It seems you belong to this current trend thinking users will never be anything more than "learning monkey", and who slaughtered the once brillant Gnome 1 into this tetraplegic Gnome 2.
I guess you didn't see my reply to my own post. We aren't even talking about Joe Dipstick User here. We're talking about the smart non-technical users, who repeatedly hesitate to try many Open Source products because of the weird-ass names that make them think those products are solely designed for the geeks who already know what the names mean. See here.
BTW, this is completely OT but I never have understood what was so "brilliant" about GNOME. I've used many different types of desktops over the last decade: several Macs, every version of Windows since 3.0, BeOS, KDE1/2/3, IceWM and several other things, and never had problems understanding how to use them within a few minutes. Yet every time I stepped into GNOME over the years I was lost. Since I never had a problem with those other desktop systems, that makes me think there wasn't anything brilliant about it. I've never understood what the appeal of GNOME was, besides politics. So I always left after 30 minutes or so of struggling to configure things, and started up KDE again, where I was happily changing this-that-and-the-other-thing within minutes of first starting up KDE1/2/3. And no, my KDE desktop looks and behaves almost nothing like a Windows desktop.
GNOME2 doesn't seem to be much of an improvement. It's simply designed by people that think differently from any other desktop system I've encountered. Very strange.
Seems pretty clear to me. The words are mostly plain English. But you're comparing apples to coconuts. How many users do you know that have a need for installing or even knowing what "Microsoft BizTalk Server System.NET 2004 Limited Enterprise Edition for Itanium Workstations" is? The word "enterprise" should be a tip-off there. The few technical people that require such a thing will be able to immediately identify what it is, whereas if it was named "Microsoft Rowrbazzle" even the techies wouldn't know what it is or why they should want it.
On the other hand, almost everyone who uses a computer uses a web browser and an e-mail client, and we would like as many of those people as possible to have access to these Open Source browsers and e-mail clients. Giving them cool names that tell them nothing and are too similar to keep apart does not help in any way.
Wouldn't most people think that an "Internet Explorer" would be something with which to explore the Internet? Seems pretty clear to me.
Sure, names like "Outlook Express" and "Entourage" (the Mac equivalent) are kind of meaningless, but they both have a sort of suggestion about them that lines up with the actual use of the product. But you see Microsoft doesn't even have to worry about having meaningless names. They have the monopolistic and marketing muscle to make "Outlook" a household name in a matter of weeks.
That's ignoring all the other examples of Microsoft programs that have clear names, like "Paint", "SQL Server", "Internet Information Server", "WordPad", "Notepad", "Publisher", "Word", "Photo Editor", "Calculator", etc. Pretty damn hard to figure those out. Even names like "BackOffice" which is pretty obscure still tells you it has something to do with whatever goes on in the back office, right. If they had named it "Mugwump" no one would have had a flippin' clue what it was for, so they didn't. But they could still do something like that, because of the power of their immense publicity and marketing departments.
The Open Source world not only doesn't have that, it also doesn't have a lot of visibility in the common mind, so choosing meaningless names is like putting up a force-field that helps fend off all the non-geeky people in the world who otherwise might find it a great product, if it appeared under a different name. It's just another hurdle for the common mind to get past. It's called marketing, and a carefully chosen name can sometimes make or break a product. At this point "Firebird" and "Thunderbird" don't even stand out in my mind, and I'm a geek! I'm getting confused about what does what in the Mozilla family, even though I read Slashdot every day! That raises alarm bells in my mind when it comes to how the non-geek world is going to look at that set of software.
Replying to my own post, here's some feedback I received from a non-geek friend who just read the parent post. This person is very intelligent but isn't "in the know" when it comes to geek terms and names that most of us who frequent Slashdot would identify immediately. Here's what she has to say:
"You sure hit the bullseye in your treatise about naming software. What you said is true. The first time you mentioned Mozilla to me, I thought of Godzilla. And now that you mentioned Firebird, I confused it with Firewire for awhile there. For those of us not 'in the know', we don't really want to try those strange-sounding softwares lest it be too technical or too strange to understand. A lot of people I know would raise their eyebrows when I suggest that they try Opera as a web browser."
Yet another fine example of my point right there. "Opera? What the hell is that? Why would I want to browse the web with an Opera?"
Welcome to the real world, folks. And this isn't even Joe User. This is a smart user. Joe User is the one who does confuse bananas and bread. Two words: "banana bread". (Another little in-joke there for those who RTFA.)
How exactly are we all expected to remember that Thunderbird is the browser component and Firebird is the e-mail client?
There's a little joke there for those "in the know", but it's really not a joke. The problem is that you *do* have to be "in the know". About a third of the people reading this post probably didn't realize there was supposed to *be* a joke there. I'll bet even a bunch of the "in the know" folks missed it. Didn't you?
That's because the names Firebird and Thunderbird are absolutely meaningless to most of us. There's no context. There's a reason the Firebird relational database is called FirebirdSQL most of the time, to help give it some context. Somebody on that team realized that Firebird all by itself wouldn't necessarily mean anything to anyone, until or unless it was built into a big name with tons of publicity.
If the Firebird/Thunderbird/Mozilla/Phoenix people actually want real humans to learn about and use their software, they really need to come up with some better, more relevant, more original names. Otherwise only the geek community is going to know what the hell we're talking about whenever we mention those products. There are still very few people who have even heard of Mozilla outside the geek realm. It shouldn't take a government study to realize that part of the problem is the cute, meaningless name. Every time I mention Mozilla I have to explain that it's a web browser. I shouldn't have to explain that it's a web browser, but only that it's a *good* web browser. Something about the name should already have told them, at least partially, that it was a web browser.
"Internet Explorer" may not be cute, but by gosh nobody is going to be confused about what a product with that name is supposed to do. I'm really kind of flabbergasted that the Mozilla community can't come up with something, after months of discussion, that's better than Firebird/Thunderbird. Two mythological names that tell me absolutely nothing about the software they refer to, and furthermore are so similar that it will be difficult even for us geeks to remember which part they refer to. "Now, does fire remind me more of the Internet, or of e-mail? Hmm..."
C'mon people. Surely the whole community can come up with something inbetween these useless "cute" names and the mundane dry clearness of the "explorer" and "navigator" names, and have something that's original, informative and catchy enough for non-geeks to use without feeling ridiculous. I mean, good God, OpenEmail and OpenBrowser would be better than what they've come up with.
Here's hoping the right people will read this, have the same thoughts and run with it...
