That's not the point. Have you ever tried to get some moron who just got done complaining about a bluescreen to even try linux? Either they don't know that X exists, or they say something like, "Meh \/\/i/\/d0wz r 7r4nzp4r3n7, f00." Having eye candy is important -- if people really didn't like jacking off to interfaces, we'd all be using command line.
Strictly speaking, if I have windows XP, legally, and I then disable all the product-activiation stuff with some kind of crack.. I'm within my rights, yes?
In order to enjoy a comparable masturbation experience with Linux, you must use a combination of Electric Eyes (for thumbnail browsing) and Netscape (for image viewing). Oftentimes, you will even have to use both hands to get the process started -- very inconvenient. Add in the fact that UNIX-like systems don't function very well with widespread use of spaces in directory names, and you have all the makings of an extremely poor monkey spanking.
Bah. Just use Nautilus -- it does everything that IE can do with the thumbnailing and whatnot, and it automagically scales those overhuge images down. Before I used nautilus, I'd end up with these huge images that I had to scale down. Not that the detail was bad sometimes, but I need to see every part of the picture to get off. In fact, I like to take advantage of the fact that my ReiserFS partition for pr0n supports many more characters in filename than an NTFS partition. Linux clearly is the superior pr0n OS.
...as long as it requires a warrant before it can be used.
No, you're missing the point. If the FBI could get a warrant on you, they'd just require you to give them your passphrase, or just subpeona the information that was encrypted in the first place. The reason that the FBI needs this is because they know that they can't get warrants for what they want to do, because it's illegal and they have no probable cause for sticking their noses in your business.
You know that if the FBI can't get a warrant for the information in the first place, they won't be able to get a warrant for this either, so what would they plan to do with it, other than break the law?
You want full info flow- give out the plans to nuke bombs, your companies network architecture, the PIN # of your ATM card.
For the first two: those things can be found out, and are really meaningless to security, because they rely upon security through obscurity. The third is not security through obscurity -- it is the kernel of security.
As concerns the first, the buidling of nuclear bombs is the natural result of science. In order to stop people from knowing about nuclear bombs, you have to censor science. This is not absolutism -- that is the only way to keep people from knowing about nuclear bombs. The people that made the bombs that wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki figured it out, and so can anyone else.
As concerns the second, the architecture of you r network is meaningless to whether or not someone is going to hack you. Your architecture will be found out by any h4x0r worth his phr33r. However, that h4x0r can't do anything at all if your servers are secure. If you're running an old version of ISS and you get 0wn3d, don't blame it on the h4x0r knowing your architecture, blame it on your server's security being shotty. Security through obscurity all too often creates false senses of security that lead to ISS-based 0wnage.
The third, as I've stated before, is another case entirely. The password is the essential thing that security boils down to in most cases. Even then, you must ask yourself: is not sharing a certain information x security through obscurity? If x is superficial, such as the address of your servers or the physics behind a nuclear reaction, then hiding x is security through obscurity. If x is at the core of your system, then hiding it is not.
Has the government ever shared the passwords to their servers? No. And neither should you share your PIN number. All else is irrelevant to security. So what if the h4x0r knows how to use your ATM card or knows the ATM you frequent -- he can't do a thing without that password.
This isn't absolutism, unless absolutism is the result of applying abstract logic to determine what's at the root of shotty security.
This is the most upsetting story I've ever read on Slashdot; it reminds of Fahrenheit 451.
Please, citizens of the US, stop your government before it's too late.
(bleh. I was so shocked that a nation of freedom could do such a thing that I screwed up my analogy and forgot about the preview button.)
We can't. Tetsuo forgot to take his pills again.
I don't think that I'll ever forget that scene from Akira where Tetsuo loses control of his powers. This is what's happening: our government is trying to control a power it never should have had in the first place: censorship. It never was designed to have that power. Now, because the people share the sentiment of censorship, the whole thing is mutating out of control. There's nothing we can do about it, even if we wanted to.
Ok, so Sony, who cowed my college into banning downloading of "copyrighted information" (not just Sony's, mind you, but everything, which, because of current common law, actually does include everything, even copylefted stuff), is going to create CDs that, when copied, destroy other people's real property.
gah
Ok, let me get this straight: I can play the original, because it is read. But, magically, I can't play a burned copy? Ok, if this works with traditional copy methods, why not just instead ignore distinctions between all kinds of data on the cd, control, audio, digital, etc., and just copy an exact replica? Correct me if I'm wrong, but if it can be read, it can be written. Anything else would mean that it couldn't be read in the first place.
Re:From the "Reminds me of this classic prose" guy
on
Review: Harry Potter
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· Score: 2
Ok, besides the fact that you were shameless enough to take credit for Singularity's work, I have to say it: not all video games are bad!
