1) The bill appears to "exempt" some things from electronic delivery. Does this mean that companies don't have to send these things over E-mail, or that they must not (meaning, therefore, that they must continue to send them using more conventional means)? If it's the latter, then I don't see why this is so bad.
2) The article talks about sending things in formats that people might not be able to read. That's what ASCII text is for. Warranties and such generally don't need anything in the way of special formatting. Perhaps that format should be required in the bill; it appears not to be.
3) What the hell is wrong with the colors on this message? No offense to whosever idea this was, but the usual green and white looks much better.
Or is this a sign of user-configurable colors to come?
Then again, I don't think anyone's added 3D-accel support for anything under LinuxPPC anyway. Anyone know what current plans are (I know Glide's out until the person who ports it gets a PPC box to work on, but what about ATI chips at least?).
Everyone who has a direct part in this whole episode is a complete, total, blithering idiot.
The motion picture was idiotic because... well... they're idiots. A bunch of profiteering, paranoid gluttons who don't yet get that they're in no danger whatsoever.
The DeCSS group was idiotic by including code to copy the movie into their software. Granted, it's Open-Source so anyone could modify it to make copies, but it's a symbolic thing. There's no need to copy the movie to a hard drive unless your machine is too slow to play back a DVD in software (in which case the money you spent on a DVD drive would have been better spent on upgrades anyway). If you've got hardware (which we also need drivers for) then there's no problem anyway. Was DeCSS trying to piss off the industry?
That said, I downloaded the software, and even though I don't have a DVD drive I intend to keep the code, and probably mirror it for a while.
Yes, you're right. IRQ's are good, but they have to be done right ro be good. What do I mean? I mean auto-configuring IRQ's, such that there are no conflicts but the user never has to worry about configuring them.
By the way, Macs have done that for years. I see no advantage to hand-configuring them; more than a handful of PC magazines have even commented that Apple did it right. I wonder why the PC industry has yet to catch up.
Look. I'll admit that the "Russian-made" line seems to have come from absolutely nowhere. But just because you don't immediately understand something is no reason to immediately and irrationally assume the author meant to defame anyone, much less an entire nation. This said, I'd like to know what he meant by it myself.
Perhaps I'm the clueless one, but why would such a law be clueless? All it does is require the makers of software to document all of the features therein. As far as I can tell, that's a Good Thing. How is this bad?
Well, I guess I'll be deleting RealPlayer from the Mac side of my machine (never found a version for LinuxPPC or I'd delete it from the Linux side too). It never worked all that well for me anyway. I guess I'll be sticking with QuickTime for my streaming video needs (there's still rumors of Apple doing a QuickTime Linux port; anyone know what ever became of those?)
Anyone know of a program to convert.rm files to MPEG (audio and video both), on any platform? I've seen programs to convert other formats to.rm, but never one to convert.rm to anything else.
Now it's working again. Looks like it wasn't intentional after all, and M$ found and fixed the bug before people could scream (except me of course). Sorry about that.
Other people have mentioned the poll at http://www.msnbc.com/news/329416.asp#survey. However, I went to take a loot. If you're using both Netscape and MacOS, you can't vote in it (IE on MacOS seems to work fine).
What other combinations of browsers and OS can't see the poll, I wonder?
What I want to see now is for Microsoft to try and rebut this document (which is quite an interesting, if long, read). It's going to be great fun watching them squirm out of the fact that yes, they have in fact acted dishonorably, so much so that something needs to be done to bring them back into line.
Oh, please. Any computer that comes with a DVD drive is fast enough to play DVD-movies in realtime; consumers wouldn't stand for it otherwise. Most do this through hardware, which is why we need to get drivers for that hardware up and running.
Many computers anymore could actually do this in software, though it'd eat most of the CPU time. Then again, if you're watching movies it's pretty unlikely you're doing any other work.
What are you trying to do, add a DVD drive to a Pentium-200? While I suppose you could try it, the money would be better spent on a real DVD player and an upgrade for the computer.
