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Comment This isn't a victory for Behring-Breivik. (Score 3, Insightful) 491

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

Comment The final vision... (Score 1) 383

Your Usenet post describing the first public version of the Linux kernel compared and contrasted it with GNU, which itself was designed to be very Unix-like. Did you have a "final vision" for Linux in your head in the early days? I mean that as, did you see Linux getting to be a suitable Unix replacement that was still very Unix-like and then stopping, or did you have some sort of vision of a radically different operating system built on top of your kernel?

Comment In before JERB-KILLITAXES AND REGULATIONZ (Score 1, Interesting) 170

Australia has corporate tax rates that are in general lower than those in, say, the United States. The US has lower tax rates for corporations with income less than $100,000, but I would very much assume that this studio made more than that. Regulations for this sort of industry are essentially the same around the world as well.

The cost of doing business in Australia is negatively impacted because of major time zone differences from other English-speaking nations, and the significantly higher costs of transportation to/from and telecommunications with what is really a very geographically isolated nation.

Comment I probably would've gotten the death penalty... (Score 5, Funny) 629

Hah. On the Windows 3.1 systems at my high school I would change the screensaver message to something like "FUCK THA POLICE" or whatever and then use the ATTRIB command to mark WIN.INI as read-only, meaning it was impossible to change the message back using the UI.

Comment Re:Pointless (Score 1) 755

I have not seen a laptop in close to a decade that didn't work 100% out of the box with Linux. Ubuntu on my laptop actually supported more of the hardware than OEM Windows did without having to find third-party drivers on some website. I remember having to manually configure my sound card with Linux, but I don't remember the last time I did it; it's been at least a decade if not more.

So yeah, the old objections to Linux are, to use an appropriately old term, FUD.

Comment What I'd love to see for 4.0 (Score 1) 199

The main thing I'd like to see for 4.0 is a massive simplification of the kernel, removing features that are no longer used anywhere. There's a lot of duplicated functionality in the kernel - two different ways to report hotplug events, three different ways to report ACPI events, several dozen filesystems, some of which don't actually work or even have userland tools that will compile on modern kernels.

So I'd like to see a winnowing of kernel features, down to a saner, all-known-to-work set.

Also, can we please at some point make /proc a bit more sane? Why do I write kernel configuration parameters to files in proc? Why not to sysfs or configfs? /proc, IMHO, should just hold process information. It's confusing.

Comment What do we use a phone for? (Score 2, Interesting) 307

I would argue that there should be some sort of regulation that ensures that phones are interoperable with one another for "phone stuff". That is, if you sell a phone in this country, by law it should be able to make a phone call to every other phone sold in the country. The problem is, what qualifies as "phone stuff" is rapidly expanding.

iMessage is a good example. Apple is trying to leverage its dominant market position to make text messaging something that's iPhone only. Remember the whole debacle with people who had an iPhone and then didn't suddenly not being able to receive text messages from other people who still had iPhones. Apple's solution was broken and only partially effective - and I think at least somewhat intentionally so. Same with FaceTime. You want to talk to your friends with an iPhone? Well, you need an iPhone too!

So yeah, we as a society need to decide what we define as "phone stuff". Having the ability to communicate with every other phone for "phone stuff" is critical from an economic perspective, and eventually will also be so from a safety perspective. Requiring inter-phone communications to be standardized isn't too far-fetched of an idea.

(Requiring the same non-phone-stuff apps to work on different platforms though is stupid.)

Comment So...don't be disposable. (Score 3, Insightful) 271

This sounds a little insensitive, but, don't be disposable. You're a Windows admin. Great. So are a million other people. If you're a Windows admin who also knows some programming, there are maybe 250,000 people with your skill set. If you add in that you know some Linux, maybe 100,000 people.

What I'm saying is, if you want to be safer than the average employee, don't be average. Enhance your skill set.

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