I can see the exploit in that already. Corp says 'okay, I've got $500' and you get $250. Then the day of the court, they say 'oh wait, we hired a new lawyer. Now it's $1,000,000.' Good luck finding your lawyer on the day of the court case.
But wait, there's more! Corp X says 'I have $50,000' and you get $25k for court fees up front... You spend them, then have NO money. How are they to get their fees back? People would be suing corporations just to have a party on the money using scam lawyers. (If you somehow think no lawyer would stoop to this... Well, there's no hope for you.)
A corporation is a legal entity just like any citizen. Under your idea, if they sue someone, they have to pay all the court costs up front. (I assume you're including lawyer's fees in this as well.) So if someone sues the corporation, they then have to be rich enough to cover all the court costs themselves.
No, that doesn't work.
I can already hear you saying 'just corporations'... So what about the small ones? It would mean the small companies would be unable to defend their rights, unless they could find an investor to back the court case.
I agree our system isn't fair, but you have to be very, very careful not to unbalance it further towards those with money.
Dangit. Sometimes I type faster than I think. Yes, I knew it was dual. When I'm typing fast, I tend towards duel and have to fix it each time. You'll notice the other time I used it, it was correct.
Yeah, I realize it's possible for smart kids to make friends. It didn't happen to me (or any of the smart kids I knew) until highschool.
I disagree about the mundane work, though. I think it's important for them to realize that not everything will be exciting, and that hard work is a necessary part of being in society, even when it seems rather stupid. Make them do everything the other students do and reward them with extra if they want it.
In fact, with the right program in place, you could do exactly that. All students have the minimum to do, but if they are bored or WANT to learn more, have the extra material available to them. The smart ones will think of it as play-time, the dumb ones will avoid it like the plague, and the average will think of it as a challenge. It would be tricky to implement, as there's no point in just giving them next year's work early, but rather to build on what they are learning that year and give them extra.
Using the spelling words in sentences a year early certainly did me no harm, and the logic puzzles we learned to do in elementary school are still fun to this day. We also did side projects like making a 'film strip' (with markers and blank strip) along with a recorded voiceover for the slides. And I see no reason that everyone couldn't have joined in the projects like the egg drop contest. (Well, except for my entry which got Jello banned from the contest ever after. It apparently stains concrete. The egg survived!)
In short: The answer isn't to offer the smart kids extra, but to offer it to EVERYONE and let them decide whether or not they want to do it. The extras receive no grades and no bonus points... They are merely there to challenge kids who are done with the rest of the stuff for class and want the extra. No parent could possibly argue with that, and you're not treating any child unfairly.
1) If the kid isn't gifted, they won't WANT to be in a harder class. 2) If the kid isn't gifted, they will do extremely poorly in a harder class. 3) If the kid isn't gifted, his friends will tease him unmercifully for being in the harder class. (Gifted kids don't have friends. Everyone teases them anyhow.)
I was in the 'GIFTED' program in elementary school. I learned a lot of things there that I would never have had a chance to learn at that age otherwise, but the class itself wasn't that much harder. What -was- harder was that I also had to do all my regular schoolwork as well. The other teachers singled me out for being in GIFTED, too. For instance, 1 year ahead of everyone else, I had to make sentences from my spelling words. I eventually got so bored with it, I started to make stories from them. And then so bored I used the words -in order- to make stories.
In middle school, they had another program that wasn't nearly as good, and a year after I left elem. school, they cancelled the GIFTED program, and the middle school one right after I went to high school. Those schools have nothing of the sort now until High School, where their are Advance Placement (AP) classes that are harder, but not really any more interesting, and dual-enrollment (colleges classes at the high school).
Without those classes, I would not have gotten into computers in 4th grade (Apple IIe!) and definitely wouldn't be who I am today. I have to wonder if I'd have the same sense of purpose without it. My sister doesn't have that sense... She only had 1 year of GIFTED and none of the one in middle school, I think. She got straight A's the entire way through school, with the exception of a band teacher who said 'nobody should get all A's' and gave her a B solely for that reason. She duel-enrolled in high school early and completed 4 years of highschool and 2 years of college in only 3 years. (Yes, she graduated both in the same year.) She burnt out on that, but that's another story. She's in college for Pharmacy now and getting straight A's as always.