This is very cool. Here I am reading along, being quite amused by all these worldly and magnificent hoaxes, and lo and behold what do I see but my own wee little home town, SITKA, ALASKA at #11. Yessir, that little stunt by Porky Bickar is quite a legend around here. I imagine it went a little something like this:
"Hey, isn't Mt. Edgecumbe an *extinct* volcano?" "What the Hell?! Run for the hills, we're all gonna die!"
What I wouldn't give to be around in 1974 when Porky lit up those tires...
There are those of us who like to mess with our Linux systems but aren't exactly experts and probably never will be. Some of us would really like to dabble a bit with the new 2.5 kernel on our personal systems, but we'd rather not hose our system in the process. Is there anyplace out there where someone periodically puts together a "semi-stable" version of the development kernel, that us dabblers can download and be reasonably sure that it will be free of such things as major filesystem bugs?
Everyone says, don't run the development kernel if you don't know what you're doing, and of course any particular 2.5 kernel grabbed off of kernel.org can be majorly broken, right? So it would be really cool if one of the real kernel developers could put together something inbetween the 2.4 "stable" kernel and the 2.5 "careful!" kernel. There are just so many cool new features in 2.5, like that huge improvement in interactivity that could really make the desktop more usable, but those of us who aren't experts are really leery to just grab the source and start compiling, because who knows what might be broken in any particular development sub-version.
Does anyone make a habit of doing this "semi-stable" thing with the development kernels? Failing that, are cool things like that interactivity improvement being backported to the 2.4 kernel already?
Check out IBM's new L200p 21" LCD. 1600x1200 native
I DO NOT understand this at all, and so far I've not seen a satisfactory explanation, even though others have asked this same question: Why in the hell do I have to get a 21" desktop LCD in order to get a decent (1600x1200) resolution, when we've had laptop screens with 1600x1200 or better in much smaller sizes for at least a couple of years now?
With the kind of prices they charge for those big desktop monsters they could just as easily be pulling the smaller laptop screens right off the assembly line and putting them on a stand! A big screen is great, but we want a decent resolution too! Some of us don't want to have a behemoth on our desk just to get a high resolution. Sometimes the whole point of getting an LCD is because it takes up so much less space than a CRT!
Anyone "in the know" care to explain the continuing dearth of small, high-res LCD desktop screens? As it is, you *cannot* find a 15" screen with better than 1024x768 (at least I haven't seen one) or a 17" with better than 1280x1024. Quite often even the 17" screens only have 1024x768! This situation is a total mystery to me. The smaller high-res screens *already* *exist* on laptops, why aren't they being put into a different case and offered as desktop models too? I just don't get it. It's almost like they're only selling the desktop users the low-end trimmings.
Pornix, a bootable linux cd with a stripped copy of xfree86, kde, konqueror and mplayer.
Um, where can I get the ISO? No, seriously.
All kidding aside, this already pretty much exists in the form of ByzantineOS. Movix/Movix2 is close too, sans web browser. Both have downloadable ISOs. Have fun.;)
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that "urpmi --auto-select" is pretty much the equivalent of "apt-get dist-upgrade". It will upgrade all packages for which there are newer versions in the urpmi database.
I used Debian for about 18 months on my personal computer and liked it, but I also had a host of dependency problems with apt-get. If you're updating from a source that changes on a regular basis, you have to use "apt-get update" or "urpmi.update SOURCENAME" religiously before you do any upgrading. Otherwise either one will happily crap out with broken or missing packages.
I finally gave up on Debian and switched to Mandrake because it's easy to use and very easy to install. It's nice to have the kind of control over everything that Debian gives you, but it's also nice to be able to install the OS and get everything configured in under 2 weeks. I was even able to set up encrypted swap and an encrypted storage partition just by checking a box in the Mandrake installer and putting in a passphrase. In Debian, I still have no clue how to begin to set up encrypted partitions. You have to figure out how to set up loopback devices and probably get an updated kernel, maybe even compile it yourself with the right options, etc.
The long and short is I got tired of messing with Linux and decided I just wanted to *use* my computer. And with the new gcc 3.2 base, Mandrake Linux is passably fast even on my old 300MHz laptop, whereas before the only distro that wasn't intolerably slow on that machine was Debian.
Mandrake makes a good distro. Most of their financial troubles have nothing to do with the distro. That all came about because the previous CEO decided they should focus on setting up some sort of poorly-defined "educational services", which he then dumped tons of money into and it never went anywhere. They finally got rid of him and now they're getting back to focusing on what they do best, making a damn fine Linux distribution.
I really, really, really wish that people would do just a little more research and stop giving Mandrake a weekly beat-down for all the wrong reasons. They deserve a little more moral support from the community, even if you don't happen to like or use their Mandrake Linux. For those of us who just want to *use* Linux, not experiment with it, Mandrake Linux rocks. Give it a try.
I laughed too, at first, then I thought that it really is an interesting question, and that some people might really want a good answer to it.
So, think about this. The movements of astronomical objects can be compared to watching a perfectly round steel ball rolling down a perfectly straight, very long, slightly inclined ramp, in which there is a groove cut so that the ball can't roll off. The ball (astronomical object) can only do one thing: roll down the slope. Using a simple clock, we can observe the motion of the ball and easily calculate how fast it's going, how fast it's accelerating, and when it will reach a certain point on the ramp with a high degree of accuracy. (They were doing this experiment with great accuracy hundreds of years ago.) The reason it's so easy in that case to predict what will happen, is that there is really only one (non-changing) vector force operating on the ball.
Now, compare that to let's say dropping a feather off a cliff, and then trying to observe the motion of the feather and predict when and where the feather is going to land when it gets to the bottom of the cliff. You're trying to predict the time to within a second, and the spot to within a millimeter. This is quite obviously impossible, but why? Because the moment the feather leaves your hand, it enters a chaotic zone where its position, direction, speed and acceleration are being operated on by billions of gas molecules, which collectively assert thousands or perhaps millions of different (changing!) vector forces on it. The molecules that directly touch the feather are in turn affected by billions of other molecules with their own vectors, and so on and so forth out to the limits of the atmosphere.
The only possible way to predict the motion of the feather would be to have some way to observe and predict the motions of every molecule of air surrounding it, out to the limits of measurable interaction. Obviously, molecules of air a mile away won't measurably interact with any molecules that interact with the feather for quite some time, so you can probably just deal with all molecules within a radius of [100 feet|1 mile|10 miles], I have no idea.
