There's no definitive interpretation of the Bible. Never was. You can go all the way back to the earliest copies, and they're different, sometimes in substantive ways.
The combination of scribes and lack of widespread literacy, and copies, people -- sometimes accidently, sometimes willfully -- changed the Bible. Case in point, one of the most popular Jesus quotes in the Bible, "He who is without sin, cast the first stone." Not just the quote, but the entire story of the stoning of the woman doesn't even exist in the earliest copies. Good story. Consistent with Jesus's teachings, but it wasn't part of the Bible.
Oh, and what got Author Bart D. Ehrman interested in this topic? He was raised a Biblical literalist and wanted to read THE definitive earliest copy of the Bible. While the historical truth of the Bible hasn't shaken he's belief in Christianity, he's no longer a literalist.
As a fairly well-known Second Lifer, I think it's got plenty of good applications. The most obvious is clearly entertainment: the ability to attend live music acts several times a week now that I'm in my married 30s instead of my single 20s has a huge appeal to me
I have to point out you're not actually attending anything. You're sitting at home on your computer watching hyper-polygoned facimilies of people move around arhythmicly while an mp3 is streamed to you. You're no more "attending a concert" than "attending the World Series" when you watch on television. Or storming the beaches of Normandy when you're playing Medal of Honor. The experiences are completely different.
There's a real world where there are real experiences, and then there's the virtual world where the expereinces are a pale in every comparison. To conflate the two is either to be naive in the extreme, or to be disingenuous.
What's the point? I don't mean this as a flame, but what does this give you that the current architecure doesn't? I mean if you're going to through the porevious archicture out, you better be getting something significantly better.
Re:A ways to go before element 137
on
Element 118 Created
·
· Score: 5, Funny
So would that make the atomic number of Unobtainium 139?
However, it can be done incorrectly. For example, users should not have to click an "I Agree" button in order to use GPLd software because the GPL does impose any restrictions on use.
Worse than that, the GPL expressly forbids such a thing. From section 5 of the GPL:
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it.
So the Irony of Ironies is that those developers that stick the GPL into an installer that requires you to agree to the license before installation, are in fact violating their own license.
Everytime a program displays a click-wrap GPL it shows that the developer has a fundamental misunderstanding of just what the GPL is. It's a source license, not a user license. There's no restrictions on what you can do when running the software, just on what you can do with source code. Frankly, I think the rise of clik-wrap GPLs are just some dev wanting to look 1337 since every other program he has a click through license.
It's absurd that I have to code up basically an extension to add a new search engine to the search box. Galeon has had the ability to add a new "smart bookmark" by just copying and pasting the appropriate URL for years. AcidSearch for Safari, will automatically find and add the appropriate search URL for you if you want. Firefox on the other hand is makes it incredibly difficult, or causes you to resort to those ugly Rollyo pages.
Completely unacceptable, and worst of all, I don't even understand how they even thought that their approach was even remotely necessary.
Heh, no. Licence IS important, because it gives software THAT freedom you are looking for. Fact that you don't want to know or don't care doesn't change a fact that GPL and other licences GIVES that freedom for software. Otherwise you would not be able to download it LEGALY, use it LEGALY. Maybe you don't care about it, but developers do, because they will be the ones who will answer when someone will sue project.
The FSF are a bunch of hypocrites. They talk and talk about freedom, but in the end they want to dictate the terms to others. If they were true supporters of freedom, they GPL wouldn't even exist. Everything would be public domain. But no. RMS wants you to believe that the public domain is evil, because its too free.
Looks like the Mozilla Foundation is pretty much in line with the Debian usage here.
I'm sure there's now that you've brought this to their attention, there's going to be CVS check in that removes all references to debian and its logos in debian. Debian is known for making political changes without concern to their consequences. ("Let's remove all the HOWTOs because they're not "free" enough!")
