IWPTA "optional char recognition", which I think would make another keen patent application:
Optional Character Recognition: An input system for electronic data processing machines by keyboard, mouse, scanner other other input devices, whereby characters entered by the user may, at the program's discretion and/or whim, be stored as the characters the user actually intended.
Errr, IANAL either (Surprise!), but I'm pretty sure they can't nail you for destroying evidence if you shred your files BEFORE they come to arrest you. It doesn't become evidence until then.
When I were a lad, 128 kiloBITS/sec wasn't slow at all. In fact, way back when (== June '99), 56 kbits was pretty much it. It's them nasty modems that give you that perception.
(Full Disclosure: I was on modem '89 - '99. I first got cable in January. For about a month or so afterwards, I used to wipe my harddisk and reinstall Debian Potato every other day, just for the hell of it. Consider this: While I was in high school, I hoped that I'd one day make enough money to afford a 2400 baud modem. We've come a long way, fellas.)
Nope, computers with CD-ROM drives do NOT count as recording devices under the AHRA. Otherwise you'd have to pay the RIAA tax when purchasing a CD-ROM drive.
Well, it should be possible to do it in Perl as well, although my P3rl h4Xor sk!11z aren't up to it (yet). Even better would be a Perl script that generates the actual code on the fly, say by permutating the US Constitution or such. Actually, I'll get cracking on that one right away. See yez.
A flamebaiter, I believe. Remember, a troll is supposed to be cunningly devised to make the respondents look more stupid than the troll. I don't see that happening here.
I don't know why we keep having these intellectual property bitchfests if people don't learn anything from them.
You do NOT have to enforce your patents. You can be choosy about who you sue over patent infringement. It loses you nothing. After 17-20 years, depending on the granting agency, your patent is toast whether you enforce it or not.
It's TRADEMARKS you have to defend. And considering that you can trademark (not patent, or copyright) such stirring slogans as "Thank you" or "Where do you want to go today?", it's just as well that you have to keep on your toes for that.
It looks as if none of the approved opensource licences fit your bill. Forth is apparently a breed apart. I would recommend patching the BSD licence to include "as well as the source code of the original program" after "the above copyright," in clause 2.
Nope - although the computer they used was an Apple notebook (PowerPC, IIRC), it purported to run Windows 95. I found ID4 a lot more believable when I realized that the aliens were really pissed-off Windows beta testers.
AFAIK, the [stable|unstable] does not refer to the state of the software but to the packaging that the maintainers do. Packaging is not trivial and sometimes people screw up[0]. The release cycle covers getting nifty new stuff and newer versions of traditional stuff and making sure that the packaging is not broken. At last count (right now, in fact), Potato covered 4402 packages, so it took a while.
[0] E.g.: Package foo depends on libBar being exactly v1.01, when in fact v1.01 or better will do. I've seen it, but rarely.
Why did you have to go and do that? Now we can look forward to an "US vs. Rest Of World" flamewar along with the "Many Eyes Of Open Source" one.
OTOH, we could go all out and add Perl vs. Python. And I think it's been a full two stories since the last Gnome vs. KDE one. And maybe emacs vs. vi also fits in there somewhere (doesn't emacs have a GPG whatsit?).
OTTH, let's not and pretend that we had.
Re:Definitions and Motivations
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 1
So, is Solitaire part of the OS or not?
It certainly is. And since my old P166 came with Descent and Panzer General, I suppose that those are parts of the OS as well - according to Everly Quality Research(tm). Not to mention my mousepad.
I've been using Gnutella for two months now, and I never stole anything. All the stuff I got was sanctioned for download and sharing by its creators. If you cannot envision that someone might use a peer-to-peer filesharing tool for legitimate purposes, I urge you to seek therapy immediately.
ObLawsuit: I think mp3board.com should sue Britney and N'Sync for making music that people want to rip. Come to think of it, mp3board.com should sue them on general principles. I know I would.
But it influenced the writers of GURPS Cyberpunk into listing it in the 'Inspirational Watching/Reading' section of their book. It might have been crap, but it had some influence.
While I'm earning my (-1, Offtopic), I'd like to mention a movie that had entirely too much influence in the sense that it managed to get funding for at least four sequels:
Witchboard 1-5. These movies are seriously the most terrible, heinous excrement I have ever had the misfortune to witness. If someone is compiling a list of "Top 50 Movies That Would Make Visiting Aliens Doubt Human Sentience", Witchboard should be at the top.
Perhaps I didn't make myself clear enough. You didn't have to take the time to refute all my arguments - I know they're bogus. My point was this: Gnome and KDE are so similar that that was all it took to decide me.
Real end users do not have a strong opinion on the GPL or QPL.