The point being, dealing with the movement of an atmosphere is an incredibly complex problem, even second-to-second, while all those astronomical objects out there in space will be following the same "ramp", or vector, in general, for the next quadrillion years. That's how they can say they think they know what will happen, when they still can't predict the motions of every molecule in Earth's atmosphere.
Here's where it gets interesting, to me anyway. If you think about this, we're talking about the difficulty of predicting the behaviour of objects on a macro scale, as opposed to a mega scale. We get the same sort of difficulties when we're talking about the difference between what happens on a quantum level (can't be predicted) and what happens on a classical level (if the atoms in your hand contact the atoms in a desk, they both maintain integrity and don't mix or explode, in other words, we can predict things that happen to atoms).
Quantum (truly impossible to predict) Micro (fairly easy to predict) Macro (almost impossible to predict) Mega (very easy to predict)
I just felt that was interesting. Is there a level above the mega (astronomical) scale, that is so predictable that it makes the mega scale seem difficult to predict? What a strange concept.
I don't understand the whole thing that just happened. I read everything people said about Nemesis on here (before and after it came out), and all the bad reviews online. As is my usual habit, I ignored them all, then went to see it in the theatre a couple of weeks ago (small town Alaska, it took a while to get here).
I was blown away.
After everything people have said I was expecting it to be about on par with Insurrection or Generations or First Contact, none of which were very strong movies. In my not so humble opinion, Nemesis was much better. I'm not the kind of person that cares about any ST series after TNG, so it's not like I'm just going ga-ga over Nemesis because it's a ST movie. I simply found it very enjoyable because it was halfway interesting story about some of my favorite people; the ST:TNG characters.
And did you *see* those special effects? FX don't make the movie, not by a long shot. There have been far too many movies in the last decade with fantastic FX and *no* discernable plot. I always leave those with a rather empty feeling inside, and forget all about them 30 minutes later. But FX can certainly help a story along when they're done well, and when there *is* a story. And the FX in Nemesis were amazing.
I'm sure it helped that every rumble of the ships could actually be *felt* through the seats in that particular theatre, but even visually all the FX in Nemesis were more visceral, more real, than anything I've seen to date. ST or otherwise. And then there was the directing style itself. It was very different from what I've seen in other ST movies, and certainly made it stand out from being "just another long TV episode".
Maybe my imagination projected more subtlety onto the characters than was actually there, but I liked ST:TNG and I found Nemesis to be a very satisfying movie. All the rest of you, I don't know exactly what you were expecting, but as other's have said already, "for Pete's sake, it's a Star Trek movie!"
And one last thing: If you're all so clear on what would make a "good" or "great" ST movie, go make one of your own. I'm sure we'd all love to see it.
I don't know. My own pet theory would probably be considered even kookier than "aliens did it". It involves heavy speculation about how something not quite inside our universe would interact geometrically in an observable way with our space. Quite interesting to me, but probably not to anyone else, and I certainly wouldn't want to put anything forth that wasn't backed up by scientifically observable phenomena. I just hope we'll find out eventually, one way or the other. To do that we'll all have to keep an open mind and keep investigating.
Re:Because for all the things that are unexplained
on
Top of the Crops 2002
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That's your conclusion, not mine.
What is it with you people? This is number three now. Did I say "aliens did it"? Did I? Can anyone here say that I said that? No, I only mentioned ETs to say that they don't even have to be part of the discussion. Does any unexplained phenomena automatically have to equal "aliens did it"? This is just getting ridiculous. I don't believe aliens did it and never said so. Stop misinterpreting me. All I tried to do was present some of the known evidence and point out that (to me) it seems to make it implausible that humans caused all of the observed phenomena. Leave the aliens out of it.
So, would you say that natural forces, or animals, or humans are the only possible facets of our reality/universe that could cause physical phenomena that we can recognize? I don't know anything. I'm just keeping an open mind.
Once upon a time, all people knew the world was perched on the back of a turtle. If less people had known something like that, maybe more of them would have spent time looking at the physical evidence, and figured some things out sooner.
I wonder how many times I'll have to reply to someone to point out the fact that I said nothing about ETs or aliens or "advanced civilizations", except to say that they don't have to even be a part of this discussion. I haven't seen any evidence that crop circles are caused by aliens, and so I don't really believe they are. ETs would probably have better things to do. So don't lump me in with that portion of the people who study crop circles that lay out wild claims that they are created by ETs.
I just deal with whatever factual evidence I can find, and that's what I tried to present. I didn't say that anything was "unbelievable" either. Anything is possible. Maybe humans have made every single circle. I just find it rather implausible, given all the facets of evidence I see before me. Get back to me when you have "proof" that every single crop circle was made by humans. So far, I haven't seen it.
If you read my post you'll notice the only time I even mentioned ETs was when I said, and I quote myself, "Extra-terrestrials don't even have to enter into it. There are things right here in our natural world that we just don't yet understand."
Congratulations on automatically assuming that every discussion of crop circles == ETs and thus it can all be discounted as being general kookiness. Laugh it up.
and assumptions out there. 99% of the posts I'm seeing here are people who have heard something once or twice on the radio about some hoaxters with a tow-by-four, and who have made up their minds and decided that every single instance of a crop circle all over the world, past and future, can be explained away by that one method. I had expected a little more from the Slashdot crowd.
I am one of the biggest skeptics out there, but I always try to balance it with an open-minded analysis of all available facts. Looking at all the factors involved, it seems to me that calling every single crop circle instance a hoax with confidence is just impossible. Let's run down some factors here:
Numbers: First off, there's the sheer number of these things occurring all over the world. They often show up in areas where the locals have never heard of the crop circle phenomenon and don't care when they do. They show up in areas where everyone is so poor that no one has time for stupid practical jokes. They show up all over the world. (This factor, in and of itself, I do not offer as complete evidence.)
Size: Some of these crop circles are huge. A pair of people may be able to flatten a circle 75 feet across in a few hours during the night, but even a team of people wouldn't be able to finish some of these things in one night. (This factor, in and of itself, I do not offer as complete evidence.)
Precision: There is an amazing level of geometrical precision to many crop circles. They aren't all just flattened circles, they're quite often fairly complex geometrical patterns. And they're huge, layed out on flat ground with nothing high nearby to get up on and observe the progress of the pattern. I have a distinctly hard time believing that anyone could create a pattern that precisely in the dark. Even in the daytime, without precise surveying instruments and some way to measure and mark off every single arc of the pattern, it would be really difficult. Certainly more than a few hours work if it was just a pair of people. (This factor, in and of itself, I do not offer as complete evidence.)
