Yes, I read the link, which looks like it's under heavy editing. I can quote the relevant parts, starting with the first sentence:
The Uniform Commercial Code (UCC or the Code) is one of a number of uniform acts that have been promulgated in conjunction with efforts to harmonize the law of sales and other commercial transactions in 49 states (all except Louisiana) within the United States of America....
In 2003, a major revision of Article 2 modernizing many aspects (as well as changes to Article 2A and Article 7) was proposed by the NCCUSL and the ALI. Although being considered, there are no states that have yet adopted the revised version of Article 2.... The controversy surrounding what is now termed the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) originated in the process of revising Article 2 of the UCC....
UCITA is the nasty bit that enforces shrink wrap so idiotically and most states have not gone for it and those who have have only done so partially.
In California, Corporations are supposed to be represented by an Officer in Small Claims Court. No lawyers allowed! That's why I love suing Corporations when their legal departments are complete assholes...
I like it even better when I don't give Gateway my money to begin with. Without sales, those asshole lawyers don't have much to do and might one day be forced to nice and earn an honest living. It's more fun to call them to you like this, "oh, waiter."
you'd see that he in fact, could not see an "I agree" button.
Even if he could have pressed that button, he'd still have a defective computer if that's all he could do with it. You can't sign a contract that violates the law any more than you can sell yourself into slavery.
now hold them responsible for anything that happens from any synthetic life. Lets see how fast the back peddle.
They are already responsible for that. Everyone is responsible for the consequences of their actions.
There are fundamental problems patenting life. Life replicates itself, life is not an invention and human life should never be owned.
Patents work by keeping people from making the patented article. Applying a patent to an article which reproduces itself is silly. Anyone who owns such an object will be violating the patent. I could make up some reasoning around this, but it would put the created rights of the patent above the natural rights of the owner.
Genetic sequences, no matter how clever, are discoveries not inventions. In order to qualify as an invention, the patent applicant should be made to prove that their particular sequence does not and never has existed in nature. The impossibility of the task highlights the absurdity of the patent itself.
Finally, if genetic sequences can be patented parts of you and me are owned by the patent holder. In the limit, a company could patent a human being, which is obviously wrong.
according to the BBC report, censorship is spreading. According to my state-run newspaper, everything is just fine
The easiest way to lay an issue to rest is to raise it the wrong way. The victims correct your mistakes, congratulate themselves and move along none the wiser.
One giant piece of missing information is that all three internet giants refused the public Amnesty International debate. It's too bad they won't clarify their position as an aid to repressive governments. As the Register noted, "no news is good news" when you have something to hide. Because they refuse to meet their critics in the open, we are all left with speculation and stink. As all of us are dependent on these three companies to one extent or another, how censored is our own world view?
The answer is to help each other and report what you see. Alternatives, like Slashdot and blogs exist for this reason. The majority of us still get most of our "news" from "mainstream" sources but we don't have to. As long as the internet remains a free place we can inform each other of what's happening.
This is good news for small newspapers, if they take advantage of it.
So how do you rate what they _do_ instead of what they _say_?
All that can really be done is to pass laws that make inappropriate data sharing unprofitable. This is the only way to make good, privacy respecting service competitive and fix those places where market forces or bad laws have eliminated choice.
Users should expect, no, demand privacy, not have to pay for it. Privacy should already be there, because the user has to trust the company to handle their data correctly.
You are obviously unaware of a product called Microsoft Windows (TM), which comes with a privacy invading EULA. They promise to abuse you, yet you pay more than you would for a free alternative. Well, you don't really pay more - Microsoft's coercive monopoly makes using free software expensive in several ways:
hardware pot luck - hardware vendors who play well with free software are punished. The user must be careful in their purchases. Accelerated video is a particularly sore spot.
unhelpful ISPs - while the usual "help" is not much, a WinDOS specific script read is never useful to a free software user.
culture lockout - users of entertainment sites often must chose between their software freedom and participation in their culture. I've never seen a US TV broadcaster video that worked with free software. Even youtube requires Flash and offers no alternatives for watching, to their credit they will take free formats to share with your non free friends. Wikipedia, archive.org and a few other places have embraced truly free culture. Non free users have as much and more problems sharing their creations, so that side of the equation is neutral.
work lockout - every few years M$ puts out another stupid format that no one but M$ can use. This is also a neutral issue, as non free users also pay the price but they have already paid half of it.
