No, you would likely have died young because no private enterprise would have had the financial incentive to develop vaccines to protect you from childhood diseases.
That's absolutely correct, and something people who oppose bad things forget: without those bad things, there's absolutely zero chance that something good could be done.
This is because those bad things have slightly positive side effects that could never, ever, possibly occur without all the bad things happening as well. It simply inconceivable that someone can develop anything that is an alternative to something reprehensable.
As you say, nobody could ever invent an alternative to the patent system that rewards people for inventing and innovating useful things without forcing anyone who invents the same thing independently to pay royalties or leave the business altogether. It's simply impossible. There can't possibly be alternatives. No. Absolutely not. If we abolish patents, why, the entire world will end as we know it. Nobody will ever develop anything. Ever again.
This is wrong, the aim of patents is to offer inventors an incentive to open up their knowledge (a patent application is just that - describing how it works) to society in exchange for a protection of that knowledge (that only they can use it or license it out).
Well, yes and no. It's a part of the intent behind patents, indeed it's the "moral contract" that's used to stifle opposition to patents, but the primary purpose is to encourage invention of things that would otherwise be expensive to invent. That is, the majority of companies used patents to get time to recover the costs of inventing whatever it is they invented. Nobody patents their work because they're looking for a way to disclose what they invented. If you're confused by this comment, look at it from the other side for a moment (the position of the inventor) and ask yourself why they support (or not support) the continuation of patents. Then ask if this "other side" and society are really distinct. Further, it really doesn't affect my argument, which did actually cover disclosure.
There was a reason it was the dark ages.
We're trying to ensure things are invented today, and that there is full disclosure. The argument "We must have patents otherwise things will NEVER BE INVENTED or THERE WILL NEVER BE DISCLOSURE" is a nonsense. How is saying "We will give money to the first person to come up with a way of doing X who tells us how it works" going to lead to a new Dark Ages? That's ridiculous!
Patents suck. There ARE alternatives. You CAN reward people for inventing things without giving them monopolies on things other people are perfectly capable of inventing. I don't see why this principle should only apply to software either. I don't see how it could be fair that, say, if I spend a few days wiring up a plug in a particular way, finding that's the safest way of doing it, that I should be forbidden from distributing devices based upon that because someone else I've never heard of did it first.
Here's a better alternative: as patents are inherently unfair (two people can independently invent something, spending the same amount of time and resources, and patents means the one who gets to the patent office first can use the fact this happened to destroy the second - and this isn't a bug, this is the fundamental definition of patents. We've always limited (until the early eighties) the scope of patents to machinery specifically because of this unfairness), let's get rid of them altogether.
The aim of patents is to encourage the creation of new inventions by rewarding someone who comes up with something new. However, it's notoriously bad at determining whether someone who created that "something-new" has created something that would have been come up with anyway.
We can fix this. Create a fund. Propose inventions that'd be genuinely useful. Use the fund to reward people who make these inventions (as long as they disclose them, of course.) If they want, they can wait up to twenty years before disclosing what they did (but they'll have to wait twenty years for the money too - but as long as they were first to invent and make their invention available, they'll get it.)
And I hate to sound like a free-market libertarian nut, but I seriously suspect that you wouldn't even need government to fund such a thing. Charities could put up the rewards for, say, important and necessary drugs. Computer companies - for the few algorithms we actually need - will be more than happy to contribute to funds for new and important algorithms. It's hard to see what useful inventions we need that invention reward funds would never come out for.
Patents, at least applied to machines, computer software, and business processes, are far from an ideal. They're not fair. They're no longer practical as a useful disclosure mechanism (when was the last time anyone tried to solve a programming problem by searching old patents?) They're used, time and time again, to create artificial barriers to interoperability and to leech off innovators. They need to go.
At a guess, they're demanding $100,000 as a deterent? I mean, be honest, if the most you could be fined was the price of the CD or DVD you copied, then that's not a deterent, you'll either get caught, and have to pay what you would have had to pay anyway had you and your friends not been freeloaders, or you'll not and save money.
Paramount would probably argue, with some justification, that the first person who distributes the DVD on a P2P network may have caused that level of damage anyway. If it ends up going to a little over 10,000 people, directly and indirectly, then that's potentially 10,000 less DVDs sold. (Yeah yeah, I know Slashdotters would only ever download a movie to check out the director, fully intending to buy original DVDs of that director's complete range of movies if they like it...)
