What does the RIAA think of this report? They called the Pew study outdated. Hmmm, I guess they feel that their
pogrom against the few file traders they plan to sue as the first "examples" is already working so well a survey conducted just this past March, April, and May is already obsolete.
The RIAA is inflicting a pogrom against file traders? They are using death camps instead of lawsuits? Such extreme hyperbole does not call the policy of the RIAA into question as much as it does the judgement of the author.
No one else here seems to be interested, but I think this is outstanding news. Fantasy Flight is an outstanding board game publisher, with great designs at Twilight Imperium, Reiner Knizia's Lord of the Rings cooperative board game, and Tom Jolly's Drakon.
By the way, people on this site may not be familiar with the great innovations that are happening in the board game world recently. Since the mid 90's, the Germans have revolutionized the industry, and there are many more original ideas coming out in board gaming recently compared to the stagnant computer game world. See Keith Amman's "German" Board Game FAQ for more information.
Now, why would he do that? I know it might be a rhetorical question, but honestly though - all he would do, I presume, is to limit this neat but useless (admit it - this is as useless as your lava-lamp and plasma-ball (no seminal jokes please)) thing out of mainstream for a long time - instead of giving him eternal fame, etc.
James Dyson would be a fool if he were to patent this invention and then not license it out to anyone. Many inventors are quite liberal with their licensing policies, and want to make sure that their invention does enter the "mainstream".
This is more of a complaint about a common practice on Slashdot, rather than this particular story.
When posting stories, the original poster often puts in too many links. For example, the above story has a link to Game Girl Advance even though it has the link to the story itself, making the first link redundant.
This is an excellent suggestion, and I wish that people would take it more seriously. The typical person sends so few e-mails that at five cents per e-mail one will only be spending a few dollars a month. That is an acceptable price to me to cut down on spam.
The only question I have is how one is to deal with mailing lists.
I find the topic of the history of anime to be fascinating, and I want to learn more about it. Can anyone recommend a book that might cover this topic?
I saw Sovereign at E3 2000 and the graphics looked like ass back then.
Reading the above, I have no idea whether the graphics looked good or bad. Specifically, who's ass are we using as a reference? Jennifer Lopez's? Strom Thurmond's? I need more information!
George Lucas merged four companies into a megacorporation? Shouldn't that be a quadcorporation? You don't often see a fusion of a million businesses into one corporate structure, unless you are talking about Enron subsidiaries.
He seems to have a negative view of the typical Hollywood ending, saying that
It seems that these deep, concrete ruts of thinking cannot be avoided: either there is a happy ending or a space catastrophe. This may have been the reason for the touch of disappointment in some of the critics' reviewsthey expected the girl created by the ocean to turn into a fury, a witch or a sorceress who would devour the main character, while worms and other filth would crawl out of her intestines.
The reason we have twenty-four hours in a day has to do with basic trigonometry. The ancient Greeks were able to find algebraic expressions for the sine and cosine of 30 degrees and 45 degrees, and the equations for the sines and cosines of differences are:
sin ( A +- B ) = sin A cos B +- cos A sin B
cos ( A +- B ) = cos A cos B -+ sin A sin B
So one can find the algebraic expressions for the sine and cosine of 15 degrees by using the above equations. (This is left as an exercise to the reader.) So 15 degrees is the smallest whole number interval (in degrees) with an algebraic expression for the sine and cosine, and 360 divided by 15 is 24. Therefore, one hour is the amount of time for the earth to rotate through 15 degrees of arc.
Are client-side spam filters a good idea any more? It seems to me that if I have to reject spam at the client end, the damage has already been done, in that I have already paid for the spam coming through the network.
Lately I've started actively finding the source of the spam and alerting the postmaster that their server has been cracked. Am I wasting my time, or should I just be deleting the stuff without worrying about it?
New Zealand has a privatised electricity production industry and it keeps electricity prices down. It's a little thing called competition.
New Zealand's electricity production is a bad example. On February 20, 1998, there was a major power outage in Aukland. The reason? Due to the privatization of electricity, the power company had cut back on the maintenance of the power grid to save money, causing a failure. For more info, read the story at the Earth Island Institute.
Since someone else posted the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, I thought that some people might find the views of John Stuart Mill, the author of On Liberty, interesting. In the following quote, he is mostly concerned with patents, but considers copyright to be analogous in that it is a monopoly that is granted by the state.
From Principles of Political Economy, book V, chapter 10:
The condemnation of monopolies ought not to extend to patents, by which the originator of an improved process is allowed to enjoy, for a limited period, the exclusive privilege of using his own improvement. This is not making the commodity dear for his benefit, but merely postponing a part of the increased cheapness which the public owe to the inventor, in order to compensate and reward him for the service. That he ought to be both compensated and rewarded for it, will not be denied, and also that if all were at once allowed to avail themselves of his ingenuity, without having shared the labours or the expenses which he had to incur in bringing his idea into a practical shape, either such expenses and labours would be undergone by nobody except very opulent and very public-spirited persons, or the state must put a value on the service rendered by an inventor, and make him a pecuniary grant. This has been done in some instances, and may be done without inconvenience in cases of very conspicuous public benefit; but in general an exclusive privilege, of temporary duration, is preferable; because it leaves nothing to any one's discretion; because the reward conferred by it depends upon the invention's being found useful, and the greater the usefulness the greater the reward; and because it is paid by the very persons to whom the service is rendered, the consumers of the commodity.
So decisive, indeed, are these considerations, that if the system of patents were abandoned for that of rewards by the state, the best shape which these could assume would be that of a small temporary tax, imposed for the inventor's benefit, on all persons making use of the invention. To this, however, or to any other system which would vest in the state the power of deciding whether an inventor should derive any pecuniary advantage from the public benefit which he confers, the objections are evidently stronger and more fundamental than the strongest which can possibly be urged against patents.
