Picture, if you will my friends, an alternate universe: where local phone numbers can begin with the digit known as the 1...
***
Ben Filchim opened his eyes, startled by the sound. It took only seconds for him to realize that it was his telephone. But it wasn't until he picked up the phone -- looking at his watch, wondering who would call at this ungodly hour -- that he realized why.
A strange melody floated over the phone. Singing. Drunken engineering students, it sounded like. The third, tonic, the fourth, tonic, the fifth, the ninth. He'd heard it the year before, about a month after he moved to Missouri. Probably a dozen times before he simply took the phone off the hook, then figured it must be over, then was called by several members of the Modern Disciples of Pythagoras and asked random personal questions -- his birthday, his height, annual income, and if his middle name happened to be Archimedes. No? Any siblings with that name? Then he'd had several more phone calls with the melody. The second, the sixths, the fifth, the third, the fifth. There had also been several solo guitar performances, and an adaptation that might have been done by Vince Clarke.
Finally, he had gotten one of the Mystics of Fermat to tell him what this was about. His phone number. His bloody phone number. The Fermatian seemed hurt when he laughed out loud after a stunned silence. After a short pause, Ben hung up and laughed again. He took his phone off the hook, until he forgot, anyway, and then received the series of phone calls which he decided where the drunk engineering students. He went into work early that day.
So it was March 14th again. Apparently every year was going to be the same. Ben paused to miss spring break before reaching over and unplugging the phone. Maybe he'd put something special on his answering machine in the morning... but in the meanwhile, he was going to get some sleep.
I saw this point made during the discussion of our friend who won a $10,000 judgement against his school for being suspended over the site that showed his principal having sex with Homer Simpson.
The students free speech rights haven't been violated at all. They're free to keep their f***_myschool.com domain. They're free to say whatever they want to the world. They can continue to do so as the school says "We don't want you here anymore," which is fully within their rights as a private entity.
Free speech is preserved, and the freedoms of a private organization are also preserved.
I think the case Jamie mentions here is more interesting because both parties seem to be much more solidly within their bounds, but there was still a confrontation. The students had taken care to block the site from being viewed on campus, and were genuinely misunderstood in terms of the fortunes. The administrators, here, did not overstep their authority because they had more than the public school did.
I can sympathize with both. I'm a geek. I got in trouble in high school. I've also taught high school. I understand that sometimes laughing at authority figures goes too far and disrupts the environment, and that even those who are doing there best are often the brunt of disrespect from teenagers who just don't really understand the world yet. And also, if you catch someone breaking a rule you've set, you've got to put up some kind of consequence.
From the story, it sounds as if the students were suspended for a few days. That's probably appropriate. Nothing permanent, just send a message.
Everything I've said above concerns the free speech problem. The police coming is another matter. I can't say I blame them too much, what with recent events around the country. It's too bad they weren't satisfied that our friends really weren't out to kill anyone.
I seem to recall that Pong is a popular easter egg. Places I've heard that it is:
1) Hidden somewhere in the open firmware of Macs that have open firmware.
2) Hidden in Microsoft Excel
3) Hidden in the about box of some version of the Mac OS.
Can anyone verify the above? Or know of any others?
One of the great things about Open Source/Free Stuff -- and I think one of its broadest appeals -- is that it's easy to learn how to use it and what it's about and what it can do w/o shelling out much other than some spare time.
I'd love to learn about Oracle and how it works. However, I think most certification classes are lame, and don't want to pay for them. I can't to it on the job because I can't seem to get a job as an Oracle admin until I know my stuff (fair enough). And I can't spend $10,000-$30,000 on an installation.
Is there any (legal) way to get a hold of the software and begin to play with it until I understand it?
I think there really was once a real "peer-to-peer" public mail service started by someone back in the 70s or 80s. I seem to remember that he was killed and someone speculated that government agents or post office staff had killed him. I've lost the bookmark and can't find it in a search. Does anyone know anything about this?
Yes, but you're failing to take into acount the extra 3 months in his life "missing" from our time scale, from when he was taken aboard an alien spacecraft by special arrangement with the DoD.
I'm intrigued - can you repeat his thinking/reasoning for this? (I could guess at a few possible reasons, but now I'm curious:-)
The idea: you need to be able to observe the state of her take on the relationship without changing it. The only way to do that is to get a close informant or bug them.
This way, you can know where you stand. If she's wavering, you push a little more and differently, and then back off (applying the "advance-and-retreat" principle). If she's really interested, you know, and can do whatever you'd do in that case. If she's not interested at all, you stop wasting time, because lots of women won't tell you.
