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  1. Re:Wrong Half on Star Wars II: Return of the Name · · Score: 2

    Well, I think of the first half as the part with the Jabba ship and the race through the forest on the bikes. After that, the Ewoks appear and I can't stop retching until the final credits. Yes, the lightsaber duel was cool.

    I can never get (what I think was) the Mad Magazine version of the space battle. There was a big sign within the super Death Star that said, "Don't Shoot Here." Seems like Lucas had run out of ideas by that point and had to rely on the same plot element as the first movie. Any other redeeming value in the space battle was bludgeoned to death by the delivery of Billy Dee Williams' lines.

  2. Great for the kiddies, but... on Star Wars II: Return of the Name · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Not that I'm ragging on the choice of topic here, but I'm genuinely curious: Do adults (>=16 yrs) really care about the Star Wars franchise? I would think that Star Wars as it has become wouldn't be of any more interest than Pokemon here.

    Do people who enjoyed George Lucas' original trilogy (well, minus the last half of RotJ) really care about the George Lucas' current focus on ten-year-olds?

  3. Re:What is RMS smoking? on Stallman And Bero Interviewed · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Using laws of scarcity to govern the infinite is foolish.

    The problem is that ideas aren't infinite in the sense that you're using the term. You can't just reach in the air and pull out a good idea for containable nuclear fusion, for example.

    The truly marvelous and useful ideas are normally the result of a tremendous amounts of hard work, brilliance, and/or extraordinary luck. They have a uniqueness that is quite analogous to the uniqueness of physical objects.

    To disregard the value of that uniqueness is to disregard the work and brilliance of the mind that created it. Besides being a disservice to that mind, it's also a disservice to a society that seeks to cultivate such minds to create more and better ideas.

  4. Re:Free Software, Intellectual Property & Freedom on Stallman And Bero Interviewed · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The land and its wheath should be divided as an inheritance to be passed to our children and their children. What we do with our piece of the pie is up to us. Demand freedom! Always!

    So, how is this division of land being decided, kind of a divide the area of the earth by the number of people on it and we each get a slice of that size?

    • Do I get to keep my slice for as long as I live?
    • Can I give my kids only my slice, or can I give them pieces of other peoples' slices as well?
    • Will there be some sort of redivision of the earth at some point?
    • If my next-door neighbor breeds like a fucking rabbit and has like 26 kids on his slice, do they all have to make do with less?
    • Can I trade my slice to someone else for some other type of goods or service?
    • If I can do whatever I want with my slice and I give it away, where do I sleep? Am I fucked?
    • I'm really into PCBs, can I pollute the hell out of my slice?
    • If I die and I don't have kids, who gets my slice?
  5. Re:Free Software, Intellectual Property & Freedom on Stallman And Bero Interviewed · · Score: 2

    Let's face it, if you can't put a fence around it, or chain it, or lock it up in some manner, it does not belong to you. It does not matter if it's music, writings, software, ideas, inventions, drawings or what have you. Once you release it, it becomes like the air that we breathe: it belongs to nobody and to everybody.

    Property and its offspring intellectual property are simply societal constructs. We live with them by convention, and I see no basis to just disregard intellectual property because you don't like it. We could just as easily say, "Let's face it, if you leave your car in a public parking lot, it belongs to nobody and to everybody." But would society benefit from such a rule?

    Personally, I think that society is better off with property rights, including some measure of intellectual property rights. Human motivation is just way too bound up with obtaining things to do with out such basic tenets.

  6. Black and white goggles in a multicolored world on Stallman And Bero Interviewed · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I just have to shake my head and chuckle whenever I read anything from Stallman. Does he always have to be so intense and extreme?

    I mean, I like "Free" software, and I've devoted some of my time to its creation and improvement - but when I see Stallman throwing around the word "freedom" as though the only thing between utopia and the world are those evil non-free software writers, I'm just more than a bit turned off to the rest of his message.

    Free software is great for hackers sharing some code and for people who just like doing things that way. But it's not always the answer. Who's going to write the crappy quilting software that my 60-year-old mom enjoys using so much? A bunch of Linux heads? Yeah, right. If someone wants to write a piece of quilting software and sell it to my mom without giving away the source, than more power to them.

