No, the "BIG LIE" is that copyright is property. Its not.
In fact, I think you'll find that SCO's saying exactly the opposite from what I'm saying. They're trying to say that anything derived from what they create, in even the remotest way possible, is theirs to control. Its not.
Copyright is a social contract. Society GIVES you this protection that you claim is a "god-given right" (its not) in exchange for you releasing your work to society instead of keeping it locked away. Part of this agreement is that, in exchange for short-term control over the work, control reverts to society as a whole. This is what the little thing known as the "public domain", and material drawn from it is responsible for some of the greatest creative works in recent history.
Destroy the public domain, and you've got to personally create everything from the ground up. Lets see how productive you are then.
No, there's nothing but dust... But they DO make great places to put habitats and other space stations. And they're fairly easy to get to (IIRC, easier than the moon) and they make good launching points for missions to other bodies. Or good places to park asteroids while you work on them.
So its not like starting a farm in the middle of the Sahara. Its more like building a highway through the Sahara from the Mediterranian.
Or do you think that, because what I've created isn't "physical", I'm not allowed to "own" it?
Actually, you're not. Not even under current law, and not under any copyright law since the American Revolution. Copyright is a limited-term monopoly granted by the government. You DO NOT own the work you hold copyright on - it is the property of society, whose resources you used to create it. You do own the rights to a temporary monopoly on the reproduction of that work.
To say nothing of possibly the best but least well-known example, gcc and egcs. egcs forked because, IIRC, they were fed up with the glacial development pace of gcc. Now gcc basically IS egcs, with a few bits of the old gcc codebase tacked on for good measure.
Why space? Abundant natural resources. We can find orders of magnitude more useful stuff just floating around up there than we ever could on Earth. And as an added bonus, we can extract it more easily than we could on a planet, and then use a lot of the waste products to build or improve housing for ourselves. Plus it makes getting everywhere else easier and building other things in space easier.
Africa, Russia, and China. Don't forget China, where the government can keep wages down by tossing labour rights agitators and those that try to improve the situation of the people in prison.
Here's a phrase to describe this type of "capitalism": economic piracy.
A bastion of American software development is acting in a way that furthers neither America nor software development. No further criticism or comment is needed. In the immortal words of Hunter S. Thompson, res ipsa loquitur.
A-freaking-men. What happened to the "rational self-interest" capitalism's supposedly based on? This is neither rational nor self-interested.
Pretty much. It looks like some PHA (Pointy-Haired Administrator) read a Gartner Group report and decided the sky was falling and they needed to make use of this NOW or they'd get crushed by their competition. So he ordered the project outsourced to an Indian group using MS tools. Never mind the damage this is going to cause to MIT's reputation among students and alumni. Its probably lined the PHA's pockets quite nicely and coincidentally, though.
Seriously, you've obviously never dealt with the administration of a center of learning. There's plenty of administrators who're almost as bad or as bad as the PHBs that infest corporate management these days.
This isn't globalization. Its economic piracy, plain and simple. Massive (and not-so-massive) corporations are taking advantage of India's development status, which has a low standard/cost of living but large numbers of marginally skilled employees, to line their own pockets while preventing local development. When wages start to rise, they'll jump ship (and they already are rising, and they already are jumping ship) to the next third-world country with aspirations of being something more. Meanwhile, the economy they leave behind dies on the vine, as it became overly dependant on foreign investment.
Or it could've been due to the Estate's prior bad experiences with RPG companies, and Tolkien's son not wanting his father's works "elaborated" into a bad D&D clone. Given that many of the upper-level designer folks at Decipher are raving D&D fanboys (just look at practically any post they make in various RPG forums), this is probably a very good idea.
