Every single X program uses xlib directly or indirectly. So GTK always uses it, and QT uses it except when using a framebuffer directly or using some other underlying mechanism (like non-X11 Mac, IIRC).
Chances are that X isn't what's crashing for you, but rather some program running under X (unless you have hardware problems, a bad driver, a corrupted X server, or something like that). X is also generally quite fast, but most programs (such as any that use GTK or QT, except for really recent ones) use it extremely badly.
Actually, what is generally slow about X is that is doesn't have the drawing primitives that modern interfaces want to use, so they have to implement them inefficiently with the available primitives. Present development is helping to rectify this situation, however.
The thing I think is missing from the whole power-to-the-artists movement is an open source project for a good site. There are now a number of sites offering music online which have a more direct connection between the artist and the fans, but they all work differently, and most of them are terribly unusable. It would be really neat to have a bunch of sites with a solid back-end, matching interfaces, and site-specific skins. From there, you could have cross-site searches and accounts.
The ideal for a music label should be that someone with well-defined taste in music finds artists they like and tells consumers with similar tastes about them. Being a good person to run a label doesn't have anything to do with being good at programming or interface design.
I am not certain my concious mind is actively involved when writing code. I often refer to it as "flowing from my fingertips." I can carry conversations while my fingers are typing.
Well, your conscious mind is probably involved with getting you to the computer, getting the right editor window open, and so forth. I tend to make a lot of mistakes that the compiler will catch and some that quick tests will catch, so it's beneficial for me if I try the thing before I forget it all.
On the other hand, there was one night when I did a set of substantial modifications to a piece of code, basically switching it to use a bunch of other code I'd written since writing the first version, got it all debugged, and then accidentally deleted it all while tidying up the directory to commit it to CVS. Then I got a fresh copy of the old version and made all of the modifications I'd made all evening, line by line, through the whole directory, without a single conscious thought. As far as I can tell, I perfectly replicated a state with a bug I'd later fixed, and then fixed it again in the same way. Then I allowed myself to start thinking again. Then I checked in the modified version, and went to bed.
I have some experience with meditation, and I think that it's actually helpful for the sorts of situations where my subconscious is going to do a better job.
There's another good reason: insensitivity to case is not well defined. There are character sets where a single capital character corresponds to a sequence of lowercase characters (e.g, some german encodings have a single character for the double S, but use two 's' characters for the lowercase). There are others where two different lowercase letters have the same uppercase (due to dropping accent marks or such). So the "is the same ignoring case" relation is not actually transitive, so you can't use equivalence classes for identifiers. Case is not nearly as simple in general as it is in ASCII.
I don't think our positions are all that different. I think that most of what's going on when you feel like you use your conscious mind is actually unconscious, with the main distinction that you are pestering it constantly rather than checking on it rarely. That's great for things like writing code, where you need your conscious mind to do things like notice that your cursor is in the wrong place and that it's time to run the compiler, but it doesn't help any for doing design, unless it's something like needing to make a diagram, which requires you to consciously go to the whiteboard, or a case where you have to do a naive implementation to find out where problems arise.
So my position is really that the unconscious mind does all the work, and the conscious mind is a manager. But when people introspect about their minds, the conscious mind generally takes all the credit, so, in fact, the stuff that people think is the work of the conscious mind is mostly the same stuff that they think is the work of the unconscious mind.
So when I was talking about the conscious mind, I meant those aspects of the mind that appear to be conscious, whereas when you were talking about it, you were talking only about those aspects that actually are. The difference is a matter of labelling, not really of theory.
SCO has specifically acted to prevent remediation, and publically stated that the reason for them to act the way they have is to prevent remediation. In this situation, SCO has basically stated that it's in their financial interests for people to not stop violating their IP, and so they've claimed their IP is worse than worthless. SCO is therefore unlikely to get any damages from anyone who fails to pay, even if they win a lawsuit against them.
In addition, SCO has yet to file any official legal claim to anything in the Linux kernel; that's all PR. At most, they've stated that IBM has violated their contract by contributing things, but nobody else is a party to that contract and therefore nobody else is liable for IBM's actions.
