No, not like people accuse JonKatz of it every fucking article. Got boring, moving on to Jamie? I can't tell you how fucking entertaining it is. Really enlivens the conversation.
Yeah, it's SO FUCKING ORIGINAL to say "All your _____ are belong to _____". Get a fucking clue. At least accuse them of being boring and unoriginal, not of plagiarism. That's like saying, "They stole the headline '5 Dead in 6.3 Earthquake' from CNN!".
This is insightful? This is the same troll that gets posted to every trademark discussion, but with a lot of "fuck" thrown in. Yes, we know trademark dilution can cause you to lose your trademark. Yes, we know it happened to Intel with their x86 line. But unless you think it's a GOOD thing that people can't call their project OpenIL without fear of being sued into the ground, try to advance your thinking beyond the couple of words your lawyer friend told you and see what can be done about it.
Oh, and if you think it IS a good thing that he can't call his project OpenIL, pull your head out of your ass.
Now, in order to get modded up by the same moderator that wasted a point on Graymalkin, let me rephrase all of that:
This is fucking insightful? This is the same fucking troll that gets fucking posted to every fucking trademark discussion, but with a lot of fucking "fuck" thrown in. Yes, we fucking know trademark fucking dilution can fucking cause you to lose your fucking trademark. Fuck yes, we fucking know it happened to Intel with their xfucking86 line. But fuck, unless you think it's a fucking GOOD thing that fucking people can't call their fucking project OpenFuckingIL without fear of being fucking sued into the fucking ground, try to advance your thinking beyond the couple of fucking words your lawyer-fucking friend told you and see what can be fucking done about it.
Oh, and if you fucking think it IS a good fucking thing that he can't call his project OpenFuckingIL, pull your fucking head out of your fucking ass. Fuck
Many wireless devices don't have TCP/IP, since it's not worth implementing it-- they're just there for HTTP, so they use an easier transfer protocol more suitable to wireless. That means, though, that on a lot of those clients you don't have TCP/IP, which certainly cuts down on hackability. This might be an easy way to implement TCP/IP, without having to hack their proprietary protocol. Yeah, it'd probably be slow as hell on a wireless e-mail client, but....
It's actually fairly amusing for a couple reasons.
1) This is a parody of the typical MS-bashing story they post, and you actually have to read the whole thing before you're sure it's not real, because this is/.
2) A lot of people actually DO think it's serious, which scares the hell out of me. But it's still funny. For example, this post.
I don't care if Linux is more powerful when Windows is just so much easier to manage. I do WORK with my time, not bug downloads and system management.
Let's hear it for anecdotal evidence. Oddly enough, your post is completely 180 degrees from my experiences. Let me tell you about last Monday at work.
Get to work. NT is acting funny. Reboot-- ooh, look! Unable to find NTLDR. Shit. Find new hard drive. Install NT. 3 reboots later, I have basic NT on my box. Not bad, right? Except that it's missing all the software I need, like Outlook, the latest IE, Visual J++, the latest Detonator drivers, vim, etc.. NINE reboots later, my system is almost back to how I had it. NINE. Read that a third time: NINE FUCKING REBOOTS. That's IN ADDITON to the 3 reboots for the initial install. Oh, and the system's still not like I had it, even though I've recovered the old hard drive's data. Why? Because all of my configurations are kept in some voodoo registry file that I can't get 'em out of. I could easily copy the config files on a Linux box.
Brief summary of last Monday: 9:30 am, NT box goes down. 6:00pm, NT box back up, MOSTLY the way I want it-- it's STILL not how I want it, on Friday.
Linux sucks? Linux is hard to install? I had NEVER installed Linux before; hell, I'd hardly ever used it, just a bunch of Unix. I had no clue what I was doing, but I went out and picked up a copy of slack. After just a few hours, I've got all my devices going, XWindows up, KDE and Gnome, and a frickin FTP server so I can grab my files at work.