Why not get kids to play Chrono Trigger or Legend of the Dragoon or one of the many Final Fantasies? Not only do they have excellent plots which would make great fodder for an English essay, but they require that kids read. It doesn't matter what you read, the fact is that you still read.
In fact, I would argue that the internet keeps kids reading all the time. You can't do anything on the internet without reading. I don't remember the last time I read a book, but I read all the time -- fanfiction, RPGs, espository and persuasive essays, even rants -- all without books.
If you don't want to fork out money to buy Chrono Trigger or the like, why not just point the kids at a few MUDs? That is the ultimate in reading, because there are no visuals; it's all imagination. In fact, MUDs should be better for developing brains not only because of the reading, but because roleplaying demands that the kids place themselves in someone else's shoes.
I'm all for reading for the same reasons as Frederick Douglass, but please don't tune out anything that isn't printed on paper. Reading is reading, and reading is what's important.
While it's true that attitude is a lot of the problem with the way that people are viewing the prequels, The Phantom Menace left a lot to be desired for me. I don't consider myself a Star Wars fan in that I read any related books (although I have leafed through a few that my borther has), but I worship episodes 4-6, because they are an adventure story and an allegory. In fact, I watced A New Hope in my tenth grade English class as an example of the genre of adventure stories, and we analyzed it for archetypes.
The problem I have with The Phantom Menace is manyfold, but mostly it comes down to the fact that it didn't do a good job of setting up the allegory of Star Wars for episodes 4-6. Now, my oppinion of The Phantom Menace is largely dependant on the semantics of how Anakin turns to the dark side. The title "Attack of the Clones" isn't very encouraging to me in that regard. The first thing that came to mind was "Attack of the Killer Tomotoes" -- why coulnd't the episode simply be name, "The Clone Wars?"
On that note, I loved a few things about The Phantom Menace, but only if "Attack of the Clones" and episode 3 deal with them properly:
The fact that Anakin will in fact bring balance to the force, but not the way that the paranoid Jedi council, who is haunted by perceptions of the Sith and other bad things as outnumbering them, imagines.
Anakin merely wants to free the slaves on Tatooine -- how will Palpatine warp innocent Anakin into the evil Darth Vader?
The council on Coruscant was manipulated by Palpatine to vote him as their leader in order to resotre order and justice against the "evil men," as Fearless Leader #43 would say, of the Trade Federation: what kind of new order will Palpatine enforce. This should be a big opportunity for Lucas to comment on how the "war" against terrorism is being used, much like the "war" against drugs, to curtail civil liberties.
There are many others, but those are the ones that come to mind at the moment. The problem is, with the whole Jar Jar debacle, I don't know if I can trust Lucas with his own story -- perhaps I'm looking too deeply into the Star Wars saga, but there's much more there than simply cool special effects, comedy, and neato light saber battles.
How did this patent ever get issued?! That wasn't new or revolutionary -- you can see transparency around you all the time. How can I see through glass? What about overhead transparencies?! An alpha channel is simply a computer representation of that? What the hell does Apple think they're doing?!
What is it with these morons?! It's just a fucking file format already! It compresses data! Ok, who's up for creating a format based on bzipping raw data? Anyone would be out of their mind to challenge that. I mean, who the hell do these people think that they are?!
Will people complain about paying slightly more per month under the penny per page model?
Of course people will. Does this article realize how many nonsense and junk sites you come across, even using Google, when you do a search for something esoteric? Why should I have to pay any moron who happened to entice me to click through to his page, especailly when I find out that his site doesn't even have anything to do with what I was searching for, or is just a list of his bookmarks? If this plan is implemented, I guarantee we'll see people trying to outsmart search engines like never before, and dissemination of information will become like never before based on greed and profit (see next point).
When you go to the book store, you never see free books.
Of course not. Let's review essentially what it takes to make a single copy of a book (IANApublisher, so bear with me).
Harvest some trees.
Make a bunch of paper.
Harvest materials for making inks.
Set up your printing machine.
Stamp out a bunch of copies.
Cut, glue, and bind everything together, maybe throwing in some leather you got in step 4.5 for the cover.
Move the book to a shelf somewhere (actually a few steps, but we'll just abstract to keep this list short).
All that needs a managerie of workers from lumberjacks to suits. Those resources and people are not free, because they are scarce. If I take the book at that store, no one else can take it. Another book must be made, which will cost even more time and resources.
Now, compare that with what it takes to get my web page to the viewer:
Hit upload, and store everything on my host.
