Naaw, Science Fiction is only for entertainment (that occasionally spurs creative application of concepts). The former are all documents which different types mass hysteria are based upon.
That's a true distinction, most of the time. Unless you're L. Ron Hubbard, in which case at least a portion of your science fiction / fantasy IS intended to befuddle and create mass hysteria.
Depending upon your point of view, all of the above could be construed as Science Fiction, too.
I appreciate and agree with the point you're trying to make, but I disagree with your choice of labels. The Bible et. al. might be construed as "Soft-Sci Fi" maybe, but I'd consider including the Bible, the Koran, and the Maya Codex under the heading of "Science Fiction" (of any kind, soft or not) to be a fundamental misuse of the term. Science Fiction is supposed to be fiction based on science, however loosely.
"Fantasy" would be a more accurate heading for those works, as in "Fantastic Fiction." After all, they include such notions as "magic," "god(s)" etc. that really have no foundation whatsoever in science.
I've always found it unfortunate that fantasy ("Lord of the Rings" etc.) is grouped with science fiction, as I consider the two genres to be no more alike than Murder Mysteries and Romance (which enjoy their own, seperate sections in the bookstore). This doesn't mean that science fiction and fantasy can't sometimes be combined, just as one can have a romance/mystery novel, but that doesn't change the fact that science fiction and fantasy are fundamentally different, just as mysteries and romance novels are.
Real atheists do not say "God does not exist". Real atheists say "I do not believe in God because there is no evidence for His existence." There's a huge difference.
I agree. I suppose I'm an athiest, as I subscribe to the latter. That having been said...
Agnosticism, on the other hand, is saying "There is no evidence for God, but I choose to neither believe nor disbelieve." How crazy is that?
I'm not so sure. I don't believe in a creator, but I do maintain an open mind of three possibilities: 1) I'm wrong (possible but IMHO not likely) and there is a creator, probably bearing absolutely no resemblence whatsover to any of the Gods described by Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, or any other -ism, 2) that I'm right and there is no creator but a spiritual dimension to the universe has evolved in a manner analogous to our intelligences evolving from lower lifeforms, ultimately from single celled lifeforms that formed out of the primordial soup, or 3) that I'm right, there is no creator, nor is there any spiritual dimension to the universe beyond the emotive sensibilities of self-deluded humans.
I am equally comfortable with any of the three outcomes above. Does this make me an agnostic? Or an athiest, as I do not believe in God because there exists no reasonable evidence that he exists (I do not include the Mormon tautology that the mere existence of the world proves God exists, for obvious reasons, including but not limited to the fact that circular reasoning produces nonsensical results, and that evidence exists that the world probably formed naturally, without supervision or intervention).
Science cannot disprove or prove the existence of a God, but it can (and has) disproven most predictions made by most of the aforementioned -isms as to the nature of this, the physical universe. Examples include the earth not being created in 7 days, not being at the center of the universe, humanity not having descended from a single couple, native Americans having absolutely no genetic relationship to the Isrealites, the earth being older than seven thousand years, and so on. For this reason, there is a mountain of evidence that the God as described by the Christians, Muslims, Mormons, Jews, etc. does not exist, i.e. that their description of God is flat-out wrong. That is not the same as proving there is no God, so as an (athiest? agnostic?) I must concede the possibility that she or he or it does exist, in some form, even though I, based on the evidence of hand, don't believe so. I do not find this stance to be either crazy, or intellectually dishonest.
So I guess the question is, am I an agostic or an athiest? I've often described myself as an agnostic with athiestic tendencies, but perhaps a better description would be an athiest with agnostic tendencies.
"In a CeBIT debate today it was concluded that the MS monopoly would not exist with today's software patenting in place back in 1985."
Or circa 1980 to prevent Microsoft/Seattle Computing from ripping off CP/M.
It sounds like the CeBit article (disclaimer, I haven't read it, merely your quote from it) is disingenuously putting forth a pro-software patent argument.
It is true that if software patents had existed in 1980 the Microsoft monopoly probably wouldn't exist. However, it is also true that free software wouldn't exist. Nor would the Internet, the World Wide Web, ubiquitious and universal email, or most of the modern software we use and enjoy.
The entire software industry would essentially be where it was in circa 1985 at best, because all of the patents on basic software design would just now be expiring, and all the patents on the next generation of ideas (which were around in 1985 or so) would just now be kicking in.
I hate the Microsoft monopoly as much as anyone, and I despise what they've done to the industry. They've held computing back a good 10 or 15 years in many respects, but compared to what software patents will bring, Microsoft is harmless. To use their anti-competative practices to justify and argue in favor of government entitlements to monopolies on ideas, however basic or advanced, is so rich in absurdity and irony it boggles the mind.
Software patents are a reality. They probably will get shoved down the Europeans' throats, and the era of breakneck software innovation and advances will come to an end. This will suit the entrenched business and political interests that are pushing so hard for software patents just fine... it is easier and cheaper to exploit an existing business model, than to remain limber and innovative in a changing market.
Expect the snail-paced progress that follows to be spun by the media and pundits as "the technology sector has matured." A mature market is doublespeak for a market that has been regulated into stagnation... often (though not always) through our patent regime.
The creator loses nothing... except theoretical income they might have made
And you consider this LESS deserving of the word theft than "taking credit" is? I consider the opposite to be true.
Absolutely. If you define the "loss of potential (i.e. hypothetical, perhaps never-would-have-existed, and by no means certain) income" as theft, then you define all aspects of competition, upon which our capitalist system depends to function, as "theft."
Steal a man's wallet and you've committed theft -- the guy you stole from is out one wallet, assorted credit and identity cards, and whatever cash/family pics/what-have-you he was carrying. Refuse to buy the man's product, either because someone gave made a knockoff copy and gave it to you for free, or because you simply don't want it, and you've stolen nothing. Nada. Nichts. If the product was copyrighted and you obtained a copy, you violated his right to restrict copying and distribution (copyright), but you still haven't STOLEN anything, regardless of whether or not he lost potential income as a result.
In short, denying someone income isn't theft. Taking something they already possess away from them is. Or put another way, the potential that something may be does not equal the reality that something is. This applies to potential vs. already obtained income, abortion vs. murder, birth control vs. murder, not-watching-commercials vs. theft, copyright violation vs. theft, patent violation vs. theft, and any host of other controversial topics where logic is muddled beneath rhetoric because of emotional feeling on one side or the other.
This article has more to do with Microsoft continuing to build an impressive array of innovators and visionaries to carry the company for another 20 years.
Oh. My. God.
Let me guess. Your day job is writing press releases for Microsoft or Microsoft shill companies.
Would someone like to explain why NASA gets to shut down an ESA project?
The US decided not to go ahead with their half of the Solar Polar Project at a fairly advanced stage, now they want to shut down the other half?
Bush probably fears for the reputation of America as leader in science and discovery, now that he has slashed NASA's budget, replaced real ongoing scientific research that is yielding exciting results today with unfunded, and unfundable, pie-in-the-sky programs that will never amount to anything (sending people to Mars will probably happen in the next century, but not in the next 20 years). Scientific discovery is likely to peter out to no small degree in America's space program as a result of these terrible policies, while the European Space Agency is coming into its own. What better way to protect ourselves from emberressment than by getting the ESA to stop research as well.
Not that it's likely to happen... the Europeans, for all their leadership's stupidity on software patents (welcome to the downward-spiral-to-hell club, by the way), they aren't likely to spike funded research just for the hell of it.
But why would the Bush regime do this? Maybe Bush fears the science will difinitively disprove the existence of God. He is dumb enough to miss the fact that the existence or lack thereof of a God is orthogonal to science, and while science has disproven most of the Book of Genesis, it will (likely) never touch on whether or not a God exists. The most it will ever do in this regard is prove or disprove various Christian/Mormon/Muslim/Jewish assumptions about said beings interaction with the physical world are/are not true. So far it's been "are not true", particularly for the Mormons (who have had a bad year having their basic beliefs WRT the Book of Mormon and the native Americans as descendents of a cursed son of an Israeli settler in pre-Columbian America disproven by genetic analysis) and the Muslims, but so what? The real question of is there or is there not a God is ananswerable by science, at least as we now know it, but I digress.