A lot of this comes down to "what's in a name"? Personally, I see Debian's position as more proper within the realm of the F/OSS community. If you toute your program as open source, yet say that if anyone makes any changes to the program that you do not approve of, that they cannot use your trademark, then that certainly doesn't sound "open" and "free" to me. Especially, if your source contains all of the trademark data in the code, and altering the content requires a great deal of work.
Why would you want to prevent people from using the name after they make changes to your code? When it doesn't do what you want it to. I think I'll download "Ice Weasel", turn it into a spambot, and then redistribute it as "Ice Weasel 2.0." That's good stuff! Or since there isn't a trademark on "ice weasel" I can create a new monkey porn site named "Ice Weasel" and then sully the "good name" of Debian's Ice Weasel. Awesome!
When you come down to it, it's the same situation as I have with Windows XP. "Oh, of course you OWN the CD, you bought it. But you're only LICENSING the data on it." They hide all this un-free double plus ungood behind telling you that you're free to do whatever you want, so long as you don't screw with them.
No. No it's not. It comes down to "Don't put my name on your crappy changes." It's the same problem I have with the FDL. You publish a book, and release it under the FDL. I can then rip all the pages out of it, and replace them with illicit pornography. Congratulations. You're name is now attached to pornography.
Or that the DoD embrasses the saying, "Ours is not to wonder why. Ours is just to do and die." Keep in mind mind the horrible plans were imposed by their leaders.
I'm not sure you have an accurate picture of the Korean DMZ. The zone itself is covered in landmines, and each side has more than a million men guarding it (with United States troops already being part of the South Korean force). An invasion by either side would be a long and bloody struggle to get more than a couple miles into the other country.
Wrong. North Korea has 70% of its army already stationed along the DMZ, with numerous tunnels to move troops and material under it. It undoubtedly has laready targeted every defense structure along the DMZ and several miles inland, as the South Koreans and the US no doubt have with respect to North Korean defenses. According to Pentagon estimates, a North Korean surprise attack would easily overwelm the forces currently stationed in South Korea. In fact OPLAN 5027 assumes that any ROK-US counterattack would begin at least 20 miles south of the DMZ on day 20 to 35 of the invasion.
Now there are some civilian anaylsists that suggest that the DoD is overestimating the initial effectiveness of a DPRK invasion, but I believe Iraq has shown how well political motivated think tanks plan a war.
The ROK does want unification with the DPRK, as seen for their support for the Sunshine Policy. However they do realize that an instant unification would be an economic disaster. Germany likewise took an economic hit when it unified. Even today, the east still lags behind the west in economic growth. With the DPRK being in a much worse situation than the GDR was in 1990, we could expect the impact on the ROK, both immediate and lasting, to be far greater.
I don't believe Japan sees the ROK as a military threat. Furthermore, it is unlikely that a nuclear democratic unified Korea, would remain nuclear for long. The ROK does have a nuclear weapons program., however it is primarily focused at countering the nuclear threat from the DPRK. If unification would occur with the ROK absorbing the DPRK, that the ROK would denuclearize.
Japan's nuclear intentions are much more indoubt, since it would require a constitutional amendment. The Japanese like Section 9 of their consitituion. However, it many ways it has outlived its purpose. Japan is not a militant culture anymore, and the region has become much less stable. Japan's purpose for a nuke would to counter the DPRK nuclear threat. Once the DPRK nuclear threat is eliminated, then the need would be eliminated, and I suspect Japan would denuclearize.
The truth is, if Japan wanted a nuke, they could have one in a year. The question is whether or not they want one. Even the Japanese don't have an answer to that question.
The key mistake in your nuclear analysis is that you assume that the only consideration for a country is who in their neighborhood has a nuke. It's not. It's who in their neighborhood is likely to attack them with a nuke. The ROK isn't going to attack anyone, let alone Japan, so there's no reason for Japan to nuclearize in light of a a nuclear democratic Korea. There's already a parallel to this with Japan's historic rival, China. China already has nuclear weapons, and yet Japan has failed to nuclearize. Why haven't they? Because, they know China won't attack them.
