Same with the otherwise excellent KOTOR. Why can't I whoo balista with a female char eh?
I'd have to hazard a guess that balista simply isn't attracted to women. If the designers were really clever, they'd have a few male charcters that can't woo her either, on account of her not liking them.
Oh, and most of your post is very close to trollish. While I agree that homosexuals deserve a plethora of rights, it's wrongheaded to think that there are no "lifestyles" deserving of scorn. Serial killers and abusive rapists are two that come easily to mind as very much scorn-worthy.
There are lots of reasoned and intelligent arguments for gay marriage and accepted homosexuality--and the world will not accept either of those things until their proponents raise their level of discorse from ill-formed arguments and ad hominem atacks.
(Ill-formed argument: an argument not thought through. For example, if you say "it should be enough that they love each other" as your argument for gay marriage, then by the same token incest, polyamory, and possibly even pedophilla are all worhty--with the same argument. [My preferred argument for gay marriage is "if we allow a sexual union to happen legally, we should have a mechanism to give it legal standing." Nice and keeps out incest & pedophillia, too.])
(The ad hominem attacks I'm referring to is the unfortunate tendancy to call someone who is opposed to gay rights a "homophobe." Mental disorders aside, there are at least two logical if not entirely convincing arguments against homosexuality that have nothing to do with fear. [ask me and I'll relate them.])
But if so many people consider copyright to be unimportant, then it might be a good idea to change the law. You live in a democracy after all, or don't you? Copyright and technology don't go together anymore. One of them has to go away. Which one would you choose?
You're arguing a real, REAL false dicotomy. I'll give you two examples to think about.
Example 1: Fifty years ago, most people considered racial equality (or the rights of a person accused of a crime) to be unimportant. Should we have stayed that way?
Example 2: Microsoft. Like it or not, copyright law is how MS got the huge dollars they get--and despite their despicable business pracites, they have pushed for innovation in the industry as a whole (even if that innovation is mostly "let's do it better than those bastards at MS").
(Now, of course, I agree that copyright isn't the right system to protect software. But speak up about the rational way to protect new things done in software--patents--and you'll get a bunch of wannabe hackers bitching about how "code is art." A hammer is art too, but you don't see Black & Decker relying on copyright to keep its designs distinct.)
Oh that's good, only P2P systems where people can stay anonymous are targeted. I'm sure oppressive regimes (at company, national, or any other level) won't mind.
News flash: you're not anonymous now. If you use Napster, or Kazaa, or Gnutella, or any of the rest of the Napster rip-offs, a competent lawyer and a competent sysadmin can track you down and slap you with a lawsuit for copyright infringement.
Oh, and if you bother to look, Creative Common's licensing scheme DOES let you be anonymous. It's actually a rather clever way to mark what items are or aren't "shareable", by tracing them back to a person who sends them out.
(not to mention that users of Bittorrent or anything else are essentially anonymous. Just the person who does the potential criminal act has to have a pointer to them.)
In the greater meme, if you really have cause to be anonymous, there are plenty of ways that don't involve the internet (which was never intended to incorporate anonymnity) to be so. The simplest method is US mail with a bogus return address, but other schemes up to an even including hiring a lawyer to convey your messages exist and are entirely workable--and far more reliable than the false anonymnity of the internet.
1.21 Gigawatts was what the Flux Capacataor needed. So, to launch an Apollo lunar module, you'd need to hardness ten good-strength lightning bolts at a more or less constant rate.
Even if you had perfect efficiency, I don't think there are 10 constant lightning bolts in the entire country. (Say 1 second for a lightning bolt, and 5 minutes to launch... 3,000 lighning strikes. Not even sure that much hits the whole country in a year.)
My problem with the GPL is that it allows companies to profit off of other people's code without sharing those profits with the creators of that code.
Would you really want to have to pay IBM whenever you make an open source program?
Given that companies also use those profits to buy legislation like the INDUCE Act...
Logical fallacy #1: overly broad assumption. You need to show that companies sponsoring INDUCE are using the GPL at all (or are using public domain software from piddly podunk programmers).