Yet for all of these created problems, people use and love free software. There are reasons beyond privacy, such as features, quality and stability, but privacy is a big one.
Privacy is just another part of good service. Another way to look at it is that people are not willing to pay as much for poor service. Once upon a time the grocer who talked to other people about what you bought was called a gossip and avoided.
While poor service might not pay well, privacy can be violated without the user knowing. Service may be expensive and appear good, but you were sold to pay for it. People still don't know about ChoicePoint. Sometimes you don't have or know of a choice in the service. A free market can fix some of these problems but it can't work where people just don't know.
The only way to insure good privacy is to pass laws that take the money out of inappropriate data sharing. Now that most of us buy groceries from big chains, automated gossip should be outlawed because it can not be avoided otherwise. How much birth control and alcohol you purchase may be of interest to your insurance company, but it's really none of their business. What books you purchase and read are no one's business. Places like ChoicePoint are an abomination that can be missused in all sorts of ways. That you paid more for an item does not mean the store won't put your information into ChoicePoint. Most of the data in ChoicePoint should not exist.
... if no one does anything to an egg that has been fertilized outside of a woman, that egg will die.
Creating a life to terminate is ghoulish to say the least, but it can be justified. Fertility treatments and research are both justification, as long as the practitioner is competent. As you point out, there's no practical way to keep all of the results alive.
the same people who are the biggest advocates against abortion also tend to be the ones that seek to limit access to birth control, so that argument doesn't get very far either.
Sure it does, if reasonable people can ignore the others. The problem is unwanted pregnancy and reasonable people can work together to reduce it and support the people who have the problem. The use of obnoxious and confused advocates is an underhanded way to kill off a proposal.
The counterexamples are communists, extreme feminists and corporate monsters who put production above personal well being. They don't value babies because they don't value each other.
You don't have to be religious or hate sex to think that abortion is murder. In almost all cases, if no one does anything to a pregnant woman, a child will be born. The person who stops that birth has ended a human life. It is a terrible thing to do and it is not justified by other terrible things, lack of resources or potential uses for the remains.
Did the cat push your button?
on
Photosynth Demo
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Or did you repost this exact message 15 minutes later for fun?
This guy and... his group shouldn't work for Microsoft
Someone else pointed out that the actual work was done outside of M$, but I agree that it's a shame they were bought up. Expect this to be crushed instead of landing on your desk.
Finish your chorus with this and then fall back to the original lyrics:
They want GNU
They want GNU
They want you as a GNU recruit
The original Lyrics:
Where can you find pleasure
Search the world for treasure
Learn science, technology
Where can you begin
To make your dreams all come true
On the land or on the sea
Where can you learn to fly
Play in sports or skindive
Study oceanography
Sign up for the big band
Or sit in the grand stand
When your team and others meet
If you like adventure
Don't you wait to enter
The recruiting office fast
Don't you hesitate,
There is no need to wait
They're signing up new seamen fast
Maybe you are too young to join up today
But don't you worry 'bout the thing
For I'm sure there will be
Always the good Navy
Protecting the land and sea
I'll stay away from the "signing up new seamen fast" part, but the learning and adventure part is probably more true in the free software world than it is on a boat and anything beats Bill Gates slave galleys. Pressing on with a few special mods for you WinDOS fanboys afraid of the plunge:
But, but, but
I'm afraid of Penguins
Hey, hey, look men
I get seasick
Even watching it on techTV
They Want GNU
Oh my goodness
They Want GNU
What am I gonna do in a GNU machine
They Want GNU
They Want GNU
In the Navy
In the Navy
Yes, you can apt-get with ease
In the Navy
Yes, that will put your mind at ease
In the Navy
There will be no blue screen disease
In the Navy
Can't you see we need a hand
In the Navy
Come on and share the source code
In the Navy
Come on and help your fellow man
In the Navy
Come on people and make a stand
In the Navy
If you can't have democracy without a free press, the above is correct. Destroying the internet won't stop "piracy", kiddie porn, or any of the other horsemen of the infopocolypse, it will only protect the corrupt from the truth. "traffic-shaping systems and network-filtering systems that can destroy contaminated P2P networks" are all the rage in China, and they could care less about music and movie sales. The free flow of information on the internet is starting to take it's toll on government and corporate propaganda. That free flow is the target of this and other attacks on the internet, because it makes corruption harder.