Evidence on the ground: In the types of crop circles that aren't immediately identifiable as hoaxes (yes, there are hoaxes, and they are almost always easy to identify, go check out some of the links), there are strange phenomena that happen inside the circles. The stalks of plants are bent without being broken. Have you ever tried to bend the stalk of any plant like grass, wheat or corn to a 90-degree angle without breaking it? Personally, I don't know of any way to do it.
There's also evidence of odd things like stunted growth within the circle and things not growing there even months or years after the fact. I'd love to know how a two-by-four could do that. (This factor, in and of itself, I do not offer as complete evidence.)
History: Crop circles didn't just start in the last couple of decades with a couple of 40-year old guys and a board. There are instances of them a long ways into the past. I'd be willing to bet that the "original" hoaxters who claimed to have done some of the circles had gotten the idea from something they heard or read about that had already happened. I think the hoax is the fact that they believed they'd started it all. (This factor, in and of itself, I do not offer as complete evidence.)
Human nature: The nature of the human animal is pretty set, and always has been. There are a lot of things that just don't jive if you make a blanket statement that every circle is created by a single person or set of people. People crave attention and recognition. Do you know anyone who knows someone who actually made a crop circle? No? The larger the circle, the more people it would have taken to create it, and the more chance for some dumbass to get drunk and start bragging about he and his buddies getting together and making "that big crop circle on the south side of town".
Saying that human hands created every crop circle ever made would also mean that there are a lot of copycats in the world. A lot of people who just love the idea of crop circles and think nothing would be more fun than going out and making their own, and then never telling anyone about it for the rest of their lives. Why? I don't buy it.
I see several people posting about how "somebody should just catch those dumb kids in action and show it on video, and all this would go away". So you know a lot of groups of teens who are organized, motivated, knowledgeable in the correct use of things like surveying instruments and laser distance measuring devices, or even know how to run a tape measure with the necessary precision to create a beautiful mathematically complex geometrical pattern 200 feet across in the space of a few hours? The idea is just ludicrous. Ever think just for a minute that there might be another reason that no one has been able to "catch them at it"? I'll let you ponder that one. (This factor, in and of itself, I do not offer as complete evidence.)
Taking all of these factors into account, I, the skeptic that I am, find it scientifically implausible to believe that crop circles are a purely human-derived phenomenon.
Ever think for a moment that there might just possibly be things out there that we don't understand yet? That science doesn't yet have the answer to everything? That everything can't just be explained away on a moment's notice without examining all the evidence? Extra-terrestrials don't even have to enter into it. There are things right here in our natural world that we just don't yet understand.
I think that the treatment of the poster is deplorable. Everyone seems to be just immediately writing him off as a kook (like the first post) and not even bothering to examine the history and wealth of physical evidence about this phenomenon. Yes, there are plenty of kooks out there, but they can't all be kooks. That's like classifying everyone on Slashdot a troll because some trolls happen to post here.
As I said in the beginning, I had expected a little more openmindedness and intelligent discussion on Slashdot (yeah, I know, silly me, but it does happen here). I hope that a few of you who thought you knew everything will just take a few minutes to read the articles, and think, and wonder about our endlessly amazing universe, like the poster of the article suggested.
Having said that, consider what organisms have been around for the previous 250 million years, and why:
Having said that, it brings to mind the fact that all those 250 million-year-old creatures really haven't changed much in 250 million years. Something tells me they probably won't change much in the next 250 million years. They just don't have any reason to. They just happen to be extremely efficient for the particular environments they find themselves in.
But the interesting thing is the animals that haven't been around for 250 million years. Like Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Anybody been paying attention to the latest discoveries vis-a-vis the Homo genus? The evidence now suggests that our oldest ancestors diverged from other proto-primates a little more than 6 million years ago.
If this is true, then nature will have almost 42 times that stretch of time in which to repeat that miracle with all the other current primates, and future primates. Something tells me that the more flexible current mammals will have a lot more of a chance to evolve into the dominant land predators, than some sea animal. No need for there to be a niche left open long enough for squids to evolve in that direction. Think about it. Only 6 million years between early bipedal primates and human beings. Even if humans disappear, there is a lot more that could happen in 250 million years than what these people thought up.
Sarcasm aside, the Battlefield Earth movie was really bad, however the book is another matter entirely. Whatever negative things one can say about L. Ron Hubbard (created Scientology, nutty as a fruitcake, paranoid bordering on schizophrenia, drug addict, etc) he was an absolute genius with logistics and human behavior. Just take a look at the structure of the Scientology organization.
I've never read another book that was quite like Battlefield Earth. For pure entertainment value it's hard to beat, and there is a real sense of solid reality and consistency in the BE universe when one reads the book. It has some of the most imaginative technology ideas I've seen in any sci-fi or sci-fantasy novel, and I've read gobs of them, including all the authors most of us would consider the "best": Heinlein, Clarke, Zelazny, Asimov, Bradbury, etc.
Throughout the book Hubbard's genius with logistics is evident in the clear and precise description of the movements of machines, plans and personnel. Yet the technology never gets in the way of the personalities and motivations that carry the story along to its conclusion. The people are real and the aliens are just as real, and the alien technologies, ideas and civilizations are very original. I highly recommend Battlefield Earth to just about anyone who enjoys sci-fi.
This is actually a good thing. Let's say you are trying to protect your house. Do you want the law to state that you must have an impenetrable fortress and if someone breaks in, tough luck?? Not having the strongest protection scheme should make a break-in (or cracking) any less illegal or wrong. If you think it should, next time someone breaks in to you house you should be saying "Well, I had it coming; I should have barred my windows and doors."
In order for this to be a proper analogy, it should go like this, "Well, I had it coming; I shouldn't have left all the doors and windows and the gate OPEN, and the door to the safe held shut with a 3-inch piece of masking tape." Depending on how stupid the DRM technology is, it could actually go more like this, "Well, I had it coming, I shouldn't have hung paper bags full of money on the outside of my fence, with a note saying, 'Opening these paper bags full of money is a violation of the DMCA.'"
The law doesn't expect you to have an impenetrable fortress for a house in order to receive legal protection, but it also doesn't have much respect for the opposite end of the spectrum. That's why we have legal ideas like criminal negligance and why people are expected to take "reasonable measures" to protect their property.
