Slashdot Mirror

Or Everything2, another cool site with hyperlinks everywhere. You learn to ignore most of them and not be perturbed by an overabundance of links anywhere.

I think it's got something to do with Yakov Smirnoff trying to revive his carreer.

The joke is that everything is backwards IN SOVIET RUSSIA.

So, if slashdot says "noun 1 verbs noun 2", the appropriate response is "IN SOVIET RUSSIA (note the caps, very important), noun 2 verbs noun 1!".

mmmmk?

IN SOVIET RUSSIA, joke explains SweetAndSourJesus!

Would that be Snarf or snarf?

Copyright simply elevates art on part with real goods

Actually, it elevates art on par with real estate. Like the space of land on this planet, the space of artistic expression is limited. There are only a finite number of words in the English language and a finite ways to combine them into a poem with three phrases of five, seven, and five syllables. There are also only a finite number of melodic hooks of a given length in the Western musical scale. When you stake your claim, you get a monopoly on the work you copyrighted, plus all the works that are substantially close to it. It's possible to get sued for a coincidence and lose. Once almost all the space has been claimed, there is no room to innovate, and all new works must be licensed by the owner of the particular space in which they fall. Spider Robinson wrote a short story about this situation.

Anybody is allowed to take quotes from a copyrighted source

Really? Then why did songwriter Frank Silver get busted for borrowing a four-note hook from a Handel piece when it was still under copyright?

There is a nice explanation of TCO here.

and, apart from that a TCO would be much more useful if there were a defined period of time in the calculation of the TCO. for instance, w2k might be cheaper within a period one year, but after that year you will be forced to upgrade even your hardware to use the new palladium/tcpa-enhanced MS OS 3000 or whatever new buzzword comes to Microsofts minds. you will have to send your admins to expensive microsoft seminars etc. to catch up with the latest technologies and such. if you add the costs of your obligation to buy whatever microsoft wants to sell you to your calculated TCO, things might look quite different.

I second the motion. To such a succinct retort, I will only add that 'metaphysics' (nice ten-dollar word, huh?) is a poor relation to its vastly superior successor: a materialist understanding of 'emergent behavior' -- something Dennett does indeed excel at teasing out of empirical facts.

Kevin Mitnick

What on earth are you gibbering about? Can macroevolution , in your confused view, decribe the initial non-living conditions or not?

Anyway, what is metaphical about the emergent properties of matter? Go read this for some real evolutionary metaphics.

First, a note of personal preference. Good scifi needs to be space opera: fleets of starships fighting with Ride of the Valkyries playing in background, exploding planets, tragic heroes and big stakes are a must. Small-scale (and low-tech) scifi can be pretty entertaining, but who wants to read about people living their everyday lives, when you can just watch your neighbour do that?

Frank Herbert's Dune series were long my favourite scifi novels. Deep ecological and religious themes are something not-so-often seen in scifi, and I belong to the rare few who actually likes Herbert's writing style. :-) However, a few years back, I discovered a Scottish writer called Iain M. Banks. His Culture books have all the elements I want: ultra-high tech (ships hiding in suns and manipulating planets with their effectors from lightyears away), a realistic look of a very advanced society , no given morals (except the Culture's very obscure ones) and thought-provoking endings. If you haven't read Banks yet, do yourself a favour and buy a book. I recommend starting with Player of Games or Use of Weapons. Then, if you want to know more about the Culture (the human utopian society), read the author's essay A few notes on The Culture.

Does anyone have a link to a list of Culture Ship names?

That's John Cleese, you culturally stunted twit.

This is what "jump the shark means

I think that thing that everyone is scared of is a Union coming in and telling them that they're relegated to Jr. SysAdmin while the mainframe guys are trained and promoted.

This is exactly what will happen, tho'. Go look up seniority. Remember the recent dispute between the dockers union and the ports on the West Coast? The union paralyzed Pacific trade in a bid to prevent the introduction of new technology. A union thinks in terms of quantity, not quality - they want as many jobs as possible and that's their only priority, even though they risk destroying the source of those jobs.

It's not like the UAW is going to come in and force their methods of union dirty tricks on the IT industry. Would any of you have a problem with an IT Union that was built by Sage/USENIX, or a like organization?

