No! If it has a story, then its a character drama with sci-fi trappings!!!! It doesn't matter if it takes place on a whole other planet, in the future, and couldn't have happened without sci-fi elements (space travel, cloning, mind transfer/remote control, etc) it's not sci-fi!
I read a review that district 9 was "not a science fiction movie." Why don't people admit to liking sci-fi?
Canonical is not a company for-profit. Simply because red hat is a distro as well as a company doesn't mean you should hold all distros to the same standards as companies. Canonical doesn't have the resources to spend on hiring a team of programmers to hack the kernel all day. Instead, it relies on debian-unstable (not the testing sid, just the unstable) for its kernels and focuses more on the gui, the included software, and making everything usable and relatively stable for the end user (i use debian stable, so everything is relatively stable unless it's debian or a few other distros).
What you're doing is criticizing someone who does volunteer work for not donating enough money.
From TFA:
But what I'd like to draw the attention of everyone who thinks of Linux as being written by techies for techies to is that major computer companies that everyone knows, like IBM, Intel, Oracle, Fujitsu, and HP, also spend hundreds of millions in making Linux better.
I don't think canonical has hundreds of millions, i thought they just had a few million.
No it isn't violating the laws, at least from what i can tell after reading half the summary. The robot might not be armed, unless it lands on someone, it won't harm them (although the whole inaction thing may be an issue). It will accept any order transmitted via Encrypted RF input to scan and survey the room. And well, it's kind of screwed on the third law, but if it can move and has automated processes, it may try to skedaddle out of the way of danger provided the operator has set the switch to auto-navigate.
beats the living crap out of peeking your head around the corner and hoping nobody shoots you or blindly charging through rooms hoping you don't set off an explosive trap. Pro-tip: the taliban, terrorists, socialists, communists, or liberal media don't have a trip-mine that can respond to a robot being chucked into the middle of the room if the robot doesn't bounce into the explosive device or any triplines.
Supposing that there are people in the room, they won't know exactly where you are. You might be able to guess at their general vicinity or point of entry, but if you were sitting on your computer, your couch or having a conversation, distracted and not expecting something to come crashing through your window, door, over your wall, or whatever, and you only see the thing landing and bouncing, I'd wager every dollar I have that you couldn't a) guess within 5 feet of where the object came from or b) react to it before your door came crashing down and marines come charging through your door.
They train the armed forces personnel how to chuck things. Like they train marines how to chuck a grenade such that it spends so much time bouncing off of walls and skating across the floor that by the time you can pick it up, it will go off in your face before you can throw it back.
I'm sure they'll come up with something that won't land in the middle of a room and sit there for 2 minutes so that the operator can get a front row seat to the robots destruction and the following retaliation.
While i applaud companies that refund the microsoft tax, i do sort of see where lenovo is coming from. If i buy a car, i can't yank out the back seats and require a refund from the car dealer. It is true i could sell those seats for a profit on ebay, the original dealer would not be required to refund me the cost of the seats. In fact, it could be assumed that you pay $2000 for the laptop hardware and they throw in windows for free.
Should you be able to sue for not being able to arbitrarily get a refund on a part of a computer? What if you want to run thin clients that never touch the hard drive? Should you be able to refund the hard drive? Just because what you're trying to get rid of has no legal resale value doesn't mean you should be able to refund it, especially if Lenovo never included an itemized list.
You know what? I'm gonna sue the next laptop company i buy from because they won't refund the cost of the touch pad, I hate those things! More than most linux people hate microsoft, i'm talking like a seething, infuriating hatred./sarcasm
What if you wrote software that included printer capabilities or SQL database access, would you refund someone who didn't want printer capabilities or SQL database access? Too bad lenovo isn't doing what sane people would do and try to work with the customer to come to something that works, but, if you don't like the back seats, either buy the whole care and remove em yourself, or don't buy the car.
