Nope, I just found it really funny that the metric system can be described as obfuscated compared to the imperial one.
No one is arguing that the imperial system is better than the metric system for measurement - that is clearly your own agenda to find an opportunity to argue.
I don't have a special agenda and didn't even knew the exact measures of the imperial system before posting (searched them on the net), the only agenda I have is that I am currently in the Uk, who still are using a lot of the imperial system, although now the official one is the metric system and my only agenda is to buy 2 liters of milk instead of 2 pint, 500G of this instead of the inperial equivalent, I vote with my dollars (well, with my pounds actually). BTW, I prefer the imperial system for pubs, 1pint of beer being more than 1/2 liter;) . Anyway I am not too anal about it, I just ask people the equivalence, either they know and it's fine or they don't knwo and it gives them one more reason to use the metric system rather than being backward compatibles;)
I encourage you to try to work on a Ford using metric tools.
My father almost always bought and worked on Fords because he loved the mechanics, unfirtunately I don't know what knid of tools he was using, but they weren't labelled as either metrics or imperials, but you took a key of 12, for example, and didn't care wether it was 12 millimeters or 12 units smaller than inches in the imperial one.
I agree that I didn't formulate my post well to be funny (but hey, try to be funny in French and we will see), but I think you took it too seriously. After many stripped nuts and broken tools no doubt you will conclude that it is the car, and not the tools that were faulty.
I hope I am not that stupid, I probably would think that there is an adequation between the car and the tools, and probably between them and me, this doesn't means that either is bad, simply that they aren't made to fit well together.
While that conclusion may be valid, your argument is off-topic I know it's off-topic, but when I saw it I couldn't resist to (try) to poke fun at it, unfortunately it didn't work very well. An English poke fun of the imperial system and of the metric one by explaining that English people were more easily understanding what three times the lenght of a dead King foot was than ten time a fraction of the perimeter of the earth.
Anyway, I am not so much against the imperial system because it is not the one I am using or because it is NIH (Not Invented Here, I'm French, the metric system being invented in France, but not the imperial one that could be a (poor) reason) rather than because I find it completely stupid and hard to understand/use. I wish it could die peacefully.
BTW, do Americans buy their stuff in imperial or is their a double tagging like in the UK? And what is teached at school?
If there are enough people wanting music high quality software under Linux and proprietary software don't want to port to it then the free ones will have more incentive to make progress which leads to less incentive to use a closed solution when they port it to Linux.
Of course their are other factors but they should take advantage that they have good software to port it, when the difference of quality isn't big enough (that is when the free ones are "good enough") and are easily available (download or in distros) they will have a harder time getting people to switch.
There is a constitutional problem with shortening outstanding patents. Patents are regarded as "property" and the Fifth Amendment says, among other things, "...nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
Oh yeah, and the congress didn't have any problem to take away the property of the public for 20 more years retroactively with copyrights a few years ago.
The problem is that if you take the property of somebody you are stealing them, so the State should compensate them, so I consider that the State should compensate the public from having stolen 20 years more of Copyright from the public, because during these 20 years added to copyright law the public is losing money, he is paying this money for material that should be where nature always put it: in the collective mind of Humanity.
If they don't have any problem for stealing from the public why should they have a problem for stealing from the public why should they have a problem stealing from corporations?
It could be worse. You could be trying to send IP over pigeon. From rfc2549:
Being able to make a rfc for that is insane enough but what would be geniusly insane would be to implement it.
Of course the Open BSD version would use pigeons with DNA-based steganography and cryptography (to be invented). It would also be engineered with materials that make it almost undestructible.
The Linux version would be sold by three hundreds different birds factories and would have most of the features of the other versions in option. It would also run on Pigeons, Eagles, canaris and even on pterodactyles for those of us that didn't upgrade our hardware.
The FreeBSD version would have a faster IP stack implemented in the pigeons, making them fly at supersonic speed.
The windows version would be with different colored feathers that look beautoiful but would literally crash without visible reason from the casual user POV.
The old Mac version would let you enter your packets only in one way and retrieve them only in one way, which is very simple but gets in your way when you are used to use a Unix pigeon.
The new Mac OS X version looks even better, can work on very long distances without problem but has got some useability issues such as when you overload the interface with too muck packets.
The Internet started on Unix, the Internet was built on Unix
Well, some more knowledgeable people than me can comment but I thought that the Internet started on other OS's than Unix, mostly PDP/10 with TOPS-10, but when the hardware became obsolete it moved on Unix because TOPS wasn't cross-platform so the death of the PDP/10 was the death of TOPS-10.
So I don't think that the Internet was created on Unix, unless you mean the modern Internet, excluding what existed with Arpanet.
