So how hard would it be to write something that automatically converts Dashboard widgets to Google widgets, so you could use the same widgets on both? It's all just javascript, so this doesn't sound like it could possibly be that difficult.
Personally I would suspect that, similar to dark matter, dark energy will come in time to be derided as an unnecessary mathematical kludge introduced to paper over problems introduced by an oversight we made somewhere else. However, this hasn't happened yet.
The people who are "kinda sorta thinking" about buying a 360 arn't going to buy one at launch. Launch is for the base and people who are hyped into it.
This wasn't exactly the case with, say, the PS2 launch. I mean, yeah, the shortage meant that it was mostly the hardcore who wound up with them, but all kinds of people were buying them and interested in buying them. I think the PS3 launch may be quite similar to the PS2 market. The Playstations target a wider market, and they get a wider market interested at launch than the diehards that the XBox 360 panders to...
3. Debut game lineup-What lineup? - See, now, here's where you and I differ. I see a console built for 21-34 somethings with an 18-game launch. Those 18 games more or less cater to that demographic: shooters, sports and racing.
That's the thing though, isn't it? This huge deal is being made about how the XBox 360 is a hook into a wider market, that this is going to be the thing that takes Microsoft from a toehold to a serious player in the console market. Yet nobody seems to be denying that the 360 is being targeted exclusively to one single demographic, that of the subset of 21-34 somethings who are able and willing to buy a console just to play shooters and sports games on.
You can't get market power by catering to a single demographic. You can build up a strong niche position that way, and you can make a lot of money (just ask Nintendo) but you can't take over a market, not one as wide as the video game console market is. Yes, I'm sure there are some people to whom 19 xbox-style shooters and sports games is more than enough to make a console a must-buy. But this thread isn't about whether one should buy the XBox 360. It's about whether Microsoft has a "clear advantage" by coming out early, it's about whether Microsoft is going to get their stated goal of rivalling Sony. And this isn't getting them that.
OK, so those 19 games'll make the specific kind of person that all 19 games are aimed at deleriously happy. But these people are the XBox's base. It's the XBox's core niche. These people would have bought the 360 whether it came out now or in a year. And if you aren't one of these people, the XBox 360 launch, if not the XBox 360, is pretty much leaving you out entirely. What advantage, if any, is left in this early launch?
Maybe I shouldn't post this, because I get the feeling it would be quite unpopular with a few of the people who've posted in this thread so far. But...
Admittedly, tastes vary - so you could easily find a game out this month that's a 'must have' for you.
I'm not entirely sure about this one part from the article. It honestly seems to me like the XBox 360 launch library caters to a very narrow range of tastes. Tastes vary, so what if you like RPGs? Or platformers? Or strategy games? Or puzzle games? Or like racers, but prefer not to play realistic ones? Or beat-em-ups, or shoot-em-ups, or hack-n-slash, or sims, or...
Basically, what if you consider "a wide range of tastes" to include things other than sports games and first person shooters? Because that's really all the 360 lineup offers this month. (Though if we are courteous enough to wait until December 1 there's one fighting game; we probably shouldn't think of those as sports games.)
There are literally three games in the XBox launch lineup which are not a sports game or a first person shooter. Kameo, King Kong, and Gun. Kameo is an adventure game-- but, I have yet to encounter anyone at all who considers Kameo a 'must-have' game, or really is particularly interested in it at all. If you like adventure games you'd be much more interested in King Kong and Gun, which do both look like absolutely fantastic games with wide-ranging appeal. But... both of these games are coming out for approximately every system known to man, from the PSP to the Gamecube to the PC. If you own any video game systems at all you can play these games already. Would anyone seriously buy an XBox 360 to play these? Aside from these three, there is one arcade-looking game on the XBox Live marketplace called "Geometry Wars" that looks really cool, but the article said 'must have', so I'm just trying to think about must-have, system seller games here. This is a minigame.
So we're left with what? Well, a niche system that caters to a "wide range" of sports gamers and first person shooter gamers, with a cop to the fighting game crowd coming next month. In other words, the XBox 360 caters to exactly those set of tastes who comprised the hardcore of XBox owners. If you weren't an XBox owner, it seems like the 360 launch library really doesn't do much for you. I can definitely see how the XBox 360 launch would look "must-own" to anyone who really, really liked the XBox! But for the rest of us... well, unless you want to spend $400 to play a $10 psychadelic arcade game, or for some reason you really, really, really want to play "Gun" in HD, the current window of XBox 360 games just seems to ignore your existence entirely.