To get this MILDLY on topic, let's do another comparison. You don't think the latest security fixes are a big deal? You don't think it's important that Windows has more frickin holes than swiss cheese? How about the immense amount of time lost to my company when the ILOVEYOU virus hit? I think that's pretty important. Oh, but it was easy to install the patch-- oh, wait, they denied there was even a problem until days after it hit. Let's hear it for closed source!
I don't know what fucking fairy land you live in that everything's just peachy on Windows ME, but if you ever work at a real Windows-dependent shop, you'll see all the crap they have to put up with. Don't even get me started about that piece of shit called SourceSafe-- suffice it to say all our SS servers are now called things like "notsafe".
Of course. I was simply advocating critical reading, as evidenced by my concluding statement, "as long as you keep that in mind, you can usually dig through all the bullshit and find out the real story". Additionally, I was warning of the dangers of complete omission, which can often be even more dangerous than hidden bias because you're not even aware there's anything there to be biased about.
So there ya go, my entire post reduced to an SAT choice.
Unrelated comment first - You're looking for comments from a major publisher where they admit to pirating the works of freelancers? That would be like getting Shawn Fanning to admit that Napster exists primarily to pirate copyrighted music. Not going to happen...
That's not unrelated at all. It's the whole reason it's going to be next to impossible to find decent coverage on this issue. Media outlets, like any other business, will do what they must to remain in business. In this age of giant conglomerates, they'll do what they must to keep their parent companies and their parent companies' other companies in business.
By way of example, notice how the definition of the word "stealing" has suddenly been changed by the mainstream media? Since when is making an unauthorized copy stealing? It's piracy, sure, but when I copy something, I'm not taking anything from the original owner. There's the specious argument, "you would have GIVEN them something otherwise", but of course that's generally false-- people who pirate hundreds of games or CDs weren't planning on buying all of them. But once major media started tossing the word "stealing" into their reports on Napster et. al., it went by almost unnoticed, until it had seeped its way into the standard discourse. Napster isn't stealing. It's piracy.
More blatantly obvious is this article, about a major case where Fox was sued by its reporters when they were fired for refusing to distort a story. The reporters were awarded $425,000. Sound familiar? Probably not, because few people reported on it. But it sure was a big story to me. But perhaps this quote from Fox's defense team will shed some light on the subject: "There is no law, rule or regulation against slanting the news."
They tell you what they want you to hear, and they just ignore what they'd rather you didn't know. As long as you keep that in mind, you can usually dig through all the bullshit and find out the real story.
San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art is doing an Art in Technological Times exhibit, complete with strange music and quotes by Nicolas Negroponte. You can check out the exhibition's web site, but more interesting to you if you're not in the SF area might be the online presentation, which may be more practical then getting to SF.
The exhibit, of course, is better than the on-line version; the on-line version is a bit gratuitous in its use of neat flash techniques and new interface choices, but it's worth a view.
I suspect the plaintiffs did little if anything to protect the information they were bothered about appearing on the defendant's site. Even if they did, once discovered (again like DeCSS), can they protect it? Where is the IP right in your address and phone number?
This is bullshit. I know some doctors that are harassed by these assholes, and they DO try to protect their privacy. Almost all of them try to keep the information secret-- they know what the dangers are. It inevitably gets out, because they follow them home. They follow their neighbors home, too, and impersonate other people to try to find out more about the doctors.
Yes, it's all legally obtained. Just like a very long list of credit card numbers can be legally obtained. Is is legal to post them? Probably not, but I'm really not familiar with the reasoning the court would use to say so.
Yes, but the patent was granted earlier this year, which means it was patented quite some time before.
If they hope to challenge it, they'll have to go with obviousness, which the patent obviously is. We did exactly what they patented to slap our i18n info into our databases, which didn't accept double byte characters. It's a trick i18n firms have been using for years, and, as usual, it's astonishing that someone could get a patent on anything this obvious.
Here's the heart of their patent: "The domain name is converted to a standard format which can represent all language character sets, such as UNICODE. The UNICODE string is then transformed to be in RFC1035 compliant format." Or, according to the article, "This solution involves converting foreign language characters into Unicode, a computer industry standard, and then encoding them in U.S. ASCII for transmission over the Internet."