Why would end users be any less biased than developers? At least developers have valid technical reasons for developing for a particular platform. For an end user, Gnome and KDE are functionally so similar (especially when you ditch KWM in favour of $WINDOWMANAGER), that preference for one over the other is quite likely to be irrational. As it is with me: I use Gnome for several spurious reasons.
Superior eye candy. I just like Gnome's icons, themes etc. better than KDE's. I'm fully aware that I could just take this stuff from/usr/share/pixmaps and stick it into the corresponding KDE directory, but I'm a lazy bastard.
Warm GPL fuzzies. I know that the QPL is just as free as the GPL, or as near as makes no dammit. But it ain't the GPL.
Neato software. There's a ton of stuff out for both Gnome and KDE. These programs pretty much cover an identical scope of functionality, but the Gnome stuff just seems, y'know, neater.
Enough irrationality? You want more? I saved the whopper for last:
KDE tries too hard to look like Windows. This is really just a variation of the eye-candy argument, but consider this: For years now, I have been delighted with BSODs, ludicrous error messages and B&D user environment courtesy of Microsoft. I don't want to be reminded of that every time I switch on my screen. I run a different OS now, and it should look different as well.
There. If that didn't teach you not to look for unbiased views from end users, nothing will.
I apologize in advance for the lame offtopicness of this post, but I just came home from seeing PB, and I would really like to know this:
At the end of PB, when Mima looks into the rear mirror and says "Yep, I am" (or words to that effect), is it her voice or Rumi's? I saw the movie dubbed and the voices sounded really similar. Sorry
I was under the impression that the Chinese had fixed type presses, where a negative of the entire page was carved out of a slab of wood (or possibly metal). Handy for printing up stuff that didn't change very often, such as money or canonical judicial and religious texts, but a real PITA for pamphlets, novels etc. Gutenberg is credited with inventing movable type, which made the printing of ephemeral texts much more economical.
I hate to break this to you, but patented stuff is published for all to see in the course of the patenting process. It is already available for any and all to see, and putting patent information on a t-shirt is not illegal. Go visit http://www.patents.ibm.com sometime. You might be surprised.
The last paragraph of the Suck article is really from last Thursday's "All the Summer's a Stage" by 40th Street Black. The technical opinions of someone who cannot handle copy'n'paste should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt...
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2. Optical Char Recognition
IWPTA "optional char recognition", which I think would make another keen patent application:
Optional Character Recognition: An input system for electronic data processing machines by keyboard, mouse, scanner other other input devices, whereby characters entered by the user may, at the program's discretion and/or whim, be stored as the characters the user actually intended.
Errr, IANAL either (Surprise!), but I'm pretty sure they can't nail you for destroying evidence if you shred your files BEFORE they come to arrest you. It doesn't become evidence until then.
Given that Edison was the one-man MPAA of his time, I'm not sure whether comparing anyone to him is such a great compliment.
The ISS (aka "Freedom") was already vaporwared 10 or 9 years ago. Other than that, I know how you feel, dude.
128 kiloBytes/sec isn't slow at all.
When I were a lad, 128 kiloBITS/sec wasn't slow at all. In fact, way back when (== June '99), 56 kbits was pretty much it. It's them nasty modems that give you that perception.
(Full Disclosure: I was on modem '89 - '99. I first got cable in January. For about a month or so afterwards, I used to wipe my harddisk and reinstall Debian Potato every other day, just for the hell of it. Consider this: While I was in high school, I hoped that I'd one day make enough money to afford a 2400 baud modem. We've come a long way, fellas.)
Irt.org, man. They saved my life many times over about a year ago.
Nope, computers with CD-ROM drives do NOT count as recording devices under the AHRA. Otherwise you'd have to pay the RIAA tax when purchasing a CD-ROM drive.
Well, it should be possible to do it in Perl as well, although my P3rl h4Xor sk!11z aren't up to it (yet). Even better would be a Perl script that generates the actual code on the fly, say by permutating the US Constitution or such. Actually, I'll get cracking on that one right away. See yez.
A flamebaiter, I believe. Remember, a troll is supposed to be cunningly devised to make the respondents look more stupid than the troll. I don't see that happening here.
I don't know why we keep having these intellectual property bitchfests if people don't learn anything from them.
You do NOT have to enforce your patents. You can be choosy about who you sue over patent infringement. It loses you nothing. After 17-20 years, depending on the granting agency, your patent is toast whether you enforce it or not.
It's TRADEMARKS you have to defend. And considering that you can trademark (not patent, or copyright) such stirring slogans as "Thank you" or "Where do you want to go today?", it's just as well that you have to keep on your toes for that.
It looks as if none of the approved opensource licences fit your bill. Forth is apparently a breed apart. I would recommend patching the BSD licence to include "as well as the source code of the original program" after "the above copyright," in clause 2.