There is also a comic about a criminal organisation that is robbing a lot of banks, the British intelligence use Clif(f?)ton (the name of the Hero IIRC) to infiltrate them, he is trained... but end up seeing that everybody except the two bosses are infitrated agents from the CIA, MI5, DST, KGB,...
to play on an analogy from Bob Young, it's like being allowed to work on your Ford, but being given only metric tools to do it.
What is his problem with metric tools? I use them all day without problem.
I would argue that this is the imperial system that is obfuscated, not the metric one. Somebody rally must be either stupid or brainwashed to think that it is easier to calculate lengths when:
Could you please do a bit of research before posting your articles?
I did it for you and to demonstrate that it is not too hard:
1. I moved my hand to the oblong device placed right to my device with letters on it (which we will call a keyboard latter on for obvious simplicity) and composed of two buttons (although I also have seen some similar devices with three buttons and have heard of rare beasts using only one button), device that we shall call a mouse from now on.
2. I accidentely moved the mouse and to my great surprise it didn't catch fire, although a strange thing happened: there was an arrow moving on the screen as if by some magical mean, this surely is a mark of the devil's work but despite that I experimented with this mouse and understood that the arrow was following the orders silently given to her by the mouse, herself following the orders that my hand gave her.
3. I moved the mouse to the name of the author's article.
4. In an unfortunate move I clicked to the up-leftmost rectangle available on the mouse, luckily for me my computer didn't explose and instead the text that was displayed under the magic arrow, the author's name, changed its color.
5. Being a curious being I asked myself what would be the consequence of clicking the right...let's call it a "button", of the mouse.
6. To my great horror another rectangle appeared on the screen, covering the text that was beneath, in a panic move I clicked on the rectangle on a part that was filed with the word Copy.
7. Being traumatised by the preceding experience and sure to be the guinea pig of some satanic sect I hit the "Page Down" key, which caused the whole thing to disappear and be replaced by a similar looking thing with other text, I did it again to experiment with more method, and again,... until I couldn't do it anymore.
8. That is at this time that I saw something that looked different than the rest of the text, it was a white filed box with no text inside with another box on its side filled with the search text.
9. I tried clicking on it, like I did with the author's name; to my stupor and to my delight...nothing happened, except that a vertical line was appearing and disappearing all the time, which I found kinda strange.
10. Seeing that clicking on it with the left button didn't work, I tried to do it with the right button, to my lesser stupor than the first time another rectangle apeared and hid the absence of text in the box.
11. Knowing what to do this time to make this box disappear I clicked on it. To my grand demise nothing happened, so I did it again.
12. I finally found that I had to click on it on a part containing text that was in black, the only one available were "Undo" and "Paste", given that the first one was available in the first box I tried the second one, "Paste". To my great delight the name of the author, which I had highlighted before with the left button, appeared in the box.
1x. I did nothing in this number, being afraid of the consequences this could have.
14. Gathering all the courage I could find around (which isn't that much, although I am no Anonymous Coward) I tried to click on the box which was placed beside, box containing, as I mentioned earlier, the text "Search". Doing so provided me with great fear when I saw the image completely disappear to be a black page (another sign of the presence of unholy things in this heretic machine), which was, luckily for my mental sanity, shortly replaced by another page with a lot of green text.
15. The lines of green text were following a line of dark text, which was containing the text "User Feedback and Open Source Development", this looked like the name of the page on which I was before.
16. Most interesting was the second line, which was conatining the text "Open Source's Achilles Heel", not knowing what this Open Source thing was, but just in case it was a monster I had one day to destroy in the name of somebody that didn't ask me to destroy it in it's name, I clicked on this text, which made the same phenomena occur again.
To my great disappointement I saw that this new page wasn't nything new but merely an older version to the story I was reading earlier.
My guess is that if even if the people working at the company doing the interface to this site are not able to use one of the most basic parts of it then how do you want total stranger to use it???
Your dead meat man! To kill you I will pour Hot Flaming Grapes down your pants and petrify SGI's $04's baby's to a dark lord named Quake and using the paganist symbol of a Fisheye and having Jon Katz's articles as a Bible.
Hum, I guess I should be treatening Katz, not you if I want to gain more/. purity percents and be a:
You are a Karma Whore when your post is designed to gain you some karma regardless of what you believe...
So if you check the +1 box to deactivate it because you think this post will give you karma points and want to have the extra one then you are karma whoring, if you keep the extra point because you want it to have a head start to be seen by moderators so he can go further up then you are karma whoring too, but differently.
You may ask yourself how other people make to distinguish the two and distinguish it from not using the bonus because you think it is unfair or using it because you have something relevant to say and hope this will help people to have more insight, well the response is: they don't they just call you a karma whore in function of how you appear to them, not in function of whether you are one or not.
