It's a shame, but yes we must watch out for this - the politics of emotion are always quickly abused by modern western governments to snatch powers away from the individual, and to impinge on their liberties and privacy.
There is a massive majority of people who are rightly keen to see justice done, but knee-jerk legislation and further ramping up of the surveillance state are what will probably huge dangers.
It's the same old process. Give a government a problem, and they will grant themselves some heinous new power over law abiding people. You can vote for people who say they will give those powers back, but whatever they say, they never really will.
The voters have been told in rolling news that they should be angry and focus on that..
How rude and insulting. The voters must be stupid, right?
No. The voters *experienced* the riots and are livid that members of their own communities would betray their own in such a nihilistic orgy of crime costing lives, injuries, homes, at least hundreds of jobs (of people/families in their own communities, not of the banks or politicians) and costing millions upon millions of pounds when the country is facing austerity measures, for entertainment and to put a flat screen tv and an xbox in their front room.
"Told they should be angry". Perhaps if you were injured, or your workplace* and/or home** was burned down, or your community had lots of people hurt, homeless and jobless and was looking down the barrel of rebuilding the town when it was facing cuts in every public service, you might think it warranted a serious deterrent for or at least removal of rioters, for however long is appropriate under the law.
Even if they aren't "mindless zombies controlled by the press".
Perhaps if it was YOU looking at your wrecked community or even life, you might think a little pause for thought was warranted before people labelled you malleable and stupid.
*Lots of places can't afford good insurance now btw
**Nobody can afford home insurance in the kind of deprived areas where homes were burnt down.
This wasn't "people hitting the streets". I am the first person to support direct action and protest, but you really need to go and examine what has gone on before you exhort this - it sounds like these people had a political purpose.
Go, examine the offenses and what happened. I promise you, it was not politicians or political institutions being protested against or smashed, it was not banks, it was not the government, hell it mostly wasn't even the police.
I can tell you how it was, I saw it. It was mostly just shopping with violence instead of cash, lots of poor/working people in their OWN COMMUNITIES getting hurt in a weird sort of hedonistic holiday for violent bastards, where the weak were being feasted upon all over the place.
The geeks on this site who like to rail against global capitalism and so on, and who support political protest/direct action are the sort of people who were getting robbed, assaulted and burned out of their homes in a heartbeat in that environment. Prey of a mob of people who have realised they can get away with whatever the hell they like. No politics necessary.
"civil unrest against a perceived corrupt political system"
Nobody involved cared about that. Seriously - you had to be there, it really was people of various walks of life just grabbing everything out of shops then setting fire to them (then attacking firemen when they tried to rescue the families in the flats above), kicking people half to death, etc. - just going nutz to get stuff and get money and get away with settling scores against specific people or whatever community they disliked.
People being violently and/or sexually assaulted, robbed or even killed in the street. Not bankers, not politicians. Their own.
Not one bank or political institution was touched, only places with Cool Stuff in, and the cars/houses/persons of the working and/or poor people in their own communities.
"a chaotic mess of angry people lashing out"
A chaotic mess of rapturously smiling laughing people taking what they wanted and doing violence to people. Families having their homes torched and their lives endangered, swathes of jobs being ended by businesses being torched when nobody can afford insurance these days.
Killings of people who tried to help the victims, attacks against ambulances trying to treat the victims, attacks against firemen trying to put out fires.
Seriously, I don't know how to explain this convincingly enough without sounding emotive - this is in the place I've grown up in. Don't let people get away with saying it was a political demonstration - I mean you had to be there but seriously it REALLY. WASN'T., I would say what we all saw and endured had no protest component to it whatsoever past about 9pm on the first night - it was just open season for the cannibalistic predators of London to hurt/take from their own.
I'm afraid, having done some work for the police, I can attest to the fact that common car thieves and burglars will often know when the shift changes are at their local police stations (because that's when the police are mostly off the street for 20 minutes), where the police are hanging around this last week or two, where there are known undercover cops, etc. Dealers and other people on the next rung up are more sophisticated again and will find ways to intercept communications and swap lookout information with their "colleagues" and "employees", and further up still you'd be amazed.