In addition, when someone downloads my page from my host, it's still there, and another person and do the same. The only thing that's scarce involved here is the bandwidth and disk space, but advertising works just fine for my host to compensate for that.
Also, since when do I have to pay to look at a book I want to purchase? At any book store worth its beans, I can read through any book I want to without buying it. (Usually, I end up at my library, where the community I live in has graciously purchased not only the multitude of books in my local library, but has networked it with several other libraries, so there's virtually no chance that I won't be able to find what I want.) The whole book == webpage metaphor is flawed, because purchasing != viewing.
One thing that keeps new book above some minimum price is that the book is scarce. True, authors deserve compensation for their insight (maybe exclusive rights for about seven years like copyright was originally in the U.S.), but that's done a whole lot better than penny-per-page. Why not set up a standard, but *voluntary* system for compensation. If you like what you see, click this button on your browser (it should never be on the page itself, because I guarantee you that it'll be in the most annoying spot possible), and, poof, the author has been given his penny.
Napster makes money off distribution of copyright information. Napster gets sued and shut down. Fasttrack makes money off distribution of copyright information. Fasttrack gets sued. LimeWire makes money off distibution of copyright information. At least Gnutella isn't a sueable entity.
It is proper for us to reject Microsoft's attempt to keep its bugs secret. But this means that we must also reject Alan Cox's attempt to protest the DMCA by withholding discussion of security holes in Linux, under his false belief that the DMCA somehow forbids such discussion. We need to openly discuss our bugs. Otherwise we are, in effect, supporting Microsoft in their effort to stifle discussion.
Not at all. The way I see it, there are two things at work here.
As pointed out in other posts, Alan Cox is not the one censoring himself, but rather it is the DMCA, which has the enforcement of the entire populace of the United States behind it. That is what it means to make a law, to create a policy with the enforcement of every single individual in the country where the law was made. On the other hand, Microsoft is the one that is censoring itself, without respect for the DMCA, whether or not it applies to the bug as it did to the bugs that Cox refuses to discuss in a forum intended for United States audience.
More importantly, the intents of the actions are completely different and somewhat incomparable. When Cox refused to discuss security of the Linux kernel, he had two intentions:
Cover his own ass from possible litigation from the people of the United States, represented by John Ashcroft.
Drive a message to the people of the United States that the DMCA is a bad law, and they should seek its immediate repeal.
On the other hand, Microsoft, while their intention is also to cover their ass, it's not from litigation and legal hot water, it's from their own bad PR. Microsoft isn't even trying to seek repeal of the DMCA, for obvious reasons. Whereas Cox was making a political statement, Microsoft is just trying to censor bad PR.
Therefore, it is right and consistent that we can hate Microsoft for censorship, and applaud Cox for censorship, because there are deeper levels and motives than simply censorship.
Great achievement, my Commodore C64 could do that so many years ago that I don't even remember when it was. SAM, the speech synthesizer which could even "sing".
::nods:: I remember programming my TI-99/4A to read me a menu of games whenver I started it up. Then there was that text-to-speech program for my 386 that came with my soundblaster that enabled me to make my computer announce that it was booted up and ready for his l33tness Velex himself to use dos. Just a few months ago, my roommate download this monkey called Bonzi that talked to him, but Bonzi got annoying so my roommate shot him.
I'm sure that there's been tons of text-to-speech programs that I've never heard of, no will I ever, because it's been done so many times before, and the AI required to get the computer to talk in an un-Vice Fearless Leader #42 fashion is beyond the grasp of even the most 31337 at the moment. What I would really like for my mobile phone is rudementary speech recognition.
As it's been pointed out before, text is just simply faster than speech, and who knows, maybe twenty years down the road we'll all carry around little AIM or ICQ devices. What I'd really like to do, though, is skip the minature keyboards or fumbling on a keypad. Speech regonition is the way to go. I'd much rather tell my phone, "call pink" and have it call pink back at the hotel, than have it announcing all my spam to the world.
How dare they! The nerve of those girls, actually daring to _choose_ who they have a relationship with! (Here's a free clue, Velex, these things amount to a hell of a lot more than "letting someone into your pants"!)
Oh, come come now. You know damn good and well that girl go around left and right saying how evil men are. Guess who they're talking to? Some nice geek who will never get any. Guess who all men are? Their loser boyfriend that they let into their pants. Why did she let him into her pants? Because he was an ass to her. Girls have no right to complain, they're a bunch of bimbos and should go to hell and die. I don't care.
Because of girls, a friend of mine got a sexual harassment suit because a girl he talked to once didn't like him, and I'm ostracised as gay. You know damn well what kind of kindness I'm talking about -- the kind that got my friend and I into these perdicaments to begin with. We shouldn't have listened attentively and been nice to the girls we liked. We should have slapped them around, and beat them up.