Technically (if you stopped distributing upon noitice from copyright holder) you have seen no copyright statement so you are not guilty.
I don't believe this is the case. The copyright notice is meant to put the fear of God into you. It isn't a notice whose presense or absense determines whether you can freely copy and redistribute the copies to millions of anonymous strangers.
In the US, as in most parts of the developed world, copyright is automatic when you create something. You don't have to assert it, and with a few, smaller than most people think, exceptions, anyone who copies your work without explicit authorization, whether they do so knowing it's copyrighted or not, is in breach of copyright.
The exceptions are "fair use", which is a woolly term but generally (but not always) applies to things like time-shifting (recording for later, one-time, use), copying that's a required part of using (such as installing software on a hard disk), and any conflict between copyright and the first amendment (such as parody or reviews), and copying some things that have been ruled uncopyrightable (such as passwords - see Lexmark's inkjet cartridges case.)
So yeah, relying upon the lack of a copyright notice does not protect you against copyright lawsuits. If it did, you wouldn't see the RIAA successfully suing so many P2P users - all they'd have to do to defend themselves is claim they didn't have the original CDs, after all, and the RIAA wouldn't have a case against them.
Songs are and have always been just commercials for live performers
No, they're not. It may be something the average copyright-hating slashbot repeats over and over again, but that doesn't make it right.
I value pre-recorded music. I like having a library of recorded music. I love the pleasure of being able to pick a piece of music and listen to it. I love the pleasure of listening to music.
It's wonderful that live performance can add another dimension to music, but, in practice, it's the music I'm buying, not watching someone standing on a stage yelling into a microphone with a bunch of other people. Indeed, live performance is often value added not by the performers but by the atmosphere - which is a product of the other paying ticket buyers.
You may not care about the music. You may consider a concert a "product", but if you do, consider it much the same way as a cruise where you and the other passengers are given oars. I'd rather take the ship with the engines myself, even if it does lack the atmosphere.
And I'd rather pay artists to create new music than to perform it.
No, it hasn't been debunked. I respect Ars a lot, but they're just plain wrong. They're arguing that "Desktop Accessories" is too liberal an idea for an implementation to be considered a rip-off of it. However, even there, they use an overly liberal definition that includes, for example, the existing OS X "Calculator.app", when in fact that app is far from being an example of Desktop Accessories, the separately managed set of basic tools that live outside of the Applications/Windows paradigm. Calculator.app does not appear in my Apple window. It cannot be made to work that way. It doesn't appear and disappear any faster than a normal application. It isn't managed as part of a group of documentless apps.
The only other platform that ever re-implemented accessories, before Konfabulator, was GEM. Outside of that, the nearest I can think of would be the TSR tools for MS DOS that tried to achieve something similar, but lived outside of a GUI (which most would argue would be a fundamental part of desktop accessories as an idea.) So Ars's contention that this is a generic technology that somehow "lived in the public consciousness" is simply nonsense. After GEM, which very obviously copied Apple, there were no new implementations of the concept until Konfabulator came along. The technology, until a year or two ago when Konfabulator was ported to Windows, never existed for Windows. I've never seen it implemented in X11.
What Konfabulator brought to the table was HTML and Javascript. Beyond that, the apps it supports are barely different in functionality from those Mac OS 1 supported. This is certainly an improvement - part of the reason desktop accessories practically died out is that they were a pain in the arse to actually develop. The original implementation allowed for, say, code in Pascal, but in practice, space limitations meant pure assembler was, realisticly, the only way they could be implemented. Space limiations, over time, became less of an issue, but only after developers had ceased even looking at the technology.
Are you going anywhere with this? You've yet to actually make whatever point you're trying to make in any meaningful manner. You've currently suggested "I wonder if we can chalk this down, to a certain extent, to the religious nature. I'm not a great fan of the whole "We need to appeal to the Christian Right for this movie" thing" has nothing to do with any film you've seen.
Well, possibly, but it is relevent to the film under discussion, which is a religious allegory, based as it is upon a book which is a religious allegory, is being marketed to Christian groups, appears to have been made, in part, to appeal to the Christian right audience that enjoyed The Passion of the Christ (as evidenced by Disney's choice of marketing agency.)