The "can't confirm" part is with respect to a nuclear detonation. NO ONE is suggesting that a "seismic event" did not occur in North Korea. The question is whether it was a nuke or just a bunch of TNT. That said, no one is seriously suggesting that it was just a bunch of TNT.
The fact is you don't need the GNU system, you can easily use the BSD tools and the intel compiler, and so you don't need GNU tools. Further more in an embeded environment, you wouldn't necessarily have any of those tools.
going through your list, there are plenty of alternatives to the GNU system, here's a few.
aspell -> ispell bash -> ash bison -> yacc diff -> bsd diff gparted -> partition magic gpg -> pgp grep -> bsd grep grub -> lilo gzip -> compress less -> bsd m4 -> bsd make -> bsd nano -> pico sed -> bsd tar -> bsd wget -> curl gnome -> kde
So no you actually, don't need any of the things you mention.
The whole "GNU/" thing is nothing more than RMS trying to horn in on some of linux's limelight. NO ONE else in the software community tries to insist that their project name get higher billing than the operating system name. Do you see Larry Wall saying, "It's Perl/Linux!"? Anyone saying "Apache/Linux?" No. Why not? Because It's absurd. It's the absurd rantings of a zealot. Personally, I suspect the reason is that RMS's own pet operating system, hurd, is failure, and he's jealous of linux's success.
Zealotry may be useful to get an idea going, but eventually the idea is sufficently spread, the zealot begins to do more harm than good, and is eventually rendered irrelevant. RMS is irrelevant. ESR is irrelevant. They could both die tomorrow, and the idea of sharing source code would go on.
RMS and his fanboys frequently insist on the term Free Software, and then toss around the canard that there's no word in the English language that means the same as the French word "libre." Wrong. The word, is "liberated." The word "free" was chosen because RMS wanted to echo the term "free speech," a political move, which is perfectly understandable. However he should have anticipated that the world would interepted "free " as the most prevelant definition in this context, "no cost " rather than "unrestricted." This misunderstanding is not a new phenomenon and should have easily been rectified 30 years ago with a renaming, or even a simple "Hey Bob, what do you think of when I say 'free sofware'?" However RMS was too arrogant to accept that when an author's work is widely misinterpreted because it's unclear, the fault lies not with the audience, but with the author, and so he insists that the fault lies with with everyone else, and not himself.
Way too many fanboys here bow to RMS because linux is cool, open source is cool, and RMS offers simple answers to complex questions. He offers certitude where none exists. In short, the fanboys surrender their thoughts and opinions for those of someone else. In that sense, for them, it's no different than a cult.
While I've now seen the box set and understand the point that reply was making, I still think it's a shame the series is so "heavy" all the time. Sure, there have been flashes of hope: the first time the count goes up in series one, for example, and a couple of the big plot twists I won't spoil in series two. But after watching the whole season within a few days (I do that with new DVD box sets...), my overwhelming emotions are still very negative. I can't think of a single character who really has a happy "story so far" at this stage, and while some of the fear and hardship and loss is integral to the plot, some of it (I'm thinking of one recurring character's death in particular here) seemed to be entirely without purpose, and to break one of the few genuinely positive things about the storyline.
Well let's be honest here. The story is about the last remaining 40,000 humans running for their lives from a relentless unlimited army of killing machines. Tell me how that's supposed to be happy? Tell me how anyone is supposed to be having a happy life stuck on a ship light years from home with everyone in their family dead That is not a happy situation. There's no way they're lives are ever going to be happy, until the cylons are gone.
Most of the population is now captured by the enemy and infiltrated with traitors. That is a bad life, and no silly episode about Tyrell's lost dog is going to change that. Hell, an episode like that would go completly against the feel of the show.
Nothing except for the thousands of man-years it took to develop and deploy PNG and other workarounds for the Unisys patent.