You see, you'll never know what it's like to compete for someone to like you! You probably have guys all over you, and all you have to do is decree which one you talk to and which ones you sue for sexual harassment. Girls are spoiled -- it would fucking be paradise if we all woke up one day and female bodies promped the soul to have sex as much as a male body. Don't say anything until you've been a guy, and been rejected time after time because you haven't had a girlfriend before or you couldn't bring yourself to beat her up.
Actually, I don't give a rat's ass whether or not I get any.
Ok, I supposed I'm biased from the outset, because I consider lawyers to inherently be intellectual whores, but hear me out. Why is it that laws need to be so complex that you need to consult a lawyer in the first place? I mean, doesn't it appear to anyone else here that there's something wrong with that?
Rolling in the leaves and sin and ecstasy will take your mind off all your other problems, and the resulting emotional cross-currents will create new ones that will absorb much of your attention.
I don't think that any human who loves life and all the joys it has to offer can disagree with that. What you are talking about is the stuff of dreams -- wet ones at that, but you probably wouldn't understand that. Emotions are powerful things, and they have the power to elevate a person to loving his Creator or cutting him down and thrashing him until suicide is the only escape.
Try to hook up with senior girls; the same ones who wouldn't spit on you when you were both freshmen may be a lot friendlier now that they've been upstaged by new waves of younger, cuter freshmen.
Ah yes, girls. Those mysterious creatures who hold the other half of human existance. While you're on your reverie about how beautiful love is, you failed to mention the dispair of rejection. It is impossible for a girl, who keeps her body in shape, to experience the type of rejection that all male geeks know and have come to accept as a way of life. All that a female has to do to get some is look pretty and let the highest bidder into her pants. What of the lower bidders? What about the geeks who can only bring kindness and attentiveness to the table, chips whose value pales in comparison with what the jocks have: violence. Therefore, a male geek is always destined to look longingly at the jocks who have such incredible sexual value that they can often sleep with a different girl who is more beautiful and sensual than the last every week.
This may be your last sojourn among thousands of unattached young ladies in a carefree, party-centric college environment.
To the young ladies of college, I say fuck you. Fuck you feminists who blame the actions of your abusive boyfriends on the kind geeks. Fuck you optimists who have never had to hit on a person in your life. Fuck all of you. All we want is the joy and happiness of a relationship that can instantly render meaningless the cobwebs of antisocial lonliness. We will never get it, because it is up to the girl to choose who she lets into her pants, and she will never choose a geek.
In response to the article at hand, I have little to say but go to grad school. Do research work. Get a job with Redhat or Microsoft where you can further the cutting edge in user-friendliness. Don't waste your time and energy on a girl thinking that it will be in any way repaid. At best, it will come to nothing, at worst you will get sued for sexual harassment.
FUD is a fact of life. As a hacker I don't like FUD, either, but it should be clear that you can't fight Microsoft FUD with conventional or even logical arguments. FUD, sadly, is the only way to go.
Microsoft is scared shitless about open source, and what it can do to its unethical monopoly. Calling Microsoft's FUD for what it is hasn't even made them flinch. The only thing that management listens to, after all, is FUD, so what reason should stop Open Source from making FUD arguments against the
Evil Empire?
Let's face it, people in management and people who don't know better have only emotions to rely upon. I don't see anything particulary wrong with creating some FUD to cloud those emotions and make them look at the facts that Microsoft is run by a megalomaniac who wants to have legal authority to basically become the first global internet government, supported by taxes like renewable licensing.
Yes, but if I tape Enterprise and hand the tape over to a co-worker who missed the episode I can't watch the tape while it is in his possession.
I usually end up just copying, so both my friend and I have it -- there's really no reason to keep all those eighties B-movies we have, so I just overwrite many, many times. Our VCRs have almost destroyed a few tapes among my circle of friends, but most are surprisingly intact and high quality after as many as ten or twenty rerecords.
We? The distribution vendors need to place these ads.
Yes. We. We need to promote open source. Where does the code for open source come from? Us. Where does the documentation for open source come from? Us. Who uses open source? We. We are open source.
There is a lot more money among us than there is with RedHat. Remember, RedHat is a corporation like Microsoft, and they are not what drives open source. They might be good allies and do good things, but, at the end of the day, it's all about us.
What's likely to happen in the case of general purposes P2P apps is that universities and ISPs will start to block out the software(such as gnutella) rather than individual users when they get complaints of copyright infringement, making the public suffer for the actions of the few.
