Hmm. I had links for Thoreau and MLK, and they showed up when I did 'preview', but they mysteriously seem to be stripped out. Ah well -- do a Google search for "civil disobedience".
Recommended reading: Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Jr.. And, um, watch this movie.
Am I equating the struggle with RIAA with the issues MLK and Gandhi dealt with? No -- that would be a bit disrespectful. However, since you want to raise the discussion to the grandiose level of The Rule of Law and the Order of Society....
To be a little more clear, it's a lack of respect for intellectual property rights of others. Whatever your view on physical property rights, it should be obvious that ownership of abstract ideas is a very different thing, linked to physical property only by a tenuous analogy. An MP3 file, after all, is just a very large number -- is it really rational that some organization (or even some individual) can restrict other people from using that number?
The problems seem to happen when everyone starts believing the perfection of the analogy, and carrying over all sorts of baggage about the way things "should" be from their conceptions of physical property rights. The RIAA/MPAA love this, of course, since perpetuating this myth is what keeps them rolling in cash.
The reality is that there's nothing natural about intellectual "property" -- it's a convenient fiction created by society and enforced by the government. Convenient to a point, at least -- I'm not a wacked out radical here: I can see the advantages of limited IP laws to promote invention and arts. It's when that focus gets lost and the spurious analogy somehow takes moral precedence that I get annoyed.
If you really must revisit this movie, I highly suggest you do so by finding yourself a copy of The Phantom Edit. It's not perfect either, but it gives a sense of how hard it wouldn't have been for Lucas to make the original not suck.
There's a quote from Lucas in the Time Magazine SWII article (hey, surprise, they got all the major news mags!) which really struck me:
"I said, 'They're gonna hate this. They're gonna get really upset that I
have a 9-year-old as the hero.' But what can I do? That's the story. I
can't make him 15. The whole story is about where he came from, who is
he? You had to start in the beginning."
It's pretty obvious that he still doesn't get it. I don't know anyone who complained about a kid being the hero -- a few who
complained about the chosen kid's acting ability, and a bunch more who complained about the cutesyness, but this was the first I've heard the idea that the problem is that audiences can't cope with the idea of a child hero. Note to George: um, ex-squeeeze me, there are a few other issues.
It's not an argument. I just find it funny that so many people are extremely trusting of factory-made chemicals, but then think than any "natural" (a funny concept in itself) chemicals can't possibly have any effect.
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be scientific study -- in fact, I'm saying it's ridiculous to discount things without study -- just as it's ridiculous to blindly accept them.
Sure, there's a lot of not-real stuff out there -- and a lot of crap being pushed by scam artists/companies -- but that doesn't mean all "alternative" medicine is inauthentic or just placebo effect. Remember where we got aspirin from. Or, if you doubt that naturally-occuring substances ever have any sort of effect, um, consider marijuana or peyote.
Well, I set up a Black & White * Sucks-Rules-O-Meter getting its results from Google -- just one query a day. After about a month, they noticed it and banned my IP from doing that search.
Since that's probably pretty effective in most cases, I'd guess they're not really saving bandwidth with this API, especially since it'll encourage *more* people to do scripted searches (and since the html page is pretty small anyway).
I think they're doing it to appear cool to computer geeks. Works for me....
For the per-site-basis -- there's a sitebar thing out there that lets you change the ua string on the fly -- that's a decent workaround.
But really, the good thing is that I've seen fewer and fewer sites that require this. Having an incorrect UA string is counterproductive in the long run -- it's better to leave it as it is and whine to the broken sites.
The original rumor of the Quicksilver release date was entirely based on the amazon.co.uk site's date. When the initial slashdot story came out, I looked all over the net for some sort of corroborating evidence and found none -- everything traces back to amazon UK. Then, as March 7 2002 actually approached, suddenly the date jumped by a year -- kind of suspicious. I can still find no indication that this is anything but a placeholder. So don't hold your breath. (But on the other hand, perhaps it will actually come out sooner -- you never know!)
It's particularly stupid because Palm[Pilot]s don't actually turn off -- the screen goes blank, but that's basically the only difference. I always feel like saying "Okay, but that guy over there has to turn off his digital watch."
But then I feel even more like not getting kicked off the plane, so I bite my tongue.
Re:For what it's worth
on
iPod on Windows
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Since my post is apparently +2 interesting and +1 funny (even if a bit -1 overrated) I might as well elaborate.