Now, when someone sells you something, like a DVD, it becomes your property. Except the DRM supporters want to be able to still treat it like *their* property, after you buy it, and be able to revoke ownership if the product isn't used in a way that they like. They also want to be able to do a strip-and-cavity search on every customer that enters their store to purchase their products. I imagine a grocery store that did that wouldn't last too long.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Mr. KDan,
This letter is to express our wish that you immediately cease and desist your attempt to dilute the name of our product.
Sincerely,
The Zinf Team
(Zinf is not FreeA*P)
P.S. Your name would be so much cooler if it had an "o" in it. It would also help if you had an armada of space warships.
I guess you didn't see my reply to my own post. We aren't even talking about Joe Dipstick User here. We're talking about the smart non-technical users, who repeatedly hesitate to try many Open Source products because of the weird-ass names that make them think those products are solely designed for the geeks who already know what the names mean. See here.
BTW, this is completely OT but I never have understood what was so "brilliant" about GNOME. I've used many different types of desktops over the last decade: several Macs, every version of Windows since 3.0, BeOS, KDE1/2/3, IceWM and several other things, and never had problems understanding how to use them within a few minutes. Yet every time I stepped into GNOME over the years I was lost. Since I never had a problem with those other desktop systems, that makes me think there wasn't anything brilliant about it. I've never understood what the appeal of GNOME was, besides politics. So I always left after 30 minutes or so of struggling to configure things, and started up KDE again, where I was happily changing this-that-and-the-other-thing within minutes of first starting up KDE1/2/3. And no, my KDE desktop looks and behaves almost nothing like a Windows desktop.
GNOME2 doesn't seem to be much of an improvement. It's simply designed by people that think differently from any other desktop system I've encountered. Very strange.
YMMV, AFAICT, FWIW, HAND (have a nice day)
Seems pretty clear to me. The words are mostly plain English. But you're comparing apples to coconuts. How many users do you know that have a need for installing or even knowing what "Microsoft BizTalk Server System .NET 2004 Limited Enterprise Edition for Itanium Workstations" is? The word "enterprise" should be a tip-off there. The few technical people that require such a thing will be able to immediately identify what it is, whereas if it was named "Microsoft Rowrbazzle" even the techies wouldn't know what it is or why they should want it.
On the other hand, almost everyone who uses a computer uses a web browser and an e-mail client, and we would like as many of those people as possible to have access to these Open Source browsers and e-mail clients. Giving them cool names that tell them nothing and are too similar to keep apart does not help in any way.
Wouldn't most people think that an "Internet Explorer" would be something with which to explore the Internet? Seems pretty clear to me.
Sure, names like "Outlook Express" and "Entourage" (the Mac equivalent) are kind of meaningless, but they both have a sort of suggestion about them that lines up with the actual use of the product. But you see Microsoft doesn't even have to worry about having meaningless names. They have the monopolistic and marketing muscle to make "Outlook" a household name in a matter of weeks.
That's ignoring all the other examples of Microsoft programs that have clear names, like "Paint", "SQL Server", "Internet Information Server", "WordPad", "Notepad", "Publisher", "Word", "Photo Editor", "Calculator", etc. Pretty damn hard to figure those out. Even names like "BackOffice" which is pretty obscure still tells you it has something to do with whatever goes on in the back office, right. If they had named it "Mugwump" no one would have had a flippin' clue what it was for, so they didn't. But they could still do something like that, because of the power of their immense publicity and marketing departments.
The Open Source world not only doesn't have that, it also doesn't have a lot of visibility in the common mind, so choosing meaningless names is like putting up a force-field that helps fend off all the non-geeky people in the world who otherwise might find it a great product, if it appeared under a different name. It's just another hurdle for the common mind to get past. It's called marketing, and a carefully chosen name can sometimes make or break a product. At this point "Firebird" and "Thunderbird" don't even stand out in my mind, and I'm a geek! I'm getting confused about what does what in the Mozilla family, even though I read Slashdot every day! That raises alarm bells in my mind when it comes to how the non-geek world is going to look at that set of software.
Yet another fine example of my point right there. "Opera? What the hell is that? Why would I want to browse the web with an Opera?"
Welcome to the real world, folks. And this isn't even Joe User. This is a smart user. Joe User is the one who does confuse bananas and bread. Two words: "banana bread". (Another little in-joke there for those who RTFA.)
How exactly are we all expected to remember that Thunderbird is the browser component and Firebird is the e-mail client?
There's a little joke there for those "in the know", but it's really not a joke. The problem is that you *do* have to be "in the know". About a third of the people reading this post probably didn't realize there was supposed to *be* a joke there. I'll bet even a bunch of the "in the know" folks missed it. Didn't you?
That's because the names Firebird and Thunderbird are absolutely meaningless to most of us. There's no context. There's a reason the Firebird relational database is called FirebirdSQL most of the time, to help give it some context. Somebody on that team realized that Firebird all by itself wouldn't necessarily mean anything to anyone, until or unless it was built into a big name with tons of publicity.
If the Firebird/Thunderbird/Mozilla/Phoenix people actually want real humans to learn about and use their software, they really need to come up with some better, more relevant, more original names. Otherwise only the geek community is going to know what the hell we're talking about whenever we mention those products. There are still very few people who have even heard of Mozilla outside the geek realm. It shouldn't take a government study to realize that part of the problem is the cute, meaningless name. Every time I mention Mozilla I have to explain that it's a web browser. I shouldn't have to explain that it's a web browser, but only that it's a *good* web browser. Something about the name should already have told them, at least partially, that it was a web browser.
"Internet Explorer" may not be cute, but by gosh nobody is going to be confused about what a product with that name is supposed to do. I'm really kind of flabbergasted that the Mozilla community can't come up with something, after months of discussion, that's better than Firebird/Thunderbird. Two mythological names that tell me absolutely nothing about the software they refer to, and furthermore are so similar that it will be difficult even for us geeks to remember which part they refer to. "Now, does fire remind me more of the Internet, or of e-mail? Hmm..."
C'mon people. Surely the whole community can come up with something inbetween these useless "cute" names and the mundane dry clearness of the "explorer" and "navigator" names, and have something that's original, informative and catchy enough for non-geeks to use without feeling ridiculous. I mean, good God, OpenEmail and OpenBrowser would be better than what they've come up with.
Here's hoping the right people will read this, have the same thoughts and run with it...
