How do all these "better patent that" quips still manage to get modded up? I mean, can you imagine if the first joke off the bat were "can you imagine a beowulf cluter of patents" or some other Soviet-Portman-Goat-Grits joke? Can we actually have a patent discussion of any sort without (and I'm not kidding, just keep reading) the veritable blizzard of "patent suing people" and "patent breathing" jokes? Cripes. I almost wish I had a patent on posting repetitive jokes to internet discussion threads, because I'd be so wealthy Bill Gates would be serving me coffee in French maid outfit by now.
Well, bombs have always been something of a problem on airplanes, too, and they used to handle that threat by asking you if you had packed your own bags.
There is no ".tar.gz" format though. There is.tar and there is.gz. One concatenates, the other compresses. The problem you mention would be less likely to annoy if one compressed, then concatenated. But that might reduce the potential for space savings-- especially in the case you mention where there are thousands of files in the archive.
No. It's not. You're acting like the guy in "1984" who just couldn't wait to cut words out of the English language. We have perfectly good words to describe various forms of intellectual dishonesty or unauthorized duplication of works without conflating something like copying an mp3 with grand theft auto.
We don't need to resort to pretending that copying something is the same as stealing something for copying something to be wrong.
The person who can't spell is telling me to get a dictionary. That's rich. Also, there is no such word as "virii". The word you were trying for is "viruses". Get a dictionary indeed!
And I've never tried Mandrake either. According to your own post I must be "fairly smart". I've been running Debian GNU/Linux for a couple of years now. Of course, my main machine runs Gentoo, which makes Debian look like Red Hat in terms of ease of installment, so according to your method for determining smartness I must be some sort of Einstein.
What set me off? The fact that you're drooling about who is a "[expletive] idiot" and at the same time you make trivial spelling errors-- the sort of error most of the "idiots" who open email attachments learned to stop making in junior high.
naturally the Democrats were somewhat harder on them
Naturally? It was Clinton who appointed Powell to head the FCC in the first place. Not only that, it's been Democrats sponsoring legislation to expand the scope of corporate control over communications the last few years, not the Republicans. Apparently, the Republicans have realized that the laws themselves aren't nearly as important as making sure to continue the "trickle up" economics stuff by giving the wealthy tax cuts and rebates (in spite of an existing and burgeoning deficit). "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one" after all.
The idea that techies in America have so it so bad (or any worse than other Americans, at least) is as silly as the notion that Buddha would be "smiling down" on anyone (especially Hindus, who belong to a different from the Buddhists).
Re:I liked this better
on
Crime Prediction
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
They aren't going to be able to stop crimes before they happen, because that's impossible (unless you count mitigating the factors that cause crime, like poverty or mental illness). If you stop it before it happens, then it hasn't happened.
The only concern I have about this is that it will heighten the notions of where to send police in the first place. In Minneapolis we have a system called CODEFOR that is used to help police track crime and prioritize resources, but it's based (I believe) on reported crime. That's quite different than using statistical measures like arrest rates to project crime rates and send police into an area based on that. One has to be very careful, since using the results of this to direct limited police resources could influence the numbers that go into the model in the first place (feedback looping).
Luckily, the people the article talks about were using a wide variety of inputs (not just police or crime-related) to what are likely a host of regression analyses.
Maybe you can tell your daughter that if she wants to run MS Windows that she is welcome to get her own job and buy her own computer and then she can install whatever software she wants? Where I come from parents are still in charge of the children, not the other way around.;)
Other than that, I agree... except that aren't most of the difficulties with repartitioning due to MS Windows? I mean, if you have the freedom to wipe the drive then multiple OS booting is not remotely difficult to set up. It's losing what's there that's a hassle. Maybe this can be avoided with a bootable CD distro like Knoppix (which would, of course, make a great subscription service) or by using GNU/Linux preinstalled on a bootable external drive (or even on an internal drive that could be put in the box as a master and the old MS drive relegated to its appropriate slave status).
Public domain does not refer to abandoned physical property. It refers to works that are not covered by copyright or patent at this time. Or land which is owned by the government. Since garbage is not land, the only applicable definition would be the first sense regarding copyright. If we're going to discuss these matters of law, we ought to at least attempt to get the words right.