Oh yeah; before I forget, do you have any idea how long it would take to convert a 4-gigabyte movie file to something like, say, an AVI or MPEG, which woulf come out larger still?
That's the problem with the industry. So the encryption was cracked. Big deal. DVD piracy is still impractical. One DVD-RAM disk costs more than a DVD movie. The storage space to hold just one DVD movie on a hard drive will set you back by as much as ten movies or more. A DVD drive costs more than a DVD player. And not enough people have DVD drives that you could recoup costs by selling pirated copies, which you'd never be able to sell anyway because you'd have to put them on DVD-RAM media (4-odd gigabytes is still a huge pain to download even on the most high-bandwidth connections), which are already more expensive than the movies, so to make any profit you'd have to price them higher still, and no one's stupid enough to buy that when the movie can be had legitimately for less.
In other words, you've got four cost-related factors which kill DVD piracy's practicality, at least for the moment. And by the time these are nullified, computers will be powerful enough that the encryption would have been cracked anyway, if it's really as weak as the crackers said.
Please explain how ActiveX is superior to Netscape's plugin system. While you're at it, you should try to explain exactly why a system so insecure it can cause web pages to totally erase your hard drive could possibly be superior to one which did everything else ActiveX could do as concerns Web pages, but didn't let pages erase your drives.
1) Everyone, get a copy of the source. If you can legally serve it up (meaning no patent issues on the encryption) do it. Basically, spread the information so far and wide that it's useless to go after anyone, because it would take more money than even the entertainment inductry has.
2) Figure out how to start a good legal defense fund. DVD on Linux would be a Good Thing.
This said, I do have a few issues with the people who cracked the decryption. Making it possible to save the unencrypted movie on a hard disk was unnecessary and uncalled for. It's possible to rite a player without that capability, and that's what they should have done, at least at first. Were they trying to get into trouble by writing that capability into their software right off the bat? And yes, I know it's Open-Source, so someone else could easily have written software to copy the DVD movie. But the people who cracked the decryption shouldn't have been the ones to do that, if only as a gesture of goodwill towards the industry. The capability would always be there for someone who wants to do it, and the original hackers come out of it looking at least tolerable to the indistry.
Both sides are in the wrong this time, albeit in different ways. But I'm sticking by the hackers, who are wrong only by virtue of a rather shortsighted design mistake, rather than the industry which, which is wrong due to undue technophobia, a healthy dose of greed, and the inability to see that copying DVD's to another DVD is pointless since a single DVD-RAM disk costs more than most DVD movies. It's cheaper just to buy it legitimately, so piracy is pretty much pointless.
Except, I suppose, for potentially wrecking the idiotic "tiered-release" schedule the entertainment industry uses. But that's no big loss.
I always thought I'd be happy when this day arrived. For everything Microsoft has done, it deserves to be smacked down hard, and I hope it is. It's done things that, if it were a human being, would have landed it in jail years ago. Simply because it's a corporation (which is treated not unlike a person under US law) doesn't make it exempt from justice.
But there's doubt in my mind, I suppose. Not in Microsoft's guilt, mind you; they're guilty as charged a thousand times over. My doubt stems mainly from the fact that, after all, it is the US Government that's trying this case. I'm afraid they'll go too far and screw up the industry even more. The hell of it is, I'm not even sure what "too far" is yet. I suppose we'll see tonight...
I don't understand your post. I have yet to see Stallman actually advocate breaking the law as concerns software piracy.
He wanted to be able to share his software legally, and saw this as a basic right. The then-current paradigm did not allow him to do this. So he decided to come up with new software under a new paradigm which did allow him to do it legally. It meant he couldn't use software developed under the old ways, but that didn't bother him.
This is why I stay out of e-commerce, at least for now. I'll buy stuff, but I tend to avoid the lure of such ventures. They're really hot now, but when the boom ends I'll be stuck with something which isn't that much more profitable than a regular store, and not quite as fun either.
