Or there is the other way, where the architect spends the same amount of effort but designs a good house with a good layout and would appeal to a broader population. He spends a year designing 8 such homes, same as before. But instead of marketing it as unique, he markets them to large scale home development companies across the country. Let's say it's a royalty basis, $200 per home built using the plan.
This is where the analogy starts to get alittle sticky. With software the "architect's cut per home" is alot higher in proportion to the cost of the product. Its as if the architect is asking the same $20,000 per non-custom home that he might charge for a custom home, and for some reason people don't have another choice. Maybe he's the only architect in town.
From the customer's perspective they had to overpay for what they wanted, and it wasn't even designed with them in mind: They can't even modify the blueprints. Maybe the architect isn't acting immorally, but the customers would be better off to band together, pool their own architectural knowledge, and come up with a design they could all use for free and modify to their own tastes. Heck, they might even hire The Architect to make those modifications for them if he was willing to charge a reasonable rate.
This isn't communism (big or little c), and noone is saying that its wrong to be paid for programming, just that closed source is a bad deal for the customer, it's like a trap you pay to get caught in. If you're going to set up incentives for creating something you should try to avoid getting trapped by the very product you paid (perhaps indirectly or after the fact) to create. And it sounds like the EU is wising up to the fact that if they're blowing billions on software a year, maybe they should actually *get* something for it besides the short-term functionality.
[How] would you feel about saying them every morning?
[It] doesn't mean that everyone else who does not [agree] should be forced to recite them.
. . . the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to require anyone to recite the Pledge back in 1943.
The question in this current case was not should anybody be made to utter those two words, but rather whether the reciting of those words can be an administration-scheduled part of the schoolday for those who do agree with them.
You are overlooking the effect that the teacher leading the class in the pledge has on those who might 'prefer' not to say it. How many children are aware of their 'legal' right to refuse to say the pledge? The teacher, who is an absolute authority that tells them when they have to come, when they can go, what they do in between, even when they can pee, and who judges their performance in the form of a grade is suddenly a questionable, challengable person making a simple suggestion which is not required to be followed?
Maybe in the eyes of an adult, but for kids this is basically state sponsored coercion of religion (though ultimately a small one, though again, to quote a famous song, little things mean a lot).
Actually I'd say the real problem here is the amount of authority we give teachers over kids. So many teachers are incompetent power tripping nitwits that it can really perform a head-job on the kids who take them seriously. What I'd like to see is a system by which teachers are penalized for their wrongdoings and mistakes the same way the kids are. Made a mistake on the board? 5% off your pay for the day. Misled your students about whether they were required to say the Pledge? 1 hour detention and an apology to the class. Basically acted like a jackass to your students? Saturday detention.
Although I hope OpenOffice clobbers MS, I hope it doesn't help you! I hope that some esoteric bug in OpenOffice screws up all of your spreadsheets in some subtle way rendering your work undetectably invalid, lest it should ever be used in the real world.
Seriously, don't you have any morals, or even a sense of the danger you're putting yourself in (even if you don't care about the rest of the human race)? How can you sleep at night? I can't understand how you can do that sort of thing, knowing the consequences of what would happen if your work were ever used! And don't give me any malarkey about 'making the world safe by making war unthinkable'. It's your weapons which put the world as a whole at risk by those who are willing to think, and do, the unthinkable!
I was a lowly second shift computer operator working for a moderately sized retail operation, and our machine room was divided into two sections, one for the computer proper (a Sequoia mainframe) and the other was our 'office' space, where the operators had their desks, but also housed the UPS, main report printers, and air conditioner, all very noisy.
Well, sometimes when I was in the computer room with the door open to the office the interaction of the white noise from the equipment all around me gave me the impression that there were voices, that someone was holding a conversation back in the office. There was also a window between the two rooms though, so I could clearly see there wasn't anyone there. I eventually started getting the creeping suspicion on late nights with no one in the whole building, much less the computer room, that the UPS, printer, and air conditioner were plotting against me.
This culminated one weekend when I had just popped in to change the paper in the report printer, and while I was unloading the already printed reports, bent over next to the UPS, there was a tremendous BOOM!, immediately followed by a piercing wail, EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
About a minute later after I recovered my wits and stopped trembling I realized the wail was coming from the UPS fault alarm, and after a quick check to confirm that the mainframe still had power (it did, yay!) I checked the UPS display. It had a useless error message, but after consulting the manual I was able to conclude that at least we weren't about to go down barring any other unforeseen disasters. I had to call the UPS manufacturer, who sent in a service guy who showed up within an hour (yay again, I hadn't planned on spending my day at work). He diagnosed the problem as a bad power transistor that had overheated and boiled its silicone coolant, which vaporized and exploded. He replaced the board, and all was right again with the world. I never did trust those damn machines after that though.
