Let me ask you this, why do you believe the exchange of money is "speech"? It conveys zero information, and without these finance laws you hate so much that requires publicizing every donation, the money fails to even express an opinion by saying "I support this person".
What is corrupt about the laws is factoring the cost of speech into these finance laws. If I want to tell someone that I support so-and-so, the cost of me doing so should not be an issue as long as I do so out of my own pocket.
Campaign finance laws are blatantly unconstitutional
I talk to my money every day, and listen to what those greenbacks have to say. The $100 dollar bills have really good stories, too. They've been everywhere, and experienced it all, from the inside of the stripper's panties to the smell of cocaine. The touch of a prostitute's dirty hands and the sight of the gum stuck to the bottom of the bureaucrat's desk.
Yeah, I think free speech should apply to money too, after all, it's got a lot to say if only people would listen.
Zoloft isn't the worst offender. It's pretty clear what that slime is going through. Now, let's take Zyrtec, which for a long time ran advertisements consisting of people climbing mountains and shouting out the drug's name.
Presumably the tree's contribution to the atmosphere does not consist of one giant puff of oxygen before they die, so it would be safe to assume that their statement means that they believe that the CO2 absorption rate provided by the trees is equal to the rate of CO2 generation by whatever technology they used for the calculation (probably coal) to make up the electricity difference between the two technologies.
Shouldn't the first sign "something" is up be an increase in bandwidth?
Thats also the sign of a new spam source, or a new exploit in the wild, or that your little brother just discovered bittorrent. All it has to do is remain below the level of the rest of the noise out there.
Insider trading is wrongly maligned because who is better to judge the worth of the stock than those responsible for generating results.
Insider trading is rightly maligned because "who is better to judge the worth of the stock" are also those who are responsible to report to the stockholders said value, such as the CEO of the company lying to the stockholders in order to inflate the value of the stock so they can sell before the deception is uncovered.
Without protections against that, everyone will panic sell every time upper management sells, on the off chance that they are attempting to get away with something or that bad news is coming.
Some apps, like mplayer and wine, even require you to use binary libraries from the products they are trying to replace.
Actually neither are true. I can run several programs strictly on the native wine libraries without any windows DLLs. mplayer only uses the codec libraries which, with the exception of microsoft's own wm* formats (which I can live happily without), are not part of the "product" it's replacing.
As for the rest though, you do have a point, most of the modern opensource software is a copy of a proprietary equivalent. But is there something wrong with that?
I fail to see the problem here. Depending on your states laws...
So its not a problem because sometimes states don't completely take the choice away from you?
Hello optimist, meet pessimist. I guess we just see the situation differently. You see roses and sunshine, I see child protection taking kids away from their parents because their living environment is "unsafe" thanks to the "dangerous" influence of the 18+ games their parents play.
So if you decide your 18 year old kid is mature enough to handle a single glass of wine with a fancy dinner for graduation, you're going to go right on out to the restaurant and ord...Oh wait. The only "control" you have is to take the choices the government tells you to take.
I have a friend in Europe where this kind of censorship of violence is common. Recently, his customs office seized some movies he bought and tried to import from America, on the grounds he might show them to his kids (amusingly, he has none). With these laws enacted, how long do you think it will be before its a crime ("endangering a minor"?) for a parent to buy this and let their kid play? Will the state start inspecting your mail to make sure you're not buying violent games from a more permissive society?
Well, FY99-00's budget shows that the Officers of the Corporation were paid between $100k-$300k each. Google found me 04-05s budget showing $5,668,000 for 59 full-time employees (with a note stating that not all 59 would be employed all year). They quit breaking it up by who was getting paid what.
Even if it's not so obviously egregious in ICANNs case, it doesn't change the fact that one cannot say "oh, it's a nonprofit" and leave it at that without checking.
So? The red cross is a non profit org too, yet somehow they come up with the money to pay its CEO half a million dollars. Being non-profit just means at the end of the day someone goes home with all the cash.
I miss the Republicans. Maybe we can get DeLay to waste federal resources hunting them down from whatever resort they went to hide and harass their wives until they show up and take control of our country again.
It's not free as long as someone has to LET me use it.
It's not free to who? The person who gets to use it, or the person who has to let the other person use it? Every freedom is a tradeoff... swinging fists and noses and all that jazz. I bet the slaveowners were upset about their lost freedom when their ex-slaves found theirs.