Aren't these 4% the share of shipment for 1999? I ask this because they cite IDC and I saw these same numbers with the same source (IDC) a few weeks ago when they where saying that in 1999 Windows NT shipped with 36% of new servers, Linux with 26%,... and they said that Linux was shipped with 4% of the desktop, which amazed me (4% this soon?).
If this is these numbers that they are citing then not 4% of desktops are using Linux, but 4% of desktop sold last year where running Linux.
For many people video games are an important entertainment and beside those that are in this business for the money the Game industry is also an industry that attract many people to computers, so I am wondering which game or games would you single out as being games that blew off your mind and made you dream that one day you would be in the game market.
And here's a misnomer on Shawn's part too: "I think it's pretty obvious to most people that Napster is not media specific". Well, no. Currently, it is. It doesn't have to be, is what I think he's trying to say, and eventually won't be, but currently, yes, it is.
Personally I understood this sentence as saying that the concept of Napster is not Media specific, that maybe someone could have thought of the same but with software instead of music, not as talking about this specific implementation of the concept.
There have been cases where because the site was accessible to citizens of that state.
Do you mean inside the USA, that is totally different than between two distinc countries, in the first case there is far more likeliness to make a ruling valid across states, because they are part of a global country and share the same constitution, than to make a ruling valid between different countries.
The web messes up traditional jurisdictional arguments.
It sure does, but this still doesn't make a foreign judgement automatically apply locally. They can sue you in China and get you condemned there (but this would really be hard to do so, given that apart from your travel here you don't have any relation to China) but if they try to make it apply in the States they will have as much a hard time as doing it directly.
What about stores with no physical presence?
They have a physical presence, just the buyer don't go to this place. Any society is registered in at least a country (well, with the exception of the illegal societys like the mafia) and that is with this country's law that they can be most directly be attacked; other countries may judge against a foreign e-commerce website (no physical store in that country) but to make it apply in the e-commerce country they need to use an international treaty and even then they cannot use it to bypass the constitution.
If I understand correctly what you are thinking that would mean that Amazon (wrong example, let's say Barnes and noble) cannot sell a pamphlet anti-Chinese because a Chinese court will censure it, make it illegal and Amazon would then be restrained from selling it outside China. As you can see this is completely crazy, the Chinese court can restrain them to not selling it in China but they cannot restrain them from selling it in another country (say, Taiwan).
Or companies that have 6 employees that are spread out over the world?
I don't understand, do you mean that the company could then sue you in each 6 countries? Well, they could try but they could not make the ruling apply in the States anyway (because of th e1st amendment).
There is a little known project that is very important to the whole (free) software community and that would save an awful lot of people to constantly reinvent the same wheel.
Yes it is an important project because any programmer needed at one time or another to write a program giving a similar functionlity, resulting in dozens of thousands fo implementations that are mostly doing the same thing.
Seeing that the world was drowned under so much waste of programmer talent doing it over and over again I decided to create a project that would allow people to get free of reimplementing it and give them the opportunity to innovate in other software models. I called this project "The ultimate Hello World".
Yes, I can see your sign of relief to the thought that not ever again you will have to re-engineer this software and taht you will be able to take a pre-cooked solution that would solve all your "Hello, World" problems and set you free of it's mind-bogging complexity.
I think that as generous and visionary as you are you will understand the importance of thi sproject and understand what boost you would give both to this project and to the software community (by inirectly saving them from the assle of thi8s program) by giving 20,000 US$ to this project.
I hereby thanks you in advance.
PS: To contact me for the donation just use the e-mail adress given above my comment after getting rid of the anti-SPAM feature.
More seriously I think that serious candidates are:
1. the FSF. Without them we wouldn't have Linux and probably wouldn't have *BSD (because of GCC), furthermore a lot of people may not love Stallman but since more than 15 years he said the same message and you can be sure that he would us ethe money to favorise Free Software.
2. One of the *BSD, particulary if this is what you prefer. This would be great for them because they don't have the IPO craze there is around Linux and I don't think they would mind a little help. 3. "The ultimate hello, World" of course;) 4. Maybe give money to people that are working not directly on Free Softwares but are fighting causes that impact Free Sofware, like the league for programming freedom which works against software patents, or the EFF which fights for the preservation of our rights online. 5. Split the sum between many smaller project, these are probably those that need more money because they are less known and attract less founding.
was not aware of the French Branch. It makes my point even more valid.
I don't think so, if they didn't have any location in France this really would be an utterly stupid lawsuit, but if they did sue was because of the foothold, because they had something in their juridiction.