If this (American Govt) is democracy, maybe we should give something else a try.
Wait... Huh? The gov't passes a bill trashing democracy so you want to trash democracy to keep the government from trashing democracy?
Re:In defence of the second ammendment.
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In most of your examples, Vietnam, Afganistan, WW II, the 'freedom fighters' were battling an occupying force which didn't really have a vital interest in winning the fight, do you think the US government will ever 'pull out' of the US?
And take a closer look about what I said about Yugoslavia, because it IS applicable. I wasn't talking about NATO vs. the Yugoslavians, I was talking about the KLA vs. the Yugoslavians. You remember the KLA? An armed citizen militia fighting against Serb oppression, and getting their asses kicked? They didn't stand a chance until NATO showed up. Where will NATO be if it comes down to US citizens taking advantage of their guns allowed under the 2nd amendment?
The 2nd amendment was written in a time when small arms were about the only weapon our country had, and were about all our enemies had. Its time has long passed.
Sure, an armed group would probably succeed in producing a lot of chaos and misery, but if the political will among the people of this country didn't exist to change whatever caused that group to take up arms in the first place, their violence would probably have the *opposite* effect to acheiving their aims. What did McVeigh acheive? In the end, the idea of taking up arms in the US is ludicrous.
Quite frankly, if you're suggesting that we even use the threat of a civil war to effect change in this country, I think you should have your head examined. Remember what happened the last time we tried that (and remember who was using their arms to protect against what US Government "encroachment"?)
In short, the 'protection' the 2nd amendment gives us against tyranny is useless, and probably worse than whatever injustices it would be used to correct. Our only hope is to NOT VOTE for people who will sell out our interests. Sadly I don't see that as a realistic likelyhood either in our society, but quite frankly I'd rather live in a so-called 'authoritarian' state, rather than suffer through the carnage of taking up arms for some dubious cause. Of course ideally, the American people would use their brains and we'd live in a free country where the politicians responded to our will because they knew we were paying attention and would throw them out if we didn't. Sadly, some people would rather not participate in the political process and then threaten to blow up a building later.
"Oh look! Here on my desk I have a bag of money from Sony and Warner Brothers. I also have this letter from Joe Shmoe in my district back in Georgia. Look at all this money."
Like it or not, this is the reason why there is a 2nd Amendment...
Sooner or later, if the government continues to listen more to the corporate minority, rather than the working majority, SOMETHING unpleasant is going to happen. That is, if hte American People ever grow a spine.
Statements like this make me laugh. You think the 2nd amendment does squat to protect you from the government imposing a corporate police state, either suddenly or incrementally? Yeah right. If it comes to that, the arms your allowed to bear because of the 2nd amendment wouldn't do squat for you. Look at the KLA in Kosovo versus the Yugoslav army. You think a.45, or even an M-16 is going to do squat against a tank, much less an army equipped with tanks, planes, and heavily armed troops? HAHAHA.
Would the right to bear arms have ever benefitted African-Americans, even when they were being hideously oppressed by our government and would have every right to take up arms against us? Or Native Americans? Go ask Leonard Peltier. So what makes you think there will ever be a situation where an armed group in America will ever be able to get 'justice' through force?
I mean, please, the 2nd amendment is a total anachronism. If you want to *REALLY* see how to protect your rights, look at the people who are interested in perpetuating our right to bear arms. The NRA isn't winning because of their arsenal, vast as I'm sure it is. They're winning because their members work the political process through votes and money. I can't say I agree with their passionate defense of the rights of the neighorhood lunatic to get a saturday night special when God tells him to go shoot up the Quickie Mart, but their methods are a textbook example of how to make things happen in a democracy.
I only wish that my fellow Americans were as eager to protect our rights to free speech, and other freedoms, including fair use of copyrighted materials, but lord knows that taking up arms is *never* going to be a realistic option in the U.S., no matter how just the issue, no matter how evil the government's actions, our power is the ballot box, not the bullet box. The American people don't need to grow a spine, we need to use our brains and quit voting for people who are going to steal our rights.