This isn't likely, mind you, and certainly no rational person would think like that... but religious fanatics are not rational, reasoning people. Faith trumps and precludes reason, and therfore rationality, and this is clearly borne out in his behavior and policies. Why he is irrationally wreaking this country we don't know, but speculation is fun, and the above is not completely out of the realm of possibility. In any event, it certainly is fun to speculate.
The whole thing with software patents is funny to me, because it means the EU is squandering its opportunity to become the next superpower (in competition with China maybe) in a few decades when the US's technological dominance has faded completely. Software patents might cause the EU to sink just as far the US will, in technological terms at least.
That is why the US Government is pushing so hard for European Software patents, and for patents on both software and business methods at the WTO/WIPO level.
If we can isolate China (we already have India on board, as they passed software patents this year) we can either coerce them to go along, or treat them as the "Russia" of the 21st century (the enemy of western capitalist society). Either outcome would be fine for the current right-wing extremists running the US.
It hasn't occurred to them, I don't think, that China's economy is now so big that isolating China will in fact mean isolating the US, not the other way around, and that the Europeans will probably balk if their software industry is wiped out while China remains firm and theirs flourishes. India's outsourced call centers will likely be unaffected, as they continue to use Officially Sanctioned(tm) Microsoft products.
China it seems recognizes its national intersts quite clearly, and wisely doesn't seem the least bit inclined toward implimenting software or business method patents. This may actually be enough of an advantage over the west to offset the stultifying effects of their other lack of freedoms (no free speech means less feedback means less improvements on dysfunctional aspects of society means a less competative society, but this is probably more than offset if we hamstring ourselves with software patents and other innovation-chilling and draconian IP laws), which would result in the interesting situation in which the most competative economy and the country with the most freedom to innovate is also a country with the least amount of freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. Though I think with the current administration, the US wins on all those counts, and China is a distant second, but that's another issue entirely.
What would be equivilant is taking a good, but little known song, then putting it onto a CD and claiming that it is mine
No, that's plagiarism.
Yes, it's plagerism.
The grandparent is correct. What they did is copyright infringement, and is every bit as much a theft, nor more and no less, than music piracy.
No, you're missing the point. Perhaps because you philosophically wish to call copyright violation theft because it offends your notion of right or wrong (it does mine as well, in most cases), or perhaps because the people you're responding to haven't clarified the issue enough.
What these people did was both copyright violation and plagerism. Copyright violation is not theft... the copyright holder remains the copyright holder. Plagerism, which is claiming authoriship of someone elses work, is theft... you have stolen credit and acclaim for the work (at the very least) and probably usurped the original author's rights to restrict reproduction and distribution (copyright) as well.
The one is not theft, the other is. It really is that simple... unless one has a specific, political ax to grind in obfuscating the terminology.
Plenty of reasonable people believe in the current copyright regime. Plenty of other reasonable people think it should be reformed or revamped, scrapped entirely. No reasonable person suggests that plagerism is okay, that a creator of a work should have their identity and work claimed by another. Most of the ideas for replacing copyright involve codifying current scholarly requirements for citation and bans of plagerism into law. Personally, I favor a weak copyright with manditory licensing... anyone can make a derivative work against the author's will, but the author always gets a good percentage of any and all proceeds of any such derivative work automatically, is given prominent credit for their contribution, and equally prominently disclaimed from any permission or endorsement of the derivative work. But that is a discussion for another day... for now copyright is what we have, so I work within it and respect it (if not its draconian extentions vis-a-vis the DMCA and similiar laws).
Stealing credit is, well, theft. The original creator loses credit and has their rightful acclaim usurped, along with whatever legal rights to their work they might have had. Replicating something without the creator's permission is not theft or stealing in any non-doublespeak sense of the word. The creator loses nothing... except theoretical income they might have made had the copyright violator bought a license, something they often never would have. Indeed, sometimes they gain from it, as the violator likes the work so much they go out and buy it (case in point: in my movie-downloading days... a brief 2-day stint years ago... I downloaded the Fellowship of the Ring, loved the movie, and broke my DVD-boycott to buy the movie because I felt the creator deserved my money for my having seen it).
Both plagerism of a copyright worked and unauthorized duplication or distribution of a copyrighted work are illegal, but they are as different from each other as spraypainting graffitti and punching someone in the nose. You may get fined or go to jail for both, but the moral and ethical implications are entirely different, and the law sees them differently with good reason, no matter the rhetoric from the peanut gallery.
There is no blanket right to shield confidential sources. Getting the scoop on MacWorld is fun and all, but it doesn't serve the public interest in any way.
Really?
Are you certain of that?
And are you certain that will always be the case? Substitute Microsoft for Apple, and draconian "trusted computer" measures that will disallow most third party and all free software from running on your computer, ever, for the specs of Apple's latest hardware, and suddenly getting the scoop, irrespective of NDAs, serves a massive public interest, one which the copyright-cartel beholden traditional press is unlikely to cover at all. Hell, don't even bother substituting "Microsoft" for "Apple," in the above (even if the trends show that as likly). That would be of major concern regardless of who was behind it.
Just because you don't see a public policy implication in today's leak, doesn't mean (a) you're right (there could be more to it than you think, though in this case I'd say that possibility asymptoticly approaches zero) or (b) tommorows leak will be equally devoid of service to the public interest (whatever the hell that is defined to be today, or tommorow when the definition probably changes yet again).
The real question should be: if the bloggers had been card-carrying journalists in a traditional medium, would the law have allowed them to keep their sources secret? If yes, then it should apply to bloggers. If not, then this entire discussion is moot.
Certainly the reasons present in the writeup of the court's decision are at odds with the Surpeme Court's opinion that overturned the SCA, in which they said (and I paraphrase) "the internet deserves at least as much protection under the first amendment as traditional print media." This might not be a first amendment issue with respect to keeping one's sources secret, but it might well be a first amendment issue with respect to defining one set of journalists "special" and another "not," or even implying that the government gets to choose who it considers journalists and who it doesn't. There is an inherent conflict of interest there... in the extreme example, Bush/Clinton could define anyone not pro right-extremest/democrat as "not a journalist" and completely undermine the intent and application of the first amendment, and the effectiveness of the fifth estate (or at least what effectiveness remains after the fifth estate's willing self-evisceration under the current administration).
I have to agree. I've deployed 3-ware SATA controllers at work and at home. Disk recovery has been straightforward, driver support for Linux excellent (it's in the stock kernel sources), and performance more than satisfactory.
It would be nice if one could expand the array "hot," rather than having to copy data around and redefine/reformat the array, but in terms of reliability in protecting my data against disk faults (I've had several disks die, and replacement was a breeze, with zero downtime). As others have pointed out, for most purposes, Linux software RAID is both faster and more robust for recovering from catastrophic hardware failures: put the disks in a new computer and big up lvm2. For those applications that need hardware RAID, I've found the 3-ware escalade cards (both SATA and the older EIDE devices) to be excellent.
Wow. I didn't know that search engines were as important as world politics.
Well, the web (and the Internet as a whole) is becoming the defacto repository of world knowledge. It arguably shapes our thoughts, opinions, and yes, politics as much as television or radio, perhaps more. It is the library of the 21st century (though one hopes the brick-and-mortor variety remain, if for no other reason than as a hardcopy backup, and a more authoritative source).
So, in effect, s/he who controls how that information is indexed and accessed has a significant impact on how the masses think, how their opinions are shaped, and what policies they support or reject. This could even shape the outcome of elections, wars, global social movements, the economies they effect, and the millions, perhaps billions, of lives that are thus affected.