It's sortof "The Rules"-esque gone techno-geek/intelligence/surveillance/psycho.
church doctrine is fundamentally racist. (e.g. Native Americans' darker skin and pretty much their entire culture being a punishment from God is part of the basic story of the Book of Mormon)
Common misconception, even among some LDS churchgoers. Maybe that's how you picked it up.
First off, the "darker skin" that one culture was apparently given was NOT the punishment. The punishment was the loss of the spirit of God, and the divine communication and direction associated therewith (this makes sense, if you're going to reject the idea that it exists, then you lose it. That's what the people/culture in question did, roughly). According to the text, the darker skin was affected to differentiate clearly who belonged to what camp and discourage intermingling between the two cultures that had some fundamental historical and spiritual differences going back to a severe family problem.
Second off, if you actually read the Book of Mormon all the way through, it becomes pretty clear that being good/bad is completely independent of skin color. The lighter guys are sometimes bad guys. The darker guys are sometimes good guys. And the cultural/racial differences that followed from lineage are eventually completely disregarded and nearly erased.
Hope you're not implying that the only reasons to restrict alcohol use are religious.
Frankly, I think the amazing thing is that society is as tolerant of it as they are, considering the bevy of ill effects that come along with it.
Yes, the associated conviviality is well and good.
The relaxation benefits can be real. But most of the ex-drinkers I know feel like even those benefits were crutches, and worth giving up along with the downsides. Sometimes, legislators feel the same way.
The principal abused his power by taking an issue outside of school, and making it a school issue. He should have pursued legal recourse outside of the school.
He certainly should have pursued legal recourse outside the school.
However, I think what our friend was trying to say above was: anything that's disruptive to the educational processs should be grounds for letting the school bar a student from participating.
Distributing the said material on the web would qualify, just as much as distributing the material across the street from the school grounds.
As others have pointed out, let the student keep the web site and continue to exercise his right to speak freely. And let him, at the same time, lose his privilege to attend institution whose administration he's villifying. I think it's a fair trade, especially considering that he can grab a GED anyway, and if the principal really sucks as much as the kid was implying, he's really not out that much.
Then again, *I* think that public school shouldn't be mandatory after age 12. There's too many people wasting time in the system. So I would be what many people would call a "kook".
Ummmm.... *all* laws legislate morality. That is, they make some judgement about what behaviors are good/bad. We as a nation just tend to agree more about some moralities/value judgements than others.
I have to partly disagree w/Shoeboy, though I know it's a matter of aesthetics.
First off, where I agree:
I hate winters. I hate being cold. As such, I am not happy in Utah in the winter. Utah is only nice between April and October (southern Utah gets sort of a break, as parts of it can be tolerable in the winter). It's also mostly ugly in the winter, except in the places where the snow doesn't melt into a turgid brown.
Second of all: some parts of Utah really do look like Tatooine. The drive between SLC and Nevada on I-80 is one of them. I went camping out at Iosepa (and old 1800s Hawaiian LDS colony town, now long since in ruins) this last summer, and the heat was terrible, and the land was pretty barren.
But if you do some looking, an interesting thing happens. You can find places that are absolutely beautiful. Some of them might take some aesthetic adjustments to appreciate -- for example, and acquiantence of mine who hailed from the florid east took two years to finally see there was beauty in "a bunch of rocks" (by which she meant: the mountains, Zion's Nat'l park, Arches, etc) -- but some of the monoliths and arches that appear in the landscape are just spectacular. And as you get up into some of the mountains, you really do see a lot of interesting vegetation, and even some real forests. Wildflowers in the cirques and meadows upon timp are a sight to behold. The waterfalls I found in the Uintahs last summer were delightful. And in the summer, when the trees have leaves and the inversion isn't there, the valleys where most of the cities are (Provo, Salt Lake, Ogden) are even pretty.
Of course, I'm already sick of the dominant political philosphy pushing unlimited growth and "progress" here, and basically trying to make all the mistakes they made in Los Angeles as far as development goes. So please: DON'T MOVE HERE. They've turned enough fruit orchards into strip malls in my area.
First off, Bruce: do you ever go outside? Have you not, perhaps, noticed, that Utah really is first rate for outdoor recreation activities? If you're into clubbing, no, this is not the place to come, but there are other sorts of recreation. And some of it here in Utah is first rate. Zion's nat'l park. Arches. Uintah national forest. To say nothing of skiing and snowboarding.