    I think the root of this problem is Stallman's propensity to use a concept that's best maintained in a relative sense in an absolute sense. If I have absolute freedom to do anything I want, I can bash your skull in with a shovel. Yeah, now that's real freedom, right? Oops?

    As with many things in life, freedom is best when it's balanced properly. As computer people, we probably like the whole binary concept, and we think it'd be great to have something like "freedom" be an on or off thing. Real life is just a bit more complicated than that.

  7. Re:More effective, yes... on Banner Ads To Become More Annoying? · · Score: 2

    The down side is that sites that count on ad revenue for their funding are going to code only for Internet Explorer, making Mozilla more and more irrelevant.

  8. Re:Yes, it's okay for ISPs to filter for me on ORBS Forks · · Score: 2

    Granted, that would be nice. Then again, it's not difficult to just go to another ISP.

  9. Re:Since when is helplessness a virtue? on ORBS Forks · · Score: 2

    Jeez, dude, pick a side in a discussion and stick with it, or at least have the decency to admit that you put forth a poor argument and try to do better next time.

    I wasn't the one who posed the extemist position suggested by Chersterton as justification for doing everything yourself, you did. I simply illustrated the logical conclusion of such an absolutist philosophy. I'm really sorry if you don't like where your arguments logically lead... maybe you should change them.

    By all means, write your own software and grow your own tomatoes, if you want to - but don't try to argue (like Chesterton did) that the increase in control that you get is always worth the probable subsequent loss of productivity due to your micromanagement of everything, or I'll call you on it.

  10. Re:I suppose in some idealistic sense, on ORBS Forks · · Score: 2

    Maybe, if you pay per-message for your email, you'd have a point.

    Assuming you pay for your internet connection, you do pay for every email, silly. You just don't receive an itemized bill. ISPs charge you more than enough to cover all your internet usage, including email. Internet access is a commodity item these days, which means that profits are at a minimum, so yes, you and the other users at your ISP pay for the bandwidth that spammers use.

    Also, btw, you pay for the extra engineers it takes to keep the mail servers working, to clean up after mail server break-ins by spammers, etc. Having owned an ISP, I can tell you that those costs aren't insignificant.

  11. Re:Since when is helplessness a virtue? on ORBS Forks · · Score: 2

    Sheesh. I understand that not everyone has the time and talent to write their own mailfilters and admin their own servers, but why sneer at those who do? Got something against taking responsibility?

    I could be wrong, since I didn't write the message to which you're responding, but I didn't read any malice or condescension toward people who do those more basic tasks for themselves. He's just saying that he'd prefer not to.

    Regarding that G. K. Chesterton quote: the extreme likelihood that you didn't create the silicon wafers, design the circuit boards, mold the plastics, and do the soldering on the machine you're using to post to your message indicates the hypocrisy of your argument.

  12. Yes, it's okay for ISPs to filter for me on ORBS Forks · · Score: 2

    I'm sick of seeing this argument:

    It's okay if you filter your own mail, but it's not okay for an ISP to filter mail for their users

    What kind of BS is that? It's called giving a proxy vote to your ISP because you trust that they'll do the right thing. It's impractical that every internet user will be able to individually filter his or her own email. My mom, for example, had no possible way to take advantage of ORBS by herself - so she went to an ISP that offered spam filtering to do it for her.

    On top of the technical need of someone to do the filtering for you, there's also the power that you give to anti-spammers... BY CHOICE. I want my ISP to unite the voices of its customers who are just sick of spam. I want my ISP to tell spammers to go to hell - because only by combining our voices under the umbrella of a representative can our shouts be heard by spammers and lawmakers alike.

  13. Re:Make a decision, folks on ORBS Forks · · Score: 2

    Explaining the details of why the commonly held evil of "censorship" doesn't apply when someone is indulging in their "free speech" on my dime feels like explaining the basics of the Theory of Evolution to a Creationist.

    What's the use? Belligerent ignorance just doesn't go away that easily.

  14. Re:Solid state on Seagate Claims New Drive Silent and Fastest · · Score: 2

    why has the development in the HD department been in a state of virtual stand-still?

    While you may be thinking that spinning platters are all the same, the technological advances used to eek out more and more bits per area have been astounding.