Are we there yet? Some would argue yes, though I would personally say "almost but not quite." Will we be there in 5-10 years? Probably, though software patents may throw everything on its ear. 50 years? Assuming no catastrophic fall of civilization, absolutely, software patents and the forthcoming glacial progress in information technology notwithstanding.
Given that, comparing the policies of the gatekeepers of knowledge, be they software monopolists that control what you are allowed to do with your computer, or indexing agencies/search engines that impact how you find and access information (you can't get it if you can't find it), I'd say comparing them to world political figures is apropos. Indeed, I'd say the Osama bin Laden / Mother Teresa comparison (Microsoft / Google) is more than apropos, as these are both famous people who have had in impact, at least one of which fancies himself a world leader though he is in fact not, but neither of which run the world the way Geoge W. Bush, Tony Blair, and Mr. Putin arguably do. Neither Microsoft ("bin Laden") nor Google ("Mother Teresa") run the Internet, but both affect it greatly, and both aspire to affect it even more so. One in particular aspires to dominate it completely, and to encode in our hardware and operating system what we are and are not allowed to do with our computers and the inforamation they access.
I'd say the comparision was rather inspired on a great many levels, actually.
Distinguishing between different types of rights is not the stupid meme. The stupid meme is that "IP is a meaningless concept". Anybody who even dares to write "IP" on Slashdot gets a predictable lecture. However IP is not a meaningless concept. At the very worst it is ambiguous.
I'm forced to agree, alas. Dissmissing this toxic term as meaningless is counter-productive.
IP is not a meaningless term. If it were, it would not be so effective as a propoganda tool for befuddling the people of the world to give up basic rights to access to information, expression, and knowledge. "IP" is loaded with meaning... all of it nonsensical and contrary to reality and the intent of patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secrets law and designed to confuse and befuddle, but quite meaningful nevertheless.
It is an attempt to attach "property rights" to areas of law that have nothing whatsoever to do with property, to propogate the toxic meme that one can "own" ideas, one can "own" expression, and one can "own" secrets, and that anyone else using an idea "owned" by another (even if they came up with it all on their own) is "stealing" "property" from the idea's "owner" (the patent holder), or if one uses an expression (e.g. "fair use" of a video clip, quotation, or tune sampling), one is "stealing" that "property" from the expression's owner (the copyright holder), or if one discovers and publishes Coke's secret recipe, one is "stealing" the "property" of Coca Cola (the "trade secret" holder).
None of these are in fact true, but the perversion of the language is such that many now believe it to be true. Many believe that patent violation is theft, no matter how obvious the idea or how innovative the inventor who lost the footrace to the patent office is, many believe that copyright infringement is theft, no matter the semantic nonsense of such a stance, nor the mountain of evidence that shows filesharers to be more likely to buy more music than those who are not, and many believe outing a secret to be theft, despite a very long history, going back many many centuries, that reverse engineering and discovering and publishing (or making profitable use of) a secret is a perfectly legitimate enterprise, with many positive social and economic consiquences.
But you're right. IP is far from meaningless. It is loaded with meaning, indeed dripping with it. It just so happens that said meaning is deceptive, confusing, and antithetical to thinking clearly and understanding the disparate legal regimes it glosses together into one big whole.
It's more akin to grouping cats, dogs, fish, etc. under the heading of 'disease' rather than pets. You could probably befuddle the masses into calling for their extinction by persisting in using that terminology long enough... especially if you got all of the media outlets on board (as the proponents of intellectual-theft-from-the-public-commons-as-prop erty) crowd has done), but you'd hardly be justified in using the term in any rational, semanticly logical sense. Ditto for "intellectual property."
Call them what they are, terrorists. Or if "terrorists" is not acceptable, then how about "necromancers festering on people's grief and death"?
I like that, but "cowardly murderers" should suffice if people's politics won't let them call a spade a spade, or in this case, a terrorist a terrorist.
Looking at that picture, it seems to me they are avoiding demoing blue pixels. Does anyone know if LCDs of this size have issues showing blue?
Good question. I'm noticing from the specs that "color saturation" is 92% of NTSC standard. Anyone know what that means exactly, and how it compares to DLP technology (I'm assuming plane old tubes have 100%... is that true, or does the standard incorporate some asymptotically unattainable ideal? Also, anyone know how this matches up to PAL, which by all accounts has a richer colorspace than NTSC, particularly with respect to reds.)
The societal pendulum does swing widely in the U.S. though, and, given it's might, is probably somewhat unnerving for the rest of the word.
The societal pendulum swings widely in the US? You've got to be kidding. You've obviously never spent any time in Europe, or if you did, you spent most of it on base with your eyes closed.
Our "societal pendulum" ranges from "right" to "far right," with a possible extention to "extreme right" under the current administration. Even under FDR, the favorite whipping boy of american reactionaries, we were well to the right of what the rest of the world calls "center."
It's unnerving to the rest of the world to be invaded by a nuclear fascist power that apparently knows no restraint beyond the limits posed by its own military strength (limits we are now seeing manifest). It's unnerving to see the one-time leader and advocate of freedom and democracy (however hypocritically we were at the time, arming and propping up dictatorships such as Saddam Hussein, Pinochet, etc.) become undemocratic. It is unnerving to see America's blatently profit-driven warmongering on behalf of Exxon, Mobile, and assorted ex-Enron principals such as the Bush and Bin-Laden families replace decades of careful diplomacy and consensus.
America hasn't historically been prone to extremism, at least at the national, policy level. Indeed, we've been quite steady while the rest of the world has oscillated between political extremes. That makes it far more unnerving, now that we are becoming a fascist state. Hell, I'm afraid of what we're becoming... who can blame the rest of the world for being even more afraid? And who can blame our innoffensive neighbor to the north for beginning to feel a little fear. No one likes living next to a Bully... you never know when he might turn on you, or blame you for his own actions, or simply shake you down for a little lunch money when his runs short.
No offense, but the list includes version numbers, so its pretty clear its not a current list.
It's also clear that (outside of the Microsoft world) newer versions won't suffer the same vulnerability, nor will it be allowed to persist if somehow the same bug does sneak back into the codebase.
I sometimes wonder if there's a single Microsoft shill or fan with an IQ that breaks triple digits... I only wish their lobbiests in Europe were so ineffective... the western world might have been spared its downward spiral into technological backwaterhood...a downward spiral the Chinese have been (and probably will continue to remain) smart enough to recognize as against their national interest and avoid (yes, I'm talking about software patents. Sue me).
Vote a punitive NO, emigrate or learn a new job (as you may have guessed I'm busy doing). Those are your only options, non-exclusive.
Where are you going to immigrate to? It looks like the whole western world is falling beneath the monopoly behometh of (software) patents. We can expect Trading Technologies to shake down all trading firms, large and small, as well as all western exchanges, and Microsoft will leverage patents to eradicate GNU/Linux as anything other than an underground resistence of shrinking mindshare, and probably stifle most other innovations as well. The Free Software world will likely be looking to China for sanctuary in the near future, which is a situation so loaded with irony it defies imagining, proving once again that fact is orders of magnitude stranger than fiction.
We have about three years before this directive becomes law in Europe. Microsoft may or may not wait those three years before attacking software freedom in America, but we can all be assured that in five years time it will be virtually impossible for us as software programmers to practice our art and our profession in the west, without a patron from one of the major software houses (Microsoft, Apple, IBM).
This isn't the end of the world, but it is the end of a dynamic, innovative industry. This is hardly unprecidented. Poor governance and patents have destroyed and stifled many innovative industries, from the AT&T monopoly that destroyed hundreds of competing phone companies and froze the technology solid for sixty-plus years, to aviation, to chemistry, to biogenetics and medicine, and so on and so forth. Now its our turn, and we didn't stand up soon enough or speak loudly enough. Well, some of us did, but we were too few and too late.
