When the law and precedent are clearly on your side to not fight is the wrong thing to do. Mastercard's lawyers are being bullies, and they clearly have nothing better to do than smear the name of a huge corporation by acting like school-yard thugs. I think the moderator's response on r.h.f. was spot on and maybe the lawyers will get it through their slime-oozing minds that by attacking a two-year-old joke (which I thought squandered the use of "priceless" in a completely unfunny way... I'm pretty tolerant of offensive material if it's funny, but this just struck me as weak and stale) they are only causing themselves and their client harm in the minds of people who are just wacky enough to do things like cancel their credit cards (which I've considered), otherwise the real joke is on them.
Having watched the debates, I would generally concede the first two to Gore, although I have severe philosophical differences with him, so there were many places I think Bush won (as far I was concerned because I agreed with him, and not his presentation, and this is the whole purpose of the debates). By the third debate Bush was hitting his stride and his message was coming through better. Gore was clearly arrogant and seemed peeved at having to sit in the same room with Dubya, but despite wandering off into some seriously dull meanderings, I think he gave a pretty good presentation. The problem with "rating" the debates as to who won or lost, the opinion of the listener matters a lot. If you decided to vote for Bush based on his debate, then he won as far as you're concerned. If you voted for Gore, then he won. The only thing everyone can argue objectively is technique, and whether facts (as opposed to philosophies) are correct.
You know, you could try Google. That's what "looking it up" means. It appears that I was wrong. It doesn't look like we have a treaty with Taiwan regarding defnese.
Treaties in Force
A List of Treaties and Other International Agreements
of the United States in Force
as of January 1, 2000
http://www.state.gov/www/global/legal_affairs/ti fi ndex.html
http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/easr98/
an excerpt:
The United States maintains robust but unofficial relations with the people on Taiwan, governed by the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) and guided by the three U.S.-PRC joint communiques. We have consistently held that the Taiwan issue is a matter for the Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait to resolve. The United States has an abiding interest that any resolution be peaceful. In accordance with the TRA and consistent with the three U.S.-PRC communiques, the United States sells defensive arms to Taiwan to enable it to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability. Our limited arms sales have contributed to maintaining peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and to creating an atmosphere conducive to the improvement of cross-Strait relations, including dialogue.
There are plenty of rational reasons not to like any president, but with Clinton, and even more so Bush, there seems to be a lot of _hate_. I think Clinton was a corrupt, self-absorbed fool who worried more about his pecker than his country, but I don't _hate_ him. I was perfectly willing to give him credit when he made a decision I thought was good.
After Bush's relatively poor showing in the debates (after which I had a lot of doubts about him, but no doubts about not wanting to see Gore win), I started noticing a lot of ad hominem attacks rather than legitimate criticism. Like Quayle, he's got the "stupid" label put on him and he could solve world peace, the energy crisis and invent a potion of immortality and there are still a lot of people who would say he's stupid.
In Clinton's case, he was just much better at presenting himself, much more smooth and comfortable with public speaking and much more able to speak (and lie) on the fly. I think in many cases in politics, the delivery counts for more than the message.
Hear! Hear! At least there is somebody who understands the situation. It's people like Katz who were "appeasing" Hitler in the late 30's and we all know where that led.
...In his naive and simplistic view of the situation is that China is upset over Gore losing the election. Clinton, etc, were doing everything they could to give China what it wanted (not that administrations prior to his were necessarily much better). They could roll tanks over students with impunity and know that they would retain MFN trading status with the U.S. (after all, the U.S. needs cheap Adam Sandler Underoo's and Barbie Do-It-Yourself Navel Piercing Kits, etc). They could intimidate Taiwan (our sworn ally) by test firing missiles at them and know that at worst there would be a little mumbling and hand-wringing from the U.S. but no real response, since the Clinton administration's position appear to be the Taiwan belongs to China, period.
So what are they going to do? Make Bush look bad by putting him in a really tough situation and forcing him to either look (and be!) weak, by apologizing for China's incompetent fighter pilot, or looking like a warmonger by refusing to back down to clear aggression and escalating a diplomatic incident. Regardless of what he does, a large portion of the country will criticize Bush, because like Clinton, there is a large portion of the population who hates him irrationally and will never give him credit for anything.
Remember, the Iranian hostages were also referred to as "detainees" at first.
As I stated last year, if the Slashdot editors want to indulge themselves in this puerile and mastubatory activity, who are we to complain? For 36[45] days out of the year they give us an interesting forum and plenty of news for nerds, most of which matters. It bugs me as much as the next guy when they do this, but I'm not going to lose sleep over 1 fewer day a year of good Slashdot content.
Ummm... I hope you were being facetious. We might all make our respective livings with technology, but if the world were suddenly transformed into a pre-Industrial Revolution level of technology, we could all survive. Certainly there would be hardship.
