Why should he have learned any lessons? Because you, personally, didn't like it? Episode 1 was the second highest grossing movie of all time. What lessons are there to learned from that, from a capitalistic point of view, other than to give people more of the same?
You'd judge the quality of a film by the box office receipts? Austin Powers got 53 mil in US Box Office returns, and AP II got over 203 mil. Was AP II four times as good?
Episode I could have been shite and still made the huge money (it did, and many say it was). This doesn't mean the movie couldn't have been better, and it doesn't mean that if it was better, it wouldn't have grossed more.
Titanic (One rung up on the gross ladder from Episode I) took in double what Episode I did. You don't think that if Ep I was better, it wouldn't have made even more?
To say no lesson is to be learned from Episode I is to say that George Lucas not only doesn't care about his work anymore, but doesn't care about money either. I'd have to say that whatever your attitude about Lucas is, you can't say both of those are true...
I don't think companies or schools block napster by blocking ports. They can just choose to exclude specific IP numbers (IE the napster server IPs) from getting through the firewall in either direction.
Wow, looking at Win2K and Whistler side by side it's like night and.. later that night!
C'mon, hiring icon artists does not a new system make. Oh, right. These are the folks who brought us Win2K, 98, and WinME! (Shouldn't that be called BuyME?)
The last two visa'ed tech workers I've worked with (one from Enzed, one from Australia (not at the same time)), both told me the same thing: They want to work here (SF Bay area) for a few years, because after that, they can go wherever they want in the world as a hot commodity.
Everyone here things we're deporting people to abject poverty and war zones, but these people have huge stars on their resumes that will let them get top jobs wherever they go. That's exactly the reason most people I know on visas came in the first place.
Similar to MindPixels, but far more entertaining, is BizarroKiehl, hooked in to AOL Instant Messenger. It learns from responses and replies based on what it learns, and is extremely amusing to boot.
From the old school, there's always AOLiza. She's not smart, she's not even that pretty, but she's the one all the guys want to talk to...
This is the most entertaining Slashdot discussion I've ever read.
On one hand, you have Unix weenies who will swear forever that MacOS is as stupid and lame as a jar of rocks painted like jellybeans, even when they themselves have to resort to FUD.
On the other you have people who have actually taken a look at OS X and can see that Apple's done a remarkable job at modernizing their OS to a Unix kernel.
Apple's finally succeded at breaking the Unix ranks into those who like Unix because it's better and those who like Unix because it makes them feel superior.
- If there's a consistent interface, then where did my window managers and widget sets go? Consistant doesn't mean identical. Almost no two mac desktops look the same today. What would make you think people won't customize them on OS X as well?
- If it's "easy to use", then where did my shell prompt go? Nice use of sarcastic quotes, but easy to use means using the best tool for a particular job. With that in mind, go ahead and use a shell prompt when you want to. It's there and full-featured. What's the complaint?
- How do I turn these (*@#% tooltips off? Ahh, that's not an OS X complaint, as MacOS doesn't have tooltips. That's more a Microsoft/Adobe/Macromedia complaint, yes? In point of fact, Mac OS X also does away with balloon help, so this is a good thing.
- How do I get a real, 8-bit-clean text editor? Use TextEdit, the 8-bit-clean text editor that replaces SimpleText in OS X.
- Why does the shell bug me about 'filetypes' all the time? Why do I care?
It doesn't because you don't. You must have noticed all these.app extensions, yes? Is n.3 really better than type/creator attributes?
Linux does look pretty slick, but personally I've found that when I have work that requires my own skill (coding, composing text, etc) I use my Linux box, but when I have work that requires the computer's skill (page layout, gif animations, etc.) I use my Mac or Win laptop. The Linux OS is slick, the Linux tools are powerful, but the MacOS is friendly, and if it can give me power and slickness(?) too, I'll take it over the alternatives.
For an A+ the computer must be hurled into a black hole (some information might be gathered from the trajectories of the particles thrown off by the nuclear blast).
Heck no. Then it could pop out anywhere! Then there's time machines...
No, I'm sorry. The only way to get an A+ is to do everything without records in a haphazard fashion, without even knowing why you're doing it yourself.
When I see Schiffer it changes my train of thought completely.
Buyt seriously, yes, of course models do vastly affect thinking. Is this even a question? As more and more of our daily interactions are with information-driven systems, the metaphor used to convey that information is the determiner of how we interpret it.
The desktop metaphor and the command line metaphor (and it is a metaphor) define how we think of, and consequently, utilize computers. Even something seemly obvious and basic as the telephone, the pager, or the palmpilot are all used defined by their metaphors.