Reason people! While microsoft's monopoly is bad, you shouldn't be sueing for a refund, sue for variety! And NO I didn't RTFA, so for all i know, the terms of the settlement may be "Sell blank slate laptops".
if microsoft waits till 2015, then any copy sold prior to then would not be protected. So yes, while there would be a disincentive to do mass beta testing, hopefully beta software would be covered by trade secrets until release. If you release it en masse, it is no longer a secret so you durn well better protect it with copyright. If it is leaked, you can use the trade secret laws to pursue anybody who leaks/distributes it. If you leak like a sieve but don't "actively" distribute it, you're SOL in court.
By the way, gmail is a perfect example of how to protect software. Wanna see how? Lets assume google has no copyright on gmail code/executibles for a second. Now, start your own gmail server that doesn't use google apps or connect to google in any way. I'll wait. You can use any torrent software you like, pirated counts too. Go on! Can't find them? Aww, looks like google protected their goods.
Moral of this exercise: Simply because something isn't protected by copyright doesn't mean you have to give it away.
Also, wine is LGPL. That being said, Wine would be another good example if it was closed source. I.E. if you want to run office 2007, you have to use the newest version of wine (or some such hypothetical software/version combo). If you want to run 5 year old software, you can use wine.000000000000ninnywaller or whatever, but you can't use the new stuff for free because that is covered by a new copyright on a new version. And each new version would be copyrighted. I.E. under this new system, vista and windows 7 would be protected, but the original and sp1 version of XP would not (if SP2 is less than 5 years old, you can't apply (run) it or distribute it without licenses, thus protecting the newest versions of the OS and allowing everyone else to have the option of keeping the OS they like).
as long as self control > marshmallows, you were "successful". I think that the test was not testing the amount of self control, but whether a mechanism was in place to delay gratification until a greater goal had been met.
I think that the average slashdotter probably would not have eaten the marshmallow if they were taking the experiment seriously. Why? Because slashdot is populated by nerds who have gone through a great deal of learning and the like. There is some instant gratification available in computers, but the majority of it comes via consuming ready made content (youtube, twitter, facebook, etc), the more slashdotty stuff, i.e. dissecting/fixing computers, programming, and learning about them are not instant gratification. I mean it seems like there are 2-3 articles a week about a tech that will make our lives better in 5-15 years and not a day sooner.
Anywho, discussion of the average slashdotter aside, there are people who have no innate self control. None. Who do you thinks buys from qvc or those buy-now ads? Who do you think falls for internet scams? Those are the people who don't stop and think "this could be a scam" instead they're thinking either "Take my moneh, give me product!" or "Take my moneh, give me moar!". Sadly, these are the same people who make up the majority of the population, the ones who think a bail-out is a good idea, the ones who think maxing out their credit cards and re-mortgaging their houses up to 3x the real value are good ideas. In order to enact real change, you have to put off instant gratification because if a low-hanging-fruit quick-fix is available to be applied to the easy problems, it will be and as a result, they have all been applied. All that is left are the "hard"* problems.
*hard denoting silly things like abortion, gay rights, and other problems meant to distract the populace from fixing the real, boring problems.
you can't get a copyright on an idea. You have to put it into a final form. At least in the US (which is trying very hard to follow the rest of the world or get the rest of the world to follow them) the copyright term doesn't start during your very first whiteboard meeting where you think up the software. Your software might take 30 years to write, but you'd get a 5 year term as soon as you shore it all up and get it ready for publication. Then you send it off to the government copyright office and they acknowledge your term starts.
Now that nefarious deeds are affecting the average net user, I wonder how long until the news agencies slog through and dust off their old virus/trojan/worm/botnet/haxx0rz stories?
At least google doesn't (accept money to) meddle with search results or allow companies to directly pay for higher ranking search results for certain queries. I guess that idea has been such a part of what made google so big early on, in addition to other things, that we blindly assume that unbiased results is a basic prerequisite for being a modern search engine. It is the something that separates real, genuine attempts at search engines and those domain squatters and malware redirected wannabe search engines.
Way to go Microsoft! Without you, we might forget what separates the Men from the Boys.
Here i was thinking it would introduce me to NEW stuff, pretty much the only piece i don't have hours and hours of experience with is virtualbox. I guess that slashdot eats up these pat-on-the-back articles endorsing software that they've been using for YEARS.