Let's say that I create a company in France that sell DeCSS (the true one) modified (under the GPL of course) to be a player/recorder. If the MPAA sues me under the DMCA in America while I am not selling it or otherwise having any relation to America they can bugger of whatever they want because in France we don't have the DMCA, we can reverse engineer for compatibility reasons and we have rights to fair use just like you did a few years ago in the States (with nuances probably), so the DeCSS is completely legal.
Of course they could try to sue me in France under a French law but not under an American law. More exactly they could sue me under the DMCA in America but since I don't have any relation with America the ruling don't have any teeth to bit me.
Mattel has locations in China, and they can try to claim that the China location is hurt by the US based website.
No, with their location in China they can sue the guy in China for his website but they will have a hard day to make the judgement valid in the States by using international treaties because these treaties hold no power on the constitution, so he keeps his free speech. in the worst case the guy can be condemned in China and then must avoid going there, which is already bad, but they cannot touch him in the States from China, otherwise it would mean that I don't have the right to free speech because China doesn't give this right to me, so if I am condemned by a Chinese court this takes away my right to free speech.
But this work the other way round, Mattel has got a implantation in France, which means that I can sue them under French law (I'm French) for something that may be legal in the States but illegal in France, they still can do it in the States (it's legal over there) but they couldn't do it anymore in France (because the French judge say they can't).
But on your point, doesn't MIT and Harvard have exhange programs with schools in France? Is that enough to cover them?
Since I am not aware of any implantation of a branch of the MIT or Harvard in France they have absolutely nothing to fear from French laws.
An exchange program isn't the same because when a student make an exchange program between a French university and a foreign (for the French) one he is enroled in the French university in France and he is enroled in the foreign university in whatever country this university is, not in France, so this is the same case as if I went to the States and got enroled to the MIT (I can dream;)), I could not complain of the lack of French enrolment forms.
Well, at least that's how I understand things, but if the MPAA can sue me in France (or England given that that's were I currently am) over the DMCA because I have got DeCSS on a French webpage then this would be called ingerence.
Did you forget, the French government brought suit against a university in Georgia for not having the website in French?
If we talk about hte same case then it is irelevant of this story because this was an American university that had an implementation in France and the website of their location in France was only in English (which is understandable for an university in which you will only speak English), including the on-line enrolment forms which is against the French law that state that enrolment forms must be available in French.
The case as you depict here is misleading and make us believe that it is "these stupid French suing an American University located in Georgia (maybe the original one was here but the targeted one was the France-located one), hey why not sue the MIT, Harvard, and every other non-French university over the world". I don't say that you said that, just that the way you said what you wanted to say was meaning that.
If it automatically detects duplicate files and symbolically links them, it will ruin your ability to backup a file by creating a copy of it somewhere.
I don't think htat Microsofties are stupid enough to do this, they probably will do what other people said, create a new copy of the file if you change it, otherwise not only would there be a problem with backups files as you explain it but also security wise.
Let's just imagine that I copy/bin/login or it's equivalent to $HOME/mylogin or it's equivalent. If they don't copy it when I modify it then I could modify it to my version of login with, say a few extra instructions to mail the password of the guy to an anonymous Internet account if connected to the net, or to a crypted file in a public writable folder (well, yes directory, but keep remembering that we are in MS embrace and extend environment) where I can fetch it and decrypt it to know the passwords. Oh, i almost forgot, I also can add a few instructions that allow me to get roo^H^H^Hadministrator access.
I don't think MS guys are stupid enough to do such a dangerous thing, so they probably did implement something to avoid that. However, if they did do it in this straightforward and wrong way we will have some funny/. stories in the future;)
Additionally, Tove will supply hand to hand training for the troops, and lead them into the building....
Just for those that are too newbies to the Linux community to understand, he is talking about Tove Torvalds, wife of Linus and ex Finnish karate champion.
But what is the part of the BSD daemon? Does he open a gate between MS headquarters and hell? Well, I guess he doesn't need to, it's already done;)
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Well, I suppose you know this joke: It's Bill Gates'wedding day and the two lovers are eager to know more "deeply" each other, so they leave the ceremony and go in their wedding room. They begin to take their suits off until Bill's new wife get to the interesting spot "Hu, I understand why you called your company Micro-soft now".
Label me a Carmack whore if you must, but any Quake[$x] comments by The Man deserve to be marked as such.
I tend to disagree, Carmack's comment deserve to be moderated like any other comment, that is, without any bias given the author but infunction of the content of the comment. Would you want him to be moderated +5 if he was doing a FIRST POST? Well, maybe the first time it would be moderated +5 funny but otherwise this would be silly.
Luckily, JC don't have time to lose doing this kind of stupid things (and i prefer him using his time for doing cool stuff liek Quake rather than trolling) and only speak when he has got something interesting to say, so he gets moderated in consequence.