Second: have you ever tried to get alcohol in Utah? Getting into one of the "private clubs for members" where drinks are served is pretty easy. Grabbing a six pack is even easier.
Third: I do consider my social life when I apply for a job. Mostly, though, I look for flexibility in terms of schedule and vacation and weekly hours no greater than 40. That's what social life means to me: I get time off. My job is NOT my life. Are you doing that? Try offering a month of vacation to your engineers and tell them they only occasionally will have to work overtime. You'll probably get a decent response.
Fourth: Are you aware that there's a fairly large talent pool endemic to Utah? There's 3 universities here with student bases of over 20,000 and more than decent engineering schools. Some of these people want to leave (me), but I'd expect that many of them wouldn't mind staying.
Gripe, gripe, gripe. Engineering is a high-demand profession at the moment. Attracting good talent is hard. Find the strengths of the place you're located at, make your corp a happy place to work for, and get over it. Hell, serve drinks at work, if it's that important to you.
What _I_ want is the "Dragonfly" from Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy. Very small, could transmit audio and video AND haptic feedback. Could fly anywhere, and I beleive it was solar powered (phototrophic?). The proverbial "fly on the wall".
A couple of years back a friend almost had me beleiving that audio surveillance was the key to succesful relationship with women... if I'd had the budget and knowhow to get the proper gear, I might have tried it.:)
[attributed to Linus Torvalds in an earlier/. discussion, so it must be true...]
--
Re:Dolphin Uplift -- Math Mistake (combinatorics)?
on
Uplifting Dolphins
·
· Score: 2
In other words, there just isn't very much information that can be extracted (in an information-theory sense) from dolphin sonic signals, regardless of what those signals mean. It's as if we can see that they have (e.g.) a 6 word vocabulary, and never use more than 4 words in a sentence, and never speak in paragraphs. No matter what they're saying, that would limit them to communicating no more than 24 thoughts total -- period.
Hmmmm. I realize this is nitpicking -- since languages are almost never so effecient as to make use of a different meaning for every possible symbol/bit (though, in context, they're effecient enough to apply multiple meanings to the same symbol). But...
6 symbols and 4 slots would actually give you
6*6*6*6 = 1296 possibilities. Even puting a "no duplicate word" rule in would give you 360 different possibilities.
--
Re: Why search for ETs? Why leave your apartment?
on
Uplifting Dolphins
·
· Score: 2
Why send email? Why post things on slashdot? Why put a premium on intelligent animals?
Because: most human beings like to communicate with other sentient beings. It's satisfying. Even having a horse or dog is nice if you're out on the trail for weeks w/o human company. I just spent 5 mere days traveling w/o really speaking more than a few sentences to anybody, and I was soooo glad to get home to where I could talk to somebody.
Intelligent animals are held in high regard because the level of interaction and communication can be higher, and most humans value this. Not to mention, of course, the mystery of what something that really is different from us could tell us if we knew how to talk with them.
The logo is sort of obscure, but the snake/sine wave thing is fairly obvious, and everybody likes to see powerful mythic figures hitting things with hammers.
But what in the WORLD were they thinking with the name? Ogg Vorbis? Nowhere near the "catchiness"
of saying mp3. Not to mention that any format must have a great three-letter acronym to catch on. I think "xiph" is a great name for the format, and XPH would make a catchy TLA.
Please guys, change the name, or adopt such a TLA. The name "Ogg Vorbis" just sounds way too plan-9-from-outer-space geeky.
So suppose I'm coding something, and I don't like some clause of GPL 3.0. Some linking clause or another. Can't I just say I'd like to use GPL 2.x? or LGPL? Or any licences I darn well please? Why, yes, I could.
I can't see a thing in the world that anybody has to complain about, as far as licenses go. You can release something you create on any terms you like. If you want to use somebody else's code, you do it on their terms. If you don't like their terms, find someone whose terms you do like or code it yourself.
It's obvious. So what's the big deal over licenses.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I'd sacrifice half my karma to mod this one up.
Thank you!
--
Picture, if you will my friends, an alternate universe: where local phone numbers can begin with the digit known as the 1 ...
***
Ben Filchim opened his eyes, startled by the sound. It took only seconds for him to realize that it was his telephone. But it wasn't until he picked up the phone -- looking at his watch, wondering who would call at this ungodly hour -- that he realized why.