No shit? The person I was responding to specifically said there was a SCOTUS ruling that said that trash was public domain-- which is clearly false. Trash might be free to take, but that does not make it public domain. An important distinction.
If you are having that much trouble finding a book, why wouldn't you just ask a librarian for help? They live for that stuff. They went to college for that stuff. They get paid to do that stuff. On top of that, they are there all day every day doing that stuff, so they are probably pretty good at it.
SCOTUS may have ruled that once you put garbage on the curb, that property is abandoned and is free to take, but I seriously doubt they ruled that it's "public domain"... as in the content is no longer copyright or patent protected.
Say what you want, but I would love to see Avril Lavigne cover a decent Metallica song, perhaps "Fade to Black", "Four Horsemen", or "Master of Puppets". But in this instance I have to say the song chosen was already so bad that no cover could possibly have made it worse.
You're being funny, right? I mean, otherwise how do you explain selling your company to AOL in the first place? And do you really think he's risking going hungry here? Somehow I think someone who's had the opportunity to sell their company to AOL has more money in hand than most of us will earn in a lifetime (unless, of course, he's squandered it or invested carelessly in the last four years).
If you'd ever been to a park, you'd know that the saying is "take only pictures and leave only footprints".
As it is you sound like an unhappy person with wild fantasies of being able to ruin other people's fun. Now I'm not a geocacher, but I have known the joy of finding some little thing in some out of the way place that someone's done. And if I'm understanding the intention of geocaching correctly you wouldn't even notice these things unless you were looking for them.
Personally I think I'd be more inclined to participate in some sort of photocaching culture, where people would recreate entire areas by submitting pictures to a database of some sort. It would even be kind of cool to have some silly collection of hundreds of different people's pictures of themselves at some place (like a statue, a historic site, or whatever).
Slashdot Mirror
heh. right. originally I was doing an echo or a cat. thanks.
How do all these "better patent that" quips still manage to get modded up? I mean, can you imagine if the first joke off the bat were "can you imagine a beowulf cluter of patents" or some other Soviet-Portman-Goat-Grits joke? Can we actually have a patent discussion of any sort without (and I'm not kidding, just keep reading) the veritable blizzard of "patent suing people" and "patent breathing" jokes? Cripes. I almost wish I had a patent on posting repetitive jokes to internet discussion threads, because I'd be so wealthy Bill Gates would be serving me coffee in French maid outfit by now.
OK. I'm done whining now. Thank you.
Well, bombs have always been something of a problem on airplanes, too, and they used to handle that threat by asking you if you had packed your own bags.
There is no ".tar.gz" format though. There is .tar and there is .gz. One concatenates, the other compresses. The problem you mention would be less likely to annoy if one compressed, then concatenated. But that might reduce the potential for space savings-- especially in the case you mention where there are thousands of files in the archive.
No. It's not. You're acting like the guy in "1984" who just couldn't wait to cut words out of the English language. We have perfectly good words to describe various forms of intellectual dishonesty or unauthorized duplication of works without conflating something like copying an mp3 with grand theft auto.
We don't need to resort to pretending that copying something is the same as stealing something for copying something to be wrong.
Wow. You have some serious issues.
The person who can't spell is telling me to get a dictionary. That's rich. Also, there is no such word as "virii". The word you were trying for is "viruses". Get a dictionary indeed!
No. I don't have anything better to do.
And I've never tried Mandrake either. According to your own post I must be "fairly smart". I've been running Debian GNU/Linux for a couple of years now. Of course, my main machine runs Gentoo, which makes Debian look like Red Hat in terms of ease of installment, so according to your method for determining smartness I must be some sort of Einstein.
What set me off? The fact that you're drooling about who is a "[expletive] idiot" and at the same time you make trivial spelling errors-- the sort of error most of the "idiots" who open email attachments learned to stop making in junior high.
If you break the terms of that contract, then you are indeed stealing it
[insert standard response about how that's not stealing, it's either a contract violation or copyright infringement or something like that]
Heh. 1982, parents' basement... yuk yuk. Oh you sure did get me there! Hooboy!
Too bad your understanding of these issues isn't remotely as keen as your sense of humor.
your too stupid
What if you're just too stupid to spell correctly? Especially a word you got right earlier in the very same sentence? Spare us the elitist BS, OK?