Said coworker is a programmer-geek type, not a sysadmin-geek type. He hates all things Microsoft with the appropriate level of passion, and has been using Linux for a while, with mixed happiness -- very impressed with the power and flexibility, totally happy with the *nix environment, but a little underwhelmed by the lack of polish on the graphics and multimedia end of things. (No flames please -- these aren't my opinions; I'm just conveying.) He'd been eyeing OS X for a while in a casual sort of way, but not with much seriousness.
When he got the iPod-gift, I suggested that hey, we might be able to play with some stuff to try to get it working on his Linux box -- there's others out there working on it. Hmmm, he said.
But then he came in the next day with his new Powerbook.:)
That's exactly the wrong approach. The point of patents is to reward people for giving the details of their inventions to the public instead of keeping them as trade secrets. As a reward for doing this, the inventor gets exclusive rights to the invention for a short time. This is generally a good idea and has a beneficial place in society.
Unfortunately, it's somehow turned into "patents are a way for a company to own an idea and milk money from it as long as possible". I'm afraid your "quiet period" idea plays into the latter -- it might make it a bit harder to get a solid patent, but generally tends to reinforce the "we own this idea now" concept.
It'd be better for patents to only last for a few years. Since US patent law was created, the term has constantly increased, which is ridiculous, because the pace of technology keeps going up too. If software patents only lasted two years, they'd be annoying, but not potentially crippling as they are now.
Yes, you're entirely right, as anyone who would bother to even slightly check before posting would see. From the very first line of the description in the mkswap(8) man page:
mkswap sets up a Linux swap area on a device or in a file.
There's no need to do any loopback mount silliness. Also, this isn't unique to Linux -- both Solaris and Irix can swap to files. This is *nix, after all -- the "everything is a file (stream)" idea runs pretty deep.
Jezzball doesn't run very well under WINE. But luckily, there's a (in all humbleness) much improved native equivalent. So that's not a very good example.:)
Slashdot Mirror
This being a geek site, we should know better. Spider silk comes out through spinneret spigots, not through the anus.
Supporting *plain text* isn't exactly rocket science.
Hmm. I had links for Thoreau and MLK, and they showed up when I did 'preview', but they mysteriously seem to be stripped out. Ah well -- do a Google search for "civil disobedience".
This is such a troll. But whatever:
Recommended reading: Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Jr.. And, um, watch this movie.
Am I equating the struggle with RIAA with the issues MLK and Gandhi dealt with? No -- that would be a bit disrespectful. However, since you want to raise the discussion to the grandiose level of The Rule of Law and the Order of Society....
To be a little more clear, it's a lack of respect for intellectual property rights of others. Whatever your view on physical property rights, it should be obvious that ownership of abstract ideas is a very different thing, linked to physical property only by a tenuous analogy. An MP3 file, after all, is just a very large number -- is it really rational that some organization (or even some individual) can restrict other people from using that number?
The problems seem to happen when everyone starts believing the perfection of the analogy, and carrying over all sorts of baggage about the way things "should" be from their conceptions of physical property rights. The RIAA/MPAA love this, of course, since perpetuating this myth is what keeps them rolling in cash.
The reality is that there's nothing natural about intellectual "property" -- it's a convenient fiction created by society and enforced by the government. Convenient to a point, at least -- I'm not a wacked out radical here: I can see the advantages of limited IP laws to promote invention and arts. It's when that focus gets lost and the spurious analogy somehow takes moral precedence that I get annoyed.
If you really must revisit this movie, I highly suggest you do so by finding yourself a copy of The Phantom Edit. It's not perfect either, but it gives a sense of how hard it wouldn't have been for Lucas to make the original not suck.
There's a quote from Lucas in the Time Magazine SWII article (hey, surprise, they got all the major news mags!) which really struck me:
It's pretty obvious that he still doesn't get it. I don't know anyone who complained about a kid being the hero -- a few who complained about the chosen kid's acting ability, and a bunch more who complained about the cutesyness, but this was the first I've heard the idea that the problem is that audiences can't cope with the idea of a child hero. Note to George: um, ex-squeeeze me, there are a few other issues.
Well, that's basically what Judge Jackson said, and he got kicked off the case.
Well, a lot of it was under friendly questioning from his own lawyer.
It's not an argument. I just find it funny that so many people are extremely trusting of factory-made chemicals, but then think than any "natural" (a funny concept in itself) chemicals can't possibly have any effect.
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be scientific study -- in fact, I'm saying it's ridiculous to discount things without study -- just as it's ridiculous to blindly accept them.