I'm sure all unions were started quite idealistically, after all, who would join the union in its early days if it wasn't a compelling proposition? The problem is that unions are about quantity not quality, and they hate competition between their members, because they rely on presenting a united front. That means that unions always look after the interest of the lowest common denominator. That's another reason they love the idea of seniority; it protects those who have been union members for longers, and it guarantees even mediocre workers promotions if they simply stick around long enough.

That works on an assembly line where workers are interchangeable, but the difference in productivity between an excellent programmer and a poor programmer can easily bee 100:1. Guess which one the union will look after, and which one it will consider a troublemaker?

If there actually were an IT union and it had some clout who do you think could be lobbying in Washington against DMCA and the like?

What makes you assume a union would do that?

Think about this: for an organization of a given size, the organization would require more sysadmins for an all-NT solution than an all-Unix solution. That means a union is going to be campaigning against Linux! That's what unions do, they try to maximize jobs at the expense of efficiency.

The problem is we all still have some of that cowboy glint in our eyes. "Yeah I can be a CIO by 30, I know more than the doofus sitting in the executive suite does anyway" Grow up a little bit and see that while not perfect, in the face of a declining IT industry a Union is one thing that can give you some power back, on a large economic sized scale.

If you think you are that good, at the moment you are free to take the risk and go for it. In a union world, your age would matter more than your skills and ideas.

The IT industry isn't declining, just changing. All those people who lost their jobs in the dotcom crash? The harsh fact is that their jobs disappeared because they weren't doing anything useful in the first place. Whether you were in marketing or programming, dogfood.com was a bad idea - period. All these people took the risk hoping to get rich on stock options, and none of them have any right to complain when it doesn't pan out.

They may neglect to mention a certain Apple Records that they had to pay off to stay in business. From what I have been told, the very famous MacOS sound "SoSuMi" was derived from that experience. "So sue me."

And how quickly they turn the other cheek.

They used to be:
Applecomm.com.au, but on the frontpage there is an announcement regarding the settlement and the change to iGreen.

I can certainly forgive them for their apples being sour.

The only upside of this is if Apple Communications would have become an ISP (not entirely far fetched). The name Apple Internet Access or Apple Broadband could certainly be too close for comfort, and would enjoy at least a small amount of probable name association; the very thing these sorts of suits are trying to protect against. It's a tough situation on either end of the boot.

--jay

OK, I guess this Tectoy SMS is probably licensed, but now I'm curious about Brazilian copyright and patent law.

Here we have patent law just like in the us.

In Brazil, do you also have software patents?

Do you have companies that apply for a patent, get it, hide it for years, and then enforce it, so as to harm other firms in the industry?

Do you have broad look-and-feel copyrights, which the USA had until Lotus v. Borland?

Do you have life+70 jail s^H^H^H^H^H^H copyright terms?

Do you have lawsuits over copying a mere four notes?

UT3K?? Wow, you must have a pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-release!

I want UT802K. In UT802K, you control Precious Moments people who have just learned that they have been bred as food for hordes of RMS-monsters for centuries.

(Read More...)

It's always a good idea to know what you're talking about.

( Read More... | 4 of 330 comments | Your Rights Online

Nope, just Prince Phillip

Given that current satellites are able to read print the size of license plates

I think that's an urban myth. You would need to broadcast on frequencies that are distinct from any ambient emitters and reflectors which probably rules out anything between IR and UV. Even then the satellite would only see you as a point source. And then, there are no real advantages over radio.

Right now cellular is fine for chatting with friends to meet at whatever resturant or bar or movie showing, but outside of that, it's impossibly expensive.

You have one phone number no matter how many times you move house.

Its up to you how reachable you are, if you don't want to answer then hit 'reject' and it'll go to voicemail.

You get stuff like E2 in your pocket all the time! :)

Its amazing that most people of the world search for similar things, irrespective of language! Good they put filters.... otherwise a normal visitor would be shocked that most of the world wants naked ladies.

How about an E2 zeitgeist? Cream of the cool is close, but it would be interesting to see what people are searching for as well as what they are contributing. I sometimes even check E2 before Google, because at least there is some active quality control on E2 nodes, unlike the web at large.