So I ask again, where can we go? What countries are left that have not fallen beneath the Microsoft/IBM/Sun regime of software patents, and how long can we reasonably expect them to hold out against Americas wonton aggression in forcing our corporate interests down the world's collective throat?
Has China truly become our last, best hope for freedom?
Has this been removed from their library? If not, doesn't it conflict with the whole concept of opensource?
Or is it a trojan, intended as a patent encumbered "gift" to the community to nix the likes of the Gimp should software patents be successfully rammed down the Europeans' throats? The MIT license conviniently says nothing about patent issues (to be fair, the current version of the GPL is hardly perfect in this area too).
Not saying that Adobe is still as evil as it was when it had Dmitry arrested for pointing out the Emporor's lack of clothing, but in these litigious, ever-widening swath-of-government-monopoly-entitlement times some degree of critical assessment is warranted.
Without GNU's GPL MS would've openly pirated various free implementations of UNIX.
What about the ones that are not released under GPL, like *BSD?
The BSD TCP/IP network stack was openly "pirated" by Microsoft, if by "pirated" one means "used while drowning in hypocracy by decrying the very free movement one is exploiting," which is really the only definition of "piracy" I can imagine would apply to using a Free product in compliance with its license. I suspect that is what the original poster meant.
I wouldn't have chosen the word "pirate" as it implies copyright violation, which is clearly not the case if you're adhering to a license. "Exploited" would have been more appropriate.
Microsoft openly exploited the BSD TCP/IP network stack because of the liberal BSD license, something the authors of FreeBSD have absolutely no problem with, and in fact encourage. As to whether this is strategicly wise of them or not, well, that is a flamefest reserved for typical GPL/BSD arguments. I personally think the GPL is what has made Linux viable and protected it against many of the worst depridations by Microsoft...though of course it won't hold up to a patent assault once Bill Gates finishes ramming software patents down the Europeans' throats (one may speculate on which appendage Mr. Gates is using to do the ramming), but as Apple, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, ogg-vorbis, and numerous other projects have shown, the BSD license has its strengths as well, and can be quite ideal for other projects.
But he's given enough of what he stole to decent charities that I say let him be crowned or sainted or venerated by the sort of people who do that sort of thing. As long as he keeps giving to charities, I just don't care.
It is exactly that attitude that has allowed the status quo to remain largely unchanged, despite the fact that humanity has had the resources and technical knowhow to end all poverty since about the 17th century.
As long as we get a few crumbs, we'll tolerate any amount of injustice. Add to that the vague dream that we may become one of the haves and enjoy the privelege of trampling on the have-nots that folks like Bill Gates enjoys, and we'll defend to the death their right to grind the rest of us beneath their heals.
It's OK. He's saved a few lives here... nevermind the millions he may have destroyed elsewhere. Be a good American(tm) and venerate him, for as a very wealthy man (never mind how he got there) he is akin to God.
So, a person that steals, but doesnt get caught, or gets let off is not a criminal?
Depends on which definition of "criminal" you're using (pedants can look up the definitions online).
One definition requires you to break a law, another merely to engage in acts against your society that harm others, and still another that you be convicted of violating criminal code of law. The latter is obviously a lawyer's definition, the others lay-people's usage of the language going back hundreds of years.
By the first two, Bill Gates is a criminal (indeed, he has been CONVICTED of abusing his monopoly, a civil law which he has violated). By the third, he is technically not a "convicted criminal," though he is most assuradly a "convicted monopolist."
In any event, his actions are "criminal" in the lay sense of the word -- they have done and continue to do great harm to millions, perhaps billions, of people -- and he gets a free pass because (a) he is rich, therefor Good By Definition(tm), at least in America and its satelites, and (b) he gives a smidgeon away to worthy causes, so he must be "good" no matter how many people and industries he's destroyed in getting the ill-gotten gains whose crumbs he scatters among some in dire need.
Draw your own conclusions. I find his ability to get a free pass by giving a little to a few worthy causes to be indicative of just how much money can buy... even admiration, no matter how despicable one is. Depressing, and certainly an argument in favor of allowing humankind to go extinct (the sooner the better, perhaps, though as a human I'd argue the opposite despite the infestation of the species by the likes of Bill Gates), but hardly unprecidented.
NO ONE stops to think that there's just millions more Windows computers out there? Windows got the most attacks because there's MILLIONS more potential sources of attack.
The intelligent among us (based on your mindlessly pro-microsoft rant/troll, this excludes you) have long considered this.
Your assumption that large deployment and large marketshare are what drives attacks, and successful attacks in particular, is a myth that has been dubunked long ago, by many, many people much more intelligent and knowledgable than you've shown yourself to be.
IIS has a smaller webserver marketshare than Apache, yet IIS is subject to many, many more successful attacks than Apache. This proves the notion that wider deployment and ubiquitiousness are what drive attacks, and not intrinsic vulnerabilities in the design, to be false.
As for the rest of your nonsensical "being more buggy and subjected to more attacks means we'll be more secure than those of you with secure systems today, because we've experienced more harm," that hardly deserves a response, except to say it bears an unsurprising resemblence to the religious notion that "Jesus will return someday and all you sinners will suffer"... which is unprovable, of course, and could happen if certain mythical and unprovable assumptions turn out to be less mythical than reason would suggest, but in 2000 years of breathless expectation by those who do believe, has still failed to occur.
Windows could end up more secure than Mac OS X, Free/OpenBSD, and GNU/Linux, but I suspect the second comming of Christ will happen first, and I say that as an athiest.
Nice troll, though. It was fun pointing out your stupidity, and a pleasure to discuss once again how poorly designed Microsoft products are, and how absurd the pro-Microsoft arguments are in the face of cold, hard facts, and the inescapable reality that their products are by far the worst in terms of security and stability, have been so for more than fifteen years, and remain so despite years of promises to the contrary.
Indeed, Microsoft's incompetence in software design and OS design with respect to security and stability is only exceed by the incompetence of its astroturfers in trying to convince the knowldegable otherwise.
But in the end, it didn't really matter. When the bill came up, there was lots of snickering, and the bill died a quick and painless death.
It's a pity the death of such bills is painless. Such attempts at subversion of the democratic process, personal liberties and expression (on the Internet, no less, which the Supreme Court has already ruled deserves better-than-average protection of the right of free expression), not to mention the free market, should be dealt with harshly. I'm not sure how one would structure such a thing in a manner that wouldn't have a chilling effect on legitimate lobbying, but some thought ought to be given to the problem.
Perhaps corporate lobbying should have more restrictive rules of engagement than private lobbying (ie. differentiate between corporations and living, breathing citizens, and limit what the former may propose, and seriously punish the former when they step out of bounds).
As things stand now, there are no negative consiquences to such behavior, and nothing to prevent wealthy enough organiziations from spamming legislatures over and over again, until at some point the legislation perhaps passes and we all suffer as a result.
If there were negative consiqences to inappropriate corporate lobbying and attempts at legislation, there would be a lot less of this nonsense (some of which does get through the best of filters, and our legislatures are hardly "the best" of filters), and our society would be far better off for it.
I'm starting to wonder the same thing. Slashdot has never been known for its "vetting" of stories, or even much editing of the captions, but the last few weeks it's become really terrible. Stories spinning the broadcast flag and attempted banning of digital HDTV VCR-like hardware as "piracy prevention", pro-ms stories rearing their heads more and more in what is (or was) supposed to be a free software/opensource news and discussion forum, and an ever increasing number of flat-out misleading headlines that misrepresent TFAs, and links to TFAs that are flagrant products of MPAA/RIAA shills... I'm beginning to think this site is dead and we just don't know it yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Naaw, Science Fiction is only for entertainment (that occasionally spurs creative application of concepts). The former are all documents which different types mass hysteria are based upon.
