Don't forget the important step of also telling Blizzard why you are not buying their game...
Considering the cluelessness of typical corporate marketroids (and the likely desire not to take the blame by their attack lawyers) if they merely see that "Warcraft III isn't selling as well as expected" they'll likely be cooking up stories of "Gee, I guess the programmers/artists didn't do a good enough job" or "we probably need more money for the marketing department to advertise with" or "Software pirates must be running rampant with our Intellectual Property and Undermining our God-Given Right to Sales(tm)!".
If they are busy digging themselves out from a pile of letters that say "If you're going to be a thug and beat people over the head with the DMCA, while insulting me by calling me a 'pirate' whether I paid for your software or not, I'm never doing business with you again." they can't really get away with this, and MAYBE a corporation will finally 'get' the cost of stooping to a DMCA threat regardless of the cost to a user's legitimate fair uses of their software...
I've seen 'em flyin' around here, I tell ya! Horribly mutated, and they got SUPERPOWERS! They got SIX legs instead o' the natural two, and they got 100's of eyes and they can FLY and spit acid to dissolve their food!
I do disagree with the article's assertion that they can eliminate 100% of the population.
Effectively, this may actually be possible. They don't have to directly kill off all of they flies themselves, only to reduce the population density below the point where the flies can sustain and/or rebuild their population. If they can get the population of flies below that point, they'll finish dying off naturally.
While it's not CERTAIN that they'll be able to accomplish this, it's not as difficult as one might think...
I agree, and I find this response especially ironic, since the same people generally have no qualms about then taking that meat and cooking it in a microwave oven...they even colloquially refer to it as "nuking" the food!
"who cares how mutated they are if they can't breed to pass any of that crap on?"
Ah, but think of the havoc caused for the short lifetime of a tsetse fly if this "nuclear radiation" gives one of them superpowers! A single tsetse fly with the strength of a HUNDRED tsetse flies could...um...make off with small pets and such I suppose....:-)
That's just it. These AREN'T new. They're tsetse flies, not some exotic giant sapient cucumber zombie built by Dr. Frankenstein somewhere.
Do you have the same concerns about using "mutant proteins" to block diseases? (A lot of research seems to be going on into ways of "plugging up" the receptors on cells that allow viruses and bacteria to invade them). I don't, and releasing sterilized Tsetse flies to "plug up" (ahem) the the baby-tsete-fly-production cycle to reduce the malaria and other diseases that they carry seems pretty analogous.
We've attempted to "fix" problems in the past with similar solutions. Those attempts have often not only NOT solved the problems, but created worse ones that are still problems today.
Bearing in mind that we're not introducing an exotic organism into the ecosystem here, can you give some examples where this sort of activity (releasing sterilized pests to cut the population of a native pest) has caused any problems? (Episodes of "The Simpsons" don't count here...)
Certainly, releasing a truly "exotic" organism into an ecosystem is a gamble (rabbits in Australia, Kudzu in the Southern US, etc. are all examples of THIS), but that's not what's happening here.
If you're worried about radiation giving some of the Tsetse flies superpowers or something, try this. Write an essay for college (or high-school or whatever). Then, write a program that will go through this essay and randomly change some of the characters in it. A configurable switch should turn up or down the chance that any individual character will get changed - this is analogous to the amount of radiation being applied to a tsetse fly.
These Tsetse flies are being exposed to an amount of radiation that experimentally gives them the greatest chance of having their reproductive capacity damaged without greatly harming them (in the short term) otherwise. If you crank up the aforementioned program to the point where your essay, after several thousand runs, typically always gets noticeably damaged while still being more-or-less comprehensible, what are the odds that if you take all of your classmate's essays and run them through your program before they get turned in to the instructor, that ANYONE's essay will actually be improved, EVEN SLIGHTLY, by this treatment? More especially, what are the odds that said improved essay will become EVEN BETTER than a typical undamaged one (which seems to be your concern about the flies)?
Yes, it COULD, statistically speaking, happen (infinite number of monkeys + typewriters = Shakespeare - yes, we all have heard the analogy). But WILL it?...
In my mind, this beats the definite environmental impact of mass spraying with pesticides, or for that matter even the environmental impact of sick or dead cattle and people (and the processes necessary to treat the sick - i.e. building hospitals, manufacturing medical equipment and supplies, medical waste disposal, etc.) by quite a large amount...