The only reason, at this point, to pay $700 to SCO would be to become the victim of extortion and mail fraud, so that you could press criminal charges against SCO. (Civil charges are essentially worthless, because once you've proved that SCO doesn't own anything, there's nothing left for you to get from them)
Your conscious and subconscious minds aren't really different things. Rather, your brain processes things, and you are conscious of some of the results. There are only certain results you can be conscious of, because your consciousness mind doesn't have structures for all of the structures in your mind (e.g., you can't experience the segmentation of your visual field into objects). But even the things that you could become aware of can happen without you knowing.
There are two differences in performance: if you are consciously thinking about a problem, this can direct your behaviour to collect more information (for example, to look up the answer online, look for details you might have missed in the problem statement, read the source code, etc). If you are consciously thinking about a problem, you can also direct your attention to different aspects of it, to a certain extent. Of course, if you don't yet know the answer to the problem, you don't know the best route to the answer, and therefore your conscious direction is as likely to be bad as good (in fact, your mind's automatic direction is likely to be better, because that's what's been trained to solve that sort of problem; you can tie your shoes by a motor program, but you probably can't figure it out easily consciously without "doing it and watching what you're doing").
As for being awake versus being asleep, if you're awake, you probably have other tasks to do with the part of your mind that's working on the problem, which interferes. If you're asleep, that part of your mind has nothing better to do than work on whatever incomplete tasks it has from when you were awake.
I found it a bit ironic that neither the page nor the slashdot article mentions that they're at MIT (or, at least, the page is, and I'd guess the people are, too), which is where Doc Edgerton (whose first name was only discovered after his death) worked. Furthermore, Doc's photo isn't even hosted at MIT, but rather at Stanford.
Right, but the extra equipment is a larger cost for broadband over power lines, where you don't even have separate wires to put the equipment on. If you're putting in the equipment, you might as well put it on a separate conductor.
I've actually been to Sierra Leone (before the most recent trouble), and I've seen the conditions. There are three seasons: heat stroke, mudslides, and dust. We were actually just in the capital city, where there was a sufficient population density for wiring, and we were there at a politically stable time. Even so, the power went out regularly due to equipment failures.
Clean water is really the most important thing. After that, electricity. After that, communications. But there's no reason to install phone at all, since it's pretty much obsolete at this point, and it's easier to maintain things that the first world is excited about. And when you're running wires, you might as well include the conductors for broadband, even if you don't put in the rectifying equipment, since you'll want it eventually. For that matter, when you're putting in your water pipes, put in the power and data lines in the same ditch in another pipe; particularly if everything comes from a dam.
As to the cost, it may actually be cheaper overall to include broadband than to just run power, since it will give your customers access to jobs which pay more money, which they can then pay to you for the service. What's really important to a poor country is becoming less poor, which means exports. (Actually, what's really important is political stability and a government that cares about the country) If anything, health concerns (i.e., clean water) are less of a local concern, because it's in the interests of the first world for diseases not to spread and mutate in the third world, while making the third world rich isn't that important to anyone else. In fact, you have to fight off first-world companies looking to provide clean water and then bill you your GNP for it.
TNG was the only one that got me to watch it regularly. I didn't think Enterprise was too bad, but I primarily watched it because we had a ReplayTV set to record it, and sci-fi on TV was thrashing really badly (hey, new series, and it's great! Too bad they cancelled it. Hey, new series...).
The problem with Star Trek these day, in my opinion, is that it's driven by a need to make episodes, rather than a need to discuss social issues. At it's core, Star Trek really has to be a view of how we hope society will eventually be. The stuff about space is thrown in to justify society being different, and science is made up to serve the plot.
Enterprise suffered somewhat from when it started, but improved somewhat after 9/11, when there were social issues to be tackled (blaming an entire race for the acts of a small group), but it wasn't a constant undertone still. At least there were episodes about human nature, but they didn't come to any particularly good or novel conclusions. When it had a point at all, it only really got as far as bringing up questions, and didn't really have answers; the Star Trek legacy is really about demonstrating the obvious answers that society isn't yet accepting.