But hey, I'm a geek. Specifically, I'm a coder. And as long as there are computers, people will need someone to make programs to run on them. When the Net boom ends, I'll code other things. It's not like the Net will disappear after the boom anyway; it just won't be a wowie-zowie-look-how-neato-keen-this-is thing like it is. It'll become like television is now (scary thought, I know); something that's such an integral part of our lives that we take it for granted. If I asked who on Slashdot could go without any television for a year or has already done so, I'd imagine I could count the responses on one hand. The same will be true of the Net; it'll still be there, it just won't be "special" like it is now.
And any TV exec will tell you there's lots of money to be made in that sort of thing.
Someone suggested making a page ranking users by Karma. I'm not so sure that's a good idea; it would turn Slashdot into a contest. Granted, it's a good contest, seeing as you can only win by being fair in moderation and thought-provoking in posts, but it still runs counter to the spirit of a news site.
Also, as for the +1 bonus thing. I think it's fine the way it is. I also think that once a person's Karma gets very high (if you get the +1 bonus at 25, then this should be at +50 or so) they should have the ability to burn a Karma point and get one additional +1 bonus for that post only. By default, this bonus isn't turned on, and the fact that you have to burn a Karma point to do it will discourage its abuse (not to mention that very few people have Karma high enough to do this). It allows for someone to post something they really think is important at a higher level, but now without paying for that extra point. It also is another reward for someone with a truly exceptional posting record.
It's sad to see what's happened to Trek over the years. TOS was pretty good. I personally think Trek was at its peak during TNG, but I know I'm in a minority as far as that's concerned so I'll just shut up about it.
DS9 was a good series in its own right. But it never felt quite right; it was tied in with the Trek universe quite well, but it didn't feel like Trek.
Voyager... I'd like to like Voyager. A few of the episodes are actually very good. But it just doesn't work like TNG or TOS or even DS9 did. It's like Trek crossed with Lost in Space (not the movie; the original TV version).
At least they cancelled that one atrocity they were thinking of doing; I can't remember the title but it sounded like it would turn out as Star Trek meets Saved by the Bell. A series based on Starfleet Academy could be a Good Thing, but I don't think the present team could pull it off.
The Trek franchise isn't going to die out anytime soon. If you don't believe me, rent Trekkies and watch some people who are probably obsessed to an unhealthy degree. The question is whether it will continue for a long time or suffer a prolonged, agonizing death. Sadly, at the moment it seems like the latter. But I hope it turns around, either with Voyager or whatever next series (that idea with Sulu and the Excelsior was very cool; what happened to it?)
As someone who's seem more than his fair shar of sites which allow... um... "alternative means of software procurement" as well as MP3's, I've seen this. Most sites will not allow you to access them until you've clicked on one or more banners; they do this to make money for the owners. Furthermore, most of the banners are porn. The way that you prove you clicked this link comes in the fact that the password for the server is some word in a specific position on the page. Sometimes you have to use two banners, one to get the login and one to get the password.
Porn sites got wise to this, though. People would click through the banners, get the word they wanted, and leave. This wasn't making the porn vendors happy, so they switched to a new tactic; only giving their referrers money for people whop actually signed up for the service. Because of this now, you actually have to join many porn sites to access certain servers, and come back with information about a "Members Only" page.
I don't know. I'd consider that forcing a user to view porn to get MP3's. You're just as forced to join the sites as many people are to use Windows; let's put it that way.
Luckily, a few people still provide MP3's without banners. But there's some truth, at least, to that statement. Granted, you're not held at gunpoint and forced to relentlessly navigate these sites, but you think you're forced, and that's just as bad.
A while back, Consumer Reports did an article on it.
It seems to work pretty well, at least in the short term, though apparently many LASIC users feel a bit more postoperative pain than those who undergo "traditional" RK (though I'm not letting anyone near my eyes with a scalpel). However, often the procedure works too well, and people get increasingly farsighted as the years pass (more so than the natural tendency toward farsightedness as one ages).
Also, I hope you weren't considering climbing Everest after this procedure; one guy tried and he was blinded after reaching a certain altitude, though his sight returned after he'd hit the top and went back down. Airplanes shouldn't have that problem, seeing as they're pressurized.