One of the most profitable businesses in the US, run by the richest man in the world, going after one of the poorest school districts for 'illegally' installing software on their machines for the sole purpose of *READING* documents created by legitmately purchased copies of their software does, indeed, suck.
Sure, there might have been alternatives, even from MS itself, and sure it would have been extremely preferable for that teacher to have installed StarOffice on those machines, but for MS to come down on them like a ton of bricks with an expensive software audit and threaten huge fines to a poor school district is disgusting.
On one hand, its dreadful that above.net would try to decide for its users what they can and can't see, on the other hand, god does spam suck, and whats up with Macromedia that they feel like they need to spam? Maybe something like this needs to be done to get their attention.
The real issue here seems to be that above.net is doing it 'stealthfully'. Would it be better if they returned a message saying "We're pissed at Macromedia (or site x), heres why, hope you agree"? Okay, it would be better, but I mean, would it be enough? Would it no longer be a slashdot-sin?
Please tell me he's only spending the year dead for tax purposes!
John
Re:So where does the information come from?
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If you read the article you would realize that it is suggesting that the information encoded in DNA is much more complex than our current understanding of it. However, even if we were to say that the raw volume of data that DNA uses to describe our bodies is less than the volume of data for Windows, it still wouldn't create the need for 'extra' information. Volume of data is not the same as signficance. Is Windows more complex than the Bible?
The disheartening thesis of this article is not that DNA is not complex enough to describe us, but that our knowledge is insufficent to even understand how DNA encodes the data that makes us individuals. In otherwords that DNA is, if anything, too complex, not too simple.
And, of course, its absurd to leap from the idea that the volume of data in DNA is smaller than we thought to the suggestion that this somehow 'proves' that there is a soul providing that extra info. The concept of the existance of the soul and the supernatural isn't inherently silly, but trying to use this as proof of it is comical.
Okay, stupid question, but a quick search hasn't given me an answer. Can Linux be ported to the Palm or Handspring PDA's? Why try and convince people to buy a different piece of hardware that *won't* run PalmOS? Why not just try and replace PalmOS on the already popular PDA's, the way Unix widely replaced DEC's operating systems on the PDP's and Vaxes?
You meant "parliament", presumably. Getting all the right letters isn't much better if you can't get them in the right order.
And although I utterly sympathize with the Rab[b]i, and admire his cursing skills, and agree with him that a spell checker for posts would be nice, I am still a little confused as to how leaving a "b" out of "rabbi" symbolizes his people's pain and suffering.
Revernd Brad Majors
The Petronas Towers are *not* taller than the Sears tower. If you were standing on the top floor of the Sears Tower, and the Petronas tower was next door, you would be looking down on the people on the top floor of the Petronas Tower.
Its only by a quirk in the architectural definition of what is part of the building and what is not which makes some people think the Petronas Tower is taller. The decorative spire on the top of the Petronas tower, which is defined as being part of the building, rises above the roof of the Sears Tower, but it's merely decorative. However the Sears Tower's antennas which have a functional purpose for the building, including for the use mentioned in this article, but are not considered architecturally to be part of the building, top the Petronas Tower's spire.
So there you have it. A useless piece of ornamentation hardly makes Petronas taller than the full functional height of the Sears Tower.
While I believe the man's main problem is that people are taking his stuff for free, he does an awful job of making that point, even if you ignore the all-caps.
If you read the article you would see he's suing AOL, which is not even tangentally involved in the copyright infringements he's so upset about, just because people could read, through AOL, the newsgroup where the copyright infringment happened. That makes me wonder what he's really talking about. I conclude that he just doesn't know what the hell he's talking about and hes just an all-caps raving jerk.
Either that, or, as I said before, its a brilliant way of getting people to sample his work for free and then buy printed copies.
And hey, while we're at it, did Roger Zelazny die poor because people were pirating his work? You and Harlan should realize that artists have bigger enemies than their fans trading copies of their works (that goes for most of the artists upset about Napster, too).
And this guy is an award-winning writer? Sheesh, he must have one hell of an editor. First the all-caps, second... what exactly is his beef?
The closest I could figure out before I shrugged my shoulders in apathy is that some guy was posting Ellison's short stories to a newsgroup, and when his ISP was notified of the copyright infringements they cut off his account. So now Ellison is suing AOL and the owners of this guy's ISP? AOL wasn't even the poster's ISP as far as I can tell? Ellison seems to be upset about the fact that people were able to read these postings on AOL, as well as for his stuff being traded on Gnutella, and since an AOL subsidiary developed the Gnutella protocol he seems to blame them for that too. Thats as close as I can figure, anyhow.