I was about to say that they didn't work for me. On the other hand, they don't seem to work for anyone else, either. Hmm, ads I can't see on sites I don't use. This is news for nerds?
Wires are really cheap, compared with the cost of putting them somewhere they'll survive. It costs a huge amount of money to run a bundle of wires somewhere. But that splits into the huge cost of running a bundle of cables (including protecting them from the elements and such), and the small cost of the bundle of cables you're running. Broadband over power lines makes some sense if you already have a power cable coming to your house but don't have broadband; you can avoid running another bundle. But if you have to run a bundle, making it a big bundle isn't much more expensive than running a small bundle.
Perhaps they ought to vote for a non-control-freak Democrat in the primary. If they did, they'd have a good candidate in the election, and this candidate would win by a landslide.
That's why you wait until unmanned missions are routine. If the crew doesn't contact Earth, one of the current rovers drives over to see what's up with them. In order to put people there, you're going to have to put a bunch of construction supplies and equipment in place first, and be able to send further supplies reliably. At that point, there's enough monitoring equipment in place to report on landings from the ground with existing and functional equipment.
Personally, I think visual design of web sites is quite important, but that it is entirely secondary to useability. More websites with a strong focus on design don't look like anything at all, because they don't render properly or at all. I'm sure someone put a whole lot of work into every totally blank page I see, but their design is totally lost due to having such bad useability that I can't actually see the design.
Within the limits of what is portable across browsers and window sizes, there's still room for a lot of variability and flashiness. If you have a techno track, you could stick an animated gif with colors throbbing based on the beat next to it. Playing the music in flash, however, just makes it less likely to work for people. And the thing about the hyper-techno market is that they're much more likely to have configured their computers is ways totally different from any other computers.
I'm personally in favor of any advertizing strategy in which step 2 doesn't involve paying anybody. It's the mark of something that's actually worthwhile if people will actually preemptively eulogize your product, instead of just shrugging.
I'm more inclined to think that most of that is actually the doing of the American right wing and those who fund it, rather than Al Queda. I'm sure that Al Queda would like little better than to damage the US economy, but what they really want is to get the US out of Middle Eastern affairs. The economic troubles aren't nearly deep enough to affect military spending, and people don't really connect the troubles to the Middle East in the right way to cause people to pressure the government to quit riling up terrorists.
The return that terrorists get is really very much tied to public perception. It doesn't help their cause much to actually cost the US hundreds of billions of dollars. What they want is for the public to believe that they could cost the US hundreds of billions of dollars at their whim. But the public generally believes that spending the money is a prudent choice (or is Bush's crazy idea), not that Al Queda is in control.
I actually know at least one song they're selling (since it's on the Pi soundtrack), and would actually be interested in buying the album it's from (to start with), and I've bought high quality mp3s without DRM online (from Magnatune.com) previously. However, the site immediately required resizing my browser and clicking randomly to do anything. And the thing to play a song is flash. I suspect the site is also somewhat slashdotted at this point.
I'm their target market, so far as I can tell, but their site design is too much of a pain to deal with.
The lesson to learn from this is that people can cause a whole lot of legal trouble even if they don't have any IP at all and you have clear records of every contribution and what else it might be related to. Trying to get even more information or to get more proof from coders of the legitimacy of their contributions is obviously useless in the face of something like SCO, since the defense will never get a chance or have a need to present any evidence of this sort.
If a case is successfully defended or especially if it gets thrown out, it would be stupid to do anything differently. If you win the case, that means that what you've been doing is fine. If anything, changing your behavior in response to winning a case means that the precedent will be less useful if you get dragged into court again.
I'm not sure that IBM wouldn't like to buy SCO. SCO has something that Sun and Microsoft are willing to pay a bunch of money to license, or at least Sun and Microsoft have pretended that SCO has something they're willing to pay for. I'd be surprised if IBM, who invented FUD in the first place, wouldn't recognize the FUD potential of being able to say that they might consider withdrawing Microsoft's license for... something... which you might care about. On the other hand, IBM will sell you a Linux solution that's been proven in court to be totally free of any hidden licensing or contract terms that might cause you liability down the road.