This places the UK government in an uncomfortable situation. On the one hand, as one of their stated goals is to be at the 'heart of Europe'
The UK really wanting to be part of Europe? Let me laugh, they probably would prefer to ba a new American State than being a part of Europe, otherwise they wouldn't help the US screw other European countries.
I guess De Gaulle was right when he said "L'Angleterre est le porte-avion de l'amerique en Europe" which means (lousely translated) "England is the plane-carrier of America in Europe".
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Nope, I just found it really funny that the metric system can be described as obfuscated compared to the imperial one.
No one is arguing that the imperial system is better than the metric system for measurement - that is clearly your own agenda to find an opportunity to argue.
I don't have a special agenda and didn't even knew the exact measures of the imperial system before posting (searched them on the net), the only agenda I have is that I am currently in the Uk, who still are using a lot of the imperial system, although now the official one is the metric system and my only agenda is to buy 2 liters of milk instead of 2 pint, 500G of this instead of the inperial equivalent, I vote with my dollars (well, with my pounds actually). BTW, I prefer the imperial system for pubs, 1pint of beer being more than 1/2 liter ;) . Anyway I am not too anal about it, I just ask people the equivalence, either they know and it's fine or they don't knwo and it gives them one more reason to use the metric system rather than being backward compatibles ;)
I encourage you to try to work on a Ford using metric tools.
My father almost always bought and worked on Fords because he loved the mechanics, unfirtunately I don't know what knid of tools he was using, but they weren't labelled as either metrics or imperials, but you took a key of 12, for example, and didn't care wether it was 12 millimeters or 12 units smaller than inches in the imperial one.
I agree that I didn't formulate my post well to be funny (but hey, try to be funny in French and we will see), but I think you took it too seriously.
After many stripped nuts and broken tools no doubt you will conclude that it is the car, and not the tools that were faulty.
I hope I am not that stupid, I probably would think that there is an adequation between the car and the tools, and probably between them and me, this doesn't means that either is bad, simply that they aren't made to fit well together.
While that conclusion may be valid, your argument is off-topic I know it's off-topic, but when I saw it I couldn't resist to (try) to poke fun at it, unfortunately it didn't work very well. An English poke fun of the imperial system and of the metric one by explaining that English people were more easily understanding what three times the lenght of a dead King foot was than ten time a fraction of the perimeter of the earth.
Anyway, I am not so much against the imperial system because it is not the one I am using or because it is NIH (Not Invented Here, I'm French, the metric system being invented in France, but not the imperial one that could be a (poor) reason) rather than because I find it completely stupid and hard to understand/use. I wish it could die peacefully.
BTW, do Americans buy their stuff in imperial or is their a double tagging like in the UK? And what is teached at school?
Of course their are other factors but they should take advantage that they have good software to port it, when the difference of quality isn't big enough (that is when the free ones are "good enough") and are easily available (download or in distros) they will have a harder time getting people to switch.
at:
2 213830.html
http://www.freshmeat.net/appindex/1998/08/04/90
The homepage being: http://www.gnu.org/software/lilypond/
Oh yeah, and the congress didn't have any problem to take away the property of the public for 20 more years retroactively with copyrights a few years ago.
The problem is that if you take the property of somebody you are stealing them, so the State should compensate them, so I consider that the State should compensate the public from having stolen 20 years more of Copyright from the public, because during these 20 years added to copyright law the public is losing money, he is paying this money for material that should be where nature always put it: in the collective mind of Humanity.
If they don't have any problem for stealing from the public why should they have a problem for stealing from the public why should they have a problem stealing from corporations?
Being able to make a rfc for that is insane enough but what would be geniusly insane would be to implement it.
Of course the Open BSD version would use pigeons with DNA-based steganography and cryptography (to be invented). It would also be engineered with materials that make it almost undestructible.
The Linux version would be sold by three hundreds different birds factories and would have most of the features of the other versions in option. It would also run on Pigeons, Eagles, canaris and even on pterodactyles for those of us that didn't upgrade our hardware.
The FreeBSD version would have a faster IP stack implemented in the pigeons, making them fly at supersonic speed.
The windows version would be with different colored feathers that look beautoiful but would literally crash without visible reason from the casual user POV.
The old Mac version would let you enter your packets only in one way and retrieve them only in one way, which is very simple but gets in your way when you are used to use a Unix pigeon.
The new Mac OS X version looks even better, can work on very long distances without problem but has got some useability issues such as when you overload the interface with too muck packets.
Well, some more knowledgeable people than me can comment but I thought that the Internet started on other OS's than Unix, mostly PDP/10 with TOPS-10, but when the hardware became obsolete it moved on Unix because TOPS wasn't cross-platform so the death of the PDP/10 was the death of TOPS-10.
