That scenario would be much more likely if the guy had just showed up out of the blue and made this claim, but he's been connected to the Bigfoot stuff from the beginning, and it was already suspected that he originated the hoax. Also, he's apparently been marginalized by Bigfoot enthusiasts for a long time, probably in fear of this very revalation.
Speaking of scientific mysteries and Michael Jackson (sorry, it's too easy), maybe it was aliens who abducted him and did all that plastic surgery. It would do a lot for my faith in humans as a race to not have to believe that a person did all that to his face on purpose and that he actually paid for it.
Obviously any evolved civilisation must have a
counterpart of the RIAA... we
only have to wait for their lawyers to make the first
contact.
You are totally confused here. If they were really that advanced, they would have torn down the headquarters of their RIAA during the same upheaval in which they executed all the lawyers*. My guess is that, as a favor, they will send a death squad to do the same for us. Maybe we should broadcast pictures of Hilary Rosen. That would really get them in high gear to put an end to all the madness.
*NOTE: It's humor folks. I'm going to law school this fall. I expect to pick up lots of great lawyer jokes there, just like I heard my favorite Marine jokes from a retired USMC Colonel.
Religion is "I don't know, and I'm going to keep it that way"
Science is "I don't know, but I'm sure as hell going to do everything in my power to find out with impressive certainty"
There is such a thing as a religious scientist. The two are not mutually exclusive. Those on both sides who think that they are just have their heads up their posteriors.
I doubt it would produce much less insight than this.
And potentially more profanity, which would have made the interview much more interesting. I think Deforest Kelley the Irrascible Grumpy Old Man would be much cooler than William Shatner, the washed-out, bitter actor. For Example:
Shatner: Get a life.
Kelley: What the hell are you damn computer geeks doing calling me in the middle of the night* again! That show was on like 50 years ago, dammit! Can't you let an old man get some sleep!
*It is, of course, something like 4:30 in the afternoon
Almost anyone can setup and use a MS windows platform. Compariatively noone can install and use a linux distro. Ask some business student to install Apache [when they aren't that computer literal to begin with] is fun:-)
I don't want to get into a flame war here, but I think your premise here relies on a flawed assumption. Windows installation is easier than Linux installation in the same sense that the stock engine in your car is easier to install than a custom engine that fits in the same slot. It's easier because it's already there. If I gave your hypothetical business major a Windows 2000 CD and told him to install it, he'd have at lease as much trouble as he would with a newer RedHat or Mandrake distro. This is particularly true if you are not dual booting. Probably the biggest hang-up people have with Linux installs is partitioning, and there is no good analog for this in Windows installation, because you generally are not setting up a dual-boot Windows system (and if you are, it is at least as hard as partitioning Linux). So, take a newbie, give him two identical boxes and one copy each of Windows 2000 and Mandrake 9, and set him loose. He'll probably manage to muddle his way through both after reading the on-screen instructions and continually choosing the default options.
The real problem with Windows is that all of those slick GUIs give people a false sense of capability. You get clueless people who think that knowing a little point-and-click qualifies them as admins. The truth is, if you want to set up a stable and secure system, it doesn't matter if it's Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris or Novell; you need to understand the system and know what you are doing. Windows doesn't have some magical solution to this.
Then I suppose we can forgive you for being clueless about the Constitution of the United States of America, which states clearly in Article 2, Section 2 "[The President] shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of impeachment." In light of that, I would say that your Jefferson quote is somewhat out of context if you are trying to imply that he was opposed to the idea of presidential pardons. The power of the President to pardon has been one of the most closely guarded, and least dilluted by statute law, Constitutional priciples over the history of the U.S. In fact, even when Clinton went on a wholesale pardons-for-sale spree on his last day in office (if you are a liberal, feel free to substitute "even when Ford purchased the presidency with a promise of a presidential pardon"), the biggest roasting he received was from late night talk shows. Conservative politicians and scholars did not make as big a deal out of it as they would have liked to because nobody wanted to get within a mile of the pardon power.
As for executive powers in states granting pardons/clemency/stays/moratoriums/whatever, those are mandated by the individual states' constitutions, so it really has nothing to do with "separation of powers" on the national level.
What you sound like you want is "pay us now, but we want to hold our code hostage so that any time someone uses it, you want to get paid."
If you were to ask 3 times as much for your work, and they got an unlimited use of your code, would that be sufficient?
