Even when done well, and I suppose Avatar is the gold standard, much of the time the 3D effect creates artificial depth that detracts from the sense of realism. Of course, Avatar wasn't intended to be particularly realistic, but even the interior scenes in the various labs and spaceships seemed very unrealistically stretched in the third dimension. It became quite distracting and annoying. Yes, gee whiz, you can make objects appear at any depth, but just because you can doesn't mean you should. There are times when they really should turn it off or tone it down a lot. I never got the sense of subtlety in the 3D effects, they were always in my face. Like music that goes from loud to loud to very loud.
That's how I feel. If only I'd registered sooner instead of being a coward for those first few months. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it.
We always think of re-entry of a spacecraft as this fiery process, but would it be possible for a paper airplane to approach the atmosphere slowly and enter it gently without any high temperatures? Perhaps someone can explain how this is impossible.
I tried Dvorak for a few weeks in college. I popped off all the keys on my keyboard and put them back in the Dvorak both-hands layout. It did seem to be faster, once I adjusted, but I never got to the point where it was easy to switch back and forth to QWERTY, which is essential because we live in a QWERTY world and you'll eventually (often) have to use someone else's keyboard. I ended up switching back to QWERTY.
Today it would be harder for me to switch. It's not that I'm so set in my ways, although I'm a much faster typist than I used to be. No, today I do most of my work on a laptop, and those keys are NOT so easy to remove and rearrange. They are actually quite difficult to get back on if they ever accidentally get pryed off. Plus now I use Emacs, and the Ctrl-key commands would really be awkward using a Dvorak layout.
Saying that CAFE standards are "market mechanisms at work" is misleading. Arbitrary constraints such as price floors and ceilings, and even such high-level constraints as overall corporate averages always interfere with a healthy market. You're just adding free-market window-dressing to a central-planning-works-best idea.
While in theory, automakers would have some latitude in how they plan their models, the CAFE standard does not really give them real latitude because it is based on vehicles sold, not made. There is no way for the automaker to invest in efficient cars and know that they will get back their investment the market doesn't demand more efficient cars. If it did, there would be no calls for government intervention.
In the late 80's and early 90's, the last time there were significant CAFE standards, Ford responded by reducing the weight of the Escort. They lightened an already efficient car to make it even more efficient, but not safer, and offered steep discounts in order to sell enough of them to lower their CAFE average. They lost money on each one, but they protected the profits of the Ford F-150 and the Explorer.
So the pressure that was meant to be put on the SUV market just went to take away safety and market influence from small car buyers. It's the law of unintended consequences, not the behavior of a free market. What else is to be expected from policies based on the belief that regulatory schemes can be made clever enough to overcome market forces.
The US isn't incapable of long term planning, commitment, and concerted action, it's just that the US has different priorities than Europe. That must be difficult for someone with such a low opinion of the US to understand, but it is true.
The problem with the US rail system is partly the distance. It's expensive to maintain so many miles of track, and who in their right mind would stay on a train for 18 or 30 hours instead of riding in an airplane for just a few hours.
The problem is also with the population density and the density of cities. Even if all the long-distance travellers took planes, trains should be competitive for short distances. But except for the Northeast, the Pacific coast, and a few other areas, there aren't very many short distances that would get enough passengers to support a better railroad. And how many car-owners would take a train to travel a short distance to a spread-out American city where you need a car to get anywhere? The US is just not like Europe.
The biggest reason we don't have a great modern railroad in the densely populated areas is government interference. We would have one already in the Northeast Corridor from Washington to Boston if it weren't for Amtrak's longtime commitment to keep unprofitable routes in the West open as a public service, using up the profits that would otherwise have been used to upgrade the trains that are actually used by commuters and travellers other than "train buffs". Some people in Congress have been trying to get rid of Amtrack for decades, but it keeps getting bailed out, which has meant it will just take longer for anything to improve.
Congress could go the other way and just decide to have European-style "commitment", and pump tons of tax dollars into trains, and it would be like the "light" rail that was built in Portland, Oregon, or the subway in LA... a huge boondoggle that no one uses.