There's an obscene amount of prior art for this, applied to databases, dll's, and pretty much anything you can think of, except DNS. Even the courts usually don't allow a patent to stand that's simply old hat applied to a slightly tweaked problem.
Actually, I wish you'd expand on your comment a little. I'm quite the amateur with Linux. I decided to put up an FTP server because it's useful, and it was easy. Sendmail also. Closed most of the rest.
But here's my question, and what I hope you (or some other kind soul) will point me to: to me, as you suggested, it isn't "that obvious" why my machine may be insecure in oh so many ways. If I decide to turn on a bunch of other services, for example, my system will probably be exploitable as all hell. But where's the best place to find out about all this? Do I need to go to the web page for my ftp daemon, and another web page for sendmail, and some other web page for security alerts, and so on and so forth? Or are there a few pages that are pretty good about keeping your box secure?
After I'm done securing my system, I'll go fix those Netscape fonts. Should be pretty easy....:P
If employees could just move around at will, they might find better jobs with higher salaries and managers that don't treat them like shit. It could result in companies having to spend more money on the most valuable people to keep them happy. And the ones that weren't kept happy would start competing companies that would drive the costs of goods and services down, hurting the profits of the company that didn't treat their employees well.
Wait-- what's that you say? I'm NOT posting in the Large Corporate Shareholders forum? Slashdot? What's that? Hackers? Damn! Alright, where's the button to cancel this post, I can't let them see what a greedy, immoral asshole I am-- excuse me, dedicated capitalist, I mean. Ah, that looks like it, the "submit" button will erase this...
First, I don't think you understand the real issues with Warcraft Adventures. Some hotshot producer was hoping to make a quick buck with little effort from Blizzard. They licensed an animation team in Russia that had some mediocre credits, figured they'd hire a few voice actors, and they'd just have to do some game design and QA. They even pretty much isolated the team that was working on it. They were cranking along, and when they finally showed off the first real stuff to the rest of the company-- it was crap. Really, real crap.
2) It's too bad about the adventure genre being smaller now, but I personally loved Grim Fandango and Monkey 4, and Longest Journey ain't too shabby either. (Grim Fandango was the best adventure game I've ever played.) So while there are few titles being released, and a lot are crap, you still have the occasional title-- nothing compared to the Sierra boom days, of course.
Hmm, he actually said, "even a cursory examination should show that these numbers don't have enough uniqueness to be globally unique IDs.". While he did go on to count bits immediately after that, he mentioned that since these numbers were taken from widely scattered machines, they should be a lot more different. The issue wasn't really the length-- it was that the numbers were almost identical for a bunch of different machines. They aren't too short-- they're too similar.
but the fact remains that few would have qualms issuing the second patent.
The hell it does-- plenty of people would have qualms, if the only innovation is that it's different from an existing "press two button" solution in that it's a wider button set on top of them. There'd have to be more genius behind it than that.
I was agreeing and disagreeing with bits here and there, nodding my head sometimes, shaking it others, but then I felt sick when I read this: "In the eyes of the rogue programmers, the worst thing that could ever happen to Linux is to become gradually corporatized..... The rogue programmers will win, because they are many and vocal."
No, that is NOT while they'll win. They'll win because they're the ones doing the work. The programmers will win, because when they want a feature, they write it. There's a reason rants are a dime a dozen (case in point), but good software is hard to find. It takes work to write good software, but when you're done with it, you have something a lot more valuable than a rant. As the saying goes, if you want something done right, do it yourself.
If Emily Dresner-Thornber is truly passionate about her rant, she'll break out her favorite development environment and start hacking. Maybe she'll start a project on sourceforge. Or maybe she'll find an existing one, and contribute to it, gain the respect of the other people in the project, and push it in the direction she wants it to go.
What in blazes are you talking about? Under the current corporate government we have now, this particular freedom does not exist: the freedom to USE the software product AND discuss it. That is one very real, very specific, itemized freedom that has been TAKEN from you. (Well, you have the freedom, but you might be sued, tossed in jail, whatever.)