"Information wants to be free" means "no one wants to pay anything for anything" as much as "lets start a company" means "I want to embezzle millions". Sure, some people who say one thing mean the other, but that doesn't define either movement.
Isn't it funny that you call the people using the GPL license as "cheapskates" when the only real cheapskate here is the people who took code other people wrote and called it their own product instead of investing their own time and money to develop a product that was truly theirs?
The abstract is just there for shits and giggles. The "inventor" can outright lie about the patent in the abstract, and some previous patent story here had two different patents with the exact same abstract. The abstract could just as easily have read "This is an invention to create happy fun places with sunshine and happiness for all!"
It's the claims that count, all they need is a claim like
12512: A method as in any of the above where the data is stored in a hiearchical format.
and they'd have XML by the balls (pending prior art).
In fact in the first patent the word "hiearchical" doesn't occur in any of the claims at all, and claim 14 describes the process by which most XML parsers work (matching data in the document to variables in the program). The second patent again doesn't mention the word anywhere in the claims, but the claims pretty much describe hierarchical data ("sub-clusters", etc).
SGML should be our prior-art saving grace though, even after all of these years of pushing "separation of presentation and data", I'm sure you can find someone who can argue that presentation is data;)
They have the means to stop these people and they're doing nothing.
How? Please, enlighten us. Should EA cripple their games to prevent people from extending them in new and cool ways because someone might make "clothes" for the characters that make them look naked?
Or should EA add a "magical nudity detector" that would automatically scan every module looking for things that look naked?
Maybe you'd personally volunteer to spend 16 hours a day with the rest of their programmers to manually check every single module anyone ever produces, to make sure that none of them contain any nudity?
So you think there should be no such thing as a civil law suit?
Fine, file a lawsuit, have the court issue a subpoena. Even civil law has processes to follow. Just because it's Big Business going around rounding up people doesn't make them any less of a vigilantee than the "good ol' boys" going out with their whiskey and guns to "get that feller".
but is there much R&D on synthetic or renewable natural gas substitutes?
Actually, yes. Several landfill operators have installed gas capture devices and retrofitted their heavy equipment to run off of methane. Many have found that the landfill was capable of producing enough methane to sustain its own equipment, and even after those landfills close to new trash, they will be able to continue to produce methane. Other general biomass conversion projects exist along these lines (using certain crops or cows or whatnot).
There's also coal gassification, though that probably qualifies as moving from one scarce fuel to another.
It's interesting that whenever patents come up, people (not necessarially you, or your group of people) always say "oh, so-and-so company isn't 'abusing' the system, since thats how the laws are! They're only doing what the laws let them do!"
Frankly, this "Martin Act" sounds like it was a bad law to begin with. Perhaps the solution is to fix the laws allowing this "abuse" of power, rather than to revile the people using them to their own ends.
Im kind of sad that the thing was cancelled. I was actually working out a script that would run along those lines, but take it further with the political statements (after all, we've gone this far, might as well go all the way).
Two game modes: Normal and Hard.
In Normal you take control of the action in the first game store you come across. Beat it up, shoot people, whatever. They don't fight back, really, and they go down for good after a well placed hit. Walk out the store, and you go down in a hail of cop bullets. Game over. You get rewarded with the newspaper headline "Psychopath Opens Fire, Kills X!" You could also call this mode "Realistic".
The real game lies in Hard mode. Here, people fight back, and they have "health". A shot to the head will still kill them... sometimes... fortunately you have health too. At the end of each "stage" you get a nice tally of how many you killed: # of "teenagers trying to earn money for college", # of "innocent children in your way" etc.
The real magic is in the voice-overs. Just browse the game racks in the store for a while, listen to the kids come in, get carded and leave disappointed. Others show up with their parents, ask mommy for "death machine 3000", the kid rattles off the list of reasons why the kid shouldn't play it, at which point the kid throws a temper tantrum and starts wrecking the place (watch out! in Normal, you can get killed by a falling rack, in which case you get the headline "Child Kills 1! Mom at Loss to Explain Rampage!") before the woman demands the game anyway "I don't care what it has! Just give it to me so I can shut him up!" and leaves the store with hellion in tow.