And I think it is reasonable to suggest that that particular audience being marketed to would be awfully upset if Disney had taken liberties with the book and, say, turned it into The Lion King.
Is your problem that you don't believe the film, or the book, is a religious allegory? Or is there some other objection you have to the comment?
From what you're saying, the two will, in practice, be neck and neck (because reading between the lines, Sony is making a lot of promises, but we don't know if the reality will match. I didn't like the way you airily dismissed MS's online features either, that strikes me as increasingly important. Hard to find a PC game without online features these days.)
One's an abusive monopolist in the computer software field, the other is an abusive content producer whose latest trick was to sneak malware into the PCs of its customers.
Nintendo's always produced perfectly servicable consoles. I'm sure the Revolution will be a valid contender. It might, like the Gamecube, end up in third place, but I've yet to meet anyone who bought a Gamecube who was actually unhappy with it. The PS2 and X-Box never got that kind of approval. I'll wait for the Revolution. If it's "Good enough", it's good enough. Know what I mean?
It's a movie called "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe". It's what this article is about. It's based upon a book of the same name by CS Lewis, and is an allegory about Jesus (presented in the film as a Lion called "Aslan"), his sacrifice, and resurrection. The film was made by Disney, who have hired the same PR company as Mel Gibson did for The Passion of the Christ. That PR company has been going around Churches and other Christian groups throughout America to promote the movie, explaining the themes and what the makers, and CS Lewis, were trying to do.
It doesn't need to answer those questions, just ensure you're asking them. Remember, this is one of a series of movies based upon one of a series of novels, and yes, just like Star Wars, there are prequels (well, one, from memory, and the book sucked, but we'll see.)
Right now, all you need to know is that the White Witch is Evil, and Aslan is Good.
There have actually been a lot of (and largely) faithful conversions lately, HHTTG, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (hey, I included "largely", yes, I know the ending and moral is different, but the rest of the film is pure Roald Dahl) to name but two.
Yes, while it's a long time since I read it, I have to confirm Wardrobe is very, from memory, faithful to the novel.
I'm (no longer) a particularly great fan of fantasy (I thought the Lord of the Rings trilogy sucked, quite honestly, but that's because it's just not my cup of tea. Mind you, while I loved The Hobbit I never got into the novel either. The Narnia series, however, I lapped up as a child), but so far as I could see it was a good, honest, and well done conversion of the novel. The first half was a little off with the timing, I don't think the novel translated to film terribly well (which is not to say that some of the best scenes weren't in the first half), but the second half worked pretty well. My fiance, who was the last person I expected to enjoy the film, said there were scenes that gave her chills. The battle scene was certainly excellent. There was stuff they managed to pull off that shouldn't have worked but just did.
So yeah, you don't have to worry about a book you fell in love with being ripped to shreds under Disney's knife this time.
I wonder if we can chalk this down, to a certain extent, to the religious nature. I'm not a great fan of the whole "We need to appeal to the Christian Right for this movie" thing (not least because Mel Gibson's underhanded "bash the left" campaign to publicise The Passion was, well, underhanded and divisive), but if you're converting a novel with a Christian sub-text, you can't very well get away with butchering it or changing the moral without knowing people are going to call for boycotts. In that respect, the conversion probably benefitted from the religious angle in a way I'd never expect. This atheist but childhood fan of CS Lewis, at least, is glad that happened.
I'm going to make a guess the answer's "Yes", and therefore the GGP's (and other's) complaints that Emacs is being "held up" because of RMS's desire to see the official stamp of approval only on an as-bug-free-as-practically-possible version are largely bogus RMS bashing (and the bashing of a principle that ought to be what everyone tries to work toward.) If I'm wrong, then I'll gladly withdraw the complaint.
Essentially, I'm glad someone cares about bugs. With this, as with a lot of RMS "controversies", I'm finding it's RMS talking sense, and his critics being downright unfair. I don't always agree with the guy - hell, I think copyright, especially for creative works, has a role to play in society - but more often than not, the complainers are the ones being ideological and knee-jerk.
Does Judith Miller still work for the New York Times? While technically she "retired", isn't it pretty obvious she was pushed? Are there many journalism outfits (newspapers, agencies, etc) that would hire her? Wasn't she shunned by her collegues, despite going to jail to uphold, on the face of it, an important principle of journalism?