There are lots of other freedoms that have been taken from you, such as the freedom to go around killing people. There's a very good reason for that. But what reason can you give for taking away someone's right to talk about the software they use? It sure as hell isn't based in freedom of speech, and it sure as hell isn't based in capitalism.
The point, of course, is that my freedom of speech should not be limited because of any software I choose to use. No government, and certainly no corporation, should have that power.
Unfortunately, this entire thread has degenerated into a pointless flamewar between people saying "MS sux0rs!" and other people saying "everyone who doesn't like this is just an anti-MS idiot!". *yawn* I was hoping there might be more interesting discussion about what grounds MS attempted to prevent this on, and more interestingly, how the benchmarks were later permitted to be posted.
Of course, no one's read the fucking article, so most of them are completely unaware that the benchmarks were eventually posted. Teach me to read a/. forum-- time to go to kuro5hin.
I just can't believe what passes for journalism these days:
"Scientists have published what they claim is conclusive evidence that bacteria once lived on Mars.... But some British experts are sceptical, saying the study falls short of absolute proof.... One thing is for certain, though. The crystals, regardless of origin, are agreed to have been a major factor in plummeting CD sales over the past year, and may have single handedly caused the recording industry wordwide losses of over a billion dollars."
Just uncalled for. Truly sloppy journalism. Fact checkers?
I know, I know, sometimes I do it to-- just read the summary and comments. But seriously, READ THE LINKS from that story. All of 'em. They're funny as hell. The response is particularly hilarious, but his own home page with bits about scientology and amway sprinkled amongst course descriptions is truly something to be seen.
Schools shut down student pages with scarcely a second thought. It's gotta be a lot harder to shut down a professor.
I agree. I simply had the advantage of being able to wait for moderation. Had you challenged me to find claims of prior art with no evidence, I would have had a much easier search and a much longer list....
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/02/23/14422 14&cid=119, posted 13 minutes before your own post. If you don't think that matches, there's a better example in http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/02/23/14422 14&cid=85, with a handy link to the patent and an explanation of why the example is prior art, 38 minutes before your post.
If you disagree with their claims, argue it. But don't ignore them and claim they don't exist.
The issue of whether or not patents increase freedom has been flamed over endlessly by the/. crowd and others. I've never seen someone actually go so far as to claim it's "by definition"-- that's simply laughable. I think it's very difficult to argue that something essentially defined by "you can't do this" by definition increases freedom.
I was at Stanford when they decided to replace their old, ugly web page with a "bigger and better" one. $50,000 later, they had one of the ugliest web pages I'd ever seen. Ugly, no problem-- it was easy to navigate, right? Wrong. Everything useful was buried under 10 or so levels of seemingly irrelevant links.
The problem? The web page was made by "professionals" who had no idea what the students or faculty needed from their web page. It was a decent advertisement for the school (aside from being really ugly), but the removal of the old site meant students and staff were left stranded for quite some time.
The entire project was finished in several months-- about the time span of 1-2 quarters. Now imagine instead the learning experience that could have come from a course dedicated to creating the site. HCI would be taught for design; databases, algorithms etc. would be taught for all of the back end. It would have been a great learning experience for all involved, and the end result would have been a web site the students and faculty would have actually used.
Instead, what eventually happened is they spent more and more money to make a slightly less crappy web page. Now, it's back to pretty much how it was before the whole fiasco, only everything's a little tougher to find.
I would like to see someone argue to me that ebay should be allowed to list auctions for cocaine or nuclear materials because they're only "listing" and not involved with the actual transfer.
Hoo boy, you sure ruined your post by including the ebay analogy. ebay lists whatever users type in. If they receive complaints, they remove it. And note that when they receive complaints and remove the offending material, they are not fined, prosecuted, shut down, etc..
Compare to Napster, who removed all the people trading Metallica the one time they were notified of anything, and are still getting fined, shut down, etc..
And another note: your argument, while it makes some "common sense", really has little if anything to do with actual law. I'm sure you've noticed by now that the law rarely has anything to do with common sense.
Slashdot Mirror
No, not like people accuse JonKatz of it every fucking article. Got boring, moving on to Jamie? I can't tell you how fucking entertaining it is. Really enlivens the conversation.
Yeah, it's SO FUCKING ORIGINAL to say "All your _____ are belong to _____". Get a fucking clue. At least accuse them of being boring and unoriginal, not of plagiarism. That's like saying, "They stole the headline '5 Dead in 6.3 Earthquake' from CNN!".
This is insightful? This is the same troll that gets posted to every trademark discussion, but with a lot of "fuck" thrown in. Yes, we know trademark dilution can cause you to lose your trademark. Yes, we know it happened to Intel with their x86 line. But unless you think it's a GOOD thing that people can't call their project OpenIL without fear of being sued into the ground, try to advance your thinking beyond the couple of words your lawyer friend told you and see what can be done about it.
Oh, and if you think it IS a good thing that he can't call his project OpenIL, pull your head out of your ass.
Now, in order to get modded up by the same moderator that wasted a point on Graymalkin, let me rephrase all of that:
This is fucking insightful? This is the same fucking troll that gets fucking posted to every fucking trademark discussion, but with a lot of fucking "fuck" thrown in. Yes, we fucking know trademark fucking dilution can fucking cause you to lose your fucking trademark. Fuck yes, we fucking know it happened to Intel with their xfucking86 line. But fuck, unless you think it's a fucking GOOD thing that fucking people can't call their fucking project OpenFuckingIL without fear of being fucking sued into the fucking ground, try to advance your thinking beyond the couple of fucking words your lawyer-fucking friend told you and see what can be fucking done about it.
Oh, and if you fucking think it IS a good fucking thing that he can't call his project OpenFuckingIL, pull your fucking head out of your fucking ass. Fuck
Many wireless devices don't have TCP/IP, since it's not worth implementing it-- they're just there for HTTP, so they use an easier transfer protocol more suitable to wireless. That means, though, that on a lot of those clients you don't have TCP/IP, which certainly cuts down on hackability. This might be an easy way to implement TCP/IP, without having to hack their proprietary protocol. Yeah, it'd probably be slow as hell on a wireless e-mail client, but....
It's actually fairly amusing for a couple reasons. /.
1) This is a parody of the typical MS-bashing story they post, and you actually have to read the whole thing before you're sure it's not real, because this is
2) A lot of people actually DO think it's serious, which scares the hell out of me. But it's still funny. For example, this post.
I don't care if Linux is more powerful when Windows is just so much easier to manage. I do WORK with my time, not bug downloads and system management.
Let's hear it for anecdotal evidence. Oddly enough, your post is completely 180 degrees from my experiences. Let me tell you about last Monday at work.
Get to work. NT is acting funny. Reboot-- ooh, look! Unable to find NTLDR. Shit. Find new hard drive. Install NT. 3 reboots later, I have basic NT on my box. Not bad, right? Except that it's missing all the software I need, like Outlook, the latest IE, Visual J++, the latest Detonator drivers, vim, etc.. NINE reboots later, my system is almost back to how I had it. NINE. Read that a third time: NINE FUCKING REBOOTS. That's IN ADDITON to the 3 reboots for the initial install. Oh, and the system's still not like I had it, even though I've recovered the old hard drive's data. Why? Because all of my configurations are kept in some voodoo registry file that I can't get 'em out of. I could easily copy the config files on a Linux box.
Brief summary of last Monday: 9:30 am, NT box goes down. 6:00pm, NT box back up, MOSTLY the way I want it-- it's STILL not how I want it, on Friday.
Linux sucks? Linux is hard to install? I had NEVER installed Linux before; hell, I'd hardly ever used it, just a bunch of Unix. I had no clue what I was doing, but I went out and picked up a copy of slack. After just a few hours, I've got all my devices going, XWindows up, KDE and Gnome, and a frickin FTP server so I can grab my files at work.
To get this MILDLY on topic, let's do another comparison. You don't think the latest security fixes are a big deal? You don't think it's important that Windows has more frickin holes than swiss cheese? How about the immense amount of time lost to my company when the ILOVEYOU virus hit? I think that's pretty important. Oh, but it was easy to install the patch-- oh, wait, they denied there was even a problem until days after it hit. Let's hear it for closed source!
I don't know what fucking fairy land you live in that everything's just peachy on Windows ME, but if you ever work at a real Windows-dependent shop, you'll see all the crap they have to put up with. Don't even get me started about that piece of shit called SourceSafe-- suffice it to say all our SS servers are now called things like "notsafe".
Of course. I was simply advocating critical reading, as evidenced by my concluding statement, "as long as you keep that in mind, you can usually dig through all the bullshit and find out the real story". Additionally, I was warning of the dangers of complete omission, which can often be even more dangerous than hidden bias because you're not even aware there's anything there to be biased about.
So there ya go, my entire post reduced to an SAT choice.
Unrelated comment first - You're looking for comments from a major publisher where they admit to pirating the works of freelancers? That would be like getting Shawn Fanning to admit that Napster exists primarily to pirate copyrighted music. Not going to happen...
That's not unrelated at all. It's the whole reason it's going to be next to impossible to find decent coverage on this issue. Media outlets, like any other business, will do what they must to remain in business. In this age of giant conglomerates, they'll do what they must to keep their parent companies and their parent companies' other companies in business.
By way of example, notice how the definition of the word "stealing" has suddenly been changed by the mainstream media? Since when is making an unauthorized copy stealing? It's piracy, sure, but when I copy something, I'm not taking anything from the original owner. There's the specious argument, "you would have GIVEN them something otherwise", but of course that's generally false-- people who pirate hundreds of games or CDs weren't planning on buying all of them. But once major media started tossing the word "stealing" into their reports on Napster et. al., it went by almost unnoticed, until it had seeped its way into the standard discourse. Napster isn't stealing. It's piracy.
More blatantly obvious is this article, about a major case where Fox was sued by its reporters when they were fired for refusing to distort a story. The reporters were awarded $425,000. Sound familiar? Probably not, because few people reported on it. But it sure was a big story to me. But perhaps this quote from Fox's defense team will shed some light on the subject: "There is no law, rule or regulation against slanting the news."
They tell you what they want you to hear, and they just ignore what they'd rather you didn't know. As long as you keep that in mind, you can usually dig through all the bullshit and find out the real story.
San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art is doing an Art in Technological Times exhibit, complete with strange music and quotes by Nicolas Negroponte. You can check out the exhibition's web site, but more interesting to you if you're not in the SF area might be the online presentation, which may be more practical then getting to SF.
The exhibit, of course, is better than the on-line version; the on-line version is a bit gratuitous in its use of neat flash techniques and new interface choices, but it's worth a view.
I suspect the plaintiffs did little if anything to protect the information they were bothered about appearing on the defendant's site. Even if they did, once discovered (again like DeCSS), can they protect it? Where is the IP right in your address and phone number?
This is bullshit. I know some doctors that are harassed by these assholes, and they DO try to protect their privacy. Almost all of them try to keep the information secret-- they know what the dangers are. It inevitably gets out, because they follow them home. They follow their neighbors home, too, and impersonate other people to try to find out more about the doctors.
Yes, it's all legally obtained. Just like a very long list of credit card numbers can be legally obtained. Is is legal to post them? Probably not, but I'm really not familiar with the reasoning the court would use to say so.
Yes, but the patent was granted earlier this year, which means it was patented quite some time before.
If they hope to challenge it, they'll have to go with obviousness, which the patent obviously is. We did exactly what they patented to slap our i18n info into our databases, which didn't accept double byte characters. It's a trick i18n firms have been using for years, and, as usual, it's astonishing that someone could get a patent on anything this obvious.
Here's the heart of their patent: "The domain name is converted to a standard format which can represent all language character sets, such as UNICODE. The UNICODE string is then transformed to be in RFC1035 compliant format." Or, according to the article, "This solution involves converting foreign language characters into Unicode, a computer industry standard, and then encoding them in U.S. ASCII for transmission over the Internet."
There's an obscene amount of prior art for this, applied to databases, dll's, and pretty much anything you can think of, except DNS. Even the courts usually don't allow a patent to stand that's simply old hat applied to a slightly tweaked problem.
Actually, I wish you'd expand on your comment a little. I'm quite the amateur with Linux. I decided to put up an FTP server because it's useful, and it was easy. Sendmail also. Closed most of the rest.
:P
But here's my question, and what I hope you (or some other kind soul) will point me to: to me, as you suggested, it isn't "that obvious" why my machine may be insecure in oh so many ways. If I decide to turn on a bunch of other services, for example, my system will probably be exploitable as all hell. But where's the best place to find out about all this? Do I need to go to the web page for my ftp daemon, and another web page for sendmail, and some other web page for security alerts, and so on and so forth? Or are there a few pages that are pretty good about keeping your box secure?
After I'm done securing my system, I'll go fix those Netscape fonts. Should be pretty easy....
If employees could just move around at will, they might find better jobs with higher salaries and managers that don't treat them like shit. It could result in companies having to spend more money on the most valuable people to keep them happy. And the ones that weren't kept happy would start competing companies that would drive the costs of goods and services down, hurting the profits of the company that didn't treat their employees well.
Wait-- what's that you say? I'm NOT posting in the Large Corporate Shareholders forum? Slashdot? What's that? Hackers? Damn! Alright, where's the button to cancel this post, I can't let them see what a greedy, immoral asshole I am-- excuse me, dedicated capitalist, I mean. Ah, that looks like it, the "submit" button will erase this...
Two points.
First, I don't think you understand the real issues with Warcraft Adventures. Some hotshot producer was hoping to make a quick buck with little effort from Blizzard. They licensed an animation team in Russia that had some mediocre credits, figured they'd hire a few voice actors, and they'd just have to do some game design and QA. They even pretty much isolated the team that was working on it. They were cranking along, and when they finally showed off the first real stuff to the rest of the company-- it was crap. Really, real crap.
2) It's too bad about the adventure genre being smaller now, but I personally loved Grim Fandango and Monkey 4, and Longest Journey ain't too shabby either. (Grim Fandango was the best adventure game I've ever played.) So while there are few titles being released, and a lot are crap, you still have the occasional title-- nothing compared to the Sierra boom days, of course.
Hmm, he actually said, "even a cursory examination should show that these numbers don't have enough uniqueness to be globally unique IDs.". While he did go on to count bits immediately after that, he mentioned that since these numbers were taken from widely scattered machines, they should be a lot more different. The issue wasn't really the length-- it was that the numbers were almost identical for a bunch of different machines. They aren't too short-- they're too similar.
but the fact remains that few would have qualms issuing the second patent.
The hell it does-- plenty of people would have qualms, if the only innovation is that it's different from an existing "press two button" solution in that it's a wider button set on top of them. There'd have to be more genius behind it than that.
I was agreeing and disagreeing with bits here and there, nodding my head sometimes, shaking it others, but then I felt sick when I read this: "In the eyes of the rogue programmers, the worst thing that could ever happen to Linux is to become gradually corporatized..... The rogue programmers will win, because they are many and vocal."
No, that is NOT while they'll win. They'll win because they're the ones doing the work. The programmers will win, because when they want a feature, they write it. There's a reason rants are a dime a dozen (case in point), but good software is hard to find. It takes work to write good software, but when you're done with it, you have something a lot more valuable than a rant. As the saying goes, if you want something done right, do it yourself.
If Emily Dresner-Thornber is truly passionate about her rant, she'll break out her favorite development environment and start hacking. Maybe she'll start a project on sourceforge. Or maybe she'll find an existing one, and contribute to it, gain the respect of the other people in the project, and push it in the direction she wants it to go.
What in blazes are you talking about? Under the current corporate government we have now, this particular freedom does not exist: the freedom to USE the software product AND discuss it. That is one very real, very specific, itemized freedom that has been TAKEN from you. (Well, you have the freedom, but you might be sued, tossed in jail, whatever.)