(you know, the one where the governemnt has monitoring tools like Echelon and Carnivore)
Anyhow, in hypothetical bigbrotherland, when you get cash from an ATM, it's trivial to include a reader into the ATM that will grab the unique, prominent serial numbers on the bills it gives you (in nice, clear, easy-to-OCR type donchaknow), and correltaes that money to you, a specific individual.
Now you spend this twenty (yuppiebuck) at the market/gun club/peepmall and, being a twenty, it will most likely not be given as change to another customer, but will go straight into the deposit pouch that the store gives to their bank at the end of the day/week.
The bank scans the money, correlates the serial numbers again, sees the path of the bill, and generates reasonable probabilities of the path it took through the system.
Do this for a while and you get statistical certainties on cashflows, who spends what where, telling more about a person's cash habits than an FBI interview would.
I've no idea if the system exists currently, but it's preposterous to think that cash is really anonymous, because cash literally isn't anonymous as long as it has a serial number. It may be anonymous enough for a given purchase, but in the aggregate it tells a great deal about you.
This applies if, for instance, I, under NDA with the MPAA posted the CSS code and the player keys. As long as they took reasonable steps to stop disemination of this information, they could still claim it was a trade secret.
But if I reverse engineered it, they lose all trade-secret rights (against people who base their code off of the reverse engineering) immediately. They could still continue prosecuting people who had violated the NDA, or did so in the future.
Not quite true. In the first example, 'resonable steps' aren't enough. If the secret gets 'widely disseminated' it's not a trade secret anymore, no mayyer how reasonable the steps to prevent it.
In the second example, if you reverse eigineered it, and the company bought your resultant information and/or product before it went widely public, and kept it internal, then it would still be a trade secret, even though it was reverse engineered on the outside.
However, in trade secrecy law, if a secret is revealed, it can still be a secret as long as it is stopped before being 'widely disseminated.' Thus, if people violating TS law aren't stopped, TS law protections disappear for future violations.
-- there's no such thing as "Defend it or lose it" under IP law. If 200 people rip off MS Windows and MS prosecutes 2 of them, there's no such defense as "Well, your honor, MS didn't prosecute the other 198 people..." This is a MASSIVE LIE made up by companies who want to shift responsibility. ANYTIME you see a company say "We had to... or lose it" they're lying.
Completely untrue. Are you a lawyer? This is a major tenant of trade secrecy law.
Reading through the letter, it becomes obvious that these folks don't know what Intellectual Property is. Intellectual Property law takes on three main forms: Trade Secrecy Law, Patent Law, and Copyright Law.
Anyone taking apart their barcode reader and creating software from what they see isn't violating Trade Secrecy law, because reverse-engineering is permitted under Trade Secrecy law. It doesn't fall under Patent law unless they have a patent that hasn't yet been mentioned (this would have to be a patent on the software, because that's what's being recreated), and it doesn't fall under Copyright law unless folks are actually using code from the barcode reader's software or ROM, or producing a work heavily derived from them.
It is a company's sad obligation to go after everyone who is violating one of these IP laws, lest they lose protection under the law, but it's a sadder 'obligation' for a company to use FUD (even when they're apologizing at the same time), under the guise of protecting legal rights, to try to dissuade people who have every right to do what they're doing.
The question here is whether D:C knows it has no legal footing, but is ding everything it can to get people to stop anyhow, or if they read too much slashdot and think 'that's our intellectual property! We must defend it!' without knowing the ramifications of IP law.
I threw up a 50 cent donation link on the AOLiza site a few days ago and I've already gotten a good response. A few people decided to 'buy' multiple donations, upping the donation.
It makes me feel a lot better than throwing up a stupid banner on every page just to get some money. Apparently it makes my visitors feel better too.
Paypal rocks, though I'm really disappointed that they dropped support for the Palm...
Slashdot Mirror
All it needs is either a DVD player or an ethernet NIC (or maybe both, in an ideal world) and it should be able to handle this stuff.
Owning a TiVo, I wouldn't want to buy this too... I'd just wait until you can get both togehter. X-box anyone?
Kevin Fox
Why should he have learned any lessons? Because you, personally, didn't like it? Episode 1 was the second highest grossing movie of all time. What lessons are there to learned from that, from a capitalistic point of view, other than to give people more of the same?
You'd judge the quality of a film by the box office receipts? Austin Powers got 53 mil in US Box Office returns, and AP II got over 203 mil. Was AP II four times as good?
Episode I could have been shite and still made the huge money (it did, and many say it was). This doesn't mean the movie couldn't have been better, and it doesn't mean that if it was better, it wouldn't have grossed more.
Titanic (One rung up on the gross ladder from Episode I) took in double what Episode I did. You don't think that if Ep I was better, it wouldn't have made even more?