Let me take away your water and your computers and see which bothers you first....
I remember the "laser holes" that certain floppies supposedly had. I also had quite an arsenal of copy programs, one was a commercial package hex patched by a guy I knew in college at the time and was the only thing I could find that would copy "PFS: File". For backup purposes only.
Ah, I spent many a day whiling away the hours with Peter Norton's secmod, hacking game save files, changing WordStar to issue obnoxious and juvenile error messages. You know, I wasted my youth.:)
Back in the day (mutters the grizzled, 35-year-old software veteran;) ), most floppy disk copy protection schemes relied on formatting the sectors differently so that they couldn't be copied, only read. It was just a matter of time until Copy II PC, and its ilk, came along to allow legitimate users to back up expensive software off of annoying fragile media.
How is it going to be different this time? The talk here is not about _if_ we can by pass the protection scheme, but how many days (counting on one hand) will it take. And I have no doubts it will turn out to be correct.
What I have to ask our friends at the RIAA, if they could hear us over the crackling of burning hundred-dollar bills lighting cigars is, who are they trying to kid? Are they assuming that the majority of CD rippers will simply give up if they can't copy music off of CD's and only the hardcore fringe will attempt to break the copy protection? Will they somehow try to leverage the DCMA to make all CD ripping illegal? Are they stupid, naive, hopelessly optimistic or just plain evil? Well, I think I can answer my own question ("Yes.")
Anyhow, just like the SDMI stuff (so far) and DiVX (capitalization?), this will probably just be a small blip on the radar of consumer consciousness and then slink back to the swampy hinterland of all failed, bad ideas.
p.s. Bob Sewell is a friend of mine, known far and wide for the level of cynicism expressed in this quote. OTOH, he's good enough to earn being cynical.
And what is the worst is that school administrators and/or professors are defending the action of these pissant vandals. If the commies ever took over, they'd know where to find good Party members...
>People living in democracies, Sunstein
>maintains, should be exposed to ideas they might
>not have chosen themselves. Unplanned,
>spontaneous, unanticipated encounters are
I hate to say it, but if want to eliminate the tunnel vision of people's views, you should start at the universities, not the Internet.
We are seeing an increase in the trend of people being allowed to suppress Free Speech because of such abstract and subjective (and whiny) reasons as "taking offense" or "hurting my feelings" or "intellectual harassment".
This is where the true danger lies.
What has happened in this country is that many liberals blame the conservatives for being close-minded and intolerant (and many are), while being blind to their own close-mindedness and intolerance.
The problem is "Diversity" is a code word for supporting the minority and attacking or suppressing the majority (particular when morality is concerned). "Diversity" should mean treating all views and opinions based on logical merit, but we all know of public figures (*cough*Jesse Jackson*cough) who cry racism (or some appropriate other -ism) in response to someone's heinous unAmerican crime of disagreeing with them. I'd like to see a little more judgement of people on the content of their character, and their ideas on the content and logic of their words, but that would mean having to be honest, hard-working and most of all, not a Victim.
There is no doubt that/. is, in many ways, its own insular little world (ask someone on the street about Open Source or "All Your Base" or DeCSS and you will most likely get a blank stare), but the real problem is the lack of open discourse and tolerance for divergent opinions in the centers of higher learning (or more accurately, Political Correctness Indoctrination Camps) that are generating the current and next generation of industry, cultural and government leaders.
There's a similar algorithm by Wu (IIRC) for drawing anti-aliased lines. You figure out how far you are from the 'true' line and use that as a ratio between source and target colors for your pixel and ( 1 - that ) for the source and target colors of the next pixel up. Once you get further than 1/2 pixel from the line offset by a pixel and start over.
There's a similar one for circles. I implemented them both for Windows and they are sweet and elegant. The Wu paper is on SIGGRAPH, but you need to pay for it. I found a short summary on an ftp site somewhere. E-mail me if you are interested and I can dig up the doc (it's a little too long to post here).
More specifically, in a battle between commercial censorware and thousands of pimply-faced adolescent boys awash in hormones and free time, who do you think would "win"?
Not the same one. This Robert Sewell is a hotshot consultant in the Washington D.C. area and a personal friend. I can personally attest to his encyclopediac knowledge and peerless software architecture and development skills on any platform you care to name.
Slashdot Mirror
When the law and precedent are clearly on your side to not fight is the wrong thing to do. Mastercard's lawyers are being bullies, and they clearly have nothing better to do than smear the name of a huge corporation by acting like school-yard thugs. I think the moderator's response on r.h.f. was spot on and maybe the lawyers will get it through their slime-oozing minds that by attacking a two-year-old joke (which I thought squandered the use of "priceless" in a completely unfunny way... I'm pretty tolerant of offensive material if it's funny, but this just struck me as weak and stale) they are only causing themselves and their client harm in the minds of people who are just wacky enough to do things like cancel their credit cards (which I've considered), otherwise the real joke is on them.
