Do the editors realize that it undermines the whole point of April Fool's Day when everything they post is a joke?
Yes, they do. At the end of the day, they'll do an April Fool's Wrapup article, where they'll explain that they do it to get the flames. In other words, they basically admit to trolling their readership.
Then, of course, a month later they'll be wondering why nobody's willing to pay for Slashdot.
This was a clever April Fool's post. It caught me by surprise. Well done, Slashdot.
Of course, what I'm not looking forward to is the next twenty-four hours, when Slashdot will be filled with nonstop April Fool's jokes, completely defeating the purpose of April Fool's day.
I hope the modderators don't mod this as a troll, as anything not 110% pro-Linux is in their hate-zone.
I am so tired of people posting this. While it may have been true in the past, it is certainly not true now. Lots of things that are pro-Linux/pro-GNU get modded down and lots of things that are not pro-Linux/pro-GNU get modded up. Your post serves as a fine example.
I agree. The best suggestion I've seen for dealing with this is for Slashdot to have a new moderation category: (-1, Asked for it).
OpenOffice.org/StarOffice, Mozilla/Netscape, Mac OS X/Darwin are examples where the sourcecode has been released after code from other companies has been removed, and yet it was beneficial for all parties involved.
Those are all cases where the company that open-sourced the product was getting beaten in the marketplace. Honest question: Can anyone think of a realistic scenario where it makes sense for a market-leader to open-source its product?
i want to be able to drag and drop my tabs either to arrange them within one window, or to move them between windows. i think they should worry less about the order of opened tabs and allow users to move them.
Galeon handles this very well. Drag a tab outside of the browser window, and it detaches into a new browser. Drag a browser window into the tab-bar of another window, and it "docks" and becomes a tab. Going along with this, galeon also lets you re-order tabs within a window easily and intuitively.
We ask that you help us to protect our brand by deleting the definition of "google" found at wordspy.com or revising it to take into account the trademark status of Google.
That seems like a perfectly reasonable and polite request. The folks at Google are now on record as trying to protect their trademark, and they were pleasant about it to boot. Note also that they provided a reasonable alternative to deleting the entry altogether. Presumably something along the lines of:
google: v To search, particularly on the Internet. Et.: Google is the trademarked name of the Internet search engine at www.google.com
would be sufficient for all involved. This sounds like much to do about nothing.
I think a more appropriate revision would go like this:
google: v To search, particularly on the Internet. Et.: While the world "Google" is a trademarked name of a major internet search engine, trademark restrictions apply only to its use as a noun. Use of the word "google" as a verb is unrestricted by law.
In some sense, I think this was inevitable. When one company is responsible for the infrastructure and is required to allow other companies to use that infrastructure to compete with it, it's too easy to make an argument that that's not a fair situation. That argument is incorrect in this case (see various posts above), but that's not the point. The point is that sooner or later, the local telcos were going to muscle out the competing ISPs.
So what happens now? Once the rules get fully phased in, the rates will rise as the telcos milk their monopolies on internet service. At some point, someone will complain, the government will step in, and internet service will become a regulated monopoly.
In the end, I don't think that'll be a bad thing. Local telephone service is a regulated monopoly, and it's been pretty good so far. But it might take awhile to get there.
This is essentially voter fraud. Not because it changes the number of the votes -it doesn't- but because it changes the placement of the votes. A regional election, which is what "the election" really is, no longer accurately represents the wishes of that region. That perverts the entire electoral process, and undermines the entire concept of representative democracy.
I'd consider that a valid argument if the current system represented voter wishes frequently. Suppose, for example, that candidates A1 and A2 have very similar platforms and each get 33% of the popular vote in a state, while candidate B has a very different platform and receives 34% of the vote. Under the current system, B would receive all the electoral votes for that state. How does that represent the wishes of the region?
The Electoral College wasn't designed to enforce two-party goverment, but that's what it does today. Because the plurality winner in a state's popular vote takes all the state's electoral votes, only the top two candidates have a reasonable chance of winning. Anyone who votes for a third party instead of one of the two major parties is really just increasing the odds that his least favorite major party will win. (This is the "A vote for Nader is a wasted vote" mantra we heard from the Deomcrats two years ago.) So the current structure of the Electoral College simply helps the two major parties maintain their stranglehold on the government, and hence on political debate.
This ruling may help to weaken the Electoral College a bit by allowing minor-party supporters to concentrate their votes in states where they won't be hurting their preferred major-party candidate.