A strange melody floated over the phone. Singing. Drunken engineering students, it sounded like. The third, tonic, the fourth, tonic, the fifth, the ninth. He'd heard it the year before, about a month after he moved to Missouri. Probably a dozen times before he simply took the phone off the hook, then figured it must be over, then was called by several members of the Modern Disciples of Pythagoras and asked random personal questions -- his birthday, his height, annual income, and if his middle name happened to be Archimedes. No? Any siblings with that name? Then he'd had several more phone calls with the melody. The second, the sixths, the fifth, the third, the fifth. There had also been several solo guitar performances, and an adaptation that might have been done by Vince Clarke.
Finally, he had gotten one of the Mystics of Fermat to tell him what this was about. His phone number. His bloody phone number. The Fermatian seemed hurt when he laughed out loud after a stunned silence. After a short pause, Ben hung up and laughed again. He took his phone off the hook, until he forgot, anyway, and then received the series of phone calls which he decided where the drunk engineering students. He went into work early that day.
So it was March 14th again. Apparently every year was going to be the same. Ben paused to miss spring break before reaching over and unplugging the phone. Maybe he'd put something special on his answering machine in the morning... but in the meanwhile, he was going to get some sleep.
--
I saw this point made during the discussion of our friend who won a $10,000 judgement against his school for being suspended over the site that showed his principal having sex with Homer Simpson.
The students free speech rights haven't been violated at all. They're free to keep their f***_myschool.com domain. They're free to say whatever they want to the world. They can continue to do so as the school says "We don't want you here anymore," which is fully within their rights as a private entity.
Free speech is preserved, and the freedoms of a private organization are also preserved.
I think the case Jamie mentions here is more interesting because both parties seem to be much more solidly within their bounds, but there was still a confrontation. The students had taken care to block the site from being viewed on campus, and were genuinely misunderstood in terms of the fortunes. The administrators, here, did not overstep their authority because they had more than the public school did.
I can sympathize with both. I'm a geek. I got in trouble in high school. I've also taught high school. I understand that sometimes laughing at authority figures goes too far and disrupts the environment, and that even those who are doing there best are often the brunt of disrespect from teenagers who just don't really understand the world yet. And also, if you catch someone breaking a rule you've set, you've got to put up some kind of consequence.
From the story, it sounds as if the students were suspended for a few days. That's probably appropriate. Nothing permanent, just send a message.
Everything I've said above concerns the free speech problem. The police coming is another matter. I can't say I blame them too much, what with recent events around the country. It's too bad they weren't satisfied that our friends really weren't out to kill anyone.
--
If you use windows, dos, or mac, I really can't see why anyone would use anything else.
Hmmm. After a brief look at pmail.com, I can't turn up any info about a Mac version -- looks like Dos/Windows only. Am I missing something?
--
I seem to recall that Pong is a popular easter egg. Places I've heard that it is:
1) Hidden somewhere in the open firmware of Macs that have open firmware.
2) Hidden in Microsoft Excel
3) Hidden in the about box of some version of the Mac OS.
Can anyone verify the above? Or know of any others?
--
One of the great things about Open Source/Free Stuff -- and I think one of its broadest appeals -- is that it's easy to learn how to use it and what it's about and what it can do w/o shelling out much other than some spare time.
I'd love to learn about Oracle and how it works. However, I think most certification classes are lame, and don't want to pay for them. I can't to it on the job because I can't seem to get a job as an Oracle admin until I know my stuff (fair enough). And I can't spend $10,000-$30,000 on an installation.
Is there any (legal) way to get a hold of the software and begin to play with it until I understand it?
--
I think there really was once a real "peer-to-peer" public mail service started by someone back in the 70s or 80s. I seem to remember that he was killed and someone speculated that government agents or post office staff had killed him. I've lost the bookmark and can't find it in a search. Does anyone know anything about this?
--
I'd be curious to hear the take of a certain high profile open source community figure who went to HP a short while back.
Bruce?
--
Errr. You have it mixed up.
You said:
"You can go here but you cannot have any bad opinions about it, and if you do, well god help you if you voice them in a way a teenager might."
He said (paraphrasing):
"You can voice any opinion you want in the way a teenager might, but if you do it rudely/disruptively, you can't go here."
So he's suggesting the reverse of what you thought.
--
Yes, but you're failing to take into acount the extra 3 months in his life "missing" from our time scale, from when he was taken aboard an alien spacecraft by special arrangement with the DoD.