That would be the "much ado" part.
People got in a dither because of all the FUD spread about the patent, both by Unisys and by anti-patent forces. ("Unisys is going to sue the world!" "If you display a GIF, you'll get sued!") And still, LZW compressed GIFs still needed to be supported by everything because there were, and still are, a significant number of them deployed. Meanwhile PNG was created as a GIF alternative that didn't gain that much traction outside the user app FOSS Community, which let's be honest, is small and ghettoized.
Also, let's not forget, that PNG is in some respects is inferior to GIF. Transparency isn't supported by all displaying apps. (Sure that's largely due to Microsoft, but let's be adults here. You can't demand that users switch their apps for your whims. That's arrogance, which sadly is all too prevalent in the FOSS Community.) Also, PNG doesn't support animations, which along is the other reason people use GIFs. (Yes, MNG exists, but it's supported by no one, so it's not an option.)
In the end GIF stuck around because of a combination of legacy support, and the fact that most people simply didn't care. We got PNG, which is an undersupported format, that remains feature-poor when compared to what it was meant to replace.
Sadly, we should have expected nothing less since it came for the FOSS Community. The Community is preoccupied with solving problems that don't exist. The Community tends to play clone-the-app instead of innovate, and as the saying goes, "If you always follow the leader, you end up in second place." OGG was created, but it's supported by no one outside the FOSS ghetto. PNG was created, but isn't a true replacement. Pick an FOSS clone, and you'll inevetiably get a feature-poor and awkward version of a well working proprietary app.
Conversely, if you look at the successful FOSS projects, you see that the common thread among them is that they aren't clones, they were first-movers. Apache, Perl, Python, Firefox, the Linux kernel (Yeah yeah, BSD386, but it didn't survive). I don't believe this is a coincidence. I believe it's simple economics (in the decision theoretical sense, not the monetary sense). When the niche is already filled, only those motivated by politics will switch away from a stable feature-rich app to a buggy feature-poor app. However when the niche is empty, people will come to you, and you can define the niche.
I'm not some anti-FOSS person, nor am I always pro-proprietary. I believe strongly in open standards. Interoperability is the main thing. The one idea I learned as an undergrad that shaped the engineer I am today was "Avoid proprietary solutions like the plauge." Why? Because you can't always integrate them properly into system. However, I'm also for using the right tool for the right job, and frankly there's a lot of places where FOSS simply comes up short. Thankfuly, for many things, there's file convertors that mostly work, so I'm not completely stuck with the proprietary app if worst comes to worst.
This patent has cost the world a huge amount of money and provided nothing in return.
No. The FUD spread by the patent the patent cost money and time. Total people sued by Unisys over the GIF patent? Zero. That is nothing.
No there isn't a free lunch. The profits on Chevron (who is actively campaigning against prop 87) would decrease. The bite must come out of the oil companies' ample profits, not from the individuals. A progressive tax (which this effectively is) is not a free lunch. No more than a regressive tax is "sound economic policy."
First off, I think you're bound for failure. However, if you really want to do this, there's a feature you should absolutly not impliment. Friends. Nothing like a/. zoo. Friends will be people that agreee with you. Foes will be people that disagree with you. Soon it degenerates into killfile.
Some say don't censor, but that's wrong. You should. Too often the shrillest voices take over the discussion. Be fair though. Five years ago Jonah Goldberg fired Ann Coulter from the National Review Online, for her notriously shrill and childish name calling. He said that there was no place for that in a serious political discussion, and he was absolutely right. (Five years later, he's realized that playing Coulter's childish game is what makes money, so he's done a 180 and wrote the self-paroding and hypocritical "Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton," but that's for another discusssion.)
This guy skipped all that, obsessed with the scholoarly aspect 24/7. He will probably do the same with his job, become quite wealthy, but ultimately very depressed. I wouldn't be surprised to see this guy on a suicide watch by the time he is 25 if he is not careful.