A good thing when you're trying to stop spam, a bad thing when the MPAA is trying to stop piracy
There's a huge difference here - in the case of the spam, the situation is "We've identified a definite and demonstrable serious abuse, and contacted the 'enabling' agency, but they've refused to deal with the problem, so we have to escalate to less pleasant means", whereas in the MPAA's case, they've gone straight to the equivalent of trying to outlaw email because there is so much illegal spam sent using it, even though email has, and is mostly used for, legitimate uses.
Even with "escalated" spam response, they're talking about blocking an area of known frequent offense. With, e.g. the use of the DMCA against DeCSS, they have leapt to directly criminalize EVERYONE's uses (both legitimate and illegitimate) regardless of whether an abuse has taken place or not...
Heh...just been poking around in writings online about public domain, one of which pointed out the peculiar phrase everybody (including me - see the subject of my parent post) has been using about this - "falling" into the public domain. As if to imply that a public domain work is somehow "less" or "degraded" due to finally being released from the copyright-protection asylum...
Therefore, I think I'll be making an effort to call it "'Maturing' into the public domain" instead...unless someone has even better suggestions?
I envision an X-Files room under corpHQ with rows of authors, poets and musicians in cryotubes with hearts beating once a minute.
Hey, provided they properly do the research to achieve this and properly patent the technology (so that it becomes public domain in 20 years!) I could cope with this. Something like this would be quite handy to the medical community, I suspect.
On the other hand, the sorts of corporations we're talking about here would probably just freeze the bodies solid, and then warn everyone that the "thawing them out again" technology is still under development, so you can't try to thaw them to see if they're still alive because the process can kill them (and if you try, you get flung in jail for manslaughter, AND get sued by the corporations for loss of potential income they claim the author/artist would have earned them...)
I was doing a bit of searching lately (specifically, I was wondering if the classic silent film "Metropolis" had dropped into the public domain yet. According to one "Public Domain Movies for sale" site (LSVideo.com), the answer boils down to "probably"...), and stumbled on a couple of sites offering "public domain" material.
This one, to my surprise, actually offered a number of cartoons that seemed shockingly recent (heck, I think I have some of them on commercial VHS!) - including even a handful of Disney shorts. Apparently, there was a window of time before copyright extension became automatic, where a lot of works evidently didn't get renewed, and therefore hit the public domain.
Unfortunately, that site vehemently denies any availability to normal people (i.e. they are a company tailored for and catering only to broadcasters with professional equipment who want some public domain material to broadcast).
Anyone know if archive.org will be getting any of this material? And for that matter, good pointers to other "public domain material" sites?
Even if Disney loses their copyright to Mickey Mouse, they surely must hold a trademark on Mickey Mouse.
Damn, where's a "+1 - insightful" when I need one?
That's exactly right - and this also applies to pretty much all of the other "Disney Characters" as well. When someone tries to convince everyone that there'll be, say, hardcore porno videos starring Mickey Mouse ("Think of the children!") if they don't keep "copyright" they are duping everyone - even if "Steamboat Willy" (early 1930's?) drops into the public domain so that everyone can legally copy it, Disney STILL has control of the "image" and name of "Mickey Mouse" in the form of trademark (which they defend quite vigorously with expensive lawyers - the story years ago of Disney, inc., suing a daycare center for having pictures of Disney characters painted on their walls without permission is a good example of this...)
You get the opportunity to profit. The government gets a revenue stream, and items become public domain after a reasonable time.
I really like this idea. It also has the built-in capability for material that STAYS really profitable to be kept in control of, say, Disney inc for a long time, but not "regardless of value" (how much money does Disney still make off of its suppressed "Song of the South" movie?...). If, after 25 year, "Peter Pan XXVI, The Old-Folks Home of Never-Never-Land" is still bringing in $1,000,000/year, they can go right ahead and re-copyright it to keep their profit (and if they just want to keep control for PR or Anal-retentiveness reasons, they actually have to PAY the "public" (indirectly, via the tax) for the priviledge, and actually have to "work" financially for it (i.e. by taking a loss on copyright tax vs. profit from the work).
all this was done when the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, which meant that EVERYTHING was for sale
Uh, huh. And where was the Democratic president with the "Veto" stamp?
