These guys don't just want it both ways. They want it every which way and twice on Sunday. Take your meds boys, and put on this comfy straight jacket before the multiple personality disorder
I didn't actually RTFA, but it's a committee receiving multiple presentations. It's somewhat natural for there to be multiple, potentially exclusive, opinions, because there are multiple agents involved with multiple backgrounds, offering multiple opinions and proposed solutions. In fact, if they didn't display multiple personalities, that's when you worry about their sanity and self-awareness.
Lately they have been displaying a hive-mind over at WIPO... this story is a refreshing break from that nonsense.
The purpose is to have browsers support this natively without using plugins.
No, the purpose is to let people who know what they're doing not use a plugin. The idiot masses are welcome to keep installing a plugin for everything because they're scared of Firefox.
Firefox (all versions combined) is ahead of IE6 in market share... finally. I think that's a good thing.
Presumably you use Windows. Flash is a clusterfuck on Linux. If you want something that "works for everyone" then Flash isn't it.
If you make it better than Flash (how?) websites will switch. And Flashs security issues and crashes in Linux will not bother them.
As for the how, I would describe "better" as something that won't crash on Linux while still working on Windows. That would be better. Of course, Adobe won't just take that sitting down. If something better does come out, they will probably pay YouTube/Google/Vimeo/what-have-you to continue using Flash.
Finally, I would argue that <video> and HTML5 are much better than Flash because: 1) It's an open standard; anyone can make an HTML5 renderer, but only Adobe can make a decent Flash viewer (yes other viewers exist, no they're not any good compared to Adobe Flash) 2) Flash has such stupidity that it disables 3d acceleration if your client glx vendor string has "SGI" in it, because Adobe is too stupid to check for whether the card actually supports acceleration (supposedly they experienced crashes when doing a more reasonable test, but that just shows they don't care enough about whether the Linux drivers work well to actually fix or work around bugs). Binary blobs tend to have stupidity like this.
Chrome for Linux is in a development/unstable state (i.e. it's in the alpha stage right now, AFAICT). That means it could e.g. randomly segfault or something (hypothetically anyway; I have no experience with Google products in the alpha stage so I wouldn't know how stable their stuff is.).
Actually, preferential voting (where you rank canidates) still keeps one big problem from our current system: the possibility of "throwing away your vote." You'd have to decide who to rank first: the candidate you really like, or the one you think can win. You don't want your vote for The Ideal Party to take votes away from The Tolerable Party and throw the election to The Horrid Party.
Range voting, on the other hand, lets you say "here's how much I like each candidate on a numerical scale." The "practical" candidate isn't hurt at all by your preference for an idealistic one.
This site gives a lot of info on why range voting tends to give the best outcome for the largest number of voters. They advocate for range voting to be used in any election - even school elections. I'd love to see it "trickle up," since it's clearly a better system.
I am guessing if you are an independent developer you could just put something similar to this in the license 'as of 25 years after the original release of this version of this software I release this software into the public domain'
I believe that was possible via creative commons at one point but it appears they took it down...
Hollywood? I always though most slashdotters were against infinite (copy)rights.
So should late Asimov or his estate still hold the rights for the book(s) or not?
IMHO the guy is free to write anything he likes, 40 years is more than enough.
The term "Foundation" when used to refer to science fiction should be trademarkable, independent of the copyright. The copyright should expire at least as early as 40 years after death. Trademarks are generally ok as long as they have not become words and copyrights are too long-lived.
Why would they leave your account in a log-innable state given that the only thing they can expect to gain from it is someone else cracking your password and giving offense or something?
I wonder how hard it'll be to pull a massive prank like that. Considering the media fell for balloon boy, it should be easy.
Just get a fake ambulance crew, fake crowd, fake paparazzi and some people with Twitpic accounts. Bring out an actor on a stretcher out of a hotel into an ambulance, get crowd to spread the word to real people that it's Mr. Jackass, let the "twitterers" take some useless pics (oh look an ambulance!), and let the story roll!
