But the President must call the shots *with respect to the law*. The President doesn't have carte blanche to ignore the law just because he's the Commander-in-Chief of the *military*. Some people seem to be confused and think that "Commander-in-Chief" applies to citizens. It does not.
I'm not sure why more people prefer dogs. Because some people enjoy the experience of training and working with dogs? That's the one thing missing from cats IMO, you can't train them, or it's extremely difficult to do so. Or try taking your cat out for a walk or a run:-P
I love dogs and cats, but they each have their place.
I always find it funny how people don't understand this view point. The other part of this is that they don't *really* have a problem with the license, they have a problem with the *people* who chose that license.
So if you really want to use that "snippet of GPL'd source code" maybe try talking to the owner of that code. As a copyright holder on the code, they can choose to release whatever they want, however they want.
I am a commercial software developer. There have been times when I've said "Gee, I sure wish I could use that GPL'd code over thar." But I never blame the license and I certainly don't blame the developers who released the code under that license. After all, it's their code, not mine, and they could always have chosen to release it under a proprietary license so that it wasn't free for anyone.
Firefox still lags behind on the standards that people care about: so far behind, in fact, that IE actually has a shot at catching up. What standards are those? I'm people and I find that FF meets the standards that I care about. I use SVG, Javascript, CSS and XHTML, those are the standards that are important to me. IE7 is woefully inadequate and IE8 still isn't going to have SVG and it's javascript will still be sub-par performance-wise from everything I've seen (am I wrong about that?). So what standard are you talking about? I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious to know.
I think speech enabled gadgets are great and possibly life saving. Any time I'm almost run off the road by some idiot who insists on trying to hold their little mini-phone up to their ear by wedging it in between his shoulder and ear I think how essential speech enabling these devices really is.
Re:I didn't miss anything. Read the law.
on
The $54 Million Laptop
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Sorry, just because the loon wants the law to cover what happened doesn't mean it actually does. Her blog indicates that the DC Attorney General seems to think that she has a case. So I guess you think she's out and out lying? Reading her blog, she seems to have done her best to *not* take this to court. Indeed, she doesn't even think $54M is reasonable, she's doing it to get BB's attention. But I guess it's too much to ask that you RTFA before you post.
The law only covers data and systems maintained by Best Buy, it does NOT cover data and systems maintained by the customer. I don't even think you know which law she is claiming was violated, because you seem to be implying that she's complaining about the lost data on her HD. That is *not* the base of what she's claiming. If you take the time to read the article, you'll know that the law she's invoking is one where BB is required to notify her that her computer was stolen because of privacy and possible identity theft resulting from the theft of her laptop. She does make claims about the lost data, but that is not the base of her case.
Second, I don't see where best buy has any responsibility for any privacy implications either. You must have missed the part where a DC privacy law requires that Best Buy notify her that her laptop had been stolen. This is pretty much the crux of her argument and why she wants the money she's asking for. Pretty much destroys your whole argument.
Of course you're right, but with the system the way it is, someone grabbing them now so that they aren't used against anyone else is the best we can hope for. Ideally, there would be a body out there to whom you could assign "obvious" patents so that they can't be used for evil. That seems like such a good idea that I'm sure it must exist. If so, maybe we could lobby Amazon to contribute their "defensive" patents to this body so we're in the clear now and forever.
If you've dragged this thread down to the name-calling level and you refuse to debate maturely, then there's no point continuing any further. Goodbye. Good riddance. I do believe, however, that I was accused of being a non-native English speaker, so, you were the one name calling. BTW, look up ass in the dictionary, you'll find that I wasn't actually name calling, it was actually quite fitting considering you assumed that I was not an English native speaker instead of just not following and buying your "political in the wider sense" argument without any proof whatsoever.
No, you twice responded to my comments in this thread while losing track of context No I haven't.
and then you didn't seem to be aware of the use of the word "politics" in the wider sense, so it was perfectly reasonable of me to establish whether I needed to phrase myself differently. Lots of non-native speakers post on Slashdot, so you can't always rely on idioms like "office politics". At no point did I suggest that your argument was invalidated by this, so it simply cannot be an ad hominem attack. You still haven't shown any hint of politics *in the wider sense* used by the W3C (presumably?) in wanting to "specify" (note that they didn't *require* any format) ogg. Again, though, not that it matters to my argument I think the HTML spec should *require* an open format. It's not political, it's, as I said, practical for me to want a standard format that all browsers support.
