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User: lcrocker

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Comments · 38

  1. Re:Worrying about piracy on Publishing-Online or "Dead Tree" Format? · · Score: 1

    Author's cant tour? Nonsense. I once personally paid $100 to see Dave Barry in person (those were the good seats--I think the masses paid $20). It was a large hall; I'm sure it raised thousands. I've paid $300 to go to a conference where I met and spoke with Marvin Minsky, Eric Drexler, and others. I'm not the only one. The full text of Eric's book "Engines of Creation" is online, and he still makes a good living out of it.

  2. Re:This isn't a haiku on Iridium Saved? · · Score: 1

    Well, it's a haiku in London, where it would be pronounced "i-ridge-um".

  3. Re:WIMPS! on Dialectizer Shut Down · · Score: 1

    As I said, if it came to an actual suit that might be a different matter--but a C&D letter is NOT legal action, it's just a damned letter. It would actually be risky for BofA to take real legal action, so there whores, er, lawyers would probably advise against it.

  4. WIMPS! on Dialectizer Shut Down · · Score: 1

    Why is it that everyone who gets a worthless C&D letter feels like he has to fold? Where's the backbone? Why don't they send the appropriate FOAD response and be done with it? If it were a subpoena or court order, that might be different, but a C&D is just blowing smoke. This one is so clearly contrary to law that the appropriate response is not only to refuse, but to insult the education of the lawyers who sent it. Fight back for a change. Demand your rights or lose them.

  5. Re:Some language, any language on Which CGI Language For Which Purpose? · · Score: 1

    Yes, they're called Java Servlets. Fully compiled, and run in a persistent VM that is a peer of the web server process, and with the full API of the language available. Apache runs them well, and there's even an optional ASP-like syntax for specifying them ("JSP") that doesn't suffer from the runtime interpreter overhead of ASP.

  6. Humility on What Is Important In A User Interface? · · Score: 1

    The most important feature of any interface, and one that is missing from many, is humility. That is, making sure the interface doesn't try to be trendy or cute or interesting or novel. Just make it right. Just make it look like what the user is already used to. Don't take up too much screen space or menu space or other resources, don't demand user attention unnecessarily, play nice with other apps, use standard, common formats. In other words, just be humble, and don't pretend your little app is the only reason I bought a computer.

  7. A great example of why copyright law doesn't work on Postscript: Who Owns The Hellmouth Posts? · · Score: 1

    I have been skeptical of the very idea of copyright for a long time, and this episode is a great demonstration of why. The use of the comments is pretty clearly a violation of the letter of the law. It's also quite clearly the right thing to do, and I applaud you for doing it. These comments need to be heard. Copyright was meant to encourage the production of good books, not to strangle them in red tape.

  8. Re:I think this is a job for distributed.net on Grok Goldbach, Grab Gold · · Score: 1

    > If on the other hand the above proof does not > exist, then there must exist a counterexample. Not quite: there's a third alternative; that the conjecture is true, but no proof exists. Godel showed us that truth and provability are not the same thing.

  9. Re:List of Approved Licenses on Sun to Release Forte CE Under Mozilla License · · Score: 1

    ...and of course Public Domain is approved as well, which is what we _real_ free software advocates have been encouraging for years.

  10. Re:Hold on... on Please Patiently Ponder Purported Poe Puzzle · · Score: 1

    This wasn't done on a typewriter. It was clearly set in lead type (look at serveral instances of the same letter in the same orientation and they are quite distinct), which makes the inversions a simple matter of mixing normal and inverted letter blocks on each line.

  11. Re:Actually, it makes good sense. on Apple Forces Aqua Themes Off themes.org · · Score: 1

    > If Unisys had lost their patent for failing to > enforce it, or had enforced it from the > beginning, we would now have an image standard > unemcumbered by an obnoxious patent. Um, we DO have an image standard unencumbered by patents: PNG (RFC 2083) was the very first W3C recommendation, is supported by all popular web browsers and graphics applications, has more capabilities than GIF and better compression.

  12. Re:Legitimate Domain Brokering? on Cyber-Squatting vs. Legitimate Domain Brokering? · · Score: 1

    What poppycock this whole issue is. OF COURSE you sell it to the highest bidder. OF COURSE domain brokering is legal and moral. OF COURSE just plain squatting is legal and moral, no matter how many people tell you otherwise. It is a moral _duty_ to make a profit from inherently valuable things. Period. Communism is dead. And "true" capitalism demands that every street bum has the same right to make a profit as a multi-national, and the government should butt the hell out. Of course we don't have a capitalist system in the US because the government butts in both in favor of and against big business, but a guy can dream.

  13. Re:WAAAAAA I'm confused! on Abstract Programming and GPL Enforcement · · Score: 1

    Fortunantely, RMS is full of beans on that one. The "viral" nature of the GPL relies on how a court might possibly interpret "derived work", and I can't imagine any court interpreting it the way he does. None of this has been litigated properly, and for all anyone knows the whole idea might be laughed out of court (though actually I suspect much of it will hold up, because things like shrink-wrap licenses have held up).