Also, someone should pretend to be his publicist and start calling up the media.. and tell them there's a fake representation calling to say he's still alive.:)
Why not just buy a large pack of disks from staples (they're pretty cheap no matter where you get them) and burn a bunch of CDs yourself? It's so much more efficient.
Or, if you're really desperate to have labeled disks, either buy a labeller or buy disks from Canonical.
If you have data that's so important that you don't want the Chinese or NSA looking at it, send it by snail mail on a disk!
Too easily intercepted. The only way to keep it secure is to whisper it in someone's ear on a lonely beach. Time was when crowded streets and shopping malls might have been good, but there seem to be cameras everywhere these days...
When I was a kid, Mr Blair's "1984" seemed a little improbable. Now it's just old hat.
I think he's just saying that there's an implicit understanding between you and the copyright holder (or whomever) that they are willfully distributing the work to you (i.e. you didn't acquire it via underhanded tactics, which might bring trade secret law into the equation).
Slashdot Mirror
[from his sig]
--
Boycott Hollywood during December 2009 [No DVD's for Christmas, no Christmas BlockBusters] Spread the word.
Why, might I ask? (I suppose my sig makes this question kind of ironic/dumb-sounding... What specifically have they done this time?)
It'll never get to 1.0, but it might get to .999...
err.. How do you breastfeed a keyboard layout?
woosh!
Are you high? What drug is that? Where can I get some (note to the humorless feds: I am kidding)?
These guys don't just want it both ways. They want it every which way and twice on Sunday. Take your meds boys, and put on this comfy straight jacket before the multiple personality disorder
I didn't actually RTFA, but it's a committee receiving multiple presentations. It's somewhat natural for there to be multiple, potentially exclusive, opinions, because there are multiple agents involved with multiple backgrounds, offering multiple opinions and proposed solutions. In fact, if they didn't display multiple personalities, that's when you worry about their sanity and self-awareness.
Lately they have been displaying a hive-mind over at WIPO... this story is a refreshing break from that nonsense.
The purpose is to have browsers support this natively without using plugins.
No, the purpose is to let people who know what they're doing not use a plugin. The idiot masses are welcome to keep installing a plugin for everything because they're scared of Firefox.
Firefox (all versions combined) is ahead of IE6 in market share... finally. I think that's a good thing.
Posting anonymously because slashdot's javascript is tweaking out, and not letting me log on right now. I get on, but it immediately forgets me.
Turn cookies on.
Flash was introduced here because it just works.
Come up with something that works for everyone.
Presumably you use Windows. Flash is a clusterfuck on Linux. If you want something that "works for everyone" then Flash isn't it.
If you make it better than Flash (how?) websites will switch. And Flashs security issues and crashes in Linux will not bother them.
As for the how, I would describe "better" as something that won't crash on Linux while still working on Windows. That would be better. Of course, Adobe won't just take that sitting down. If something better does come out, they will probably pay YouTube/Google/Vimeo/what-have-you to continue using Flash.
Finally, I would argue that <video> and HTML5 are much better than Flash because:
1) It's an open standard; anyone can make an HTML5 renderer, but only Adobe can make a decent Flash viewer (yes other viewers exist, no they're not any good compared to Adobe Flash)
2) Flash has such stupidity that it disables 3d acceleration if your client glx vendor string has "SGI" in it, because Adobe is too stupid to check for whether the card actually supports acceleration (supposedly they experienced crashes when doing a more reasonable test, but that just shows they don't care enough about whether the Linux drivers work well to actually fix or work around bugs). Binary blobs tend to have stupidity like this.
Chrome for Linux is in a development/unstable state (i.e. it's in the alpha stage right now, AFAICT). That means it could e.g. randomly segfault or something (hypothetically anyway; I have no experience with Google products in the alpha stage so I wouldn't know how stable their stuff is.).