Of course, that's how justice is done now-a-days. If a person does something wrong, an entire group gets punished. I can only think of a few exceptions, but that's what happens. Ever since I was in first grade, that's what happens. Someone does something wrong, and all the boys have to stay after -- if a girl does something wrong, the entire class stays after. If an Arab blows a few buildings up, all Arabs get in trouble. I think that the idea is that the group will keep its members in check, so they don't all get in trouble. At least that's what my CIS teacher at the Ottawa County Careerline Tech Center in Holland, Michigan, a big proponent of group justice, said anyway. Another advantage that groupjustice has over the canonical form of individual responsiblity is that the authorities don't have to waste their time investigating -- all they have to do is get a general profile. Group justice is the wave of the future, better get used to it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not the point. Have you ever tried to get some moron who just got done complaining about a bluescreen to even try linux? Either they don't know that X exists, or they say something like, "Meh \/\/i/\/d0wz r 7r4nzp4r3n7, f00." Having eye candy is important -- if people really didn't like jacking off to interfaces, we'd all be using command line.
Strictly speaking, if I have windows XP, legally, and I then disable all the product-activiation stuff with some kind of crack.. I'm within my rights, yes?
Well, you see, that's what the DMCA fixes.
In order to enjoy a comparable masturbation experience with Linux, you must use a combination of Electric Eyes (for thumbnail browsing) and Netscape (for image viewing). Oftentimes, you will even have to use both hands to get the process started -- very inconvenient. Add in the fact that UNIX-like systems don't function very well with widespread use of spaces in directory names, and you have all the makings of an extremely poor monkey spanking.
Bah. Just use Nautilus -- it does everything that IE can do with the thumbnailing and whatnot, and it automagically scales those overhuge images down. Before I used nautilus, I'd end up with these huge images that I had to scale down. Not that the detail was bad sometimes, but I need to see every part of the picture to get off. In fact, I like to take advantage of the fact that my ReiserFS partition for pr0n supports many more characters in filename than an NTFS partition. Linux clearly is the superior pr0n OS.
No, you're missing the point. If the FBI could get a warrant on you, they'd just require you to give them your passphrase, or just subpeona the information that was encrypted in the first place. The reason that the FBI needs this is because they know that they can't get warrants for what they want to do, because it's illegal and they have no probable cause for sticking their noses in your business.
You know that if the FBI can't get a warrant for the information in the first place, they won't be able to get a warrant for this either, so what would they plan to do with it, other than break the law?
You want full info flow- give out the plans to nuke bombs, your companies network architecture, the PIN # of your ATM card.
For the first two: those things can be found out, and are really meaningless to security, because they rely upon security through obscurity. The third is not security through obscurity -- it is the kernel of security.
As concerns the first, the buidling of nuclear bombs is the natural result of science. In order to stop people from knowing about nuclear bombs, you have to censor science. This is not absolutism -- that is the only way to keep people from knowing about nuclear bombs. The people that made the bombs that wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki figured it out, and so can anyone else.
As concerns the second, the architecture of you r network is meaningless to whether or not someone is going to hack you. Your architecture will be found out by any h4x0r worth his phr33r. However, that h4x0r can't do anything at all if your servers are secure. If you're running an old version of ISS and you get 0wn3d, don't blame it on the h4x0r knowing your architecture, blame it on your server's security being shotty. Security through obscurity all too often creates false senses of security that lead to ISS-based 0wnage.
The third, as I've stated before, is another case entirely. The password is the essential thing that security boils down to in most cases. Even then, you must ask yourself: is not sharing a certain information x security through obscurity? If x is superficial, such as the address of your servers or the physics behind a nuclear reaction, then hiding x is security through obscurity. If x is at the core of your system, then hiding it is not.
Has the government ever shared the passwords to their servers? No. And neither should you share your PIN number. All else is irrelevant to security. So what if the h4x0r knows how to use your ATM card or knows the ATM you frequent -- he can't do a thing without that password.
This isn't absolutism, unless absolutism is the result of applying abstract logic to determine what's at the root of shotty security.
This is the most upsetting story I've ever read on Slashdot; it reminds of Fahrenheit 451.
Please, citizens of the US, stop your government before it's too late.
(bleh. I was so shocked that a nation of freedom could do such a thing that I screwed up my analogy and forgot about the preview button.)
We can't. Tetsuo forgot to take his pills again.
I don't think that I'll ever forget that scene from Akira where Tetsuo loses control of his powers. This is what's happening: our government is trying to control a power it never should have had in the first place: censorship. It never was designed to have that power. Now, because the people share the sentiment of censorship, the whole thing is mutating out of control. There's nothing we can do about it, even if we wanted to.
It already is too late.
This is the most upsetting story I've ever read on Slashdot; it reminds of Fahrenheit 451.