Too bad Ellison didn't use any of his award-winning writing skills in making his arguement. Seeing this sure doesn't give me any interest in buying his works OR pirating them.
Maybe thats the ploy: Ellison raises a stink about his works being pirated, which then alerts people that they can get his stuff for free, people then download and sample his work, and finally (this is the brilliant part) buy a book so they can read it away from their computer.
And another thing, whats his deal with dragging dead authors like Asimov and Heinlein into this? I don't know what their opinions would have been on this matter, maybe they would have agreed with him, but they definately had a tendency to look at things in an unconventional way, so I think they might have embraced their works being distributed on the web, via the technology that they found so fascinating.
And then theres the whole
"WELL, WHAT IS KICK AN ACRONYM FOR?" WE RESPOND, "IT'S FOR KICK 'EM IN THE ASS!"
Great, thanks Harlan. Hey, how 'bout you look up 'acronym' in your dictionary, or just stop capitalizing the word 'Kick' in your group's name, eh?
No. Paper-pushing is dead. You aren't going to build a multi-billion dollar business on a dead market with no margins.
Despite your blind assertion that printers are dead (what planet are you from?), I think the point was that even if HP is riding on its printers, the fact that it can do so is evidence that HP could still be a major force if they got behind Linux and started doing things as well as they do their printers.
In other words, the printers are enough to keep paying attention to HP.
When people first started imagining computers running real world objects it may have seemed more efficient to have a humanoid robot be able to use human tools instead of a plethora of specialized smart tools. However, now the costs of the 'brains' have dropped drastically, and wireless communications would allow these tools to communicate with even smarter sources if they weren't smart enough to do something by themselves. So the question comes back, is it more efficient to build small, smart, special purpose tools or generic simple human-or-robot usable tools, and one big complex smart human-like robot?
Probably the answer is both. Smarter more capable tools should be built when they can do most of their jobs without human help and without too much more cost, but some more generally capable bots would be needed to do tasks that a computer might be *smart* enough to do, but the tool itself can't be easily designed to do. Like a wheeled robot vacuum cleaner might not be able to walk itself up the stairs.
Even then, theres no need for the general-purpose bot to be human-shaped. A quadraped bot with a set of arms no human torso or head could do it too. Basically the only *real* reason to make a human-shaped bot is because its a cool challenge. If the goal was to make helpful general purpose bots in the short term future I can't think of any reason that it needs to be a bipedal human-shaped bot. Bipedalism works well for us, and its a neat trick, especially if you could to it cheaply, but somehow I don't think the Honda or Sony jobs will be cheap any time in the near future.
Anyone notice that if you click the "Authorized Distributors" link on that naked pc page, the default country to find MS Authorized Distributors in is Afganistan?
Apparently Bill likes the Taliban's thinking on religious freedom and wants to apply it to the software markets.
Yeah, Well, You guys go around opening up nuclear subs that other superpowers lose, so how can we use you as an example?
Sheesh. Next thing you know you'll be telling us your women are tall, blonde, and curvaceous, so other countries with decent land-lines should have them too.
If only Norwegian women were as easy as Norwegian cell phones.
2. The RIAA , which is the Recording Industry Artists of America, a UNION FOR AND BY THE ARTISTS, chooses to fight the digital theft of music. THey go after Napster.
Uhm. No. The RIAA is the RI ASSOCIATION of A. They are *NOT* a union, they are an industry organization of the record companies. They do not represent the artists in any direct way.
To quote from their website"Eligibility for corporate membership in the Recording Industry Association of America... is open to legitimate record companies... that are engaged in the production and sale, under their own brand label, of recordings of performances for home use. The RIAA does not offer individual or associate memberships."
Slashdot Mirror
This is where the analogy starts to get alittle sticky. With software the "architect's cut per home" is alot higher in proportion to the cost of the product. Its as if the architect is asking the same $20,000 per non-custom home that he might charge for a custom home, and for some reason people don't have another choice. Maybe he's the only architect in town.