So you've dodged the rest of my comment, and are now calling me names. Please apologise and address the part of my comment that wasn't about language, or I don't see the point in "bringing this back on track". What have I dodged? You haven't provided any basis for your argument that what the W3C did was political. Talk about dodging arguments...
And, no, I won't apologize. I read the links and there is no proof of politicization *at all*. Until you show me where I erred, I don't buy it. And what you did was ad hominem. You incorrectly assumed that because I didn't see any politics that I didn't understand what you said. If it's so obvious, post the argument. Again, though, not that it matters one way or the other what I'm arguing. I guess I could argue that you must not read english natively since you can't seem to understand that I don't find this an obvious political situation.
What arguments do *you think* I haven't addressed? You and I disgree that HTML should spec a format that must be supported. I haven't bought your arguments and said that I think we need to agree to disagree. No matter what you think about the specification process (I'm a software engineer, I write specs all the time), it is only up to the body writing the spec to decide what should and shouldn't go into a spec. So, you can't prove factually your point and I can't either. My only point is that I think that HTML should specify a format that *must be required* (note that they *DID NOT* do this) by implementations (I'd go so far as to say they should spec them for image/audio/video formats).
What do you mean? This is obviously a political issue. No, it's not obvious to me that it is a political issue, post support for your motivations for thinking so, not that I think it's actually germane to the dialog.
Just a guess, are you a non-native speaker of English Wrong, born and raised in the midwest since 1970, English is my native language, though I do speak two others.
and do you think that "politics" is always about what the government does? "Politics" means a lot more than that. Are you familiar with the phrase "office politics"? You obviously have resorted to ad-hominem attacks, though I thought the discussion actually had a point until you post this trash. Of course I know what you mean by politics within your sentence, and yet, I still don't know how politics was brought into the discussion...
ass.
Provide some motivation for why you think it's political and try to bring this back on track. Even if you do find some motivation for making it political, it really doesn't have any bearing on whether HTML should specify a supported media type. Again, I think it should for practical reasons, to give content providers a stable platform upon which to serve web documents to users, including media other than text.
The choice of codec has absolutely no relevance to the markup Completely disagree. I think it's fair to say "here's the markup spec for embedding video and, btw, you must support <insert open and free media format here>, but you may support others." Done. When someone comes to my site, I want to *know* that they can support at least one codec that I can provide without them having to go elsewhere to get a codec before they can view my site the way I want it viewed. I just can't understand why you don't think this would be a *good thing* and I don't see why HTML shouldn't evolve to make this better.
so trying to force what is a political issue To me it's a practical issue and has nothing to do with politics whatsoever. Not sure how you even pull politics into this.
So you think that anything useful, no matter what it is, should be crammed into one behemoth specification? I don't think that including a standard image/audio/video format that must be supported makes the spec much bigger than it already is. If it's a behemoth because of the added "you must support these media formats", then I think it was a behemoth before it specified that.
Experience demonstrates that problems arise where orthogonal concepts occur in a single specification. I disagree with you that this is an orthogonal concept. I think it sits right smack dab in the middle of the problem. HTML may have been just a markup language, but it has become media. And the whole point of HTML is to present a document to you. You can't argue that images/video/audio aren't part of today's web documents, you're being ludicrous if you argue that. You haven't convinced me that HTML shouldn't specify what media can be embedded inside of it (and it should *allow* for others as well). Honestly, though, I don't care if it's in HTML or some other spec, but if HTML is going to stand up and do it, then so be it. It needs to be done.
At this point I think we'll have to agree to disagree. You won't convince me and I know I'm not convincing you, so it's time to let everyone see our positions and decide for themselves.
I wasn't complaining that Firefox doesn't support JPEG 2000. Go back and read the thread again. Ignorant Aardvark was describing a (to him) hypothetical scenario where the HTML specification didn't require particular image formats, and said that the consequence was a nightmare of image formats that weren't reliably supported by open-source browsers. I was pointing out that this is, in fact, the world we live in today, and pointed out JPEG 2000 support in Firefox as evidence of that. You need to read what I said. I know this is the world we live in and I want that to change. W3C *should* specify a required (image/audio/video) format that everyone must support. If you support more, call it a competitive advantage. That's the world I want to live in.
