If you really want gifs off of slashdot, why lobby Malda (who is too busy to listen, anyway)?
Here's how to get some action on the matter:
Send a message to Unisys identifying Slashdot as a site violating the gif licensing terms. Remind the company that if they are negligent in demanding the $5000 licensing fee from Slashdot, Unisys will run the risk of their intellectual property falling into the public domain- as is the case with any copywrited material which isn't dilegently protected by a myriad of lawsuits.
I wouldn't normally encourage this sort of approach, but Slashdot is no longer a couple of tech slackers working out of their apartments. It's a business enterprise. Andover.net will probably pay the $5000 without even flinching and Malda won't get called on the carpet over it. But then again, in the world of stock options, any obstacle to a dot.com achieving profitability is an obstacle to the employees becoming millionaires (off of paper).
I think you're right about this being a tactic to strangle the grey-market importers. It's absurd for anyone to think that Sony would be at the mercy of ANY Japanese law. Sony Power-owns that whole country and certainly enacted this law in its own best interest.
Being an American currently living in London, I'd have to say I'm surprised that you are saying the Europeans have more healthy eating habits than Americans.
I am used to eating low-fat foods in the US, but I am unable to find anything with a low-fat label in British grocery stores. There just doesn't seem to be a market here for lite foods. On top of that, there is a plethora of heavy foods like kidney pies that just makes my head spin.
I've noticed this come up a lot regarding stuff like celebrity picture pages, arcade ROM archives, etc. People who have gone to the trouble to build a lot of content on their site don't like to have their site hijacked by some jackass with a geocities page and a bunch of links directly to the content.
Here's a simple mechanism that will fix said jackass's little red wagon- change the path for all the content on a regular basis. You can set a script up to do this via chron job every evening. Here's an example:
Say the ROM files are all located in the following directory:
/~seth/roms
So a link in my own web page to a ROM would look like:
http://mac6100.dhs.org/~seth/roms/gladiator.zip
On a nightly basis I could change the name of the roms directory to something else like roms3.30.99 and then have a script do a regsub on all my html files to replace 'roms' with 'roms3.30.99' in every link. This would require mr. geocities hijacker to hand-edit his page on a nightly basis. Which is probably more overhead than he's willing to support since s/he's already demonstrated a tendency of not wanting to put real work into developing a site.
You went beyond the call of duty in getting the lawyers off your ass. Assigning the copyright over to Mattel appears to have been part of a financial arrangement to line your own pockets. It wouldn't have been necessary just to end the litigation.
I've noticed that you haven't denied the allegations that you've benefitted financially from this settlement. Usually when people settle for money, part of the agreement is that neither party will disclose the amount of money handed over.
By continuing to avoid naming the figure or making any comments about the money side of this issue, it confirms you received a payoff to turn the copyright over to Mattel.
>
Superintelligent robots and rebellious AIs have been a staple of science fiction for decades, but we are not any closer to realizing these visions than we were in the 1950's.
I wouldn't be so pessimistic about our advancements. DeepBlue beat the best human chess player in the world. While that is neither consciousness or rebelliousness, it does stand as a highwater mark in our pursuit of these goals.
Come to think of it, I think you're right. I guess the orangutangs just didn't want the other damn dirty apes to know that humans had once been advanced because of the path it eventually led them down (self destruction). I guess it also might have been because it would challenge their own beliefs about the supremacy of apes, which is a good parallel between the movie and the religious zealots who persecuted copernicus when he suggested the Earth wasn't the center of the universe and then went on to form large corporations who settled on WinNT as the standardized platform. I say, if those are the decisions they're going to make, then the third planet from the sun SHOULD be dead.
Hmmm... I always thought the film was about religious zealots who suppressed the scientific investigation of evolution. As in how Dr. Zeus didn't want anyone to dig in that cliff because they'd find out the monkeys evolved from humans..
This has dropped through so many hands so far. Glad to see Burton was able to get a hold of it.
Here's a story about how James Cameron was going to do it. That article also mentions how Oliver Stone had been named as a possible director and Arnold Swarzanegger as the lead role. Now that Burton appears to be in charge, I would be very surprised if the Terminator was sent to dispatch all those damn hairy apes with a mini gun.
Don't believe the hype. This thing was never intended to work. I'm almost certain this is the groundwork of a common scam where some guy conceives a fake technology, gets it patented, then shops it around to dumb investors. With the patent, the technology gains credibility in the eyes of people who have more money than sense (which both are often in short quantity) and they will ante up money to get a prototype built. A working prototype is never finished and the investors lose their money. Unfortunately, if executed correctly, this scam is completely legal.
I wouldn't be surprised if during the pitch meetings, the inventor promises to add "dot-com" to the name of the company.