Logical fallacy #2: Assumption of corruption. After the flagrant disregard for copyright brouhgt about by Napster and its clones, criminalizing software that is designed to share copywritten work isn't unreasonable. Especially since, as its worded, INDUCE won't slap BitTorrent or FTP or even a classic P2P that uses Creative Common's licenseing schemes.
Sometimes technology can cause people to forget the obvious ways of doing things.
Yes, it can. And sometimes the inertia of an installed system will lead us to think that the ettiqette of a situation hasn't changed.
It's very, very rarely that anyone stops by my home without calling first. Heck, a lot of the time I have people call from downstairs, instead of using the buzzer.
Now I know why I absolutely loathe Rick Berman and what he has done to Star Trek. TOS is the root from which the entire Star Trek Universe sprang. Cheesy or not, it is the model for everything that came before it.
Not so. At the most, they're one iternation of the genesis of 'Trek.
Far more of Trek's root (and a much truer form) can be found in the movies and the TNG series.
You DO realize that there have been some rather high-profile bugs, malware, exploits, and viruses for Linux (and even BSD), don't you?
And you also realize that, if Gecko had only been put in Free Computing systems, it would have essentially rotted away to nothingness years ago.
Of course, you're also completely ignoring the amazing PR spin Mozilla is for Open Source. Sure, it has a bugs and holes--but those bugs are publicly filed, honestly reported, and fixed in a VERY timely fashion.
(Then again, you're comparing Free Computing and pregnancy.)
DoD has always (well, ever since they started planning the end of the Gulf War) wanted to be nice to the Iraqis. How else do you think we expected them to rise up and help us kick Saddam out?
It's just a higher priority now, since the ass-kicking is out of the picture.
Trust me--this isn't a PR stunt. It might be an Iraqi-relations stunt, but not a US PR stunt.
but all I see of americans in Iraq are people all gung-ho.
Minor correction: "Gung-ho", the Marine core slogan, does not mean "go kill something." Rather, it's a bastardization of a Jappanese slogan that means essentially "work together", and the Marines use it in that light.
(I am not a marine, just an American with respect for the military.)
I'm completely embarrassed for this woman and her apparent inability to control her emotions. Be a man; swear a little bit, pound your fist and move on.
He hee. Ha.
"Women should be leaders--when they lose control of their emotions, the cost is a box of tissues, not a new desk."
Both products, of course, can be used without breaking the law.
Kindly point me to a napster-style (i.e., search and download) P2P app that includes a working and used feature whereby the copyright status of any given file can be verified before I download it.
BitTorrent--which, IMIANALO, would be still legal under Hatch's law--is a file from the creator to a "mini-P2P net". It's inherently permission-driven.
If not, what is the difference between these actions and downloading a movie that makes one theft and the other not? Hint: what was stolen and who was it stolen from?
The U.S. Constititution, actually.
MPAA/RIAA are two large organizations taking advantage of a legal concept that we keep around to help the little guy.
IP isn't even an amendment--it's as basic to our government as managing money or going to war. Yes, it's a bit too bloated, and yes, it's being exploited--but if it wasn't for copyright, we'd all be sighning contracts when we buy home movies, if we could get them at all, and the quality of the movies we do see would be much worse than it is now.
P2P "piracy" isn't theft, and you're right. It's worse than that--it's an usurption of another American's constitutionally guaranteed right.
(you can feel free to rant about corporate personhood stealing from real people if you like, and I'll agree with you--but the three types of "intellectual property" are a good thing that do more benefit than harm.)
Re:OT: Silly spelling rants
on
Who Wrote Linux?
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
This, of course, makes me a bad person and probably a comunist or terrorist or the like, but I tend to read, write and speak colloquial English as it is presented to me, not what the OED has pre-approved. I prefer a living, breathing language to bookworm-food.
No, no. The terrorists and anti-americans are the ones with the strict languages.
You can patent putting similar tools together? Like cut, copy and paste in any application? Or backwards and forwards in a web browser? How about +, -, * and / in a calculator?
You must automatically turn off every new feature before trying it out. And you call yourself a geek.
MS's patent is for the "technique" of automatically grouping simliar programs in the taskbar (that bar on the bottom of the screen that shows each application that's running), not simply putting similar tools together.