Still up in the air about the final stage (vs. the CEO and family). What I've thought up so far is you meet her (IIRC Thompson demanded a female CEO) at her home, and she immediately springs into action to defend her family. After challenging you verbally ("I've put more hours into murder simulations that you've even been alive, little man!") she transforms, sprouting a keyboard from her left hand and a mouse and gun from her right ("Behold! The ultimate in weaponry, a mouse-controlled gun! I cannot miss!") and proceeds to pwn you... but she has a weakness, if you watch her fingers you can see her movement in advance. If you somehow manage to survive and triumph, she respawns. (hey, I said Normal Mode was "Realistic")
I did however, think about the secret mode that would be included. Let's call it "Iced Tea". Enter a certain code at the start menu, and the game begins as in Hard, except that when you get to the CEO level, you arrive at some run-down slum "This must be the wrong address". You go in anyways, guns blazing against the CEO, and instead of respawning, you hear some guy in the next room over shout as he's struck through the wall by a stray bullet. She stops and shouts "Henry!" just as you deliver the finishing blow. You go into the next room, darkened save for the light filtering in through the bullet holes in the wall, and find her husband's body slumped against the wall in a puddle of blood. A girl's voice says "Are you the doctor? I think my daddy's hurt" and you turn to see a little girl, illuminated by a single beam of light, laying in bed hooked up to the latest in medical gadgetry. The little girl chatters on, she's been paralyzed since she was 3, some incurable brain disease slowly eating away her brain as she slowly went blind and is starting to lose her hearing (as expressed in the most childish and somehow heartwrenching monologue possible) before finally telling you to unplug her because she doesn't want her mommy and daddy to worry anymore, she can hear them crying at night because mommy does all sorts of "bad things she hates to do" because her drugs are so expensive.
Then Jack Thompson appears and tells you that if you kill her he'll donate $10,000 to charity.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me ask you this, why do you believe the exchange of money is "speech"? It conveys zero information, and without these finance laws you hate so much that requires publicizing every donation, the money fails to even express an opinion by saying "I support this person".
What is corrupt about the laws is factoring the cost of speech into these finance laws. If I want to tell someone that I support so-and-so, the cost of me doing so should not be an issue as long as I do so out of my own pocket.
Campaign finance laws are blatantly unconstitutional
I talk to my money every day, and listen to what those greenbacks have to say. The $100 dollar bills have really good stories, too. They've been everywhere, and experienced it all, from the inside of the stripper's panties to the smell of cocaine. The touch of a prostitute's dirty hands and the sight of the gum stuck to the bottom of the bureaucrat's desk.
Yeah, I think free speech should apply to money too, after all, it's got a lot to say if only people would listen.
Zoloft isn't the worst offender. It's pretty clear what that slime is going through. Now, let's take Zyrtec, which for a long time ran advertisements consisting of people climbing mountains and shouting out the drug's name.
Are they talking 1 year running time or 100
Presumably the tree's contribution to the atmosphere does not consist of one giant puff of oxygen before they die, so it would be safe to assume that their statement means that they believe that the CO2 absorption rate provided by the trees is equal to the rate of CO2 generation by whatever technology they used for the calculation (probably coal) to make up the electricity difference between the two technologies.
Shouldn't the first sign "something" is up be an increase in bandwidth?
Thats also the sign of a new spam source, or a new exploit in the wild, or that your little brother just discovered bittorrent. All it has to do is remain below the level of the rest of the noise out there.
Insider trading is wrongly maligned because who is better to judge the worth of the stock than those responsible for generating results.
Insider trading is rightly maligned because "who is better to judge the worth of the stock" are also those who are responsible to report to the stockholders said value, such as the CEO of the company lying to the stockholders in order to inflate the value of the stock so they can sell before the deception is uncovered.
Without protections against that, everyone will panic sell every time upper management sells, on the off chance that they are attempting to get away with something or that bad news is coming.
Some apps, like mplayer and wine, even require you to use binary libraries from the products they are trying to replace.
Actually neither are true. I can run several programs strictly on the native wine libraries without any windows DLLs. mplayer only uses the codec libraries which, with the exception of microsoft's own wm* formats (which I can live happily without), are not part of the "product" it's replacing.
As for the rest though, you do have a point, most of the modern opensource software is a copy of a proprietary equivalent. But is there something wrong with that?
I fail to see the problem here. Depending on your states laws...
So its not a problem because sometimes states don't completely take the choice away from you?