I was thinking that very thing. I wouldn't be surprised if he did commit suicide. Suicide at young age is a known problem with child prodigies.
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Oh, and what got Author Bart D. Ehrman interested in this topic? He was raised a Biblical literalist and wanted to read THE definitive earliest copy of the Bible. While the historical truth of the Bible hasn't shaken he's belief in Christianity, he's no longer a literalist.
As a fairly well-known Second Lifer, I think it's got plenty of good applications. The most obvious is clearly entertainment: the ability to attend live music acts several times a week now that I'm in my married 30s instead of my single 20s has a huge appeal to me
I have to point out you're not actually attending anything. You're sitting at home on your computer watching hyper-polygoned facimilies of people move around arhythmicly while an mp3 is streamed to you. You're no more "attending a concert" than "attending the World Series" when you watch on television. Or storming the beaches of Normandy when you're playing Medal of Honor. The experiences are completely different.
There's a real world where there are real experiences, and then there's the virtual world where the expereinces are a pale in every comparison. To conflate the two is either to be naive in the extreme, or to be disingenuous.
Since when does US care about international law?
When it's convienent.
What's the point? I don't mean this as a flame, but what does this give you that the current architecure doesn't? I mean if you're going to through the porevious archicture out, you better be getting something significantly better.
So would that make the atomic number of Unobtainium 139?
Worse than that, the GPL expressly forbids such a thing. From section 5 of the GPL:
So the Irony of Ironies is that those developers that stick the GPL into an installer that requires you to agree to the license before installation, are in fact violating their own license.
Everytime a program displays a click-wrap GPL it shows that the developer has a fundamental misunderstanding of just what the GPL is. It's a source license, not a user license. There's no restrictions on what you can do when running the software, just on what you can do with source code. Frankly, I think the rise of clik-wrap GPLs are just some dev wanting to look 1337 since every other program he has a click through license.
Yeah that sounds nice and all, but I just have acidsearch do that for me. Save me time and effort.
It's absurd that I have to code up basically an extension to add a new search engine to the search box. Galeon has had the ability to add a new "smart bookmark" by just copying and pasting the appropriate URL for years. AcidSearch for Safari, will automatically find and add the appropriate search URL for you if you want. Firefox on the other hand is makes it incredibly difficult, or causes you to resort to those ugly Rollyo pages.
Completely unacceptable, and worst of all, I don't even understand how they even thought that their approach was even remotely necessary.
only on /. would this be "informative"
Heh, no. Licence IS important, because it gives software THAT freedom you are looking for. Fact that you don't want to know or don't care doesn't change a fact that GPL and other licences GIVES that freedom for software. Otherwise you would not be able to download it LEGALY, use it LEGALY. Maybe you don't care about it, but developers do, because they will be the ones who will answer when someone will sue project.
The FSF are a bunch of hypocrites. They talk and talk about freedom, but in the end they want to dictate the terms to others. If they were true supporters of freedom, they GPL wouldn't even exist. Everything would be public domain. But no. RMS wants you to believe that the public domain is evil, because its too free.
I do think that this business is a big waste of developer time and effort.
Which makes it the perfect for Debian developers.
Now excuse me. Some of us have important work to do.
Looks like the Mozilla Foundation is pretty much in line with the Debian usage here.
I'm sure there's now that you've brought this to their attention, there's going to be CVS check in that removes all references to debian and its logos in debian. Debian is known for making political changes without concern to their consequences. ("Let's remove all the HOWTOs because they're not "free" enough!")
God I hate Debian.
A lot of this comes down to "what's in a name"? Personally, I see Debian's position as more proper within the realm of the F/OSS community. If you toute your program as open source, yet say that if anyone makes any changes to the program that you do not approve of, that they cannot use your trademark, then that certainly doesn't sound "open" and "free" to me. Especially, if your source contains all of the trademark data in the code, and altering the content requires a great deal of work.