Locking your door at night is greedy preventing all those less fortunate homeless people from eating your food, sleeping on your couch, and stealing your TV.
A publicly traded company has an obligation to do what's best for the company. It does not, however, have an obligation to support a mode of play most commonly associated with unauthorized copies of the game.
Communist pig
Hells yeah I'm greedy, the new golden rule once you leave your parent's basement is "The only one who will keep your best interests at heart is you, nobody else." So I follow the new golden rule and try my best to honor the old one as well.
But your hyperbole does bring up an interesting point, preventing about piracy is NOT (repeat NOT, once more for clarification: NOT) about reclaiming sales lost to pirated copies, instead, it is about projecting the image of a company that fights piracy. If you have $X00,000 that you are going to invest in a company (there are many of these types of investors, but they're too small to appear on the radar), would you rather invest it in a company that appears to fight piracy or one that appears to let its wares get picked up and walked off with? So in order to get investments, sell stock, and generally do well as a publicly traded company, they need to project the image of a company that is hard on piracy. This isn't a "rewarded for your efforts" movement, because blizzard has no trouble making money, hand overfist from their products, but instead of getting YOU to pay that $50, the fighting piracy is all about landing that $X00,000 investor.
Greed makes capitalism work. I just call a spade a spade.
fighting piracy = greed, although I wouldn't be surprised if it takes a pirated version of scII to play over the lan, which would eventually make the pirated copy the de-facto version for tournament play. (I.E. someone might come up with a shell wrapper that directs scII to look for a lan server rather than battle.net)
Yeah, i was thinking "Gee, that'll give them MORE than enough time to implement lan play." The only reason for not implementing it now is good old fashioned greed.
It would be blocked at the router. If you are attempting to reach the intertubes from a military ethernet port, myspace will be blocked. Now whether or not you'll get network connectivity is another issue altogether as personal laptops may not be configured properly within the domain.
Slashdot Mirror
the plot device doesn't output that ability.
No! If it has a story, then its a character drama with sci-fi trappings!!!! It doesn't matter if it takes place on a whole other planet, in the future, and couldn't have happened without sci-fi elements (space travel, cloning, mind transfer/remote control, etc) it's not sci-fi!
I read a review that district 9 was "not a science fiction movie." Why don't people admit to liking sci-fi?
Either that or 4% of respondants have looked very closely at the games lineup for the wii or ps3.
Worst design decision ever: Letting George Lucas have access to the Star Wars IP after the mid 80's.
What you're doing is criticizing someone who does volunteer work for not donating enough money.
From TFA:
But what I'd like to draw the attention of everyone who thinks of Linux as being written by techies for techies to is that major computer companies that everyone knows, like IBM, Intel, Oracle, Fujitsu, and HP, also spend hundreds of millions in making Linux better.
I don't think canonical has hundreds of millions, i thought they just had a few million.
No it isn't violating the laws, at least from what i can tell after reading half the summary. The robot might not be armed, unless it lands on someone, it won't harm them (although the whole inaction thing may be an issue). It will accept any order transmitted via Encrypted RF input to scan and survey the room. And well, it's kind of screwed on the third law, but if it can move and has automated processes, it may try to skedaddle out of the way of danger provided the operator has set the switch to auto-navigate.
beats the living crap out of peeking your head around the corner and hoping nobody shoots you or blindly charging through rooms hoping you don't set off an explosive trap. Pro-tip: the taliban, terrorists, socialists, communists, or liberal media don't have a trip-mine that can respond to a robot being chucked into the middle of the room if the robot doesn't bounce into the explosive device or any triplines.
Supposing that there are people in the room, they won't know exactly where you are. You might be able to guess at their general vicinity or point of entry, but if you were sitting on your computer, your couch or having a conversation, distracted and not expecting something to come crashing through your window, door, over your wall, or whatever, and you only see the thing landing and bouncing, I'd wager every dollar I have that you couldn't a) guess within 5 feet of where the object came from or b) react to it before your door came crashing down and marines come charging through your door.