Forbes ASAP devoted an issue a few years ago to the differences between the East coast and West coast ways of doing business. The best explanation is probably Tom Wolfe's (rather famous) 1983 article about Bob Noyce. Sorry no link, but it can be found in his recent book
Hooking Up
.
Re:One of the most interesting aspects of the film
on
Review: Blow
·
· Score: 1
That's pretty cool. Didn't know that.
OK, you made me curious. What are the brands of film from the 60's and 70's, and is it possible to get them as a non-professional photographer?
Maybe some enterprising PC OEM could make a nifty PC like the Mac Cube with no fan. I'm tired of staying up at night listening to the rush of air coming out the back of my Linux box. I'd spring for a Crusoe workstation that could just convect.
True. I've been shopping for digital recording technology because now that I have a fast enough computer, I'd like to record personal interviews, musical performances, and the like, and be able to transfer them digitally to my PC for editing. It's absurd how expensive this stuff is compared to how cheap it is to get a CD-burner and just make a copy of a CD.
While I gather from the earlier posts that there is no "IP potential-copying tax" on CD-R's, I think there is such a tax or cost element involved with DAT tapes and recorders, which is absurd.
Even if I bought a DAT, I don't think it can easily transfer a digital copy to my PC unless I buy an expensive sound card with a digital input. The back of my computer is crammed with nothing but digital inputs, but none of the kind that Sony uses for "digital" audio streams. An interesting point, being that ripping a CD to a wav removes the dependence on the real-time steady flow the the digital stream, while the sound quality of Sony's digital inputs and outputs depend upon the steadiness of the CD player spindle, or the DAT's tape drive mechanism.
Alas, Either I have to shell out a lot of bucks for great digital sound, or I go the cheaper/easier/crappier way and use analog! I know this is way off-topic, but I just think it's crazy how the electronics manufacturers really don't want consumers to have the power to produce their own digital content, while they don't seem to care how cheap and easy it is to make a straight copy of a CD.
When the process is easy, people think less. When something takes months, you get to the point of asking yourself "is this any good?" late one night. The easier it gets for Lucas to do this, the crappier it will get, IMHO.
The Pod Race in episode 1 was neato, if you're impressed by watching a video game, but it lacks the realism that the speeder-bike scene in Jedi had. The speeder-bike footage was shot using a camera that took something like 2-3 frames per second (thus the blur effect) mounted on a steadicam. They walked slowly through the forest for at least a day to get the footage, which became the background for the green-screen action. Can you imagine how real the Pod Racer scene would have looked if they had done that? Just look back at the shots from episode 4 where the jawas are peering out from the rocks at R2. Imagine that kind of photography in terms of the texture of the rocks, the way the sunlight hit the rough edges of the rocks. No CGI can duplicate that! Just imagine if they had taken a week to walk with a steadicam through Bryce Canyon, or someplace like that. We would have forgotten and forgiven Lucas for Jar-Jar because those shots would have been so damn beautiful! I've never heard anyone describe cg shots as beautiful, and there's some truth to that.
Lucas just doesn't get it. Kubrick did. Whether you like his films or not, they are stunning, and beautiful. Even Eyes Wide Shut had great photography. Now can you imagine how much it would have sucked if the "Beyond the infinite" shots at the end of 2001 had been done with computer graphics, even Lucas' hot-shit ILM latest gee-whiz technology?!
OK, end rant.
BTW, does anyone know if Kershner is still alive? He's probably the only person who can save Lucas from himself.
First, the Yorktown is a Cruiser, not a battleship.
The control systems that were automated with NT were largely in the engineering and auxiliary support systems. It controls things like starting and stopping engines, monitoring operating conditions, etc. It does not run the AEGIS combat system, which is many orders of magnitude more complex, and which requires real-time analysis of data, most of which is done with specially designed hardware, rather than software.