To say no lesson is to be learned from Episode I is to say that George Lucas not only doesn't care about his work anymore, but doesn't care about money either. I'd have to say that whatever your attitude about Lucas is, you can't say both of those are true...
Kevin Fox
I don't think companies or schools block napster by blocking ports. They can just choose to exclude specific IP numbers (IE the napster server IPs) from getting through the firewall in either direction.
Port hopping would be irrelevant.
Kevin Fox
Breaking news today: Regents of the University of California refuse to block Napster at any of the nine UC campuses.
Kevin Fox
Wow, looking at Win2K and Whistler side by side it's like night and.. later that night!
C'mon, hiring icon artists does not a new system make. Oh, right. These are the folks who brought us Win2K, 98, and WinME! (Shouldn't that be called BuyME?)
Kevin Fox
Mac OS '01 == Redhat '98
Don't forget to escape the apostrophies...
Kevin Fox
Mac OS '01 = Redhat '98
Kevin Fox
The last two visa'ed tech workers I've worked with (one from Enzed, one from Australia (not at the same time)), both told me the same thing: They want to work here (SF Bay area) for a few years, because after that, they can go wherever they want in the world as a hot commodity.
Everyone here things we're deporting people to abject poverty and war zones, but these people have huge stars on their resumes that will let them get top jobs wherever they go. That's exactly the reason most people I know on visas came in the first place.
Kevin Fox
Cool. Obviously one of the 'superior' camp didn't like it so much, as I've been 'overrated' back down to 3...
Somebody obviously needs a jar of jelly beans...
Kevin Fox
Similar to MindPixels, but far more entertaining, is BizarroKiehl, hooked in to AOL Instant Messenger. It learns from responses and replies based on what it learns, and is extremely amusing to boot.
From the old school, there's always AOLiza. She's not smart, she's not even that pretty, but she's the one all the guys want to talk to...
Kevin Fox
This is the most entertaining Slashdot discussion I've ever read.
On one hand, you have Unix weenies who will swear forever that MacOS is as stupid and lame as a jar of rocks painted like jellybeans, even when they themselves have to resort to FUD.
On the other you have people who have actually taken a look at OS X and can see that Apple's done a remarkable job at modernizing their OS to a Unix kernel.
Apple's finally succeded at breaking the Unix ranks into those who like Unix because it's better and those who like Unix because it makes them feel superior.
Kevin Fox
To address your points one by one:
.app extensions, yes? Is n.3 really better than type/creator attributes?
- If there's a consistent interface, then where did my window managers and widget sets go?
Consistant doesn't mean identical. Almost no two mac desktops look the same today. What would make you think people won't customize them on OS X as well?
- If it's "easy to use", then where did my shell prompt go?
Nice use of sarcastic quotes, but easy to use means using the best tool for a particular job. With that in mind, go ahead and use a shell prompt when you want to. It's there and full-featured. What's the complaint?
- How do I turn these (*@#% tooltips off?
Ahh, that's not an OS X complaint, as MacOS doesn't have tooltips. That's more a Microsoft/Adobe/Macromedia complaint, yes? In point of fact, Mac OS X also does away with balloon help, so this is a good thing.
- How do I get a real, 8-bit-clean text editor?
Use TextEdit, the 8-bit-clean text editor that replaces SimpleText in OS X.
- Why does the shell bug me about 'filetypes' all the time? Why do I care?
It doesn't because you don't. You must have noticed all these
Linux does look pretty slick, but personally I've found that when I have work that requires my own skill (coding, composing text, etc) I use my Linux box, but when I have work that requires the computer's skill (page layout, gif animations, etc.) I use my Mac or Win laptop. The Linux OS is slick, the Linux tools are powerful, but the MacOS is friendly, and if it can give me power and slickness(?) too, I'll take it over the alternatives.
Kevin Fox
The last thing I need to read about is geeks hacking their palms...
Kevin Fox
For an A+ the computer must be hurled into a black hole (some information might be gathered from the trajectories of the particles thrown off by the nuclear blast).
Heck no. Then it could pop out anywhere! Then there's time machines...
No, I'm sorry. The only way to get an A+ is to do everything without records in a haphazard fashion, without even knowing why you're doing it yourself.
Oh, wait a minute...
Kevin Fox
Is this just a publicity grab to take attention away from the One Hectare Array (now known as the Allen Telescope Array, after a large contribution by Paul Allen)?
More SETI telescopes are great and all, but wouldn't it be nice of the SETI project had more cohesion than the Reform Party?
Kevin Fox
When I see Schiffer it changes my train of thought completely.