Why would you want to prevent people from using the name after they make changes to your code? When it doesn't do what you want it to. I think I'll download "Ice Weasel", turn it into a spambot, and then redistribute it as "Ice Weasel 2.0." That's good stuff! Or since there isn't a trademark on "ice weasel" I can create a new monkey porn site named "Ice Weasel" and then sully the "good name" of Debian's Ice Weasel. Awesome!
When you come down to it, it's the same situation as I have with Windows XP. "Oh, of course you OWN the CD, you bought it. But you're only LICENSING the data on it." They hide all this un-free double plus ungood behind telling you that you're free to do whatever you want, so long as you don't screw with them.
No. No it's not. It comes down to "Don't put my name on your crappy changes." It's the same problem I have with the FDL. You publish a book, and release it under the FDL. I can then rip all the pages out of it, and replace them with illicit pornography. Congratulations. You're name is now attached to pornography.
Or that the DoD embrasses the saying, "Ours is not to wonder why. Ours is just to do and die." Keep in mind mind the horrible plans were imposed by their leaders.
I'm not sure you have an accurate picture of the Korean DMZ. The zone itself is covered in landmines, and each side has more than a million men guarding it (with United States troops already being part of the South Korean force). An invasion by either side would be a long and bloody struggle to get more than a couple miles into the other country.
Wrong. North Korea has 70% of its army already stationed along the DMZ, with numerous tunnels to move troops and material under it. It undoubtedly has laready targeted every defense structure along the DMZ and several miles inland, as the South Koreans and the US no doubt have with respect to North Korean defenses. According to Pentagon estimates, a North Korean surprise attack would easily overwelm the forces currently stationed in South Korea. In fact OPLAN 5027 assumes that any ROK-US counterattack would begin at least 20 miles south of the DMZ on day 20 to 35 of the invasion.
Now there are some civilian anaylsists that suggest that the DoD is overestimating the initial effectiveness of a DPRK invasion, but I believe Iraq has shown how well political motivated think tanks plan a war.
The ROK does want unification with the DPRK, as seen for their support for the Sunshine Policy. However they do realize that an instant unification would be an economic disaster. Germany likewise took an economic hit when it unified. Even today, the east still lags behind the west in economic growth. With the DPRK being in a much worse situation than the GDR was in 1990, we could expect the impact on the ROK, both immediate and lasting, to be far greater.
I don't believe Japan sees the ROK as a military threat. Furthermore, it is unlikely that a nuclear democratic unified Korea, would remain nuclear for long. The ROK does have a nuclear weapons program., however it is primarily focused at countering the nuclear threat from the DPRK. If unification would occur with the ROK absorbing the DPRK, that the ROK would denuclearize.
Japan's nuclear intentions are much more indoubt, since it would require a constitutional amendment. The Japanese like Section 9 of their consitituion. However, it many ways it has outlived its purpose. Japan is not a militant culture anymore, and the region has become much less stable. Japan's purpose for a nuke would to counter the DPRK nuclear threat. Once the DPRK nuclear threat is eliminated, then the need would be eliminated, and I suspect Japan would denuclearize.
The truth is, if Japan wanted a nuke, they could have one in a year. The question is whether or not they want one. Even the Japanese don't have an answer to that question.
The key mistake in your nuclear analysis is that you assume that the only consideration for a country is who in their neighborhood has a nuke. It's not. It's who in their neighborhood is likely to attack them with a nuke. The ROK isn't going to attack anyone, let alone Japan, so there's no reason for Japan to nuclearize in light of a a nuclear democratic Korea. There's already a parallel to this with Japan's historic rival, China. China already has nuclear weapons, and yet Japan has failed to nuclearize. Why haven't they? Because, they know China won't attack them.
The "can't confirm" part is with respect to a nuclear detonation. NO ONE is suggesting that a "seismic event" did not occur in North Korea. The question is whether it was a nuke or just a bunch of TNT. That said, no one is seriously suggesting that it was just a bunch of TNT.