You've obviously never contracted with the government or military. As messed up as it sounds, this is exactly how it is done much of the time. The government pays some Corporation to provide a software product, the Corporation provides the software product and keeps proprietary rights to all source code, and then continues milking the cash cow for many years as bug fixes and updates are required. It's not necessarily a "good" thing, but it happens like this all the time.
In my opinion, this is the way it should be. Let them use existing laws and the technology available to them to enforce the protection of their copyrights. This means that they can make the cost of illegally sharing music higher without trampling on legitimate fair-use rights like portability, and without passing technology-crippling legislation that promises to squash any kind of independent invention. If they find somebody who is passing stuff around illegally, and they feel they have received enough financial damage that it is worth pursuing him/her in the courts, then let them do it.
More likely, they're trying to send a message to serve as an example and ward off future crack attempts.
Which, in my opinion (and you may agree), is far more devious than just trying to shut up DeCSS. I will state outright that I am not in favor of illegally copying copyrighted material, but the right to take stuff apart and tinker is downright SACRED! This is the same problem I have with shutting down mod chippers and prosecuting those who break encryption schemes. Sure, Corporation X has a right to protect its copyrighted materials, but the burden of protection should be on Corporation X. The government has no business stepping in and artificially bolstering its content protection schemes. If your encryption algorithm is so trivial that some teenager with a PC can crack it, then it is not deserving of legal protection. I think the most astonishing case of this was when Skylarov (I think) broke a rot-13 "encrypted" e-document and got prosecuted for it. That's absolutely ridiculous. Now, whenever this argument comes up, somebody inevitably brings out the old analogy of "his locks were so easy to pick, I have every right to steal stuff from his apartment." However, there is one fundamental difference. Cracking an encryption algorithm is not stealing. It is more analogous to getting a set of locks and practicing lock picking techniques on them. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. It's not even wrong to show others how to do it. In fact, as word gets out that people know how to pick the locks, ideally the result would be even better locks for everybody. Once you pick a lock and take something, then you have crossed the line. Similarly, I should be able to reverse-engineer any algorithm I please, and show anybody else how to do the same. The result should be better encryption for all. However, once I use that knowledge to "stal" or illegally copy copyrighted work, prosecution is justified via the existing court system -- special shortcuts for digital works are not fair. I get pretty riled up whenever I view something as a threat to my right to tinker. Just my rant, I guess.
Re:This is too easy...
on
Green Geeks?
·
· Score: 2
Economics is not perfect, but it is a science, and one set of theories have been proven over the last 100 years to be predictive, both forward and backward in time.
I'll be the first to say that I don't always agree with MacAndrew. I'm about as conservative as they come without joining the John Birch society, and as far as I can tell MacAndrew is pretty liberal. That being said, he (she?) is dead on about meteorology and economics. I am neither an economicist nor meteorologist, but I am an engineer, so I understand the systems of differential equations that are used to predict this stuff. The differential equations themselves are hard science, and given complete and accurate data, they are deterministic. However, they rely heavily on initial conditions, so they can be predicted 1-2 days out at best. After that, the butterfly in Japan kicks in, and you just don't know. There are too many variables to model them all accurately, and once you get an initial condition that you didn't expect, the errors compouund themselves with increase in time. Economics and meteorology rely upon the exact same trick to extrapolate their predictions beyond the immediate future -- they look at historical records where conditions were similar, and based on that, they make a best guess. This is, at the very best -- and I am being generous here -- soft science. Now, you may want to get smart and bring up stuff like cosmic theory or quantum mechanics and say they are comparable, so let me discredit that theory right away. Cosmic theorists are mostly trying to understand what happened to get us to this point, and know that they are making educated guesses. Quantum theory is about predicting how unpredictable things are, and is really good to that end. Futhermore, neither of these pretends to be affecting people's life on a regular basis. Meteorology and Economics pretend to know what they're talking about as they tell people stuff that will affect them directly tomorrow and next week, and as often as not, they are wrong.
Also, no matter how far south you go, anyone north of you is a damn Yankee.
I live about as far south as you can get (S. Texas), but I still don't think I'd go wandering around the Mississippi delta yelling "All ya'll ar a bunch of Damn Yankees!" Of course, around here, the N/S question is somewhat secondary to why we even let all those other states join the Republic of Texas to begin with.
I've laughed out loud at a Slashdot post maybe three times in my life. Heck, I even have moderator points. Unfortunately, I can't mod a reply to my own post. Somebody mod this guy up to "+5, The All Too Sad Truth."
And of course, what kind of crack was being smoked when Jar Jar was created?