And what about this in the congressional record? - "10/7/1998:
Passed Senate with an amendment by Unanimous Consent. "
"Unanimous" doesn't sound like "The Republicans but not the Democrats" at all, does it? Sounds like Democrats were hanging out at the Big Media(tm) crackhouse quite happily as well. In short - This isn't a 'political party' issue!. This is a "Big Media offers Big Bucks to ALL politicians, and ALL mainstream party senators (and, presumably, representatives, but it's hard to say, it passed the house by voice vote) are happily taking bribes.
Pointing at whichever of the two mainstream parties you hate most and saying "it's all THEIR fault" just makes your least hated party happy to have the attention drawn away from them, whichever of The Two Parties(tm) they may be, and keeps this sort of thing "business as usual".
I just seen an advert for Microsoft visual studio.net on SLASHDOT!
Sounds like a conspiracy to me - Linux Today has been running advertisements for Windows XP for a couple of weeks now, as well, and of course, months ago "Linux" magazine got a lot of grief for running Microsoft advertisements...
They're everywhere! Everywhere, I tell you! I was wondering why the black helicopters flying overhead had the colorful MSN logo painted on them lately...
To answer my own question a few posts down - the focus handling in KDE3 is still broken as of this release...
This is the one quirk left that, for me, ruins usability of KDE3 (though thankfully it IS slated to be fixed before release).
The problem is, evidently, the fact that when you select something it's not necessarily what has 'focus' - if you click on a textarea field and start typing, what really has 'focus' is the first link on the page. Hit 'enter' in the textarea and Konqueror loads whatever is on that first link...
Double-clicking URL's in Konqueror's location toolbar and hitting 'delete' to clear out the bar no longer works either, which I assume is related to the focus bugs.
Looking forward to the final release, though - all in all, KDE3 is VERY nice. Spiffier looking, and konqueror works even better...
Synchronise clipboard on highlight? That's a bit obscure.
Bear in mind I'm quoting this option from memory, so the exact phrase may be a little different. You're right, though, the phrase they used was slightly cryptic, though since it's exactly what I was looking for, I recognized it when I saw it...
Why not "Copy text to clipboard when highlighted"?
Good question...except maybe that didn't sound as 'cool' as "synchronise":-). Perhaps this (the text of the option) would make a good patch for some non-programmer who wants to help to submit...
So, what are all you other KDE fans looking forward to?
The improved javascript support. It's the one place where I still occasionally run into problems using Konqueror, but so far the KDE3 CVS snapshots have been looking much improved over KDE2 in this department...
I'm downloading and compiling the beta as I type this...
I've been playing with CVS snapshots off and on recently, and I must say they're looking promising. The appearance is similar to 2.2, but with a bit more 'beautification' and eye-candy effects available, and certainly, Javascript support is MUCH improved (though I still haven't been able to view things on Atomfilms for some time in Konqueror...). The ONE complaint I have that keeps driving me back to 2.2 is the apparently broken focus handling in KDE3...
I haven't been able to tab between fields in a form, for example, though this isn't a BIG problem. The BIG problem is that while entering text in textareas (such as this form right here on slashdot), hitting 'enter' to drop to a new line will frequently...do something. Not actually submit the form, but the page seems to re(?)load. The back button brings the form back up, sans all the text that was entered in these cases. I haven't been able to figure out EXACTLY what it's doing yet.
This is the only problem I've run into, but I spend enough time on web forums that it kills me...anybody already tried the beta out know whether or not this has been fixed yet? I DO recall reading that the focus problem, in general, was due to be fixed before the final release...
Your wish is granted - the default behavior of the clipboard has changed in KDE3 (much to MY annoyance, I LIKE being able to highlight to copy).
Fortunately, this is configurable. If you want the old copy-on-highlight behavior, click the "synchronise clipboard on highlight" option in the preferences...
it is happening under a Conservative Republician[sic] presidency.
And congress is very happy that you think that way. As long as everything they do gets blamed on that figurehead known as "the president", they can get away with anything they want...
Note also that if I'm reading that article correctly, this specific case has little to do with the Federal government, but is instead a local Washington D.C. measure.
I realize that "Hating George W. Bush" is the "cool" thing to do right now, but keep your eye on the people actually responsible for setting up bad policies while you're at it, please. Keep in mind that GWB's job is to enforce laws written by Congress. In short - GWB is (to put it in blunt modern terms) "Congress' Bitch". GWB is NOT (contrary to popular opinion) responsible for even implementing (let alone enacting) local or state policies that suck...