From the customer's perspective they had to overpay for what they wanted, and it wasn't even designed with them in mind: They can't even modify the blueprints. Maybe the architect isn't acting immorally, but the customers would be better off to band together, pool their own architectural knowledge, and come up with a design they could all use for free and modify to their own tastes. Heck, they might even hire The Architect to make those modifications for them if he was willing to charge a reasonable rate.
This isn't communism (big or little c), and noone is saying that its wrong to be paid for programming, just that closed source is a bad deal for the customer, it's like a trap you pay to get caught in. If you're going to set up incentives for creating something you should try to avoid getting trapped by the very product you paid (perhaps indirectly or after the fact) to create. And it sounds like the EU is wising up to the fact that if they're blowing billions on software a year, maybe they should actually *get* something for it besides the short-term functionality.
[It] doesn't mean that everyone else who does not [agree] should be forced to recite them.
. . . the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to require anyone to recite the Pledge back in 1943.
The question in this current case was not should anybody be made to utter those two words, but rather whether the reciting of those words can be an administration-scheduled part of the schoolday for those who do agree with them.
You are overlooking the effect that the teacher leading the class in the pledge has on those who might 'prefer' not to say it. How many children are aware of their 'legal' right to refuse to say the pledge? The teacher, who is an absolute authority that tells them when they have to come, when they can go, what they do in between, even when they can pee, and who judges their performance in the form of a grade is suddenly a questionable, challengable person making a simple suggestion which is not required to be followed?
Maybe in the eyes of an adult, but for kids this is basically state sponsored coercion of religion (though ultimately a small one, though again, to quote a famous song, little things mean a lot).
Actually I'd say the real problem here is the amount of authority we give teachers over kids. So many teachers are incompetent power tripping nitwits that it can really perform a head-job on the kids who take them seriously. What I'd like to see is a system by which teachers are penalized for their wrongdoings and mistakes the same way the kids are. Made a mistake on the board? 5% off your pay for the day. Misled your students about whether they were required to say the Pledge? 1 hour detention and an apology to the class. Basically acted like a jackass to your students? Saturday detention.
Although I hope OpenOffice clobbers MS, I hope it doesn't help you! I hope that some esoteric bug in OpenOffice screws up all of your spreadsheets in some subtle way rendering your work undetectably invalid, lest it should ever be used in the real world.
Seriously, don't you have any morals, or even a sense of the danger you're putting yourself in (even if you don't care about the rest of the human race)? How can you sleep at night? I can't understand how you can do that sort of thing, knowing the consequences of what would happen if your work were ever used! And don't give me any malarkey about 'making the world safe by making war unthinkable'. It's your weapons which put the world as a whole at risk by those who are willing to think, and do, the unthinkable!
I was a lowly second shift computer operator working for a moderately sized retail operation, and our machine room was divided into two sections, one for the computer proper (a Sequoia mainframe) and the other was our 'office' space, where the operators had their desks, but also housed the UPS, main report printers, and air conditioner, all very noisy.
Well, sometimes when I was in the computer room with the door open to the office the interaction of the white noise from the equipment all around me gave me the impression that there were voices, that someone was holding a conversation back in the office. There was also a window between the two rooms though, so I could clearly see there wasn't anyone there. I eventually started getting the creeping suspicion on late nights with no one in the whole building, much less the computer room, that the UPS, printer, and air conditioner were plotting against me.
This culminated one weekend when I had just popped in to change the paper in the report printer, and while I was unloading the already printed reports, bent over next to the UPS, there was a tremendous BOOM!, immediately followed by a piercing wail, EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
About a minute later after I recovered my wits and stopped trembling I realized the wail was coming from the UPS fault alarm, and after a quick check to confirm that the mainframe still had power (it did, yay!) I checked the UPS display. It had a useless error message, but after consulting the manual I was able to conclude that at least we weren't about to go down barring any other unforeseen disasters. I had to call the UPS manufacturer, who sent in a service guy who showed up within an hour (yay again, I hadn't planned on spending my day at work). He diagnosed the problem as a bad power transistor that had overheated and boiled its silicone coolant, which vaporized and exploded. He replaced the board, and all was right again with the world. I never did trust those damn machines after that though.
Wait... Huh? The gov't passes a bill trashing democracy so you want to trash democracy to keep the government from trashing democracy?
The 2nd amendment was written in a time when small arms were about the only weapon our country had, and were about all our enemies had. Its time has long passed.