Opera does, but it doesn't (AFAICT) come with a blacklist, so you have to tell it what is an ad and what isn't.
Actually, preferential voting (where you rank canidates) still keeps one big problem from our current system: the possibility of "throwing away your vote." You'd have to decide who to rank first: the candidate you really like, or the one you think can win. You don't want your vote for The Ideal Party to take votes away from The Tolerable Party and throw the election to The Horrid Party.
Range voting, on the other hand, lets you say "here's how much I like each candidate on a numerical scale." The "practical" candidate isn't hurt at all by your preference for an idealistic one.
This site gives a lot of info on why range voting tends to give the best outcome for the largest number of voters. They advocate for range voting to be used in any election - even school elections. I'd love to see it "trickle up," since it's clearly a better system.
That's interesting... it looks like Arrow's impossibility theorem doesn't apply to that.
OffTopic:Slashcode is borken again! It stripped out the spaces on that url so I had to use underscores instead! *Rant rant rant*!!!
you guys are hilarious.
Why isn't this modded redundant?
I am guessing if you are an independent developer you could just put something similar to this in the license 'as of 25 years after the original release of this version of this software I release this software into the public domain'
I believe that was possible via creative commons at one point but it appears they took it down...
Hollywood? I always though most slashdotters were against infinite (copy)rights.
So should late Asimov or his estate still hold the rights for the book(s) or not?
IMHO the guy is free to write anything he likes, 40 years is more than enough.
The term "Foundation" when used to refer to science fiction should be trademarkable, independent of the copyright. The copyright should expire at least as early as 40 years after death. Trademarks are generally ok as long as they have not become words and copyrights are too long-lived.
Time is never^H^H *looks around suspiciously* rarely on the y-axis.
--[from his sig]
f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmng
Does this job consist of undisemvoweling words?
Why would they leave your account in a log-innable state given that the only thing they can expect to gain from it is someone else cracking your password and giving offense or something?
I wonder how hard it'll be to pull a massive prank like that. Considering the media fell for balloon boy, it should be easy.
Just get a fake ambulance crew, fake crowd, fake paparazzi and some people with Twitpic accounts. Bring out an actor on a stretcher out of a hotel into an ambulance, get crowd to spread the word to real people that it's Mr. Jackass, let the "twitterers" take some useless pics (oh look an ambulance!), and let the story roll!
Also, someone should pretend to be his publicist and start calling up the media.. and tell them there's a fake representation calling to say he's still alive. :)
Haha, you would be sued so fast...
Count Rugen:
Status:Dead (5 minutes ago)
Status:Bleeding (6 minutes ago)
Status:Preparing for death-by-Inigo-Montoya (7 minutes ago)
What makes you think they should?
He doesn't... (I think).
Agree with parent, mostly, but:
You are allowed to wear shoes, you are allowed to bring toothpaste, you are allowed to bring shampoo.
I think GP had something else in mind here.
Nonetheless, the GP is worng here.
Why not just buy a large pack of disks from staples (they're pretty cheap no matter where you get them) and burn a bunch of CDs yourself? It's so much more efficient.
Or, if you're really desperate to have labeled disks, either buy a labeller or buy disks from Canonical.
If you have data that's so important that you don't want the Chinese or NSA looking at it, send it by snail mail on a disk!
Too easily intercepted. The only way to keep it secure is to whisper it in someone's ear on a lonely beach. Time was when crowded streets and shopping malls might have been good, but there seem to be cameras everywhere these days...
When I was a kid, Mr Blair's "1984" seemed a little improbable. Now it's just old hat.
Why not just encrypt the disk? Are you worried about the two generals problem?
I think he's just saying that there's an implicit understanding between you and the copyright holder (or whomever) that they are willfully distributing the work to you (i.e. you didn't acquire it via underhanded tactics, which might bring trade secret law into the equation).
IANAL.
Mod parent UP as informative
Mod GP DOWN as worng