In many cases, the spam includes an URL where their Enlarge-Your-Penis-Breasts-And-Hairline scams are hosted, and generally it isn't hosted on the same ISP as the spam came from...
In these cases, I like to traceroute to the server hosting the URL and cc the ISP that the spammer is hosting their scam on. Most ISP's have clauses in their acceptable use policy forbidding ANY spamming, even from other ISP's.
The spammer may not care that his throwaway dial-up account gets canceled 5-times-per-week, but if their scam site goes down, there goes the whole purpose for sending the spam in the first place...
Re:MOSIX question
on
OpenMosix
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· Score: 3, Informative
From my brief experimentation with Mosix and a bit of reading, this sounds correct.
Basically, mosix is a very "chunky" sort of clustering - it works on the level of "whole processes". Because of this, you don't need to write your software to do the splitting and migrating yourself as you do with "less chunky" pvm and mpi. On the other hand, a process split off from a pvm program running can be handled by mosix like any other process and migrated to the cpu that mosix thinks can get the process finished fastest.
Mosix seems like an ideal way to 'lend' processing power to slower machines. This is what I was doing when I played with it previously - I had a K6/2-350 and a P-100 laptop with no L2 cache. I got Mosix set up on them both and used a command-line mp3 encoder as a benchmark. On the P-100, encoding speed was about 15% of realtime. On the K6/2, it was about 110%. Running Mosix between the two over 10Mb Ethernet, I could encode mp3 at about 85% - I suspect it'd have been significantly closer to 100% if I'd had 100Mb Ethernet at the time...
Hopefully OpenMosix will keep up with current kernel versions better. Better still, maybe they'll be able to get it merged into 2.5 at some point...
bring an end to the charade of people you've never heard of having $70 million before a presidential campaign even gets started.
Actually, the problem (well, A problem) is that this doesn't happen. What happens is that only someone who LOTS of people have heard of can raise "$70 million before a presidential campaign even gets started". Poor schmucks without a pile of connections or fame, whether they care about individual citizens or not, can't raise "legal small amounts of money from each of millions of people" like the famous 'big-party' bigwigs can, so their only hope is to round up one or two big donors who are willing to contribute enough to allow them to 'buy a voice' from the media.
This is what people are referring to when they say that restrictions on campaign contributions inhibits free political speech. If you 'cap' individual contributions, then only famous incumbents will ever be able to round up the money to be heard, and "new guys" who aren't "connected" will always end up drowned out by well connected and entrenched people.
Realize also that apparently one of the 'reform' bills being considered forbids political advertisements for 90 days before an election. This is BAD - when "big famous bigwig" makes a speech, it's NEWS, so the news media can still cover it and pass on the speech (an advertisement, really, but not 'legally') to the viewers, while poor Joe Schmuck, who the media never mentions but who actually cares what happens to individuals in this country, not only get drowned out by the media (and lets not forget how much of a problem the influence that large corporate media entities has on government is), and he can't even hope for a wealthy sympathetic sponsor to 'buy' him an advertisement so he can at least be HEARD...
Granted that this doesn't make famous big-party people's vast amounts of funds obscene, but simply capping donation amounts will only hurt the LITTLE guys.
Advertisers will just have to focus on making their commercials WATCHABLE. It can be done. After all, I think the commercials that popped up during the Superbowl got as much commentary and attention as the game itself.
This does mean that advertisers won't be able to just slap together dull and irritating advertisements and assume that you'll be forced to watch them (poor babies). On the other hand, if the commercials become actually entertaining, nobody will bother skipping them...
I've always wondered where lawyers find their job satisfaction.
There are some "good" lawyers. Maybe not many, but a few.
If you think of the convoluted legal code that lawyers have helped legislatures build up, you can think of it as a really complicated weapon, that requires special training to use.
There ARE lawyers out there who enjoy using this metaphorical 'weapon' on behalf of actual victims of real crimes. Sometimes this takes creativity (I recall reading of a case where a man abducted a woman and, among other bizarre things, made a small cut in her foot(?) and drank some of her blood...but didn't go far enough to be charged with 'rape'. The lawyers for the prosecution managed to get him charged with "robbery" - he stole some of her blood.)