Posting articles like this perpatuates the nerd stereotype for slashdotters. Just when girls were really starting to think we were cool because of our expensive cars and fancy portable mp3 players at the gym, slashdot up and posts some RPG rubbish! Until a 19-year-old Playboy centerfold lists Advanced Dungeons & Dragons as one of her hobies, I'd recommend we all avoid RPG like the plague.
Remember what happened with that Voyager satellite causing all the trouble for the Enterprise? We need to nip this thing in the bud before it builds a huge electrified cloud and returns to earth to zap people while they have sex.
Maybe we'll have a new episode where Marilyn Manson is the guest host and he'll do that "Beautiful People" song, but substitute "Piggy" for "People" and Miss Piggy will be all flattered and get her nose pierced.
Alice Cooper on Muppet Show..
on
Muppets Sold
·
· Score: 2
Does anyone remember when they had Alice Cooper on the Muppet Show? Who was pushing for this? Do you think Jim Henson was telling the producers, "Really. This is to keep the adults / parents watching. Your demograph will widen and you'll be able to sell more commercials to the breweries." Or do you think it was the producers forcing Henson to feature Cooper as a musical act, "He'll be performing with his boa constrictor.
Kids love reptiles!"
If I were you, I would also be proud of having a neat portable computer like the Vaio. I've seen a few of these running around in my building and they are really cool laptops.
To compare the Vaio to the new (and older) Powerbook G3s, I'd have to say the weight of the Vaio is misleading in that the cdrom drive you mentioned is external and not included in this measurement. So too is the floppy drive, but I doubt most people would even need to carry a floppy drive around, so that's a moot point. Like the other respondent mentioned, the Powerbook G3's have ethernet built in, so you don't have to connect the cable to the pcmcia card, which is one of the most jerry-rigged looking things I've seen in a modern computing product in years-- I can't believe PC laptop makers are still doing this. It's also really great to have DVD standard, so there's no having to convince the purchasing dept. to shell out extra cash on the DVD option so you can watch movies while flying on planes.
Now that Open Source software has really ventured into the commercial realm, the quality of the user interface has become a prominent issue and isn't being ignored by the companies (Red Hat, Debian, Corel, etc.) who are trying to sell their product to the largest possible market (non-geeks).
I think the guy who wrote this piece has sort of been spending too much time with his wife and family lately.
Keep in mind, short-term capital gains taxes can take something like 30% of the profit you make from cashing in your options. In order to alleviate this, purchase your options AS SOON AS YOU GET THEM. You don't have to be vested in order to purchase the options. If you wait until you are vested before you purchase the options, you will have to pay tax on the difference between what you're paying for them (often less than a dollar a share) and the market value on the day you purchase them. The government treats this difference as compensation from your employer, so you are taxed as if it was your salary.
The best scenario is that you'll get hired when the options are 50 cents apiece. You buy them for a few grand on the day you're hired. Work for the same company until you're completely vested. This means that when you sell the stocks, the profit will be treated as long-term capital gains and you will pay the smallest amount of taxes possible. Consider the difference between short and long term capital gains taxes on a million dollars to be something like the cost of a new Lamborghini. That's about the cost of two new Ferraris.
This article has struck me by surprise as I remember reading about how Sony had chosen Linux as its official development platform for Playstation 2. I naturally assumed that Metrowerks would be building a linux version of the IDE for PSX 2. Well, I guess not. This article at The Register indicates that Cygnus is shipping a Linux IDE for PSX 2, but that Metrowerks is only shipping a Windows IDE. Ugh. And what's more, it looks like Sony has authorized it:
"That said, Sony has also backed Metrowerks' Windows 95/98/NT-hosted PlayStation 2 version of its CodeWarrior IDE, so while the company [Sony] is backing Linux for its own development systems, it clearly doesn't want to force developers onto the open source platform. However, there's no ship date for the Metrowerks product as yet. "
Slashdot Mirror
If you really want gifs off of slashdot, why lobby Malda (who is too busy to listen, anyway)?
Here's how to get some action on the matter:
I wouldn't normally encourage this sort of approach, but Slashdot is no longer a couple of tech slackers working out of their apartments. It's a business enterprise. Andover.net will probably pay the $5000 without even flinching and Malda won't get called on the carpet over it. But then again, in the world of stock options, any obstacle to a dot.com achieving profitability is an obstacle to the employees becoming millionaires (off of paper).
Seth
Tesco grocery store....
Seth
Seth
The music piracy industry is getting almost as bad as the music publishing industry. What the heck happened to HTML formatting in posts?
Seth
Seth
Sorry to have offended 'Mr. Geocities'....
My site doesn't have any purpose. I don't have a site. What the heck are you referring to? I sell drugs for a living.
[iOpener execs]- So how can we keep these linux hackers interested in buying our product, but also enforce the purhcasing of the service contract?
