In that case wouldn't Tom be guilty of illicit insider trading, as he used confidential information when trading securities? In order to profit he had to initiate the trade either before the trade secret was public, or shortly afterwords - both of which are illegal. He might even be in violation of some market manipulation laws.
Note, this does not disprove your core point that if someone publishes trade secrets they are just as responsible for the damage caused by doing so as the leaker.
A question for those of you that use KWord heavily - How does the MS Word import compare to open office? About the same? More limited? Better perhaps?
I have been using Open Office, and would like to ditch it, in part because it is too resource intensive (even with java disabled), but also because the.doc import feature is less exact than I need. Don't get me wrong, it does import just about every part of every document I read, and renders it pretty close to the way that MS does, which is very impressive given how horrible that file format is. However, for WYSIWYG programs, rendering things "pretty close" to the same often isn't good enough.
In particular it renders all the fonts slightly larger than Word does. This means that documents are often paginated differently that the original - a big problem when someone is trying to refer to information on a certain page of a manual. It means that documents that expect a line of text to fit on the page often don't, causing unacceptable wrapping. A large percentage of the Word documents I deal with are flyers and forms, where WYSIWYG is essential, and I have to end up reformating nearly all of them before converting to PDF to post on our (a non-profit's) website. If KWord is better at this, then I will be installing KDE pronto.
This is a cool little robot - a nice example of how much you can do with a simple design. However, I think it is a bit premature to declare that it has set any biped records, seeing as how it can't balance on two legs yet.
He didn't say that - this just another case of a horribly misleading summary. What he said is that someone who multitasks every day has a harder time focusing on a single task. The athlete quote is an analogy taken out of context, which caused it to loose all meaning.
Using this strategy, they managed to net second place, and they get a newspaper article for it.
That is the administrations improved PR in work.
As a proud alumni, I'd like to point out, just because our adminstration hates it when we do so, that the name is New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, and it is not a University:) It is not in the name, and historicaly, the term university, has been reserved for large schools that are divided into multiple colleges. We are a small engineering college and we like it that way. Bigger is not always better - stop trying to ruin the school with your illusions of grandure.
</rant>
Sorry for that. Several years ago the administration decided make increasing enrollment it's biggest goal, which came with talks of improving freshmen retention. Tech already accepts almost anyone who applies (a good thing), and about half drop out after before completing their junior year. While a couple classes seemed to be "weeding-out classes", most were reasonably challenging for those willing to learn. So there is naturally concern that standards will drop as a result of the administrations direction.
The practice of slapping the word Univerity into all the press releases started at the same time, and the two are linked in my mind, hence the rant.
Anyway, sounds like a fun competition, and best regards to the materials students that designed the project.
It is unfortunate that people are so self-righteous and hostile when attempting to explain why our rights are important - it just confirms people's preconceptions that the ideas are just conspiracy theories.
I definitely agree that CD's are better. When I buy music I am creating a collection that I plan on keeping for decades. CD's win on every mark for this. The fact that it is a wide-spread industry-standard means that I will never have to worry about finding a drive to read the data. Because it is an open standard I will never have to break the law to listen to it on the OS of my choice. Since it has not been encoded using lossy compression, I can encode it into whatever format is convenient for me without the artifacts that come from transcoding. Pressed CD's last a long time if you take care of them, which gives me a second level of backups in addition to my normal computer backups. Plus I like the jacket covers - I enjoy laying on my bed, reading and thinking about the lyrics, while listening to the music. For the advantages, the extra $3 that a CD costs is worth it to me.
Why should I settle for DRM? Sure the lossy-encoding is good enough for listening. But why buy music whose quality is inferior, but good enough. Sure iTMS has the most lenient DRM policy than any of the other DRM schemes. But why give up any rights at all, when not only is there a completely open standard available, but it is also widely used? Why settle for second best, just because it is "the future"? There is one significant advantage to buying music on iTunes - the price of a single. I can understand that, although I have never had a desire to buy singles myself.
It is frustrating to me that people are so eager to switch to a format that is inferior in both sound quality and consumer rights. Not because I am a control freak who wants to dictate peoples lives, but because once the majority decide that proprietary DRM'ed formats are good enough, companies will stop selling CD's. Then I won't have a choice. Eventually even the independent artists will switch to whatever the dominant format is, because that is what is easiest for most of their fans. I don't want to loose that choice.
I can't seem to find the article right now, but I remember reading about researchers who were looking at incorporating non-newtonian fluids like this into kevlar jackets. The material was basically cosmetic wax mixed with nano-silicate particles, and became solid under pressure. When you worked the material into a fabric it would act as armor, and what better fabric to work it into than kevlar. Most bullet-proof jackets are not entirely kevlar, and have solid plates over critical areas. The preliminary tests done showed that if you worked this material into the kevlar, you could get rid of the plates, and almost half the thickness, and it would offer the same protection as current jackets. Alternately, you could keep the thickness and improve the level of protection.