It is generally admitted that the present Patent Laws need much improvement; but in this case, as well as in the closely analogous one of Copyright, it would be a gross immorality in the law to set everybody free to use a person's work without his consent, and without giving him an equivalent. I have seen with real alarm several recent attempts, in quarters carrying some authority, to impugn the principle of patents altogether; attempts which, if practically successful, would enthrone free stealing under the prostituted name of free trade, and make the men of brains, still more than at present, the needy retainers and dependents of the men of money-bags.
Anyway, i would love to see motif become open source, so it could be increased in productivity and life as far as programming in unix/linux/other . . .
FYI, Lesstif, which is virtually a complete implementation of OSF/Motif 1.2, is not only open-sourced, it's GPL'd as well.
How would YOU react if you'd spent all the time and effort Bezos has, only to see that a competitor is copying everything you do, and trying very specifically to put YOUR company out of business? What other methods are there, legally, to stop this sort of thing?
Yes, but it's not as though Amazon hasn't been stealing ideas from everyone else as well. Have you seen all the different stuff they're trying to sell on their site? What with the auctions (an Ebay ripoff), the electronics, the movies, etc., the book-selling business of theirs has become lost in the noise.
I think they're a bunch of hypocrites for stealing from everyone else, and then suing Barnes and Noble for stealing from them.
Slashdot Mirror
From the original article:
The RIAA is inflicting a pogrom against file traders? They are using death camps instead of lawsuits? Such extreme hyperbole does not call the policy of the RIAA into question as much as it does the judgement of the author.
No one else here seems to be interested, but I think this is outstanding news. Fantasy Flight is an outstanding board game publisher, with great designs at Twilight Imperium, Reiner Knizia's Lord of the Rings cooperative board game, and Tom Jolly's Drakon.
By the way, people on this site may not be familiar with the great innovations that are happening in the board game world recently. Since the mid 90's, the Germans have revolutionized the industry, and there are many more original ideas coming out in board gaming recently compared to the stagnant computer game world. See Keith Amman's "German" Board Game FAQ for more information.
James Dyson would be a fool if he were to patent this invention and then not license it out to anyone. Many inventors are quite liberal with their licensing policies, and want to make sure that their invention does enter the "mainstream".
This is more of a complaint about a common practice on Slashdot, rather than this particular story.
When posting stories, the original poster often puts in too many links. For example, the above story has a link to Game Girl Advance even though it has the link to the story itself, making the first link redundant.
Enough with the promiscuous linking!
This is an excellent suggestion, and I wish that people would take it more seriously. The typical person sends so few e-mails that at five cents per e-mail one will only be spending a few dollars a month. That is an acceptable price to me to cut down on spam.
The only question I have is how one is to deal with mailing lists.
I find the topic of the history of anime to be fascinating, and I want to learn more about it. Can anyone recommend a book that might cover this topic?
Reading the above, I have no idea whether the graphics looked good or bad. Specifically, who's ass are we using as a reference? Jennifer Lopez's? Strom Thurmond's? I need more information!
Someone posted a parody on aus.tv of Dennis Ritchie being interviewed on an AOL chat session. It's more a jab at the AOL'ers, but I thought it was quite good.
George Lucas merged four companies into a megacorporation? Shouldn't that be a quadcorporation? You don't often see a fusion of a million businesses into one corporate structure, unless you are talking about Enron subsidiaries.
Get your prefixes straight!
At the official Stanislaw Lem Web site, they have the entire statement made by Lem about the new movie version of Solaris , written on December 8th.
He seems to have a negative view of the typical Hollywood ending, saying that
The reason we have twenty-four hours in a day has to do with basic trigonometry. The ancient Greeks were able to find algebraic expressions for the sine and cosine of 30 degrees and 45 degrees, and the equations for the sines and cosines of differences are:
So one can find the algebraic expressions for the sine and cosine of 15 degrees by using the above equations. (This is left as an exercise to the reader.) So 15 degrees is the smallest whole number interval (in degrees) with an algebraic expression for the sine and cosine, and 360 divided by 15 is 24. Therefore, one hour is the amount of time for the earth to rotate through 15 degrees of arc.
Source: Ptolemy's Almagest
Are client-side spam filters a good idea any more? It seems to me
that if I have to reject spam at the client end, the damage has already
been done, in that I have already paid for the spam coming through
the network.
Lately I've started actively finding the source of the spam and
alerting the postmaster that their server has been cracked. Am I
wasting my time, or should I just be deleting the stuff without
worrying about it?
New Zealand's electricity production is a bad example. On February 20, 1998, there was a major power outage in Aukland. The reason? Due to the privatization of electricity, the power company had cut back on the maintenance of the power grid to save money, causing a failure. For more info, read the story at the Earth Island Institute.
Since someone else posted the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, I thought that some people might find the views of John Stuart Mill, the author of On Liberty, interesting. In the following quote, he is mostly concerned with patents, but considers copyright to be analogous in that it is a monopoly that is granted by the state.
From Principles of Political Economy, book V, chapter 10:
You can also download packages (RPM, DEB, TGZ) from ICS. You don't have to get the raw source code from the Open Group.
Yes, but it's not as though Amazon hasn't been stealing ideas from everyone else as well. Have you seen all the different stuff they're trying to sell on their site? What with the auctions (an Ebay ripoff), the electronics, the movies, etc., the book-selling business of theirs has become lost in the noise.
I think they're a bunch of hypocrites for stealing from everyone else, and then suing Barnes and Noble for stealing from them.