    I think that storage technology researchers in this field should be given a lot of credit for what they've accomplished.

    Maybe, instead of railing against them, you can lead us into the new solid-state technology revolution. It's simple, right?

  15. Re:Caveat Lector on Biotech and the Environment · · Score: 2

    Insects will eventually adapt to any measures taken, but using pesticides in severely limited cases severely limits the yield gains.

    To take your argument just one step further, if we don't *ever* use a pesticide for crops it will most likely remain effective at killing bugs in the laboratory forever. Of course, if you never use it, it's useless.

    The mistake you're making is in your implicit assumption that the genetic modifications to produce pesticides are intended to be permanent solutions. They're not. Genetic modifications of this nature are just a one-upsmanship solution, intended to give crops an edge for the time-being. Sure, the bugs will evolve, then the engineers will make further modifications, etc.

    The war goes on, but it doesn't mean we can't enjoy battle victories along the way.

  16. Re:hypocrisy on Microsoft Verdict Vacated · · Score: 2

    Tainting of the judicial process is serious business, even if actual resulting bias can't be proven.

    If a cop barges into someone's home without a warrant or probable cause, and discovers illegal activity, the judicial process is tainted, and the perpetrators will go unpunished. You may think that the illegal activity should be prosecuted regardless of how it was discovered, but that would go against one of the core tenets of our judicial system.

  17. No, I think you're missing the point... on Ask Carl Kadie About Censorship and Privacy at Colleges · · Score: 2

    I'd probably leave computer seizure to the police.

    A valid reason to read an email message is to see why you just sent out ten million copies of it through the campus mail server.

    The point I was making is that there are two sides to this. Casually dismissing the rights of some users is just as bad as casually dismissing the rights of administrators or casually dismissing the rights of other users who want nothing more than a stable network with moderate access to bandwidth and don't appreciate your "right" to decimate services while protecting your own assumptions of privacy.

    I've been a network administrator before. I know that it's not easy meeting the needs of your users, especially when one or two out of thousands are determined to fuck everything up.

    Give administrators the authority to take action to preserve the network for the significant majority. Hold network administrators accountable when they abuse their authority to play politics and advance their own selfish agendas. Hold users accountable who abuse their access privileges.

    Above all, avoid kneejerk reactions based solely on one narrow point of view when deciding large policy issues that affect a lot of people.

  18. Compatibility with FreeBSD on Apple to Include BSD in WWDC · · Score: 4
    I'd like to hear from any of the developers working on OSX.
    • How easy is it to build current FreeBSD software on X?
    • Are there any standard package managers included by default?
    • Does it come with all of the build tools needed so you can normally just do the "./configure; make" mambo?
    • Do you have to spend a lot of extra time tweaking your environment and downloading other libraries?
    • What are the biggest differences that you notice from the shell prompt between a typical FreeBSD installation and OSX?
  19. Re:It's not a post office or a library on Ask Carl Kadie About Censorship and Privacy at Colleges · · Score: 2

    As most people in the /. crowd are generally concerned with civil liberties and personal freedoms, I'm curious as to why you would make such a statement. Isn't the right to speak your mind, just as important as the right to speak it without being identified? People should be able to say whatever they want, and still have the OPTION of remaining anonymous if they are speaking about something personal and would like not to be unfairly singled out/identified.

    Nice straw man. I'm not advocating removing the right to post anonymously. It's just that most people who post anonymously do so to protect their karma, say something rude, etc. Useless crap. I have just as much of a right to *not* read useless crap as others have to post it. I also have the right to let them know that I won't be reading their useless crap.

  20. A few predictions that won't happen soon: on The End Of Books As We Know Them? · · Score: 2

    • Jesus will return to send sinners to hell for all time
    • Books will disappear
    • Moore's Law will cease to be "true" because of physical limits
    • We'll all drive flying cars to work and the mall
    • JonKatz will write interesting articles
    • We'll vacation on the moon
    • Terabytes of data will be stored on a credit card-sized device
    • Robots will do all of our house work
    • CmdrTaco will learn to spell
  21. It's not a post office or a library on Ask Carl Kadie About Censorship and Privacy at Colleges · · Score: 4
    Oddly enough, these sorts of policies are in place even at schools that would never dream of snooping on students' postal mail or the books they read at the library.