Sure it would. But it's not the HTML specification's job to provide leverage for a particular video or audio codec. The HTML specification should standardise HTML and not blunder into orthogonal issues like video/audio codecs. Then who's job is it? Times change and I think the HTML spec should grow with the times. I envision a future where I don't have to require my users to download special players to play my content (or codecs for that matter) unless I really want them to.
Yes, in fact that's precisely the state of the world today. For instance, Firefox doesn't support JPEG 2000. ...
The choice of video and audio codecs is outside the scope of the HTML 5 specification. Attempting to more tightly couple independent formats is myopic. It's funny, you contradict yourself. You don't want the W3C to standardize on formats, and, yet, you complain about browsers that don't support your formats. Wouldn't the web be a better place if there were a few good, open standards of media on which the web platform could standardize? I know it sure would be easier for content providers and it would be better for users. So I really don't understand where you're coming from.
Welcome to 2007, things change. The W3C should be specifying *open* formats for their platform that content providers can rely on to be supported so that users *don't* have to download plugins to make web sites work.
The point is that unlike WMV etc., codecs for all the most used platforms and architectures can be written for Ogg/Theora. Ideally, that would be the case, but reality isn't ideal, at least not today. My opinion is that if W3C specifies standards for these formats, then they are adopted by the browsers. Not only that, but they can be implemented in the browser and I don't have to rely on crappy plugins for my users to view my content (and trying to find an appropriate codec for every viewer/platform). Take a look at image formats. Even today there is poor support in browsers for various image formats. How about IE6 not supporting PNG? If PNG were specified in the standard, do you think IE6 would have fully supported it? (heh, well, maybe not even then/sigh). Don't get me wrong, allow other formats to be integrated, but standardize at least one format that producers of content can rely on to work seemlessly in the browser. If I want them to use a different codec for better quality, I can point them to one, but it *should just work* when they come to my site. *That* is what's needed to make the web more usable. Honestly, you think that asking people to install a codec is reasonable in this day and age? Never mind mass consumers who just aren't going to do it, but even I feel the pain and I'm a pretty technical guy.
What are you seeing as the big reason you'd have to supply media in multiple formats? I have to provide multiple formats because it's hard for users to find the right codecs to be able to consume my media. *You* don't think it is a problem, but I'm telling you that in reality, it *is*. For instance, some media players don't support MPEG-4 but they do support.WMV. And it's just the opposite for other players. I don't know, I guess I thought everyone understood this. Audio is slightly better, but I still run into the same problems. There's a reason that sites like amazon.com provide two different audio formats so that people can preview the music. Welcome to 1998, it really hasn't gotten much better since then. I do believe that standards would make this better.
I haven't heard *your* reasoning Having to provide different multi-megabyte/multi-gigabyte files so that I can support three or four different browsers is a huge time sink and takes up a lot of resources. Thought that would be obvious.
Saying "Codec Hell" is like saying "Window Manager Hell", it's fun, but meaningless in the end. What are you smoking? It isn't meaningless and I'd like to know your reasoning for saying it is.
Ok, I'll bite. It seems you want to play cat and mouse games instead of just coming out and saying what you want to say. The fact of the matter is, though, that if we can do *anything* to help slow global warming, why shouldn't we? Not only would getting rid of our need for oil help global climate (even if it is inevitable that there isn't anything we can do), but it could help us become economically independent as well. And why is that bad?
Ok, I'll begrudgingly give you that, but only because I set myself up. Since I put it the way I did, I allowed you to find *one* example and allowed you to make that representative of all Open Source. The fact of the matter is, though, that if Firefox is so god awful, as you put it, why is it's uptake growing? And comparing Firefox to Vista, if Vista *isn't* so god awful, why is it's uptake not as good as Microsoft would like? Think about *that* for a bit.
As I've said in other posts, I actually *like* Vista's user experience *better* than XP's. But the bugs in Vista are just too fundamental for me to believe it's a quality piece of software. Compare your Firefox example to this http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942435/en-us and tell me that the comparison isn't apples to oranges. I dunno, but it seems to me that copying files is something that should *just work* in an operating system.
We hear too often from these climate "experts", finally someone is ready to admit that our climate is so big and complex that we don't know exactly how it all works. That's funny, I didn't see the word climate in what you quoted anywhere, it says "atmosphere." And I think if I extrapolate to what you're trying to troll, no one purports to understand how our climate works completely. So go away troll. Not sure how you got modded insightful.