He gave XP four months, that's more patience than he should have had. So, I give him high marks for objectivity and I don't understand when you say:
TFA reads less like a comparison of two OS's than an Ubuntu sales pitch. Granted, I use and love Ubuntu, but I like my side-by-sides with a little less bias from the get-go.
Are there any specific facts he mentioned that are wrong? Care to poke at some of his opinions on the ease of instal, reliability or anything else he actually said? As a Debian user, I'm not always pleased with the things Ubuntu does but I understand how some people could like those things. Just same, any distribution makes any WinDOS look archaic, from c:\ to the single window GUI and the security model that matches. When you add in the famous M$ attitude and digital restrictions, the difference is as great as having an egg or a horse turd for breakfast. It's almost impossible to describe the difference without ranting about how bad horse turd tastes. Let's try:
Which would you prefer:
The Egg, with it's delightful shape... or the Turd, which smears itself on your plate. Can you even get passed the smell?
The Egg, which needs a little salt, but is otherwise smooth, mellow and filling.... or the Turd which leaves your parched and hungrier than before. Even if that maggot has protein, the rest of the package will soon have you hugging the toilet.
Thanks for the link, it clears up a lot. The site itself is a pain, so it would probably be easier to Google site:developer.nvidia.com for "IP Status".
As for the example you give, Holy Shit!
SGI owns US Patent #6,650,327, issued November 18, 2003. SGI believes this patent contains necessary IP for graphics systems implementing floating point (FP) rasterization and FP framebuffer capabilities.
A patent on floating point raterization and framebuffers? Is that what I think it is? Yes it is. I can not think of anything more obvious in high quality imaging than representing the image as a floating point matrix. It may be true that there are still "fat line" patents out there.
Kudos to Nvidia for shining a small light on this insanity. Knowing the problem is always the first step. It would be nicer if they would put patent and other encumbering as symbos on the reference page and a link to the actual patent in the description page.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I read the link, which looks like it's under heavy editing. I can quote the relevant parts, starting with the first sentence:
UCITA is the nasty bit that enforces shrink wrap so idiotically and most states have not gone for it and those who have have only done so partially.
In California, Corporations are supposed to be represented by an Officer in Small Claims Court. No lawyers allowed! That's why I love suing Corporations when their legal departments are complete assholes...
I like it even better when I don't give Gateway my money to begin with. Without sales, those asshole lawyers don't have much to do and might one day be forced to nice and earn an honest living. It's more fun to call them to you like this, "oh, waiter."
Three words: Uniform Commercial Code, It's a modification to contract law that is intended to make in-box agreements legal.
Your state may not be so stupid as to have enacted that law. If they were, get it repealed.
you'd see that he in fact, could not see an "I agree" button.
Even if he could have pressed that button, he'd still have a defective computer if that's all he could do with it. You can't sign a contract that violates the law any more than you can sell yourself into slavery.
now hold them responsible for anything that happens from any synthetic life. Lets see how fast the back peddle.
They are already responsible for that. Everyone is responsible for the consequences of their actions.
There are fundamental problems patenting life. Life replicates itself, life is not an invention and human life should never be owned.
Patents work by keeping people from making the patented article. Applying a patent to an article which reproduces itself is silly. Anyone who owns such an object will be violating the patent. I could make up some reasoning around this, but it would put the created rights of the patent above the natural rights of the owner.