Granted that modern law has become so convoluted and lucrative that it attracts far to much of the 'wrong sort of person' to the trade, just to make a pile of money, but there are a few left who actually enjoy getting 'bad people' put away.
No need for snide remarks - I DID read the article. As I clarified further down, I wanted to know how they got an extra 6 years in the US vs. the UK.
Incidentally, "Not being part of the post office any more" doesn't automatically make them a private entity, rather than a 'spinoff' government agency.
People seem so EAGER to be "pissed off" these days....
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget the important step of also telling Blizzard why you are not buying their game...
Considering the cluelessness of typical corporate marketroids (and the likely desire not to take the blame by their attack lawyers) if they merely see that "Warcraft III isn't selling as well as expected" they'll likely be cooking up stories of "Gee, I guess the programmers/artists didn't do a good enough job" or "we probably need more money for the marketing department to advertise with" or "Software pirates must be running rampant with our Intellectual Property and Undermining our God-Given Right to Sales(tm)!".
If they are busy digging themselves out from a pile of letters that say "If you're going to be a thug and beat people over the head with the DMCA, while insulting me by calling me a 'pirate' whether I paid for your software or not, I'm never doing business with you again." they can't really get away with this, and MAYBE a corporation will finally 'get' the cost of stooping to a DMCA threat regardless of the cost to a user's legitimate fair uses of their software...
I've seen 'em flyin' around here, I tell ya! Horribly mutated, and they got SUPERPOWERS! They got SIX legs instead o' the natural two, and they got 100's of eyes and they can FLY and spit acid to dissolve their food!
Run fer the hills!
Effectively, this may actually be possible. They don't have to directly kill off all of they flies themselves, only to reduce the population density below the point where the flies can sustain and/or rebuild their population. If they can get the population of flies below that point, they'll finish dying off naturally.
While it's not CERTAIN that they'll be able to accomplish this, it's not as difficult as one might think...
I agree, and I find this response especially ironic, since the same people generally have no qualms about then taking that meat and cooking it in a microwave oven...they even colloquially refer to it as "nuking" the food!
"who cares how mutated they are if they can't breed to pass any of that crap on?"Ah, but think of the havoc caused for the short lifetime of a tsetse fly if this "nuclear radiation" gives one of them superpowers! A single tsetse fly with the strength of a HUNDRED tsetse flies could...um...make off with small pets and such I suppose.... :-)
That's just it. These AREN'T new. They're tsetse flies, not some exotic giant sapient cucumber zombie built by Dr. Frankenstein somewhere.
Do you have the same concerns about using "mutant proteins" to block diseases? (A lot of research seems to be going on into ways of "plugging up" the receptors on cells that allow viruses and bacteria to invade them). I don't, and releasing sterilized Tsetse flies to "plug up" (ahem) the the baby-tsete-fly-production cycle to reduce the malaria and other diseases that they carry seems pretty analogous.
We've attempted to "fix" problems in the past with similar solutions. Those attempts have often not only NOT solved the problems, but created worse ones that are still problems today.Bearing in mind that we're not introducing an exotic organism into the ecosystem here, can you give some examples where this sort of activity (releasing sterilized pests to cut the population of a native pest) has caused any problems? (Episodes of "The Simpsons" don't count here...)
Certainly, releasing a truly "exotic" organism into an ecosystem is a gamble (rabbits in Australia, Kudzu in the Southern US, etc. are all examples of THIS), but that's not what's happening here.
If you're worried about radiation giving some of the Tsetse flies superpowers or something, try this. Write an essay for college (or high-school or whatever). Then, write a program that will go through this essay and randomly change some of the characters in it. A configurable switch should turn up or down the chance that any individual character will get changed - this is analogous to the amount of radiation being applied to a tsetse fly.
These Tsetse flies are being exposed to an amount of radiation that experimentally gives them the greatest chance of having their reproductive capacity damaged without greatly harming them (in the short term) otherwise. If you crank up the aforementioned program to the point where your essay, after several thousand runs, typically always gets noticeably damaged while still being more-or-less comprehensible, what are the odds that if you take all of your classmate's essays and run them through your program before they get turned in to the instructor, that ANYONE's essay will actually be improved, EVEN SLIGHTLY, by this treatment? More especially, what are the odds that said improved essay will become EVEN BETTER than a typical undamaged one (which seems to be your concern about the flies)?