Note that Decipher does have the rights to the Lord of the Rings books in addition to the movies. Just not the Silmarillion or any of the Unfinished Tales. (Can't remember if they've got rights to The Hobbit or not)
This may be true, but the established pattern right now is that industrialized, developed, and stable countries tend to have lower population growth rates, or even shrinking populations. China and India do not fit any of the above criteria, though both are making baby steps towards them. (And are trying to convince the rest of the world that they're there to attract foreign investment) Over the next couple of decades, this investment should hopefully lead to more progress in this area (and not be channelled into making the lives of the upper-class even more opulent, as it is in the United States and other third-world countries) which, in turn, will hopefully reduce their problems with overpopulation.
One of the largest factors in reducing the population growth rate seems to be womens' rights. (Duh, if women aren't forced to stay home and act as baby machines, they have fewer kids) India and China both have horrible records in this department, though again, proper foreign investment and local economic development will hopefully help.
And from what I've heard, they did so to avoid taking any further damage themselves from the sinking ship. One can't fault them for that - ICE really screwed up with MERP. Not that Decipher seems to be doing much better with their LotR RPG, judging from the (debatable) rules issues and plodding suppliment pace.
Actually, you should get your facts straight. Bush campaigned repeatedly on the promise of ending the MS anti-trust trial as soon as possible via settlement.
So the fact that Microsoft helped buy the election of the administration that handed them the keys to the kingdom instead of buying them off after makes things better how, exactly?
What it comes down to is realizing that software isn't a product, just like we realized twenty years ago that hardware isn't a product. (Product in the sense that you can base an entire company around producing it and just it) What matter is (and this is very poorly phrased) the services and other such things that comes with it. What matters is the whole package. software's just a component of that package - a very important component, for sure, and one that requires a lot of focus and effort. But still just a component, from the business perspective.
Want to do better than free? Then make something people will want to pay money for. Red Hat, for example, has managed to do this. So has IBM - they're not selling hardware or software. They're selling packages, complete with service and support. So has Apple - they're not selling hardware or software, they're selling an experience and a solution. (In theory, hassle-free ubiquitous computing. As evidence, see the iPod/iTunes)
get slap-on-the-hand settlements for the rest and then see to it that the slap doesn't even actually happen.
Or, even worse, get settlements that actually make their position stronger. Forcing a convicted monopolist to give away a certain amount of their own software makes no sense. The problem is that they've already got far too much market dominance. Giving them a way to get still more market dominance is not a punishment.
Of course, given that they won the antitrust case by paying off the Federal government after Bush got elected, this shouldn't surprise anyone...
Well, the problem in the US is that election officials tend to be the ones doing the stuffing. In the last Presidentail election in Florida, for example. Or numbers get reported and ballots get dumped into a paper shredder. Or conveniently misplaced on the way to permanent storage.
Not only that, but it can be trivially made to look different. Currentl (X)HTML standards allow for multiple stylesheets per document. And many modern browsers, such as Firebird, give prominent indication of alternate stylesheets, and allow easy switching between them.
I must agree. MP3 used to be sort of useful, but the site's interface has been going continually downhill since I first heard about it. It used to just plain be difficult to get it to do what you want, now its actually painful.
I hope CNet tidies it up and actually makes its policies sane again...
Nice theory, but the Supreme Court threw that theory out in Eldred V Ashcroft. Because Congress and the Senate must by definition know what they're doing when passing copyright laws, it is impossible for such laws to be unconstitutional, even if they infringe on the First Amendment or overstep the Constitutional bounds of copyright law. Or so their logic went. Remember - these are the same people that believe that "Forever minus a day" is a "limited" copyright term.
I find it amusing that you're preaching about complex plots to someone that loves anime, but I'll humor you.
The reason I didn't like it was not because it had a complex plot, but because the plot sucked. Yes, that's right, you heard me: it sucked. It was poorly-written, poorly-handled, and poorly planned. They pulled too many about-faces. "The machines are evil and seek to wipe out the 'virus' mankind." "No, the machines are good, just misunderstood." "Oh, wait, they're evil again and are just toying with us." "No, they're good, they're just trying to wipe out humanity because we left the toilet seat up! Silly us!" To say nothing of the neutering of Neo after the first movie. He goes from being able to alter the Matrix however he likes with his mind, as its all just code to a bad Goku or Superman impersonator.