Genetic sequences, no matter how clever, are discoveries not inventions. In order to qualify as an invention, the patent applicant should be made to prove that their particular sequence does not and never has existed in nature. The impossibility of the task highlights the absurdity of the patent itself.
Finally, if genetic sequences can be patented parts of you and me are owned by the patent holder. In the limit, a company could patent a human being, which is obviously wrong.
Give the robot a menacing look with red eyes ...
Why make it look menacing? Imagine:
RRRRR RRRRRR RRRRR
Gomer Pile looks up to see what the noise is.
"Oh look, a panda bear. How cute."
Bang!
Poor Gomer.
according to the BBC report, censorship is spreading. According to my state-run newspaper, everything is just fine
The easiest way to lay an issue to rest is to raise it the wrong way. The victims correct your mistakes, congratulate themselves and move along none the wiser.
One giant piece of missing information is that all three internet giants refused the public Amnesty International debate. It's too bad they won't clarify their position as an aid to repressive governments. As the Register noted, "no news is good news" when you have something to hide. Because they refuse to meet their critics in the open, we are all left with speculation and stink. As all of us are dependent on these three companies to one extent or another, how censored is our own world view?
The answer is to help each other and report what you see. Alternatives, like Slashdot and blogs exist for this reason. The majority of us still get most of our "news" from "mainstream" sources but we don't have to. As long as the internet remains a free place we can inform each other of what's happening.
This is good news for small newspapers, if they take advantage of it.
So how do you rate what they _do_ instead of what they _say_?
All that can really be done is to pass laws that make inappropriate data sharing unprofitable. This is the only way to make good, privacy respecting service competitive and fix those places where market forces or bad laws have eliminated choice.
Users should expect, no, demand privacy, not have to pay for it. Privacy should already be there, because the user has to trust the company to handle their data correctly.
You are obviously unaware of a product called Microsoft Windows (TM), which comes with a privacy invading EULA. They promise to abuse you, yet you pay more than you would for a free alternative. Well, you don't really pay more - Microsoft's coercive monopoly makes using free software expensive in several ways:
Yet for all of these created problems, people use and love free software. There are reasons beyond privacy, such as features, quality and stability, but privacy is a big one.
Privacy is just another part of good service. Another way to look at it is that people are not willing to pay as much for poor service. Once upon a time the grocer who talked to other people about what you bought was called a gossip and avoided.
While poor service might not pay well, privacy can be violated without the user knowing. Service may be expensive and appear good, but you were sold to pay for it. People still don't know about ChoicePoint. Sometimes you don't have or know of a choice in the service. A free market can fix some of these problems but it can't work where people just don't know.
The only way to insure good privacy is to pass laws that take the money out of inappropriate data sharing. Now that most of us buy groceries from big chains, automated gossip should be outlawed because it can not be avoided otherwise. How much birth control and alcohol you purchase may be of interest to your insurance company, but it's really none of their business. What books you purchase and read are no one's business. Places like ChoicePoint are an abomination that can be missused in all sorts of ways. That you paid more for an item does not mean the store won't put your information into ChoicePoint. Most of the data in ChoicePoint should not exist.
Creating a life to terminate is ghoulish to say the least, but it can be justified. Fertility treatments and research are both justification, as long as the practitioner is competent. As you point out, there's no practical way to keep all of the results alive.
Actually, the fetus will naturally miscarry a significant percentage of the time ...
100% of the time, human life ends in death. Life is hard, that does not justify killing.
Some trolly AC taunts:
well, that's 30 minutes of your life you'll never get back
To which I say, "It beats working." Silly troll, Bill Gates pays you too much.
I'll have you know I also changed the word "often" to "awesome", but yeah, sorry about that.
Ah, I missed the word change. No need to apologize to me.
it can develop into a baby, and that it already is a human
I thought it was a cat. No?
the same people who are the biggest advocates against abortion also tend to be the ones that seek to limit access to birth control, so that argument doesn't get very far either.