A different way of saying this would be to say that they're patetning the idea of having all your porn bookmarks auto-sort by catagory--although, really, all they're doing is auto-sorting by what program they're using.
2) There's nothing wrong with IPv4 which is why there is no rush to switch it out.
there's plenty wrong with IPv4. The reason we're not switched to IPv6 (which could be done in about a month of concerted effort) is that NAT--an ugly hack to make IPv4 work--is such an effective hack.
3) The fact that pretty much everything kept running on 1/1/00 even though most of it was never touched for an "update" suggests that maybe it wasn't a big deal after all.
It was a big deal. And a LOT got touched. 1/1/2000 was such a non-event because I.T. did its job, not because the threat wasn't there.
On the subject of IP, the only inherent problem in IPv4 was that nobody expected us to try hooking everything including the kitchen sink - literally - to the Internet.
4,228,250,625
If we were to limit each person to one address, and require each address to have one owner, we'd still run out of IP addresses shortly after half the planet was online.
(Actually, quite a bit soooner--the number above doesn't allow for the 16,581,375 reserved addresses.)
Slashdot Mirror
Same with the otherwise excellent KOTOR. Why can't I whoo balista with a female char eh?
I'd have to hazard a guess that balista simply isn't attracted to women. If the designers were really clever, they'd have a few male charcters that can't woo her either, on account of her not liking them.
Oh, and most of your post is very close to trollish. While I agree that homosexuals deserve a plethora of rights, it's wrongheaded to think that there are no "lifestyles" deserving of scorn. Serial killers and abusive rapists are two that come easily to mind as very much scorn-worthy.
There are lots of reasoned and intelligent arguments for gay marriage and accepted homosexuality--and the world will not accept either of those things until their proponents raise their level of discorse from ill-formed arguments and ad hominem atacks.
(Ill-formed argument: an argument not thought through. For example, if you say "it should be enough that they love each other" as your argument for gay marriage, then by the same token incest, polyamory, and possibly even pedophilla are all worhty--with the same argument. [My preferred argument for gay marriage is "if we allow a sexual union to happen legally, we should have a mechanism to give it legal standing." Nice and keeps out incest & pedophillia, too.])
(The ad hominem attacks I'm referring to is the unfortunate tendancy to call someone who is opposed to gay rights a "homophobe." Mental disorders aside, there are at least two logical if not entirely convincing arguments against homosexuality that have nothing to do with fear. [ask me and I'll relate them.])
Cool. Thanks for the factual corrections.
But if so many people consider copyright to be unimportant, then it might be a good idea to change the law. You live in a democracy after all, or don't you? Copyright and technology don't go together anymore. One of them has to go away. Which one would you choose?
You're arguing a real, REAL false dicotomy. I'll give you two examples to think about.
Example 1: Fifty years ago, most people considered racial equality (or the rights of a person accused of a crime) to be unimportant. Should we have stayed that way?
Example 2: Microsoft. Like it or not, copyright law is how MS got the huge dollars they get--and despite their despicable business pracites, they have pushed for innovation in the industry as a whole (even if that innovation is mostly "let's do it better than those bastards at MS").
(Now, of course, I agree that copyright isn't the right system to protect software. But speak up about the rational way to protect new things done in software--patents--and you'll get a bunch of wannabe hackers bitching about how "code is art." A hammer is art too, but you don't see Black & Decker relying on copyright to keep its designs distinct.)
Oh that's good, only P2P systems where people can stay anonymous are targeted. I'm sure oppressive regimes (at company, national, or any other level) won't mind.
News flash: you're not anonymous now. If you use Napster, or Kazaa, or Gnutella, or any of the rest of the Napster rip-offs, a competent lawyer and a competent sysadmin can track you down and slap you with a lawsuit for copyright infringement.
Oh, and if you bother to look, Creative Common's licensing scheme DOES let you be anonymous. It's actually a rather clever way to mark what items are or aren't "shareable", by tracing them back to a person who sends them out.
(not to mention that users of Bittorrent or anything else are essentially anonymous. Just the person who does the potential criminal act has to have a pointer to them.)