In other news, Al Queda agents and officials retired en masse today. Evidentally, the U.S. government is now doing a far better job of making Americans fearful and submissive than Al Queda could hope to do with the techniques they have. "We did a lot of damage and killed a lot of people," said one unnamed source. "But Americans responded only with defiance and belligerence. Within a couple of months, they'd gotten on with their lives. The DHS, on the other hand, can frighten the American people practically at will, just by announcing rumors or cancelling a plane flight. In this climate, we can't hope to compete."
Representatives of the Bush Administration called the mass retirement a possible ruse, and urged people to remember all the rumored attacks that might have been thwarted had Al Queda attempted any attack on U.S. soil since domestic security initiatives were put in place.
Having the second head be plastic means they don't use it much, and therefore the character doesn't work as well. I think they should have a second actor for the second head and edit them together. Zaphod needs to be able to argue with himself and finish his own sentences. I agree that it needs to be low-budget, but it should also be ambitious. The low budget shouldn't affect the script, like having a mostly-inanimate head would. Instead, it should be written as if they could achieve any desired special effect, and then produced with cheap effects. the BBC series was actually on a low budget, and therefore couldn't do some of the content. I want to also see effects that look cheap but are actually quite expensive.
Now I'm imagining people writing CG for B-movie camp. "For Zaphod, we rendered the whole thing, because it was easier that way, and then we came up with a technique for getting the second head to move like it was just overlaid on the rest of the model. We had to figure out how to produce the artifacts you get around the edges with blue-screen, too. Now this scene is completely CG, including the wires you can see blocking stars on occasion. The Heart of Gold is an actual running shoe model from a shoe company."
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, with Windows you expect to grope the girl, but, in fact, some script kiddie gropes her instead. But she thinks you groped her.
He's 1974 years idle in that shell, though. At least he has a user account, unlike the rest of wheel on that system.
Every single X program uses xlib directly or indirectly. So GTK always uses it, and QT uses it except when using a framebuffer directly or using some other underlying mechanism (like non-X11 Mac, IIRC).
Chances are that X isn't what's crashing for you, but rather some program running under X (unless you have hardware problems, a bad driver, a corrupted X server, or something like that). X is also generally quite fast, but most programs (such as any that use GTK or QT, except for really recent ones) use it extremely badly.
Actually, what is generally slow about X is that is doesn't have the drawing primitives that modern interfaces want to use, so they have to implement them inefficiently with the available primitives. Present development is helping to rectify this situation, however.
The thing I think is missing from the whole power-to-the-artists movement is an open source project for a good site. There are now a number of sites offering music online which have a more direct connection between the artist and the fans, but they all work differently, and most of them are terribly unusable. It would be really neat to have a bunch of sites with a solid back-end, matching interfaces, and site-specific skins. From there, you could have cross-site searches and accounts.
The ideal for a music label should be that someone with well-defined taste in music finds artists they like and tells consumers with similar tastes about them. Being a good person to run a label doesn't have anything to do with being good at programming or interface design.
I am not certain my concious mind is actively involved when writing code. I often refer to it as "flowing from my fingertips." I can carry conversations while my fingers are typing.
Well, your conscious mind is probably involved with getting you to the computer, getting the right editor window open, and so forth. I tend to make a lot of mistakes that the compiler will catch and some that quick tests will catch, so it's beneficial for me if I try the thing before I forget it all.
On the other hand, there was one night when I did a set of substantial modifications to a piece of code, basically switching it to use a bunch of other code I'd written since writing the first version, got it all debugged, and then accidentally deleted it all while tidying up the directory to commit it to CVS. Then I got a fresh copy of the old version and made all of the modifications I'd made all evening, line by line, through the whole directory, without a single conscious thought. As far as I can tell, I perfectly replicated a state with a bug I'd later fixed, and then fixed it again in the same way. Then I allowed myself to start thinking again. Then I checked in the modified version, and went to bed.