Sure it does, if reasonable people can ignore the others. The problem is unwanted pregnancy and reasonable people can work together to reduce it and support the people who have the problem. The use of obnoxious and confused advocates is an underhanded way to kill off a proposal.
The counterexamples are communists, extreme feminists and corporate monsters who put production above personal well being. They don't value babies because they don't value each other.
You don't have to be religious or hate sex to think that abortion is murder. In almost all cases, if no one does anything to a pregnant woman, a child will be born. The person who stops that birth has ended a human life. It is a terrible thing to do and it is not justified by other terrible things, lack of resources or potential uses for the remains.
Or did you repost this exact message 15 minutes later for fun?
Curious how things go around here.
This guy and ... his group shouldn't work for Microsoft
Someone else pointed out that the actual work was done outside of M$, but I agree that it's a shame they were bought up. Expect this to be crushed instead of landing on your desk.
Finish your chorus with this and then fall back to the original lyrics:
They want GNU
They want GNU
They want you as a GNU recruit
The original Lyrics:
I'll stay away from the "signing up new seamen fast" part, but the learning and adventure part is probably more true in the free software world than it is on a boat and anything beats Bill Gates slave galleys. Pressing on with a few special mods for you WinDOS fanboys afraid of the plunge:
But, but, but
I'm afraid of Penguins
Hey, hey, look men
I get seasick
Even watching it on techTV
They Want GNU
Oh my goodness
They Want GNU
What am I gonna do in a GNU machine
They Want GNU
They Want GNU
In the Navy
In the Navy
Yes, you can apt-get with ease
In the Navy
Yes, that will put your mind at ease
In the Navy
There will be no blue screen disease
In the Navy
Can't you see we need a hand
In the Navy
Come on and share the source code
In the Navy
Come on and help your fellow man
In the Navy
Come on people and make a stand
In the Navy
I Can Stop Democracy
If you can't have democracy without a free press, the above is correct. Destroying the internet won't stop "piracy", kiddie porn, or any of the other horsemen of the infopocolypse, it will only protect the corrupt from the truth. "traffic-shaping systems and network-filtering systems that can destroy contaminated P2P networks" are all the rage in China, and they could care less about music and movie sales. The free flow of information on the internet is starting to take it's toll on government and corporate propaganda. That free flow is the target of this and other attacks on the internet, because it makes corruption harder.
No, as in there's nothing I have to add.
He gave XP four months, that's more patience than he should have had. So, I give him high marks for objectivity and I don't understand when you say:
TFA reads less like a comparison of two OS's than an Ubuntu sales pitch. Granted, I use and love Ubuntu, but I like my side-by-sides with a little less bias from the get-go.
Are there any specific facts he mentioned that are wrong? Care to poke at some of his opinions on the ease of instal, reliability or anything else he actually said? As a Debian user, I'm not always pleased with the things Ubuntu does but I understand how some people could like those things. Just same, any distribution makes any WinDOS look archaic, from c:\ to the single window GUI and the security model that matches. When you add in the famous M$ attitude and digital restrictions, the difference is as great as having an egg or a horse turd for breakfast. It's almost impossible to describe the difference without ranting about how bad horse turd tastes. Let's try:
It's just hard to compare some things.
Just wondering if you were planning on replying to some of these. Thanks.
No.
Microsoft are the real owners of the SGI OpenGL patents and are blocking this entire show ...
Ah yes, who else can suck life like M$? I should have known.
Thanks for the link, it clears up a lot. The site itself is a pain, so it would probably be easier to Google site:developer.nvidia.com for "IP Status".
As for the example you give, Holy Shit!
A patent on floating point raterization and framebuffers? Is that what I think it is? Yes it is. I can not think of anything more obvious in high quality imaging than representing the image as a floating point matrix. It may be true that there are still "fat line" patents out there.
Kudos to Nvidia for shining a small light on this insanity. Knowing the problem is always the first step. It would be nicer if they would put patent and other encumbering as symbos on the reference page and a link to the actual patent in the description page.