The XBox was quite paranoid about refusing to run "unsigned" code. Unless Microsoft's really dumb, the hard-drive-resident emulator programs will similarly refuse to run if they've been modified (and thus no longer match Microsoft's cryptographic key). So a virus could probably only effect modchippers. Here's what makes me more curious:
The XBox backwards compatibility is handled by a series of small emulator programs installed on the hard drive, and distributed by Microsoft either on CD or over XBox Live (your choice).
I cannot help but wonder, how long until someone manages to make some kind of pseudo-VMware program that allows you to run the XBox 360's XBox emulators on a Macintosh, or a Playstation 3? I'd probably be willing to modchip my PS3 if it meant I could play KOTOR:)
They made the PSU external for the 360, now reviewers are complaining about that. I personally could care less if the damn Xbox weighed 10 lbs as long as it does what its supposed to do.
I have on a decent number of occasions dropped my Gamecube into a backpack and taken it with me if I was going to a party or on a roadtrip or somewhere that a multiplayer throwdown would be likely. The Gamecube, PSU, controllers, and a little cd binder full of games cumulatively take up less than half the space in my backpack, and not a whole lot of weight. And the handle's a nice touch.
You could do this same thing with a second-generation "pstwo", and it looks like you'll be able to do it with the upcoming Nintendo Revolution. but I do not think you could easily duplicate this feat with an XBox or first-generation PS2 or PS3. Which is a pity, because I've gotten some fantastic use out of my Gamecube in its capacity as portable console.
Whether a console is small and light or big and heavy may not matter to you, but it is an issue for some people and it was an issue based on which the XBox was widely criticized. Therefore it is altogether reasonable for reviewers to bring this up.
The details here seem rather scant. What search algorithm? Is this just like a normal database search? Or is there any way data can be searched using something like PageRank?
Because if this is just a normal database, meh, I could do that myself. But if I could in some way define a group of webpages and then perform pagerank-intelligent searches within that group, that would be a lot more interesting.
Are people allowed to define new "kinds" of information to search for, or only new attributes? And is Google Base available through a Google API like interface? Because I don't see anything about that on the site right now.
In other words, this site is criticizing the global warming side of the argument for neglecting the effect of water.
Yes, that is exactly the position which "evw" was describing in the original parent post.
I think there is some confusion here because the original parent used highly problematic grammar. Typos happen. "They didn't believe the contribution of water vapor" can be interpreted more than one way, but in the context this sentence appears in the original post, the word "they" is to be interpreted as referring to the models.
I'm just curious how many scientists have looked at the possibility that the earth warms and cools in cycles,
Yes. All of them. Find an atmospheric science textbook. It's in there.
and there's really not anything we can do to affect it, or stop it.
You're asking whether atmospheric scientists, people who study the atmosphere and its behavior, think that the manner in which earth's chaotic, multi-factored atmosphere behaves over time is fixed, unchanging, and can never be effected by anything.
The way in which the atmospheric cycles have operated for the last 2 billion years or so-- long stable periods followed by slowly increasing, then sudden and dramtic shifts-- suggest not that climate is some preplanned externally determined thing, caused by the hand of God moving a knob on a thermostat somewhere. What they suggest is the idea of the earth's atmospheric state having a number of equilibrium points, and we are moving back and forth between those equilibrium points. This is exactly what the article slashdot links here is about-- feedback mechanisms. The idea is that as you move further away from a stable equilibrium point, positive feedback mechanisms come into play which move you further and further away from that equilibrium point, and negative feedback mechanisms which were keeping you stable at that equilibrium point shut down. Once you nudge things away from the place where they were, the more the mean temperature rises the more the mean temperature is inspired to rise further, and the more the CO2 concentration rises the more the CO2 concentration is naturally inspired to rise even further. The lesson to take away here isn't to blame the cycles; the cycles themselves need that nudge to start. The lesson to take away is, you don't want to nudge the atmosphere out of that stable state, because once you start it may be too late to nudge it back.
