So here's the deal...Slashdotters simply love to defend the indefensible when it comes to pirating software, music, etc. Pure sophistry, but if you want to play silly games...

Stealing : to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as an habitual or regular practice...

synonyms STEAL, PILFER, FILCH, PURLOIN mean to take from another without right or without detection. STEAL may apply to any surreptitious taking of something and differs from the other terms by commonly applying to intangibles as well as material things

Property : something owned or possessed...b : the exclusive right to possess, enjoy, and dispose of a thing : OWNERSHIP c : something to which a person or business has a legal title...

Thief : one that steals...

I fully expect vicious rebuttals, most likely quoting the bits I deliberately eschewed from the links I posted. Look, just be honest and admit it for what it is: it's stealing, and you're a thief.

With the recent talk about Comcast this and Comcast that, it's probably a pertinent time to remind people that Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast, controls 33 1/3% of the vote at any shareholders' meeting. This is despite owning less than 1% of shares. From the above link:

In addition to CMCSA and CMCSK, which trade on The NASDAQ Stock Market, Comcast has a Class B Common Stock, which does not trade publicly and is held entirely by BRCC LLC (a limited liability company controlled by Brian L. Roberts, CEO and President of the Company) and two estate planning trusts of Mr. Roberts. The Class B Common Stock constitutes an undilutable 33 1/3% of the voting power of the total voting power of all classes of the Company's Common Stock.

Comcast, by the way, was started by the Roberts family. Just reward for their hard work? Or a flagrant abuse of power?

Why does Comcast needs Disney? They're already as Mickey Mouse a company as you can get.

So we all know Michael rants like a small kid. Par for the course from Slashdot "editors", really. But isn't he the slightest bit embarrassed (given that he wants nothing so much as to be a journalist) by his continued inability to interpret a story correctly or perform elementary fact-checking?
 

Got Tru64 Unix? It's vulnerable (SSH and IPsec) and /. doesn't want you to know about it.

Okay, so we know that complaining about story submissions is just going to get modded down (usually), and, fair enough, it happens, nothing personal. But I'm really curious as to why this one got rejected. Inside of 5 minutes -- that's a pretty quick dismissal.

2004-01-16 19:10:55 Critical HP Tru64 Unix security holes patched (articles,news) (rejected)

If you want to read it, it's here. What's up? HP has had to patch two vulnerabilities -- one in SSH, one in IPsec -- in Tru64 Unix. It's almost refreshing to see a non-Microsoft security nasty, I would've thought -- and it's also rather embarrassing for HP. Oh yeah...and potentially dangerous for anyone running Tru64 Unix.

Maybe someone else submitted it -- we'll see. Or maybe it's just considered not important enough, given the phasing out of Alpha. But given the delight with which any MS security flaws are greeted, I would've hoped this would at least make some sort of ripple. After all, it's not like there's a double standard or anything, is it?

Anyone who feels particularly bored and chooses to ramble through my postings sometime will see that I have a wee problem with MS-bashers without cause. Is NT or W2K perfect? Of course not. But to suggest they're impossible to configure to stay up is just plain ludicrous.

Whenever I read some poster suggesting this, I inevitably react with a biting reply. It really does annoy me, I'm afraid, not because these people should know better (the rather poor quality of most of these posts betrays that notion), but because they inevitably get modded up as +4 Informative or +5 Interesting when it's simply unsustainable nonsense.

There are machine shops who run NT 3.5 controllers that have uptimes counted in the years, not a paltry couple of months or so. But how about some hard figures? I currently have a NT 4.0 file server that is literally accessed 24 x 7 x 365 by several hundred people simultaneously, as well as running a licensing dongle for development software. As I write this morning -- 8 September 2003 -- the uptime is:

656 days, 11 hours, 42 minutes, 49 seconds

No, it's not on the Internet and therefore not vulnerable to attacks. Yes, I've performed some maintenance on it (had to change the IP addressing just a few weeks ago). Guess what -- despite popular opinion to the contrary, there are a number of maintenance operations which don't require reboots.

Now then...who wants to talk?

=================================

UPDATE 16 DECEMBER 2003

Yep, still going. Now at:

755 days, 20 hours, 38 minutes, 20 seconds

Not too terriby shabby, is it?