This is very cool. Here I am reading along, being quite amused by all these worldly and magnificent hoaxes, and lo and behold what do I see but my own wee little home town, SITKA, ALASKA at #11. Yessir, that little stunt by Porky Bickar is quite a legend around here. I imagine it went a little something like this:
"Hey, isn't Mt. Edgecumbe an *extinct* volcano?"
"What the Hell?! Run for the hills, we're all gonna die!"
What I wouldn't give to be around in 1974 when Porky lit up those tires...
There are those of us who like to mess with our Linux systems but aren't exactly experts and probably never will be. Some of us would really like to dabble a bit with the new 2.5 kernel on our personal systems, but we'd rather not hose our system in the process. Is there anyplace out there where someone periodically puts together a "semi-stable" version of the development kernel, that us dabblers can download and be reasonably sure that it will be free of such things as major filesystem bugs?
Everyone says, don't run the development kernel if you don't know what you're doing, and of course any particular 2.5 kernel grabbed off of kernel.org can be majorly broken, right? So it would be really cool if one of the real kernel developers could put together something inbetween the 2.4 "stable" kernel and the 2.5 "careful!" kernel. There are just so many cool new features in 2.5, like that huge improvement in interactivity that could really make the desktop more usable, but those of us who aren't experts are really leery to just grab the source and start compiling, because who knows what might be broken in any particular development sub-version.
Does anyone make a habit of doing this "semi-stable" thing with the development kernels? Failing that, are cool things like that interactivity improvement being backported to the 2.4 kernel already?
Yes, the Ancient Greeks had their lawyer send a C&D letter.
Sincerely,
The Mino^H^H^H^HThunderbird team
I DO NOT understand this at all, and so far I've not seen a satisfactory explanation, even though others have asked this same question: Why in the hell do I have to get a 21" desktop LCD in order to get a decent (1600x1200) resolution, when we've had laptop screens with 1600x1200 or better in much smaller sizes for at least a couple of years now?
With the kind of prices they charge for those big desktop monsters they could just as easily be pulling the smaller laptop screens right off the assembly line and putting them on a stand! A big screen is great, but we want a decent resolution too! Some of us don't want to have a behemoth on our desk just to get a high resolution. Sometimes the whole point of getting an LCD is because it takes up so much less space than a CRT!
Anyone "in the know" care to explain the continuing dearth of small, high-res LCD desktop screens? As it is, you *cannot* find a 15" screen with better than 1024x768 (at least I haven't seen one) or a 17" with better than 1280x1024. Quite often even the 17" screens only have 1024x768! This situation is a total mystery to me. The smaller high-res screens *already* *exist* on laptops, why aren't they being put into a different case and offered as desktop models too? I just don't get it. It's almost like they're only selling the desktop users the low-end trimmings.
Um, where can I get the ISO? No, seriously.
All kidding aside, this already pretty much exists in the form of ByzantineOS. Movix/Movix2 is close too, sans web browser. Both have downloadable ISOs. Have fun.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that "urpmi --auto-select" is pretty much the equivalent of "apt-get dist-upgrade". It will upgrade all packages for which there are newer versions in the urpmi database.
I used Debian for about 18 months on my personal computer and liked it, but I also had a host of dependency problems with apt-get. If you're updating from a source that changes on a regular basis, you have to use "apt-get update" or "urpmi.update SOURCENAME" religiously before you do any upgrading. Otherwise either one will happily crap out with broken or missing packages.
I finally gave up on Debian and switched to Mandrake because it's easy to use and very easy to install. It's nice to have the kind of control over everything that Debian gives you, but it's also nice to be able to install the OS and get everything configured in under 2 weeks. I was even able to set up encrypted swap and an encrypted storage partition just by checking a box in the Mandrake installer and putting in a passphrase. In Debian, I still have no clue how to begin to set up encrypted partitions. You have to figure out how to set up loopback devices and probably get an updated kernel, maybe even compile it yourself with the right options, etc.
The long and short is I got tired of messing with Linux and decided I just wanted to *use* my computer. And with the new gcc 3.2 base, Mandrake Linux is passably fast even on my old 300MHz laptop, whereas before the only distro that wasn't intolerably slow on that machine was Debian.
Mandrake makes a good distro. Most of their financial troubles have nothing to do with the distro. That all came about because the previous CEO decided they should focus on setting up some sort of poorly-defined "educational services", which he then dumped tons of money into and it never went anywhere. They finally got rid of him and now they're getting back to focusing on what they do best, making a damn fine Linux distribution.
I really, really, really wish that people would do just a little more research and stop giving Mandrake a weekly beat-down for all the wrong reasons. They deserve a little more moral support from the community, even if you don't happen to like or use their Mandrake Linux. For those of us who just want to *use* Linux, not experiment with it, Mandrake Linux rocks. Give it a try.
I laughed too, at first, then I thought that it really is an interesting question, and that some people might really want a good answer to it.
So, think about this. The movements of astronomical objects can be compared to watching a perfectly round steel ball rolling down a perfectly straight, very long, slightly inclined ramp, in which there is a groove cut so that the ball can't roll off. The ball (astronomical object) can only do one thing: roll down the slope. Using a simple clock, we can observe the motion of the ball and easily calculate how fast it's going, how fast it's accelerating, and when it will reach a certain point on the ramp with a high degree of accuracy. (They were doing this experiment with great accuracy hundreds of years ago.) The reason it's so easy in that case to predict what will happen, is that there is really only one (non-changing) vector force operating on the ball.
Now, compare that to let's say dropping a feather off a cliff, and then trying to observe the motion of the feather and predict when and where the feather is going to land when it gets to the bottom of the cliff. You're trying to predict the time to within a second, and the spot to within a millimeter. This is quite obviously impossible, but why? Because the moment the feather leaves your hand, it enters a chaotic zone where its position, direction, speed and acceleration are being operated on by billions of gas molecules, which collectively assert thousands or perhaps millions of different (changing!) vector forces on it. The molecules that directly touch the feather are in turn affected by billions of other molecules with their own vectors, and so on and so forth out to the limits of the atmosphere.
The only possible way to predict the motion of the feather would be to have some way to observe and predict the motions of every molecule of air surrounding it, out to the limits of measurable interaction. Obviously, molecules of air a mile away won't measurably interact with any molecules that interact with the feather for quite some time, so you can probably just deal with all molecules within a radius of [100 feet|1 mile|10 miles], I have no idea.
