Which, when you live in a plutocracy, is the same thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutocracy

K.

Four legs good - two legs better

Four legs good - two legs better

...

Four legs good - two legs better

Four legs good - two legs better

K.

RIAA agents would just shoot their mouths off, then shoot themselves in the foot.

K.

Look, this is where you need a car analogy.

I'm a Linux nerd, driving carefully down the road.

The guy in front is a hardware vendor, drives like an idiot.

His bad driving certainly isn't my fault, but when his car crashes, it becomes my problem.

Oh, and there's a Linux newbie in a Honda Civic driving along behind me. He wants to bolt insanely expensive flanged speed-holes onto his ride, and it's apparently my problem (though not my fault) that the vendor has crashed because that distracts the newbie into crashing into me...

K.

Maybe this will be more use, then.

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+milestone/ubuntu-9.04-beta

It wasn't really difficult for me to find it, starting from the page whose link I posted...

about three click and twelve seconds, all told.

And if that is still not good enough, then I suggest you go back to whatever you usually do when you don't get everything spoon-fed to you.

K.

You could look at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/jaunty/beta to find out.

Or wait until Saint George's Day.

K.

Indeed, the article at http://weblog.infoworld.com/sustainableit/archives/2008/12/pc_power_manage_1.html ends with that nonsensical question, and claims that the forrester report costs $279.

But if you follow the link, Forrester's report in entitled "How Much Money Are Your Idle PCs Wasting? but costs US $749

K.

No, no, no.

The policy is made in the assumption that the people at the sharp end have either no common sense or will not have time to think and consider the consequences of their actions.

The policy is made to be rigid, inflexible, "one size fits all", with no grey area left for interpretation.

which would perhaps be fine if

1. the policy was well worded and
2. the personnel applying the policy were well trained.

K.

Another quote from the article.

This shows the attitude of the school district officials involved. Even the presumption of innocence is seen at being irrelevant.

K.

I wish Linus would just come clean and say what he thinks, instead of beating about the bush.

K.

whoosh!

did you spend any time at all in higher education? Or was it so long ago that the PC brigade hadn't started making terms like "blackboard" into unwords?

K.

Look at maps of Europe at any time from around 1100AD to around 1800AD.

Feudalism doesn't rely on territorial contiguity. An entity can hold scattered territories within other territories (enclaves) or have privileges within other sovereign territories.

Big corporations are often called transnational for a good reason. Comparing them to feudal states is useful. The chaebol and keiretsu systems may be even closer to feudalism than American conglomerates.

K.

Or is Shell a "digging in the ground and under the sea and moving fluids around in tubes" company?

Oil extraction companies have a lot of technical expertise in drilling down through mud and rock, often starting at the seabed, to reach pockets of oil and gas bearing "sponges".

What Shell is doing is recentering on the technical expertise it has, rather than adding a different technology in the same broad energy game.

Adding a carbon sequestration business is using that technical expertise and simply reversing the flow and changing the fluid. From getting oil or gas out of the ground, Shell wants to put carbon dioxide into the ground.

K.

From the article:

In fact, this would be the universities giving up-front financing for future legal action against file sharers.

K.