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News: Community Choice Award "Most Likely to be Shut Down By Govt" 246 comments
Last week we took nominations for a Slashdot category at the
SourceForge Community Choice awards. Our category was 'Most Likely to be Shut Down By Government Agency'. Your nominations were tallied, and we arbitrarily selected a few that we think are the best. Today is the day where you can at long last determine the winner, using the incredibly scientifically accurate Slashdot Poll. Our nominees are
Truecrypt,
EFF Patent Busting,
GNU Software Radio,
WikiLeaks,
Cryptome.org,
Tor,
Freenet,
and CowboyNeal.
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Mobile: FSF's "Defective By Design" Targets Apple Genius Bars 838 comments
mjasay writes
"At OSCON this year, MySQL's Brian Aker made this bold statement: 'Microsoft is irrelevant ... We're more worried about Apple.' The Free Software Foundation appears to have caught the hint, and has turned its attention to all-things-Apple with a 'denial of service' attack on the Apple Genius Bars. The idea is to completely book all Genius Bars and then ask the 'geniuses,' over and over again, a few questions about Apple's proprietary ways (while, apparently, real customers with support issues are left to flounder). Lost in this anti-Apple fervor, however, is the Free Software Foundation's complete and conscious failure to protect the web. Richard Stallman has long felt that software that doesn't sit on his desktop doesn't affect his freedom, but isn't the opposite true? Why is the FSF focused on Apple when the bigger concern should be Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, and other web players, a point made by Tim O'Reilly recently at OSCON?" Defective by Design is just one of many FSF projects, remember; it
hardly seems fair to say that the FSF has been ignoring the implications of software as a service.
Pretty Fly (Score:2, Funny)
Now he's getting a tattoo yeah
he's getting ink done
He asks for a 13
but they drew a 31!
Friends say he's trying too hard and he's not quite hip
But in his own mind he's the
he's the dopest trick
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I almost got a chuckle, but by the end of your mangled sentence the English language was way past dead by you beating it with your mangled version of it :(
I got Zune tattoos (Score:1, Funny)
You've probably seen my photo around [engadgetmobile.com], but I'm trying to get them removed now.
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Please tell me you're joking... (Score:5, Informative)
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Indeed, I feel sorry for these people who get tattoos like this.
Oooh, look what geek cred I have, I have open source logos on me. Except that the penguin has never been anything but, well, pretty lame really.
And then add to the the speed of progress in the tech world, and you've got yourself a permanent reminder of how narrow focused you happened to be at one point in your life.
Fast forward 10 years or so and you have so many other things that you are interested in, and you can see how foolish it may have b
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Actuallly I really enjoyed checking out some of the ink done at this site:
Carl Zimmer's Science Tattoos [sciencetattoo.com]
I have just one tat and it is on my shoulder and not really geeky at all. It's just a Greatful Dead "Steal Your Face" tat that I have had since I was about 16.
(Oh - and someone fix this window size please? I hate trying to post in idle just because of this.)
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http://carlzimmer.typepad.com/sciencetattoo/2008/02/cousin-to-pigeo.html [typepad.com]
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But it's not an operating system, it's my whole life! See, I won't regret it.
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Re:Please tell me you're joking... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because if no-one points out the folly in doing this when others do it, but just heap praise on them, well, others are likely to do the same thing.
Then you have even more people who wish they maybe should have thought a bit longer about getting something so topical inked onto their body for life.
If comments like this make just a few people think 'oh... hmmm, yeah, maybe I won't still think Linux is the centre of the universe in 10 years', and perhaps just get themselves a nice t-shirt or something, then my work here is done.
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Yeah, that was a well thought out response pulling on all available knowledge, bravo sir.
Did I say all tats? No
Did I even state any kind of age at which getting one of these tats is foolhardy? No
Do you know how old I am? Well, maybe, it's not hard to find out, but I would say, no.
I'm not going to say that everyone who gets a tat in their 20s will regret it, but I am going to say a lot will, especially with the numbers who get ridiculously fleeting things like company logos inked into their flesh.
Band names
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A Zune logo is pretty dumb, but something like Tux or Mario do have a lot of significance already. Mario is just an icon in his own right, and a big part of gaming history. Tux perhaps isn't very well recognised outside of geek circles, but MS are going to be remembered for centuries to come as the company to drive home computing forward (in a pretty crappy way, but they have done some slight good in amongst all the bad). Linux looks like it's going to be the thing to get us out of the mire and drive comput
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I've been in the business for almost twenty years now, and I could not agree more. Of course, this is also true for a lot of things: the name of your lover, a favorite band, etc. I always get a laugh out of the guys that walk in and immediately want to show off their pre-existing stuff with "I got this one in prison". Of course, when you have so many scratchers out there that just want to take your money, it's not hard to see why people make poor decisions and end up with poorly done work.
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Well, if we look back 10 years at someone who got a tattoo of tux...
Linux is quickly closing on 20 years, and is likely to keep going for quite some time yet.