--
I'm intrigued - can you repeat his thinking/reasoning for this? (I could guess at a few possible reasons, but now I'm curious :-)
The idea: you need to be able to observe the state of her take on the relationship without changing it. The only way to do that is to get a close informant or bug them.
This way, you can know where you stand. If she's wavering, you push a little more and differently, and then back off (applying the "advance-and-retreat" principle). If she's really interested, you know, and can do whatever you'd do in that case. If she's not interested at all, you stop wasting time, because lots of women won't tell you.
It's sortof "The Rules"-esque gone techno-geek/intelligence/surveillance/psycho.
--
church doctrine is fundamentally racist. (e.g. Native Americans' darker skin and pretty much their entire culture being a punishment from God is part of the basic story of the Book of Mormon)
Common misconception, even among some LDS churchgoers. Maybe that's how you picked it up.
First off, the "darker skin" that one culture was apparently given was NOT the punishment. The punishment was the loss of the spirit of God, and the divine communication and direction associated therewith (this makes sense, if you're going to reject the idea that it exists, then you lose it. That's what the people/culture in question did, roughly). According to the text, the darker skin was affected to differentiate clearly who belonged to what camp and discourage intermingling between the two cultures that had some fundamental historical and spiritual differences going back to a severe family problem.
Second off, if you actually read the Book of Mormon all the way through, it becomes pretty clear that being good/bad is completely independent of skin color. The lighter guys are sometimes bad guys. The darker guys are sometimes good guys. And the cultural/racial differences that followed from lineage are eventually completely disregarded and nearly erased.
--
Hope you're not implying that the only reasons to restrict alcohol use are religious.
Frankly, I think the amazing thing is that society is as tolerant of it as they are, considering the bevy of ill effects that come along with it.
Yes, the associated conviviality is well and good.
The relaxation benefits can be real. But most of the ex-drinkers I know feel like even those benefits were crutches, and worth giving up along with the downsides. Sometimes, legislators feel the same way.
--
The principal abused his power by taking an issue outside of school, and making it a school issue. He should have pursued legal recourse outside of the school.
He certainly should have pursued legal recourse outside the school.
However, I think what our friend was trying to say above was: anything that's disruptive to the educational processs should be grounds for letting the school bar a student from participating.
Distributing the said material on the web would qualify, just as much as distributing the material across the street from the school grounds.
As others have pointed out, let the student keep the web site and continue to exercise his right to speak freely. And let him, at the same time, lose his privilege to attend institution whose administration he's villifying. I think it's a fair trade, especially considering that he can grab a GED anyway, and if the principal really sucks as much as the kid was implying, he's really not out that much.
Then again, *I* think that public school shouldn't be mandatory after age 12. There's too many people wasting time in the system. So I would be what many people would call a "kook".
--
Ummmm.... *all* laws legislate morality. That is, they make some judgement about what behaviors are good/bad. We as a nation just tend to agree more about some moralities/value judgements than others.
--
I have to partly disagree w/Shoeboy, though I know it's a matter of aesthetics.
:)
First off, where I agree:
I hate winters. I hate being cold. As such, I am not happy in Utah in the winter. Utah is only nice between April and October (southern Utah gets sort of a break, as parts of it can be tolerable in the winter). It's also mostly ugly in the winter, except in the places where the snow doesn't melt into a turgid brown.
Second of all: some parts of Utah really do look like Tatooine. The drive between SLC and Nevada on I-80 is one of them. I went camping out at Iosepa (and old 1800s Hawaiian LDS colony town, now long since in ruins) this last summer, and the heat was terrible, and the land was pretty barren.
But if you do some looking, an interesting thing happens. You can find places that are absolutely beautiful. Some of them might take some aesthetic adjustments to appreciate -- for example, and acquiantence of mine who hailed from the florid east took two years to finally see there was beauty in "a bunch of rocks" (by which she meant: the mountains, Zion's Nat'l park, Arches, etc) -- but some of the monoliths and arches that appear in the landscape are just spectacular. And as you get up into some of the mountains, you really do see a lot of interesting vegetation, and even some real forests. Wildflowers in the cirques and meadows upon timp are a sight to behold. The waterfalls I found in the Uintahs last summer were delightful. And in the summer, when the trees have leaves and the inversion isn't there, the valleys where most of the cities are (Provo, Salt Lake, Ogden) are even pretty.
Of course, I'm already sick of the dominant political philosphy pushing unlimited growth and "progress" here, and basically trying to make all the mistakes they made in Los Angeles as far as development goes. So please: DON'T MOVE HERE. They've turned enough fruit orchards into strip malls in my area.