Hello optimist, meet pessimist. I guess we just see the situation differently. You see roses and sunshine, I see child protection taking kids away from their parents because their living environment is "unsafe" thanks to the "dangerous" influence of the 18+ games their parents play.
first generation 360 titles will be single-threaded ... the initial PS3 games may be worse
They'll be half-threaded?
The goverment is giving parents the control.
So if you decide your 18 year old kid is mature enough to handle a single glass of wine with a fancy dinner for graduation, you're going to go right on out to the restaurant and ord...Oh wait. The only "control" you have is to take the choices the government tells you to take.
I have a friend in Europe where this kind of censorship of violence is common. Recently, his customs office seized some movies he bought and tried to import from America, on the grounds he might show them to his kids (amusingly, he has none). With these laws enacted, how long do you think it will be before its a crime ("endangering a minor"?) for a parent to buy this and let their kid play? Will the state start inspecting your mail to make sure you're not buying violent games from a more permissive society?
With the advent of live CDs
You can lock out booting from the cd, then. Don't go about giving up your rights to control what your kid can and cannot do just yet.
Well, FY99-00's budget shows that the Officers of the Corporation were paid between $100k-$300k each. Google found me 04-05s budget showing $5,668,000 for 59 full-time employees (with a note stating that not all 59 would be employed all year). They quit breaking it up by who was getting paid what.
Even if it's not so obviously egregious in ICANNs case, it doesn't change the fact that one cannot say "oh, it's a nonprofit" and leave it at that without checking.
Also ICANN is a non-profit org
So? The red cross is a non profit org too, yet somehow they come up with the money to pay its CEO half a million dollars. Being non-profit just means at the end of the day someone goes home with all the cash.
the Republican Majority balanced it
I miss the Republicans. Maybe we can get DeLay to waste federal resources hunting them down from whatever resort they went to hide and harass their wives until they show up and take control of our country again.
It's not free as long as someone has to LET me use it.
It's not free to who? The person who gets to use it, or the person who has to let the other person use it? Every freedom is a tradeoff... swinging fists and noses and all that jazz. I bet the slaveowners were upset about their lost freedom when their ex-slaves found theirs.
"Information wants to be free" means "no one wants to pay anything for anything" as much as "lets start a company" means "I want to embezzle millions". Sure, some people who say one thing mean the other, but that doesn't define either movement.
Isn't it funny that you call the people using the GPL license as "cheapskates" when the only real cheapskate here is the people who took code other people wrote and called it their own product instead of investing their own time and money to develop a product that was truly theirs?
The abstract is just there for shits and giggles. The "inventor" can outright lie about the patent in the abstract, and some previous patent story here had two different patents with the exact same abstract. The abstract could just as easily have read "This is an invention to create happy fun places with sunshine and happiness for all!"
;)
It's the claims that count, all they need is a claim like
12512: A method as in any of the above where the data is stored in a hiearchical format.
and they'd have XML by the balls (pending prior art).
In fact in the first patent the word "hiearchical" doesn't occur in any of the claims at all, and claim 14 describes the process by which most XML parsers work (matching data in the document to variables in the program). The second patent again doesn't mention the word anywhere in the claims, but the claims pretty much describe hierarchical data ("sub-clusters", etc).
SGML should be our prior-art saving grace though, even after all of these years of pushing "separation of presentation and data", I'm sure you can find someone who can argue that presentation is data
The local government and you and I don't profit from the selling of porn.
Thats right, because when I walk into a 7-11 the only items in the store that doesn't have sales tax are their copies of Playboy.
failed to defend their trademark
From what? Did someone make a game and call it "the sims" while I was asleep last night?
But if your customer is hosted by an ISP who only uses L3, it's still Your Fault.
They have the means to stop these people and they're doing nothing.
How? Please, enlighten us. Should EA cripple their games to prevent people from extending them in new and cool ways because someone might make "clothes" for the characters that make them look naked?
Or should EA add a "magical nudity detector" that would automatically scan every module looking for things that look naked?
Maybe you'd personally volunteer to spend 16 hours a day with the rest of their programmers to manually check every single module anyone ever produces, to make sure that none of them contain any nudity?
So you think there should be no such thing as a civil law suit?
Fine, file a lawsuit, have the court issue a subpoena. Even civil law has processes to follow. Just because it's Big Business going around rounding up people doesn't make them any less of a vigilantee than the "good ol' boys" going out with their whiskey and guns to "get that feller".
but is there much R&D on synthetic or renewable natural gas substitutes?