Sure, an armed group would probably succeed in producing a lot of chaos and misery, but if the political will among the people of this country didn't exist to change whatever caused that group to take up arms in the first place, their violence would probably have the *opposite* effect to acheiving their aims. What did McVeigh acheive? In the end, the idea of taking up arms in the US is ludicrous.
Quite frankly, if you're suggesting that we even use the threat of a civil war to effect change in this country, I think you should have your head examined. Remember what happened the last time we tried that (and remember who was using their arms to protect against what US Government "encroachment"?)
In short, the 'protection' the 2nd amendment gives us against tyranny is useless, and probably worse than whatever injustices it would be used to correct. Our only hope is to NOT VOTE for people who will sell out our interests. Sadly I don't see that as a realistic likelyhood either in our society, but quite frankly I'd rather live in a so-called 'authoritarian' state, rather than suffer through the carnage of taking up arms for some dubious cause. Of course ideally, the American people would use their brains and we'd live in a free country where the politicians responded to our will because they knew we were paying attention and would throw them out if we didn't. Sadly, some people would rather not participate in the political process and then threaten to blow up a building later.
Like it or not, this is the reason why there is a 2nd Amendment...
Sooner or later, if the government continues to listen more to the corporate minority, rather than the working majority, SOMETHING unpleasant is going to happen. That is, if hte American People ever grow a spine.
Statements like this make me laugh. You think the 2nd amendment does squat to protect you from the government imposing a corporate police state, either suddenly or incrementally? Yeah right. If it comes to that, the arms your allowed to bear because of the 2nd amendment wouldn't do squat for you. Look at the KLA in Kosovo versus the Yugoslav army. You think a .45, or even an M-16 is going to do squat against a tank, much less an army equipped with tanks, planes, and heavily armed troops? HAHAHA.
Would the right to bear arms have ever benefitted African-Americans, even when they were being hideously oppressed by our government and would have every right to take up arms against us? Or Native Americans? Go ask Leonard Peltier. So what makes you think there will ever be a situation where an armed group in America will ever be able to get 'justice' through force?
I mean, please, the 2nd amendment is a total anachronism. If you want to *REALLY* see how to protect your rights, look at the people who are interested in perpetuating our right to bear arms. The NRA isn't winning because of their arsenal, vast as I'm sure it is. They're winning because their members work the political process through votes and money. I can't say I agree with their passionate defense of the rights of the neighorhood lunatic to get a saturday night special when God tells him to go shoot up the Quickie Mart, but their methods are a textbook example of how to make things happen in a democracy.
I only wish that my fellow Americans were as eager to protect our rights to free speech, and other freedoms, including fair use of copyrighted materials, but lord knows that taking up arms is *never* going to be a realistic option in the U.S., no matter how just the issue, no matter how evil the government's actions, our power is the ballot box, not the bullet box. The American people don't need to grow a spine, we need to use our brains and quit voting for people who are going to steal our rights.
Sure, there might have been alternatives, even from MS itself, and sure it would have been extremely preferable for that teacher to have installed StarOffice on those machines, but for MS to come down on them like a ton of bricks with an expensive software audit and threaten huge fines to a poor school district is disgusting.
The real issue here seems to be that above.net is doing it 'stealthfully'. Would it be better if they returned a message saying "We're pissed at Macromedia (or site x), heres why, hope you agree"? Okay, it would be better, but I mean, would it be enough? Would it no longer be a slashdot-sin?
John
John
The disheartening thesis of this article is not that DNA is not complex enough to describe us, but that our knowledge is insufficent to even understand how DNA encodes the data that makes us individuals. In otherwords that DNA is, if anything, too complex, not too simple.
And, of course, its absurd to leap from the idea that the volume of data in DNA is smaller than we thought to the suggestion that this somehow 'proves' that there is a soul providing that extra info. The concept of the existance of the soul and the supernatural isn't inherently silly, but trying to use this as proof of it is comical.
John
John
And although I utterly sympathize with the Rab[b]i, and admire his cursing skills, and agree with him that a spell checker for posts would be nice, I am still a little confused as to how leaving a "b" out of "rabbi" symbolizes his people's pain and suffering. Revernd Brad Majors
Its only by a quirk in the architectural definition of what is part of the building and what is not which makes some people think the Petronas Tower is taller. The decorative spire on the top of the Petronas tower, which is defined as being part of the building, rises above the roof of the Sears Tower, but it's merely decorative. However the Sears Tower's antennas which have a functional purpose for the building, including for the use mentioned in this article, but are not considered architecturally to be part of the building, top the Petronas Tower's spire.