In the greater meme, if you really have cause to be anonymous, there are plenty of ways that don't involve the internet (which was never intended to incorporate anonymnity) to be so. The simplest method is US mail with a bogus return address, but other schemes up to an even including hiring a lawyer to convey your messages exist and are entirely workable--and far more reliable than the false anonymnity of the internet.
Ten lightning bolts, actually.
1.21 Gigawatts was what the Flux Capacataor needed. So, to launch an Apollo lunar module, you'd need to hardness ten good-strength lightning bolts at a more or less constant rate.
Even if you had perfect efficiency, I don't think there are 10 constant lightning bolts in the entire country. (Say 1 second for a lightning bolt, and 5 minutes to launch... 3,000 lighning strikes. Not even sure that much hits the whole country in a year.)
My problem with the GPL is that it allows companies to profit off of other people's code without sharing those profits with the creators of that code.
Would you really want to have to pay IBM whenever you make an open source program?
Given that companies also use those profits to buy legislation like the INDUCE Act...
Logical fallacy #1: overly broad assumption. You need to show that companies sponsoring INDUCE are using the GPL at all (or are using public domain software from piddly podunk programmers).
Logical fallacy #2: Assumption of corruption. After the flagrant disregard for copyright brouhgt about by Napster and its clones, criminalizing software that is designed to share copywritten work isn't unreasonable. Especially since, as its worded, INDUCE won't slap BitTorrent or FTP or even a classic P2P that uses Creative Common's licenseing schemes.
Sometimes technology can cause people to forget the obvious ways of doing things.
Yes, it can. And sometimes the inertia of an installed system will lead us to think that the ettiqette of a situation hasn't changed.
It's very, very rarely that anyone stops by my home without calling first. Heck, a lot of the time I have people call from downstairs, instead of using the buzzer.
Close. But unlike VoIP, the quality is good, and you don't need your computer to be on.
The best VoIP services, such as Vonage and that thing Time Warner is rolling out, are desinged to work like this older "POTS" system.
You've probably encountered this system before you had a broadband connection. It's like DSL, but the technology is much more primitive.
Now I know why I absolutely loathe Rick Berman and what he has done to Star Trek. TOS is the root from which the entire Star Trek Universe sprang. Cheesy or not, it is the model for everything that came before it.
Not so. At the most, they're one iternation of the genesis of 'Trek.
Far more of Trek's root (and a much truer form) can be found in the movies and the TNG series.
I wouldn't expect knights in shiny armor on slashdot (like there are any), but, hey, that's a little too radical.
We're here, but we're enlighted, so we give the woman a chance to defend herself first.
You DO realize that there have been some rather high-profile bugs, malware, exploits, and viruses for Linux (and even BSD), don't you?
And you also realize that, if Gecko had only been put in Free Computing systems, it would have essentially rotted away to nothingness years ago.
Of course, you're also completely ignoring the amazing PR spin Mozilla is for Open Source. Sure, it has a bugs and holes--but those bugs are publicly filed, honestly reported, and fixed in a VERY timely fashion.
(Then again, you're comparing Free Computing and pregnancy.)
DoD wants to be nice to Iraqis now.
DoD has always (well, ever since they started planning the end of the Gulf War) wanted to be nice to the Iraqis. How else do you think we expected them to rise up and help us kick Saddam out?
It's just a higher priority now, since the ass-kicking is out of the picture.
Trust me--this isn't a PR stunt. It might be an Iraqi-relations stunt, but not a US PR stunt.
but all I see of americans in Iraq are people all gung-ho.
Minor correction: "Gung-ho", the Marine core slogan, does not mean "go kill something." Rather, it's a bastardization of a Jappanese slogan that means essentially "work together", and the Marines use it in that light.
(I am not a marine, just an American with respect for the military.)
So, you're saying that profit and capital gain from invention is evil?
Yes. They are, however, contained evil that's benefical to society.
I'm completely embarrassed for this woman and her apparent inability to control her emotions. Be a man; swear a little bit, pound your fist and move on.
He hee. Ha.
"Women should be leaders--when they lose control of their emotions, the cost is a box of tissues, not a new desk."
Because of the LZW compression algorhythm.
It's still superior to PNG's compression and I hazard a guess that PNG can be modified to use LZW.