Merrill Lynch aren't journalists, they aren't a video game company. They aren't Microsoft. They aren't Sony. They aren't accountable to anyone. They're analysts. They guess. If they're wrong, there are no consequences to them.
Merrill Lynch also seems to make awfully consistent guesses about the next generation, specifically: Whatever is good for Microsoft. The persistent claims in the last several months that the Playstation 3 will cost exorbant amounts of money also, if you follow sources, inevitably stem from guesses by Merrill Lynch. Contrast this with Merrill Lynch's guesses in 1999, which predicted the ps2 would sell for well more than it ever did.
Other recent winning predictions by analysts about the video game industry have been that the PSP would be a smash success and knock the Nintendo DS and Game Boy outside of the market (it's outsold neither); that Nintendo would die every year for the last five; that Apple would die every year for the five before that; that Nintendo DS online would launch with free VOIP; and that the PS3 will launch in 2007.
Actually it would be reasonable to expect the complete suspension of a major nation's space program to have negative effects on a space station. Skylab, for example, can be directly seen as a casualty of the suspension of America's space program which resulted from the transition to the Space Shuttle. Space stations need active upkeep and visits from crew if they're going to remain in orbit at all. In a hypothetical universe where Russia and America weren't allies in this decade, when the Columbia accident occurred it would have been a serious problem for the space station-- because in the absence of space shuttle flights post-Columbia the flights run by the Russian space program were necessary to keep the thing inhabited.
It might be their intellectual property but it's my culture, dammit. If they won't keep it in print and sell me a copy, which I'm willing to pay for, then they should keep their mouths shut when I go and find one for myself.
What I find funniest about the entire copyright debate is how so few people are actually aware of what a flimsy basis copyright rests on.
The Congress shall have power... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries -- The U.S. Constitution
Intellectual property rights are not property, nor rights. They're grants (a decidedly un-libertarian form of state monopoly), given by the government, with the explicit intent of promoting the public good. Copyright holders are created for the good of society, not the other way around. The way I see it, once copyright starts being used to limit the creation and propagation of information and culture rather than encourage it, copyright might as well just not exist
So does this mean, once this document is unsealed, that Redhat will FINALLY be able to proceed with its restraint of trade case? This looks like exactly the sort of thing that the Redhat case has been blocking on.
Have you ever read errno.h? It's, like, about a page and a half of numbers. And I'm pretty sure SCO never claimed the file was copied line for line (like, comments and whitespace and all), they claimed they owned the ABI. That's like a phone book company suing another phone book company because the second phone book company listed some of the same phone numbers the first one.
And didn't the UNIX copyright holder specifically lose rights to errno.h in the USL/BSD settlment anyway?
If the people in The Matrix start asking probing questions, that does not mean they are being managed by supernatural beings nor make such question asking into a religion.
"The Matrix" is a work of fiction, one with explicitly religious overtones. One of the major themes of the Matrix trilogy was the moral that rationality is ultimately limited and sometimes faith is absolutely necessary for progress to occur. The very plot of the series incorporates concepts of soteriology and reincarnation which are fundamentally Hindu in origin, and I have seen both secular commentators and Christian priests comment on the obvious Christ allegory within the character relationships (Neo as Jesus, Morpheus as John the Baptist, etc).
I don't see what would be unreasonable in the least about viewing the actions of the characters in The Matrix as religious in nature.
Isn't this the sort of copyright abuse that would have all of Slashdot up in arms yelling "Fair use! Fair use!" if it were being employed in any other context?
Of course this does not answer the issue of where the original creator(s) came from
Then it isn't science.
Until the "intelligent design" peoples adopt the idea that their "creator" is explainably a part of the natural world; and accept that if they want to be doing science, they're going to have to at least attempt to explain who this "designer" is, where it came from, and how we identify its work; then yes, they are definitely relying on the supernatural. If there is a difference between "it was caused by supernatural forces" and "it was caused by a force we can't know or detect the origin of, can't explain, and can't reason about", then... well, the difference only matters to a dictionary. De facto this is pretty much exactly what is meant by use of the word "supernatural".