Without those classes, I'd have been bored stiff. I'd definitely have a lot of time on my hands to get in trouble with.
Yes, we are failing our geniuses. (I am not genius level IQ. Any geniuses in the same situation would be very poorly handled indeed.)
No, actually, it took advantage of some of the spells that had things like 'prevent more than 10% damage' and 'heal for X points when hit' and such so that they could never take more damage at a time than would kill them, and would automatically heal for more than they were hit as well. It was quite clever of them. It wasn't the only odd build so far, but it's probably the oddest.
No, my fault for skipping that paragraph. When it said 'how it'll use the Microsoft technology' I said 'I don't care' and skipped that paragraph.
What kind of FREAK would think of taking something like a watermark and using it as a cue as to whether to play an advertisement or not? Why not just play them for ALL songs? This is so amazingly stupid I still can't believe it was possible to come up with.
DRM obviously doesn't work, is expensive, and loses customers.
Even if this doesn't prevent piracy (which it's not designed to do, if you RTFA) it doesn't piss off customers and probably isn't very expensive at all, since the file format doesn't change, doesn't require special software or codecs on the users' end, and is generally painless to everyone.
The article talks about this only being used to track where a file came from originally, and not watermarking them individually. Personally, I think it would be almost trivial to watermark each individual file with the buyer's information. AllOfMP3.com used to transcode the files to several formats and bitrates on their server and STILL sold the songs for like $.10 each. If this takes off, it WILL be used to watermark the buyer's info into it.
Personally, I don't have a problem with that. I don't have any problem with buying music I listen to, so long as it's a reasonable price and not crippled. And I don't have any problem with each song being watermarked with my info, so long as it doesn't allow someone to impersonate me. (No credit card numbers, social security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. Name and/or customer ID at their store is acceptable only.) They will, of course, go too far at some point.
You have absolutely no fscking idea what you're talking about, do you?
A 'watermark' is a image on a piece of paper that is typically 'invisible' under most circumstances, but you can see if you hold the paper up to a light, or at a certain angle to the light.
A 'watermark' in audio or printed media is a slight distortion of the audio or image that is unable to be detected by humans but can be deciphered by a computer.
It has absolutely nothing to do with advertising whatsoever.
You say that as if it's negative, but I see it otherwise.
While I haven't played a lot of pen & paper D&D, there have been quite a few video games based on fairly loose rules that you use in the right way to really come up with a great character.
For instance: In Guild Wars, someone figured out that you could purposefully use runes to reduce your health to about 10% of what other people had... And use the game's rules to keep yourself healed and deal major damage to a whole group of enemies all at once. This is obviously WAY beyond what the game designers had thought of, and shows how flexible the system is. To this day, people are still finding new combinations of classes and skills that seem to be way overpowered. Most of them COULD have been created on day 1, but were just finally imagined.
I see D&D's rules and arguments about the rules in the same way. All those arguments come from people interpreting the rules or the rules' interactions differently and coming up with new strategies. So for those who just want to play mindlessly, it's a pointless argument. For those that care, it's pretty much a basic part of the fun.
I assume by that you mean that you quit fighting for your rights, since the only way to guarantee you'll keep them is to keep fighting for them. The moment you relax, they WILL be taken from you. It may be so slowly you won't even notice, but it'll happen.
I not surprise you didn't get modded up for this. You are failing to make MS look bad and going against group-think majorly, no matter how right you are.
I do this all the time as well and I have a hell of a time convincing people to even TRY it. Many have been brainwashed into believing the keycode is burned into the disc, and many more believe that only the Dell CD will work with a Dell OEM keycode. I often have to push them out of the way and just do it myself to prove otherwise.
I don't know how they managed to get so wrongheaded about this, but a standard XP Home OEM CD will always work for any XP Home OEM sticker, no matter the manufacturer. (Of course, with SP2c adding new valid keys, I'll have to update my disc to be that soon... Bleh.)
