Slashdot Mirror
GIF Patent Prepares to Expire
pajamacore writes "It's worth noting that 20 June 2003 is GIF Liberation Day, the day on which US Patent 4,558,302 expires. The patent describes the LZW compression algorithm used in .gif files. That said, maybe the prices of image editing applications will drop slightly when corporations don't have to pay fees to Unisys."
Post Aborted! Reason: Cowboyneal is too Fat
Hey, I can stop pirating apps then!
Sig & Below
Yuck Fou
If media companies want to boost ratings and credibility at the same time, they should follow the lead of New York Times columnists Paul Krugman and Nicholas D. Kristof and make weapons of mass destruction the top story of the summer. Not only have President Bush and his administration exaggerated the evidence that Iraq had WMD, but now that news of their lies has leaked out, the pro-war camp is spinning like mad. The odds of exposing a major cover-up are looking very good indeed.
Consider the momentum this story has picked up from the Times Op-Ed page in recent weeks. On May 30, Kristof reported that according to "a torrent" of sources, WMD intelligence was "deliberately warped . . . to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorize [the war in Iraq]." On June 3, Krugman noted that "misrepresentation and deception are standard operating procedure for this administration," and on June 10, he demanded accountability, blasting the Bush team's m.o. as one of "cherry picking, of choosing and exaggerating intelligence that suited [their] preconceptions."
At press time, the Bush team and Tony Blair stand widely accused of intentionally publicizing bogus evidence to justify the war. Not only did Bush rely on forged documents when he made the claim in his State of the Union address that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Niger, but, as Kristof reported on May 6 and June 13, everyone in the intelligence community knew this was a lie, including the office of Dick Cheney. With some Democrats demanding public WMD hearings, the Bush team is running scared, scheduling closed hearings and scheming to make CIA director George Tenet the fall guy.
What did the president know, and when did he know it? The refrain dates back to Watergate days, when Richard Nixon had to resign because of his lies. Just think, with gavel-to-gavel coverage, WMD hearings could be an enlightening spectacle, filling the cable channels with Watergate nostalgia while reminding the world that in America, political leaders have an obligation to tell the truth. Even lying about sex, as conservatives liked to remind us during the Clinton era, is an impeachable offense.
Now that a Republican is accused of lying to launch an endless military occupation, hawks are rushing to reassert the legitimacy of U.S. aggression. But the "bouquet of new justifications," as Maureen Dowd calls their arguments, have wilted quickly. What's the rush to find WMD? asks the Bush camp. We found other neat stuff, like torture chambers. Saddam Hussein had these weapons before, but he hid them really wellâ"or maybe sent them to Syria. Dr. Germ and Mrs. Anthrax aren't talking, 'cause they don't want to be tried as war criminals. And besides, would Dubya lie to you?
The Bush defense begins and ends with the assertion that we're better off now that the U.S. is occupying Iraq. Questioned on June 9 about his reasons for going to war, Bush declared, "The credibility of the United States is based upon our strong desire to make the world more peaceful, and the world is now more peaceful." It is?
Some hawkish columnists invoke noble goals to justify the war, but they dodge the question of organized deception. Writing for the British Mirror on June 5, Christopher Hitchens argued that allegations of hyped evidence do not discredit regime change in Iraq, concluding that the failure to find WMD is "a good thing on the whole"â"because it means Hussein has been disarmed. On June 4, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman shrugged off WMD hype as a necessary selling technique for Bush, arguing that we hit Hussein "because we could" and that what matters is whether we succeed at building a "progressive Arab regime." In other words, the ends justify the means.
In a June 8 op-ed, Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan apologized for Bush and Blair by linking them with anyone who ever said Iraq had WMD. "If Bush and [Blair] are lying," he wrote, "they're not alone. They're part of a vast conspiratorial network of liars that include
> Know how you do all of the above with Windows 98se or Win2k? Select internet connection sharing in help and the wizard does it all for you.
Yeah, but you couldn't do this in Windows 95. Once the GUIs have as much time to mature as it took Microsoft to get there, this functionality might be there. It will be eventually. GNU/Linux has come a long way in the past decade.
Kevin Mitchell's , one of the first GIF-manipulating products for Mac, is still available as shareware.
He's still dedicated Mac only, so he could use your support.
Design for Use, not Construction!
Ummmm... are you in the right discussion???
yesterday waiting in line for onion ring sauce for my onion rings and this little kid came up behind me and asked for a simpsons watch and i was like "hey punk where are you goddamn manners" and his dad came up behind me and he thought he was a tough ass because he was driving a ford f150 with the calvin windows decal pissing on the dodge logo and i said "look motherfucker my pythons are registered weapons with the federal government" and he said "yeah sure" so i socked him in the gut then in the face and then stomped on him about 672 times while his kid and girlfriend watched and then i ran off with his boots
I am so fucking drunk. Windows sucks. Slashdot rules. I am a nerd.
If you can spare some bandwidth, please drop by macgimp.org to offer a mirror for the MacGIMP update. It is a 52 megabyte file.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
My favorite part about XV was, if you did "xv *.jpg" (for instance) and then deleted some of the files out from under it, it would pop up a box as you got to each file that was deleted to let you know that it couldn't load the picture.
The dialog box said something along the lines of, "Couldn't display picture." But the fun part was, the button didn't say "OK," because, well, it probably wasn't OK. It said "Bummer."
I always thought that was a nice counterpoint to programs that say things like "All of your data has been lost" and then ask you to click "OK" No, it's NOT OK! But xv gaved you a way to acknowledge receipt of the information without having you approve of it, and I always appreciated that.
I'm waiting a bit before I go to bed, in hopes of getting a (near) FP and linking to goatse.cx
You can't say I haven't done my part in trying to destroy slsahdot.
It's Sklyarov. Get it right.
You are one rude, arrogant in-duh-vidual.
Someone else made a transposition error - so what. It was obvious who the poster was referring too.
Did being pompous and rude over a transposition error make you feel better, did it boost your ego?.
It wasn't even me that made the error, and moronic no-value comments like yours still piss me off.
Tedious grammar and spelling nazi's stifle free speech on the web because people don't want to post if others are just going to nitpick at their spelling or grammar.
Please grow up or find somewhere else to hang out.
and that's why I run on a Mac platform as well [...] and screwing with XFree so that windows don't lock (as) randomly.
XFree86 is reliable and efficient, in particular compared to the Mac OS window system.
If your XFree86 server "locks [up] randomly", you probably have bad hardware, unsupported hardware, or perhaps you are just making it up.
It's Atari. Get it right.