It's a tradeoff. My own vision is pretty bad, but I think I'm going to wait this one out until the percentages are better.
I still don't like QT. I've programmed in it before; that's why I don't like it. It's not a language issue (I prefer C++) I just dislike QT and some of the things it does. It's not a GTK vs. QT thing either; I've never programmed for GTK so I won't say anything about it.
However, I really, really fail to see why it is that these licensing issues come up. I believe it's calles a Section 10 Exception, people. That is, an exception to the GPL which grants the user rights to distribute a specific component of the software under non-GPL terms. I use one myself in the ICQ client I'm working on, to allow for distribution even though you can't distribute PowerPlant (the framework I'm writing it with).
It's not so hard. KDE could have done it before QPL. Corel could do it now. Honest question: why don't people do this when such issues come up? Yeah, I know it isn't "pure" GPL, but sometimes you've gotta do what you've gotta do to get the code out there.
Perhaps you only read the first trade paperback. That one did, admittedly, have an extremely lame superhero subplot. Or maybe you started right on the eigth one (huge mistake); the story in that one is wonderful but unless you've read the rest of the series you won't understand just why the characters were drawn as they were in that one.
My advice: keep reading. As quickly as the second of the TPB's, it dumps the superhero junk and very quickly becomes among the best books, "comic" or otherwise, most people I know have ever read.
Oh, and yes, the pictures and words in Sandman probably could stand alone (you'd have to put it into novel form, I'm guessing, but that's not too much of an alteration).
I don't know whether to rate this Funny, Flamebait, Troll, or What the Hell Are You Talking About?
It doesn't seem to have anything to do with any of the BSD's. I have no experience with any of the BSD stuff, but I doubt it could possibly be that bad. Actually, it sounds more like a rant that would be targeted at Microsoft than one targeted at the BSD's.
True, but the line gets a lot blurrier at so-called "intellectual property." Can an idea be patented? Look, for example, at the RSA algorithm. R, S, and A did not create it; they merely discovered it. Not only this, but they published it far and wide before ever even applying for any patents (that's why to this day you can find it in any decent text book on discrete mathematics and number theory).
Now, we get to the human genome. One could argue for "prior art"; after all, I can think of six billion examples currently in existence, and untold billions before that. But the fact is, do we really want someone patenting human genes? Or is this an abuse of the patent system which really doesn't do anything to protect inventors (which is the purpose of the patent system, not protecting business).
Let's put another way. Suppose I were to patent a process consisting of a two major devices (called a "protagonist" and an "antagonist") and a variable number of secondary devices (called "major and minor characters). This process describes an interaction between these devices, including both action and dialogue, and determines an outcome which affects all devices in the process. The process itself is usually documented in books, but can be documented by electronic means or even on motion-picture film.
I just tried, in other words, to patent stories. If I get this patent (which may actually be possible; hell, IBM patented the wheel), I've basically bound every non-technical writer in the country to come to me and pay before releasing any of their work. Is this right? Of course not. The patent does not reflect any work I did at all.
It's the same with human genes. It's nothing but raw data. There is no process described (perhaps pattenting the process by which the data was obtained is one thing, but this is not the case). The data was not even really the creation of the scientists; they merely studied it. Can you patent a piece of paper with some numbers written on it?
The same argument applies to software. Patenting an algorithm does not reflect the work of a company. What reflects the work of a company is its specific implementation of an algorithm (in other words, its code); this cannot be patented but copyrights provide adequate protection of intellectual property of this nature (and, at least when issued to individuals, they can last up to ten times longer than patents, not to mention that they're far less expensive).
I would have no objections is this company were merely patenting the process by which they got this data. That would be highly unscientific, of course (since it kills replication of the experiments, one of the cornerstones of real science), but certainly within their rights. If they copyrighted their data, I wouldn't object; might as well, if only to keep someone from messing with it and re-releasing it for whatever reason. To patent the data they obtained, though, is very different.
Slashdot Mirror
1) The bill appears to "exempt" some things from electronic delivery. Does this mean that companies don't have to send these things over E-mail, or that they must not (meaning, therefore, that they must continue to send them using more conventional means)? If it's the latter, then I don't see why this is so bad.