The point being, dealing with the movement of an atmosphere is an incredibly complex problem, even second-to-second, while all those astronomical objects out there in space will be following the same "ramp", or vector, in general, for the next quadrillion years. That's how they can say they think they know what will happen, when they still can't predict the motions of every molecule in Earth's atmosphere.
Here's where it gets interesting, to me anyway. If you think about this, we're talking about the difficulty of predicting the behaviour of objects on a macro scale, as opposed to a mega scale. We get the same sort of difficulties when we're talking about the difference between what happens on a quantum level (can't be predicted) and what happens on a classical level (if the atoms in your hand contact the atoms in a desk, they both maintain integrity and don't mix or explode, in other words, we can predict things that happen to atoms).
Quantum (truly impossible to predict) Micro (fairly easy to predict)
Macro (almost impossible to predict) Mega (very easy to predict)
I just felt that was interesting. Is there a level above the mega (astronomical) scale, that is so predictable that it makes the mega scale seem difficult to predict? What a strange concept.
I don't understand the whole thing that just happened. I read everything people said about Nemesis on here (before and after it came out), and all the bad reviews online. As is my usual habit, I ignored them all, then went to see it in the theatre a couple of weeks ago (small town Alaska, it took a while to get here).
I was blown away.
After everything people have said I was expecting it to be about on par with Insurrection or Generations or First Contact, none of which were very strong movies. In my not so humble opinion, Nemesis was much better. I'm not the kind of person that cares about any ST series after TNG, so it's not like I'm just going ga-ga over Nemesis because it's a ST movie. I simply found it very enjoyable because it was halfway interesting story about some of my favorite people; the ST:TNG characters.
And did you *see* those special effects? FX don't make the movie, not by a long shot. There have been far too many movies in the last decade with fantastic FX and *no* discernable plot. I always leave those with a rather empty feeling inside, and forget all about them 30 minutes later. But FX can certainly help a story along when they're done well, and when there *is* a story. And the FX in Nemesis were amazing.
I'm sure it helped that every rumble of the ships could actually be *felt* through the seats in that particular theatre, but even visually all the FX in Nemesis were more visceral, more real, than anything I've seen to date. ST or otherwise. And then there was the directing style itself. It was very different from what I've seen in other ST movies, and certainly made it stand out from being "just another long TV episode".
Maybe my imagination projected more subtlety onto the characters than was actually there, but I liked ST:TNG and I found Nemesis to be a very satisfying movie. All the rest of you, I don't know exactly what you were expecting, but as other's have said already, "for Pete's sake, it's a Star Trek movie!"
And one last thing: If you're all so clear on what would make a "good" or "great" ST movie, go make one of your own. I'm sure we'd all love to see it.
I don't know. My own pet theory would probably be considered even kookier than "aliens did it". It involves heavy speculation about how something not quite inside our universe would interact geometrically in an observable way with our space. Quite interesting to me, but probably not to anyone else, and I certainly wouldn't want to put anything forth that wasn't backed up by scientifically observable phenomena. I just hope we'll find out eventually, one way or the other. To do that we'll all have to keep an open mind and keep investigating.
That's your conclusion, not mine.
What is it with you people? This is number three now. Did I say "aliens did it"? Did I? Can anyone here say that I said that? No, I only mentioned ETs to say that they don't even have to be part of the discussion. Does any unexplained phenomena automatically have to equal "aliens did it"? This is just getting ridiculous. I don't believe aliens did it and never said so. Stop misinterpreting me. All I tried to do was present some of the known evidence and point out that (to me) it seems to make it implausible that humans caused all of the observed phenomena. Leave the aliens out of it.
So, would you say that natural forces, or animals, or humans are the only possible facets of our reality/universe that could cause physical phenomena that we can recognize? I don't know anything. I'm just keeping an open mind.
Once upon a time, all people knew the world was perched on the back of a turtle. If less people had known something like that, maybe more of them would have spent time looking at the physical evidence, and figured some things out sooner.
I wonder how many times I'll have to reply to someone to point out the fact that I said nothing about ETs or aliens or "advanced civilizations", except to say that they don't have to even be a part of this discussion. I haven't seen any evidence that crop circles are caused by aliens, and so I don't really believe they are. ETs would probably have better things to do. So don't lump me in with that portion of the people who study crop circles that lay out wild claims that they are created by ETs.
I just deal with whatever factual evidence I can find, and that's what I tried to present. I didn't say that anything was "unbelievable" either. Anything is possible. Maybe humans have made every single circle. I just find it rather implausible, given all the facets of evidence I see before me. Get back to me when you have "proof" that every single crop circle was made by humans. So far, I haven't seen it.
If you read my post you'll notice the only time I even mentioned ETs was when I said, and I quote myself, "Extra-terrestrials don't even have to enter into it. There are things right here in our natural world that we just don't yet understand."
Congratulations on automatically assuming that every discussion of crop circles == ETs and thus it can all be discounted as being general kookiness. Laugh it up.
and assumptions out there. 99% of the posts I'm seeing here are people who have heard something once or twice on the radio about some hoaxters with a tow-by-four, and who have made up their minds and decided that every single instance of a crop circle all over the world, past and future, can be explained away by that one method. I had expected a little more from the Slashdot crowd.
I am one of the biggest skeptics out there, but I always try to balance it with an open-minded analysis of all available facts. Looking at all the factors involved, it seems to me that calling every single crop circle instance a hoax with confidence is just impossible. Let's run down some factors here:
Numbers: First off, there's the sheer number of these things occurring all over the world. They often show up in areas where the locals have never heard of the crop circle phenomenon and don't care when they do. They show up in areas where everyone is so poor that no one has time for stupid practical jokes. They show up all over the world.
(This factor, in and of itself, I do not offer as complete evidence.)
Size: Some of these crop circles are huge. A pair of people may be able to flatten a circle 75 feet across in a few hours during the night, but even a team of people wouldn't be able to finish some of these things in one night.
(This factor, in and of itself, I do not offer as complete evidence.)
Precision: There is an amazing level of geometrical precision to many crop circles. They aren't all just flattened circles, they're quite often fairly complex geometrical patterns. And they're huge, layed out on flat ground with nothing high nearby to get up on and observe the progress of the pattern. I have a distinctly hard time believing that anyone could create a pattern that precisely in the dark. Even in the daytime, without precise surveying instruments and some way to measure and mark off every single arc of the pattern, it would be really difficult. Certainly more than a few hours work if it was just a pair of people.