Please, citizens of the US, stop your government before it's too late.
We can't. Akira's forgotten to take his drugs again.
Ruri put it best: "They're all idiots."
Ok, so Sony, who cowed my college into banning downloading of "copyrighted information" (not just Sony's, mind you, but everything, which, because of current common law, actually does include everything, even copylefted stuff), is going to create CDs that, when copied, destroy other people's real property.
gah
Ok, let me get this straight: I can play the original, because it is read. But, magically, I can't play a burned copy? Ok, if this works with traditional copy methods, why not just instead ignore distinctions between all kinds of data on the cd, control, audio, digital, etc., and just copy an exact replica? Correct me if I'm wrong, but if it can be read, it can be written. Anything else would mean that it couldn't be read in the first place.
Ok, besides the fact that you were shameless enough to take credit for Singularity's work, I have to say it: not all video games are bad!
Why not get kids to play Chrono Trigger or Legend of the Dragoon or one of the many Final Fantasies? Not only do they have excellent plots which would make great fodder for an English essay, but they require that kids read. It doesn't matter what you read, the fact is that you still read.
In fact, I would argue that the internet keeps kids reading all the time. You can't do anything on the internet without reading. I don't remember the last time I read a book, but I read all the time -- fanfiction, RPGs, espository and persuasive essays, even rants -- all without books.
If you don't want to fork out money to buy Chrono Trigger or the like, why not just point the kids at a few MUDs? That is the ultimate in reading, because there are no visuals; it's all imagination. In fact, MUDs should be better for developing brains not only because of the reading, but because roleplaying demands that the kids place themselves in someone else's shoes.
I'm all for reading for the same reasons as Frederick Douglass, but please don't tune out anything that isn't printed on paper. Reading is reading, and reading is what's important.
While it's true that attitude is a lot of the problem with the way that people are viewing the prequels, The Phantom Menace left a lot to be desired for me. I don't consider myself a Star Wars fan in that I read any related books (although I have leafed through a few that my borther has), but I worship episodes 4-6, because they are an adventure story and an allegory. In fact, I watced A New Hope in my tenth grade English class as an example of the genre of adventure stories, and we analyzed it for archetypes.
The problem I have with The Phantom Menace is manyfold, but mostly it comes down to the fact that it didn't do a good job of setting up the allegory of Star Wars for episodes 4-6. Now, my oppinion of The Phantom Menace is largely dependant on the semantics of how Anakin turns to the dark side. The title "Attack of the Clones" isn't very encouraging to me in that regard. The first thing that came to mind was "Attack of the Killer Tomotoes" -- why coulnd't the episode simply be name, "The Clone Wars?"
On that note, I loved a few things about The Phantom Menace, but only if "Attack of the Clones" and episode 3 deal with them properly:
There are many others, but those are the ones that come to mind at the moment. The problem is, with the whole Jar Jar debacle, I don't know if I can trust Lucas with his own story -- perhaps I'm looking too deeply into the Star Wars saga, but there's much more there than simply cool special effects, comedy, and neato light saber battles.
How did this patent ever get issued?! That wasn't new or revolutionary -- you can see transparency around you all the time. How can I see through glass? What about overhead transparencies?! An alpha channel is simply a computer representation of that? What the hell does Apple think they're doing?!
What is it with these morons?! It's just a fucking file format already! It compresses data! Ok, who's up for creating a format based on bzipping raw data? Anyone would be out of their mind to challenge that. I mean, who the hell do these people think that they are?!
What the hell kind of idea is this?
Will people complain about paying slightly more per month under the penny per page model?
Of course people will. Does this article realize how many nonsense and junk sites you come across, even using Google, when you do a search for something esoteric? Why should I have to pay any moron who happened to entice me to click through to his page, especailly when I find out that his site doesn't even have anything to do with what I was searching for, or is just a list of his bookmarks? If this plan is implemented, I guarantee we'll see people trying to outsmart search engines like never before, and dissemination of information will become like never before based on greed and profit (see next point).
When you go to the book store, you never see free books.
Of course not. Let's review essentially what it takes to make a single copy of a book (IANApublisher, so bear with me).
All that needs a managerie of workers from lumberjacks to suits. Those resources and people are not free, because they are scarce. If I take the book at that store, no one else can take it. Another book must be made, which will cost even more time and resources.
Now, compare that with what it takes to get my web page to the viewer:
In addition, when someone downloads my page from my host, it's still there, and another person and do the same. The only thing that's scarce involved here is the bandwidth and disk space, but advertising works just fine for my host to compensate for that.