In today's Navy, this is still the case. Even on the "smart ship" the control system that runs NT handles engineering and auxiliaries. The combat systems are not likely to run NT or any version of UNIX any time soon. Yes, most were designed in the seventies, and yes they have the processing power of something like a 386, but they also have a completely different architecture that is designed for a specific purpose, which isn't running spreadsheets or crunching a lot of numbers. Mainly it's handling a huge I/O load in real time, which is something that PC's and operating systems like *nix or NT are not meant to do. Military electronic systems are rarely built around "general purpose" computers or operating systems. Maybe some things could be done with today's faster processors and with optimized OS's, but when these systems were designed, the only way to do it was to hard-wire everything onto chips and circuit boards, many of which use "back plane wiring" (looks like spaghetti on the back of a circuit board) due to the low volume of production. Even today, it would be difficult to improve on many of these designs, aside from shrinking the racks of cards into a smaller number of ASIC's with the exact same circuitry.
You may laugh about how kludgey those ancient tape drives are, or maybe about the 10MB hard drives the size of washing machines, and yes, they're old and slow. But when the ship takes a missile or torpedo hit, or an electromagnetic pulse, these slow and old systems keep on running. You won't see a BSOD as the clunky old hardware transmits the launch signal of death to the missile launchers.
One fact that I've always found interesting is the incredible resistance that users have to changing the qwerty keyboard. I realize that there are differing opinions, but when I tried using a Dvorak layout in college, it improved my typing speed considerably. Of course, even though I was willing to relearn the keyboard layout, I quickly gave it up when I realized it would be too confusing to go back and forth, and I was going to have to use other computers than my own home PC, which would all have QWERTY.
(Since then, I've gotten fast enough on the QWERTY that I think there might be some truth to the theory that QWERTY can be just as fast as DVORAK. But I guess that's like trying to figure out how many licks it takes to get to the tootsie-roll center of a tootsie-pop. "The world may never know.")
Another example is the VITALY keyboard, which is a keyboard layout for palm pilots that is optimized for one-handed stylus hunt-and-peck speed. It's a great idea, and everyone I've heard who's tried it claims a huge increase in speed and accuracy. Despite this, competing products with a qwerty layout are selling extremely well (I think).
Since users are so incredibly loyal to the old familiar QWERTY keyboard, I am pretty confident it will still be the primary input device in 2010.
I think it's important to keep compatibilities on the lowest possible level. It's important to resist conformity just for the sake of convenience rather than for technical reasons.
Case in point, I recently installed Oracle on Slackware. Oracle recommends installing it on RedHat, and has a nice bundling arrangement. I'm sure most corporate Oracle for Linux users will stick with Red Hat. But the fine print reads that all Oracle needs is a recent kernel, compiler, and c library. In practice, it was necessary to add a few symlinks to mimic the Red Hat locations of some basic tools, but other than that is was fully compatible. Oracle uses NOTHING that is unique to RedHat, but they make a point of only supporting that distribution.
My whole decision to run Slackware rather than RedHat was that if I wanted default decisions to be made without my knowledge, and GUI-only configuration, I would have stuck with Windows.
Reusable code is fine, but like someone already mentioned, console-only *nix gives you that. I don't understand why the "Desktop Environment" projects feel it's necessary to re-implement everything with a GUI. Do we really need a GUI to dial into an ISP, when we can just as easily run a script from either xterm or (gee-whiz) a window manager configured root menu or hot-key.
If we're just trying to mimic what Microsoft has done with Windows, we will only look comparatively sloppy and inconsistent. IMHO, the beauty of Unix and Linux is the Unix philosophy. Take how *nix handles email: sendmail is pretty standard, but there are alternatives, and your decision to use one of those doesn't affect who you can communicate with, or which clients the user must use.
I think people should be able to choose their window manager without having that affect what applications they can run. They should be able to choose a between several different browsers, email clients, instant-messaging clients, file managers, terms, menus, etc. The re-use of code should be on the lowest possible level, so that these choices can remain independent. If I am forced to choose between All-GNOME or All-KDE, I would choose neither.
When I was at the LinuxWorld Expo in New York, the Sun reps were very proud to point out how Sun was planning to re-write StarOffice in Java and enable StarOffice components to be embedded in other applications. I'll be a believer when I see it, but this could lead to smaller, tighter apps based on StarOffice with much less bloat.