Having watched the debates, I would generally concede the first two to Gore, although I have severe philosophical differences with him, so there were many places I think Bush won (as far I was concerned because I agreed with him, and not his presentation, and this is the whole purpose of the debates). By the third debate Bush was hitting his stride and his message was coming through better. Gore was clearly arrogant and seemed peeved at having to sit in the same room with Dubya, but despite wandering off into some seriously dull meanderings, I think he gave a pretty good presentation. The problem with "rating" the debates as to who won or lost, the opinion of the listener matters a lot. If you decided to vote for Bush based on his debate, then he won as far as you're concerned. If you voted for Gore, then he won. The only thing everyone can argue objectively is technique, and whether facts (as opposed to philosophies) are correct.
You know, you could try Google. That's what "looking it up" means. It appears that I was wrong. It doesn't look like we have a treaty with Taiwan regarding defnese.
i fi ndex.html
Treaties in Force
A List of Treaties and Other International Agreements
of the United States in Force
as of January 1, 2000
http://www.state.gov/www/global/legal_affairs/t
http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/easr98/
an excerpt:
The United States maintains robust but unofficial relations with the people on Taiwan, governed by the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) and guided by the three U.S.-PRC joint communiques. We have consistently held that the Taiwan issue is a matter for the Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait to resolve. The United States has an abiding interest that any resolution be peaceful. In accordance with the TRA and consistent with the three U.S.-PRC communiques, the United States sells defensive arms to Taiwan to enable it to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability. Our limited arms sales have contributed to maintaining peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and to creating an atmosphere conducive to the improvement of cross-Strait relations, including dialogue.
Rick
There are plenty of rational reasons not to like any president, but with Clinton, and even more so Bush, there seems to be a lot of _hate_. I think Clinton was a corrupt, self-absorbed fool who worried more about his pecker than his country, but I don't _hate_ him. I was perfectly willing to give him credit when he made a decision I thought was good.
After Bush's relatively poor showing in the debates (after which I had a lot of doubts about him, but no doubts about not wanting to see Gore win), I started noticing a lot of ad hominem attacks rather than legitimate criticism. Like Quayle, he's got the "stupid" label put on him and he could solve world peace, the energy crisis and invent a potion of immortality and there are still a lot of people who would say he's stupid.
In Clinton's case, he was just much better at presenting himself, much more smooth and comfortable with public speaking and much more able to speak (and lie) on the fly. I think in many cases in politics, the delivery counts for more than the message.
Hear! Hear! At least there is somebody who understands the situation. It's people like Katz who were "appeasing" Hitler in the late 30's and we all know where that led.
...In his naive and simplistic view of the situation is that China is upset over Gore losing the election. Clinton, etc, were doing everything they could to give China what it wanted (not that administrations prior to his were necessarily much better). They could roll tanks over students with impunity and know that they would retain MFN trading status with the U.S. (after all, the U.S. needs cheap Adam Sandler Underoo's and Barbie Do-It-Yourself Navel Piercing Kits, etc). They could intimidate Taiwan (our sworn ally) by test firing missiles at them and know that at worst there would be a little mumbling and hand-wringing from the U.S. but no real response, since the Clinton administration's position appear to be the Taiwan belongs to China, period.
So what are they going to do? Make Bush look bad by putting him in a really tough situation and forcing him to either look (and be!) weak, by apologizing for China's incompetent fighter pilot, or looking like a warmonger by refusing to back down to clear aggression and escalating a diplomatic incident. Regardless of what he does, a large portion of the country will criticize Bush, because like Clinton, there is a large portion of the population who hates him irrationally and will never give him credit for anything.
Remember, the Iranian hostages were also referred to as "detainees" at first.
That's OK, /.'s massive productivity drain on the world's information technology industry will never be offset by people doing something useful with /.
Slashdot as ubiquitous scratch pad. I hate to say it, but I'd give that +1 for insightful. :)
Um, that can pretty much be said of any law, though... or any aspect of society.
No, because I'm not counting 1 April.
As I stated last year, if the Slashdot editors want to indulge themselves in this puerile and mastubatory activity, who are we to complain? For 36[45] days out of the year they give us an interesting forum and plenty of news for nerds, most of which matters. It bugs me as much as the next guy when they do this, but I'm not going to lose sleep over 1 fewer day a year of good Slashdot content.
That's my point. You can _generally_ live without technology. You can't without water.
:)
I just think some folks get too wrapped up in their toys. I know well, because I sure do.
Ummm... I hope you were being facetious. We might all make our respective livings with technology, but if the world were suddenly transformed into a pre-Industrial Revolution level of technology, we could all survive. Certainly there would be hardship.
Let me take away your water and your computers and see which bothers you first....