The fact is you don't need the GNU system, you can easily use the BSD tools and the intel compiler, and so you don't need GNU tools. Further more in an embeded environment, you wouldn't necessarily have any of those tools.
." This misunderstanding is not a new phenomenon and should have easily been rectified 30 years ago with a renaming, or even a simple "Hey Bob, what do you think of when I say 'free sofware'?" However RMS was too arrogant to accept that when an author's work is widely misinterpreted because it's unclear, the fault lies not with the audience, but with the author, and so he insists that the fault lies with with everyone else, and not himself.
going through your list, there are plenty of alternatives to the GNU system, here's a few.
aspell -> ispell
bash -> ash
bison -> yacc
diff -> bsd diff
gparted -> partition magic
gpg -> pgp
grep -> bsd grep
grub -> lilo
gzip -> compress
less -> bsd
m4 -> bsd
make -> bsd
nano -> pico
sed -> bsd
tar -> bsd
wget -> curl
gnome -> kde
So no you actually, don't need any of the things you mention.
The whole "GNU/" thing is nothing more than RMS trying to horn in on some of linux's limelight. NO ONE else in the software community tries to insist that their project name get higher billing than the operating system name. Do you see Larry Wall saying, "It's Perl/Linux!"? Anyone saying "Apache/Linux?" No. Why not? Because It's absurd. It's the absurd rantings of a zealot. Personally, I suspect the reason is that RMS's own pet operating system, hurd, is failure, and he's jealous of linux's success.
Zealotry may be useful to get an idea going, but eventually the idea is sufficently spread, the zealot begins to do more harm than good, and is eventually rendered irrelevant. RMS is irrelevant. ESR is irrelevant. They could both die tomorrow, and the idea of sharing source code would go on.
RMS and his fanboys frequently insist on the term Free Software, and then toss around the canard that there's no word in the English language that means the same as the French word "libre." Wrong. The word, is "liberated." The word "free" was chosen because RMS wanted to echo the term "free speech," a political move, which is perfectly understandable. However he should have anticipated that the world would interepted "free " as the most prevelant definition in this context, "no cost " rather than "unrestricted
Way too many fanboys here bow to RMS because linux is cool, open source is cool, and RMS offers simple answers to complex questions. He offers certitude where none exists. In short, the fanboys surrender their thoughts and opinions for those of someone else. In that sense, for them, it's no different than a cult.
While I've now seen the box set and understand the point that reply was making, I still think it's a shame the series is so "heavy" all the time. Sure, there have been flashes of hope: the first time the count goes up in series one, for example, and a couple of the big plot twists I won't spoil in series two. But after watching the whole season within a few days (I do that with new DVD box sets...), my overwhelming emotions are still very negative. I can't think of a single character who really has a happy "story so far" at this stage, and while some of the fear and hardship and loss is integral to the plot, some of it (I'm thinking of one recurring character's death in particular here) seemed to be entirely without purpose, and to break one of the few genuinely positive things about the storyline.
Well let's be honest here. The story is about the last remaining 40,000 humans running for their lives from a relentless unlimited army of killing machines. Tell me how that's supposed to be happy? Tell me how anyone is supposed to be having a happy life stuck on a ship light years from home with everyone in their family dead That is not a happy situation. There's no way they're lives are ever going to be happy, until the cylons are gone.
Most of the population is now captured by the enemy and infiltrated with traitors. That is a bad life, and no silly episode about Tyrell's lost dog is going to change that. Hell, an episode like that would go completly against the feel of the show.
Nothing except for the thousands of man-years it took to develop and deploy PNG and other workarounds for the Unisys patent.
That would be the "much ado" part.