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Hey! A fellow BRIEF fan! :-D I too have been missing column selection for a long time!
But the President must call the shots *with respect to the law*. The President doesn't have carte blanche to ignore the law just because he's the Commander-in-Chief of the *military*. Some people seem to be confused and think that "Commander-in-Chief" applies to citizens. It does not.
Nope, I was agreeing with you 100% ;-)
I love dogs and cats, but they each have their place.
I always find it funny how people don't understand this view point. The other part of this is that they don't *really* have a problem with the license, they have a problem with the *people* who chose that license.
So if you really want to use that "snippet of GPL'd source code" maybe try talking to the owner of that code. As a copyright holder on the code, they can choose to release whatever they want, however they want.
I am a commercial software developer. There have been times when I've said "Gee, I sure wish I could use that GPL'd code over thar." But I never blame the license and I certainly don't blame the developers who released the code under that license. After all, it's their code, not mine, and they could always have chosen to release it under a proprietary license so that it wasn't free for anyone.
I think speech enabled gadgets are great and possibly life saving. Any time I'm almost run off the road by some idiot who insists on trying to hold their little mini-phone up to their ear by wedging it in between his shoulder and ear I think how essential speech enabling these devices really is.
Of course you're right, but with the system the way it is, someone grabbing them now so that they aren't used against anyone else is the best we can hope for. Ideally, there would be a body out there to whom you could assign "obvious" patents so that they can't be used for evil. That seems like such a good idea that I'm sure it must exist. If so, maybe we could lobby Amazon to contribute their "defensive" patents to this body so we're in the clear now and forever.
Take care.
And, no, I won't apologize. I read the links and there is no proof of politicization *at all*. Until you show me where I erred, I don't buy it. And what you did was ad hominem. You incorrectly assumed that because I didn't see any politics that I didn't understand what you said. If it's so obvious, post the argument. Again, though, not that it matters one way or the other what I'm arguing. I guess I could argue that you must not read english natively since you can't seem to understand that I don't find this an obvious political situation.
What arguments do *you think* I haven't addressed? You and I disgree that HTML should spec a format that must be supported. I haven't bought your arguments and said that I think we need to agree to disagree. No matter what you think about the specification process (I'm a software engineer, I write specs all the time), it is only up to the body writing the spec to decide what should and shouldn't go into a spec. So, you can't prove factually your point and I can't either. My only point is that I think that HTML should specify a format that *must be required* (note that they *DID NOT* do this) by implementations (I'd go so far as to say they should spec them for image/audio/video formats).
ass.
Provide some motivation for why you think it's political and try to bring this back on track. Even if you do find some motivation for making it political, it really doesn't have any bearing on whether HTML should specify a supported media type. Again, I think it should for practical reasons, to give content providers a stable platform upon which to serve web documents to users, including media other than text.
At this point I think we'll have to agree to disagree. You won't convince me and I know I'm not convincing you, so it's time to let everyone see our positions and decide for themselves.
Welcome to 2007, things change. The W3C should be specifying *open* formats for their platform that content providers can rely on to be supported so that users *don't* have to download plugins to make web sites work.
And he got modded insightful /sigh
Ok, I'll bite. It seems you want to play cat and mouse games instead of just coming out and saying what you want to say. The fact of the matter is, though, that if we can do *anything* to help slow global warming, why shouldn't we? Not only would getting rid of our need for oil help global climate (even if it is inevitable that there isn't anything we can do), but it could help us become economically independent as well. And why is that bad?
Ok, I'll begrudgingly give you that, but only because I set myself up. Since I put it the way I did, I allowed you to find *one* example and allowed you to make that representative of all Open Source. The fact of the matter is, though, that if Firefox is so god awful, as you put it, why is it's uptake growing? And comparing Firefox to Vista, if Vista *isn't* so god awful, why is it's uptake not as good as Microsoft would like? Think about *that* for a bit.
As I've said in other posts, I actually *like* Vista's user experience *better* than XP's. But the bugs in Vista are just too fundamental for me to believe it's a quality piece of software. Compare your Firefox example to this http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942435/en-us and tell me that the comparison isn't apples to oranges. I dunno, but it seems to me that copying files is something that should *just work* in an operating system.