I have some experience with meditation, and I think that it's actually helpful for the sorts of situations where my subconscious is going to do a better job.
There's another good reason: insensitivity to case is not well defined. There are character sets where a single capital character corresponds to a sequence of lowercase characters (e.g, some german encodings have a single character for the double S, but use two 's' characters for the lowercase). There are others where two different lowercase letters have the same uppercase (due to dropping accent marks or such). So the "is the same ignoring case" relation is not actually transitive, so you can't use equivalence classes for identifiers. Case is not nearly as simple in general as it is in ASCII.
I don't think our positions are all that different. I think that most of what's going on when you feel like you use your conscious mind is actually unconscious, with the main distinction that you are pestering it constantly rather than checking on it rarely. That's great for things like writing code, where you need your conscious mind to do things like notice that your cursor is in the wrong place and that it's time to run the compiler, but it doesn't help any for doing design, unless it's something like needing to make a diagram, which requires you to consciously go to the whiteboard, or a case where you have to do a naive implementation to find out where problems arise.
So my position is really that the unconscious mind does all the work, and the conscious mind is a manager. But when people introspect about their minds, the conscious mind generally takes all the credit, so, in fact, the stuff that people think is the work of the conscious mind is mostly the same stuff that they think is the work of the unconscious mind.
So when I was talking about the conscious mind, I meant those aspects of the mind that appear to be conscious, whereas when you were talking about it, you were talking only about those aspects that actually are. The difference is a matter of labelling, not really of theory.
SCO has specifically acted to prevent remediation, and publically stated that the reason for them to act the way they have is to prevent remediation. In this situation, SCO has basically stated that it's in their financial interests for people to not stop violating their IP, and so they've claimed their IP is worse than worthless. SCO is therefore unlikely to get any damages from anyone who fails to pay, even if they win a lawsuit against them.
In addition, SCO has yet to file any official legal claim to anything in the Linux kernel; that's all PR. At most, they've stated that IBM has violated their contract by contributing things, but nobody else is a party to that contract and therefore nobody else is liable for IBM's actions.
The only reason, at this point, to pay $700 to SCO would be to become the victim of extortion and mail fraud, so that you could press criminal charges against SCO. (Civil charges are essentially worthless, because once you've proved that SCO doesn't own anything, there's nothing left for you to get from them)
Your conscious and subconscious minds aren't really different things. Rather, your brain processes things, and you are conscious of some of the results. There are only certain results you can be conscious of, because your consciousness mind doesn't have structures for all of the structures in your mind (e.g., you can't experience the segmentation of your visual field into objects). But even the things that you could become aware of can happen without you knowing.
There are two differences in performance: if you are consciously thinking about a problem, this can direct your behaviour to collect more information (for example, to look up the answer online, look for details you might have missed in the problem statement, read the source code, etc). If you are consciously thinking about a problem, you can also direct your attention to different aspects of it, to a certain extent. Of course, if you don't yet know the answer to the problem, you don't know the best route to the answer, and therefore your conscious direction is as likely to be bad as good (in fact, your mind's automatic direction is likely to be better, because that's what's been trained to solve that sort of problem; you can tie your shoes by a motor program, but you probably can't figure it out easily consciously without "doing it and watching what you're doing").
As for being awake versus being asleep, if you're awake, you probably have other tasks to do with the part of your mind that's working on the problem, which interferes. If you're asleep, that part of your mind has nothing better to do than work on whatever incomplete tasks it has from when you were awake.
I found it a bit ironic that neither the page nor the slashdot article mentions that they're at MIT (or, at least, the page is, and I'd guess the people are, too), which is where Doc Edgerton (whose first name was only discovered after his death) worked. Furthermore, Doc's photo isn't even hosted at MIT, but rather at Stanford.
Right, but the extra equipment is a larger cost for broadband over power lines, where you don't even have separate wires to put the equipment on. If you're putting in the equipment, you might as well put it on a separate conductor.