So I don't think that the Internet was created on Unix, unless you mean the modern Internet, excluding what existed with Arpanet.
There is also a comic about a criminal organisation that is robbing a lot of banks, the British intelligence use Clif(f?)ton (the name of the Hero IIRC) to infiltrate them, he is trained... but end up seeing that everybody except the two bosses are infitrated agents from the CIA, MI5, DST, KGB,...
Quite a good comic.
What is his problem with metric tools? I use them all day without problem.
I would argue that this is the imperial system that is obfuscated, not the metric one. Somebody rally must be either stupid or brainwashed to think that it is easier to calculate lengths when:
12 inches...= 1 foot
.3 feet.....= 1 yard
.8 furlongs.= 1 mile
22 yards....= 1 chain
10 chains...= 1 furlong
5280 feet...= 1 mile
1760 yards..= 1 mile
rather than calculing them when:
10 millimeters.= 1 centimeter
...
10 centimeters.= 1 decimeter
10 decimeters..= 1 meter
10 meters......= 1 decameter (rarely used)
10 decameters..= 1 hectometer (rarely used)
10 hectometers.= 1 kilometer
Yeah, I guess multiplying and dividing by 12 3 22 8 is easier than by 10.
I did it for you and to demonstrate that it is not too hard:
1. I moved my hand to the oblong device placed right to my device with letters on it (which we will call a keyboard latter on for obvious simplicity) and composed of two buttons (although I also have seen some similar devices with three buttons and have heard of rare beasts using only one button), device that we shall call a mouse from now on.
2. I accidentely moved the mouse and to my great surprise it didn't catch fire, although a strange thing happened: there was an arrow moving on the screen as if by some magical mean, this surely is a mark of the devil's work but despite that I experimented with this mouse and understood that the arrow was following the orders silently given to her by the mouse, herself following the orders that my hand gave her.
3. I moved the mouse to the name of the author's article.
4. In an unfortunate move I clicked to the up-leftmost rectangle available on the mouse, luckily for me my computer didn't explose and instead the text that was displayed under the magic arrow, the author's name, changed its color.
5. Being a curious being I asked myself what would be the consequence of clicking the right...let's call it a "button", of the mouse.
6. To my great horror another rectangle appeared on the screen, covering the text that was beneath, in a panic move I clicked on the rectangle on a part that was filed with the word Copy.
7. Being traumatised by the preceding experience and sure to be the guinea pig of some satanic sect I hit the "Page Down" key, which caused the whole thing to disappear and be replaced by a similar looking thing with other text, I did it again to experiment with more method, and again,... until I couldn't do it anymore.
8. That is at this time that I saw something that looked different than the rest of the text, it was a white filed box with no text inside with another box on its side filled with the search text.
9. I tried clicking on it, like I did with the author's name; to my stupor and to my delight...nothing happened, except that a vertical line was appearing and disappearing all the time, which I found kinda strange.
10. Seeing that clicking on it with the left button didn't work, I tried to do it with the right button, to my lesser stupor than the first time another rectangle apeared and hid the absence of text in the box.
11. Knowing what to do this time to make this box disappear I clicked on it. To my grand demise nothing happened, so I did it again.
12. I finally found that I had to click on it on a part containing text that was in black, the only one available were "Undo" and "Paste", given that the first one was available in the first box I tried the second one, "Paste". To my great delight the name of the author, which I had highlighted before with the left button, appeared in the box.
1x. I did nothing in this number, being afraid of the consequences this could have.
14. Gathering all the courage I could find around (which isn't that much, although I am no Anonymous Coward) I tried to click on the box which was placed beside, box containing, as I mentioned earlier, the text "Search". Doing so provided me with great fear when I saw the image completely disappear to be a black page (another sign of the presence of unholy things in this heretic machine), which was, luckily for my mental sanity, shortly replaced by another page with a lot of green text.
15. The lines of green text were following a line of dark text, which was containing the text "User Feedback and Open Source Development", this looked like the name of the page on which I was before.
16. Most interesting was the second line, which was conatining the text "Open Source's Achilles Heel", not knowing what this Open Source thing was, but just in case it was a monster I had one day to destroy in the name of somebody that didn't ask me to destroy it in it's name, I clicked on this text, which made the same phenomena occur again.
To my great disappointement I saw that this new page wasn't nything new but merely an older version to the story I was reading earlier.
My guess is that if even if the people working at the company doing the interface to this site are not able to use one of the most basic parts of it then how do you want total stranger to use it???
Your dead meat man! To kill you I will pour Hot Flaming Grapes down your pants and petrify SGI's $04's baby's to a dark lord named Quake and using the paganist symbol of a Fisheye and having Jon Katz's articles as a Bible.