But feel free to visit.
--
First off, Bruce: do you ever go outside? Have you not, perhaps, noticed, that Utah really is first rate for outdoor recreation activities? If you're into clubbing, no, this is not the place to come, but there are other sorts of recreation. And some of it here in Utah is first rate. Zion's nat'l park. Arches. Uintah national forest. To say nothing of skiing and snowboarding.
Second: have you ever tried to get alcohol in Utah? Getting into one of the "private clubs for members" where drinks are served is pretty easy. Grabbing a six pack is even easier.
Third: I do consider my social life when I apply for a job. Mostly, though, I look for flexibility in terms of schedule and vacation and weekly hours no greater than 40. That's what social life means to me: I get time off. My job is NOT my life. Are you doing that? Try offering a month of vacation to your engineers and tell them they only occasionally will have to work overtime. You'll probably get a decent response.
Fourth: Are you aware that there's a fairly large talent pool endemic to Utah? There's 3 universities here with student bases of over 20,000 and more than decent engineering schools. Some of these people want to leave (me), but I'd expect that many of them wouldn't mind staying.
Gripe, gripe, gripe. Engineering is a high-demand profession at the moment. Attracting good talent is hard. Find the strengths of the place you're located at, make your corp a happy place to work for, and get over it. Hell, serve drinks at work, if it's that important to you.
--
What _I_ want is the "Dragonfly" from Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy. Very small, could transmit audio and video AND haptic feedback. Could fly anywhere, and I beleive it was solar powered (phototrophic?). The proverbial "fly on the wall".
:)
A couple of years back a friend almost had me beleiving that audio surveillance was the key to succesful relationship with women... if I'd had the budget and knowhow to get the proper gear, I might have tried it.
--
Nanny Ogg
Deacon Vorbis
It's all Terry Pratchett.
Great. It's Terry Practchet geeky. A step up from Ed Wood, but still....
--
and anyone else is just a whiner."
/. discussion, so it must be true...]
[attributed to Linus Torvalds in an earlier
--
In other words, there just isn't very much information that can be extracted (in an information-theory sense) from dolphin sonic signals, regardless of what those signals mean. It's as if we can see that they have (e.g.) a 6 word vocabulary, and never use more than 4 words in a sentence, and never speak in paragraphs. No matter what they're saying, that would limit them to communicating no more than 24 thoughts total -- period.
Hmmmm. I realize this is nitpicking -- since languages are almost never so effecient as to make use of a different meaning for every possible symbol/bit (though, in context, they're effecient enough to apply multiple meanings to the same symbol). But...
6 symbols and 4 slots would actually give you
6*6*6*6 = 1296 possibilities. Even puting a "no duplicate word" rule in would give you 360 different possibilities.
--
Why send email? Why post things on slashdot? Why put a premium on intelligent animals?
Because: most human beings like to communicate with other sentient beings. It's satisfying. Even having a horse or dog is nice if you're out on the trail for weeks w/o human company. I just spent 5 mere days traveling w/o really speaking more than a few sentences to anybody, and I was soooo glad to get home to where I could talk to somebody.
Intelligent animals are held in high regard because the level of interaction and communication can be higher, and most humans value this. Not to mention, of course, the mystery of what something that really is different from us could tell us if we knew how to talk with them.
--
The logo is sort of obscure, but the snake/sine wave thing is fairly obvious, and everybody likes to see powerful mythic figures hitting things with hammers.
But what in the WORLD were they thinking with the name? Ogg Vorbis? Nowhere near the "catchiness"
of saying mp3. Not to mention that any format must have a great three-letter acronym to catch on. I think "xiph" is a great name for the format, and XPH would make a catchy TLA.
Please guys, change the name, or adopt such a TLA. The name "Ogg Vorbis" just sounds way too plan-9-from-outer-space geeky.
--
So suppose I'm coding something, and I don't like some clause of GPL 3.0. Some linking clause or another. Can't I just say I'd like to use GPL 2.x? or LGPL? Or any licences I darn well please? Why, yes, I could.
I can't see a thing in the world that anybody has to complain about, as far as licenses go. You can release something you create on any terms you like. If you want to use somebody else's code, you do it on their terms. If you don't like their terms, find someone whose terms you do like or code it yourself.
It's obvious. So what's the big deal over licenses.
--
Question:
If you've created your hotmail account from a
public location, what then?
Or if you dialup on a free ISP with fake information, and then create your hotmail account?
Can they track you through all that?
--