I've actually been to Sierra Leone (before the most recent trouble), and I've seen the conditions. There are three seasons: heat stroke, mudslides, and dust. We were actually just in the capital city, where there was a sufficient population density for wiring, and we were there at a politically stable time. Even so, the power went out regularly due to equipment failures.
Clean water is really the most important thing. After that, electricity. After that, communications. But there's no reason to install phone at all, since it's pretty much obsolete at this point, and it's easier to maintain things that the first world is excited about. And when you're running wires, you might as well include the conductors for broadband, even if you don't put in the rectifying equipment, since you'll want it eventually. For that matter, when you're putting in your water pipes, put in the power and data lines in the same ditch in another pipe; particularly if everything comes from a dam.
As to the cost, it may actually be cheaper overall to include broadband than to just run power, since it will give your customers access to jobs which pay more money, which they can then pay to you for the service. What's really important to a poor country is becoming less poor, which means exports. (Actually, what's really important is political stability and a government that cares about the country) If anything, health concerns (i.e., clean water) are less of a local concern, because it's in the interests of the first world for diseases not to spread and mutate in the third world, while making the third world rich isn't that important to anyone else. In fact, you have to fight off first-world companies looking to provide clean water and then bill you your GNP for it.
TNG was the only one that got me to watch it regularly. I didn't think Enterprise was too bad, but I primarily watched it because we had a ReplayTV set to record it, and sci-fi on TV was thrashing really badly (hey, new series, and it's great! Too bad they cancelled it. Hey, new series...).
The problem with Star Trek these day, in my opinion, is that it's driven by a need to make episodes, rather than a need to discuss social issues. At it's core, Star Trek really has to be a view of how we hope society will eventually be. The stuff about space is thrown in to justify society being different, and science is made up to serve the plot.
Enterprise suffered somewhat from when it started, but improved somewhat after 9/11, when there were social issues to be tackled (blaming an entire race for the acts of a small group), but it wasn't a constant undertone still. At least there were episodes about human nature, but they didn't come to any particularly good or novel conclusions. When it had a point at all, it only really got as far as bringing up questions, and didn't really have answers; the Star Trek legacy is really about demonstrating the obvious answers that society isn't yet accepting.
I was about to say that they didn't work for me. On the other hand, they don't seem to work for anyone else, either. Hmm, ads I can't see on sites I don't use. This is news for nerds?
Wires are really cheap, compared with the cost of putting them somewhere they'll survive. It costs a huge amount of money to run a bundle of wires somewhere. But that splits into the huge cost of running a bundle of cables (including protecting them from the elements and such), and the small cost of the bundle of cables you're running. Broadband over power lines makes some sense if you already have a power cable coming to your house but don't have broadband; you can avoid running another bundle. But if you have to run a bundle, making it a big bundle isn't much more expensive than running a small bundle.
Perhaps they ought to vote for a non-control-freak Democrat in the primary. If they did, they'd have a good candidate in the election, and this candidate would win by a landslide.
I'm expect it to end by saying, "On the plus side, they're never going to release any more games worth playing anyway, so it doesn't really matter."
That's why you wait until unmanned missions are routine. If the crew doesn't contact Earth, one of the current rovers drives over to see what's up with them. In order to put people there, you're going to have to put a bunch of construction supplies and equipment in place first, and be able to send further supplies reliably. At that point, there's enough monitoring equipment in place to report on landings from the ground with existing and functional equipment.
Personally, I think visual design of web sites is quite important, but that it is entirely secondary to useability. More websites with a strong focus on design don't look like anything at all, because they don't render properly or at all. I'm sure someone put a whole lot of work into every totally blank page I see, but their design is totally lost due to having such bad useability that I can't actually see the design.
Within the limits of what is portable across browsers and window sizes, there's still room for a lot of variability and flashiness. If you have a techno track, you could stick an animated gif with colors throbbing based on the beat next to it. Playing the music in flash, however, just makes it less likely to work for people. And the thing about the hyper-techno market is that they're much more likely to have configured their computers is ways totally different from any other computers.