Hum, I guess I should be treatening Katz, not you if I want to gain more /. purity percents and be a:
.So if you check the +1 box to deactivate it because you think this post will give you karma points and want to have the extra one then you are karma whoring, if you keep the extra point because you want it to have a head start to be seen by moderators so he can go further up then you are karma whoring too, but differently.
You may ask yourself how other people make to distinguish the two and distinguish it from not using the bonus because you think it is unfair or using it because you have something relevant to say and hope this will help people to have more insight, well the response is: they don't they just call you a karma whore in function of how you appear to them, not in function of whether you are one or not.
If this is these numbers that they are citing then not 4% of desktops are using Linux, but 4% of desktop sold last year where running Linux.
Thanks and continue the good work.
"I think it's pretty obvious to most people that Napster is not media specific".
Well, no. Currently, it is. It doesn't have to be, is what I think he's trying to say, and eventually won't be, but currently, yes, it is.
Personally I understood this sentence as saying that the concept of Napster is not Media specific, that maybe someone could have thought of the same but with software instead of music, not as talking about this specific implementation of the concept.
Do you mean inside the USA, that is totally different than between two distinc countries, in the first case there is far more likeliness to make a ruling valid across states, because they are part of a global country and share the same constitution, than to make a ruling valid between different countries.
The web messes up traditional jurisdictional arguments.
It sure does, but this still doesn't make a foreign judgement automatically apply locally. They can sue you in China and get you condemned there (but this would really be hard to do so, given that apart from your travel here you don't have any relation to China) but if they try to make it apply in the States they will have as much a hard time as doing it directly.
What about stores with no physical presence?
They have a physical presence, just the buyer don't go to this place. Any society is registered in at least a country (well, with the exception of the illegal societys like the mafia) and that is with this country's law that they can be most directly be attacked; other countries may judge against a foreign e-commerce website (no physical store in that country) but to make it apply in the e-commerce country they need to use an international treaty and even then they cannot use it to bypass the constitution.
If I understand correctly what you are thinking that would mean that Amazon (wrong example, let's say Barnes and noble) cannot sell a pamphlet anti-Chinese because a Chinese court will censure it, make it illegal and Amazon would then be restrained from selling it outside China. As you can see this is completely crazy, the Chinese court can restrain them to not selling it in China but they cannot restrain them from selling it in another country (say, Taiwan).
Or companies that have 6 employees that are spread out over the world?
I don't understand, do you mean that the company could then sue you in each 6 countries? Well, they could try but they could not make the ruling apply in the States anyway (because of th e1st amendment).
Yes it is an important project because any programmer needed at one time or another to write a program giving a similar functionlity, resulting in dozens of thousands fo implementations that are mostly doing the same thing.
Seeing that the world was drowned under so much waste of programmer talent doing it over and over again I decided to create a project that would allow people to get free of reimplementing it and give them the opportunity to innovate in other software models. I called this project "The ultimate Hello World".
Yes, I can see your sign of relief to the thought that not ever again you will have to re-engineer this software and taht you will be able to take a pre-cooked solution that would solve all your "Hello, World" problems and set you free of it's mind-bogging complexity.
I think that as generous and visionary as you are you will understand the importance of thi sproject and understand what boost you would give both to this project and to the software community (by inirectly saving them from the assle of thi8s program) by giving 20,000 US$ to this project.
I hereby thanks you in advance.
PS: To contact me for the donation just use the e-mail adress given above my comment after getting rid of the anti-SPAM feature.
More seriously I think that serious candidates are:
1. the FSF. Without them we wouldn't have Linux and probably wouldn't have *BSD (because of GCC), furthermore a lot of people may not love Stallman but since more than 15 years he said the same message and you can be sure that he would us ethe money to favorise Free Software.
2. One of the *BSD, particulary if this is what you prefer. This would be great for them because they don't have the IPO craze there is around Linux and I don't think they would mind a little help. 3. "The ultimate hello, World" of course ;) 4. Maybe give money to people that are working not directly on Free Softwares but are fighting causes that impact Free Sofware, like the league for programming freedom which works against software patents, or the EFF which fights for the preservation of our rights online. 5. Split the sum between many smaller project, these are probably those that need more money because they are less known and attract less founding.
I don't think so, if they didn't have any location in France this really would be an utterly stupid lawsuit, but if they did sue was because of the foothold, because they had something in their juridiction.
Let's say that I create a company in France that sell DeCSS (the true one) modified (under the GPL of course) to be a player/recorder. If the MPAA sues me under the DMCA in America while I am not selling it or otherwise having any relation to America they can bugger of whatever they want because in France we don't have the DMCA, we can reverse engineer for compatibility reasons and we have rights to fair use just like you did a few years ago in the States (with nuances probably), so the DeCSS is completely legal.