Someone later commented something like 'this is why I run linux. this anti-piracy crap is stupid.' I run Linux as my main desktop OS at work and home both, but that is NOT why. If you are reformatting so often that this is a hassle, you are doing something seriously wrong.
While I disagree with your statement that "scientists were the true moral crusaders of our age", I find the notion that 'morality depends on science' to be intriguing.
But if that's so, why is it okay to eat meat right now? You can adequately survive on plants and medical supplements right now. Does this not mean that killing animals is wrong already, or does personal comfort/quality of life mean alter morality also?
Personally, I don't find it immoral at all to eat animals, no matter the situation. I will admit that if I was the one that had to kill them, there'd probably be less meat on my plate each night, though.
We make the pens and Tang down here, too. Why do they get to stay?
Or are you suggesting that we'd already have discovered and created these crystals on earth without that experiment? Why wouldn't we have created the pens and Tang here instead?
Just because something has been done again in a different way doesn't mean the original way wasn't instrumental in finding it.
Don't forget that you need to be careful of the PR spin on each new eco-friendly device. We recently saw a study here on Slashdot that said that walking is worse for the environment than driving because you create more CO2 that way. What else might cause the same? Can you say for sure that your electric-only car was powered by eco-friendly power? What if it came from coal? Burning gas, then sending the power down the power lines to your car is a -lot- less efficient than just burning gas in your car. Careful studies would have to be done to determine each energy source's exact impact on the environment per watt generated.
Just creating that report is wasteful, though, isn't it? Hundreds or thousands or man-hours, tons of electricity, forests of trees... Just to determine how we can save the environment. Even that study might well be worse than doing nothing. WE DON'T KNOW.
So don't state it like fact that changing our ways will definitely be for the better. Until you know the exact impact of your new ways, you can't say anything.
Exactly so. 4xAA as a hardware capability requirement is -nothing-. It just happens to be one of the things they require, alongside the other things that -are- going to cause problems.
Microsoft has already backed down on requirements once because hardware manufacturers couldn't meet the demands. (DX10 required some virtualization that nVidia found themselves unable to implement, I believe.) I see no reason to think that any of these are set in stone. If the hardware devs can't hack it, it'll be relaxed. I wouldn't be surprised to see that all current DX10 cards -can- run DX10.1 when it comes out, after all. MS follows the money, and if there's none in these requirements, that'll be that.
You're reading it wrong. The -games- aren't required to support 4xAA, the -hardware- is. It's great that you hate AA and all, but there are plenty of others that insist on it. By requiring the hardware to support to be '10.1 compatible' they are merely pandering to the majority of gamers out there.
They haven't forced you to do anything, and they haven't forced developers either.
That's all true, except the part that 'blame' doesn't matter. It does.
If mankind is causing the increase, we can curb it by stopping the things that cause it. If we aren't, stopping them won't matter a whit!
It's not really about blame at all, see. It's about identifying what is actually effective at changing the situation. Until we know that, we couldn't possibly formulate a plan.
'Option 3' has nothing to do with the GPL and everything to do with the typical attitude of open source programmers. You'll find the same attitude in programmers under BSD, MPL, and probably just about any other Open Source (officially sanctioned or not) license.
The 'viral FUD' about the GPL isn't FUD simply because there ARE nice programmers, but because there are those who AREN'T. GPL is viral whether you like it or not. The ability to work out another arrangement does -not- change this in the slightest.
I'm guessing they're using that as a way to make sure only subscribers can get first post now? It wouldn't load for me until someone had posted.
As for the IM... I don't care what it is, it's not their job to censor it. Virus check attachments, sure... But not sensor the chat. Absolutely ridiculous. Reminds me of games that try to filter out all 'bad' words and end up filtering out words like 'fanny' because they mean 'butt' in the US and apparently refer to women's genitalia in the UK. How people NAMED Fanny deal with that, I can't imagine. There were quite a few more commonplace words that mean odd things in other languages or countries and were filtered as well. Ridiculous.
Because he doesn't know. He's asking us for reasons why his shop should continue to use Linux and cannot provide any himself. He even goes as far as to say that his boss only know 'linux is free' and nothing more, and yet he hasn't even attempted to tell him the advantages, even in the most general terms. (Stability, upgrades, security, etc.)