The thing is, the intelligent design movement will never be able to satisfy the above and enter the realm of science, because the ID movement isn't interested in trying to look for "natural" (non-supernatural) designers, such as time travellers or space aliens or flying spaghetti monsters. This is because their entire goal is to find a way to talk about the Christian God without having to admit that's what they're doing.
There's nothing untrue about "the greeks believed in Aphrodite" any more or less than "some scientists believe the world was created by intelligent design".
What scientists believe has no place in a science classroom.
What we should be teaching in a science classroom is what scientists have demonstrated to be most likely accurate using the tools and methods of science.
It is true that at least two persons who incidentally happen to be molecular biologists believe speciation is caused by direct interference in the natural order of things by God. However, the fact these opinions are held by scientists does not make the opinions science; that's just simple appeal to authority. It isn't like there's some kind of rule where, okay, you get a PH.D and you know what a "polypeptide" is, therefore now you have an inalienable right to be quoted in science textbooks. Science textbooks should contain, well, science, i.e., conclusions about the natural world arrived at through the scientific process.
It would not be a true statement to say that any of those persons who believe speciation is the result of interference by God has managed to express or justify this belief as actual science. All "creation science" or "intelligent design" literature takes on trappings and appearance which mimic that of science, but this does not mean it gets to pretend it's science beneath the surface. It's written by a "scientist", it uses the word "polypeptide" at least once, therefore it's science, right? Well, hell no, these are just superficial details. Distinguishing what is and is not valid as science requires more thought and analysis than that, and if anyone must be capable of performing this distinction correctly it must be the public schools.
There are scientists who believe space aliens have visited the earth in the last century, scientists who believe no god exists or has ever existed, and scientsts who believe in the truth of the works of Aliester Crowley. Some of these people can present their beliefs in a way that from a superficial perspective resembles science just as well as the works of Michael Behe. This does not mean any of these beliefs deserve mention in a science classroom. The followers of Phillip Johnson do not deserve the special treatment by public schools that the followers of Anton LaVey are denied.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't destroy a plane with a book.
You can, under the right circumstances, destroy a political party with a book.
Which of these do you think the current government is more afraid of? You destroying a plane? Or you destroying a political party?
I mean, not that anyone's going to be destroying anything with Mao's little book of trite speeches, but hey, it's the thought that counts.
So how hard would it be to write something that automatically converts Dashboard widgets to Google widgets, so you could use the same widgets on both? It's all just javascript, so this doesn't sound like it could possibly be that difficult.
the powers-that-be... It is better to let them think they are tapping you, when in reality you are circumventing the system.
Better hope then that the powers-that-be don't read Slashdot
You are talking about dark matter
This article is talking about dark energy
These are different things.
Personally I would suspect that, similar to dark matter, dark energy will come in time to be derided as an unnecessary mathematical kludge introduced to paper over problems introduced by an oversight we made somewhere else. However, this hasn't happened yet.
The people who are "kinda sorta thinking" about buying a 360 arn't going to buy one at launch. Launch is for the base and people who are hyped into it.
This wasn't exactly the case with, say, the PS2 launch. I mean, yeah, the shortage meant that it was mostly the hardcore who wound up with them, but all kinds of people were buying them and interested in buying them. I think the PS3 launch may be quite similar to the PS2 market. The Playstations target a wider market, and they get a wider market interested at launch than the diehards that the XBox 360 panders to...
3. Debut game lineup-What lineup? - See, now, here's where you and I differ. I see a console built for 21-34 somethings with an 18-game launch. Those 18 games more or less cater to that demographic: shooters, sports and racing.
That's the thing though, isn't it? This huge deal is being made about how the XBox 360 is a hook into a wider market, that this is going to be the thing that takes Microsoft from a toehold to a serious player in the console market. Yet nobody seems to be denying that the 360 is being targeted exclusively to one single demographic, that of the subset of 21-34 somethings who are able and willing to buy a console just to play shooters and sports games on.
You can't get market power by catering to a single demographic. You can build up a strong niche position that way, and you can make a lot of money (just ask Nintendo) but you can't take over a market, not one as wide as the video game console market is. Yes, I'm sure there are some people to whom 19 xbox-style shooters and sports games is more than enough to make a console a must-buy. But this thread isn't about whether one should buy the XBox 360. It's about whether Microsoft has a "clear advantage" by coming out early, it's about whether Microsoft is going to get their stated goal of rivalling Sony. And this isn't getting them that.