They train the armed forces personnel how to chuck things. Like they train marines how to chuck a grenade such that it spends so much time bouncing off of walls and skating across the floor that by the time you can pick it up, it will go off in your face before you can throw it back.
I'm sure they'll come up with something that won't land in the middle of a room and sit there for 2 minutes so that the operator can get a front row seat to the robots destruction and the following retaliation.
heh, so he never tried to contact microsoft or the microsoft affiliate? This is gonna be a short case.
While i applaud companies that refund the microsoft tax, i do sort of see where lenovo is coming from. If i buy a car, i can't yank out the back seats and require a refund from the car dealer. It is true i could sell those seats for a profit on ebay, the original dealer would not be required to refund me the cost of the seats. In fact, it could be assumed that you pay $2000 for the laptop hardware and they throw in windows for free.
/sarcasm
Should you be able to sue for not being able to arbitrarily get a refund on a part of a computer? What if you want to run thin clients that never touch the hard drive? Should you be able to refund the hard drive? Just because what you're trying to get rid of has no legal resale value doesn't mean you should be able to refund it, especially if Lenovo never included an itemized list.
You know what? I'm gonna sue the next laptop company i buy from because they won't refund the cost of the touch pad, I hate those things! More than most linux people hate microsoft, i'm talking like a seething, infuriating hatred.
What if you wrote software that included printer capabilities or SQL database access, would you refund someone who didn't want printer capabilities or SQL database access? Too bad lenovo isn't doing what sane people would do and try to work with the customer to come to something that works, but, if you don't like the back seats, either buy the whole care and remove em yourself, or don't buy the car.
Reason people! While microsoft's monopoly is bad, you shouldn't be sueing for a refund, sue for variety! And NO I didn't RTFA, so for all i know, the terms of the settlement may be "Sell blank slate laptops".
if microsoft waits till 2015, then any copy sold prior to then would not be protected. So yes, while there would be a disincentive to do mass beta testing, hopefully beta software would be covered by trade secrets until release. If you release it en masse, it is no longer a secret so you durn well better protect it with copyright. If it is leaked, you can use the trade secret laws to pursue anybody who leaks/distributes it. If you leak like a sieve but don't "actively" distribute it, you're SOL in court.
.000000000000ninnywaller or whatever, but you can't use the new stuff for free because that is covered by a new copyright on a new version. And each new version would be copyrighted. I.E. under this new system, vista and windows 7 would be protected, but the original and sp1 version of XP would not (if SP2 is less than 5 years old, you can't apply (run) it or distribute it without licenses, thus protecting the newest versions of the OS and allowing everyone else to have the option of keeping the OS they like).
By the way, gmail is a perfect example of how to protect software. Wanna see how? Lets assume google has no copyright on gmail code/executibles for a second. Now, start your own gmail server that doesn't use google apps or connect to google in any way. I'll wait. You can use any torrent software you like, pirated counts too. Go on! Can't find them? Aww, looks like google protected their goods.
Moral of this exercise: Simply because something isn't protected by copyright doesn't mean you have to give it away.
Also, wine is LGPL. That being said, Wine would be another good example if it was closed source. I.E. if you want to run office 2007, you have to use the newest version of wine (or some such hypothetical software/version combo). If you want to run 5 year old software, you can use wine
as long as self control > marshmallows, you were "successful". I think that the test was not testing the amount of self control, but whether a mechanism was in place to delay gratification until a greater goal had been met.
I think that the average slashdotter probably would not have eaten the marshmallow if they were taking the experiment seriously. Why? Because slashdot is populated by nerds who have gone through a great deal of learning and the like. There is some instant gratification available in computers, but the majority of it comes via consuming ready made content (youtube, twitter, facebook, etc), the more slashdotty stuff, i.e. dissecting/fixing computers, programming, and learning about them are not instant gratification. I mean it seems like there are 2-3 articles a week about a tech that will make our lives better in 5-15 years and not a day sooner.
