Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Electioneering, Blimps, Shuffling
Let's get the politics out of the way.
The Washington state Republican Party has been working to prove that the election of November 2, between Democrat Christine Gregoire and Republican Dino Rossi, was too fraudulent to be trusted, given the small margin of victory by Gregoire (129 votes), and they want a new election. Hundreds of alleged fraudulent votes (mostly felons, but also out-of-state, duplicate, and deceased voters), uncounted ballots, unaccounted-for absentee ballots, and illegally counted provisional ballots comprise the bulk of the GOP's case. The trial begins May 23, and the judge expects it to last two weeks. The hearing to decide the burden of proof standard will be May 2.
Unctuous politicians relive their student-council glory days:
Jackson West writes "As it stands, two versions of the Electronic Engineering bill (discussed earlier on Slashdot) presented to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors have passed their 'first reading.' This means both the first, unamended piece of legislation, and an amended version that will "specifically exclude web logs, forums, opt-in email lists and postings on general web pages." The Rules Committee will consider the amended bill on Monday, with a final vote on both bills on Tuesday."
How to get attention, part IIVVIVIVM.SanLouBlues writes "On March 30th, Slashdot reported on the FBI request for the logs of several radical-leaning sites. The Washington Post has an article about the man who was responsible for the posts which resulted in the FBI request. He claimed to have killed a cop in several forum posts."
Now on to the fun stuff!Matt Omori writes to say that GimpShop, the recently mentioned version of The GIMP hacked to feel more familiar to users of Photoshop, isn't just for Linux and Mac OS X. "Yes, it's finally been coded for Windows XP. After lots of hard work, some people devoted to a website, plasticbugs.com, have coded GimpShop for Windows."
To use it, you'll need Windows XP, GTK+, and a reboot. However, I'd also like to point out a BigSven's comment about the themeability of The GIMP; it would be great to see GIMPersonalities of all sorts -- and it sounds like this can be accomplished with some XML editing.
Still looks actionable to me.MrToast writes "The iPodLounge is reporting that LuxPro's Super Shuffle is back, but this time with slight alterations. The Super Tangent, as it is being called, has a slightly different button area and also has new headphones. Otherwise it appears to be identical to the iPod shuffle."
(The SuperShuffle disappeared from the Web site, and was reported as a hoax, shortly after it was mentioned in mid-March.)
Let's close on some uplifting news. Vaeske writes with more on my favorite futuristic means of broadband delivery, region-covering airships. "GlobeTel Communications Corp announced that they will be showing their prototype of the Sanswire One on April 12th. This "Stratalite" as they call it, will float in the stratosphere at 65,000 feet and provide line of sight communications to approximately 300,000 square miles, providing two-way high-sped communication. This project has attracted many high-profile NASA engineers to leave their posts for a position with GlobeTel. The military has also shown interest and was present at the GlobeTel Summit."
" Macromedia was sued not long ago for emulating some of these elements in their Flash authoring tool (no idea how that suit resolved)."
Macromedia counter-sued under the claim that Adobe violated some of their patents. They traded licences or something or other and it was dropped. (Macromedia may have had to make changes, but my memory is fuzzy.)
"Adobe are also litigious so-and-sos who are all too willing to harass people in defense of their intellectual "property"."
So long as Adobe is within their rights, that's the court's fault.
"So if Adobe feels even the slightest bit threatened by it, expect the project to receive a nastygram."
Maybe, but they can't claim ignorance. Adobe's suit was widely publicized. Whether Adobe's claims are legit or not, I really don't care. It strikes me that they should follow the spirit of patent law regardless. Patent protected? No prob, innovate. Do things a little differently, improve upon them, and suddenly you have stronger reasons for your development to be adopted. Additionally, you don't have to fear nastygrams! Two birds with one stone, yadda yadda yadda.
"Derp de derp."
"They'd much rather be doing programming. That's 30 hours of development. Now multiply that by all the people who would like to switch to GimpShop but want all the features of Photoshop."
I appreciate the spirit, but I don't think it's all that practical. I mean, who's going to free up $600 and wait for days/weeks/months for a feature that might get developed?
Alternatively, though, do you remember the bounty idea a few years back? Imagine if there was a list of features/goals for GIMP. Each of those features has a donation bin or something like that. Users can Paypal a few bucks towards the features they really want. When somebody completes that feature, they get whatever that feature collected. People vote for their dollars. Programmers have a strong incentive.
Good?
"Derp de derp."