OK, so those 19 games'll make the specific kind of person that all 19 games are aimed at deleriously happy. But these people are the XBox's base. It's the XBox's core niche. These people would have bought the 360 whether it came out now or in a year. And if you aren't one of these people, the XBox 360 launch, if not the XBox 360, is pretty much leaving you out entirely. What advantage, if any, is left in this early launch?
Ah. I'll take your word for it, I haven't tried it.
Basically, what if you consider "a wide range of tastes" to include things other than sports games and first person shooters? Because that's really all the 360 lineup offers this month. (Though if we are courteous enough to wait until December 1 there's one fighting game; we probably shouldn't think of those as sports games.)
There are literally three games in the XBox launch lineup which are not a sports game or a first person shooter. Kameo, King Kong, and Gun. Kameo is an adventure game-- but, I have yet to encounter anyone at all who considers Kameo a 'must-have' game, or really is particularly interested in it at all. If you like adventure games you'd be much more interested in King Kong and Gun, which do both look like absolutely fantastic games with wide-ranging appeal. But... both of these games are coming out for approximately every system known to man, from the PSP to the Gamecube to the PC. If you own any video game systems at all you can play these games already. Would anyone seriously buy an XBox 360 to play these? Aside from these three, there is one arcade-looking game on the XBox Live marketplace called "Geometry Wars" that looks really cool, but the article said 'must have', so I'm just trying to think about must-have, system seller games here. This is a minigame.
So we're left with what? Well, a niche system that caters to a "wide range" of sports gamers and first person shooter gamers, with a cop to the fighting game crowd coming next month. In other words, the XBox 360 caters to exactly those set of tastes who comprised the hardcore of XBox owners. If you weren't an XBox owner, it seems like the 360 launch library really doesn't do much for you. I can definitely see how the XBox 360 launch would look "must-own" to anyone who really, really liked the XBox! But for the rest of us... well, unless you want to spend $400 to play a $10 psychadelic arcade game, or for some reason you really, really, really want to play "Gun" in HD, the current window of XBox 360 games just seems to ignore your existence entirely.
The XBox was quite paranoid about refusing to run "unsigned" code. Unless Microsoft's really dumb, the hard-drive-resident emulator programs will similarly refuse to run if they've been modified (and thus no longer match Microsoft's cryptographic key). So a virus could probably only effect modchippers. Here's what makes me more curious:
:)
The XBox backwards compatibility is handled by a series of small emulator programs installed on the hard drive, and distributed by Microsoft either on CD or over XBox Live (your choice).
I cannot help but wonder, how long until someone manages to make some kind of pseudo-VMware program that allows you to run the XBox 360's XBox emulators on a Macintosh, or a Playstation 3? I'd probably be willing to modchip my PS3 if it meant I could play KOTOR
They made the PSU external for the 360, now reviewers are complaining about that. I personally could care less if the damn Xbox weighed 10 lbs as long as it does what its supposed to do.
I have on a decent number of occasions dropped my Gamecube into a backpack and taken it with me if I was going to a party or on a roadtrip or somewhere that a multiplayer throwdown would be likely. The Gamecube, PSU, controllers, and a little cd binder full of games cumulatively take up less than half the space in my backpack, and not a whole lot of weight. And the handle's a nice touch.
You could do this same thing with a second-generation "pstwo", and it looks like you'll be able to do it with the upcoming Nintendo Revolution. but I do not think you could easily duplicate this feat with an XBox or first-generation PS2 or PS3. Which is a pity, because I've gotten some fantastic use out of my Gamecube in its capacity as portable console.
Whether a console is small and light or big and heavy may not matter to you, but it is an issue for some people and it was an issue based on which the XBox was widely criticized. Therefore it is altogether reasonable for reviewers to bring this up.
Xbox 360: Good, but not great. Right there in bold in big letters at the top of the article.
Perhaps people should read the article before flaming the Slashdot editors for not doing so. Or at least read as far as the article title.
The details here seem rather scant. What search algorithm? Is this just like a normal database search? Or is there any way data can be searched using something like PageRank?