Of course they could try to sue me in France under a French law but not under an American law. More exactly they could sue me under the DMCA in America but since I don't have any relation with America the ruling don't have any teeth to bit me.
Mattel has locations in China, and they can try to claim that the China location is hurt by the US based website.
No, with their location in China they can sue the guy in China for his website but they will have a hard day to make the judgement valid in the States by using international treaties because these treaties hold no power on the constitution, so he keeps his free speech. in the worst case the guy can be condemned in China and then must avoid going there, which is already bad, but they cannot touch him in the States from China, otherwise it would mean that I don't have the right to free speech because China doesn't give this right to me, so if I am condemned by a Chinese court this takes away my right to free speech.
But this work the other way round, Mattel has got a implantation in France, which means that I can sue them under French law (I'm French) for something that may be legal in the States but illegal in France, they still can do it in the States (it's legal over there) but they couldn't do it anymore in France (because the French judge say they can't).
But on your point, doesn't MIT and Harvard have exhange programs with schools in France? Is that enough to cover them?
Since I am not aware of any implantation of a branch of the MIT or Harvard in France they have absolutely nothing to fear from French laws.
An exchange program isn't the same because when a student make an exchange program between a French university and a foreign (for the French) one he is enroled in the French university in France and he is enroled in the foreign university in whatever country this university is, not in France, so this is the same case as if I went to the States and got enroled to the MIT (I can dream ;)), I could not complain of the lack of French enrolment forms.
Well, at least that's how I understand things, but if the MPAA can sue me in France (or England given that that's were I currently am) over the DMCA because I have got DeCSS on a French webpage then this would be called ingerence.
If we talk about hte same case then it is irelevant of this story because this was an American university that had an implementation in France and the website of their location in France was only in English (which is understandable for an university in which you will only speak English), including the on-line enrolment forms which is against the French law that state that enrolment forms must be available in French.
The case as you depict here is misleading and make us believe that it is "these stupid French suing an American University located in Georgia (maybe the original one was here but the targeted one was the France-located one), hey why not sue the MIT, Harvard, and every other non-French university over the world". I don't say that you said that, just that the way you said what you wanted to say was meaning that.
NB: If you don't understand it, read the above post.
I don't think htat Microsofties are stupid enough to do this, they probably will do what other people said, create a new copy of the file if you change it, otherwise not only would there be a problem with backups files as you explain it but also security wise.
Let's just imagine that I copy /bin/login or it's equivalent to $HOME/mylogin or it's equivalent. If they don't copy it when I modify it then I could modify it to my version of login with, say a few extra instructions to mail the password of the guy to an anonymous Internet account if connected to the net, or to a crypted file in a public writable folder (well, yes directory, but keep remembering that we are in MS embrace and extend environment) where I can fetch it and decrypt it to know the passwords. Oh, i almost forgot, I also can add a few instructions that allow me to get roo^H^H^Hadministrator access.
I don't think MS guys are stupid enough to do such a dangerous thing, so they probably did implement something to avoid that. However, if they did do it in this straightforward and wrong way we will have some funny /. stories in the future ;)
Just for those that are too newbies to the Linux community to understand, he is talking about Tove Torvalds, wife of Linus and ex Finnish karate champion.
But what is the part of the BSD daemon? Does he open a gate between MS headquarters and hell? Well, I guess he doesn't need to, it's already done ;)
Well, I suppose you know this joke:
It's Bill Gates'wedding day and the two lovers are eager to know more "deeply" each other, so they leave the ceremony and go in their wedding room. They begin to take their suits off until Bill's new wife get to the interesting spot "Hu, I understand why you called your company Micro-soft now".
Sorry, I couldn't resist :)
I tend to disagree, Carmack's comment deserve to be moderated like any other comment, that is, without any bias given the author but infunction of the content of the comment. Would you want him to be moderated +5 if he was doing a FIRST POST? Well, maybe the first time it would be moderated +5 funny but otherwise this would be silly.
Luckily, JC don't have time to lose doing this kind of stupid things (and i prefer him using his time for doing cool stuff liek Quake rather than trolling) and only speak when he has got something interesting to say, so he gets moderated in consequence.
Of course this apply to any public figure.
Do you think that they are stupid enough not to have any backup copy of their site???
The UK really wanting to be part of Europe? Let me laugh, they probably would prefer to ba a new American State than being a part of Europe, otherwise they wouldn't help the US screw other European countries.
I guess De Gaulle was right when he said "L'Angleterre est le porte-avion de l'amerique en Europe" which means (lousely translated) "England is the plane-carrier of America in Europe".