Both products, of course, can be used without breaking the law.
Kindly point me to a napster-style (i.e., search and download) P2P app that includes a working and used feature whereby the copyright status of any given file can be verified before I download it.
BitTorrent--which, IMIANALO, would be still legal under Hatch's law--is a file from the creator to a "mini-P2P net". It's inherently permission-driven.
Not so for other P2P programs I've seen.
If not, what is the difference between these actions and downloading a movie that makes one theft and the other not? Hint: what was stolen and who was it stolen from?
The U.S. Constititution, actually.
MPAA/RIAA are two large organizations taking advantage of a legal concept that we keep around to help the little guy.
IP isn't even an amendment--it's as basic to our government as managing money or going to war. Yes, it's a bit too bloated, and yes, it's being exploited--but if it wasn't for copyright, we'd all be sighning contracts when we buy home movies, if we could get them at all, and the quality of the movies we do see would be much worse than it is now.
P2P "piracy" isn't theft, and you're right. It's worse than that--it's an usurption of another American's constitutionally guaranteed right.
(you can feel free to rant about corporate personhood stealing from real people if you like, and I'll agree with you--but the three types of "intellectual property" are a good thing that do more benefit than harm.)
This, of course, makes me a bad person and probably a comunist or terrorist or the like, but I tend to read, write and speak colloquial English as it is presented to me, not what the OED has pre-approved. I prefer a living, breathing language to bookworm-food.
No, no. The terrorists and anti-americans are the ones with the strict languages.
Like the french and arabs.
Everyone was so powerful there was no suspense.
Acutally, the Neo/Smith fight was fairly well done. They were both "so powerful" that they were a rather even match--i.e., suspense.
there's a lot wrong with The Matrix. But lack of suspense isn't one of its problems.
if something goes wrong with a fusion reaction, it just fizzles out, it can NEVER start a chain reaction
Odd, same exact thing is said about pellet-bed fission reactors.
And no one mentions that we can use nuclear waste as nuclear fuel, for a different type of reactor.
And you're forgetting that, when fission was still "fifty years away", the prediction was that we would have atomic piles beneath stadium bleechers.
The fact that they spent three years integrating anything from "explorer.exe" to the kernel with IE?
And if Gecko is sufficiently old better than IE06.dll (or whatever the HTML renderer is called), they'll swap it out lickity-split.
Heck, there's even a Mozilla project to do just that.
You can patent putting similar tools together? Like cut, copy and paste in any application? Or backwards and forwards in a web browser? How about +, -, * and / in a calculator?
You must automatically turn off every new feature before trying it out. And you call yourself a geek.
MS's patent is for the "technique" of automatically grouping simliar programs in the taskbar (that bar on the bottom of the screen that shows each application that's running), not simply putting similar tools together.
A different way of saying this would be to say that they're patetning the idea of having all your porn bookmarks auto-sort by catagory--although, really, all they're doing is auto-sorting by what program they're using.
2) There's nothing wrong with IPv4 which is why there is no rush to switch it out.
there's plenty wrong with IPv4. The reason we're not switched to IPv6 (which could be done in about a month of concerted effort) is that NAT--an ugly hack to make IPv4 work--is such an effective hack.
3) The fact that pretty much everything kept running on 1/1/00 even though most of it was never touched for an "update" suggests that maybe it wasn't a big deal after all.
It was a big deal. And a LOT got touched. 1/1/2000 was such a non-event because I.T. did its job, not because the threat wasn't there.
On the subject of IP, the only inherent problem in IPv4 was that nobody expected us to try hooking everything including the kitchen sink - literally - to the Internet.
4,228,250,625
If we were to limit each person to one address, and require each address to have one owner, we'd still run out of IP addresses shortly after half the planet was online.
(Actually, quite a bit soooner--the number above doesn't allow for the 16,581,375 reserved addresses.)
Yes, but $21k is, by many standards, not a noteworthy job.
$1800/mo, with huge room to grow
You make ~$21,600 per year. That's in the range of what I make, working in a near-mindless administrative job.
We both make only about $3000 above the poverty line. Not something to be bragging about--and not 'pretty well off' at all.