I think the GGP was largely correct, and Judith Miller is an excellent example. There are some exceptions, Fox springs to mind, but generally journalists should be aware that being caught in a lie or in deliberate bias (in Miller's case, this is what's hanged her. I have no doubt if she'd gone to jail to protect a source and not been seen as a partisan hack she'd have been defended by her collegues, not shunned) is a surefire route to losing your job.
Judith Miller is just about the worst example you could pick to discredit the argument of the GGP.
You know, I see the American government being attacked regularly on Slashdot by the liberals and left (much to the chagrin of the wingnuts), but it's usually the whole of France, et al, that gets attacked by the right-wing element. In fact, I don't think I can recall ever seeing a genuinely anti-American/anti-America rant on Slashdot. I don't doubt they exist, but they're so few and far between.
So, yeah, it's not a fair comparison. The Slashdot right wing is more obnoxious, by far, and the bias is against those damned furry-ners, not just obnoxious governments.
You just proved you do. Someone points out that a lot of right-wingers post simplistic, stupid, pro-US-government anti-everyone-else rants, and you immediately get offended and assume he's criticising YOU PERSONALLY.
Funnily enough, this seems to be a trait of most right-wingers I know.
I'm sure that's true of the movie or song they're trying to download - you've set yourself a specific target, you're going to try and solve it, even if it takes you all day. The long term effect, though, is likely to be that people see the P2P network as less useful as a source of music.
Put it this way: you've just heard a song you like on the radio, and you want a copy. Do you, pre-polluter, go to Kazster, perform a quick search, look at the 17 rips available, download the 192kbps MP3, and five minutes later have the song, or do you go onto Amazon, search for the CD, add it to your shopping basket, check out, and 20 minutes later have an email confirming your order with the CD arriving 3 days-3 weeks later?
Now, post polluter, do you: go to Beartella, perform a quick search, look at the 48 rips available, pick one, knowing, in the gut of your stomach, it's likely to be bogus, download it, play it, it sucks, download next one, it sucks, download next one, won't start, download next one, is this a joke? Download the next one... and an hour or three later, have a 96kbps MP3 that happens to have the music and be what you're prepared to settle on because, damn it, you're not downloading any more tonight, or do you go to Amazon.com, search for the CD, add it to your shopping basket, check out, and 20 minutes later have an email confirming your order, with you sitting back and thinking "It's on the way!"?
In the latter scenario, you'd have to be increasingly desperate and/or cheap not to see Amazon.com (or equivalent) as a more enjoyable way of getting your music.
I'm not suggesting this company was particularly successful at making P2P networks like that, but the whole "Make P2P piracy a complete Pain in the Arse" scenario is one that could work if they put enough effort and resources into it. If I were evil, and I were head of the RIAA, I'd offer to knock down some of those fines I'm imposing on P2P pirates in exchange for them participating in a mass polluting.
We must read different dictionaries. Innovate isn't a synonym for "invent", even if a lot of people on Slashdot use it to mean that. If it was, why use it in the first place? Why not just use the word "invent"?
Please don't remove the ability to easily explain an idea from the English language by redefining a word to mean something an existing, well-known, word does perfectly well.
Patents aren't issued on the basis of being innovative, just on being original and being the first invention. That's part of the problem: a company can invent something, keep it quiet so only patent trawlers would be aware of it, wait for someone to invent the same thing innovatively (eg. actually put it into production and let people have it), and then sue the pants off them.
This is one of the reasons Microsoft's views on patents aren't as simple as the average Slashdotter would think. As a company that does sell what it makes, original or otherwise, it's threatened by patents, some quite obvious to people in the field (such as the Eolas patent on plugins.) And Free Software, while under threat from them, isn't as under threat as Microsoft would hope. Only in the case of true malice or a fear free distribution is competing with royalty-payers is it worth a patent holder enforcing patent claims against a Free Software programmer - they're better off going to distributors and sellers of the software concerned. Microsoft can use patents to bash Free Software, but it's well aware the entire scheme is a double-edged sword.
I was going for Funny, and I went for fried chicken because it's relatively neutral and inoffensive as opposed to jokes about Indian/Chinese/etc restaurants that are the other traditional butts of these kinds of comments.
The major reason for the domestication of cats, as I understand it, was pest control. Be it mice or cockroaches, they're very good at that, and there's a fairly large amount of history showing this usage. Dogs, conversely, were widely used to help with hunting.