There is a very lengthy node on Everything2 regarding this, called Why Strapping Buttered Toast to a Cat Will Not Produce Infinite Power

Don't believe him, folks. Read the Everything2 node. (And, no, I didn't do any of the writeups.)

So where is the e2 node ?

I have two alternative answers to that:

1. The only thing American society hates more than an intellectual is a loner. (Go watch Bowling for Columbine.)
2. Due to Metcalfe's Law (ie: people only will join the Online service if it's a party), loners do not contribute as much to Maxim's bottom line.

In the article Wright says that the game is designed to encourage the kind of behaviour that Maxim appreciates in society -- this would actually be scary if a significant portion of the population started playing it... But what I'm really looking forward to is seeing what kinds of bots people can get away with.

This is a famous troll piece from forever ago, often echoed on Adequacy (when it was around) and also shown on kuro5hin a lot.

Sounds like a prion, popularly believed to be the cause of mad cow disease et al. Prions are believed to be proteins that self-replicate using host DNA. They gestate over 20 or so years or so.

Would some kind Windows hacker please program this?!
Yes I am aware that there may be legal implications, I'm just thinking about the tech here. That's why I'm saying countermeasures and not counterattacks, e.g. some kind of teergrube

At the bottom of the jokes page that the poster, Biedermann, links to in his post, we see the following footnote:

"To link directly to this page, please use http://www.jestsandjokes.com/show.php3?name=dos.co mmandments"

Slashdotting's kinda as big a direct linking you can get...

there is only so many times in a day you can "go make coffee" or "check your email".

Geek Slack List

• http://www.subgenius.com/
• http://www.slackersguild.com/
• BBC News
• http://www.memepool.com/
• http://www.plastic.com/
• http://www.arstechnica.com/
• http://www.metafilter.com/
• http://www.techdirt.com/
• http://www.bottomquark.com/ (Science News)
• http://newsforge.com/
• http://www.theregister.co.uk/
• http://www.anandtech.com/
• http://www.bjorn3d.com/
• http://cellar.org - Image of the Day
• http://www.collegehumor.com/
• http://www.everything2.com/
• http://www.kuro5hin.org/
• http://www.theonion.com/
• NASA - Astronomy Picutre of the Day
• http://www.majorgeeks.com - Windows Shareware / Freeware
• http://www.advogato.org/
• http://www.sweetcode.org/
• http://www.disinfo.com/ - Disinformation
• http://www.somethingawful.com/
• http://www.astronomynow.com/ - Astronomy News
• http://www.aip.org/ - American Institue of Physics - News
• http://www.adequacy.org/

• The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking 1 on Large Computations

Hope this helps =)

See the "history" page on my site for a description of the Army SL-1 that went critical in Idaho in the 60s. That's one I didn't learn about until recently, and apparently it was a pretty hot one too.

There is a common belief that 'going critical' is synonymous with a meltdown, or out-of-control chain reaction or manifold other bad things. This is, however, false.

A nuclear reactor is a device which creates chain reactions to amplify the effects of neutrons. The neutron multiplication factor describes whether the number of neutrons present in the core is increasing, decreasing, or remaining the same. Based upon this, the following are defined:

Subcritical: there are fewer neutrons in the current neutron generation than in the previous neutron generation, e.g. the neutron multiplication factor is less than one.
Critical: there are exactly the same number of neutrons in the current neutron generation than in the previous neutron generation, e.g. the neutron multiplication factor is equal to one.
Supercritical: there are more neutrons in the current neutron generation than in the previous neutron generation as a result of delayed neutrons only, e.g. the neutron multiplication factor is greater than one.
Prompt Critical: there are more neutrons in the current neutron generation than in the previous neutron generation as a result of prompt neutrons alone, e.g. the neutron multiplication factor is equal to one plus the reciprocal of 1-beta, where beta is the fraction of neutrons which are delayed.

Therefore: 1) A reactor must be critical to maintain its power. 2) A reactor must be supercritical to increase in power. Criticality and supercriticality are normal states for a reactor. It's prompt criticality which is bad.

music written by the band or singer themselves

How can the performer-songwriters make sure that they didn't unconsciously copy a previous song? George Harrison got in trouble for that. It can even happen by coincidence, leading to a hypothetical situation in which the Copyright Office rejects works as "unoriginal".