Because if this is just a normal database, meh, I could do that myself. But if I could in some way define a group of webpages and then perform pagerank-intelligent searches within that group, that would be a lot more interesting.
Are people allowed to define new "kinds" of information to search for, or only new attributes? And is Google Base available through a Google API like interface? Because I don't see anything about that on the site right now.
In other words, this site is criticizing the global warming side of the argument for neglecting the effect of water.
Yes, that is exactly the position which "evw" was describing in the original parent post.
I think there is some confusion here because the original parent used highly problematic grammar. Typos happen. "They didn't believe the contribution of water vapor" can be interpreted more than one way, but in the context this sentence appears in the original post, the word "they" is to be interpreted as referring to the models.
I'm just curious how many scientists have looked at the possibility that the earth warms and cools in cycles,
Yes. All of them. Find an atmospheric science textbook. It's in there.
and there's really not anything we can do to affect it, or stop it.
You're asking whether atmospheric scientists, people who study the atmosphere and its behavior, think that the manner in which earth's chaotic, multi-factored atmosphere behaves over time is fixed, unchanging, and can never be effected by anything.
No, none of them think that. The cycles themselves, which are quite erratic, demonstrate that changes can happen: For one thing, the cycles obviously happen for some kind of reason. For another thing, the cycles to which you refer haven't always happened. Further back in the past the climate's cycles operated differently.
The way in which the atmospheric cycles have operated for the last 2 billion years or so-- long stable periods followed by slowly increasing, then sudden and dramtic shifts-- suggest not that climate is some preplanned externally determined thing, caused by the hand of God moving a knob on a thermostat somewhere. What they suggest is the idea of the earth's atmospheric state having a number of equilibrium points, and we are moving back and forth between those equilibrium points. This is exactly what the article slashdot links here is about-- feedback mechanisms. The idea is that as you move further away from a stable equilibrium point, positive feedback mechanisms come into play which move you further and further away from that equilibrium point, and negative feedback mechanisms which were keeping you stable at that equilibrium point shut down. Once you nudge things away from the place where they were, the more the mean temperature rises the more the mean temperature is inspired to rise further, and the more the CO2 concentration rises the more the CO2 concentration is naturally inspired to rise even further. The lesson to take away here isn't to blame the cycles; the cycles themselves need that nudge to start. The lesson to take away is, you don't want to nudge the atmosphere out of that stable state, because once you start it may be too late to nudge it back.
That argument was never made by skeptics, ever.
You are incorrect.
Look for yourself.
Merrill Lynch aren't journalists, they aren't a video game company. They aren't Microsoft. They aren't Sony. They aren't accountable to anyone. They're analysts. They guess. If they're wrong, there are no consequences to them.
Merrill Lynch also seems to make awfully consistent guesses about the next generation, specifically: Whatever is good for Microsoft. The persistent claims in the last several months that the Playstation 3 will cost exorbant amounts of money also, if you follow sources, inevitably stem from guesses by Merrill Lynch. Contrast this with Merrill Lynch's guesses in 1999, which predicted the ps2 would sell for well more than it ever did.
Other recent winning predictions by analysts about the video game industry have been that the PSP would be a smash success and knock the Nintendo DS and Game Boy outside of the market (it's outsold neither); that Nintendo would die every year for the last five; that Apple would die every year for the five before that; that Nintendo DS online would launch with free VOIP; and that the PS3 will launch in 2007.
And trying to pull such a stunt isn't a good way to impress the judges. It only shows the incompetence of your lawyers.
That's never stopped SCO yet
Actually it would be reasonable to expect the complete suspension of a major nation's space program to have negative effects on a space station. Skylab, for example, can be directly seen as a casualty of the suspension of America's space program which resulted from the transition to the Space Shuttle. Space stations need active upkeep and visits from crew if they're going to remain in orbit at all. In a hypothetical universe where Russia and America weren't allies in this decade, when the Columbia accident occurred it would have been a serious problem for the space station-- because in the absence of space shuttle flights post-Columbia the flights run by the Russian space program were necessary to keep the thing inhabited.