I prefer Cringeley's explanation that SCO/Caldera put the code there themselves.
naturally the Democrats were somewhat harder on them
Naturally? It was Clinton who appointed Powell to head the FCC in the first place. Not only that, it's been Democrats sponsoring legislation to expand the scope of corporate control over communications the last few years, not the Republicans. Apparently, the Republicans have realized that the laws themselves aren't nearly as important as making sure to continue the "trickle up" economics stuff by giving the wealthy tax cuts and rebates (in spite of an existing and burgeoning deficit). "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one" after all.
The idea that techies in America have so it so bad (or any worse than other Americans, at least) is as silly as the notion that Buddha would be "smiling down" on anyone (especially Hindus, who belong to a different from the Buddhists).
They aren't going to be able to stop crimes before they happen, because that's impossible (unless you count mitigating the factors that cause crime, like poverty or mental illness). If you stop it before it happens, then it hasn't happened.
The only concern I have about this is that it will heighten the notions of where to send police in the first place. In Minneapolis we have a system called CODEFOR that is used to help police track crime and prioritize resources, but it's based (I believe) on reported crime. That's quite different than using statistical measures like arrest rates to project crime rates and send police into an area based on that. One has to be very careful, since using the results of this to direct limited police resources could influence the numbers that go into the model in the first place (feedback looping).
Luckily, the people the article talks about were using a wide variety of inputs (not just police or crime-related) to what are likely a host of regression analyses.
Linux: Telling Microsoft where to go since 1991
With respect to your sig: I believe Linux was originated due to problems with Minix, which is not a Microsoft product. Just a thought.
Maybe you can tell your daughter that if she wants to run MS Windows that she is welcome to get her own job and buy her own computer and then she can install whatever software she wants? Where I come from parents are still in charge of the children, not the other way around. ;)
Other than that, I agree... except that aren't most of the difficulties with repartitioning due to MS Windows? I mean, if you have the freedom to wipe the drive then multiple OS booting is not remotely difficult to set up. It's losing what's there that's a hassle. Maybe this can be avoided with a bootable CD distro like Knoppix (which would, of course, make a great subscription service) or by using GNU/Linux preinstalled on a bootable external drive (or even on an internal drive that could be put in the box as a master and the old MS drive relegated to its appropriate slave status).
And your cynicism is contributing what exactly to the mix?
Public domain does not refer to abandoned physical property. It refers to works that are not covered by copyright or patent at this time. Or land which is owned by the government. Since garbage is not land, the only applicable definition would be the first sense regarding copyright. If we're going to discuss these matters of law, we ought to at least attempt to get the words right.
No shit? The person I was responding to specifically said there was a SCOTUS ruling that said that trash was public domain-- which is clearly false. Trash might be free to take, but that does not make it public domain. An important distinction.
If you are having that much trouble finding a book, why wouldn't you just ask a librarian for help? They live for that stuff. They went to college for that stuff. They get paid to do that stuff. On top of that, they are there all day every day doing that stuff, so they are probably pretty good at it.
B.S.
SCOTUS may have ruled that once you put garbage on the curb, that property is abandoned and is free to take, but I seriously doubt they ruled that it's "public domain"... as in the content is no longer copyright or patent protected.
Say what you want, but I would love to see Avril Lavigne cover a decent Metallica song, perhaps "Fade to Black", "Four Horsemen", or "Master of Puppets". But in this instance I have to say the song chosen was already so bad that no cover could possibly have made it worse.
You're being funny, right? I mean, otherwise how do you explain selling your company to AOL in the first place? And do you really think he's risking going hungry here? Somehow I think someone who's had the opportunity to sell their company to AOL has more money in hand than most of us will earn in a lifetime (unless, of course, he's squandered it or invested carelessly in the last four years).
If you'd ever been to a park, you'd know that the saying is "take only pictures and leave only footprints".
As it is you sound like an unhappy person with wild fantasies of being able to ruin other people's fun. Now I'm not a geocacher, but I have known the joy of finding some little thing in some out of the way place that someone's done. And if I'm understanding the intention of geocaching correctly you wouldn't even notice these things unless you were looking for them.
Personally I think I'd be more inclined to participate in some sort of photocaching culture, where people would recreate entire areas by submitting pictures to a database of some sort. It would even be kind of cool to have some silly collection of hundreds of different people's pictures of themselves at some place (like a statue, a historic site, or whatever).