I'm with you entirely. Another left-winger who at first supported, but in the end opposed, Bill Clinton. The Democrats now are nothing more than Republicans Lite. When you vote Republican, you're voting in favor of large corporations at the expense of everyday people. When you vote Democrat, you're just voting for a different group of large corporations at the expense of everyday people.
That's why I vote Green and Libertarian now. I'm still not sure which of those two parties I agree with more, but they're both a damn sight better than the two major parties.
HPR: The MPAA has backed several bills mandating copy prevention technologies. Critics have lambasted these bills for curbing consumer's "fair use" rights, including the ability to make back-up copies. How can we balance the interests of consumers and the movie industry?
JV: What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law.
The industry in a statement issued jointly by 10 organizations, including the Business Software Alliance (BSA), International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and Motion Picture Association (MPA), blasted the proposal, calling it "inadequate" and "unambitious."
Funny, I never considered it a virtue for a government regulation to be "ambitious".
When you download Linux, you DO NOT OWN IT. Copyrights are ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
An copyright is just that: an exclusive right to copy. The owner of a copyright has the right to prohibit others from distributing copies of the copyrighted work. Nothing in a copyright, however, gives the holder the right to impose restrictions on how the purchaser uses it in private.
I'll give you a wonderful example. Brigham Young University decided to show Schindler's List to the students. Except, they wanted to show their own version, with all the "offensive content" removed. Speilberg said "no way", and he was fully within his rights to do so.
Yes, you're correct, because copyright includes the right to restrict public performances of the copyrighted work. It does not include the right to restrict private uses (such as running it through a ClearPlay DVD player for viewing in your own home).
If copyright owners are not allowed to control what happens to their work, we could not enfoce the GPL. Free software would die.
Baloney. The GPL deals only with copying and redistribution of the GPL'd code. It says nothing about private use of the code, just as copyright law says nothing about private use of the copyrighted work.
Gregg Easterbrook (one of the editors of New Republic) writes a weekly column about pro football for ESPN.com. Recently he touched on the Segway in one of his columns:
[I predict] these devices will be a, what's the word, oh yeah, fiasco. Why? They will become the SUVs of the sidewalk.
Everyone who walks will intensely hate Segways. The manufacturer has already persuaded 32 states to certify these monstrosities for use on sidewalks; without that permission, no one would buy one. But the Segway is 200 pounds of metal with a 200-pound rider atop moving 12 mph, velocity of someone who runs track in the 100-meter event. This means a pedestrian struck by a Segway will be hit by 400 pounds moving at sprinter speed. Being struck by a Segway roaring down the sidewalk will be significantly worse than being popped by an NFL linebacker at maximum warp. The things will simply be dangerous.
Segways are also likely to be driven in a selfish manner. They will clog downtown sidewalks, depriving space to regular pedestrians; and sidewalks in downtown New York, Boston and, especially, London are already so crowded you practically have to walk at the curb. People atop Segways will feel that, as the SUVs of the sidewalk, everyone else should jump out of their way. Riders will barrel along on these monstrosities, terrorizing pedestrians, injuring people without accountability, expecting women and children to lunge aside. One of the few quasi-civilized experiences left in big-city downtowns -- walking along, enjoying the day, checking out babes/hunks and looking in shop windows -- could become a nerve-wracking exasperation.
Probably the Segway will be a bust, considering the thing is expensive and hopelessly impractical: where do you put it when you're not riding it? Are you going to carry a 200-pound object in the elevator up to the office with you? Alternatively, Segway's manufacturer may be driven out of business once liability suits begin rolling. Segways are going to cause harm when used as intended, which is a formula to warm the tort lawyer's heart.
But if somehow Segways do catch on, their main effect on society will be to make strolling so unpleasant and risky that people who presently use the subway (TMQ, for example) will resort to driving in order to be off the sidewalks and safe from Segways. Which means the enviro-green marketing of this contraption is a total fiction. Discouraging people from walking in order to get them to ride a dangerous $5,000 hulk of metal that consumes energy! How very Earth-friendly.
His numbers seem to be a bit off--Segways only weigh 69 pounds according to the CNN article--but I think his conclusions are spot on.
Slashdot Mirror
Get it? They closed the source... to an open source project. That's what's so funny!
TheFrood
Do the editors realize that it undermines the whole point of April Fool's Day when everything they post is a joke?
Yes, they do. At the end of the day, they'll do an April Fool's Wrapup article, where they'll explain that they do it to get the flames. In other words, they basically admit to trolling their readership.
Then, of course, a month later they'll be wondering why nobody's willing to pay for Slashdot.
TheFrood
This was a clever April Fool's post. It caught me by surprise. Well done, Slashdot.