2) The article talks about sending things in formats that people might not be able to read. That's what ASCII text is for. Warranties and such generally don't need anything in the way of special formatting. Perhaps that format should be required in the bill; it appears not to be.
3) What the hell is wrong with the colors on this message? No offense to whosever idea this was, but the usual green and white looks much better.
Or is this a sign of user-configurable colors to come?
Intel ASM... I guess I'm out of this one.
Then again, I don't think anyone's added 3D-accel support for anything under LinuxPPC anyway. Anyone know what current plans are (I know Glide's out until the person who ports it gets a PPC box to work on, but what about ATI chips at least?).
Everyone who has a direct part in this whole episode is a complete, total, blithering idiot.
The motion picture was idiotic because... well... they're idiots. A bunch of profiteering, paranoid gluttons who don't yet get that they're in no danger whatsoever.
The DeCSS group was idiotic by including code to copy the movie into their software. Granted, it's Open-Source so anyone could modify it to make copies, but it's a symbolic thing. There's no need to copy the movie to a hard drive unless your machine is too slow to play back a DVD in software (in which case the money you spent on a DVD drive would have been better spent on upgrades anyway). If you've got hardware (which we also need drivers for) then there's no problem anyway. Was DeCSS trying to piss off the industry?
That said, I downloaded the software, and even though I don't have a DVD drive I intend to keep the code, and probably mirror it for a while.
Yes, you're right. IRQ's are good, but they have to be done right ro be good. What do I mean? I mean auto-configuring IRQ's, such that there are no conflicts but the user never has to worry about configuring them.
By the way, Macs have done that for years. I see no advantage to hand-configuring them; more than a handful of PC magazines have even commented that Apple did it right. I wonder why the PC industry has yet to catch up.
Look. I'll admit that the "Russian-made" line seems to have come from absolutely nowhere. But just because you don't immediately understand something is no reason to immediately and irrationally assume the author meant to defame anyone, much less an entire nation. This said, I'd like to know what he meant by it myself.
Perhaps I'm the clueless one, but why would such a law be clueless? All it does is require the makers of software to document all of the features therein. As far as I can tell, that's a Good Thing. How is this bad?
Well, I guess I'll be deleting RealPlayer from the Mac side of my machine (never found a version for LinuxPPC or I'd delete it from the Linux side too). It never worked all that well for me anyway. I guess I'll be sticking with QuickTime for my streaming video needs (there's still rumors of Apple doing a QuickTime Linux port; anyone know what ever became of those?)
.rm files to MPEG (audio and video both), on any platform? I've seen programs to convert other formats to .rm, but never one to convert .rm to anything else.
Anyone know of a program to convert
Go ahead. Defend the principle of inovation. But before you do, try innovating for a change, instead of your usual Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
The point: MS has no right to speak of innovation when they haven't done anything truly innovative in the past twenty years.
Now it's working again. Looks like it wasn't intentional after all, and M$ found and fixed the bug before people could scream (except me of course). Sorry about that.
Other people have mentioned the poll at http://www.msnbc.com/news/329416.asp#survey. However, I went to take a loot. If you're using both Netscape and MacOS, you can't vote in it (IE on MacOS seems to work fine).
What other combinations of browsers and OS can't see the poll, I wonder?
What I want to see now is for Microsoft to try and rebut this document (which is quite an interesting, if long, read). It's going to be great fun watching them squirm out of the fact that yes, they have in fact acted dishonorably, so much so that something needs to be done to bring them back into line.
Oh, please. Any computer that comes with a DVD drive is fast enough to play DVD-movies in realtime; consumers wouldn't stand for it otherwise. Most do this through hardware, which is why we need to get drivers for that hardware up and running.
Many computers anymore could actually do this in software, though it'd eat most of the CPU time. Then again, if you're watching movies it's pretty unlikely you're doing any other work.
What are you trying to do, add a DVD drive to a Pentium-200? While I suppose you could try it, the money would be better spent on a real DVD player and an upgrade for the computer.