Nope - although the computer they used was an Apple notebook (PowerPC, IIRC), it purported to run Windows 95. I found ID4 a lot more believable when I realized that the aliens were really pissed-off Windows beta testers.
Agreed, and that is also something releases are supposed to check for. I might have had the very situation you described as well.
AFAIK, the [stable|unstable] does not refer to the state of the software but to the packaging that the maintainers do. Packaging is not trivial and sometimes people screw up[0]. The release cycle covers getting nifty new stuff and newer versions of traditional stuff and making sure that the packaging is not broken. At last count (right now, in fact), Potato covered 4402 packages, so it took a while.
[0] E.g.: Package foo depends on libBar being exactly v1.01, when in fact v1.01 or better will do. I've seen it, but rarely.
Why did you have to go and do that? Now we can look forward to an "US vs. Rest Of World" flamewar along with the "Many Eyes Of Open Source" one.
OTOH, we could go all out and add Perl vs. Python. And I think it's been a full two stories since the last Gnome vs. KDE one. And maybe emacs vs. vi also fits in there somewhere (doesn't emacs have a GPG whatsit?).
OTTH, let's not and pretend that we had.
It certainly is. And since my old P166 came with Descent and Panzer General, I suppose that those are parts of the OS as well - according to Everly Quality Research(tm). Not to mention my mousepad.
Speak for yourself.
I've been using Gnutella for two months now, and I never stole anything. All the stuff I got was sanctioned for download and sharing by its creators. If you cannot envision that someone might use a peer-to-peer filesharing tool for legitimate purposes, I urge you to seek therapy immediately.
ObLawsuit: I think mp3board.com should sue Britney and N'Sync for making music that people want to rip. Come to think of it, mp3board.com should sue them on general principles. I know I would.
But it influenced the writers of GURPS Cyberpunk into listing it in the 'Inspirational Watching/Reading' section of their book. It might have been crap, but it had some influence.
While I'm earning my (-1, Offtopic), I'd like to mention a movie that had entirely too much influence in the sense that it managed to get funding for at least four sequels:
Witchboard 1-5. These movies are seriously the most terrible, heinous excrement I have ever had the misfortune to witness. If someone is compiling a list of "Top 50 Movies That Would Make Visiting Aliens Doubt Human Sentience", Witchboard should be at the top.
--
Perhaps I didn't make myself clear enough. You didn't have to take the time to refute all my arguments - I know they're bogus. My point was this: Gnome and KDE are so similar that that was all it took to decide me.
Let's not go there.
--Why would end users be any less biased than developers? At least developers have valid technical reasons for developing for a particular platform. For an end user, Gnome and KDE are functionally so similar (especially when you ditch KWM in favour of $WINDOWMANAGER), that preference for one over the other is quite likely to be irrational. As it is with me: I use Gnome for several spurious reasons.
- Superior eye candy. I just like Gnome's icons, themes etc. better than KDE's. I'm fully aware that I could just take this stuff from
/usr/share/pixmaps and stick it into the corresponding KDE directory, but I'm a lazy bastard.
- Warm GPL fuzzies. I know that the QPL is just as free as the GPL, or as near as makes no dammit. But it ain't the GPL.
- Neato software. There's a ton of stuff out for both Gnome and KDE. These programs pretty much cover an identical scope of functionality, but the Gnome stuff just seems, y'know, neater.
Enough irrationality? You want more? I saved the whopper for last:- KDE tries too hard to look like Windows. This is really just a variation of the eye-candy argument, but consider this: For years now, I have been delighted with BSODs, ludicrous error messages and B&D user environment courtesy of Microsoft. I don't want to be reminded of that every time I switch on my screen. I run a different OS now, and it should look different as well.
There. If that didn't teach you not to look for unbiased views from end users, nothing will.--
I apologize in advance for the lame offtopicness of this post, but I just came home from seeing PB, and I would really like to know this:
At the end of PB, when Mima looks into the rear mirror and says "Yep, I am" (or words to that effect), is it her voice or Rumi's? I saw the movie dubbed and the voices sounded really similar. Sorry
Other Slashdot artticles you may see today...
I was under the impression that the Chinese had fixed type presses, where a negative of the entire page was carved out of a slab of wood (or possibly metal). Handy for printing up stuff that didn't change very often, such as money or canonical judicial and religious texts, but a real PITA for pamphlets, novels etc. Gutenberg is credited with inventing movable type, which made the printing of ephemeral texts much more economical.
I hate to break this to you, but patented stuff is published for all to see in the course of the patenting process. It is already available for any and all to see, and putting patent information on a t-shirt is not illegal. Go visit http://www.patents.ibm.com sometime. You might be surprised.
The last paragraph of the Suck article is really from last Thursday's "All the Summer's a Stage" by 40th Street Black. ...
The technical opinions of someone who cannot handle copy'n'paste should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt