Naturally, this is not really that big of news. This has been going on since Eisenhower and bringing it into the open is just another way to manipulate the populace.
Really, in two or three weeks they'll probably be trying to deny this program even exists.
The funny thing is, sometime around the time Jurassic Park came out (before or after, I don't remember) I clearly remember visiting DisneyWorld with my family, and in one of the buildings at Epcot, SGI had this big display set up with some huge mainframe where they were giving demos rendering a complicated Egyptian tomb in realtime, and then there were a bunch of Indigo 2s sitting out on the floor with people to mess with. I spent most of the day just and playing with the tech demos they'd stocked up the Indy 2s with, running what in retrospect I recognize as X windows. I don't remember seeing the 3d file browser thing-- I seem to remember spending most of the time messing with a program called "New Jello", but I was just kind of clicking around at random, and maybe I saw it but didn't remember it. I would have been older than ten at the time, but not by much. I could certainly imagine someone about my age doing the same thing, randomly clicking into the 3d file system visualizer, and playing with it until they basically worked out what was going on.
So we could possibly explain that bit in Jurassic Park entirely if "this is UNIX!" girl had at some point in the year or so before the events of the film simply visited Disneyworld.
This is more like "ten films I've seen containing computers, which I will describe in belittling terms". Okay, so some of these movies really did butcher the technology they included. But some of these complaints just show a lack of imagination on the part of the article writer.
In particular, this guy basically loses for complaining about the "This is UNIX, I know this!" scene in Jurassic Park, complaining that a ten year old girl couldn't have "magically" known that the computer was running UNIX. Okay, except that at that exact moment the computer in front of her-- hell, he even has screenshots-- was in fact showing a real world file manager / demo program that came with SGI's IRIX operating system-- which is, as it happens, a System V UNIX. You don't think it's possible that a computer geek from a rich family might have at some point in her life used IRIX, or at least used it enough to recognize a very distinctive tech demo that came with IRIX at the time and could be used as a file manager? Is it really that improbable that a ten year old might know at least enough about UNIX to know what/usr is? Or is the idea that girls don't use computers?
First off, there's a well known story that Larry Sanger originally bailed from the Wikipedia because he was submitting poor-quality edits that didn't fit to the standards the community had hashed out, and Larry Sanger got really angry that they weren't being accepted. His logic was, how dare you, I am a professor of philosophy at somewhere or other and I helped found this project etc. The community response was, whatever, but you're putting things into philosophy articles which are not only not very clearly written, but are just your opinion as a single opinionated philosophy professor, and we're trying to build something objective and neutral. Then his edits got alternately rewritten or taken out, depending on circumstance. Larry Sanger went HOW DARE YOU and quit the project. I must stress that I was not there and have heard all of this only secondhand, but I have heard it from multiple sources and if it's even remotely true, I don't think Larry Sanger is going to be able to handle the people skills of getting many people to contribute to this new gated community wiki.
Second off, this exact model has been tried before, and it has failed. Have you ever heard of H2G2? Unless you've been around on Slashdot since 1999, no, probably not. H2G2 started around the same time, maybe before, I don't even remember, as wikipedia. (I'm pretty sure it started after everything2.) It was sort of the same premise as wikipedia, but the articles were edited and approved by a board. The problem a few experts writing stellar stuff isn't enough. Most people just don't have the energy to do that for more than a few articles. You need lots of people contributing and massive openness and community momentum or, like H2G2, the whole thing fizzles.
endanger China's national security, reputation and interests
Now, which part of the above is horribly bad and oppressive?
I cannot believe there is anyone in the world who would actually fall for something this transparent. On the offchance you're just stupid and not trying to actually deceive people, let's turn this around for a minute. Although not everyone who reads this site is American, and neither the article nor the post you are replying to mention America, you seem to want really badly to distract us from thinking about China and get us to think about America instead. You want to talk about America? Fine. Let's talk about America.
Let's talk about the Bush Administration. Everything the Bush Administration has done in the last five years, they have done in the name of preventing people from "endangering America's national security, reputation and interests".
Are there, say, any things the Bush Administration has done in the last five years that you disagree with?
If so, why? After all, they were only trying to prevent the endangering of America's national security, reputation and interests.
Let's say the Bush Administration announced they were going to start banning importing or reading of foreign newspaper articles or websites that "endanger America's national security, reputation and interests". Would you at all mistrust them with that power? Would you complain?
If so, why? In this hypothetical example, they say they're only going to go after publications which "endanger America's national security, reputation and interests". What's so horribly bad and oppressive about that?
And the answer of course is obvious, which is that something like "endangering national security, reputation and interests" is so vague that if you write a blank check to anyone in a position of governmental power to take action aginst it, they can define "national security, reputation and interests" to suit their own needs and use that blank check to shut down simply anything and anybody they don't like. Likewise, pretty much anything that tries to hold any government accountable for its actions can be easily labelled by that government "undermin[ing] national unity". Almost any group any government doesn't like can be easily labelled an "evil cult". I don't think I need to explain the problem with the clause "include[s] other content banned by Chinese laws and administrative regulations".
Which part of Xinhua's little announcement/article is horribly bad and oppressive? The whole thing. It's dressed up in pretty language, sure, but hey, fascism always is.
What China is doing here is unambiguously, unconditionally wrong, and what America is or isn't doing has absolutely nothing to do with that. You can try to make excuses for China; you can be an instrument of a totaltarian government if for some reason you get off on that. But you can't change what China is doing by dressing it up with pretty words.
In the meanwhile, I never cease to be saddened to see how much mileage propagandists can get out of accusing others of "bias"...
So you view controlling the movement of information on the internet
and controlling the movement of money on the internet
as exactly the same thing?
That's kinda weird.
Cuz, y'know, I seriously disagree with the recent movements by the U.S. government against online gambling, but I can't conceive of equating that at ANY level with movements against freedom of speech or the press. After all, there's already enormous precedent everywhere in the world for treating the movement or use of money as something that there's nothing weird or authortarian about governments regulating; even in places where people would be horrified by the idea of a government telling a newspaper what to print, the government does things like tax all commercial tranactions and regulate everything banks do very strictly and very few people have an actual problem with this. So which is regulating internet gambling more like-- regulating a newspaper? Or regulating a bank?
Anyway, aside from that, I never understand this thing where people try to excuse tyranny by [some government or group] by pointing wildly at [some other government or group], and going, hey, but those OTHER guys, they're evil TOO! Uh... so? That doesn't make group #1 any less evil...
Anyone else think it's kind of fucked up people are even asking how the "economy can survive in a world without" something that wasn't even really invented yet five or ten years ago? I can't really think of any DRMed media that predates the Sony Minidisc in 1992 or so, and funnily enough, not only did both the media and other economies get by just fine before the Minidisc, after the Minidisc came out it was mostly ignored and the DRM-like features were widely cited as a major point against using it as a format for music.
DRM was a necessity for digital sales of music online, because the oligopoly that controls professional music recording in this country demanded it before they'd willingly do business in that market. That doesn't exactly mean it's necessary to make the economy work, or that consumers have to put up with it; it's just a term of sale that some media producers desire.
He was CLEARLY talking about jumping out of a tank, into a larger body of water. He specifically mentioned jumping-out of fishing nets, and the like. You know, things that would make sense.
Are these, in fact, behaviors which "make sense" or are in any way desirable in the natural marine environment?
You know, the environment that the behavioral instincts of dolphins have developed to survive in?
This would be a really worrying thing, but the fact is TPM has already won. It won the instant that Apple adopted TPM and the communities who were publicly worrying and complaining about Palladium and Trusted Computing for all those years went suddenly silent and shrugged the instant that nebulous notions like "freedom" came into conflict with solid, purdy white plastic.
Here is the thing: TPM's adoption was waiting not on an adoption cycle exactly, but an apathy cycle. TPM was never something that the consumer was supposed to approve of, want, or even really know was there. The adoption of TPM was mostly counting on the consumer not having any idea what they were buying, counting on the blinking 12:00 effect, counting on the idea that most consumers would not even know TPM was in their computer until the first time that they try to do something and the computer says "no".
TPM isn't there for the consumer. It's there to protect the computer from the consumers. It's there to allow software and content vendors to trust your computer, to trust your computer to ensure it will act in their interests and not yours. These vendors are the ones that TPM is being done for the benefit of, not the consumer. This means that in order for TPM to win, it isn't necessary for the consumer to "adopt" it. All that has to happen is for the consumer to fail to actively reject it when it is quietly dropped into the hardware they were going to buy anyway.
And that's already happening. So although the military would legitmately represent an adoption cycle-- the military, of course, has a legitimate and logical need to create networks within which the machinery is trusted and the user is absolutely not-- it doesn't really matter. The military isn't the kind of adoption TPM needs to reach enough critical mass that vendors can begin requiring it in new applications, I don't think-- it's not like military hardware is going to be used to run lots of games and DRMed consumer media, as far as I know. The worrying thing is TPM's level adoption in the consumer segment, since that's where it has potential to do actual harm. And that's already begun, and so far nothing is happening to stop it...
I know that there are cases where black holes have been indirectly observed by their effects on neighboring objects and light. Could these same data that were used to indirectly observe the black hole be adequately explained by the presence of whatever this other hypothetical object is?
Do we even care about Debian anymore?
on
Debian to Run on AMD64
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
Debian has gone from one of the most vibrant and important Linux distributions to something that basically only gets in the news when it's running late on something. Once upon a time it offered us a choice between cutting edge unstable and super-solid stable; now even the unstable is year[s] behind even relatively mainstream competing distributions, and the stable version is only free of bugs in the same sense that corpses don't get diseases (i.e.: you have to pretend rigor mortis and maggots don't count).
Daniel Lyons, once again, is just trying desperately to find any imagined silver lining to distract the public (or at least whatever part of the public might be reading forbes.com) from how bad things are getting for SCO. SCO's been making this claim about destruction of code at random for awhile, before Lyons picked it out of their last huge filing and decided to make a big deal out of it. I don't seem to remember the judge ever being nearly as impressed with it as Lyons had. I also don't seem to remember there ever being any reason to believe that SCO's allegations about IBM destroying evidence-- much like the central allegations of their case, actually-- were backed up by anything except wishful thinking.
Throughout this case there have been two consistent trends. One, IBM gives everything the court asks of them and goes to enormous lengths and expense trying to produce materials that SCO sometimes doesn't even seem to have wound up using, while SCO drags their feet and refuses to provide either what IBM requests or what is explicitly ordered of them by the judge. And two, this whole time, SCO rants ceaselessly in the press, usually through mouthpieces like Daniel Lyons, that IBM is refusing to provide what is ordered, IBM is obstructing justice, IBM is dragging their feet. (IBM, for some reason having decided to try their case in the courts rather than the media, tends to remain silent.)
At this point Forbes may be the only thing that still qualifies as a media source where you can read the news about SCO and get any impression except that things are going disastrously, one-sidedly bad for SCO.
I'm sure people will celebrate just because they hate those "family video" type places-- I'm seeing people in various places doing so already-- but this decision is really bad in the long run. This strengthens the restrictions on what can be done with sampling and fair use rights, and ultimately restricts what is possible in the realm of art.
Voluntary censorship, like these editing services comprise, can be a bad thing, since creeping nonvoluntary censorship is possible even through entirely voluntary mechanisms. There is a free speech issue with allowing these service to stay open; if someone in a small bible belt town finds that they can no longer rent uncensored videos because so many of the locals demand censored videos that that's all the market can bear, then it won't matter to the person who wants to watch uncensored videos whether the reason why they can't do so is government censorship (technically not allowed by the first amendment) or censorship by market forces (technically allowed by the first amendment).
But it simply isn't worth it to take steps against these editing services, even if you're virulently anti-censorship. By doing so you lose more right to expression than you protect. If the law limits someone's ability to voluntarily self-censor copyrighted material, it naturally in the process limits what they are allowed to do with copyrighted material period. The inordinate power the government has already granted to "intellectual property" holders increases, and somewhere Negativland sheds a single tear.
Halo 3 will not launch when the PS3 does. Period. Microsoft will be lucky if Halo 3 has launched by the time there are no longer shortages on the PS3.
Now, what will launch at about the same time as the PS3 is Final Fantasy XII. I don't think that will exactly sell any PS3s, but it's certainly not going to help the XBox 360.
I expect the Nintendo Wii will seriously outperform people's expectations this generation, but it's not going to conquer the world out of the gate. It will probably take time to build.
If someone wants to derail the PS3, it isn't as simple as mucking up the launch; Sony's already doing a fantastic job of mucking up the launch all by themselves. A competitor who wants to supplant the PS3 would have to muck up so badly that they manage to interfere with or stop the first round of real games, MGS3 and FFXIII and whatnot, when they come out a year or two after launch.
Huh. Then how could that make SCO, as this press release claims, the "only" allowed distributor of Linux, if anyone could just distribute Linux by going back to 2.4 or 2.5 and distributing that?
Or is the idea that they took 2.5 and stripped out the parts SCO alleges copyright to, and nobody else can do that since nobody knows what SCO's secret allegations are except SCO?
And how could SCO take out the parts they claim copyright on? They've claimed copyright on nearly the whole thing at one point or another. At one time they were claiming ownership of 2.4, and just a couple weeks ago it came out that even now one of their export reports SCO is claiming ownership of the ELF magic number. Did they just take out ELF support or what?
Domain ID:D1704028-LROR Domain Name:OPENLINUX.ORG Created On:03-Aug-1998 04:00:00 UTC Last Updated On:10-Nov-2004 04:47:01 UTC Expiration Date:02-Aug-2006 04:00:00 UTC Sponsoring Registrar:Dotster, Inc. (R34-LROR) Status:CLIENT UPDATE PROHIBITED Registrant ID:DOTR-00936995 Registrant Name:Domain Administrator Registrant Organization:The SCO Group Registrant Street1:355 S 520 W Registrant Street2:Suite 100 Registrant Street3: Registrant City:Lindon Registrant State/Province:UT Registrant Postal Code:84042 Registrant Country:US Registrant Phone:+1.8019325800 Registrant Phone Ext.: Registrant FAX: Registrant FAX Ext.: Registrant ******************@sco.com Admin ID:DOTC-03050361 Admin Name:Domain Administrator Admin Organization:The SCO Group Admin Street1:355 S 520 W Admin Street2:Suite 100 Admin Street3: Admin City:Lindon Admin State/Province:UT Admin Postal Code:84042 Admin Country:US Admin Phone:+1.8019325800 Admin Phone Ext.: Admin FAX: Admin FAX Ext.: Admin ******************@sco.com Tech ID:DOTC-03050361 Tech Name:Domain Administrator Tech Organization:The SCO Group Tech Street1:355 S 520 W Tech Street2:Suite 100 Tech Street3: Tech City:Lindon Tech State/Province:UT Tech Postal Code:84042 Tech Country:US Tech Phone:+1.8019325800 Tech Phone Ext.: Tech FAX: Tech FAX Ext.: Tech ******************@sco.com Name Server:NS.CALDERASYSTEMS.COM Name Server:NS2.CALDERASYSTEMS.COM
Caldera nameservers and everything. So this is not a parody site. If this press release isn't real, it's only because SCO got hacked. Which is, y'know, a possibility. Weirdly enough, if you go to the IP address that openlinux.org currently points to (thus stripping away the openlinux.org site's virtual server), you get.. a page saying nothing but "FSI INF". "FSI INF"? WTF?
Meanwhile it is awfully suspicious that caldera.com says nothing about this that I can see. Is there any evidence this "press release" has been... you know... released to the press? Or is it just a page on a website?
In some alternate universe where SCO had a case, they perhaps might wind up with copyright ownership of some small part of the linux kernel. But that wouldn't mean they own linux. SCO would own part of the Linux kernel, and all the other parts of the Linux kernel would be owned by a wide variety of other persons who wrote those parts of the kernel. SCO could wind up with ownership of part of the kernel, and say "all you other people, you don't have the right to distribute what we own". But then this raises the question of why SCO has the right to distribute Linux-- they don't, except under the terms of the GPL. And the GPL says that if you can't allow free relicensing and free use of a piece of GPLed software, you aren't allowed to distribtue it at all.
In other words if SCO had valid claims to copyright over part of the Linux kernel, and denied anyone the right to distribute that part of the Linux kernel except under propreitary terms, it would be illegal for ANYONE, INCLUDING SCO, to distribute Linux. But if SCO distributed even one copy of Linux anyway, then they'd lose the ability to deny anyone the rights to distribute Linux, because the GPL says that anyone SCO distributes to automatically has the right to redistribute the copy of Linux they got from SCO...
I wonder if SCO, when they distribute these new copies of Linux, is including and adhering to the requirements of the GPL. If not they're opening a floodgate of lawsuits from all the people who own copyrights to parts of Linux and have only granted ability to use them under the GPL. Either way just this press release might open up for some nasty slander of title lawsuits or at least extensions of the Lanham Act cases already filed against them by Redhat etc...
This is interesting, SCO has made a major misstep here. The only way they can keep this latest action from destroying them is if they know that they'll be bankrupt by the time anyone has the time to respond to it...
The font is AWFUL. Maybe it looks good on a Linux box or on a Mac, but the subjective readability of Slashdot's text on IE6 has just dropped by 50%.
Looks terrible on the macintosh as well. You get some kind of unholy resonance with the built-in text antialiasing that just slaughters readability. It's just one big blur, like the page is all antialiasing and no text.
The only good thing about this is that I'm going to get about an hour of my time back every day I avoid reading Slashdot.
I'm thinking maybe I should finally get around to trying out Digg. If slashdot really wants to be Digg so hard as to steal their layout, I might as well just go ahead and read that instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Naturally, this is not really that big of news. This has been going on since Eisenhower and bringing it into the open is just another way to manipulate the populace.
Really, in two or three weeks they'll probably be trying to deny this program even exists.
Isn't Britain part of the United States?
"either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version."
There, was that so hard?
The funny thing is, sometime around the time Jurassic Park came out (before or after, I don't remember) I clearly remember visiting DisneyWorld with my family, and in one of the buildings at Epcot, SGI had this big display set up with some huge mainframe where they were giving demos rendering a complicated Egyptian tomb in realtime, and then there were a bunch of Indigo 2s sitting out on the floor with people to mess with. I spent most of the day just and playing with the tech demos they'd stocked up the Indy 2s with, running what in retrospect I recognize as X windows. I don't remember seeing the 3d file browser thing-- I seem to remember spending most of the time messing with a program called "New Jello", but I was just kind of clicking around at random, and maybe I saw it but didn't remember it. I would have been older than ten at the time, but not by much. I could certainly imagine someone about my age doing the same thing, randomly clicking into the 3d file system visualizer, and playing with it until they basically worked out what was going on.
So we could possibly explain that bit in Jurassic Park entirely if "this is UNIX!" girl had at some point in the year or so before the events of the film simply visited Disneyworld.
This is more like "ten films I've seen containing computers, which I will describe in belittling terms". Okay, so some of these movies really did butcher the technology they included. But some of these complaints just show a lack of imagination on the part of the article writer.
/usr is? Or is the idea that girls don't use computers?
In particular, this guy basically loses for complaining about the "This is UNIX, I know this!" scene in Jurassic Park, complaining that a ten year old girl couldn't have "magically" known that the computer was running UNIX. Okay, except that at that exact moment the computer in front of her-- hell, he even has screenshots-- was in fact showing a real world file manager / demo program that came with SGI's IRIX operating system-- which is, as it happens, a System V UNIX. You don't think it's possible that a computer geek from a rich family might have at some point in her life used IRIX, or at least used it enough to recognize a very distinctive tech demo that came with IRIX at the time and could be used as a file manager? Is it really that improbable that a ten year old might know at least enough about UNIX to know what
Clearly what we need to do is just release fish into the computer systems as well.
Targeted advertising.
First off, there's a well known story that Larry Sanger originally bailed from the Wikipedia because he was submitting poor-quality edits that didn't fit to the standards the community had hashed out, and Larry Sanger got really angry that they weren't being accepted. His logic was, how dare you, I am a professor of philosophy at somewhere or other and I helped found this project etc. The community response was, whatever, but you're putting things into philosophy articles which are not only not very clearly written, but are just your opinion as a single opinionated philosophy professor, and we're trying to build something objective and neutral. Then his edits got alternately rewritten or taken out, depending on circumstance. Larry Sanger went HOW DARE YOU and quit the project. I must stress that I was not there and have heard all of this only secondhand, but I have heard it from multiple sources and if it's even remotely true, I don't think Larry Sanger is going to be able to handle the people skills of getting many people to contribute to this new gated community wiki.
Second off, this exact model has been tried before, and it has failed. Have you ever heard of H2G2? Unless you've been around on Slashdot since 1999, no, probably not. H2G2 started around the same time, maybe before, I don't even remember, as wikipedia. (I'm pretty sure it started after everything2.) It was sort of the same premise as wikipedia, but the articles were edited and approved by a board. The problem a few experts writing stellar stuff isn't enough. Most people just don't have the energy to do that for more than a few articles. You need lots of people contributing and massive openness and community momentum or, like H2G2, the whole thing fizzles.
1. Ico
2. Abe's Oddysee
3. Super Metroid
4. Final Fantasy VI
5. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
I cannot believe there is anyone in the world who would actually fall for something this transparent. On the offchance you're just stupid and not trying to actually deceive people, let's turn this around for a minute. Although not everyone who reads this site is American, and neither the article nor the post you are replying to mention America, you seem to want really badly to distract us from thinking about China and get us to think about America instead. You want to talk about America? Fine. Let's talk about America.
Let's talk about the Bush Administration. Everything the Bush Administration has done in the last five years, they have done in the name of preventing people from "endangering America's national security, reputation and interests".
Are there, say, any things the Bush Administration has done in the last five years that you disagree with?
If so, why? After all, they were only trying to prevent the endangering of America's national security, reputation and interests.
Let's say the Bush Administration announced they were going to start banning importing or reading of foreign newspaper articles or websites that "endanger America's national security, reputation and interests". Would you at all mistrust them with that power? Would you complain?
If so, why? In this hypothetical example, they say they're only going to go after publications which "endanger America's national security, reputation and interests". What's so horribly bad and oppressive about that?
And the answer of course is obvious, which is that something like "endangering national security, reputation and interests" is so vague that if you write a blank check to anyone in a position of governmental power to take action aginst it, they can define "national security, reputation and interests" to suit their own needs and use that blank check to shut down simply anything and anybody they don't like. Likewise, pretty much anything that tries to hold any government accountable for its actions can be easily labelled by that government "undermin[ing] national unity". Almost any group any government doesn't like can be easily labelled an "evil cult". I don't think I need to explain the problem with the clause "include[s] other content banned by Chinese laws and administrative regulations".
Which part of Xinhua's little announcement/article is horribly bad and oppressive? The whole thing. It's dressed up in pretty language, sure, but hey, fascism always is.
What China is doing here is unambiguously, unconditionally wrong, and what America is or isn't doing has absolutely nothing to do with that. You can try to make excuses for China; you can be an instrument of a totaltarian government if for some reason you get off on that. But you can't change what China is doing by dressing it up with pretty words.
In the meanwhile, I never cease to be saddened to see how much mileage propagandists can get out of accusing others of "bias"...
So you view controlling the movement of information on the internet
and controlling the movement of money on the internet
as exactly the same thing?
That's kinda weird.
Cuz, y'know, I seriously disagree with the recent movements by the U.S. government against online gambling, but I can't conceive of equating that at ANY level with movements against freedom of speech or the press. After all, there's already enormous precedent everywhere in the world for treating the movement or use of money as something that there's nothing weird or authortarian about governments regulating; even in places where people would be horrified by the idea of a government telling a newspaper what to print, the government does things like tax all commercial tranactions and regulate everything banks do very strictly and very few people have an actual problem with this. So which is regulating internet gambling more like-- regulating a newspaper? Or regulating a bank?
Anyway, aside from that, I never understand this thing where people try to excuse tyranny by [some government or group] by pointing wildly at [some other government or group], and going, hey, but those OTHER guys, they're evil TOO! Uh... so? That doesn't make group #1 any less evil...
Anyone else think it's kind of fucked up people are even asking how the "economy can survive in a world without" something that wasn't even really invented yet five or ten years ago? I can't really think of any DRMed media that predates the Sony Minidisc in 1992 or so, and funnily enough, not only did both the media and other economies get by just fine before the Minidisc, after the Minidisc came out it was mostly ignored and the DRM-like features were widely cited as a major point against using it as a format for music.
DRM was a necessity for digital sales of music online, because the oligopoly that controls professional music recording in this country demanded it before they'd willingly do business in that market. That doesn't exactly mean it's necessary to make the economy work, or that consumers have to put up with it; it's just a term of sale that some media producers desire.
He was CLEARLY talking about jumping out of a tank, into a larger body of water. He specifically mentioned jumping-out of fishing nets, and the like. You know, things that would make sense.
Are these, in fact, behaviors which "make sense" or are in any way desirable in the natural marine environment?
You know, the environment that the behavioral instincts of dolphins have developed to survive in?
What kind of strange rabbits have these topologists seen?
Chocolate ones
This would be a really worrying thing, but the fact is TPM has already won. It won the instant that Apple adopted TPM and the communities who were publicly worrying and complaining about Palladium and Trusted Computing for all those years went suddenly silent and shrugged the instant that nebulous notions like "freedom" came into conflict with solid, purdy white plastic.
Here is the thing: TPM's adoption was waiting not on an adoption cycle exactly, but an apathy cycle. TPM was never something that the consumer was supposed to approve of, want, or even really know was there. The adoption of TPM was mostly counting on the consumer not having any idea what they were buying, counting on the blinking 12:00 effect, counting on the idea that most consumers would not even know TPM was in their computer until the first time that they try to do something and the computer says "no".
TPM isn't there for the consumer. It's there to protect the computer from the consumers. It's there to allow software and content vendors to trust your computer, to trust your computer to ensure it will act in their interests and not yours. These vendors are the ones that TPM is being done for the benefit of, not the consumer. This means that in order for TPM to win, it isn't necessary for the consumer to "adopt" it. All that has to happen is for the consumer to fail to actively reject it when it is quietly dropped into the hardware they were going to buy anyway.
And that's already happening. So although the military would legitmately represent an adoption cycle-- the military, of course, has a legitimate and logical need to create networks within which the machinery is trusted and the user is absolutely not-- it doesn't really matter. The military isn't the kind of adoption TPM needs to reach enough critical mass that vendors can begin requiring it in new applications, I don't think-- it's not like military hardware is going to be used to run lots of games and DRMed consumer media, as far as I know. The worrying thing is TPM's level adoption in the consumer segment, since that's where it has potential to do actual harm. And that's already begun, and so far nothing is happening to stop it...
I know that there are cases where black holes have been indirectly observed by their effects on neighboring objects and light. Could these same data that were used to indirectly observe the black hole be adequately explained by the presence of whatever this other hypothetical object is?
Debian has gone from one of the most vibrant and important Linux distributions to something that basically only gets in the news when it's running late on something. Once upon a time it offered us a choice between cutting edge unstable and super-solid stable; now even the unstable is year[s] behind even relatively mainstream competing distributions, and the stable version is only free of bugs in the same sense that corpses don't get diseases (i.e.: you have to pretend rigor mortis and maggots don't count).
At what point do we just give up on Debian?
Daniel Lyons, once again, is just trying desperately to find any imagined silver lining to distract the public (or at least whatever part of the public might be reading forbes.com) from how bad things are getting for SCO. SCO's been making this claim about destruction of code at random for awhile, before Lyons picked it out of their last huge filing and decided to make a big deal out of it. I don't seem to remember the judge ever being nearly as impressed with it as Lyons had. I also don't seem to remember there ever being any reason to believe that SCO's allegations about IBM destroying evidence-- much like the central allegations of their case, actually-- were backed up by anything except wishful thinking.
Throughout this case there have been two consistent trends. One, IBM gives everything the court asks of them and goes to enormous lengths and expense trying to produce materials that SCO sometimes doesn't even seem to have wound up using, while SCO drags their feet and refuses to provide either what IBM requests or what is explicitly ordered of them by the judge. And two, this whole time, SCO rants ceaselessly in the press, usually through mouthpieces like Daniel Lyons, that IBM is refusing to provide what is ordered, IBM is obstructing justice, IBM is dragging their feet. (IBM, for some reason having decided to try their case in the courts rather than the media, tends to remain silent.)
At this point Forbes may be the only thing that still qualifies as a media source where you can read the news about SCO and get any impression except that things are going disastrously, one-sidedly bad for SCO.
I'm sure people will celebrate just because they hate those "family video" type places-- I'm seeing people in various places doing so already-- but this decision is really bad in the long run. This strengthens the restrictions on what can be done with sampling and fair use rights, and ultimately restricts what is possible in the realm of art.
Voluntary censorship, like these editing services comprise, can be a bad thing, since creeping nonvoluntary censorship is possible even through entirely voluntary mechanisms. There is a free speech issue with allowing these service to stay open; if someone in a small bible belt town finds that they can no longer rent uncensored videos because so many of the locals demand censored videos that that's all the market can bear, then it won't matter to the person who wants to watch uncensored videos whether the reason why they can't do so is government censorship (technically not allowed by the first amendment) or censorship by market forces (technically allowed by the first amendment).
But it simply isn't worth it to take steps against these editing services, even if you're virulently anti-censorship. By doing so you lose more right to expression than you protect. If the law limits someone's ability to voluntarily self-censor copyrighted material, it naturally in the process limits what they are allowed to do with copyrighted material period. The inordinate power the government has already granted to "intellectual property" holders increases, and somewhere Negativland sheds a single tear.
Halo 3 will not launch when the PS3 does. Period. Microsoft will be lucky if Halo 3 has launched by the time there are no longer shortages on the PS3.
Now, what will launch at about the same time as the PS3 is Final Fantasy XII. I don't think that will exactly sell any PS3s, but it's certainly not going to help the XBox 360.
I expect the Nintendo Wii will seriously outperform people's expectations this generation, but it's not going to conquer the world out of the gate. It will probably take time to build.
If someone wants to derail the PS3, it isn't as simple as mucking up the launch; Sony's already doing a fantastic job of mucking up the launch all by themselves. A competitor who wants to supplant the PS3 would have to muck up so badly that they manage to interfere with or stop the first round of real games, MGS3 and FFXIII and whatnot, when they come out a year or two after launch.
Huh. Then how could that make SCO, as this press release claims, the "only" allowed distributor of Linux, if anyone could just distribute Linux by going back to 2.4 or 2.5 and distributing that?
Or is the idea that they took 2.5 and stripped out the parts SCO alleges copyright to, and nobody else can do that since nobody knows what SCO's secret allegations are except SCO?
And how could SCO take out the parts they claim copyright on? They've claimed copyright on nearly the whole thing at one point or another. At one time they were claiming ownership of 2.4, and just a couple weeks ago it came out that even now one of their export reports SCO is claiming ownership of the ELF magic number. Did they just take out ELF support or what?
The whole thing defies logic at every level.
Caldera nameservers and everything. So this is not a parody site. If this press release isn't real, it's only because SCO got hacked. Which is, y'know, a possibility. Weirdly enough, if you go to the IP address that openlinux.org currently points to (thus stripping away the openlinux.org site's virtual server), you get.. a page saying nothing but "FSI INF". "FSI INF"? WTF?
Meanwhile it is awfully suspicious that caldera.com says nothing about this that I can see. Is there any evidence this "press release" has been... you know... released to the press? Or is it just a page on a website?
In some alternate universe where SCO had a case, they perhaps might wind up with copyright ownership of some small part of the linux kernel. But that wouldn't mean they own linux. SCO would own part of the Linux kernel, and all the other parts of the Linux kernel would be owned by a wide variety of other persons who wrote those parts of the kernel. SCO could wind up with ownership of part of the kernel, and say "all you other people, you don't have the right to distribute what we own". But then this raises the question of why SCO has the right to distribute Linux-- they don't, except under the terms of the GPL. And the GPL says that if you can't allow free relicensing and free use of a piece of GPLed software, you aren't allowed to distribtue it at all.
In other words if SCO had valid claims to copyright over part of the Linux kernel, and denied anyone the right to distribute that part of the Linux kernel except under propreitary terms, it would be illegal for ANYONE, INCLUDING SCO, to distribute Linux. But if SCO distributed even one copy of Linux anyway, then they'd lose the ability to deny anyone the rights to distribute Linux, because the GPL says that anyone SCO distributes to automatically has the right to redistribute the copy of Linux they got from SCO...
I wonder if SCO, when they distribute these new copies of Linux, is including and adhering to the requirements of the GPL. If not they're opening a floodgate of lawsuits from all the people who own copyrights to parts of Linux and have only granted ability to use them under the GPL. Either way just this press release might open up for some nasty slander of title lawsuits or at least extensions of the Lanham Act cases already filed against them by Redhat etc...
This is interesting, SCO has made a major misstep here. The only way they can keep this latest action from destroying them is if they know that they'll be bankrupt by the time anyone has the time to respond to it...
The font is AWFUL. Maybe it looks good on a Linux box or on a Mac, but the subjective readability of Slashdot's text on IE6 has just dropped by 50%.
Looks terrible on the macintosh as well. You get some kind of unholy resonance with the built-in text antialiasing that just slaughters readability. It's just one big blur, like the page is all antialiasing and no text.
The only good thing about this is that I'm going to get about an hour of my time back every day I avoid reading Slashdot.
I'm thinking maybe I should finally get around to trying out Digg. If slashdot really wants to be Digg so hard as to steal their layout, I might as well just go ahead and read that instead.
Am I just hallucinating, or did slashdot just switch over to that new CSS layout like they were threatening to last week?
Hm. I don't think anyone's ever accused slashdot of being pretty, but this new layout is somehow even uglier. How do I turn this off?