Not to mention the Microsoft C Pessimizing Compiler 5.0...
Worst thing is that was at _work_.
:)
LOL! You rock, Bobo!
:)
I remember the "laser holes" that certain floppies supposedly had. I also had quite an arsenal of copy programs, one was a commercial package hex patched by a guy I knew in college at the time and was the only thing I could find that would copy "PFS: File". For backup purposes only.
Ah, I spent many a day whiling away the hours with Peter Norton's secmod, hacking game save files, changing WordStar to issue obnoxious and juvenile error messages. You know, I wasted my youth.
Back in the day (mutters the grizzled, 35-year-old software veteran ;) ), most floppy disk copy protection schemes relied on formatting the sectors differently so that they couldn't be copied, only read. It was just a matter of time until Copy II PC, and its ilk, came along to allow legitimate users to back up expensive software off of annoying fragile media.
How is it going to be different this time? The talk here is not about _if_ we can by pass the protection scheme, but how many days (counting on one hand) will it take. And I have no doubts it will turn out to be correct.
What I have to ask our friends at the RIAA, if they could hear us over the crackling of burning hundred-dollar bills lighting cigars is, who are they trying to kid? Are they assuming that the majority of CD rippers will simply give up if they can't copy music off of CD's and only the hardcore fringe will attempt to break the copy protection? Will they somehow try to leverage the DCMA to make all CD ripping illegal? Are they stupid, naive, hopelessly optimistic or just plain evil? Well, I think I can answer my own question ("Yes.")
Anyhow, just like the SDMI stuff (so far) and DiVX (capitalization?), this will probably just be a small blip on the radar of consumer consciousness and then slink back to the swampy hinterland of all failed, bad ideas.
...and look how well Gnutella scales.
If you want 99.9% of Internet traffic be nodes forwarding search requests and results back and forth, that's the way to go.
Be my guest. I'm due for new one anyway. Enjoy!
Rick
p.s. Bob Sewell is a friend of mine, known far and wide for the level of cynicism expressed in this quote. OTOH, he's good enough to earn being cynical.
And what is the worst is that school administrators and/or professors are defending the action of these pissant vandals. If the commies ever took over, they'd know where to find good Party members...
>People living in democracies, Sunstein
/. is, in many ways, its own insular little world (ask someone on the street about Open Source or "All Your Base" or DeCSS and you will most likely get a blank stare), but the real problem is the lack of open discourse and tolerance for divergent opinions in the centers of higher learning (or more accurately, Political Correctness Indoctrination Camps) that are generating the current and next generation of industry, cultural and government leaders.
>maintains, should be exposed to ideas they might
>not have chosen themselves. Unplanned,
>spontaneous, unanticipated encounters are
I hate to say it, but if want to eliminate the tunnel vision of people's views, you should start at the universities, not the Internet.
We are seeing an increase in the trend of people being allowed to suppress Free Speech because of such abstract and subjective (and whiny) reasons as "taking offense" or "hurting my feelings" or "intellectual harassment".
This is where the true danger lies.
What has happened in this country is that many liberals blame the conservatives for being close-minded and intolerant (and many are), while being blind to their own close-mindedness and intolerance.
The problem is "Diversity" is a code word for supporting the minority and attacking or suppressing the majority (particular when morality is concerned). "Diversity" should mean treating all views and opinions based on logical merit, but we all know of public figures (*cough*Jesse Jackson*cough) who cry racism (or some appropriate other -ism) in response to someone's heinous unAmerican crime of disagreeing with them. I'd like to see a little more judgement of people on the content of their character, and their ideas on the content and logic of their words, but that would mean having to be honest, hard-working and most of all, not a Victim.
There is no doubt that
Well, let's see:
10 atoms this year
20 atoms by early 2003
40 atoms by late 2004...
By the 22nd century, the entire universe will be a computer. Or is it already?
There's a similar algorithm by Wu (IIRC) for drawing anti-aliased lines. You figure out how far you are from the 'true' line and use that as a ratio between source and target colors for your pixel and ( 1 - that ) for the source and target colors of the next pixel up. Once you get further than 1/2 pixel from the line offset by a pixel and start over.
There's a similar one for circles. I implemented them both for Windows and they are sweet and elegant. The Wu paper is on SIGGRAPH, but you need to pay for it. I found a short summary on an ftp site somewhere. E-mail me if you are interested and I can dig up the doc (it's a little too long to post here).
Rick
More specifically, in a battle between commercial censorware and thousands of pimply-faced adolescent boys awash in hormones and free time, who do you think would "win"?
Not the same one. This Robert Sewell is a hotshot consultant in the Washington D.C. area and a personal friend. I can personally attest to his encyclopediac knowledge and peerless software architecture and development skills on any platform you care to name.
Umm... the company that can make more money? (by 3 orders of magnitude...)
Rick