If my boss said the company was moving to Windows-based servers (this would never happen, but if it did...) then I'd immediately compile a list of things that work extremely well under Linux and would -not- work well or at all on Windows. I would outline how my workflow would change and how much time I (and everyone else) would spend fighting the system instead of coding.
As I am also sysadmin at the moment, I'd get to lecture how much time is involved with that as well.
And I'd also note that everyone there has Linux experience, but not many have Windows or Windows Server experience, and that the 3 are vastly different.
The question is remarkably simple if you have -any- idea what's going on in the shop. If you just love Linux and don't even know why, it's almost impossible to answer... And you probably shouldn't even be asking it.
I imagine it's because of the legal issues involved. Debian/Ubuntu doesn't want to create the packages because they like not being sued/arrested/whatever, and nobody else has simply because they aren't used to making them.
Whoever wrote Automatix is probably a programmer and not a package maintainer, and simply did what he was most comfortable with.
Creating packages would have been the -proper- way, but we all know how much the 'proper way' is enforced when the product is questionably legal at best. (Alright, maybe some of us dont'... Here's a hint: It isn't.)
Now that an 'official' developer has pointed out the 'proper' way, you can pretty much bet someone will do it just to prove whether it can or cannot be done. I really don't -care- and I'm considering it already. I've managed to set up my Kubuntu just like I like it without tedious command line editing (admittedly, I don't find it tedious) or using Automatix. Add an apt source for codecs, uncomment a few for multi-verse, add the commercial repository line... Voila. Happy as a pig in shit.
I specified it because he did, but there's also the fact that outside is in PUBLIC, under the eye of everyone already. What difference does a camera make to your privacy when you're standing on the street in broad daylight with everyone already watching you? In your home, you have some reasonable expectation of privacy.
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I can see the exploit in that already. Corp says 'okay, I've got $500' and you get $250. Then the day of the court, they say 'oh wait, we hired a new lawyer. Now it's $1,000,000.' Good luck finding your lawyer on the day of the court case.
But wait, there's more! Corp X says 'I have $50,000' and you get $25k for court fees up front... You spend them, then have NO money. How are they to get their fees back? People would be suing corporations just to have a party on the money using scam lawyers. (If you somehow think no lawyer would stoop to this... Well, there's no hope for you.)
A corporation is a legal entity just like any citizen. Under your idea, if they sue someone, they have to pay all the court costs up front. (I assume you're including lawyer's fees in this as well.) So if someone sues the corporation, they then have to be rich enough to cover all the court costs themselves.
No, that doesn't work.
I can already hear you saying 'just corporations'... So what about the small ones? It would mean the small companies would be unable to defend their rights, unless they could find an investor to back the court case.
I agree our system isn't fair, but you have to be very, very careful not to unbalance it further towards those with money.
Dangit. Sometimes I type faster than I think. Yes, I knew it was dual. When I'm typing fast, I tend towards duel and have to fix it each time. You'll notice the other time I used it, it was correct.
Yeah, I realize it's possible for smart kids to make friends. It didn't happen to me (or any of the smart kids I knew) until highschool.
I disagree about the mundane work, though. I think it's important for them to realize that not everything will be exciting, and that hard work is a necessary part of being in society, even when it seems rather stupid. Make them do everything the other students do and reward them with extra if they want it.
In fact, with the right program in place, you could do exactly that. All students have the minimum to do, but if they are bored or WANT to learn more, have the extra material available to them. The smart ones will think of it as play-time, the dumb ones will avoid it like the plague, and the average will think of it as a challenge. It would be tricky to implement, as there's no point in just giving them next year's work early, but rather to build on what they are learning that year and give them extra.
Using the spelling words in sentences a year early certainly did me no harm, and the logic puzzles we learned to do in elementary school are still fun to this day. We also did side projects like making a 'film strip' (with markers and blank strip) along with a recorded voiceover for the slides. And I see no reason that everyone couldn't have joined in the projects like the egg drop contest. (Well, except for my entry which got Jello banned from the contest ever after. It apparently stains concrete. The egg survived!)
