Introducing RMS-Lint

Shlomi Fish writes "There's a new tool called RMS-Lint that aims to check and correct documents for their compliance with correspondence rules from Richard Stallman. If you plan on sending RMS an E-mail, you may actually need it."

fuck off

[larry bagina]

christ slashdot sucks on april fools day.

How about doing something original, like weirdo moderation ("insightful" becomes "no shit", interesting becomes "word up", etc). or announce that slashdot will now be requiring all posters to subscribe in order to post comments, or "Kathleen Fent, please divorce rob and marry me!" posted by Hemos.

Re:Full List of April Fools Web Sites

[RickHunter]

http://www.userfriendly.org/ - SCO joke, parodying Illiad's usual April Fool's joke.

and freshmeat.net...

[Anonymous Coward]

All project descriptions are ROT-13 encoded.

Re:Proof of AF

[sepluv]

I sent RMS an email recently about sthg and he sent a nice reply quite quickly--I'm not sure why everyone thinks RMS is that funny actually (for a geek anyway).

Although, in his reply, he did say that I should attach webpages instead of giving him the URI's so that he doesn't have to wait for his next batch of mail to receive the webpages (by emailing the URI's) (i.e.: he dsoesn't have WWW access ort doesn't use it) which I thought was a bit sad.

Re:fuck off

[Jim Hall]

christ slashdot sucks on april fools day. How about doing something original, like weirdo moderation ("insightful" becomes "no shit", interesting becomes "word up", etc).

Actually, that's a very good idea. MOD PARENT UP. Slashdot is hella lame on April 1st. Ever since this morning, I've been avoiding slashdot (it's lunchtime now, so I'm slacking off.)

Sorry guys, I read slashdot for the news. When you don't post real news, you've become something like BBSpot or Fark, and I don't read them every day.

Just do something simple (I like the idea from the parent poster) and let that be it.

april's (?) fool

[molnarcs]

Do you know why GNU su doesn't support the wheel group (well, I think it does now, but it didn't for a time). Because RMS opined that it creates a divide between those with power and those without. (Actually I found this jewel in this this thread, so credit isn't mine... [freebsdforums.org]

manpage is from SUSE 6.1...

Why GNU su does not support the wheel group (by Richard Stallman)
Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.)

However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual su mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he can tell the rest. The "wheel group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.

I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first.

Actually I respect the guy: he is a man with strong principles, and I admire him for that. Given the historical context (1984) this isn't as silly as it sounds now. Without the internet this wasn't as much a security threat as it is today. But there is no excuse for linux distributions (second half of 90's) to follow that policy (or did they just take su for what it is - e.g. no wheel support - without looking at the outdated and by now somewhat silly reasons?).

April's fool day on ./ featuring RMS ... when I saw it, I thought I'd share this cute (I'd say funny) piece of history, but again, no disrespect intended. Although being somewhat cynical is en vogue in nerd circles (unfortunately and boringly), when I say I respect RMS for what he is and for what he represents, I mean it.