I'm personally in favor of any advertizing strategy in which step 2 doesn't involve paying anybody. It's the mark of something that's actually worthwhile if people will actually preemptively eulogize your product, instead of just shrugging.
I'm more inclined to think that most of that is actually the doing of the American right wing and those who fund it, rather than Al Queda. I'm sure that Al Queda would like little better than to damage the US economy, but what they really want is to get the US out of Middle Eastern affairs. The economic troubles aren't nearly deep enough to affect military spending, and people don't really connect the troubles to the Middle East in the right way to cause people to pressure the government to quit riling up terrorists.
The return that terrorists get is really very much tied to public perception. It doesn't help their cause much to actually cost the US hundreds of billions of dollars. What they want is for the public to believe that they could cost the US hundreds of billions of dollars at their whim. But the public generally believes that spending the money is a prudent choice (or is Bush's crazy idea), not that Al Queda is in control.
I actually know at least one song they're selling (since it's on the Pi soundtrack), and would actually be interested in buying the album it's from (to start with), and I've bought high quality mp3s without DRM online (from Magnatune.com) previously. However, the site immediately required resizing my browser and clicking randomly to do anything. And the thing to play a song is flash. I suspect the site is also somewhat slashdotted at this point.
I'm their target market, so far as I can tell, but their site design is too much of a pain to deal with.
The lesson to learn from this is that people can cause a whole lot of legal trouble even if they don't have any IP at all and you have clear records of every contribution and what else it might be related to. Trying to get even more information or to get more proof from coders of the legitimacy of their contributions is obviously useless in the face of something like SCO, since the defense will never get a chance or have a need to present any evidence of this sort.
If a case is successfully defended or especially if it gets thrown out, it would be stupid to do anything differently. If you win the case, that means that what you've been doing is fine. If anything, changing your behavior in response to winning a case means that the precedent will be less useful if you get dragged into court again.
I'm not sure that IBM wouldn't like to buy SCO. SCO has something that Sun and Microsoft are willing to pay a bunch of money to license, or at least Sun and Microsoft have pretended that SCO has something they're willing to pay for. I'd be surprised if IBM, who invented FUD in the first place, wouldn't recognize the FUD potential of being able to say that they might consider withdrawing Microsoft's license for... something... which you might care about. On the other hand, IBM will sell you a Linux solution that's been proven in court to be totally free of any hidden licensing or contract terms that might cause you liability down the road.
In other news, Al Queda agents and officials retired en masse today. Evidentally, the U.S. government is now doing a far better job of making Americans fearful and submissive than Al Queda could hope to do with the techniques they have. "We did a lot of damage and killed a lot of people," said one unnamed source. "But Americans responded only with defiance and belligerence. Within a couple of months, they'd gotten on with their lives. The DHS, on the other hand, can frighten the American people practically at will, just by announcing rumors or cancelling a plane flight. In this climate, we can't hope to compete."
Representatives of the Bush Administration called the mass retirement a possible ruse, and urged people to remember all the rumored attacks that might have been thwarted had Al Queda attempted any attack on U.S. soil since domestic security initiatives were put in place.
Having the second head be plastic means they don't use it much, and therefore the character doesn't work as well. I think they should have a second actor for the second head and edit them together. Zaphod needs to be able to argue with himself and finish his own sentences. I agree that it needs to be low-budget, but it should also be ambitious. The low budget shouldn't affect the script, like having a mostly-inanimate head would. Instead, it should be written as if they could achieve any desired special effect, and then produced with cheap effects. the BBC series was actually on a low budget, and therefore couldn't do some of the content. I want to also see effects that look cheap but are actually quite expensive.
Now I'm imagining people writing CG for B-movie camp. "For Zaphod, we rendered the whole thing, because it was easier that way, and then we came up with a technique for getting the second head to move like it was just overlaid on the rest of the model. We had to figure out how to produce the artifacts you get around the edges with blue-screen, too. Now this scene is completely CG, including the wires you can see blocking stars on occasion. The Heart of Gold is an actual running shoe model from a shoe company."