Sure, there's a lot of not-real stuff out there -- and a lot of crap being pushed by scam artists/companies -- but that doesn't mean all "alternative" medicine is inauthentic or just placebo effect. Remember where we got aspirin from. Or, if you doubt that naturally-occuring substances ever have any sort of effect, um, consider marijuana or peyote.
Well, I set up a Black & White * Sucks-Rules-O-Meter getting its results from Google -- just one query a day. After about a month, they noticed it and banned my IP from doing that search.
Since that's probably pretty effective in most cases, I'd guess they're not really saving bandwidth with this API, especially since it'll encourage *more* people to do scripted searches (and since the html page is pretty small anyway).
I think they're doing it to appear cool to computer geeks. Works for me....
* the game
For the per-site-basis -- there's a sitebar thing out there that lets you change the ua string on the fly -- that's a decent workaround.
But really, the good thing is that I've seen fewer and fewer sites that require this. Having an incorrect UA string is counterproductive in the long run -- it's better to leave it as it is and whine to the broken sites.
I'm just glad that they changed from
Work at "Home"
to just
Work at Home
.
My geek-sense was *killing* me every time I drove past one. And my wife was about to kill me for complaining about it every time.
I don't see any indication that amazon uk has any special knowledge -- I think they're just makin' stuff up.
The original rumor of the Quicksilver release date was entirely based on the amazon.co.uk site's date. When the initial slashdot story came out, I looked all over the net for some sort of corroborating evidence and found none -- everything traces back to amazon UK. Then, as March 7 2002 actually approached, suddenly the date jumped by a year -- kind of suspicious. I can still find no indication that this is anything but a placeholder. So don't hold your breath. (But on the other hand, perhaps it will actually come out sooner -- you never know!)
It's particularly stupid because Palm[Pilot]s don't actually turn off -- the screen goes blank, but that's basically the only difference. I always feel like saying "Okay, but that guy over there has to turn off his digital watch."
But then I feel even more like not getting kicked off the plane, so I bite my tongue.
Since my post is apparently +2 interesting and +1 funny (even if a bit -1 overrated) I might as well elaborate.
:)
Said coworker is a programmer-geek type, not a sysadmin-geek type. He hates all things Microsoft with the appropriate level of passion, and has been using Linux for a while, with mixed happiness -- very impressed with the power and flexibility, totally happy with the *nix environment, but a little underwhelmed by the lack of polish on the graphics and multimedia end of things. (No flames please -- these aren't my opinions; I'm just conveying.) He'd been eyeing OS X for a while in a casual sort of way, but not with much seriousness.
When he got the iPod-gift, I suggested that hey, we might be able to play with some stuff to try to get it working on his Linux box -- there's others out there working on it. Hmmm, he said.
But then he came in the next day with his new Powerbook.
I have a coworker whose girlfriend gave him an iPod for Christmas, so he promptly went out and bought a new Titanium Powerbook.
read more carefully. he said the gcc3 packages would return, not that the default gcc packages would be upgraded to gcc-3.x. That's a big difference.
Yes, they are.
http://www.smoogespace.com/documents/behind_the_na mes.html.
That's exactly the wrong approach. The point of patents is to reward people for giving the details of their inventions to the public instead of keeping them as trade secrets. As a reward for doing this, the inventor gets exclusive rights to the invention for a short time. This is generally a good idea and has a beneficial place in society.
Unfortunately, it's somehow turned into "patents are a way for a company to own an idea and milk money from it as long as possible". I'm afraid your "quiet period" idea plays into the latter -- it might make it a bit harder to get a solid patent, but generally tends to reinforce the "we own this idea now" concept.
It'd be better for patents to only last for a few years. Since US patent law was created, the term has constantly increased, which is ridiculous, because the pace of technology keeps going up too. If software patents only lasted two years, they'd be annoying, but not potentially crippling as they are now.
I'd probably be just like tofu.
Hmm. Bringing new meaning to the phrase "you are what you eat", I see.
Yes, you're entirely right, as anyone who would bother to even slightly check before posting would see. From the very first line of the description in the mkswap(8) man page:
mkswap sets up a Linux swap area on a device or in a file.
There's no need to do any loopback mount silliness. Also, this isn't unique to Linux -- both Solaris and Irix can swap to files. This is *nix, after all -- the "everything is a file (stream)" idea runs pretty deep.
Jezzball doesn't run very well under WINE. But luckily, there's a (in all humbleness) much improved native equivalent. So that's not a very good example. :)