They wrote themselves into a corner with Animatrix and Reloaded, and Revolutions is the product of them desperately trying to get out of it. It suffers accordingly. I wouldn't say that its worse than Star Wars I and II, but I wouldn't say that its better either.
And something you're missing - for many, LotR is a new story. Many of the friends I've gone to see the LotR movies have never read the books, and they've still loved them. So its obviously not because its an old story that everyone knows. It seems to be because they're actually semi-competently written and directed.
Or maybe the Slashdot editors actually went and saw it and are reporting on their own opinions of the movie? (To whit, that it sucked and blew at the same time, and did both with great force)
And it was a little more than 25 comments. In fact, almost every opinion I've seen of the movie from people who aren't die-hard fans and would have liked it even if the machine city had turned out to be filled with clones of Jar-Jar Binks is, at best, "it could have been worse."
Exactly my view. It would reduce the impact of the story to almost nothing and add only some pointless, unanswerable philosophical questions that've been asked hundreds of times before in much better ways. But you'll still find a lot of proponents of that view here on Slashdot - practically every Matrix story after Reloaded was filled with them. I guess the idea that even the "real world" is nothing more than a computer program appeals to the sort of geek that idolizes computers or something.
Me, I'm glad they didn't go with that theory. I like the idea of the real world as the real world, and the idea of machines that aren't perfect and can't create a Matrix so sophisticateed that it'll ensnare all of humanity. And Neo's ability to do Wierd Shit outside of the Matrix just shows that even the machines don't know everything about the world.
Especially education. The university I go to uses Netware for authentication on all their Windows machines, and has for years. Given that they're constantly purchasing new boxes, and this sort of thing is common for universities, that's quite a nice chunk of cash right there.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the "BIG LIE" is that copyright is property. Its not.
In fact, I think you'll find that SCO's saying exactly the opposite from what I'm saying. They're trying to say that anything derived from what they create, in even the remotest way possible, is theirs to control. Its not.
Copyright is a social contract. Society GIVES you this protection that you claim is a "god-given right" (its not) in exchange for you releasing your work to society instead of keeping it locked away. Part of this agreement is that, in exchange for short-term control over the work, control reverts to society as a whole. This is what the little thing known as the "public domain", and material drawn from it is responsible for some of the greatest creative works in recent history.
Destroy the public domain, and you've got to personally create everything from the ground up. Lets see how productive you are then.
No, there's nothing but dust... But they DO make great places to put habitats and other space stations. And they're fairly easy to get to (IIRC, easier than the moon) and they make good launching points for missions to other bodies. Or good places to park asteroids while you work on them.
So its not like starting a farm in the middle of the Sahara. Its more like building a highway through the Sahara from the Mediterranian.
Or do you think that, because what I've created isn't "physical", I'm not allowed to "own" it?
Actually, you're not. Not even under current law, and not under any copyright law since the American Revolution. Copyright is a limited-term monopoly granted by the government. You DO NOT own the work you hold copyright on - it is the property of society, whose resources you used to create it. You do own the rights to a temporary monopoly on the reproduction of that work.
To say nothing of possibly the best but least well-known example, gcc and egcs. egcs forked because, IIRC, they were fed up with the glacial development pace of gcc. Now gcc basically IS egcs, with a few bits of the old gcc codebase tacked on for good measure.
Why space? Abundant natural resources. We can find orders of magnitude more useful stuff just floating around up there than we ever could on Earth. And as an added bonus, we can extract it more easily than we could on a planet, and then use a lot of the waste products to build or improve housing for ourselves. Plus it makes getting everywhere else easier and building other things in space easier.
Africa, Russia, and China. Don't forget China, where the government can keep wages down by tossing labour rights agitators and those that try to improve the situation of the people in prison.