So there you have it. A useless piece of ornamentation hardly makes Petronas taller than the full functional height of the Sears Tower.
Subscriber ID: censorship4
Password: sucks
[the preview button is my friend... the preview button is my friend...]
subscriber id: censorship4 password: sucks
If you read the article you would see he's suing AOL, which is not even tangentally involved in the copyright infringements he's so upset about, just because people could read, through AOL, the newsgroup where the copyright infringment happened. That makes me wonder what he's really talking about. I conclude that he just doesn't know what the hell he's talking about and hes just an all-caps raving jerk.
Either that, or, as I said before, its a brilliant way of getting people to sample his work for free and then buy printed copies.
And hey, while we're at it, did Roger Zelazny die poor because people were pirating his work? You and Harlan should realize that artists have bigger enemies than their fans trading copies of their works (that goes for most of the artists upset about Napster, too).
The closest I could figure out before I shrugged my shoulders in apathy is that some guy was posting Ellison's short stories to a newsgroup, and when his ISP was notified of the copyright infringements they cut off his account. So now Ellison is suing AOL and the owners of this guy's ISP? AOL wasn't even the poster's ISP as far as I can tell? Ellison seems to be upset about the fact that people were able to read these postings on AOL, as well as for his stuff being traded on Gnutella, and since an AOL subsidiary developed the Gnutella protocol he seems to blame them for that too. Thats as close as I can figure, anyhow.
Too bad Ellison didn't use any of his award-winning writing skills in making his arguement. Seeing this sure doesn't give me any interest in buying his works OR pirating them.
Maybe thats the ploy: Ellison raises a stink about his works being pirated, which then alerts people that they can get his stuff for free, people then download and sample his work, and finally (this is the brilliant part) buy a book so they can read it away from their computer.
And another thing, whats his deal with dragging dead authors like Asimov and Heinlein into this? I don't know what their opinions would have been on this matter, maybe they would have agreed with him, but they definately had a tendency to look at things in an unconventional way, so I think they might have embraced their works being distributed on the web, via the technology that they found so fascinating.
And then theres the whole
"WELL, WHAT IS KICK AN ACRONYM FOR?" WE RESPOND, "IT'S FOR KICK 'EM IN THE ASS!"
Great, thanks Harlan. Hey, how 'bout you look up 'acronym' in your dictionary, or just stop capitalizing the word 'Kick' in your group's name, eh?
No. Paper-pushing is dead. You aren't going to build a multi-billion dollar business on a dead market with no margins.
Despite your blind assertion that printers are dead (what planet are you from?), I think the point was that even if HP is riding on its printers, the fact that it can do so is evidence that HP could still be a major force if they got behind Linux and started doing things as well as they do their printers.
In other words, the printers are enough to keep paying attention to HP.
Probably the answer is both. Smarter more capable tools should be built when they can do most of their jobs without human help and without too much more cost, but some more generally capable bots would be needed to do tasks that a computer might be *smart* enough to do, but the tool itself can't be easily designed to do. Like a wheeled robot vacuum cleaner might not be able to walk itself up the stairs.
Even then, theres no need for the general-purpose bot to be human-shaped. A quadraped bot with a set of arms no human torso or head could do it too. Basically the only *real* reason to make a human-shaped bot is because its a cool challenge. If the goal was to make helpful general purpose bots in the short term future I can't think of any reason that it needs to be a bipedal human-shaped bot. Bipedalism works well for us, and its a neat trick, especially if you could to it cheaply, but somehow I don't think the Honda or Sony jobs will be cheap any time in the near future.
And crawling on the planet's face
some insects called the human race
lost in time, and lost in space
and meaning
(once more for the virgins!)
meaning
Apparently Bill likes the Taliban's thinking on religious freedom and wants to apply it to the software markets.
Sheesh. Next thing you know you'll be telling us your women are tall, blonde, and curvaceous, so other countries with decent land-lines should have them too.
If only Norwegian women were as easy as Norwegian cell phones.
Uhm. No. The RIAA is the RI ASSOCIATION of A. They are *NOT* a union, they are an industry organization of the record companies. They do not represent the artists in any direct way.
To quote from their website "Eligibility for corporate membership in the Recording Industry Association of America ... is open to legitimate record companies ... that are engaged in the production and sale, under their own brand label, of recordings of performances for home use. The RIAA does not offer individual or associate memberships."