Yes, it COULD, statistically speaking, happen (infinite number of monkeys + typewriters = Shakespeare - yes, we all have heard the analogy). But WILL it?...
In my mind, this beats the definite environmental impact of mass spraying with pesticides, or for that matter even the environmental impact of sick or dead cattle and people (and the processes necessary to treat the sick - i.e. building hospitals, manufacturing medical equipment and supplies, medical waste disposal, etc.) by quite a large amount...
There's a huge difference here - in the case of the spam, the situation is "We've identified a definite and demonstrable serious abuse, and contacted the 'enabling' agency, but they've refused to deal with the problem, so we have to escalate to less pleasant means", whereas in the MPAA's case, they've gone straight to the equivalent of trying to outlaw email because there is so much illegal spam sent using it, even though email has, and is mostly used for, legitimate uses.
Even with "escalated" spam response, they're talking about blocking an area of known frequent offense. With, e.g. the use of the DMCA against DeCSS, they have leapt to directly criminalize EVERYONE's uses (both legitimate and illegitimate) regardless of whether an abuse has taken place or not...
Heh...just been poking around in writings online about public domain, one of which pointed out the peculiar phrase everybody (including me - see the subject of my parent post) has been using about this - "falling" into the public domain. As if to imply that a public domain work is somehow "less" or "degraded" due to finally being released from the copyright-protection asylum...
Therefore, I think I'll be making an effort to call it "'Maturing' into the public domain" instead...unless someone has even better suggestions?
Hey, provided they properly do the research to achieve this and properly patent the technology (so that it becomes public domain in 20 years!) I could cope with this. Something like this would be quite handy to the medical community, I suspect.
On the other hand, the sorts of corporations we're talking about here would probably just freeze the bodies solid, and then warn everyone that the "thawing them out again" technology is still under development, so you can't try to thaw them to see if they're still alive because the process can kill them (and if you try, you get flung in jail for manslaughter, AND get sued by the corporations for loss of potential income they claim the author/artist would have earned them...)
I'd better stop, I'm scaring myself... :-)
I was doing a bit of searching lately (specifically, I was wondering if the classic silent film "Metropolis" had dropped into the public domain yet. According to one "Public Domain Movies for sale" site (LSVideo.com), the answer boils down to "probably"...), and stumbled on a couple of sites offering "public domain" material.
This one, to my surprise, actually offered a number of cartoons that seemed shockingly recent (heck, I think I have some of them on commercial VHS!) - including even a handful of Disney shorts. Apparently, there was a window of time before copyright extension became automatic, where a lot of works evidently didn't get renewed, and therefore hit the public domain.
Unfortunately, that site vehemently denies any availability to normal people (i.e. they are a company tailored for and catering only to broadcasters with professional equipment who want some public domain material to broadcast).
Anyone know if archive.org will be getting any of this material? And for that matter, good pointers to other "public domain material" sites?
Damn, where's a "+1 - insightful" when I need one?
That's exactly right - and this also applies to pretty much all of the other "Disney Characters" as well. When someone tries to convince everyone that there'll be, say, hardcore porno videos starring Mickey Mouse ("Think of the children!") if they don't keep "copyright" they are duping everyone - even if "Steamboat Willy" (early 1930's?) drops into the public domain so that everyone can legally copy it, Disney STILL has control of the "image" and name of "Mickey Mouse" in the form of trademark (which they defend quite vigorously with expensive lawyers - the story years ago of Disney, inc., suing a daycare center for having pictures of Disney characters painted on their walls without permission is a good example of this...)
I really like this idea. It also has the built-in capability for material that STAYS really profitable to be kept in control of, say, Disney inc for a long time, but not "regardless of value" (how much money does Disney still make off of its suppressed "Song of the South" movie?...). If, after 25 year, "Peter Pan XXVI, The Old-Folks Home of Never-Never-Land" is still bringing in $1,000,000/year, they can go right ahead and re-copyright it to keep their profit (and if they just want to keep control for PR or Anal-retentiveness reasons, they actually have to PAY the "public" (indirectly, via the tax) for the priviledge, and actually have to "work" financially for it (i.e. by taking a loss on copyright tax vs. profit from the work).
Uh, huh. And where was the Democratic president with the "Veto" stamp?