This is in a (relatively) low-crime part of the world, not some teeming American metropolis. Don't underestimate the cunning and observational capacity of even quite stupid people - and when it's on a larger scale, well people who put planning and organisation into their money-making are the ones that stay successful at it.
I think there has to be a clear distinction between personal life and professional interaction.
You have a right to privacy when you're going about your personal business, but when you're employed to do someone else's business, they can realistically be expected to control and/or monitor how you do that business itself.
If your employer, wishes to monitor your performance so they can assess it, or install/check CCTV to catch a particular criminal when you know criminal offences are being committed, we don't usually have a problem with it. They obviously have no right to film you changing or using the lavatory, but they can and will monitor your interactions with the public and the company assets if needed.
It's hard to see a logical reason for denying the public the same.
I've never understood the second language "response" to correction.
In languages other than my native one, I'm grateful for correction, because it might help me to be correct more often. I usually respond with "thank you".
Mainstream PC makers in the United States have chosen to do a number of things with new PCs, including Windows Vista, Linux (RH and Ubuntu) distros with wine packages, and invasive shovelware the novice end user can't get rid of without thermite.
Dell being the most obvious example in the US, there are others outside the US (like Acer, for example).
In the light of these widely varied good/bad decisions, what they choose to "make a business out of" or not demonstrates.. very little.
1. A *LOT* of software looks in/etc/passwd because you can get uid, gid, homedir etc. from there (try grep $USER/etc/passwd - go on)
2. Passwords are very rarely stored in/etc/passwd these days.
3. I've written scripts that touch firefox profiles for stuff as innocuous as protocol handlers..yeah, erm.
4. Why is AppArmor a link to an ubuntu wiki? Are Ubuntu about to invent AppArmor like they invented networkmanager et al?
quote>I have been over ruled by our controller, to my disagreement. I would never turn them in, but I am in tough place by knowing doing something illegal. You're being coerced into low-level law-breaking, which you would be held completely liable for and which could damage your future career - now think about whether your company would break the law for you.
Think about whether they would string you up by the nether regions if you suggested the director help you out with some casual law-breaking you were involved in.
Think about how much integrity they have, and how much you have, how much this company cares whether you go to jail, weigh it all up against money and losing your job, and you should have your choice right there.
PS: Without actually turning anyone in, how would the director of your company feel if he got a boatload of unexpected literature about businesses pirating software? Or would they realise that was you?
The point I'm making is that the distiction between the definitions is made on the basis of whether the object concerned is a person capable of free will, or an inanimate object. This is the common case I believe. I have never seen any confusion in people using the term free, as the context defines meaning. No, with respect you've just arrived at a really, really bad 'ruleset' about when the word "free" is used.
It's completely understandable that some folks assume it means "costs nothing" when they first hear it, but come on now - the word "free" can be applied to nouns, verbs or abstract verbs or nouns to express unfetteredness of some sort, or a relationship to it. It's pretty hard to pretend "free software" doesn't compute semantically.
Free software is a thing that's free in its creation, its intention and its use, that makes perfect sense. It's used to describe both the concept of making it, and the results themselves - just like free speech, thought, expression and information.
I could show you a page of free writing or a work of free expression, they're objects, neither is necessarily free of charge, neither can go to the store just any time it likes and buy a pint of milk.
Also a defacto standard is not if no 'upto' date linux plugin is available. What do you mean by this? Are you talking about the lengthy hiatus when Adobe acquired it between 8 and 9?
The Linux plugin is good now, development is fairly visible, as is communication from the developers, rendering accuracy is obviously being treated very seriously as it is everywehere and performance/sound/video capture issues are being gradually mopped up (not bad considering the position they started from).
It's not as if I'm the world's biggest Adobe fan, but their position on Linux seems marginally less completely stony-faced than it used to be, let's put it that way.
"the actual value of the product"
The price they charge for it, how much people pay for it - these are what set the value of the product as far as I know.