Oh yeah; before I forget, do you have any idea how long it would take to convert a 4-gigabyte movie file to something like, say, an AVI or MPEG, which woulf come out larger still?
That's the problem with the industry. So the encryption was cracked. Big deal. DVD piracy is still impractical. One DVD-RAM disk costs more than a DVD movie. The storage space to hold just one DVD movie on a hard drive will set you back by as much as ten movies or more. A DVD drive costs more than a DVD player. And not enough people have DVD drives that you could recoup costs by selling pirated copies, which you'd never be able to sell anyway because you'd have to put them on DVD-RAM media (4-odd gigabytes is still a huge pain to download even on the most high-bandwidth connections), which are already more expensive than the movies, so to make any profit you'd have to price them higher still, and no one's stupid enough to buy that when the movie can be had legitimately for less.
In other words, you've got four cost-related factors which kill DVD piracy's practicality, at least for the moment. And by the time these are nullified, computers will be powerful enough that the encryption would have been cracked anyway, if it's really as weak as the crackers said.
Please explain how ActiveX is superior to Netscape's plugin system. While you're at it, you should try to explain exactly why a system so insecure it can cause web pages to totally erase your hard drive could possibly be superior to one which did everything else ActiveX could do as concerns Web pages, but didn't let pages erase your drives.
Actually, two I suppose.
1) Everyone, get a copy of the source. If you can legally serve it up (meaning no patent issues on the encryption) do it. Basically, spread the information so far and wide that it's useless to go after anyone, because it would take more money than even the entertainment inductry has.
2) Figure out how to start a good legal defense fund. DVD on Linux would be a Good Thing.
This said, I do have a few issues with the people who cracked the decryption. Making it possible to save the unencrypted movie on a hard disk was unnecessary and uncalled for. It's possible to rite a player without that capability, and that's what they should have done, at least at first. Were they trying to get into trouble by writing that capability into their software right off the bat?
And yes, I know it's Open-Source, so someone else could easily have written software to copy the DVD movie. But the people who cracked the decryption shouldn't have been the ones to do that, if only as a gesture of goodwill towards the industry. The capability would always be there for someone who wants to do it, and the original hackers come out of it looking at least tolerable to the indistry.
Both sides are in the wrong this time, albeit in different ways. But I'm sticking by the hackers, who are wrong only by virtue of a rather shortsighted design mistake, rather than the industry which, which is wrong due to undue technophobia, a healthy dose of greed, and the inability to see that copying DVD's to another DVD is pointless since a single DVD-RAM disk costs more than most DVD movies. It's cheaper just to buy it legitimately, so piracy is pretty much pointless.
Except, I suppose, for potentially wrecking the idiotic "tiered-release" schedule the entertainment industry uses. But that's no big loss.
I always thought I'd be happy when this day arrived. For everything Microsoft has done, it deserves to be smacked down hard, and I hope it is. It's done things that, if it were a human being, would have landed it in jail years ago. Simply because it's a corporation (which is treated not unlike a person under US law) doesn't make it exempt from justice.
But there's doubt in my mind, I suppose. Not in Microsoft's guilt, mind you; they're guilty as charged a thousand times over. My doubt stems mainly from the fact that, after all, it is the US Government that's trying this case. I'm afraid they'll go too far and screw up the industry even more. The hell of it is, I'm not even sure what "too far" is yet. I suppose we'll see tonight...
I don't understand your post. I have yet to see Stallman actually advocate breaking the law as concerns software piracy.
He wanted to be able to share his software legally, and saw this as a basic right. The then-current paradigm did not allow him to do this. So he decided to come up with new software under a new paradigm which did allow him to do it legally. It meant he couldn't use software developed under the old ways, but that didn't bother him.
How does that break the law?
This is why I stay out of e-commerce, at least for now. I'll buy stuff, but I tend to avoid the lure of such ventures. They're really hot now, but when the boom ends I'll be stuck with something which isn't that much more profitable than a regular store, and not quite as fun either.