Of course, what I'm not looking forward to is the next twenty-four hours, when Slashdot will be filled with nonstop April Fool's jokes, completely defeating the purpose of April Fool's day.
TheFrood
I agree. The best suggestion I've seen for dealing with this is for Slashdot to have a new moderation category: (-1, Asked for it).
TheFrood
OpenOffice.org/StarOffice, Mozilla/Netscape, Mac OS X/Darwin are examples where the sourcecode has been released after code from other companies has been removed, and yet it was beneficial for all parties involved.
Those are all cases where the company that open-sourced the product was getting beaten in the marketplace. Honest question: Can anyone think of a realistic scenario where it makes sense for a market-leader to open-source its product?
TheFrood
Number of Linux Distributions Surpasses Number of Users
Next time you cut-and-paste, how about giving BBspot credit?
TheFrood
From the article:
At last, an opportunity to see my hometown Detroit Tigers more than once a year!
Why on earth would you want to do that?
TheFrood
i want to be able to drag and drop my tabs either to arrange them within one window, or to move them between windows. i think they should worry less about the order of opened tabs and allow users to move them.
Galeon handles this very well. Drag a tab outside of the browser window, and it detaches into a new browser. Drag a browser window into the tab-bar of another window, and it "docks" and becomes a tab. Going along with this, galeon also lets you re-order tabs within a window easily and intuitively.
TheFrood
Think how much the industry is making on Plasma screens. Do they have any real incentive to start selling a cheaper alternative?
No, "the industry" doesn't have an incentive, but fortunately for us, individual companies do.
TheFrood
Nice work. You've slashdotted the booth babes.
TheFrood
That seems like a perfectly reasonable and polite request. The folks at Google are now on record as trying to protect their trademark, and they were pleasant about it to boot. Note also that they provided a reasonable alternative to deleting the entry altogether. Presumably something along the lines of:would be sufficient for all involved. This sounds like much to do about nothing.
I think a more appropriate revision would go like this:That explains things more fully, I think.
TheFrood
In some sense, I think this was inevitable. When one company is responsible for the infrastructure and is required to allow other companies to use that infrastructure to compete with it, it's too easy to make an argument that that's not a fair situation. That argument is incorrect in this case (see various posts above), but that's not the point. The point is that sooner or later, the local telcos were going to muscle out the competing ISPs.
So what happens now? Once the rules get fully phased in, the rates will rise as the telcos milk their monopolies on internet service. At some point, someone will complain, the government will step in, and internet service will become a regulated monopoly.
In the end, I don't think that'll be a bad thing. Local telephone service is a regulated monopoly, and it's been pretty good so far. But it might take awhile to get there.
It is all about cooperation to unlock the knowledge of Egypt.
Shows the developers know nothing about what motivated explorers.
Mostly, it shows that you didn't read the article. The game isn't about Egyptology, it's about ancient Egypt.
TheFrood
Although the main site for this massive-multiplayer game by Sony (once known as Verant)
I'm pretty sure the Sony Corporation was never known as Verant.
TheFrood
This is essentially voter fraud. Not because it changes the number of the votes -it doesn't- but because it changes the placement of the votes. A regional election, which is what "the election" really is, no longer accurately represents the wishes of that region. That perverts the entire electoral process, and undermines the entire concept of representative democracy.
I'd consider that a valid argument if the current system represented voter wishes frequently. Suppose, for example, that candidates A1 and A2 have very similar platforms and each get 33% of the popular vote in a state, while candidate B has a very different platform and receives 34% of the vote. Under the current system, B would receive all the electoral votes for that state. How does that represent the wishes of the region?
The Electoral College wasn't designed to enforce two-party goverment, but that's what it does today. Because the plurality winner in a state's popular vote takes all the state's electoral votes, only the top two candidates have a reasonable chance of winning. Anyone who votes for a third party instead of one of the two major parties is really just increasing the odds that his least favorite major party will win. (This is the "A vote for Nader is a wasted vote" mantra we heard from the Deomcrats two years ago.) So the current structure of the Electoral College simply helps the two major parties maintain their stranglehold on the government, and hence on political debate.
This ruling may help to weaken the Electoral College a bit by allowing minor-party supporters to concentrate their votes in states where they won't be hurting their preferred major-party candidate.
I'm with you entirely. Another left-winger who at first supported, but in the end opposed, Bill Clinton. The Democrats now are nothing more than Republicans Lite. When you vote Republican, you're voting in favor of large corporations at the expense of everyday people. When you vote Democrat, you're just voting for a different group of large corporations at the expense of everyday people.