I can imagine cats and dogs were eaten as a last resort, but I don't believe that was ever the primary reason for keeping them by the vast majority of owners. More a "Shit! We're out of food! Eat the cat!" rather than "Hmm, what if there's a famine in 150BC like the prophets were forecasting on the Weather Temple last night? Better get a cat, just in case."
Slashdot Mirror
This is because those bad things have slightly positive side effects that could never, ever, possibly occur without all the bad things happening as well. It simply inconceivable that someone can develop anything that is an alternative to something reprehensable.
As you say, nobody could ever invent an alternative to the patent system that rewards people for inventing and innovating useful things without forcing anyone who invents the same thing independently to pay royalties or leave the business altogether. It's simply impossible. There can't possibly be alternatives. No. Absolutely not. If we abolish patents, why, the entire world will end as we know it. Nobody will ever develop anything. Ever again.
Patents suck. There ARE alternatives. You CAN reward people for inventing things without giving them monopolies on things other people are perfectly capable of inventing. I don't see why this principle should only apply to software either. I don't see how it could be fair that, say, if I spend a few days wiring up a plug in a particular way, finding that's the safest way of doing it, that I should be forbidden from distributing devices based upon that because someone else I've never heard of did it first.
The aim of patents is to encourage the creation of new inventions by rewarding someone who comes up with something new. However, it's notoriously bad at determining whether someone who created that "something-new" has created something that would have been come up with anyway.
We can fix this. Create a fund. Propose inventions that'd be genuinely useful. Use the fund to reward people who make these inventions (as long as they disclose them, of course.) If they want, they can wait up to twenty years before disclosing what they did (but they'll have to wait twenty years for the money too - but as long as they were first to invent and make their invention available, they'll get it.)
And I hate to sound like a free-market libertarian nut, but I seriously suspect that you wouldn't even need government to fund such a thing. Charities could put up the rewards for, say, important and necessary drugs. Computer companies - for the few algorithms we actually need - will be more than happy to contribute to funds for new and important algorithms. It's hard to see what useful inventions we need that invention reward funds would never come out for.
Patents, at least applied to machines, computer software, and business processes, are far from an ideal. They're not fair. They're no longer practical as a useful disclosure mechanism (when was the last time anyone tried to solve a programming problem by searching old patents?) They're used, time and time again, to create artificial barriers to interoperability and to leech off innovators. They need to go.
Paramount would probably argue, with some justification, that the first person who distributes the DVD on a P2P network may have caused that level of damage anyway. If it ends up going to a little over 10,000 people, directly and indirectly, then that's potentially 10,000 less DVDs sold. (Yeah yeah, I know Slashdotters would only ever download a movie to check out the director, fully intending to buy original DVDs of that director's complete range of movies if they like it...)
In the US, as in most parts of the developed world, copyright is automatic when you create something. You don't have to assert it, and with a few, smaller than most people think, exceptions, anyone who copies your work without explicit authorization, whether they do so knowing it's copyrighted or not, is in breach of copyright.
The exceptions are "fair use", which is a woolly term but generally (but not always) applies to things like time-shifting (recording for later, one-time, use), copying that's a required part of using (such as installing software on a hard disk), and any conflict between copyright and the first amendment (such as parody or reviews), and copying some things that have been ruled uncopyrightable (such as passwords - see Lexmark's inkjet cartridges case.)
So yeah, relying upon the lack of a copyright notice does not protect you against copyright lawsuits. If it did, you wouldn't see the RIAA successfully suing so many P2P users - all they'd have to do to defend themselves is claim they didn't have the original CDs, after all, and the RIAA wouldn't have a case against them.
I value pre-recorded music. I like having a library of recorded music. I love the pleasure of being able to pick a piece of music and listen to it. I love the pleasure of listening to music.
It's wonderful that live performance can add another dimension to music, but, in practice, it's the music I'm buying, not watching someone standing on a stage yelling into a microphone with a bunch of other people. Indeed, live performance is often value added not by the performers but by the atmosphere - which is a product of the other paying ticket buyers.
You may not care about the music. You may consider a concert a "product", but if you do, consider it much the same way as a cruise where you and the other passengers are given oars. I'd rather take the ship with the engines myself, even if it does lack the atmosphere.
And I'd rather pay artists to create new music than to perform it.