Also, since when do I have to pay to look at a book I want to purchase? At any book store worth its beans, I can read through any book I want to without buying it. (Usually, I end up at my library, where the community I live in has graciously purchased not only the multitude of books in my local library, but has networked it with several other libraries, so there's virtually no chance that I won't be able to find what I want.) The whole book == webpage metaphor is flawed, because purchasing != viewing.
One thing that keeps new book above some minimum price is that the book is scarce. True, authors deserve compensation for their insight (maybe exclusive rights for about seven years like copyright was originally in the U.S.), but that's done a whole lot better than penny-per-page. Why not set up a standard, but *voluntary* system for compensation. If you like what you see, click this button on your browser (it should never be on the page itself, because I guarantee you that it'll be in the most annoying spot possible), and, poof, the author has been given his penny.
Napster makes money off distribution of copyright information. Napster gets sued and shut down. Fasttrack makes money off distribution of copyright information. Fasttrack gets sued. LimeWire makes money off distibution of copyright information. At least Gnutella isn't a sueable entity.
It is proper for us to reject Microsoft's attempt to keep its bugs secret. But this means that we must also reject Alan Cox's attempt to protest the DMCA by withholding discussion of security holes in Linux, under his false belief that the DMCA somehow forbids such discussion. We need to openly discuss our bugs. Otherwise we are, in effect, supporting Microsoft in their effort to stifle discussion.
Not at all. The way I see it, there are two things at work here.
- Cover his own ass from possible litigation from the people of the United States, represented by John Ashcroft.
- Drive a message to the people of the United States that the DMCA is a bad law, and they should seek its immediate repeal.
On the other hand, Microsoft, while their intention is also to cover their ass, it's not from litigation and legal hot water, it's from their own bad PR. Microsoft isn't even trying to seek repeal of the DMCA, for obvious reasons. Whereas Cox was making a political statement, Microsoft is just trying to censor bad PR.Therefore, it is right and consistent that we can hate Microsoft for censorship, and applaud Cox for censorship, because there are deeper levels and motives than simply censorship.
Just don't wind up in the Land of Oz!
Great achievement, my Commodore C64 could do that so many years ago that I don't even remember when it was. SAM, the speech synthesizer which could even "sing".
::nods:: I remember programming my TI-99/4A to read me a menu of games whenver I started it up. Then there was that text-to-speech program for my 386 that came with my soundblaster that enabled me to make my computer announce that it was booted up and ready for his l33tness Velex himself to use dos. Just a few months ago, my roommate download this monkey called Bonzi that talked to him, but Bonzi got annoying so my roommate shot him.
I'm sure that there's been tons of text-to-speech programs that I've never heard of, no will I ever, because it's been done so many times before, and the AI required to get the computer to talk in an un-Vice Fearless Leader #42 fashion is beyond the grasp of even the most 31337 at the moment. What I would really like for my mobile phone is rudementary speech recognition.
As it's been pointed out before, text is just simply faster than speech, and who knows, maybe twenty years down the road we'll all carry around little AIM or ICQ devices. What I'd really like to do, though, is skip the minature keyboards or fumbling on a keypad. Speech regonition is the way to go. I'd much rather tell my phone, "call pink" and have it call pink back at the hotel, than have it announcing all my spam to the world.
No, unfortunatly nothing new's happened lately
No you shouldn't have any choice, because guys don't have any choice either.
How dare they! The nerve of those girls, actually daring to _choose_ who they have a relationship with! (Here's a free clue, Velex, these things amount to a hell of a lot more than "letting someone into your pants"!)
Oh, come come now. You know damn good and well that girl go around left and right saying how evil men are. Guess who they're talking to? Some nice geek who will never get any. Guess who all men are? Their loser boyfriend that they let into their pants. Why did she let him into her pants? Because he was an ass to her. Girls have no right to complain, they're a bunch of bimbos and should go to hell and die. I don't care.
Because of girls, a friend of mine got a sexual harassment suit because a girl he talked to once didn't like him, and I'm ostracised as gay. You know damn well what kind of kindness I'm talking about -- the kind that got my friend and I into these perdicaments to begin with. We shouldn't have listened attentively and been nice to the girls we liked. We should have slapped them around, and beat them up.
You see, you'll never know what it's like to compete for someone to like you! You probably have guys all over you, and all you have to do is decree which one you talk to and which ones you sue for sexual harassment. Girls are spoiled -- it would fucking be paradise if we all woke up one day and female bodies promped the soul to have sex as much as a male body. Don't say anything until you've been a guy, and been rejected time after time because you haven't had a girlfriend before or you couldn't bring yourself to beat her up.
Actually, I don't give a rat's ass whether or not I get any.