What I find funniest about the entire copyright debate is how so few people are actually aware of what a flimsy basis copyright rests on.Intellectual property rights are not property, nor rights. They're grants (a decidedly un-libertarian form of state monopoly), given by the government, with the explicit intent of promoting the public good. Copyright holders are created for the good of society, not the other way around. The way I see it, once copyright starts being used to limit the creation and propagation of information and culture rather than encourage it, copyright might as well just not exist
So does this mean, once this document is unsealed, that Redhat will FINALLY be able to proceed with its restraint of trade case? This looks like exactly the sort of thing that the Redhat case has been blocking on.
Have you ever read errno.h? It's, like, about a page and a half of numbers. And I'm pretty sure SCO never claimed the file was copied line for line (like, comments and whitespace and all), they claimed they owned the ABI. That's like a phone book company suing another phone book company because the second phone book company listed some of the same phone numbers the first one.
And didn't the UNIX copyright holder specifically lose rights to errno.h in the USL/BSD settlment anyway?
If the people in The Matrix start asking probing questions, that does not mean they are being managed by supernatural beings nor make such question asking into a religion.
"The Matrix" is a work of fiction, one with explicitly religious overtones. One of the major themes of the Matrix trilogy was the moral that rationality is ultimately limited and sometimes faith is absolutely necessary for progress to occur. The very plot of the series incorporates concepts of soteriology and reincarnation which are fundamentally Hindu in origin, and I have seen both secular commentators and Christian priests comment on the obvious Christ allegory within the character relationships (Neo as Jesus, Morpheus as John the Baptist, etc).
I don't see what would be unreasonable in the least about viewing the actions of the characters in The Matrix as religious in nature.
Isn't this the sort of copyright abuse that would have all of Slashdot up in arms yelling "Fair use! Fair use!" if it were being employed in any other context?
No.
Of course this does not answer the issue of where the original creator(s) came from
Then it isn't science.
Until the "intelligent design" peoples adopt the idea that their "creator" is explainably a part of the natural world; and accept that if they want to be doing science, they're going to have to at least attempt to explain who this "designer" is, where it came from, and how we identify its work; then yes, they are definitely relying on the supernatural. If there is a difference between "it was caused by supernatural forces" and "it was caused by a force we can't know or detect the origin of, can't explain, and can't reason about", then... well, the difference only matters to a dictionary. De facto this is pretty much exactly what is meant by use of the word "supernatural".
The thing is, the intelligent design movement will never be able to satisfy the above and enter the realm of science, because the ID movement isn't interested in trying to look for "natural" (non-supernatural) designers, such as time travellers or space aliens or flying spaghetti monsters. This is because their entire goal is to find a way to talk about the Christian God without having to admit that's what they're doing.
There's nothing untrue about "the greeks believed in Aphrodite" any more or less than "some scientists believe the world was created by intelligent design".
What scientists believe has no place in a science classroom.
What we should be teaching in a science classroom is what scientists have demonstrated to be most likely accurate using the tools and methods of science.
It is true that at least two persons who incidentally happen to be molecular biologists believe speciation is caused by direct interference in the natural order of things by God. However, the fact these opinions are held by scientists does not make the opinions science; that's just simple appeal to authority. It isn't like there's some kind of rule where, okay, you get a PH.D and you know what a "polypeptide" is, therefore now you have an inalienable right to be quoted in science textbooks. Science textbooks should contain, well, science, i.e., conclusions about the natural world arrived at through the scientific process.
It would not be a true statement to say that any of those persons who believe speciation is the result of interference by God has managed to express or justify this belief as actual science. All "creation science" or "intelligent design" literature takes on trappings and appearance which mimic that of science, but this does not mean it gets to pretend it's science beneath the surface. It's written by a "scientist", it uses the word "polypeptide" at least once, therefore it's science, right? Well, hell no, these are just superficial details. Distinguishing what is and is not valid as science requires more thought and analysis than that, and if anyone must be capable of performing this distinction correctly it must be the public schools.
There are scientists who believe space aliens have visited the earth in the last century, scientists who believe no god exists or has ever existed, and scientsts who believe in the truth of the works of Aliester Crowley. Some of these people can present their beliefs in a way that from a superficial perspective resembles science just as well as the works of Michael Behe. This does not mean any of these beliefs deserve mention in a science classroom. The followers of Phillip Johnson do not deserve the special treatment by public schools that the followers of Anton LaVey are denied.