Here's a phrase to describe this type of "capitalism": economic piracy.
A bastion of American software development is acting in a way that furthers neither America nor software development. No further criticism or comment is needed. In the immortal words of Hunter S. Thompson, res ipsa loquitur.
A-freaking-men. What happened to the "rational self-interest" capitalism's supposedly based on? This is neither rational nor self-interested.
Pretty much. It looks like some PHA (Pointy-Haired Administrator) read a Gartner Group report and decided the sky was falling and they needed to make use of this NOW or they'd get crushed by their competition. So he ordered the project outsourced to an Indian group using MS tools. Never mind the damage this is going to cause to MIT's reputation among students and alumni. Its probably lined the PHA's pockets quite nicely and coincidentally, though.
Seriously, you've obviously never dealt with the administration of a center of learning. There's plenty of administrators who're almost as bad or as bad as the PHBs that infest corporate management these days.
This isn't globalization. Its economic piracy, plain and simple. Massive (and not-so-massive) corporations are taking advantage of India's development status, which has a low standard/cost of living but large numbers of marginally skilled employees, to line their own pockets while preventing local development. When wages start to rise, they'll jump ship (and they already are rising, and they already are jumping ship) to the next third-world country with aspirations of being something more. Meanwhile, the economy they leave behind dies on the vine, as it became overly dependant on foreign investment.
Or it could've been due to the Estate's prior bad experiences with RPG companies, and Tolkien's son not wanting his father's works "elaborated" into a bad D&D clone. Given that many of the upper-level designer folks at Decipher are raving D&D fanboys (just look at practically any post they make in various RPG forums), this is probably a very good idea.
Note that Decipher does have the rights to the Lord of the Rings books in addition to the movies. Just not the Silmarillion or any of the Unfinished Tales. (Can't remember if they've got rights to The Hobbit or not)
This may be true, but the established pattern right now is that industrialized, developed, and stable countries tend to have lower population growth rates, or even shrinking populations. China and India do not fit any of the above criteria, though both are making baby steps towards them. (And are trying to convince the rest of the world that they're there to attract foreign investment) Over the next couple of decades, this investment should hopefully lead to more progress in this area (and not be channelled into making the lives of the upper-class even more opulent, as it is in the United States and other third-world countries) which, in turn, will hopefully reduce their problems with overpopulation.
One of the largest factors in reducing the population growth rate seems to be womens' rights. (Duh, if women aren't forced to stay home and act as baby machines, they have fewer kids) India and China both have horrible records in this department, though again, proper foreign investment and local economic development will hopefully help.
And from what I've heard, they did so to avoid taking any further damage themselves from the sinking ship. One can't fault them for that - ICE really screwed up with MERP. Not that Decipher seems to be doing much better with their LotR RPG, judging from the (debatable) rules issues and plodding suppliment pace.
Actually, you should get your facts straight. Bush campaigned repeatedly on the promise of ending the MS anti-trust trial as soon as possible via settlement.
So the fact that Microsoft helped buy the election of the administration that handed them the keys to the kingdom instead of buying them off after makes things better how, exactly?
What it comes down to is realizing that software isn't a product, just like we realized twenty years ago that hardware isn't a product. (Product in the sense that you can base an entire company around producing it and just it) What matter is (and this is very poorly phrased) the services and other such things that comes with it. What matters is the whole package. software's just a component of that package - a very important component, for sure, and one that requires a lot of focus and effort. But still just a component, from the business perspective.
Want to do better than free? Then make something people will want to pay money for. Red Hat, for example, has managed to do this. So has IBM - they're not selling hardware or software. They're selling packages, complete with service and support. So has Apple - they're not selling hardware or software, they're selling an experience and a solution. (In theory, hassle-free ubiquitous computing. As evidence, see the iPod/iTunes)
get slap-on-the-hand settlements for the rest and then see to it that the slap doesn't even actually happen.