Buyt seriously, yes, of course models do vastly affect thinking. Is this even a question? As more and more of our daily interactions are with information-driven systems, the metaphor used to convey that information is the determiner of how we interpret it.
The desktop metaphor and the command line metaphor (and it is a metaphor) define how we think of, and consequently, utilize computers. Even something seemly obvious and basic as the telephone, the pager, or the palmpilot are all used defined by their metaphors.
Kevin Fox
(you know, the one where the governemnt has monitoring tools like Echelon and Carnivore)
Anyhow, in hypothetical bigbrotherland, when you get cash from an ATM, it's trivial to include a reader into the ATM that will grab the unique, prominent serial numbers on the bills it gives you (in nice, clear, easy-to-OCR type donchaknow), and correltaes that money to you, a specific individual.
Now you spend this twenty (yuppiebuck) at the market/gun club/peepmall and, being a twenty, it will most likely not be given as change to another customer, but will go straight into the deposit pouch that the store gives to their bank at the end of the day/week.
The bank scans the money, correlates the serial numbers again, sees the path of the bill, and generates reasonable probabilities of the path it took through the system.
Do this for a while and you get statistical certainties on cashflows, who spends what where, telling more about a person's cash habits than an FBI interview would.
I've no idea if the system exists currently, but it's preposterous to think that cash is really anonymous, because cash literally isn't anonymous as long as it has a serial number. It may be anonymous enough for a given purchase, but in the aggregate it tells a great deal about you.
Kevin Fox
This applies if, for instance, I, under NDA with the MPAA posted the CSS code and the player keys. As long as they took reasonable steps to stop disemination of this information, they could still claim it was a trade secret.
But if I reverse engineered it, they lose all trade-secret rights (against people who base their code off of the reverse engineering) immediately. They could still continue prosecuting people who had violated the NDA, or did so in the future.
Not quite true. In the first example, 'resonable steps' aren't enough. If the secret gets 'widely disseminated' it's not a trade secret anymore, no mayyer how reasonable the steps to prevent it.
In the second example, if you reverse eigineered it, and the company bought your resultant information and/or product before it went widely public, and kept it internal, then it would still be a trade secret, even though it was reverse engineered on the outside.
Kevin Fox
Okay, okay, I misspelled 'tenet', so thanks.
However, in trade secrecy law, if a secret is revealed, it can still be a secret as long as it is stopped before being 'widely disseminated.' Thus, if people violating TS law aren't stopped, TS law protections disappear for future violations.
Kevin Fox
-- there's no such thing as "Defend it or lose it" under IP law. If 200 people rip off MS Windows and MS prosecutes 2 of them, there's no such defense as "Well, your honor, MS didn't prosecute the other 198 people..." This is a MASSIVE LIE made up by companies who want to shift responsibility. ANYTIME you see a company say "We had to ... or lose it" they're lying.
Completely untrue. Are you a lawyer? This is a major tenant of trade secrecy law.
Kevin Fox
Reading through the letter, it becomes obvious that these folks don't know what Intellectual Property is. Intellectual Property law takes on three main forms: Trade Secrecy Law, Patent Law, and Copyright Law.
Anyone taking apart their barcode reader and creating software from what they see isn't violating Trade Secrecy law, because reverse-engineering is permitted under Trade Secrecy law. It doesn't fall under Patent law unless they have a patent that hasn't yet been mentioned (this would have to be a patent on the software, because that's what's being recreated), and it doesn't fall under Copyright law unless folks are actually using code from the barcode reader's software or ROM, or producing a work heavily derived from them.
It is a company's sad obligation to go after everyone who is violating one of these IP laws, lest they lose protection under the law, but it's a sadder 'obligation' for a company to use FUD (even when they're apologizing at the same time), under the guise of protecting legal rights, to try to dissuade people who have every right to do what they're doing.
The question here is whether D:C knows it has no legal footing, but is ding everything it can to get people to stop anyhow, or if they read too much slashdot and think 'that's our intellectual property! We must defend it!' without knowing the ramifications of IP law.
Kevin Fox
Looks like someone at NASA discovered what happens when you fill a balloon with baking soda and vinegar...
Kevin Fox
where's thanks.php?
:-) but I'll send you a thank-you email!!
In my head right now.
Kevin Fox
What would this lead to? Soylent Green in regular and decaf?
Kevin Fox
I threw up a 50 cent donation link on the AOLiza site a few days ago and I've already gotten a good response. A few people decided to 'buy' multiple donations, upping the donation.
It makes me feel a lot better than throwing up a stupid banner on every page just to get some money. Apparently it makes my visitors feel better too.
Paypal rocks, though I'm really disappointed that they dropped support for the Palm...
Kevin Fox