That's a true distinction, most of the time. Unless you're L. Ron Hubbard, in which case at least a portion of your science fiction / fantasy IS intended to befuddle and create mass hysteria.
Depending upon your point of view, all of the above could be construed as Science Fiction, too.
I appreciate and agree with the point you're trying to make, but I disagree with your choice of labels. The Bible et. al. might be construed as "Soft-Sci Fi" maybe, but I'd consider including the Bible, the Koran, and the Maya Codex under the heading of "Science Fiction" (of any kind, soft or not) to be a fundamental misuse of the term. Science Fiction is supposed to be fiction based on science, however loosely.
"Fantasy" would be a more accurate heading for those works, as in "Fantastic Fiction." After all, they include such notions as "magic," "god(s)" etc. that really have no foundation whatsoever in science.
I've always found it unfortunate that fantasy ("Lord of the Rings" etc.) is grouped with science fiction, as I consider the two genres to be no more alike than Murder Mysteries and Romance (which enjoy their own, seperate sections in the bookstore). This doesn't mean that science fiction and fantasy can't sometimes be combined, just as one can have a romance/mystery novel, but that doesn't change the fact that science fiction and fantasy are fundamentally different, just as mysteries and romance novels are.
Real atheists do not say "God does not exist". Real atheists say "I do not believe in God because there is no evidence for His existence." There's a huge difference.
...
I agree. I suppose I'm an athiest, as I subscribe to the latter. That having been said
Agnosticism, on the other hand, is saying "There is no evidence for God, but I choose to neither believe nor disbelieve." How crazy is that?
I'm not so sure. I don't believe in a creator, but I do maintain an open mind of three possibilities: 1) I'm wrong (possible but IMHO not likely) and there is a creator, probably bearing absolutely no resemblence whatsover to any of the Gods described by Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, or any other -ism, 2) that I'm right and there is no creator but a spiritual dimension to the universe has evolved in a manner analogous to our intelligences evolving from lower lifeforms, ultimately from single celled lifeforms that formed out of the primordial soup, or 3) that I'm right, there is no creator, nor is there any spiritual dimension to the universe beyond the emotive sensibilities of self-deluded humans.
I am equally comfortable with any of the three outcomes above. Does this make me an agnostic? Or an athiest, as I do not believe in God because there exists no reasonable evidence that he exists (I do not include the Mormon tautology that the mere existence of the world proves God exists, for obvious reasons, including but not limited to the fact that circular reasoning produces nonsensical results, and that evidence exists that the world probably formed naturally, without supervision or intervention).
Science cannot disprove or prove the existence of a God, but it can (and has) disproven most predictions made by most of the aforementioned -isms as to the nature of this, the physical universe. Examples include the earth not being created in 7 days, not being at the center of the universe, humanity not having descended from a single couple, native Americans having absolutely no genetic relationship to the Isrealites, the earth being older than seven thousand years, and so on. For this reason, there is a mountain of evidence that the God as described by the Christians, Muslims, Mormons, Jews, etc. does not exist, i.e. that their description of God is flat-out wrong. That is not the same as proving there is no God, so as an (athiest? agnostic?) I must concede the possibility that she or he or it does exist, in some form, even though I, based on the evidence of hand, don't believe so. I do not find this stance to be either crazy, or intellectually dishonest.
So I guess the question is, am I an agostic or an athiest? I've often described myself as an agnostic with athiestic tendencies, but perhaps a better description would be an athiest with agnostic tendencies.
"In a CeBIT debate today it was concluded that the MS monopoly would not exist with today's software patenting in place back in 1985."
... it is easier and cheaper to exploit an existing business model, than to remain limber and innovative in a changing market.
... often (though not always) through our patent regime.
Or circa 1980 to prevent Microsoft/Seattle Computing from ripping off CP/M.
It sounds like the CeBit article (disclaimer, I haven't read it, merely your quote from it) is disingenuously putting forth a pro-software patent argument.
It is true that if software patents had existed in 1980 the Microsoft monopoly probably wouldn't exist. However, it is also true that free software wouldn't exist. Nor would the Internet, the World Wide Web, ubiquitious and universal email, or most of the modern software we use and enjoy.
The entire software industry would essentially be where it was in circa 1985 at best, because all of the patents on basic software design would just now be expiring, and all the patents on the next generation of ideas (which were around in 1985 or so) would just now be kicking in.
I hate the Microsoft monopoly as much as anyone, and I despise what they've done to the industry. They've held computing back a good 10 or 15 years in many respects, but compared to what software patents will bring, Microsoft is harmless. To use their anti-competative practices to justify and argue in favor of government entitlements to monopolies on ideas, however basic or advanced, is so rich in absurdity and irony it boggles the mind.
Software patents are a reality. They probably will get shoved down the Europeans' throats, and the era of breakneck software innovation and advances will come to an end. This will suit the entrenched business and political interests that are pushing so hard for software patents just fine
Expect the snail-paced progress that follows to be spun by the media and pundits as "the technology sector has matured." A mature market is doublespeak for a market that has been regulated into stagnation
The creator loses nothing ... except theoretical income they might have made
And you consider this LESS deserving of the word theft than "taking credit" is? I consider the opposite to be true.
Absolutely. If you define the "loss of potential (i.e. hypothetical, perhaps never-would-have-existed, and by no means certain) income" as theft, then you define all aspects of competition, upon which our capitalist system depends to function, as "theft."
Steal a man's wallet and you've committed theft -- the guy you stole from is out one wallet, assorted credit and identity cards, and whatever cash/family pics/what-have-you he was carrying. Refuse to buy the man's product, either because someone gave made a knockoff copy and gave it to you for free, or because you simply don't want it, and you've stolen nothing. Nada. Nichts. If the product was copyrighted and you obtained a copy, you violated his right to restrict copying and distribution (copyright), but you still haven't STOLEN anything, regardless of whether or not he lost potential income as a result.
In short, denying someone income isn't theft. Taking something they already possess away from them is. Or put another way, the potential that something may be does not equal the reality that something is. This applies to potential vs. already obtained income, abortion vs. murder, birth control vs. murder, not-watching-commercials vs. theft, copyright violation vs. theft, patent violation vs. theft, and any host of other controversial topics where logic is muddled beneath rhetoric because of emotional feeling on one side or the other.
This article has more to do with Microsoft continuing to build an impressive array of innovators and visionaries to carry the company for another 20 years.
Oh. My. God.
Let me guess. Your day job is writing press releases for Microsoft or Microsoft shill companies.
Would someone like to explain why NASA gets to shut down an ESA project?
... the Europeans, for all their leadership's stupidity on software patents (welcome to the downward-spiral-to-hell club, by the way), they aren't likely to spike funded research just for the hell of it.
... but religious fanatics are not rational, reasoning people. Faith trumps and precludes reason, and therfore rationality, and this is clearly borne out in his behavior and policies. Why he is irrationally wreaking this country we don't know, but speculation is fun, and the above is not completely out of the realm of possibility. In any event, it certainly is fun to speculate.
The US decided not to go ahead with their half of the Solar Polar Project at a fairly advanced stage, now they want to shut down the other half?
Bush probably fears for the reputation of America as leader in science and discovery, now that he has slashed NASA's budget, replaced real ongoing scientific research that is yielding exciting results today with unfunded, and unfundable, pie-in-the-sky programs that will never amount to anything (sending people to Mars will probably happen in the next century, but not in the next 20 years). Scientific discovery is likely to peter out to no small degree in America's space program as a result of these terrible policies, while the European Space Agency is coming into its own. What better way to protect ourselves from emberressment than by getting the ESA to stop research as well.