For those who don't want to type it in, real links:

archive.org
Everything2.com

Apparently, you are not familiar with the "Even-Odd" rule of Star Trek movies. This is an even-numbered movie, and thus, will rock.

No, I'm familiar with it, however I think the rule was broken with Generations (Movie #7).

Yes, I thought Generations was better than First Contact, but that's not to say I didn't think First Contact was anything but good. Except the Borg Queen. I think her concept is stupid and ridiculous. The Borg have degraded in all appearences after The Best of Both Worlds.

Rather than rehash my thoughts on this particular subject, you can go read them here if you so desire.

It's fun and easy to kill your Sims. Make your point by targetting the corporate employees specifically.

What's up with the pseudo-Japanese name?

A node I wrote on E2 should explain.

How about facing this fact.

ISP's that don't do something to combat spam are going to have customers leave over it.

There are other ways of maintaining the list. I have heard the arguements many times, but fundamentally, its up to the sender to be certain that the recipients want to receive the email.

First of all, is the sign up process a Double Opt-In process? A pita to implement if it isn't done already, but good luck keeping an accurate list without it. It also helps establish a trust with the people who want the mail. 99% of the spam I still get claims that at some point in time I signed up for this list.

Secondly how active is the list? Someone signing up for a list that doesn't generate any traffic for 6 months is a sure way to have people think your spamming them, even if they did actually ask to be on the list.

As far as the spam lists, I've had to deal with there overzealous behaviour as well. They block mail servers that have an open relay hole in them very fast. The more zealous the site, the less likely I am to use the list. No ISP is doing their customers a service by using lists that are ready to block every IP out there and damn them to hell for ever.

Trademarks don't expire. They last as long as the name has not become generic.

Copyrights don't expire. Disney can usually get the EU Parliament and the US Congress to pass repeated blanket copyright term extension laws.

Patents, on the other hand...

Digital imaging and printing has been around for a long time. Hasn't the patent [on color matching] expired by now, or due to expire shortly?

...don't expire. There is a practice called "patent evergreening" where a patent holder makes minor additional disclosures, such as the process or an intermediate product. It's even worse in the drug world, where once a drug has fallen out of patent and the slightly improved replacement with fewer side effects is on the market, the pharmaceutical company lobbies to get the older drug ruled "unsafe" and pulled from the market before generics pop up. It happened with Seldane.

That's why GIMP won't support color matching for the foreseeable future.

I suspect that street bum might have this to say.

Actually - there are a lot of other posts here that talk about why parallel necessarily isn't better. At high speeds with long cables it can be a pain in the ass to keep all the bits lined-up. Sometimes it is easier to develope hardware that does serial faster than it is to add more wires and do it parallel.

You are being bombarded with all of the above constantly, every day of your life.

You are being bombarded with all of the above constantly, every day of your life.

You are being bombarded with all of the above constantly, every day of your life.

You are being bombarded with all of the above constantly, every day of your life.

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=strangele t
(The link works, for some reason, Slashdot put a space in the link's description.)

---
Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others! - Kodos

Yes, if I duplicate your stuff almost exactly and hurt your business, then copyright should kick in. However:

• Set designers need to build sets based on existing architecture.
• Cartoonists should be able to draw an eyeball even if they saw other green eyeballs in the 60's. [back on that discussion, Blizzard could say both groups stole it from their Warcraft 2 'Eye of Kilrog']
• Musicians should be able to use any set of notes, not worrying that a particular set of 4 notes will get them in copyright issues.
• Any other creative art (programming, artistry, city planning, construction, &c.) requires the use of elements that are used elsewhere, or that may have been discovered by someone else for the same purpose.

Frob.

Softlinks have escaped from E2 to the rest of the Web! No one is safe!

No CARP royalty problems since these bands are unsigned and own the music themselves.

Really?

I know how to play a few instruments, I know some music theory, and I want to write some music, record it, and put it on the Internet, but I've run into one slight problem: How is it possible to write original music, when it's so hard to avoid accidentally re-inventing something you've heard ten years ago and losing a lawsuit? Especially when a large music publisher can take you down with just four notes?