But hey, I'm a geek. Specifically, I'm a coder. And as long as there are computers, people will need someone to make programs to run on them. When the Net boom ends, I'll code other things. It's not like the Net will disappear after the boom anyway; it just won't be a wowie-zowie-look-how-neato-keen-this-is thing like it is. It'll become like television is now (scary thought, I know); something that's such an integral part of our lives that we take it for granted. If I asked who on Slashdot could go without any television for a year or has already done so, I'd imagine I could count the responses on one hand. The same will be true of the Net; it'll still be there, it just won't be "special" like it is now.
And any TV exec will tell you there's lots of money to be made in that sort of thing.
Someone suggested making a page ranking users by Karma. I'm not so sure that's a good idea; it would turn Slashdot into a contest. Granted, it's a good contest, seeing as you can only win by being fair in moderation and thought-provoking in posts, but it still runs counter to the spirit of a news site.
Also, as for the +1 bonus thing. I think it's fine the way it is. I also think that once a person's Karma gets very high (if you get the +1 bonus at 25, then this should be at +50 or so) they should have the ability to burn a Karma point and get one additional +1 bonus for that post only. By default, this bonus isn't turned on, and the fact that you have to burn a Karma point to do it will discourage its abuse (not to mention that very few people have Karma high enough to do this). It allows for someone to post something they really think is important at a higher level, but now without paying for that extra point. It also is another reward for someone with a truly exceptional posting record.
It's sad to see what's happened to Trek over the years. TOS was pretty good. I personally think Trek was at its peak during TNG, but I know I'm in a minority as far as that's concerned so I'll just shut up about it.
DS9 was a good series in its own right. But it never felt quite right; it was tied in with the Trek universe quite well, but it didn't feel like Trek.
Voyager... I'd like to like Voyager. A few of the episodes are actually very good. But it just doesn't work like TNG or TOS or even DS9 did. It's like Trek crossed with Lost in Space (not the movie; the original TV version).
At least they cancelled that one atrocity they were thinking of doing; I can't remember the title but it sounded like it would turn out as Star Trek meets Saved by the Bell. A series based on Starfleet Academy could be a Good Thing, but I don't think the present team could pull it off.
The Trek franchise isn't going to die out anytime soon. If you don't believe me, rent Trekkies and watch some people who are probably obsessed to an unhealthy degree. The question is whether it will continue for a long time or suffer a prolonged, agonizing death. Sadly, at the moment it seems like the latter. But I hope it turns around, either with Voyager or whatever next series (that idea with Sulu and the Excelsior was very cool; what happened to it?)
As someone who's seem more than his fair shar of sites which allow... um... "alternative means of software procurement" as well as MP3's, I've seen this. Most sites will not allow you to access them until you've clicked on one or more banners; they do this to make money for the owners. Furthermore, most of the banners are porn. The way that you prove you clicked this link comes in the fact that the password for the server is some word in a specific position on the page. Sometimes you have to use two banners, one to get the login and one to get the password.
Porn sites got wise to this, though. People would click through the banners, get the word they wanted, and leave. This wasn't making the porn vendors happy, so they switched to a new tactic; only giving their referrers money for people whop actually signed up for the service. Because of this now, you actually have to join many porn sites to access certain servers, and come back with information about a "Members Only" page.
I don't know. I'd consider that forcing a user to view porn to get MP3's. You're just as forced to join the sites as many people are to use Windows; let's put it that way.
Luckily, a few people still provide MP3's without banners. But there's some truth, at least, to that statement. Granted, you're not held at gunpoint and forced to relentlessly navigate these sites, but you think you're forced, and that's just as bad.
A while back, Consumer Reports did an article on it.
It seems to work pretty well, at least in the short term, though apparently many LASIC users feel a bit more postoperative pain than those who undergo "traditional" RK (though I'm not letting anyone near my eyes with a scalpel). However, often the procedure works too well, and people get increasingly farsighted as the years pass (more so than the natural tendency toward farsightedness as one ages).