I haven't heard much about that since, but if it pans out, StarOffice could become like Mozilla. Again, I'm waiting for Mozilla to improve, but I'm confident that when it is finished there will be both full-featured and no-frills adaptations to satisfy most users. The real danger for Corel is losing mindshare to the idea of a leaner StarOffice, as the promise of Mozilla has reduced interest in competing browser development projects.
Couldn't they offer free downloads of source, but charge your credit card for a precompiled binary? That would keep most people paying, while still allowing developers to use it for free.
I guess if source is available, someone else could offer a compiled binary for free, but corporations don't like to buy things from other than the "official" source, which to them means the official brand.
Moderation on Napster wouldn't have to be like Slashdot's complex moderation system. Without karma points, there would be no karma whoring. If the moderation system was simply "clean" vs. "distorted", and if download statistics were shown (I'm not a Napster user so I don't know if there are stats or not), moderation could work.
If a track had established a download track-record, a false-positive "distorted" moderation wouldn't be trusted.
New tracks might be vulnerable to abusive moderators, but if the system forced moderators to first download the complete file, it would prevent abusers from mass-negative-moderation.
If that's not good enough, then a two-tiered moderation system could be implemented, where bad tracks are identified by the first moderator, and then verified by a second.
So, Mr. Katz, I'm having trouble imagining the bloodbath, can you name a few? The double decker highways collapsing in Oakland or Japan? I'm sure a foolish company put in an earthquake resistant bid for those, and I'm sure they weren't the low bidder. Some government official decided those highways didn't need to be earthquake resistant, maybe we should execute them.
So should the engineers be held accountable, or the government officials?
I've been bothered for some time about the differences between the concept of professionalism in engineering, and the lack of any such concept in the management and bureaucratic fields. Engineers take tests and work under the guidance of qualified mentors in order to obtain a Professional Engineer license. This is so they can "sign off" on designs that people's lives depend on, putting their qualification and reputation on the line. I'm not sure of all the legalities in terms of being sued for engineering malpractice, but there is certainly the risk of losing one's license if a design turns out to be flawed, or a calculation incorrect.
Managers and bureaucrats seem to get a pass on this kind of structured responsibility. While they often have more power than engineers, their profession is "too uncertain", "too difficult", etc, for them to be held accountable when they screw up. Of course they can be fired, at least managers in private industry can be fired (I'm not so sure about government bureaucrats), but they aren't held up to the same professional standard as engineers. It's almost like politics, where good intentions and sincerity seem to be more important than having a good plan, or actual results.
I too hope that LCD's will be as easy on the eyes as paper, someday, but they will need more than just higher resolution.
Paper offers much better contrast without glare. Reading on white paper is easy on the eyes because you are only seeing reflected ambient light, and if the paper has a nice texture, the reflected light is diffused. Notice that it's harder to read text on glossy paper when you have undiffused light in the room, like overhead fluorescent lighting, because of the reflected glare.
LCD screens are better than CRT's, but the light is still radiating out at us. Black text on white can be too bright sometimes. I find it easier to read black text on a medium grey background.
Is there a difference between making xerox copies of a single chapter from a textbook for a class, and scanning that single chapter and putting it on a publicly accessible web site?
It's the same chapter, but the audience has changed. Is it still fair use?
What if instead of distributing paper copies to the class, the chapter was put on a web site that only the class could access? Does fair use depend on the access restrictions alone?
I don't know the answer, but I think this is the central issue of this whole controversy. Of course, it's not Napster's fault any more than it's an ISP's fault if you make a fair-use excerpt of copyrighted material publicly available vs. privately available.
Slashdot Mirror
Even when done well, and I suppose Avatar is the gold standard, much of the time the 3D effect creates artificial depth that detracts from the sense of realism. Of course, Avatar wasn't intended to be particularly realistic, but even the interior scenes in the various labs and spaceships seemed very unrealistically stretched in the third dimension. It became quite distracting and annoying. Yes, gee whiz, you can make objects appear at any depth, but just because you can doesn't mean you should. There are times when they really should turn it off or tone it down a lot. I never got the sense of subtlety in the 3D effects, they were always in my face. Like music that goes from loud to loud to very loud.