Serious question - how else would you quantify its value?
Well talk is cheap - speaking as someone who stopped my 3 CDs a month habit when CD copy protection became widespread, It's going to take more than "considering" to get me near their coasters again.
To be honest, the idea of giving money to them at all doesn't sit well with me with the way record companies have behaved over the last few year - it just feels more like paying a ransom to suited mobsters than buying music.
Ah well, there's no good way to pay the artists and not the record companies I suppose, so I'll continue to enjoy music through royalties-based channels and magnatunes.
"You're a retard if you think there are no other reasons to use Linux other than it's OS nature. I like it's OS, but if it sucked, then I would be using SOMETHING ELSE."
So what? Why you or anybody else uses it is irrelevant to the terms of its use. As a matter of fact, you are only getting it under the terms of the GPL.
The GPL is the license, the reason and the conditions for all that hard work running on your computer.
"Kororaa is doing nothing wrong, and if the GPL is against it, then the GPL needs reform. In fact, Kororaa is helping Linux a lot. Most people believe X-Windows = irresponsive. Kororaa fights that."
Insanity. The linux kernel is copyright-protected software, and consent to use it is given only under the terms of the GPL - ie that you must keep it Free software. It is the copyright holders' wish that it remain Free Software, and not Non-Free software.
If you want to re-publish somebody else's copyright works, you do so under the terms laid down by them, or not at all.
If you don't like that, you can go and do your own work, or even use BSD-licensed materials which provide for you in their licensing terms.
There is **no divine right to use other people's copyright materials in direct contravention of the copyright holder's consent**, which is what making linux non-free is.
As it stands, the violation directly mirrors taking Microsoft's source code and releasing it under the GPL.
It needs to be changed by people creating the drivers in order to abide by the terms of the GPL, and not the other way around.
If you believe that some hardware vendor writing a driver, makes it right to rewrite or ignore the hard-working copyright holder's wishes, what's next?
Am I morally OK to sell bootleg copies of current bestsellers without paying the author if I stick a Post-It on the front with my own poem on it?
Slashdot Mirror
It's a shame, but yes we must watch out for this - the politics of emotion are always quickly abused by modern western governments to snatch powers away from the individual, and to impinge on their liberties and privacy.
There is a massive majority of people who are rightly keen to see justice done, but knee-jerk legislation and further ramping up of the surveillance state are what will probably huge dangers.
It's the same old process. Give a government a problem, and they will grant themselves some heinous new power over law abiding people. You can vote for people who say they will give those powers back, but whatever they say, they never really will.
The voters have been told in rolling news that they should be angry and focus on that..
How rude and insulting. The voters must be stupid, right?
No. The voters *experienced* the riots and are livid that members of their own communities would betray their own in such a nihilistic orgy of crime costing lives, injuries, homes, at least hundreds of jobs (of people/families in their own communities, not of the banks or politicians) and costing millions upon millions of pounds when the country is facing austerity measures, for entertainment and to put a flat screen tv and an xbox in their front room.
"Told they should be angry". Perhaps if you were injured, or your workplace* and/or home** was burned down, or your community had lots of people hurt, homeless and jobless and was looking down the barrel of rebuilding the town when it was facing cuts in every public service, you might think it warranted a serious deterrent for or at least removal of rioters, for however long is appropriate under the law.
Even if they aren't "mindless zombies controlled by the press".
Perhaps if it was YOU looking at your wrecked community or even life, you might think a little pause for thought was warranted before people labelled you malleable and stupid.
*Lots of places can't afford good insurance now btw
**Nobody can afford home insurance in the kind of deprived areas where homes were burnt down.
This wasn't "people hitting the streets". I am the first person to support direct action and protest, but you really need to go and examine what has gone on before you exhort this - it sounds like these people had a political purpose.
Go, examine the offenses and what happened. I promise you, it was not politicians or political institutions being protested against or smashed, it was not banks, it was not the government, hell it mostly wasn't even the police.