Anywho, discussion of the average slashdotter aside, there are people who have no innate self control. None. Who do you thinks buys from qvc or those buy-now ads? Who do you think falls for internet scams? Those are the people who don't stop and think "this could be a scam" instead they're thinking either "Take my moneh, give me product!" or "Take my moneh, give me moar!". Sadly, these are the same people who make up the majority of the population, the ones who think a bail-out is a good idea, the ones who think maxing out their credit cards and re-mortgaging their houses up to 3x the real value are good ideas. In order to enact real change, you have to put off instant gratification because if a low-hanging-fruit quick-fix is available to be applied to the easy problems, it will be and as a result, they have all been applied. All that is left are the "hard"* problems.
*hard denoting silly things like abortion, gay rights, and other problems meant to distract the populace from fixing the real, boring problems.
you can't get a copyright on an idea. You have to put it into a final form. At least in the US (which is trying very hard to follow the rest of the world or get the rest of the world to follow them) the copyright term doesn't start during your very first whiteboard meeting where you think up the software. Your software might take 30 years to write, but you'd get a 5 year term as soon as you shore it all up and get it ready for publication. Then you send it off to the government copyright office and they acknowledge your term starts.
social engineering: because there is no patch for human stupidity.
apparently it's ghost-hosted as well...
people can't update facebook. They get ajax errors.
Now that nefarious deeds are affecting the average net user, I wonder how long until the news agencies slog through and dust off their old virus/trojan/worm/botnet/haxx0rz stories?
At least google doesn't (accept money to) meddle with search results or allow companies to directly pay for higher ranking search results for certain queries. I guess that idea has been such a part of what made google so big early on, in addition to other things, that we blindly assume that unbiased results is a basic prerequisite for being a modern search engine. It is the something that separates real, genuine attempts at search engines and those domain squatters and malware redirected wannabe search engines.
Way to go Microsoft! Without you, we might forget what separates the Men from the Boys.
Here i was thinking it would introduce me to NEW stuff, pretty much the only piece i don't have hours and hours of experience with is virtualbox. I guess that slashdot eats up these pat-on-the-back articles endorsing software that they've been using for YEARS.
Locking your door at night is greedy preventing all those less fortunate homeless people from eating your food, sleeping on your couch, and stealing your TV. A publicly traded company has an obligation to do what's best for the company. It does not, however, have an obligation to support a mode of play most commonly associated with unauthorized copies of the game. Communist pig
Hells yeah I'm greedy, the new golden rule once you leave your parent's basement is "The only one who will keep your best interests at heart is you, nobody else." So I follow the new golden rule and try my best to honor the old one as well.
But your hyperbole does bring up an interesting point, preventing about piracy is NOT (repeat NOT, once more for clarification: NOT) about reclaiming sales lost to pirated copies, instead, it is about projecting the image of a company that fights piracy. If you have $X00,000 that you are going to invest in a company (there are many of these types of investors, but they're too small to appear on the radar), would you rather invest it in a company that appears to fight piracy or one that appears to let its wares get picked up and walked off with? So in order to get investments, sell stock, and generally do well as a publicly traded company, they need to project the image of a company that is hard on piracy. This isn't a "rewarded for your efforts" movement, because blizzard has no trouble making money, hand overfist from their products, but instead of getting YOU to pay that $50, the fighting piracy is all about landing that $X00,000 investor.
Greed makes capitalism work. I just call a spade a spade.
fighting piracy = greed, although I wouldn't be surprised if it takes a pirated version of scII to play over the lan, which would eventually make the pirated copy the de-facto version for tournament play. (I.E. someone might come up with a shell wrapper that directs scII to look for a lan server rather than battle.net)
Yeah, i was thinking "Gee, that'll give them MORE than enough time to implement lan play." The only reason for not implementing it now is good old fashioned greed.
I may look into getting the game down the road when i have some pocket cash if they truly clean up their act.
wow, that'd be awesome to have the dialogue clipped from the movie. I'd play it.
I thought you were going to quote the story surrounding zaphod beeblebrox's birth, i don't have my books handy so I can't look it up.
It would be blocked at the router. If you are attempting to reach the intertubes from a military ethernet port, myspace will be blocked. Now whether or not you'll get network connectivity is another issue altogether as personal laptops may not be configured properly within the domain.