And what about this in the congressional record? - "10/7/1998:
Passed Senate with an amendment by Unanimous Consent. "
"Unanimous" doesn't sound like "The Republicans but not the Democrats" at all, does it? Sounds like Democrats were hanging out at the Big Media(tm) crackhouse quite happily as well. In short - This isn't a 'political party' issue!. This is a "Big Media offers Big Bucks to ALL politicians, and ALL mainstream party senators (and, presumably, representatives, but it's hard to say, it passed the house by voice vote) are happily taking bribes.
Pointing at whichever of the two mainstream parties you hate most and saying "it's all THEIR fault" just makes your least hated party happy to have the attention drawn away from them, whichever of The Two Parties(tm) they may be, and keeps this sort of thing "business as usual".
Sounds like a conspiracy to me - Linux Today has been running advertisements for Windows XP for a couple of weeks now, as well, and of course, months ago "Linux" magazine got a lot of grief for running Microsoft advertisements...
They're everywhere! Everywhere, I tell you! I was wondering why the black helicopters flying overhead had the colorful MSN logo painted on them lately...
To answer my own question a few posts down - the focus handling in KDE3 is still broken as of this release...
This is the one quirk left that, for me, ruins usability of KDE3 (though thankfully it IS slated to be fixed before release).
The problem is, evidently, the fact that when you select something it's not necessarily what has 'focus' - if you click on a textarea field and start typing, what really has 'focus' is the first link on the page. Hit 'enter' in the textarea and Konqueror loads whatever is on that first link...
Double-clicking URL's in Konqueror's location toolbar and hitting 'delete' to clear out the bar no longer works either, which I assume is related to the focus bugs.
Looking forward to the final release, though - all in all, KDE3 is VERY nice. Spiffier looking, and konqueror works even better...
Bear in mind I'm quoting this option from memory, so the exact phrase may be a little different. You're right, though, the phrase they used was slightly cryptic, though since it's exactly what I was looking for, I recognized it when I saw it...
Why not "Copy text to clipboard when highlighted"?Good question...except maybe that didn't sound as 'cool' as "synchronise" :-). Perhaps this (the text of the option) would make a good patch for some non-programmer who wants to help to submit...
The improved javascript support. It's the one place where I still occasionally run into problems using Konqueror, but so far the KDE3 CVS snapshots have been looking much improved over KDE2 in this department...
I'm downloading and compiling the beta as I type this...
I've been playing with CVS snapshots off and on recently, and I must say they're looking promising. The appearance is similar to 2.2, but with a bit more 'beautification' and eye-candy effects available, and certainly, Javascript support is MUCH improved (though I still haven't been able to view things on Atomfilms for some time in Konqueror...). The ONE complaint I have that keeps driving me back to 2.2 is the apparently broken focus handling in KDE3...
I haven't been able to tab between fields in a form, for example, though this isn't a BIG problem. The BIG problem is that while entering text in textareas (such as this form right here on slashdot), hitting 'enter' to drop to a new line will frequently...do something. Not actually submit the form, but the page seems to re(?)load. The back button brings the form back up, sans all the text that was entered in these cases. I haven't been able to figure out EXACTLY what it's doing yet.
This is the only problem I've run into, but I spend enough time on web forums that it kills me...anybody already tried the beta out know whether or not this has been fixed yet? I DO recall reading that the focus problem, in general, was due to be fixed before the final release...
Your wish is granted - the default behavior of the clipboard has changed in KDE3 (much to MY annoyance, I LIKE being able to highlight to copy).
Fortunately, this is configurable. If you want the old copy-on-highlight behavior, click the "synchronise clipboard on highlight" option in the preferences...
And congress is very happy that you think that way. As long as everything they do gets blamed on that figurehead known as "the president", they can get away with anything they want...
Note also that if I'm reading that article correctly, this specific case has little to do with the Federal government, but is instead a local Washington D.C. measure.
I realize that "Hating George W. Bush" is the "cool" thing to do right now, but keep your eye on the people actually responsible for setting up bad policies while you're at it, please. Keep in mind that GWB's job is to enforce laws written by Congress. In short - GWB is (to put it in blunt modern terms) "Congress' Bitch". GWB is NOT (contrary to popular opinion) responsible for even implementing (let alone enacting) local or state policies that suck...
In many cases, the spam includes an URL where their Enlarge-Your-Penis-Breasts-And-Hairline scams are hosted, and generally it isn't hosted on the same ISP as the spam came from...