    That analogy can only go so far. The thing you have to remember with Internet access is that the potential for abuse is so great.

    How can you abuse the post office? Get a lot of mail? Since all mail delivered is paid for through postage, receiving more mail just means more business for them.

    How can you abuse the Library (assuming you don't just destroy books or not return them, which are against "the rules" anyway)? One person can only read so many books. You really would have to go out of your way to abuse a library so that it's noticeable to a large percentage of the libary's users.

    How can you abuse a computer network?
    • I could set up a couple of hard-core porn sites on the campus network and bring it to its knees.
    • I don't even need porn. I could decide to start mirroring Yahoo and /., or maybe CPAN and RedHat.
    • I could start spamming people with product literature for some piece of software that I've written, sending out tens of millions of pieces of email through the servers.
    • I could engage in DoS battles with others on the net.

    In short, networking technology is just ripe for abuse, and having been an administrator at an ISP, I know that there is always that 1% of the people out there who will greedily waste 90% of everyone's shared resources without even being embarrassed.

    Because of that high abuse potential, network administrators need policies that allow them take action when there's a problem. I admit that it's not an ideal situation, but for now it's a compromise position that a lot of us who are just innocently going about our business are willing to deal with.

    One solution might be to make up and enforce heavy-handed rules for every aspect of Internet use. Set things up so that all of the machines on campus have very small individual pipes to the backbone. Heavily restrict server space, mailbox size, and firewall the hell out of everything. Lock up the whole network nice and tight... but that sucks too.

    Face it, it's not an easy problem to solve. Shaking our fists in the air at network administrators who are just trying to maintain a stable network that is available for all of their users is unfair and counterproductive.

    It would be nice if eventually the technology automatically prevented some chances for abuse. It'd be nice if our culture embraced a system of ethics that would make such safeguards unnecessary.

    Instead of just carping at authority in a typically /. fashion, how about proposing ways that the systems can be improved so that these kinds of stiff measures aren't necessary. Why is there such a problem with acknowledging that there are two sides to every problem and that solutions of value can only be reached by respecting everyone's goals?
  22. Re:What I would like to see... on Are Unix GUIs All Wrong? · · Score: 2

    So, maybe what's needed is a good XML definition for passing information to and from programs. Done properly with the support of some basic system-level shared libraries, code for basic programs like "cat" shouldn't really increase. With a little extra work, even programs like cat could add meta-data to their output that could be interpreted in a variety of ways by various programs.

    That way, even the most bare-bones system could manage to display something intelligible from a meta-data-program's output; and the more capable systems could have a meaningful way to pipe data streams between GUI programs without needing to re-invent a protocol for every two programs that want to work together.

    Just a thought.

  23. Think forward, past silicon on Sourceforge + Hardware = OpenH? · · Score: 4

    Open Sourcing some hardware designs now is a good idea, and a good way to begin building up a knowledge base while working out the inevitable technical kinks such a system will encounter.

    Currently, it may seem that this knowledge base won't get much use, since most people don't have access to the specialty design, testing, and fabrication equipment needed to really crank out sophisticated circuit boards.

    Before too long, though, you'll be able to print circuits with polymers on polymer substrates with modified ink-jet printers.

    When that happens, we'll see a tremendous explosion in this segment of the industry, and Open Source will already be there.

  24. Ah, the joy of one-sided articles on Crackdown on M-Rated Videogames? · · Score: 2

    We will, however, leave you with this thought: we're chilled to the bone by the lengths to which the IDSA seems to be prepared to go to appease the U.S. Congress and the Federal Trade Commission.

    The article in its chilled indignation completely ignores whether or not limiting minors' exposure to violence is a good thing.

    I hate to admit it, since I enjoy a bit of violence in my movies and videogames: I'd like to believe that we can all handle any type of stimulus at any age, but it seems that study after study shows that kids exposed to violent media absorb that violence like sponges - acting it out in a myriad of ways against their peers.

    It seems a bit journalistically irresponsible to automatically take the side of the videogame industry's profits when there are other issues involved here.

  25. Re:Katz on Crackdown on M-Rated Videogames? · · Score: 1

    My /. reading experience improved so much when I disabled all articles from the great Jon Katz.

    YMMV