Sounds like it could be used to make the strongest and most absorbent paper towels ever.
That's how I feel. If only I'd registered sooner instead of being a coward for those first few months. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it.
We always think of re-entry of a spacecraft as this fiery process, but would it be possible for a paper airplane to approach the atmosphere slowly and enter it gently without any high temperatures? Perhaps someone can explain how this is impossible.
oh wait... it's not that kind of blackbox.
The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear... will keep the local systems in line.
I tried Dvorak for a few weeks in college. I popped off all the keys on my keyboard and put them back in the Dvorak both-hands layout. It did seem to be faster, once I adjusted, but I never got to the point where it was easy to switch back and forth to QWERTY, which is essential because we live in a QWERTY world and you'll eventually (often) have to use someone else's keyboard. I ended up switching back to QWERTY.
Today it would be harder for me to switch. It's not that I'm so set in my ways, although I'm a much faster typist than I used to be. No, today I do most of my work on a laptop, and those keys are NOT so easy to remove and rearrange. They are actually quite difficult to get back on if they ever accidentally get pryed off. Plus now I use Emacs, and the Ctrl-key commands would really be awkward using a Dvorak layout.
Saying that CAFE standards are "market mechanisms at work" is misleading. Arbitrary constraints such as price floors and ceilings, and even such high-level constraints as overall corporate averages always interfere with a healthy market. You're just adding free-market window-dressing to a central-planning-works-best idea.
While in theory, automakers would have some latitude in how they plan their models, the CAFE standard does not really give them real latitude because it is based on vehicles sold, not made. There is no way for the automaker to invest in efficient cars and know that they will get back their investment the market doesn't demand more efficient cars. If it did, there would be no calls for government intervention.
In the late 80's and early 90's, the last time there were significant CAFE standards, Ford responded by reducing the weight of the Escort. They lightened an already efficient car to make it even more efficient, but not safer, and offered steep discounts in order to sell enough of them to lower their CAFE average. They lost money on each one, but they protected the profits of the Ford F-150 and the Explorer.
So the pressure that was meant to be put on the SUV market just went to take away safety and market influence from small car buyers. It's the law of unintended consequences, not the behavior of a free market. What else is to be expected from policies based on the belief that regulatory schemes can be made clever enough to overcome market forces.
The US isn't incapable of long term planning, commitment, and concerted action, it's just that the US has different priorities than Europe. That must be difficult for someone with such a low opinion of the US to understand, but it is true.
The problem with the US rail system is partly the distance. It's expensive to maintain so many miles of track, and who in their right mind would stay on a train for 18 or 30 hours instead of riding in an airplane for just a few hours.
The problem is also with the population density and the density of cities. Even if all the long-distance travellers took planes, trains should be competitive for short distances. But except for the Northeast, the Pacific coast, and a few other areas, there aren't very many short distances that would get enough passengers to support a better railroad. And how many car-owners would take a train to travel a short distance to a spread-out American city where you need a car to get anywhere? The US is just not like Europe.
The biggest reason we don't have a great modern railroad in the densely populated areas is government interference. We would have one already in the Northeast Corridor from Washington to Boston if it weren't for Amtrak's longtime commitment to keep unprofitable routes in the West open as a public service, using up the profits that would otherwise have been used to upgrade the trains that are actually used by commuters and travellers other than "train buffs". Some people in Congress have been trying to get rid of Amtrack for decades, but it keeps getting bailed out, which has meant it will just take longer for anything to improve.
Congress could go the other way and just decide to have European-style "commitment", and pump tons of tax dollars into trains, and it would be like the "light" rail that was built in Portland, Oregon, or the subway in LA... a huge boondoggle that no one uses.
- Hooking Up
.OK, you made me curious. What are the brands of film from the 60's and 70's, and is it possible to get them as a non-professional photographer?