I can tell you how it was, I saw it. It was mostly just shopping with violence instead of cash, lots of poor/working people in their OWN COMMUNITIES getting hurt in a weird sort of hedonistic holiday for violent bastards, where the weak were being feasted upon all over the place.
The geeks on this site who like to rail against global capitalism and so on, and who support political protest/direct action are the sort of people who were getting robbed, assaulted and burned out of their homes in a heartbeat in that environment. Prey of a mob of people who have realised they can get away with whatever the hell they like. No politics necessary.
"civil unrest against a perceived corrupt political system"
Nobody involved cared about that. Seriously - you had to be there, it really was people of various walks of life just grabbing everything out of shops then setting fire to them (then attacking firemen when they tried to rescue the families in the flats above), kicking people half to death, etc. - just going nutz to get stuff and get money and get away with settling scores against specific people or whatever community they disliked.
People being violently and/or sexually assaulted, robbed or even killed in the street. Not bankers, not politicians. Their own.
Not one bank or political institution was touched, only places with Cool Stuff in, and the cars/houses/persons of the working and/or poor people in their own communities.
"a chaotic mess of angry people lashing out"
A chaotic mess of rapturously smiling laughing people taking what they wanted and doing violence to people. Families having their homes torched and their lives endangered, swathes of jobs being ended by businesses being torched when nobody can afford insurance these days.
Killings of people who tried to help the victims, attacks against ambulances trying to treat the victims, attacks against firemen trying to put out fires.
Seriously, I don't know how to explain this convincingly enough without sounding emotive - this is in the place I've grown up in. Don't let people get away with saying it was a political demonstration - I mean you had to be there but seriously it REALLY. WASN'T., I would say what we all saw and endured had no protest component to it whatsoever past about 9pm on the first night - it was just open season for the cannibalistic predators of London to hurt/take from their own.
I'm afraid, having done some work for the police, I can attest to the fact that common car thieves and burglars will often know when the shift changes are at their local police stations (because that's when the police are mostly off the street for 20 minutes), where the police are hanging around this last week or two, where there are known undercover cops, etc. Dealers and other people on the next rung up are more sophisticated again and will find ways to intercept communications and swap lookout information with their "colleagues" and "employees", and further up still you'd be amazed.
This is in a (relatively) low-crime part of the world, not some teeming American metropolis. Don't underestimate the cunning and observational capacity of even quite stupid people - and when it's on a larger scale, well people who put planning and organisation into their money-making are the ones that stay successful at it.
I think there has to be a clear distinction between personal life and professional interaction.
You have a right to privacy when you're going about your personal business, but when you're employed to do someone else's business, they can realistically be expected to control and/or monitor how you do that business itself.
If your employer, wishes to monitor your performance so they can assess it, or install/check CCTV to catch a particular criminal when you know criminal offences are being committed, we don't usually have a problem with it. They obviously have no right to film you changing or using the lavatory, but they can and will monitor your interactions with the public and the company assets if needed.
It's hard to see a logical reason for denying the public the same.
I've never understood the second language "response" to correction.
In languages other than my native one, I'm grateful for correction, because it might help me to be correct more often. I usually respond with "thank you".
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from surveillance." *snip*
Careful. That's a double-edged sword you're brandishing there.
Woooosh!
The idiom is "Whooooosh!" ;)
Mainstream PC makers in the United States have chosen to do a number of things with new PCs, including Windows Vista, Linux (RH and Ubuntu) distros with wine packages, and invasive shovelware the novice end user can't get rid of without thermite.
Dell being the most obvious example in the US, there are others outside the US (like Acer, for example).
In the light of these widely varied good/bad decisions, what they choose to "make a business out of" or not demonstrates.. very little.
Understandable because the key word in the original assertion was "always":
...*snip*...
"Native clients will always run faster than Wine."
"what happens when Wine supports DirectX directly?"