In short: The answer isn't to offer the smart kids extra, but to offer it to EVERYONE and let them decide whether or not they want to do it. The extras receive no grades and no bonus points... They are merely there to challenge kids who are done with the rest of the stuff for class and want the extra. No parent could possibly argue with that, and you're not treating any child unfairly.
You fail to take a few things into account:
1) If the kid isn't gifted, they won't WANT to be in a harder class.
2) If the kid isn't gifted, they will do extremely poorly in a harder class.
3) If the kid isn't gifted, his friends will tease him unmercifully for being in the harder class. (Gifted kids don't have friends. Everyone teases them anyhow.)
I was in the 'GIFTED' program in elementary school. I learned a lot of things there that I would never have had a chance to learn at that age otherwise, but the class itself wasn't that much harder. What -was- harder was that I also had to do all my regular schoolwork as well. The other teachers singled me out for being in GIFTED, too. For instance, 1 year ahead of everyone else, I had to make sentences from my spelling words. I eventually got so bored with it, I started to make stories from them. And then so bored I used the words -in order- to make stories.
In middle school, they had another program that wasn't nearly as good, and a year after I left elem. school, they cancelled the GIFTED program, and the middle school one right after I went to high school. Those schools have nothing of the sort now until High School, where their are Advance Placement (AP) classes that are harder, but not really any more interesting, and dual-enrollment (colleges classes at the high school).
Without those classes, I would not have gotten into computers in 4th grade (Apple IIe!) and definitely wouldn't be who I am today. I have to wonder if I'd have the same sense of purpose without it. My sister doesn't have that sense... She only had 1 year of GIFTED and none of the one in middle school, I think. She got straight A's the entire way through school, with the exception of a band teacher who said 'nobody should get all A's' and gave her a B solely for that reason. She duel-enrolled in high school early and completed 4 years of highschool and 2 years of college in only 3 years. (Yes, she graduated both in the same year.) She burnt out on that, but that's another story. She's in college for Pharmacy now and getting straight A's as always.
Without those classes, I'd have been bored stiff. I'd definitely have a lot of time on my hands to get in trouble with.
Yes, we are failing our geniuses. (I am not genius level IQ. Any geniuses in the same situation would be very poorly handled indeed.)
No, actually, it took advantage of some of the spells that had things like 'prevent more than 10% damage' and 'heal for X points when hit' and such so that they could never take more damage at a time than would kill them, and would automatically heal for more than they were hit as well. It was quite clever of them. It wasn't the only odd build so far, but it's probably the oddest.
No, my fault for skipping that paragraph. When it said 'how it'll use the Microsoft technology' I said 'I don't care' and skipped that paragraph.
What kind of FREAK would think of taking something like a watermark and using it as a cue as to whether to play an advertisement or not? Why not just play them for ALL songs? This is so amazingly stupid I still can't believe it was possible to come up with.
DRM obviously doesn't work, is expensive, and loses customers.
Even if this doesn't prevent piracy (which it's not designed to do, if you RTFA) it doesn't piss off customers and probably isn't very expensive at all, since the file format doesn't change, doesn't require special software or codecs on the users' end, and is generally painless to everyone.
The article talks about this only being used to track where a file came from originally, and not watermarking them individually. Personally, I think it would be almost trivial to watermark each individual file with the buyer's information. AllOfMP3.com used to transcode the files to several formats and bitrates on their server and STILL sold the songs for like $.10 each. If this takes off, it WILL be used to watermark the buyer's info into it.
Personally, I don't have a problem with that. I don't have any problem with buying music I listen to, so long as it's a reasonable price and not crippled. And I don't have any problem with each song being watermarked with my info, so long as it doesn't allow someone to impersonate me. (No credit card numbers, social security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. Name and/or customer ID at their store is acceptable only.) They will, of course, go too far at some point.
You have absolutely no fscking idea what you're talking about, do you?
A 'watermark' is a image on a piece of paper that is typically 'invisible' under most circumstances, but you can see if you hold the paper up to a light, or at a certain angle to the light.
A 'watermark' in audio or printed media is a slight distortion of the audio or image that is unable to be detected by humans but can be deciphered by a computer.