(This factor, in and of itself, I do not offer as complete evidence.)
Evidence on the ground: In the types of crop circles that aren't immediately identifiable as hoaxes (yes, there are hoaxes, and they are almost always easy to identify, go check out some of the links), there are strange phenomena that happen inside the circles. The stalks of plants are bent without being broken. Have you ever tried to bend the stalk of any plant like grass, wheat or corn to a 90-degree angle without breaking it? Personally, I don't know of any way to do it.
There's also evidence of odd things like stunted growth within the circle and things not growing there even months or years after the fact. I'd love to know how a two-by-four could do that.
(This factor, in and of itself, I do not offer as complete evidence.)
History: Crop circles didn't just start in the last couple of decades with a couple of 40-year old guys and a board. There are instances of them a long ways into the past. I'd be willing to bet that the "original" hoaxters who claimed to have done some of the circles had gotten the idea from something they heard or read about that had already happened. I think the hoax is the fact that they believed they'd started it all.
(This factor, in and of itself, I do not offer as complete evidence.)
Human nature: The nature of the human animal is pretty set, and always has been. There are a lot of things that just don't jive if you make a blanket statement that every circle is created by a single person or set of people. People crave attention and recognition. Do you know anyone who knows someone who actually made a crop circle? No? The larger the circle, the more people it would have taken to create it, and the more chance for some dumbass to get drunk and start bragging about he and his buddies getting together and making "that big crop circle on the south side of town".
Saying that human hands created every crop circle ever made would also mean that there are a lot of copycats in the world. A lot of people who just love the idea of crop circles and think nothing would be more fun than going out and making their own, and then never telling anyone about it for the rest of their lives. Why? I don't buy it.
I see several people posting about how "somebody should just catch those dumb kids in action and show it on video, and all this would go away". So you know a lot of groups of teens who are organized, motivated, knowledgeable in the correct use of things like surveying instruments and laser distance measuring devices, or even know how to run a tape measure with the necessary precision to create a beautiful mathematically complex geometrical pattern 200 feet across in the space of a few hours? The idea is just ludicrous. Ever think just for a minute that there might be another reason that no one has been able to "catch them at it"? I'll let you ponder that one.
(This factor, in and of itself, I do not offer as complete evidence.)
Taking all of these factors into account, I, the skeptic that I am, find it scientifically implausible to believe that crop circles are a purely human-derived phenomenon.
Ever think for a moment that there might just possibly be things out there that we don't understand yet? That science doesn't yet have the answer to everything? That everything can't just be explained away on a moment's notice without examining all the evidence? Extra-terrestrials don't even have to enter into it. There are things right here in our natural world that we just don't yet understand.
I think that the treatment of the poster is deplorable. Everyone seems to be just immediately writing him off as a kook (like the first post) and not even bothering to examine the history and wealth of physical evidence about this phenomenon. Yes, there are plenty of kooks out there, but they can't all be kooks. That's like classifying everyone on Slashdot a troll because some trolls happen to post here.
As I said in the beginning, I had expected a little more openmindedness and intelligent discussion on Slashdot (yeah, I know, silly me, but it does happen here). I hope that a few of you who thought you knew everything will just take a few minutes to read the articles, and think, and wonder about our endlessly amazing universe, like the poster of the article suggested.
Having said that, it brings to mind the fact that all those 250 million-year-old creatures really haven't changed much in 250 million years. Something tells me they probably won't change much in the next 250 million years. They just don't have any reason to. They just happen to be extremely efficient for the particular environments they find themselves in.
But the interesting thing is the animals that haven't been around for 250 million years. Like Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Anybody been paying attention to the latest discoveries vis-a-vis the Homo genus? The evidence now suggests that our oldest ancestors diverged from other proto-primates a little more than 6 million years ago.
If this is true, then nature will have almost 42 times that stretch of time in which to repeat that miracle with all the other current primates, and future primates. Something tells me that the more flexible current mammals will have a lot more of a chance to evolve into the dominant land predators, than some sea animal. No need for there to be a niche left open long enough for squids to evolve in that direction. Think about it. Only 6 million years between early bipedal primates and human beings. Even if humans disappear, there is a lot more that could happen in 250 million years than what these people thought up.
No, no, no... The studios were unusually fast. If you're going to do MPAA math, do it right. ;)
Sarcasm aside, the Battlefield Earth movie was really bad, however the book is another matter entirely. Whatever negative things one can say about L. Ron Hubbard (created Scientology, nutty as a fruitcake, paranoid bordering on schizophrenia, drug addict, etc) he was an absolute genius with logistics and human behavior. Just take a look at the structure of the Scientology organization.
I've never read another book that was quite like Battlefield Earth. For pure entertainment value it's hard to beat, and there is a real sense of solid reality and consistency in the BE universe when one reads the book. It has some of the most imaginative technology ideas I've seen in any sci-fi or sci-fantasy novel, and I've read gobs of them, including all the authors most of us would consider the "best": Heinlein, Clarke, Zelazny, Asimov, Bradbury, etc.
Throughout the book Hubbard's genius with logistics is evident in the clear and precise description of the movements of machines, plans and personnel. Yet the technology never gets in the way of the personalities and motivations that carry the story along to its conclusion. The people are real and the aliens are just as real, and the alien technologies, ideas and civilizations are very original. I highly recommend Battlefield Earth to just about anyone who enjoys sci-fi.
In order for this to be a proper analogy, it should go like this, "Well, I had it coming; I shouldn't have left all the doors and windows and the gate OPEN, and the door to the safe held shut with a 3-inch piece of masking tape." Depending on how stupid the DRM technology is, it could actually go more like this, "Well, I had it coming, I shouldn't have hung paper bags full of money on the outside of my fence, with a note saying, 'Opening these paper bags full of money is a violation of the DMCA.'"
The law doesn't expect you to have an impenetrable fortress for a house in order to receive legal protection, but it also doesn't have much respect for the opposite end of the spectrum. That's why we have legal ideas like criminal negligance and why people are expected to take "reasonable measures" to protect their property.
Now, when someone sells you something, like a DVD, it becomes your property. Except the DRM supporters want to be able to still treat it like *their* property, after you buy it, and be able to revoke ownership if the product isn't used in a way that they like. They also want to be able to do a strip-and-cavity search on every customer that enters their store to purchase their products. I imagine a grocery store that did that wouldn't last too long.
Why is it that the posts marked (Score: 5, Funny), are often also the most frightening? It's only 1.5 steps away now, folks...