Ok, I supposed I'm biased from the outset, because I consider lawyers to inherently be intellectual whores, but hear me out. Why is it that laws need to be so complex that you need to consult a lawyer in the first place? I mean, doesn't it appear to anyone else here that there's something wrong with that?
Rolling in the leaves and sin and ecstasy will take your mind off all your other problems, and the resulting emotional cross-currents will create new ones that will absorb much of your attention.
I don't think that any human who loves life and all the joys it has to offer can disagree with that. What you are talking about is the stuff of dreams -- wet ones at that, but you probably wouldn't understand that. Emotions are powerful things, and they have the power to elevate a person to loving his Creator or cutting him down and thrashing him until suicide is the only escape.
Try to hook up with senior girls; the same ones who wouldn't spit on you when you were both freshmen may be a lot friendlier now that they've been upstaged by new waves of younger, cuter freshmen.
Ah yes, girls. Those mysterious creatures who hold the other half of human existance. While you're on your reverie about how beautiful love is, you failed to mention the dispair of rejection. It is impossible for a girl, who keeps her body in shape, to experience the type of rejection that all male geeks know and have come to accept as a way of life. All that a female has to do to get some is look pretty and let the highest bidder into her pants. What of the lower bidders? What about the geeks who can only bring kindness and attentiveness to the table, chips whose value pales in comparison with what the jocks have: violence. Therefore, a male geek is always destined to look longingly at the jocks who have such incredible sexual value that they can often sleep with a different girl who is more beautiful and sensual than the last every week.
This may be your last sojourn among thousands of unattached young ladies in a carefree, party-centric college environment.
To the young ladies of college, I say fuck you. Fuck you feminists who blame the actions of your abusive boyfriends on the kind geeks. Fuck you optimists who have never had to hit on a person in your life. Fuck all of you. All we want is the joy and happiness of a relationship that can instantly render meaningless the cobwebs of antisocial lonliness. We will never get it, because it is up to the girl to choose who she lets into her pants, and she will never choose a geek.
In response to the article at hand, I have little to say but go to grad school. Do research work. Get a job with Redhat or Microsoft where you can further the cutting edge in user-friendliness. Don't waste your time and energy on a girl thinking that it will be in any way repaid. At best, it will come to nothing, at worst you will get sued for sexual harassment.
FUD is a fact of life. As a hacker I don't like FUD, either, but it should be clear that you can't fight Microsoft FUD with conventional or even logical arguments. FUD, sadly, is the only way to go.
Microsoft is scared shitless about open source, and what it can do to its unethical monopoly. Calling Microsoft's FUD for what it is hasn't even made them flinch. The only thing that management listens to, after all, is FUD, so what reason should stop Open Source from making FUD arguments against the Evil Empire?
Let's face it, people in management and people who don't know better have only emotions to rely upon. I don't see anything particulary wrong with creating some FUD to cloud those emotions and make them look at the facts that Microsoft is run by a megalomaniac who wants to have legal authority to basically become the first global internet government, supported by taxes like renewable licensing.
Yes, but if I tape Enterprise and hand the tape over to a co-worker who missed the episode I can't watch the tape while it is in his possession.
I usually end up just copying, so both my friend and I have it -- there's really no reason to keep all those eighties B-movies we have, so I just overwrite many, many times. Our VCRs have almost destroyed a few tapes among my circle of friends, but most are surprisingly intact and high quality after as many as ten or twenty rerecords.
We? The distribution vendors need to place these ads.
Yes. We. We need to promote open source. Where does the code for open source come from? Us. Where does the documentation for open source come from? Us. Who uses open source? We. We are open source.
There is a lot more money among us than there is with RedHat. Remember, RedHat is a corporation like Microsoft, and they are not what drives open source. They might be good allies and do good things, but, at the end of the day, it's all about us .
What's likely to happen in the case of general purposes P2P apps is that universities and ISPs will start to block out the software(such as gnutella) rather than individual users when they get complaints of copyright infringement, making the public suffer for the actions of the few.
Of course, that's how justice is done now-a-days. If a person does something wrong, an entire group gets punished. I can only think of a few exceptions, but that's what happens. Ever since I was in first grade, that's what happens. Someone does something wrong, and all the boys have to stay after -- if a girl does something wrong, the entire class stays after. If an Arab blows a few buildings up, all Arabs get in trouble. I think that the idea is that the group will keep its members in check, so they don't all get in trouble. At least that's what my CIS teacher at the Ottawa County Careerline Tech Center in Holland, Michigan, a big proponent of group justice, said anyway. Another advantage that groupjustice has over the canonical form of individual responsiblity is that the authorities don't have to waste their time investigating -- all they have to do is get a general profile. Group justice is the wave of the future, better get used to it.