That's why I vote Green and Libertarian now. I'm still not sure which of those two parties I agree with more, but they're both a damn sight better than the two major parties.
TheFrood
Bullshit, Jack. It's right here: US Code: Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107.
TheFrood
Why is the word "policy" in quotation marks here? I assume these are supposed to be "sarcastic quotation marks", as in
or
or
But in this case, I don't see why you would sarcastically call the new rules a "policy". They are a policy.
(Oh, that's on top of misspelling "prohibit". Nice work, dude.)
TheFrood
From the article:
The industry in a statement issued jointly by 10 organizations, including the Business Software Alliance (BSA), International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and Motion Picture Association (MPA), blasted the proposal, calling it "inadequate" and "unambitious."
Funny, I never considered it a virtue for a government regulation to be "ambitious".
TheFrood
When you download Linux, you DO NOT OWN IT. Copyrights are ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
An copyright is just that: an exclusive right to copy. The owner of a copyright has the right to prohibit others from distributing copies of the copyrighted work. Nothing in a copyright, however, gives the holder the right to impose restrictions on how the purchaser uses it in private.
I'll give you a wonderful example. Brigham Young University decided to show Schindler's List to the students. Except, they wanted to show their own version, with all the "offensive content" removed. Speilberg said "no way", and he was fully within his rights to do so.
Yes, you're correct, because copyright includes the right to restrict public performances of the copyrighted work. It does not include the right to restrict private uses (such as running it through a ClearPlay DVD player for viewing in your own home).
If copyright owners are not allowed to control what happens to their work, we could not enfoce the GPL. Free software would die.
Baloney. The GPL deals only with copying and redistribution of the GPL'd code. It says nothing about private use of the code, just as copyright law says nothing about private use of the copyrighted work.
TheFrood
Hey, CmdrTaco, I found a site you might want to read sometime.
TheFrood
You mean, can it topple Duke Nukem Forever as the #1 vaporware item for this year, and the year before, and the year before... and so on...
No, you mean can it topple Duke Nukem Forever as the #1 vaporward item for this year, and next year, and the year after... and so on...
TheFrood
Wow you sure added a lot to that article. Glad you posted your scintillating insight there Sparky.
You're welcome. Thanks for your contribution to the debate, by the way.
TheFrood
Gregg Easterbrook (one of the editors of New Republic) writes a weekly column about pro football for ESPN.com. Recently he touched on the Segway in one of his columns:
[I predict] these devices will be a, what's the word, oh yeah, fiasco. Why? They will become the SUVs of the sidewalk.
Everyone who walks will intensely hate Segways. The manufacturer has already persuaded 32 states to certify these monstrosities for use on sidewalks; without that permission, no one would buy one. But the Segway is 200 pounds of metal with a 200-pound rider atop moving 12 mph, velocity of someone who runs track in the 100-meter event. This means a pedestrian struck by a Segway will be hit by 400 pounds moving at sprinter speed. Being struck by a Segway roaring down the sidewalk will be significantly worse than being popped by an NFL linebacker at maximum warp. The things will simply be dangerous.
Segways are also likely to be driven in a selfish manner. They will clog downtown sidewalks, depriving space to regular pedestrians; and sidewalks in downtown New York, Boston and, especially, London are already so crowded you practically have to walk at the curb. People atop Segways will feel that, as the SUVs of the sidewalk, everyone else should jump out of their way. Riders will barrel along on these monstrosities, terrorizing pedestrians, injuring people without accountability, expecting women and children to lunge aside. One of the few quasi-civilized experiences left in big-city downtowns -- walking along, enjoying the day, checking out babes/hunks and looking in shop windows -- could become a nerve-wracking exasperation.
Probably the Segway will be a bust, considering the thing is expensive and hopelessly impractical: where do you put it when you're not riding it? Are you going to carry a 200-pound object in the elevator up to the office with you? Alternatively, Segway's manufacturer may be driven out of business once liability suits begin rolling. Segways are going to cause harm when used as intended, which is a formula to warm the tort lawyer's heart.
But if somehow Segways do catch on, their main effect on society will be to make strolling so unpleasant and risky that people who presently use the subway (TMQ, for example) will resort to driving in order to be off the sidewalks and safe from Segways. Which means the enviro-green marketing of this contraption is a total fiction. Discouraging people from walking in order to get them to ride a dangerous $5,000 hulk of metal that consumes energy! How very Earth-friendly.
His numbers seem to be a bit off--Segways only weigh 69 pounds according to the CNN article--but I think his conclusions are spot on.
TheFrood