgage in order to be able to pay for his "complete solution".
>which isn't really what we want.
Except it really is what most of us want. Why shouldn't it?
A slashvertisment suggestion for tomorrow:
"The Pirate Bay also Releases Mathematica 7"
>hence beyond the effective reach of at least German politicians and judges.
Actually, it isn't.
German admins, though knowing that de.wikipedia.org is just a german language wikipedia and not a _german_ wikipedia, still enforce every fucked up ruling that gets out from german courts. By doing this, they effectively force every german speaker on the internet, even people from other german speaking countries, to obey silly german laws and court rulings and censor information which may even be perfectly legal outside Germany. Its like Saudi-Arabian admins from Fuckupistan were allowed to censor the worldwide Arab language wikipedia just because it had "Arab" in its name. German nazi-Admins in their best tradition of "vorauseilender Gehorsam" (hurry-ahead obedience) censoring swiss authors on a server located in the USA, give me a break. Why is such a idiocy even allowed by the Wikimedia central??
What they were actually asked for is to prove that random two people, one of them being a Duke student, communicated over the net and that the content of that communication was file of which the RIAA claims "intellectual ownership". File sharing is, after all, as it's called, peer-2-peer, and is thus private, even if the initial offering negotiation took place in public.
I can't imagine how actually that should work without RIAA having a possibility to monitor _all_ actual communication, not only the offerings, going on on the whole net. In Europe, our oligarchs are already paving the way for such proof by mandating internet providers to log _all_ communication for several months, so that the copy industry has enough time to look through it and find the proofs it needs to fight "theft by communication".
As I always said it, theres just no way to enforce copyright in private communication without a goebbelsian TOTAL SURVEILLANCE of private communication.
>People become obsessed with the scam. They are so desperate to recoup their losses with
>the big payout, they descend into a vicious cycle of sending money in hopes the false
>promises will turn out to be real.
The emotional trap these people are caught in immediately reminded me of religion. I'm sure many religious people, at least the more intelligent ones, have at some point in their religious lives thought about just getting out of the scam, but found it, as they get older, increasingly difficult to do so because all those years (decades) they've wasted time on religion (sunk costs) may result in momumental losses (life without a meaning) if they would simply give it up at a later point in their lives. So, like Spears, they just decide to stay in the cycle in hopes all they've imagined or being told, one day will turn to be true and that the "big payout" in the heavens will come.
Not even half a lifetime after getting rid of one sowiet union, we're getting another.
I dont know, every time I read how the EU managed to get away another piece of our rights I wonder, why do these oligarchist fucks cling on to calling their bueraucratic regime a "democracy" at all? Why dont they just proclaim a open dictatorship so I can move to Switzerland finally? How did the swiss manage to be the ONLY nation on earth where the people control their politicians and not vice versa and keep defending their rights from being taken away piece by piece like in all their neighbour states?
>You only get 18 months of support for those.
>Debian stable will always give you more than that.
First, you can't get official commercial grade support Debian for stable at all. Second, even if you could, the LTS in the average lasts longer than Debian stable usually does.
Not only are Debians unpredictable releases a disadvantage compared to Ubuntu LTS, but even the community grade support you _can_ get for a stable does not last long enough to compare with Canonicals LTS.
Ubuntu beats Debian on polish, predictablity, support quality and suport longevity. Debian should just accept the fact that they've become some kind of a headless living organ donor for Ubuntu, which, although important regarding that single aspect, has little to none purpose of existance on their own merit any more.
I kinda doubt Linux will be supported.
> The apps are meant to be an extension to locally installed
> instances of the next version of Microsoft Office,
How its then supposed to run on Linux at all?
Wikipedia, as I had to learn the hard way bevor I gave up working on it, does not actually require real verifiablity of the facts presented, but solely on the verifiability of the sources presented. You are not required to actually show that A+B=C, citing a source arguing that A+B=C often suffices.
So if I can source any kind of bullshit properly, regardles of any truthfullness of the actual content, it gets in. All you can do against it is find a competing source and cram it also in. If you cant, tough luck, the bullshit stays.
> This is also an argument in favor of using open source software.
No it isn't, since simply no OSS application matches the features Skype provides accross platforms.
Please correct me if I'm wrong. Which non obscure open source program can I use myself and recommend to my Windows using friends to be able to do text chat, VoIP and webcam, with a easy to use interface, without the need to compile anything and which is actively developed and provided in standard package repositories and will be available in the years to come?
Skype/MSN/ICQ/YIM (which all are able to do Chat/VoIP/Webcam and have been since the 90's) wouldnt be so prevalent if the OSS world would have _anything_ to match their features, or even be better than the proprietary alternatives. Getting a OSS app like firefox know in the CSS world worked because the app in question did its job well. OSS communication suites simply don't. I know half a dozen people who cant/wont leave windows solely for the fact that practically all the available Linux communication apps are scheiße and all lack at least one important feature practically their current Windows/proprietary communication app provides. Not only that, the fact that all leading Linux apps are scheiße, seriously (at least in my circle of friends) affects the linux uptake on netbooks. Whats the point on putting Linux on a mobile device when practically no app works as its mobile windows conuterpart and when yu practiclly cant do anythin besides browsing with firefox? Browsing becomes boring when you cant talk to anybody about it. Cant the "community" somehow team up together and at least get ONE FREAKING SINGLE MULTI PLATFORM COMMUNICATION APP right?
> Sounds like the FSF got this one right.
Then they should start paying developers to make it possible to communicate with other people. Otherwise nobody but IRC users will bother using free software.
Severe punishment of people who freely share information bites (1) which are deemed a threat to the functioning of the system (2) by the ruling classes is not only happening in China, you know...
So when is the Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC) going to offer tools to circumwent our own capitalistic censorship machine? Or do they count censorship as such only if somebody else does it?
(1) aka "files"
(2) aka "intellectual property"
The IOC without doubt would cooperate with western censorship in order to, lets say, prevent the athletes to share so called "intellectual property" freely, which is considered holy in the west. I dont see much difference with them now simply respecting Chinas weird laws protecting their fucked up "communist intellectual values" in order not to be prosecuted by the chinese.
But its "on the iPhone!!!!". Just wait till they start patenting those things as novelties because you can do them "on the iPhone!!!". It worked for a slew of obvious so called "on the internet" inventions.
There will never gonna be only _ONE_ distribution to rule them all like the gleichschaltung nazis always untiringly call for. Let windows converts use distros with CSS, let gpl purists use their gnewsense, let apfel fanboys use whatever apple feeds them with. Diversity is good. Diversity is healthy. Diversity is a sign of free, uncensored evolution.
>That's the most idiotic thing I've ever heard.
Forgive him. He just wants you to buy overpriced hardware from a company/cult he deeply worships (and jacks off to), to make really really sure it wont never ever die. Its just like a scientologist tries to sell you Dianetics as a solution to all your problems, no matter what problem you actually have. here, at Slashdot, the equivalent of a Dianetics book seems to be "Get a Mac".