The only other platform that ever re-implemented accessories, before Konfabulator, was GEM. Outside of that, the nearest I can think of would be the TSR tools for MS DOS that tried to achieve something similar, but lived outside of a GUI (which most would argue would be a fundamental part of desktop accessories as an idea.) So Ars's contention that this is a generic technology that somehow "lived in the public consciousness" is simply nonsense. After GEM, which very obviously copied Apple, there were no new implementations of the concept until Konfabulator came along. The technology, until a year or two ago when Konfabulator was ported to Windows, never existed for Windows. I've never seen it implemented in X11.
What Konfabulator brought to the table was HTML and Javascript. Beyond that, the apps it supports are barely different in functionality from those Mac OS 1 supported. This is certainly an improvement - part of the reason desktop accessories practically died out is that they were a pain in the arse to actually develop. The original implementation allowed for, say, code in Pascal, but in practice, space limitations meant pure assembler was, realisticly, the only way they could be implemented. Space limiations, over time, became less of an issue, but only after developers had ceased even looking at the technology.
Surely you're not proposing that writing them in HTML and JavaScript makes them an entirely different thing?
It can save you $130 if you don't particularly want to upgrade to Tiger and have no need for Tiger's other, non-Konfabulator-like, features...
Well, possibly, but it is relevent to the film under discussion, which is a religious allegory, based as it is upon a book which is a religious allegory, is being marketed to Christian groups, appears to have been made, in part, to appeal to the Christian right audience that enjoyed The Passion of the Christ (as evidenced by Disney's choice of marketing agency.)
And I think it is reasonable to suggest that that particular audience being marketed to would be awfully upset if Disney had taken liberties with the book and, say, turned it into The Lion King.
Is your problem that you don't believe the film, or the book, is a religious allegory? Or is there some other objection you have to the comment?
From what you're saying, the two will, in practice, be neck and neck (because reading between the lines, Sony is making a lot of promises, but we don't know if the reality will match. I didn't like the way you airily dismissed MS's online features either, that strikes me as increasingly important. Hard to find a PC game without online features these days.)
One's an abusive monopolist in the computer software field, the other is an abusive content producer whose latest trick was to sneak malware into the PCs of its customers.
Nintendo's always produced perfectly servicable consoles. I'm sure the Revolution will be a valid contender. It might, like the Gamecube, end up in third place, but I've yet to meet anyone who bought a Gamecube who was actually unhappy with it. The PS2 and X-Box never got that kind of approval. I'll wait for the Revolution. If it's "Good enough", it's good enough. Know what I mean?
It's a movie called "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe". It's what this article is about. It's based upon a book of the same name by CS Lewis, and is an allegory about Jesus (presented in the film as a Lion called "Aslan"), his sacrifice, and resurrection. The film was made by Disney, who have hired the same PR company as Mel Gibson did for The Passion of the Christ. That PR company has been going around Churches and other Christian groups throughout America to promote the movie, explaining the themes and what the makers, and CS Lewis, were trying to do.
Right now, all you need to know is that the White Witch is Evil, and Aslan is Good.
Yes, while it's a long time since I read it, I have to confirm Wardrobe is very, from memory, faithful to the novel.
I'm (no longer) a particularly great fan of fantasy (I thought the Lord of the Rings trilogy sucked, quite honestly, but that's because it's just not my cup of tea. Mind you, while I loved The Hobbit I never got into the novel either. The Narnia series, however, I lapped up as a child), but so far as I could see it was a good, honest, and well done conversion of the novel. The first half was a little off with the timing, I don't think the novel translated to film terribly well (which is not to say that some of the best scenes weren't in the first half), but the second half worked pretty well. My fiance, who was the last person I expected to enjoy the film, said there were scenes that gave her chills. The battle scene was certainly excellent. There was stuff they managed to pull off that shouldn't have worked but just did.
So yeah, you don't have to worry about a book you fell in love with being ripped to shreds under Disney's knife this time.
I wonder if we can chalk this down, to a certain extent, to the religious nature. I'm not a great fan of the whole "We need to appeal to the Christian Right for this movie" thing (not least because Mel Gibson's underhanded "bash the left" campaign to publicise The Passion was, well, underhanded and divisive), but if you're converting a novel with a Christian sub-text, you can't very well get away with butchering it or changing the moral without knowing people are going to call for boycotts. In that respect, the conversion probably benefitted from the religious angle in a way I'd never expect. This atheist but childhood fan of CS Lewis, at least, is glad that happened.