It has absolutely nothing to do with advertising whatsoever.
You say that as if it's negative, but I see it otherwise.
While I haven't played a lot of pen & paper D&D, there have been quite a few video games based on fairly loose rules that you use in the right way to really come up with a great character.
For instance: In Guild Wars, someone figured out that you could purposefully use runes to reduce your health to about 10% of what other people had... And use the game's rules to keep yourself healed and deal major damage to a whole group of enemies all at once. This is obviously WAY beyond what the game designers had thought of, and shows how flexible the system is. To this day, people are still finding new combinations of classes and skills that seem to be way overpowered. Most of them COULD have been created on day 1, but were just finally imagined.
I see D&D's rules and arguments about the rules in the same way. All those arguments come from people interpreting the rules or the rules' interactions differently and coming up with new strategies. So for those who just want to play mindlessly, it's a pointless argument. For those that care, it's pretty much a basic part of the fun.
I assume by that you mean that you quit fighting for your rights, since the only way to guarantee you'll keep them is to keep fighting for them. The moment you relax, they WILL be taken from you. It may be so slowly you won't even notice, but it'll happen.
I not surprise you didn't get modded up for this. You are failing to make MS look bad and going against group-think majorly, no matter how right you are.
I do this all the time as well and I have a hell of a time convincing people to even TRY it. Many have been brainwashed into believing the keycode is burned into the disc, and many more believe that only the Dell CD will work with a Dell OEM keycode. I often have to push them out of the way and just do it myself to prove otherwise.
I don't know how they managed to get so wrongheaded about this, but a standard XP Home OEM CD will always work for any XP Home OEM sticker, no matter the manufacturer. (Of course, with SP2c adding new valid keys, I'll have to update my disc to be that soon... Bleh.)
Someone later commented something like 'this is why I run linux. this anti-piracy crap is stupid.' I run Linux as my main desktop OS at work and home both, but that is NOT why. If you are reformatting so often that this is a hassle, you are doing something seriously wrong.
While I disagree with your statement that "scientists were the true moral crusaders of our age", I find the notion that 'morality depends on science' to be intriguing.
But if that's so, why is it okay to eat meat right now? You can adequately survive on plants and medical supplements right now. Does this not mean that killing animals is wrong already, or does personal comfort/quality of life mean alter morality also?
Personally, I don't find it immoral at all to eat animals, no matter the situation. I will admit that if I was the one that had to kill them, there'd probably be less meat on my plate each night, though.
You do realize that's exactly backwards, right? If the overhead is an issue, they would need MORE processor speed, not less.
When the speed is reduced, it's not like it's still running full speed but only using 2/3 of it... it's running at 2/3 speed.
We make the pens and Tang down here, too. Why do they get to stay?
Or are you suggesting that we'd already have discovered and created these crystals on earth without that experiment? Why wouldn't we have created the pens and Tang here instead?
Just because something has been done again in a different way doesn't mean the original way wasn't instrumental in finding it.
Don't forget that you need to be careful of the PR spin on each new eco-friendly device. We recently saw a study here on Slashdot that said that walking is worse for the environment than driving because you create more CO2 that way. What else might cause the same? Can you say for sure that your electric-only car was powered by eco-friendly power? What if it came from coal? Burning gas, then sending the power down the power lines to your car is a -lot- less efficient than just burning gas in your car. Careful studies would have to be done to determine each energy source's exact impact on the environment per watt generated.
Just creating that report is wasteful, though, isn't it? Hundreds or thousands or man-hours, tons of electricity, forests of trees... Just to determine how we can save the environment. Even that study might well be worse than doing nothing. WE DON'T KNOW.
So don't state it like fact that changing our ways will definitely be for the better. Until you know the exact impact of your new ways, you can't say anything.
Exactly so. 4xAA as a hardware capability requirement is -nothing-. It just happens to be one of the things they require, alongside the other things that -are- going to cause problems.