Maybe some enterprising PC OEM could make a nifty PC like the Mac Cube with no fan. I'm tired of staying up at night listening to the rush of air coming out the back of my Linux box. I'd spring for a Crusoe workstation that could just convect.
While I gather from the earlier posts that there is no "IP potential-copying tax" on CD-R's, I think there is such a tax or cost element involved with DAT tapes and recorders, which is absurd.
Even if I bought a DAT, I don't think it can easily transfer a digital copy to my PC unless I buy an expensive sound card with a digital input. The back of my computer is crammed with nothing but digital inputs, but none of the kind that Sony uses for "digital" audio streams. An interesting point, being that ripping a CD to a wav removes the dependence on the real-time steady flow the the digital stream, while the sound quality of Sony's digital inputs and outputs depend upon the steadiness of the CD player spindle, or the DAT's tape drive mechanism.
Alas, Either I have to shell out a lot of bucks for great digital sound, or I go the cheaper/easier/crappier way and use analog! I know this is way off-topic, but I just think it's crazy how the electronics manufacturers really don't want consumers to have the power to produce their own digital content, while they don't seem to care how cheap and easy it is to make a straight copy of a CD.
"Come on, Mandrake. The redcoats are coming!"
The Pod Race in episode 1 was neato, if you're impressed by watching a video game, but it lacks the realism that the speeder-bike scene in Jedi had. The speeder-bike footage was shot using a camera that took something like 2-3 frames per second (thus the blur effect) mounted on a steadicam. They walked slowly through the forest for at least a day to get the footage, which became the background for the green-screen action. Can you imagine how real the Pod Racer scene would have looked if they had done that? Just look back at the shots from episode 4 where the jawas are peering out from the rocks at R2. Imagine that kind of photography in terms of the texture of the rocks, the way the sunlight hit the rough edges of the rocks. No CGI can duplicate that! Just imagine if they had taken a week to walk with a steadicam through Bryce Canyon, or someplace like that. We would have forgotten and forgiven Lucas for Jar-Jar because those shots would have been so damn beautiful! I've never heard anyone describe cg shots as beautiful, and there's some truth to that.
Lucas just doesn't get it. Kubrick did. Whether you like his films or not, they are stunning, and beautiful. Even Eyes Wide Shut had great photography. Now can you imagine how much it would have sucked if the "Beyond the infinite" shots at the end of 2001 had been done with computer graphics, even Lucas' hot-shit ILM latest gee-whiz technology?!
OK, end rant.
BTW, does anyone know if Kershner is still alive? He's probably the only person who can save Lucas from himself.
The control systems that were automated with NT were largely in the engineering and auxiliary support systems. It controls things like starting and stopping engines, monitoring operating conditions, etc. It does not run the AEGIS combat system, which is many orders of magnitude more complex, and which requires real-time analysis of data, most of which is done with specially designed hardware, rather than software.
You may laugh about how kludgey those ancient tape drives are, or maybe about the 10MB hard drives the size of washing machines, and yes, they're old and slow. But when the ship takes a missile or torpedo hit, or an electromagnetic pulse, these slow and old systems keep on running. You won't see a BSOD as the clunky old hardware transmits the launch signal of death to the missile launchers.
Go Navy! Beat Army!
Isn't that the system that's raining debris all over Europe?
(Since then, I've gotten fast enough on the QWERTY that I think there might be some truth to the theory that QWERTY can be just as fast as DVORAK. But I guess that's like trying to figure out how many licks it takes to get to the tootsie-roll center of a tootsie-pop. "The world may never know.")
Another example is the VITALY keyboard, which is a keyboard layout for palm pilots that is optimized for one-handed stylus hunt-and-peck speed. It's a great idea, and everyone I've heard who's tried it claims a huge increase in speed and accuracy. Despite this, competing products with a qwerty layout are selling extremely well (I think).
Since users are so incredibly loyal to the old familiar QWERTY keyboard, I am pretty confident it will still be the primary input device in 2010.