In these cases, I like to traceroute to the server hosting the URL and cc the ISP that the spammer is hosting their scam on. Most ISP's have clauses in their acceptable use policy forbidding ANY spamming, even from other ISP's.
The spammer may not care that his throwaway dial-up account gets canceled 5-times-per-week, but if their scam site goes down, there goes the whole purpose for sending the spam in the first place...
From my brief experimentation with Mosix and a bit of reading, this sounds correct.
Basically, mosix is a very "chunky" sort of clustering - it works on the level of "whole processes". Because of this, you don't need to write your software to do the splitting and migrating yourself as you do with "less chunky" pvm and mpi. On the other hand, a process split off from a pvm program running can be handled by mosix like any other process and migrated to the cpu that mosix thinks can get the process finished fastest.
Mosix seems like an ideal way to 'lend' processing power to slower machines. This is what I was doing when I played with it previously - I had a K6/2-350 and a P-100 laptop with no L2 cache. I got Mosix set up on them both and used a command-line mp3 encoder as a benchmark. On the P-100, encoding speed was about 15% of realtime. On the K6/2, it was about 110%. Running Mosix between the two over 10Mb Ethernet, I could encode mp3 at about 85% - I suspect it'd have been significantly closer to 100% if I'd had 100Mb Ethernet at the time...
Hopefully OpenMosix will keep up with current kernel versions better. Better still, maybe they'll be able to get it merged into 2.5 at some point...
Actually, the problem (well, A problem) is that this doesn't happen. What happens is that only someone who LOTS of people have heard of can raise "$70 million before a presidential campaign even gets started". Poor schmucks without a pile of connections or fame, whether they care about individual citizens or not, can't raise "legal small amounts of money from each of millions of people" like the famous 'big-party' bigwigs can, so their only hope is to round up one or two big donors who are willing to contribute enough to allow them to 'buy a voice' from the media.
This is what people are referring to when they say that restrictions on campaign contributions inhibits free political speech. If you 'cap' individual contributions, then only famous incumbents will ever be able to round up the money to be heard, and "new guys" who aren't "connected" will always end up drowned out by well connected and entrenched people.
Realize also that apparently one of the 'reform' bills being considered forbids political advertisements for 90 days before an election. This is BAD - when "big famous bigwig" makes a speech, it's NEWS, so the news media can still cover it and pass on the speech (an advertisement, really, but not 'legally') to the viewers, while poor Joe Schmuck, who the media never mentions but who actually cares what happens to individuals in this country, not only get drowned out by the media (and lets not forget how much of a problem the influence that large corporate media entities has on government is), and he can't even hope for a wealthy sympathetic sponsor to 'buy' him an advertisement so he can at least be HEARD...
Granted that this doesn't make famous big-party people's vast amounts of funds obscene, but simply capping donation amounts will only hurt the LITTLE guys.
There's another option, of course.
Advertisers will just have to focus on making their commercials WATCHABLE. It can be done. After all, I think the commercials that popped up during the Superbowl got as much commentary and attention as the game itself.
This does mean that advertisers won't be able to just slap together dull and irritating advertisements and assume that you'll be forced to watch them (poor babies). On the other hand, if the commercials become actually entertaining, nobody will bother skipping them...
There are some "good" lawyers. Maybe not many, but a few.
If you think of the convoluted legal code that lawyers have helped legislatures build up, you can think of it as a really complicated weapon, that requires special training to use.
There ARE lawyers out there who enjoy using this metaphorical 'weapon' on behalf of actual victims of real crimes. Sometimes this takes creativity (I recall reading of a case where a man abducted a woman and, among other bizarre things, made a small cut in her foot(?) and drank some of her blood...but didn't go far enough to be charged with 'rape'. The lawyers for the prosecution managed to get him charged with "robbery" - he stole some of her blood.)
Granted that modern law has become so convoluted and lucrative that it attracts far to much of the 'wrong sort of person' to the trade, just to make a pile of money, but there are a few left who actually enjoy getting 'bad people' put away.
No need for snide remarks - I DID read the article. As I clarified further down, I wanted to know how they got an extra 6 years in the US vs. the UK.
Incidentally, "Not being part of the post office any more" doesn't automatically make them a private entity, rather than a 'spinoff' government agency.
People seem so EAGER to be "pissed off" these days....