" Why not wait until America's electoral fraud problems become the world's worst, and THEN fix them?"
Odd, I did't say anything like that.
"Derp de derp."
"The problem with Gimp is that they have innovated instead of copied. That is a problem because some people are used to the way Photoshop works, that's why GimpShop was made."
Uh, no, that is not GIMP's problem. Innovation typically implies they made something better. Not even close.
"The problem is that most of the portable music players only support the MP3 format. Innovation doesn't help when you have to deal with vendor lock-in, which is true for both file formats and user interfaces."
Vendor lock-in? No, there are two problems there:
1.) Vorbis requires significantly more processing power than MP3s to decode. A lot of MP3 players out there simply do not have the processing power for it.
2.) MP3 is the de-facto standard. The market decided its dominance.
The patents on MP3 have only made Vorbis more viable, not less.
"Derp de derp."
Huh, dunno. Ever asked your president the same question?
I think that was out of line.
What a coincidence: I thought the post I was replying to was out of line. Funny that!
But it still seems to me that for every step forward in our rights in one area we loose just a tad more in another.
... but even then, since that time, we've had anti-sodomy laws ruled unconstitutional, and virtual child porn ruled legal (not that I am in favor of virtual child porn, but it's nice that the courts recognize we can do fake things and distinguish them from reality, which didn't happen before).
... these things take time. You can't expect the government to immediately recognize and adapt to our new situation in a way that is going to be entirely congruous with our rights. This is a slow process. An example: it has always been legal to stand outside someone's property and view it, as long as you don't actually enter the property. So a cop can listen and look through your window from the sidewalk, hear or see a crime, and then arrest you, without a warrant.
It doesn't seem that way to me. Maybe if you look only at the few years since 9/11
Perhaps the 2nd suffers less under the gop, but doese not privacy and freedom suffer more?
"Freedom" is ambiguous. The Second Amendment is about freedom too. As to privacy, I am unconvinced. The great majority of the things the left complains about -- for example, being able to search library records -- is not, in my opinion, the least bit antagonistic to our rights. Further, these things all had bipartisan support, so I question your attack of the GOP in these matters.
And one thing also to remember is that the most egregious moves by the Congress are being challenged in court, and are often losing, including getting support in some cases from conservative justices like Scalia, who sided against the government in the Padilla case. The point being that when the government does overstep its bounds against our rights, we can't run around like chickens with our heads cut off, because at the end of the day, our rights will usually be just fine.
perhaps the big evils of slavery are finally cast down for what they are, but do we not through pc-ism find our right to speak our mind diminished?
I find that to be absoutely, in every way, irrelevant to the discussion at hand. I am talking about the legal right to free speech, not whether you feel constrained by cultural forces that have no force of law. I never feel constrained to speak my mind.
There are thousands of tiny examples.
I doubt it. But even if so, there are thousands of examples from 200 years ago, from 150 years ago, from 100 years ago, from 50 years ago, too. And most of those are worse, and most of those we would not stand for today, and most of those included the ones we take issue with today, such as property rights and search/seizure rights. Those are not new problems; at most, they are existing problems amplified both by our current situation (terrorist threats + new technologies).
And getting back to the courts
That's all well and good, but what about new technology that allows me to actually "see" through your walls using UV or heat sensors? Is that an invasion of privacy? How should the law be rewritten to prevent it, if it should be prevented?
I have confidence these things will work themselves out in favor of our rights, because with the notable exception of guns, they almost always do. But it takes time.
Gosh, a typical neo-con non-response to the outlandish Fascism exhibited by Your Beloved and Glorious Leader, George W. Bush the First. You can't possibly defend his murderousness, so you duck. Tell us again why this "jury's out" guy sent TEN TIMES as many troops into Iraq (where Osama bin Laden was NOT) than he sent into Afghanistan (where OBL probably WAS), and ZERO troops into Saudi Arabia (where OBL probably now IS)? You can't possibly defend that rhetorical truth, either. Who's "Bandar Bush"? Care to discuss that for a while? I doubt it. We wouldn't want to establish any nasty link between your Republican Godhead and those terrorist-supporting Saudis.
...
...
Go fuck yourself, Neo-Con. The only deliberation possible is what GWB will be doing like Kissinger does right now, by thinking carefully about what country he visits in case he's captured by local law enforcement and then indicted for his crimes against Humanity.
Imperialist shitbag. YOU
LOVE
MURDERING PEOPLE! And all the world can see that's perfectly true.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]