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For a logo that represents a product (even an Free one), you may be right. People do have to think that they will have if for their lives, and that's something. You can't do it for impulse, it has to be a matured decision.
That's why I got a GNU tattoo [googlepages.com]. It's not about the GNU system, but about the whole Free Software movement. It won't die. Even if 30 years from now I'm completely away from the scene, or it's still an important part of my life, and it represents important ideals for me.
I'm also considering a
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I got my tux tattoo about 8 years ago, and had it touched up with the rest of these folks (actually, earlier on in the day because I had to MC the party.)
I think it's still as timely now as it was when I got it, and I think that if 30 years go by I'll always remember how important Linux was to me during this time in my life. If it weren't for my exposure to Linux, I probably wouldn't have become a sysadmin when I was a kid, I probably wouldn't have become a developer in my twenties, and I wouldn't be the c
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I wish I had an Amazon affiliate code because "So, you got a penguin tattoo, what now?" would be a perfect recommendation.
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... in 25 years, your body-art will be as timely as the "Primos Rules" tattoo I have.
Is that because "Primus" was misspelled, or because you just aren't as big a fan of the band anymore? :)
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Also, I believe the slogan for the band Primus is/was, "Primus Sucks"...
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Exactly. I mean, I lean on the side of the vast majority of tattoos are lame anyway (though I have seen some I like), but how pathetic a life do you have to lead that you want to be permanently marked with a -- let's be honest -- pretty stupid-looking penguin. If I went insane for whatever reason and wanted to get a Linux penguin icon, I'd at least get some really cool looking penguin (pardon the pun), with some really co
Re:Please tell me you're joking... (Score:5, Informative)
Primos was the operating system for Prime Computer's line of minicomputers. They had a few years of fame as the first mini with disk-backed virtual memory. Then DEC cleaned their clock with VMS and the VAXen.
Open-Source Tattoos? (Score:5, Funny)
'Cause I've got the needles right here...
Atomic Power (Score:2)
I have a three-orbital atom [worldalmanacforkids.com] tatooed on the bicep of my left arm. One of the orbitals is blue, one is red, and the third is green. (I've had an obsession with the primary colours of light for as long as I can remember.)
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3 orbitals means 3 electrons which means 3 protons. Proclaiming your love for Lithium, huh?
tat != tough (Score:3, Funny)
here [sourceforge.net] is my favorite.
Trying to pull a tough-guy face while sporting Tux on your arm just doesn't work.
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When I see the look on his face, I'm pretty sure he knows he isn't tough, and that fact was just starting to sink in as that picture was taken!
Uh, okay (Score:2)
Now, I have a lot of ink with much more planned, but I'm not getting tux, beastie, the Microsoft butterfly, or any other tech logos tattooed on my body.
I'd consider wearing a T-shirt or hoodie with tux on it to a Microsoft conference (just to be irritating) if the opportunity arises, but no geek tats for me thanks.
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A Microsoft conference? And you call this courage? Tux, this is Steve. Steve, this is Tux. [vrana.cz]. ;-)
BSD Daemon (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're going to do something stupid like get an OSS logo tattoo, at least get something more cool than a penguin.
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If you're going to do something stupid like get an OSS logo tattoo, at least get something more cool than a penguin.
Too bad Linus's favorite animal wasn't the unicorn.
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If you believe my high school, which uses one as a logo, Unicorns are a symbol of masculinity. This is because all Unicorns are male.
The other thing to remember about them, which makes them so fitting for Slashdot, is that all Unicorns are infertile.
No doubt why they're so popular amongst girls.
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That's why BSD is way cooler than Linux. She-daemon anyone (regular [bellaminettes.com]) (nsfw version [bellaminettes.com]) (another nsfw [netcode.pl]? And if you're lucky you could hook up with a real [netcode.pl] one [eugeneciurana.com].
Re:BSD Daemon (Score:4, Funny)
Can't speak for other women, but I read those as "I never want any contact with a real woman 'evah.'"
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Yeah, if you want to look scary, don't settle for anything less than a Hans Reiser tattoo.
My wife thought they were fake (Score:3, Funny)
Then I told her they were real. She was in shock.
Her introduction to the open source/geek culture is progressing well though.
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Her introduction to the open source/geek culture is progressing well though.
Perhaps you should introduce her to something less deleterious to social lives first. Something like anorexia, or heroin.
Not Exactly a Tux Tattoo (Score:3, Insightful)
At the time, I was working heavily with MS Site Server (what they called portals before portals were called portals). It jumpstarted my career as a systems administrator and I don't ever want to forget that time, when I was energized, full of life, and right about nearly everything.
That said, all of my Windows skills went out the window(s) when I became a Java middleware admin.
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Thats pretty cool. I got my last name in binary a few years back. It wraps around my upper arm. Thankfully I only have a 3 letter last name.
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the freedom to need to manually add /sbin and /usr/sbin to your $PATH