People got in a dither because of all the FUD spread about the patent, both by Unisys and by anti-patent forces. ("Unisys is going to sue the world!" "If you display a GIF, you'll get sued!") And still, LZW compressed GIFs still needed to be supported by everything because there were, and still are, a significant number of them deployed. Meanwhile PNG was created as a GIF alternative that didn't gain that much traction outside the user app FOSS Community, which let's be honest, is small and ghettoized.
Also, let's not forget, that PNG is in some respects is inferior to GIF. Transparency isn't supported by all displaying apps. (Sure that's largely due to Microsoft, but let's be adults here. You can't demand that users switch their apps for your whims. That's arrogance, which sadly is all too prevalent in the FOSS Community.) Also, PNG doesn't support animations, which along is the other reason people use GIFs. (Yes, MNG exists, but it's supported by no one, so it's not an option.)
In the end GIF stuck around because of a combination of legacy support, and the fact that most people simply didn't care. We got PNG, which is an undersupported format, that remains feature-poor when compared to what it was meant to replace.
Sadly, we should have expected nothing less since it came for the FOSS Community. The Community is preoccupied with solving problems that don't exist. The Community tends to play clone-the-app instead of innovate, and as the saying goes, "If you always follow the leader, you end up in second place." OGG was created, but it's supported by no one outside the FOSS ghetto. PNG was created, but isn't a true replacement. Pick an FOSS clone, and you'll inevetiably get a feature-poor and awkward version of a well working proprietary app.
Conversely, if you look at the successful FOSS projects, you see that the common thread among them is that they aren't clones, they were first-movers. Apache, Perl, Python, Firefox, the Linux kernel (Yeah yeah, BSD386, but it didn't survive). I don't believe this is a coincidence. I believe it's simple economics (in the decision theoretical sense, not the monetary sense). When the niche is already filled, only those motivated by politics will switch away from a stable feature-rich app to a buggy feature-poor app. However when the niche is empty, people will come to you, and you can define the niche.
I'm not some anti-FOSS person, nor am I always pro-proprietary. I believe strongly in open standards. Interoperability is the main thing. The one idea I learned as an undergrad that shaped the engineer I am today was "Avoid proprietary solutions like the plauge." Why? Because you can't always integrate them properly into system. However, I'm also for using the right tool for the right job, and frankly there's a lot of places where FOSS simply comes up short. Thankfuly, for many things, there's file convertors that mostly work, so I'm not completely stuck with the proprietary app if worst comes to worst.
This patent has cost the world a huge amount of money and provided nothing in return.
No. The FUD spread by the patent the patent cost money and time. Total people sued by Unisys over the GIF patent? Zero. That is nothing.
Looking back at the whole GIF patent saga, I believe Shakespear said it best. Much ado about nothing.
No there isn't a free lunch. The profits on Chevron (who is actively campaigning against prop 87) would decrease. The bite must come out of the oil companies' ample profits, not from the individuals. A progressive tax (which this effectively is) is not a free lunch. No more than a regressive tax is "sound economic policy."
First off, I think you're bound for failure. However, if you really want to do this, there's a feature you should absolutly not impliment. Friends. Nothing like a /. zoo. Friends will be people that agreee with you. Foes will be people that disagree with you. Soon it degenerates into killfile.
Some say don't censor, but that's wrong. You should. Too often the shrillest voices take over the discussion. Be fair though. Five years ago Jonah Goldberg fired Ann Coulter from the National Review Online, for her notriously shrill and childish name calling. He said that there was no place for that in a serious political discussion, and he was absolutely right. (Five years later, he's realized that playing Coulter's childish game is what makes money, so he's done a 180 and wrote the self-paroding and hypocritical "Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton," but that's for another discusssion.)
This guy skipped all that, obsessed with the scholoarly aspect 24/7. He will probably do the same with his job, become quite wealthy, but ultimately very depressed. I wouldn't be surprised to see this guy on a suicide watch by the time he is 25 if he is not careful.
I was thinking that very thing. I wouldn't be surprised if he did commit suicide. Suicide at young age is a known problem with child prodigies.