There are lots of other freedoms that have been taken from you, such as the freedom to go around killing people. There's a very good reason for that. But what reason can you give for taking away someone's right to talk about the software they use? It sure as hell isn't based in freedom of speech, and it sure as hell isn't based in capitalism.
The point, of course, is that my freedom of speech should not be limited because of any software I choose to use. No government, and certainly no corporation, should have that power.
/. forum-- time to go to kuro5hin.
Unfortunately, this entire thread has degenerated into a pointless flamewar between people saying "MS sux0rs!" and other people saying "everyone who doesn't like this is just an anti-MS idiot!". *yawn* I was hoping there might be more interesting discussion about what grounds MS attempted to prevent this on, and more interestingly, how the benchmarks were later permitted to be posted.
Of course, no one's read the fucking article, so most of them are completely unaware that the benchmarks were eventually posted. Teach me to read a
I just can't believe what passes for journalism these days:
"Scientists have published what they claim is conclusive evidence that bacteria once lived on Mars.... But some British experts are sceptical, saying the study falls short of absolute proof.... One thing is for certain, though. The crystals, regardless of origin, are agreed to have been a major factor in plummeting CD sales over the past year, and may have single handedly caused the recording industry wordwide losses of over a billion dollars."
Just uncalled for. Truly sloppy journalism. Fact checkers?
I know, I know, sometimes I do it to-- just read the summary and comments. But seriously, READ THE LINKS from that story. All of 'em. They're funny as hell. The response is particularly hilarious, but his own home page with bits about scientology and amway sprinkled amongst course descriptions is truly something to be seen.
Schools shut down student pages with scarcely a second thought. It's gotta be a lot harder to shut down a professor.
I agree. I simply had the advantage of being able to wait for moderation. Had you challenged me to find claims of prior art with no evidence, I would have had a much easier search and a much longer list....
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/02/23/14422 14&cid=119, posted 13 minutes before your own post. If you don't think that matches, there's a better example in http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/02/23/14422 14&cid=85, with a handy link to the patent and an explanation of why the example is prior art, 38 minutes before your post.
If you disagree with their claims, argue it. But don't ignore them and claim they don't exist.
By definition patents increase freedom...
/. crowd and others. I've never seen someone actually go so far as to claim it's "by definition"-- that's simply laughable. I think it's very difficult to argue that something essentially defined by "you can't do this" by definition increases freedom.
The issue of whether or not patents increase freedom has been flamed over endlessly by the
I was at Stanford when they decided to replace their old, ugly web page with a "bigger and better" one. $50,000 later, they had one of the ugliest web pages I'd ever seen. Ugly, no problem-- it was easy to navigate, right? Wrong. Everything useful was buried under 10 or so levels of seemingly irrelevant links.
The problem? The web page was made by "professionals" who had no idea what the students or faculty needed from their web page. It was a decent advertisement for the school (aside from being really ugly), but the removal of the old site meant students and staff were left stranded for quite some time.
The entire project was finished in several months-- about the time span of 1-2 quarters. Now imagine instead the learning experience that could have come from a course dedicated to creating the site. HCI would be taught for design; databases, algorithms etc. would be taught for all of the back end. It would have been a great learning experience for all involved, and the end result would have been a web site the students and faculty would have actually used.
Instead, what eventually happened is they spent more and more money to make a slightly less crappy web page. Now, it's back to pretty much how it was before the whole fiasco, only everything's a little tougher to find.
I would like to see someone argue to me that ebay should be allowed to list auctions for cocaine or nuclear materials because they're only "listing" and not involved with the actual transfer.
Hoo boy, you sure ruined your post by including the ebay analogy. ebay lists whatever users type in. If they receive complaints, they remove it. And note that when they receive complaints and remove the offending material, they are not fined, prosecuted, shut down, etc..
Compare to Napster, who removed all the people trading Metallica the one time they were notified of anything, and are still getting fined, shut down, etc..
And another note: your argument, while it makes some "common sense", really has little if anything to do with actual law. I'm sure you've noticed by now that the law rarely has anything to do with common sense.