Not that it's likely to happen
But why would the Bush regime do this? Maybe Bush fears the science will difinitively disprove the existence of God. He is dumb enough to miss the fact that the existence or lack thereof of a God is orthogonal to science, and while science has disproven most of the Book of Genesis, it will (likely) never touch on whether or not a God exists. The most it will ever do in this regard is prove or disprove various Christian/Mormon/Muslim/Jewish assumptions about said beings interaction with the physical world are/are not true. So far it's been "are not true", particularly for the Mormons (who have had a bad year having their basic beliefs WRT the Book of Mormon and the native Americans as descendents of a cursed son of an Israeli settler in pre-Columbian America disproven by genetic analysis) and the Muslims, but so what? The real question of is there or is there not a God is ananswerable by science, at least as we now know it, but I digress.
This isn't likely, mind you, and certainly no rational person would think like that
The whole thing with software patents is funny to me, because it means the EU is squandering its opportunity to become the next superpower (in competition with China maybe) in a few decades when the US's technological dominance has faded completely. Software patents might cause the EU to sink just as far the US will, in technological terms at least.
That is why the US Government is pushing so hard for European Software patents, and for patents on both software and business methods at the WTO/WIPO level.
If we can isolate China (we already have India on board, as they passed software patents this year) we can either coerce them to go along, or treat them as the "Russia" of the 21st century (the enemy of western capitalist society). Either outcome would be fine for the current right-wing extremists running the US.
It hasn't occurred to them, I don't think, that China's economy is now so big that isolating China will in fact mean isolating the US, not the other way around, and that the Europeans will probably balk if their software industry is wiped out while China remains firm and theirs flourishes. India's outsourced call centers will likely be unaffected, as they continue to use Officially Sanctioned(tm) Microsoft products.
China it seems recognizes its national intersts quite clearly, and wisely doesn't seem the least bit inclined toward implimenting software or business method patents. This may actually be enough of an advantage over the west to offset the stultifying effects of their other lack of freedoms (no free speech means less feedback means less improvements on dysfunctional aspects of society means a less competative society, but this is probably more than offset if we hamstring ourselves with software patents and other innovation-chilling and draconian IP laws), which would result in the interesting situation in which the most competative economy and the country with the most freedom to innovate is also a country with the least amount of freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. Though I think with the current administration, the US wins on all those counts, and China is a distant second, but that's another issue entirely.
What would be equivilant is taking a good, but little known song, then putting it onto a CD and claiming that it is mine
... the copyright holder remains the copyright holder. Plagerism, which is claiming authoriship of someone elses work, is theft ... you have stolen credit and acclaim for the work (at the very least) and probably usurped the original author's rights to restrict reproduction and distribution (copyright) as well.
... unless one has a specific, political ax to grind in obfuscating the terminology.
... anyone can make a derivative work against the author's will, but the author always gets a good percentage of any and all proceeds of any such derivative work automatically, is given prominent credit for their contribution, and equally prominently disclaimed from any permission or endorsement of the derivative work. But that is a discussion for another day ... for now copyright is what we have, so I work within it and respect it (if not its draconian extentions vis-a-vis the DMCA and similiar laws).
... except theoretical income they might have made had the copyright violator bought a license, something they often never would have. Indeed, sometimes they gain from it, as the violator likes the work so much they go out and buy it (case in point: in my movie-downloading days ... a brief 2-day stint years ago ... I downloaded the Fellowship of the Ring, loved the movie, and broke my DVD-boycott to buy the movie because I felt the creator deserved my money for my having seen it).
No, that's plagiarism.
Yes, it's plagerism.
The grandparent is correct. What they did is copyright infringement, and is every bit as much a theft, nor more and no less, than music piracy.
No, you're missing the point. Perhaps because you philosophically wish to call copyright violation theft because it offends your notion of right or wrong (it does mine as well, in most cases), or perhaps because the people you're responding to haven't clarified the issue enough.
What these people did was both copyright violation and plagerism. Copyright violation is not theft
The one is not theft, the other is. It really is that simple
Plenty of reasonable people believe in the current copyright regime. Plenty of other reasonable people think it should be reformed or revamped, scrapped entirely. No reasonable person suggests that plagerism is okay, that a creator of a work should have their identity and work claimed by another. Most of the ideas for replacing copyright involve codifying current scholarly requirements for citation and bans of plagerism into law. Personally, I favor a weak copyright with manditory licensing
Stealing credit is, well, theft. The original creator loses credit and has their rightful acclaim usurped, along with whatever legal rights to their work they might have had. Replicating something without the creator's permission is not theft or stealing in any non-doublespeak sense of the word. The creator loses nothing
Both plagerism of a copyright worked and unauthorized duplication or distribution of a copyrighted work are illegal, but they are as different from each other as spraypainting graffitti and punching someone in the nose. You may get fined or go to jail for both, but the moral and ethical implications are entirely different, and the law sees them differently with good reason, no matter the rhetoric from the peanut gallery.
There is no blanket right to shield confidential sources. Getting the scoop on MacWorld is fun and all, but it doesn't serve the public interest in any way.
... in the extreme example, Bush/Clinton could define anyone not pro right-extremest/democrat as "not a journalist" and completely undermine the intent and application of the first amendment, and the effectiveness of the fifth estate (or at least what effectiveness remains after the fifth estate's willing self-evisceration under the current administration).
Really?
Are you certain of that?
And are you certain that will always be the case? Substitute Microsoft for Apple, and draconian "trusted computer" measures that will disallow most third party and all free software from running on your computer, ever, for the specs of Apple's latest hardware, and suddenly getting the scoop, irrespective of NDAs, serves a massive public interest, one which the copyright-cartel beholden traditional press is unlikely to cover at all. Hell, don't even bother substituting "Microsoft" for "Apple," in the above (even if the trends show that as likly). That would be of major concern regardless of who was behind it.
Just because you don't see a public policy implication in today's leak, doesn't mean (a) you're right (there could be more to it than you think, though in this case I'd say that possibility asymptoticly approaches zero) or (b) tommorows leak will be equally devoid of service to the public interest (whatever the hell that is defined to be today, or tommorow when the definition probably changes yet again).
The real question should be: if the bloggers had been card-carrying journalists in a traditional medium, would the law have allowed them to keep their sources secret? If yes, then it should apply to bloggers. If not, then this entire discussion is moot.
Certainly the reasons present in the writeup of the court's decision are at odds with the Surpeme Court's opinion that overturned the SCA, in which they said (and I paraphrase) "the internet deserves at least as much protection under the first amendment as traditional print media." This might not be a first amendment issue with respect to keeping one's sources secret, but it might well be a first amendment issue with respect to defining one set of journalists "special" and another "not," or even implying that the government gets to choose who it considers journalists and who it doesn't. There is an inherent conflict of interest there
I have to agree. I've deployed 3-ware SATA controllers at work and at home. Disk recovery has been straightforward, driver support for Linux excellent (it's in the stock kernel sources), and performance more than satisfactory.
It would be nice if one could expand the array "hot," rather than having to copy data around and redefine/reformat the array, but in terms of reliability in protecting my data against disk faults (I've had several disks die, and replacement was a breeze, with zero downtime). As others have pointed out, for most purposes, Linux software RAID is both faster and more robust for recovering from catastrophic hardware failures: put the disks in a new computer and big up lvm2. For those applications that need hardware RAID, I've found the 3-ware escalade cards (both SATA and the older EIDE devices) to be excellent.
Wow. I didn't know that search engines were as important as world politics.
Well, the web (and the Internet as a whole) is becoming the defacto repository of world knowledge. It arguably shapes our thoughts, opinions, and yes, politics as much as television or radio, perhaps more. It is the library of the 21st century (though one hopes the brick-and-mortor variety remain, if for no other reason than as a hardcopy backup, and a more authoritative source).
So, in effect, s/he who controls how that information is indexed and accessed has a significant impact on how the masses think, how their opinions are shaped, and what policies they support or reject. This could even shape the outcome of elections, wars, global social movements, the economies they effect, and the millions, perhaps billions, of lives that are thus affected.