Essentially, I'm glad someone cares about bugs. With this, as with a lot of RMS "controversies", I'm finding it's RMS talking sense, and his critics being downright unfair. I don't always agree with the guy - hell, I think copyright, especially for creative works, has a role to play in society - but more often than not, the complainers are the ones being ideological and knee-jerk.
In the mean time, is it possible for non-developers to download Emacs 22, say, from CVS?
I think the GGP was largely correct, and Judith Miller is an excellent example. There are some exceptions, Fox springs to mind, but generally journalists should be aware that being caught in a lie or in deliberate bias (in Miller's case, this is what's hanged her. I have no doubt if she'd gone to jail to protect a source and not been seen as a partisan hack she'd have been defended by her collegues, not shunned) is a surefire route to losing your job.
Judith Miller is just about the worst example you could pick to discredit the argument of the GGP.
So, yeah, it's not a fair comparison. The Slashdot right wing is more obnoxious, by far, and the bias is against those damned furry-ners, not just obnoxious governments.
Funnily enough, this seems to be a trait of most right-wingers I know.
Put it this way: you've just heard a song you like on the radio, and you want a copy. Do you, pre-polluter, go to Kazster, perform a quick search, look at the 17 rips available, download the 192kbps MP3, and five minutes later have the song, or do you go onto Amazon, search for the CD, add it to your shopping basket, check out, and 20 minutes later have an email confirming your order with the CD arriving 3 days-3 weeks later?
Now, post polluter, do you: go to Beartella, perform a quick search, look at the 48 rips available, pick one, knowing, in the gut of your stomach, it's likely to be bogus, download it, play it, it sucks, download next one, it sucks, download next one, won't start, download next one, is this a joke? Download the next one... and an hour or three later, have a 96kbps MP3 that happens to have the music and be what you're prepared to settle on because, damn it, you're not downloading any more tonight, or do you go to Amazon.com, search for the CD, add it to your shopping basket, check out, and 20 minutes later have an email confirming your order, with you sitting back and thinking "It's on the way!"?
In the latter scenario, you'd have to be increasingly desperate and/or cheap not to see Amazon.com (or equivalent) as a more enjoyable way of getting your music.
I'm not suggesting this company was particularly successful at making P2P networks like that, but the whole "Make P2P piracy a complete Pain in the Arse" scenario is one that could work if they put enough effort and resources into it. If I were evil, and I were head of the RIAA, I'd offer to knock down some of those fines I'm imposing on P2P pirates in exchange for them participating in a mass polluting.
Please don't remove the ability to easily explain an idea from the English language by redefining a word to mean something an existing, well-known, word does perfectly well.
Patents aren't issued on the basis of being innovative, just on being original and being the first invention. That's part of the problem: a company can invent something, keep it quiet so only patent trawlers would be aware of it, wait for someone to invent the same thing innovatively (eg. actually put it into production and let people have it), and then sue the pants off them.
This is one of the reasons Microsoft's views on patents aren't as simple as the average Slashdotter would think. As a company that does sell what it makes, original or otherwise, it's threatened by patents, some quite obvious to people in the field (such as the Eolas patent on plugins.) And Free Software, while under threat from them, isn't as under threat as Microsoft would hope. Only in the case of true malice or a fear free distribution is competing with royalty-payers is it worth a patent holder enforcing patent claims against a Free Software programmer - they're better off going to distributors and sellers of the software concerned. Microsoft can use patents to bash Free Software, but it's well aware the entire scheme is a double-edged sword.
The major reason for the domestication of cats, as I understand it, was pest control. Be it mice or cockroaches, they're very good at that, and there's a fairly large amount of history showing this usage. Dogs, conversely, were widely used to help with hunting.
I can imagine cats and dogs were eaten as a last resort, but I don't believe that was ever the primary reason for keeping them by the vast majority of owners. More a "Shit! We're out of food! Eat the cat!" rather than "Hmm, what if there's a famine in 150BC like the prophets were forecasting on the Weather Temple last night? Better get a cat, just in case."
(I'm probably showing my naivety here and am about to get a lesson in how a Nashville Pussy differs from, say, a Portugese Breakfast)
Plus cats taste better, as customers to your local fried chicken outlet will attest.