[You]- uhhh....
Have a good trip anyway!
Seth
I've noticed this come up a lot regarding stuff like celebrity picture pages, arcade ROM archives, etc. People who have gone to the trouble to build a lot of content on their site don't like to have their site hijacked by some jackass with a geocities page and a bunch of links directly to the content.
/~seth/roms
Here's a simple mechanism that will fix said jackass's little red wagon- change the path for all the content on a regular basis. You can set a script up to do this via chron job every evening. Here's an example:
Say the ROM files are all located in the following directory:
So a link in my own web page to a ROM would look like:
http://mac6100.dhs.org/~seth/roms/gladiator.zip
On a nightly basis I could change the name of the roms directory to something else like roms3.30.99 and then have a script do a regsub on all my html files to replace 'roms' with 'roms3.30.99' in every link. This would require mr. geocities hijacker to hand-edit his page on a nightly basis. Which is probably more overhead than he's willing to support since s/he's already demonstrated a tendency of not wanting to put real work into developing a site.
I wouldn't be so pessimistic about our advancements. DeepBlue beat the best human chess player in the world. While that is neither consciousness or rebelliousness, it does stand as a highwater mark in our pursuit of these goals.
Come to think of it, I think you're right. I guess the orangutangs just didn't want the other damn dirty apes to know that humans had once been advanced because of the path it eventually led them down (self destruction). I guess it also might have been because it would challenge their own beliefs about the supremacy of apes, which is a good parallel between the movie and the religious zealots who persecuted copernicus when he suggested the Earth wasn't the center of the universe and then went on to form large corporations who settled on WinNT as the standardized platform. I say, if those are the decisions they're going to make, then the third planet from the sun SHOULD be dead.
Hmmm... I always thought the film was about religious zealots who suppressed the scientific investigation of evolution. As in how Dr. Zeus didn't want anyone to dig in that cliff because they'd find out the monkeys evolved from humans..
This has dropped through so many hands so far. Glad to see Burton was able to get a hold of it.
Here's a story about how James Cameron was going to do it.
That article also mentions how Oliver Stone had been named as a possible director and Arnold Swarzanegger as the lead role. Now that Burton appears to be in charge, I would be very surprised if the Terminator was sent to dispatch all those damn hairy apes with a mini gun.
Posting articles like this perpatuates the nerd stereotype for slashdotters. Just when girls were really starting to think we were cool because of our expensive cars and fancy portable mp3 players at the gym, slashdot up and posts some RPG rubbish!
Until a 19-year-old Playboy centerfold lists Advanced Dungeons & Dragons as one of her hobies, I'd recommend we all avoid RPG like the plague.
you might be gay.
If I were you, I would also be proud of having a neat portable computer like the Vaio. I've seen a few of these running around in my building and they are really cool laptops.
To compare the Vaio to the new (and older) Powerbook G3s, I'd have to say the weight of the Vaio is misleading in that the cdrom drive you mentioned is external and not included in this measurement. So too is the floppy drive, but I doubt most people would even need to carry a floppy drive around, so that's a moot point. Like the other respondent mentioned, the Powerbook G3's have ethernet built in, so you don't have to connect the cable to the pcmcia card, which is one of the most jerry-rigged looking things I've seen in a modern computing product in years-- I can't believe PC laptop makers are still doing this. It's also really great to have DVD standard, so there's no having to convince the purchasing dept. to shell out extra cash on the DVD option so you can watch movies while flying on planes.
I saw this on CNN about a dozen times last week. Emmet, I recommend you spend less time with your friends / lovers and more time watching the news.
Now that Open Source software has really ventured into the commercial realm, the quality of the user interface has become a prominent issue and isn't being ignored by the companies (Red Hat, Debian, Corel, etc.) who are trying to sell their product to the largest possible market (non-geeks).
I think the guy who wrote this piece has sort of been spending too much time with his wife and family lately.
Keep in mind, short-term capital gains taxes can take something like 30% of the profit you make from cashing in your options. In order to alleviate this, purchase your options AS SOON AS YOU GET THEM. You don't have to be vested in order to purchase the options. If you wait until you are vested before you purchase the options, you will have to pay tax on the difference between what you're paying for them (often less than a dollar a share) and the market value on the day you purchase them. The government treats this difference as compensation from your employer, so you are taxed as if it was your salary.
The best scenario is that you'll get hired when the options are 50 cents apiece. You buy them for a few grand on the day you're hired. Work for the same company until you're completely vested. This means that when you sell the stocks, the profit will be treated as long-term capital gains and you will pay the smallest amount of taxes possible. Consider the difference between short and long term capital gains taxes on a million dollars to be something like the cost of a new Lamborghini. That's about the cost of two new Ferraris.