Are we there yet? Some would argue yes, though I would personally say "almost but not quite." Will we be there in 5-10 years? Probably, though software patents may throw everything on its ear. 50 years? Assuming no catastrophic fall of civilization, absolutely, software patents and the forthcoming glacial progress in information technology notwithstanding.
Given that, comparing the policies of the gatekeepers of knowledge, be they software monopolists that control what you are allowed to do with your computer, or indexing agencies/search engines that impact how you find and access information (you can't get it if you can't find it), I'd say comparing them to world political figures is apropos. Indeed, I'd say the Osama bin Laden / Mother Teresa comparison (Microsoft / Google) is more than apropos, as these are both famous people who have had in impact, at least one of which fancies himself a world leader though he is in fact not, but neither of which run the world the way Geoge W. Bush, Tony Blair, and Mr. Putin arguably do. Neither Microsoft ("bin Laden") nor Google ("Mother Teresa") run the Internet, but both affect it greatly, and both aspire to affect it even more so. One in particular aspires to dominate it completely, and to encode in our hardware and operating system what we are and are not allowed to do with our computers and the inforamation they access.
I'd say the comparision was rather inspired on a great many levels, actually.
Distinguishing between different types of rights is not the stupid meme. The stupid meme is that "IP is a meaningless concept". Anybody who even dares to write "IP" on Slashdot gets a predictable lecture. However IP is not a meaningless concept. At the very worst it is ambiguous.
... all of it nonsensical and contrary to reality and the intent of patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secrets law and designed to confuse and befuddle, but quite meaningful nevertheless.
... especially if you got all of the media outlets on board (as the proponents of intellectual-theft-from-the-public-commons-as-prop erty) crowd has done), but you'd hardly be justified in using the term in any rational, semanticly logical sense. Ditto for "intellectual property."
I'm forced to agree, alas. Dissmissing this toxic term as meaningless is counter-productive.
IP is not a meaningless term. If it were, it would not be so effective as a propoganda tool for befuddling the people of the world to give up basic rights to access to information, expression, and knowledge. "IP" is loaded with meaning
It is an attempt to attach "property rights" to areas of law that have nothing whatsoever to do with property, to propogate the toxic meme that one can "own" ideas, one can "own" expression, and one can "own" secrets, and that anyone else using an idea "owned" by another (even if they came up with it all on their own) is "stealing" "property" from the idea's "owner" (the patent holder), or if one uses an expression (e.g. "fair use" of a video clip, quotation, or tune sampling), one is "stealing" that "property" from the expression's owner (the copyright holder), or if one discovers and publishes Coke's secret recipe, one is "stealing" the "property" of Coca Cola (the "trade secret" holder).
None of these are in fact true, but the perversion of the language is such that many now believe it to be true. Many believe that patent violation is theft, no matter how obvious the idea or how innovative the inventor who lost the footrace to the patent office is, many believe that copyright infringement is theft, no matter the semantic nonsense of such a stance, nor the mountain of evidence that shows filesharers to be more likely to buy more music than those who are not, and many believe outing a secret to be theft, despite a very long history, going back many many centuries, that reverse engineering and discovering and publishing (or making profitable use of) a secret is a perfectly legitimate enterprise, with many positive social and economic consiquences.
But you're right. IP is far from meaningless. It is loaded with meaning, indeed dripping with it. It just so happens that said meaning is deceptive, confusing, and antithetical to thinking clearly and understanding the disparate legal regimes it glosses together into one big whole.
It's more akin to grouping cats, dogs, fish, etc. under the heading of 'disease' rather than pets. You could probably befuddle the masses into calling for their extinction by persisting in using that terminology long enough
Call them what they are, terrorists. Or if "terrorists" is not acceptable, then how about "necromancers festering on people's grief and death"?
I like that, but "cowardly murderers" should suffice if people's politics won't let them call a spade a spade, or in this case, a terrorist a terrorist.
Looking at that picture, it seems to me they are avoiding demoing blue pixels. Does anyone know if LCDs of this size have issues showing blue?
... is that true, or does the standard incorporate some asymptotically unattainable ideal? Also, anyone know how this matches up to PAL, which by all accounts has a richer colorspace than NTSC, particularly with respect to reds.)
Good question. I'm noticing from the specs that "color saturation" is 92% of NTSC standard. Anyone know what that means exactly, and how it compares to DLP technology (I'm assuming plane old tubes have 100%
The societal pendulum does swing widely in the U.S. though, and, given it's might, is probably somewhat unnerving for the rest of the word.
... who can blame the rest of the world for being even more afraid? And who can blame our innoffensive neighbor to the north for beginning to feel a little fear. No one likes living next to a Bully ... you never know when he might turn on you, or blame you for his own actions, or simply shake you down for a little lunch money when his runs short.
The societal pendulum swings widely in the US? You've got to be kidding. You've obviously never spent any time in Europe, or if you did, you spent most of it on base with your eyes closed.
Our "societal pendulum" ranges from "right" to "far right," with a possible extention to "extreme right" under the current administration. Even under FDR, the favorite whipping boy of american reactionaries, we were well to the right of what the rest of the world calls "center."
It's unnerving to the rest of the world to be invaded by a nuclear fascist power that apparently knows no restraint beyond the limits posed by its own military strength (limits we are now seeing manifest). It's unnerving to see the one-time leader and advocate of freedom and democracy (however hypocritically we were at the time, arming and propping up dictatorships such as Saddam Hussein, Pinochet, etc.) become undemocratic. It is unnerving to see America's blatently profit-driven warmongering on behalf of Exxon, Mobile, and assorted ex-Enron principals such as the Bush and Bin-Laden families replace decades of careful diplomacy and consensus.
America hasn't historically been prone to extremism, at least at the national, policy level. Indeed, we've been quite steady while the rest of the world has oscillated between political extremes. That makes it far more unnerving, now that we are becoming a fascist state. Hell, I'm afraid of what we're becoming
No offense, but the list includes version numbers, so its pretty clear its not a current list.
... I only wish their lobbiests in Europe were so ineffective ... the western world might have been spared its downward spiral into technological backwaterhood...a downward spiral the Chinese have been (and probably will continue to remain) smart enough to recognize as against their national interest and avoid (yes, I'm talking about software patents. Sue me).
It's also clear that (outside of the Microsoft world) newer versions won't suffer the same vulnerability, nor will it be allowed to persist if somehow the same bug does sneak back into the codebase.
I sometimes wonder if there's a single Microsoft shill or fan with an IQ that breaks triple digits
Vote a punitive NO, emigrate or learn a new job (as you may have guessed I'm busy doing). Those are your only options, non-exclusive.
Where are you going to immigrate to? It looks like the whole western world is falling beneath the monopoly behometh of (software) patents. We can expect Trading Technologies to shake down all trading firms, large and small, as well as all western exchanges, and Microsoft will leverage patents to eradicate GNU/Linux as anything other than an underground resistence of shrinking mindshare, and probably stifle most other innovations as well. The Free Software world will likely be looking to China for sanctuary in the near future, which is a situation so loaded with irony it defies imagining, proving once again that fact is orders of magnitude stranger than fiction.
We have about three years before this directive becomes law in Europe. Microsoft may or may not wait those three years before attacking software freedom in America, but we can all be assured that in five years time it will be virtually impossible for us as software programmers to practice our art and our profession in the west, without a patron from one of the major software houses (Microsoft, Apple, IBM).
This isn't the end of the world, but it is the end of a dynamic, innovative industry. This is hardly unprecidented. Poor governance and patents have destroyed and stifled many innovative industries, from the AT&T monopoly that destroyed hundreds of competing phone companies and froze the technology solid for sixty-plus years, to aviation, to chemistry, to biogenetics and medicine, and so on and so forth. Now its our turn, and we didn't stand up soon enough or speak loudly enough. Well, some of us did, but we were too few and too late.