1. A *LOT* of software looks in /etc/passwd because you can get uid, gid, homedir etc. from there (try grep $USER /etc/passwd - go on)
2. Passwords are very rarely stored in /etc/passwd these days.
3. I've written scripts that touch firefox profiles for stuff as innocuous as protocol handlers..yeah, erm.
4. Why is AppArmor a link to an ubuntu wiki? Are Ubuntu about to invent AppArmor like they invented networkmanager et al?
Small oversight by (on id's part) a hugely prolific developer of GPL'd software. Easily corrected and pushed out to clients straight away.
Attacking John Carmack for this precipitately is basically irrational. It also stinks of divisive trolling.
The man's licensed (a great deal of) his own software under the GPL, for goodness' sake.
quote>I have been over ruled by our controller, to my disagreement. I would never turn them in, but I am in tough place by knowing doing something illegal. You're being coerced into low-level law-breaking, which you would be held completely liable for and which could damage your future career - now think about whether your company would break the law for you.
Think about whether they would string you up by the nether regions if you suggested the director help you out with some casual law-breaking you were involved in.
Think about how much integrity they have, and how much you have, how much this company cares whether you go to jail, weigh it all up against money and losing your job, and you should have your choice right there.
PS: Without actually turning anyone in, how would the director of your company feel if he got a boatload of unexpected literature about businesses pirating software? Or would they realise that was you?
It's completely understandable that some folks assume it means "costs nothing" when they first hear it, but come on now - the word "free" can be applied to nouns, verbs or abstract verbs or nouns to express unfetteredness of some sort, or a relationship to it. It's pretty hard to pretend "free software" doesn't compute semantically.
Free software is a thing that's free in its creation, its intention and its use, that makes perfect sense. It's used to describe both the concept of making it, and the results themselves - just like free speech, thought, expression and information.
I could show you a page of free writing or a work of free expression, they're objects, neither is necessarily free of charge, neither can go to the store just any time it likes and buy a pint of milk.
"the actual value of the product" The price they charge for it, how much people pay for it - these are what set the value of the product as far as I know. Serious question - how else would you quantify its value?
This just functionally equates to letting everyone elevate, then adding an "ALL ALL = applicationname" entry.
So this is a behaviour you can specify with sudo - just not necessarily a desirable one.
Well talk is cheap - speaking as someone who stopped my 3 CDs a month habit when CD copy protection became widespread, It's going to take more than "considering" to get me near their coasters again. To be honest, the idea of giving money to them at all doesn't sit well with me with the way record companies have behaved over the last few year - it just feels more like paying a ransom to suited mobsters than buying music. Ah well, there's no good way to pay the artists and not the record companies I suppose, so I'll continue to enjoy music through royalties-based channels and magnatunes.
"You're a retard if you think there are no other reasons to use Linux other than it's OS nature. I like it's OS, but if it sucked, then I would be using SOMETHING ELSE." So what? Why you or anybody else uses it is irrelevant to the terms of its use. As a matter of fact, you are only getting it under the terms of the GPL. The GPL is the license, the reason and the conditions for all that hard work running on your computer. "Kororaa is doing nothing wrong, and if the GPL is against it, then the GPL needs reform. In fact, Kororaa is helping Linux a lot. Most people believe X-Windows = irresponsive. Kororaa fights that." Insanity. The linux kernel is copyright-protected software, and consent to use it is given only under the terms of the GPL - ie that you must keep it Free software. It is the copyright holders' wish that it remain Free Software, and not Non-Free software. If you want to re-publish somebody else's copyright works, you do so under the terms laid down by them, or not at all. If you don't like that, you can go and do your own work, or even use BSD-licensed materials which provide for you in their licensing terms. There is **no divine right to use other people's copyright materials in direct contravention of the copyright holder's consent**, which is what making linux non-free is. As it stands, the violation directly mirrors taking Microsoft's source code and releasing it under the GPL. It needs to be changed by people creating the drivers in order to abide by the terms of the GPL, and not the other way around. If you believe that some hardware vendor writing a driver, makes it right to rewrite or ignore the hard-working copyright holder's wishes, what's next? Am I morally OK to sell bootleg copies of current bestsellers without paying the author if I stick a Post-It on the front with my own poem on it?