Case in point, I recently installed Oracle on Slackware. Oracle recommends installing it on RedHat, and has a nice bundling arrangement. I'm sure most corporate Oracle for Linux users will stick with Red Hat. But the fine print reads that all Oracle needs is a recent kernel, compiler, and c library. In practice, it was necessary to add a few symlinks to mimic the Red Hat locations of some basic tools, but other than that is was fully compatible. Oracle uses NOTHING that is unique to RedHat, but they make a point of only supporting that distribution.
My whole decision to run Slackware rather than RedHat was that if I wanted default decisions to be made without my knowledge, and GUI-only configuration, I would have stuck with Windows.
Reusable code is fine, but like someone already mentioned, console-only *nix gives you that. I don't understand why the "Desktop Environment" projects feel it's necessary to re-implement everything with a GUI. Do we really need a GUI to dial into an ISP, when we can just as easily run a script from either xterm or (gee-whiz) a window manager configured root menu or hot-key.
If we're just trying to mimic what Microsoft has done with Windows, we will only look comparatively sloppy and inconsistent. IMHO, the beauty of Unix and Linux is the Unix philosophy. Take how *nix handles email: sendmail is pretty standard, but there are alternatives, and your decision to use one of those doesn't affect who you can communicate with, or which clients the user must use.
I think people should be able to choose their window manager without having that affect what applications they can run. They should be able to choose a between several different browsers, email clients, instant-messaging clients, file managers, terms, menus, etc. The re-use of code should be on the lowest possible level, so that these choices can remain independent. If I am forced to choose between All-GNOME or All-KDE, I would choose neither.
I haven't heard much about that since, but if it pans out, StarOffice could become like Mozilla. Again, I'm waiting for Mozilla to improve, but I'm confident that when it is finished there will be both full-featured and no-frills adaptations to satisfy most users. The real danger for Corel is losing mindshare to the idea of a leaner StarOffice, as the promise of Mozilla has reduced interest in competing browser development projects.
I guess if source is available, someone else could offer a compiled binary for free, but corporations don't like to buy things from other than the "official" source, which to them means the official brand.
If a track had established a download track-record, a false-positive "distorted" moderation wouldn't be trusted.
New tracks might be vulnerable to abusive moderators, but if the system forced moderators to first download the complete file, it would prevent abusers from mass-negative-moderation.
If that's not good enough, then a two-tiered moderation system could be implemented, where bad tracks are identified by the first moderator, and then verified by a second.
So should the engineers be held accountable, or the government officials?
I've been bothered for some time about the differences between the concept of professionalism in engineering, and the lack of any such concept in the management and bureaucratic fields. Engineers take tests and work under the guidance of qualified mentors in order to obtain a Professional Engineer license. This is so they can "sign off" on designs that people's lives depend on, putting their qualification and reputation on the line. I'm not sure of all the legalities in terms of being sued for engineering malpractice, but there is certainly the risk of losing one's license if a design turns out to be flawed, or a calculation incorrect.
Managers and bureaucrats seem to get a pass on this kind of structured responsibility. While they often have more power than engineers, their profession is "too uncertain", "too difficult", etc, for them to be held accountable when they screw up. Of course they can be fired, at least managers in private industry can be fired (I'm not so sure about government bureaucrats), but they aren't held up to the same professional standard as engineers. It's almost like politics, where good intentions and sincerity seem to be more important than having a good plan, or actual results.
Paper offers much better contrast without glare. Reading on white paper is easy on the eyes because you are only seeing reflected ambient light, and if the paper has a nice texture, the reflected light is diffused. Notice that it's harder to read text on glossy paper when you have undiffused light in the room, like overhead fluorescent lighting, because of the reflected glare.
LCD screens are better than CRT's, but the light is still radiating out at us. Black text on white can be too bright sometimes. I find it easier to read black text on a medium grey background.
It's the same chapter, but the audience has changed. Is it still fair use?
What if instead of distributing paper copies to the class, the chapter was put on a web site that only the class could access? Does fair use depend on the access restrictions alone?
I don't know the answer, but I think this is the central issue of this whole controversy. Of course, it's not Napster's fault any more than it's an ISP's fault if you make a fair-use excerpt of copyrighted material publicly available vs. privately available.