So I ask again, where can we go? What countries are left that have not fallen beneath the Microsoft/IBM/Sun regime of software patents, and how long can we reasonably expect them to hold out against Americas wonton aggression in forcing our corporate interests down the world's collective throat?
Has China truly become our last, best hope for freedom?
Has this been removed from their library? If not, doesn't it conflict with the whole concept of opensource?
Or is it a trojan, intended as a patent encumbered "gift" to the community to nix the likes of the Gimp should software patents be successfully rammed down the Europeans' throats? The MIT license conviniently says nothing about patent issues (to be fair, the current version of the GPL is hardly perfect in this area too).
Not saying that Adobe is still as evil as it was when it had Dmitry arrested for pointing out the Emporor's lack of clothing, but in these litigious, ever-widening swath-of-government-monopoly-entitlement times some degree of critical assessment is warranted.
Without GNU's GPL MS would've openly pirated various free implementations of UNIX.
What about the ones that are not released under GPL, like *BSD?
The BSD TCP/IP network stack was openly "pirated" by Microsoft, if by "pirated" one means "used while drowning in hypocracy by decrying the very free movement one is exploiting," which is really the only definition of "piracy" I can imagine would apply to using a Free product in compliance with its license. I suspect that is what the original poster meant.
I wouldn't have chosen the word "pirate" as it implies copyright violation, which is clearly not the case if you're adhering to a license. "Exploited" would have been more appropriate.
Microsoft openly exploited the BSD TCP/IP network stack because of the liberal BSD license, something the authors of FreeBSD have absolutely no problem with, and in fact encourage. As to whether this is strategicly wise of them or not, well, that is a flamefest reserved for typical GPL/BSD arguments. I personally think the GPL is what has made Linux viable and protected it against many of the worst depridations by Microsoft...though of course it won't hold up to a patent assault once Bill Gates finishes ramming software patents down the Europeans' throats (one may speculate on which appendage Mr. Gates is using to do the ramming), but as Apple, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, ogg-vorbis, and numerous other projects have shown, the BSD license has its strengths as well, and can be quite ideal for other projects.
But he's given enough of what he stole to decent charities that I say let him be crowned or sainted or venerated by the sort of people who do that sort of thing. As long as he keeps giving to charities, I just don't care.
... nevermind the millions he may have destroyed elsewhere. Be a good American(tm) and venerate him, for as a very wealthy man (never mind how he got there) he is akin to God.
It is exactly that attitude that has allowed the status quo to remain largely unchanged, despite the fact that humanity has had the resources and technical knowhow to end all poverty since about the 17th century.
As long as we get a few crumbs, we'll tolerate any amount of injustice. Add to that the vague dream that we may become one of the haves and enjoy the privelege of trampling on the have-nots that folks like Bill Gates enjoys, and we'll defend to the death their right to grind the rest of us beneath their heals.
It's OK. He's saved a few lives here
So, a person that steals, but doesnt get caught, or gets let off is not a criminal?
... even admiration, no matter how despicable one is. Depressing, and certainly an argument in favor of allowing humankind to go extinct (the sooner the better, perhaps, though as a human I'd argue the opposite despite the infestation of the species by the likes of Bill Gates), but hardly unprecidented.
Depends on which definition of "criminal" you're using (pedants can look up the definitions online).
One definition requires you to break a law, another merely to engage in acts against your society that harm others, and still another that you be convicted of violating criminal code of law. The latter is obviously a lawyer's definition, the others lay-people's usage of the language going back hundreds of years.
By the first two, Bill Gates is a criminal (indeed, he has been CONVICTED of abusing his monopoly, a civil law which he has violated). By the third, he is technically not a "convicted criminal," though he is most assuradly a "convicted monopolist."
In any event, his actions are "criminal" in the lay sense of the word -- they have done and continue to do great harm to millions, perhaps billions, of people -- and he gets a free pass because (a) he is rich, therefor Good By Definition(tm), at least in America and its satelites, and (b) he gives a smidgeon away to worthy causes, so he must be "good" no matter how many people and industries he's destroyed in getting the ill-gotten gains whose crumbs he scatters among some in dire need.
Draw your own conclusions. I find his ability to get a free pass by giving a little to a few worthy causes to be indicative of just how much money can buy
Some Tuesday morning morsels for the troll:
... which is unprovable, of course, and could happen if certain mythical and unprovable assumptions turn out to be less mythical than reason would suggest, but in 2000 years of breathless expectation by those who do believe, has still failed to occur.
NO ONE stops to think that there's just millions more Windows computers out there? Windows got the most attacks because there's MILLIONS more potential sources of attack.
The intelligent among us (based on your mindlessly pro-microsoft rant/troll, this excludes you) have long considered this.
Your assumption that large deployment and large marketshare are what drives attacks, and successful attacks in particular, is a myth that has been dubunked long ago, by many, many people much more intelligent and knowledgable than you've shown yourself to be.
IIS has a smaller webserver marketshare than Apache, yet IIS is subject to many, many more successful attacks than Apache. This proves the notion that wider deployment and ubiquitiousness are what drive attacks, and not intrinsic vulnerabilities in the design, to be false.
As for the rest of your nonsensical "being more buggy and subjected to more attacks means we'll be more secure than those of you with secure systems today, because we've experienced more harm," that hardly deserves a response, except to say it bears an unsurprising resemblence to the religious notion that "Jesus will return someday and all you sinners will suffer"
Windows could end up more secure than Mac OS X, Free/OpenBSD, and GNU/Linux, but I suspect the second comming of Christ will happen first, and I say that as an athiest.
Nice troll, though. It was fun pointing out your stupidity, and a pleasure to discuss once again how poorly designed Microsoft products are, and how absurd the pro-Microsoft arguments are in the face of cold, hard facts, and the inescapable reality that their products are by far the worst in terms of security and stability, have been so for more than fifteen years, and remain so despite years of promises to the contrary.
Indeed, Microsoft's incompetence in software design and OS design with respect to security and stability is only exceed by the incompetence of its astroturfers in trying to convince the knowldegable otherwise.
But in the end, it didn't really matter. When the bill came up, there was lots of snickering, and the bill died a quick and painless death.
It's a pity the death of such bills is painless. Such attempts at subversion of the democratic process, personal liberties and expression (on the Internet, no less, which the Supreme Court has already ruled deserves better-than-average protection of the right of free expression), not to mention the free market, should be dealt with harshly. I'm not sure how one would structure such a thing in a manner that wouldn't have a chilling effect on legitimate lobbying, but some thought ought to be given to the problem.
Perhaps corporate lobbying should have more restrictive rules of engagement than private lobbying (ie. differentiate between corporations and living, breathing citizens, and limit what the former may propose, and seriously punish the former when they step out of bounds).
As things stand now, there are no negative consiquences to such behavior, and nothing to prevent wealthy enough organiziations from spamming legislatures over and over again, until at some point the legislation perhaps passes and we all suffer as a result.
If there were negative consiqences to inappropriate corporate lobbying and attempts at legislation, there would be a lot less of this nonsense (some of which does get through the best of filters, and our legislatures are hardly "the best" of filters), and our society would be far better off for it.
... I have to agree with you wholeheartedly.
/.
... I'm beginning to think this site is dead and we just don't know it yet.
This was a cost savings move and nothing more.
And it makes the front page of
Why do I come here anymore?
I'm starting to wonder the same thing. Slashdot has never been known for its "vetting" of stories, or even much editing of the captions, but the last few weeks it's become really terrible. Stories spinning the broadcast flag and attempted banning of digital HDTV VCR-like hardware as "piracy prevention", pro-ms stories rearing their heads more and more in what is (or was) supposed to be a free software/opensource news and discussion forum, and an ever increasing number of flat-out misleading headlines that misrepresent TFAs, and links to TFAs that are flagrant products of MPAA/RIAA shills
Anyone know of any decent competitors out there?