They were smoking straight, unadulterated cash, rolled-up like a joint. Then they got this brilliant idea! We could sell out the whole franchise and turn it into a stupid on-screen comic book by adding an annoying pidgen-english speaking patsy that everybody under 6 will think is funny, and sell licensed merchandise by the truckload, and the loyal fans of the original trilogy that was actually cool will still lay down $9 each to come see it on opening night because Georgie-boy slapped a Star Wars logo on the opening credits!
You just gave me a Brilliant Idea (tm)! I'm going to make a Civil War MMORPG, but in my game, the South wins. I'm going to set up my display right next to the ammo section in every Wal-Mart south of the Mason-Dixon line. The tag line will be "You done knew yer whole life them damn yankees was lyin' 'bout that war. Now let's end the thing right and kick some Yankee butt!" Hoo-boy. I can't wait to see those dump trucks full of money dropping the cash right in front of my door.
Now all I need is a game developer. Anybody want to join me?
I work with a guy whose actual, given name is James (P, not T) Kirk, and he was once a Captain in the Air Force. He once considered applying to NASA as a test pilot so he could fly the Enterprise (that's the shuttle that doesn't go into space, for those who don't know). He figured he'd probably get the spot just for the publicity it would bring, but decided in the end the test pilot life just wasn't for him.
I also heard a rumor that all of the McGyver gadgets/contrived solutions were tested for feasability before being used on the show. Don't know if that's true either, but I am rather skeptical about that "gate" thingy he uses to instantly travel to other worlds.
Slashdot Mirror
That scenario would be much more likely if the guy had just showed up out of the blue and made this claim, but he's been connected to the Bigfoot stuff from the beginning, and it was already suspected that he originated the hoax. Also, he's apparently been marginalized by Bigfoot enthusiasts for a long time, probably in fear of this very revalation.
Speaking of scientific mysteries and Michael Jackson (sorry, it's too easy), maybe it was aliens who abducted him and did all that plastic surgery. It would do a lot for my faith in humans as a race to not have to believe that a person did all that to his face on purpose and that he actually paid for it.
*NOTE: It's humor folks. I'm going to law school this fall. I expect to pick up lots of great lawyer jokes there, just like I heard my favorite Marine jokes from a retired USMC Colonel.
I always thought politics was more like, "If you only knew what my opponent has done..."
Shatner: Get a life.
Kelley: What the hell are you damn computer geeks doing calling me in the middle of the night* again! That show was on like 50 years ago, dammit! Can't you let an old man get some sleep!
*It is, of course, something like 4:30 in the afternoon
The real problem with Windows is that all of those slick GUIs give people a false sense of capability. You get clueless people who think that knowing a little point-and-click qualifies them as admins. The truth is, if you want to set up a stable and secure system, it doesn't matter if it's Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris or Novell; you need to understand the system and know what you are doing. Windows doesn't have some magical solution to this.
As for executive powers in states granting pardons/clemency/stays/moratoriums/whatever, those are mandated by the individual states' constitutions, so it really has nothing to do with "separation of powers" on the national level.
In my opinion, this is the way it should be. Let them use existing laws and the technology available to them to enforce the protection of their copyrights. This means that they can make the cost of illegally sharing music higher without trampling on legitimate fair-use rights like portability, and without passing technology-crippling legislation that promises to squash any kind of independent invention. If they find somebody who is passing stuff around illegally, and they feel they have received enough financial damage that it is worth pursuing him/her in the courts, then let them do it.
You used your dictaphone to post, didn't you? Somebody mail this guy a keyboard.
I've laughed out loud at a Slashdot post maybe three times in my life. Heck, I even have moderator points. Unfortunately, I can't mod a reply to my own post. Somebody mod this guy up to "+5, The All Too Sad Truth."
Apparently, the plan worked.
Now all I need is a game developer. Anybody want to join me?
I work with a guy whose actual, given name is James (P, not T) Kirk, and he was once a Captain in the Air Force. He once considered applying to NASA as a test pilot so he could fly the Enterprise (that's the shuttle that doesn't go into space, for those who don't know). He figured he'd probably get the spot just for the publicity it would bring, but decided in the end the test pilot life just wasn't for him.
No, just death. Isn't that enough?
Apparently it isn't.
I was a little skeptical of the egg in the radiator too. In fact, even as I was posting, that very thought occurred to me.
I also heard a rumor that all of the McGyver gadgets/contrived solutions were tested for feasability before being used on the show. Don't know if that's true either, but I am rather skeptical about that "gate" thingy he uses to instantly travel to other worlds.
As far as a text editor, Vim works nicely in both Windows and Linux. There may be a tiny learning curve.