Actually, yes. Several landfill operators have installed gas capture devices and retrofitted their heavy equipment to run off of methane. Many have found that the landfill was capable of producing enough methane to sustain its own equipment, and even after those landfills close to new trash, they will be able to continue to produce methane. Other general biomass conversion projects exist along these lines (using certain crops or cows or whatnot).
There's also coal gassification, though that probably qualifies as moving from one scarce fuel to another.
It's interesting that whenever patents come up, people (not necessarially you, or your group of people) always say "oh, so-and-so company isn't 'abusing' the system, since thats how the laws are! They're only doing what the laws let them do!"
Frankly, this "Martin Act" sounds like it was a bad law to begin with. Perhaps the solution is to fix the laws allowing this "abuse" of power, rather than to revile the people using them to their own ends.
Im kind of sad that the thing was cancelled. I was actually working out a script that would run along those lines, but take it further with the political statements (after all, we've gone this far, might as well go all the way).
Two game modes: Normal and Hard.
In Normal you take control of the action in the first game store you come across. Beat it up, shoot people, whatever. They don't fight back, really, and they go down for good after a well placed hit. Walk out the store, and you go down in a hail of cop bullets. Game over. You get rewarded with the newspaper headline "Psychopath Opens Fire, Kills X!" You could also call this mode "Realistic".
The real game lies in Hard mode. Here, people fight back, and they have "health". A shot to the head will still kill them... sometimes... fortunately you have health too. At the end of each "stage" you get a nice tally of how many you killed: # of "teenagers trying to earn money for college", # of "innocent children in your way" etc.
The real magic is in the voice-overs. Just browse the game racks in the store for a while, listen to the kids come in, get carded and leave disappointed. Others show up with their parents, ask mommy for "death machine 3000", the kid rattles off the list of reasons why the kid shouldn't play it, at which point the kid throws a temper tantrum and starts wrecking the place (watch out! in Normal, you can get killed by a falling rack, in which case you get the headline "Child Kills 1! Mom at Loss to Explain Rampage!") before the woman demands the game anyway "I don't care what it has! Just give it to me so I can shut him up!" and leaves the store with hellion in tow.
Still up in the air about the final stage (vs. the CEO and family). What I've thought up so far is you meet her (IIRC Thompson demanded a female CEO) at her home, and she immediately springs into action to defend her family. After challenging you verbally ("I've put more hours into murder simulations that you've even been alive, little man!") she transforms, sprouting a keyboard from her left hand and a mouse and gun from her right ("Behold! The ultimate in weaponry, a mouse-controlled gun! I cannot miss!") and proceeds to pwn you... but she has a weakness, if you watch her fingers you can see her movement in advance. If you somehow manage to survive and triumph, she respawns. (hey, I said Normal Mode was "Realistic")
I did however, think about the secret mode that would be included. Let's call it "Iced Tea". Enter a certain code at the start menu, and the game begins as in Hard, except that when you get to the CEO level, you arrive at some run-down slum "This must be the wrong address". You go in anyways, guns blazing against the CEO, and instead of respawning, you hear some guy in the next room over shout as he's struck through the wall by a stray bullet. She stops and shouts "Henry!" just as you deliver the finishing blow. You go into the next room, darkened save for the light filtering in through the bullet holes in the wall, and find her husband's body slumped against the wall in a puddle of blood. A girl's voice says "Are you the doctor? I think my daddy's hurt" and you turn to see a little girl, illuminated by a single beam of light, laying in bed hooked up to the latest in medical gadgetry. The little girl chatters on, she's been paralyzed since she was 3, some incurable brain disease slowly eating away her brain as she slowly went blind and is starting to lose her hearing (as expressed in the most childish and somehow heartwrenching monologue possible) before finally telling you to unplug her because she doesn't want her mommy and daddy to worry anymore, she can hear them crying at night because mommy does all sorts of "bad things she hates to do" because her drugs are so expensive.
Then Jack Thompson appears and tells you that if you kill her he'll donate $10,000 to charity.
Yes. Google for "Reassortment Virus". Also try "Influenza A".
Virus A infects your cells by injecting its dna into your cell and turning it into a factory producing more virus A parts.
Virus B infects your cells by injecting its dna into your cell and turning it into a factory producing more virus B parts.
If B infects a cell already infected by A, then it becomes a factory producing virus A parts, virus B parts, and possibly a virus AB or two.