Microsoft has already backed down on requirements once because hardware manufacturers couldn't meet the demands. (DX10 required some virtualization that nVidia found themselves unable to implement, I believe.) I see no reason to think that any of these are set in stone. If the hardware devs can't hack it, it'll be relaxed. I wouldn't be surprised to see that all current DX10 cards -can- run DX10.1 when it comes out, after all. MS follows the money, and if there's none in these requirements, that'll be that.
You're reading it wrong. The -games- aren't required to support 4xAA, the -hardware- is. It's great that you hate AA and all, but there are plenty of others that insist on it. By requiring the hardware to support to be '10.1 compatible' they are merely pandering to the majority of gamers out there.
They haven't forced you to do anything, and they haven't forced developers either.
That's all true, except the part that 'blame' doesn't matter. It does.
If mankind is causing the increase, we can curb it by stopping the things that cause it. If we aren't, stopping them won't matter a whit!
It's not really about blame at all, see. It's about identifying what is actually effective at changing the situation. Until we know that, we couldn't possibly formulate a plan.
'Option 3' has nothing to do with the GPL and everything to do with the typical attitude of open source programmers. You'll find the same attitude in programmers under BSD, MPL, and probably just about any other Open Source (officially sanctioned or not) license.
The 'viral FUD' about the GPL isn't FUD simply because there ARE nice programmers, but because there are those who AREN'T. GPL is viral whether you like it or not. The ability to work out another arrangement does -not- change this in the slightest.
You think vegetables are more technologically advanced than humans? What planet do you live on?
And I'm going to assume you meant vegans are statistically smarter than us meat-eaters, not that you think the vegetables are smarter.
"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."
I'm guessing they're using that as a way to make sure only subscribers can get first post now? It wouldn't load for me until someone had posted.
As for the IM... I don't care what it is, it's not their job to censor it. Virus check attachments, sure... But not sensor the chat. Absolutely ridiculous. Reminds me of games that try to filter out all 'bad' words and end up filtering out words like 'fanny' because they mean 'butt' in the US and apparently refer to women's genitalia in the UK. How people NAMED Fanny deal with that, I can't imagine. There were quite a few more commonplace words that mean odd things in other languages or countries and were filtered as well. Ridiculous.
Because he doesn't know. He's asking us for reasons why his shop should continue to use Linux and cannot provide any himself. He even goes as far as to say that his boss only know 'linux is free' and nothing more, and yet he hasn't even attempted to tell him the advantages, even in the most general terms. (Stability, upgrades, security, etc.)
If my boss said the company was moving to Windows-based servers (this would never happen, but if it did...) then I'd immediately compile a list of things that work extremely well under Linux and would -not- work well or at all on Windows. I would outline how my workflow would change and how much time I (and everyone else) would spend fighting the system instead of coding.
As I am also sysadmin at the moment, I'd get to lecture how much time is involved with that as well.
And I'd also note that everyone there has Linux experience, but not many have Windows or Windows Server experience, and that the 3 are vastly different.
The question is remarkably simple if you have -any- idea what's going on in the shop. If you just love Linux and don't even know why, it's almost impossible to answer... And you probably shouldn't even be asking it.
I imagine it's because of the legal issues involved. Debian/Ubuntu doesn't want to create the packages because they like not being sued/arrested/whatever, and nobody else has simply because they aren't used to making them.
Whoever wrote Automatix is probably a programmer and not a package maintainer, and simply did what he was most comfortable with.
Creating packages would have been the -proper- way, but we all know how much the 'proper way' is enforced when the product is questionably legal at best. (Alright, maybe some of us dont'... Here's a hint: It isn't.)
Now that an 'official' developer has pointed out the 'proper' way, you can pretty much bet someone will do it just to prove whether it can or cannot be done. I really don't -care- and I'm considering it already. I've managed to set up my Kubuntu just like I like it without tedious command line editing (admittedly, I don't find it tedious) or using Automatix. Add an apt source for codecs, uncomment a few for multi-verse, add the commercial repository line... Voila. Happy as a pig in shit.
I specified it because he did, but there's also the fact that outside is in PUBLIC, under the eye of everyone already. What difference does a camera make to your privacy when you're standing on the street in broad daylight with everyone already watching you? In your home, you have some reasonable expectation of privacy.