Also, I hope you weren't considering climbing Everest after this procedure; one guy tried and he was blinded after reaching a certain altitude, though his sight returned after he'd hit the top and went back down. Airplanes shouldn't have that problem, seeing as they're pressurized.
It's a tradeoff. My own vision is pretty bad, but I think I'm going to wait this one out until the percentages are better.
I still don't like QT. I've programmed in it before; that's why I don't like it. It's not a language issue (I prefer C++) I just dislike QT and some of the things it does. It's not a GTK vs. QT thing either; I've never programmed for GTK so I won't say anything about it.
However, I really, really fail to see why it is that these licensing issues come up. I believe it's calles a Section 10 Exception, people. That is, an exception to the GPL which grants the user rights to distribute a specific component of the software under non-GPL terms. I use one myself in the ICQ client I'm working on, to allow for distribution even though you can't distribute PowerPlant (the framework I'm writing it with).
It's not so hard. KDE could have done it before QPL. Corel could do it now. Honest question: why don't people do this when such issues come up? Yeah, I know it isn't "pure" GPL, but sometimes you've gotta do what you've gotta do to get the code out there.
Perhaps you only read the first trade paperback. That one did, admittedly, have an extremely lame superhero subplot. Or maybe you started right on the eigth one (huge mistake); the story in that one is wonderful but unless you've read the rest of the series you won't understand just why the characters were drawn as they were in that one.
My advice: keep reading. As quickly as the second of the TPB's, it dumps the superhero junk and very quickly becomes among the best books, "comic" or otherwise, most people I know have ever read.
Oh, and yes, the pictures and words in Sandman probably could stand alone (you'd have to put it into novel form, I'm guessing, but that's not too much of an alteration).
I don't know whether to rate this Funny, Flamebait, Troll, or What the Hell Are You Talking About?
It doesn't seem to have anything to do with any of the BSD's. I have no experience with any of the BSD stuff, but I doubt it could possibly be that bad. Actually, it sounds more like a rant that would be targeted at Microsoft than one targeted at the BSD's.
True, but the line gets a lot blurrier at so-called "intellectual property." Can an idea be patented? Look, for example, at the RSA algorithm. R, S, and A did not create it; they merely discovered it. Not only this, but they published it far and wide before ever even applying for any patents (that's why to this day you can find it in any decent text book on discrete mathematics and number theory).
Now, we get to the human genome. One could argue for "prior art"; after all, I can think of six billion examples currently in existence, and untold billions before that. But the fact is, do we really want someone patenting human genes? Or is this an abuse of the patent system which really doesn't do anything to protect inventors (which is the purpose of the patent system, not protecting business).
Let's put another way. Suppose I were to patent a process consisting of a two major devices (called a "protagonist" and an "antagonist") and a variable number of secondary devices (called "major and minor characters). This process describes an interaction between these devices, including both action and dialogue, and determines an outcome which affects all devices in the process. The process itself is usually documented in books, but can be documented by electronic means or even on motion-picture film.
I just tried, in other words, to patent stories. If I get this patent (which may actually be possible; hell, IBM patented the wheel), I've basically bound every non-technical writer in the country to come to me and pay before releasing any of their work. Is this right? Of course not. The patent does not reflect any work I did at all.
It's the same with human genes. It's nothing but raw data. There is no process described (perhaps pattenting the process by which the data was obtained is one thing, but this is not the case). The data was not even really the creation of the scientists; they merely studied it. Can you patent a piece of paper with some numbers written on it?
The same argument applies to software. Patenting an algorithm does not reflect the work of a company. What reflects the work of a company is its specific implementation of an algorithm (in other words, its code); this cannot be patented but copyrights provide adequate protection of intellectual property of this nature (and, at least when issued to individuals, they can last up to ten times longer than patents, not to mention that they're far less expensive).
I would have no objections is this company were merely patenting the process by which they got this data. That would be highly unscientific, of course (since it kills replication of the experiments, one of the cornerstones of real science), but certainly within their rights. If they copyrighted their data, I wouldn't object; might as well, if only to keep someone from messing with it and re-releasing it for whatever reason. To patent the data they obtained, though, is very different.