Or, even worse, get settlements that actually make their position stronger. Forcing a convicted monopolist to give away a certain amount of their own software makes no sense. The problem is that they've already got far too much market dominance. Giving them a way to get still more market dominance is not a punishment.
Of course, given that they won the antitrust case by paying off the Federal government after Bush got elected, this shouldn't surprise anyone...
Well, the problem in the US is that election officials tend to be the ones doing the stuffing. In the last Presidentail election in Florida, for example. Or numbers get reported and ballots get dumped into a paper shredder. Or conveniently misplaced on the way to permanent storage.
I'm going to have to call bull and ask for a reference.
Not only that, but it can be trivially made to look different. Currentl (X)HTML standards allow for multiple stylesheets per document. And many modern browsers, such as Firebird, give prominent indication of alternate stylesheets, and allow easy switching between them.
I must agree. MP3 used to be sort of useful, but the site's interface has been going continually downhill since I first heard about it. It used to just plain be difficult to get it to do what you want, now its actually painful.
I hope CNet tidies it up and actually makes its policies sane again...
Nice theory, but the Supreme Court threw that theory out in Eldred V Ashcroft. Because Congress and the Senate must by definition know what they're doing when passing copyright laws, it is impossible for such laws to be unconstitutional, even if they infringe on the First Amendment or overstep the Constitutional bounds of copyright law. Or so their logic went. Remember - these are the same people that believe that "Forever minus a day" is a "limited" copyright term.
I find it amusing that you're preaching about complex plots to someone that loves anime, but I'll humor you.
The reason I didn't like it was not because it had a complex plot, but because the plot sucked. Yes, that's right, you heard me: it sucked. It was poorly-written, poorly-handled, and poorly planned. They pulled too many about-faces. "The machines are evil and seek to wipe out the 'virus' mankind." "No, the machines are good, just misunderstood." "Oh, wait, they're evil again and are just toying with us." "No, they're good, they're just trying to wipe out humanity because we left the toilet seat up! Silly us!" To say nothing of the neutering of Neo after the first movie. He goes from being able to alter the Matrix however he likes with his mind, as its all just code to a bad Goku or Superman impersonator.
They wrote themselves into a corner with Animatrix and Reloaded, and Revolutions is the product of them desperately trying to get out of it. It suffers accordingly. I wouldn't say that its worse than Star Wars I and II, but I wouldn't say that its better either.
And something you're missing - for many, LotR is a new story. Many of the friends I've gone to see the LotR movies have never read the books, and they've still loved them. So its obviously not because its an old story that everyone knows. It seems to be because they're actually semi-competently written and directed.
Doubly-so since you can get the direct output drivers with mplayer, which make watching videos smooth as silk even on slower machines.
Or maybe the Slashdot editors actually went and saw it and are reporting on their own opinions of the movie? (To whit, that it sucked and blew at the same time, and did both with great force)
And it was a little more than 25 comments. In fact, almost every opinion I've seen of the movie from people who aren't die-hard fans and would have liked it even if the machine city had turned out to be filled with clones of Jar-Jar Binks is, at best, "it could have been worse."
Exactly my view. It would reduce the impact of the story to almost nothing and add only some pointless, unanswerable philosophical questions that've been asked hundreds of times before in much better ways. But you'll still find a lot of proponents of that view here on Slashdot - practically every Matrix story after Reloaded was filled with them. I guess the idea that even the "real world" is nothing more than a computer program appeals to the sort of geek that idolizes computers or something.
Me, I'm glad they didn't go with that theory. I like the idea of the real world as the real world, and the idea of machines that aren't perfect and can't create a Matrix so sophisticateed that it'll ensnare all of humanity. And Neo's ability to do Wierd Shit outside of the Matrix just shows that even the machines don't know everything about the world.
Especially education. The university I go to uses Netware for authentication on all their Windows machines, and has for years. Given that they're constantly purchasing new boxes, and this sort of thing is common for universities, that's quite a nice chunk of cash right there.