Obligatory: That is what I recall from reading, human memory is not perfect.
There seems to be a half a beat pause after I first click a link (during the "contacting the website" phase), then the page almost instantly appears. In contrast, Safari begins rendering almost immediately, but takes half a beat to finish.
If you have a preference about how long the browser waits for data before it starts to render the data it already has, you can play with it in Camino (and Firefox) by typing about:config into the address window and editing "nglayout.initialpaint.delay". The value is in milliseconds and defaults to 250. If the parameter doesn't already exist create it by right-clicking and selecting New->Integer.
Obviously, this is one of those settings that is far too fine grained to put into a config box, so you just have to make a decision about what you think most users would want and go with it. But the about:config settings are there for the adventureous.
Curious. I know that it is in Snowcrash, as I just read that recently. However, while reading that part in Snowcrash, I could have sworn that I had read it before in Cryptinomicon (the only book of his that I have read). Now perhaps I am mistaken, and I had encountered the quote it on the internet somewhere, which is why it was familiar, but I am starting to get the feeling that he really likes that quote, and has used it in multiple novels:)
When I heard about Mozilla, I tried Milestone 8 (around 1999), and it was slow as a snail on my poor machine. WTF were they thinking? The Netscape code might have been difficult to maintain, but what really needed a revamp was the html renderer.
The reason Firefox did get a huge market share is not because of the XUL framework, but because it was finished. I'm sure all that delay could've been avoided.
Except that the main reason that Mozilla was so slow was because the XPCOM/XUL, not gecko. And improving that framework, in particular, the user interface portion is what made firefox more usable (Mozilla Suite, SeaMonkey, whatever, also incorporates many of those improvements too now).
They likely would have saved some time by going with an existing crossplatform libraries - if they did so from the begining. However, given the option of ripping out all the Netscape in-house cross-platform libraries and replacing them with stuff like ACE, Boost or QT, or improving upon what they already had, I think they made the right choice.
Here is the actuall paper[PDF], at the University of Washington website.
I tracked it down because I was wondering if malicious cookies were concidered malware in the 1 in 62 statistic, which would make it not so surprizing. I actually found that the metric they were using was much more limited the blurb suggestests. The number of sites merely distributing spyware was actually 1 in 20. The 1 in 62 statistic refered to sites that went further and used drive-by infection techniques, ie sites that used a flaw in the browser to modify files or registry items when you visited the site! See section 4, starting on page 9 for detailed methodology.
If the police can convince a judge that certain information is necisarry evidence in a criminal investigation, and they document the justification, then the police can access any information or property they need. In all other cases, releasing my private information to anyone other than me is simply unacceptable. (In the case of a company cell phone used on company time, it is the company's private information.)
You don't need to trade away your freedom for security - ever. The due process of law that we have had for hundreds of years already provides the all the powers (and "tools") needed to maintain the peace.
If you do webdesign, you need to check your pages in Explorer. If you do application software, and your users are on windows. If you do embedded software, and the dev kits are windows only. If you do electrical design, you will probably need to run OrCAD. If you do drafting, you will probably need to run AutoCAD. If you teach and your school requires a specific application for grades.
Since MS Office was ported to the Mac, most business people will probably be able to get by without using windows. For graphics work, all the professional tools are also on the Mac, so they can get by just fine as well. There are also many good audio tools as well, although most professionals use a mix of Mac and Windows software (plus that one that boots up without a seprate OS).
However for many people, they really don't have that option. Even if there are replacements apps on the Mac that are as good or better than the windows based industry standards, compatibility with others pretty much forces you to have a copy around.
For best effect read this joke in the accent of a drunk scottish math professor.
Suppose that there were some uninteresting counting numbers. They would be ordered, and would be greater than zero. Therefore there must be a first uninteresting number.
For games dual booting is the way to go. For everything else, I'd rather have the app be a little more slugish than to be constantly rebooting. For example, I work on websites in my spare time, it would be really nice to be able to check a page in both IE5win and IE6win on my mac (two vmware images) rather than having to use a seperate computer with two different installs of windows.
Here in the US, it is very rare for public schools to have competent network administrators. They don't have the money to attract people who know what they are doing, and the schools are slow to adapt to change. In rural areas it is not uncommon for the main tech support guy to be one of the teachers, who does it all in his spare time. Usually they don't have any training in IT administration, and never had any intention of doing that kind of work, but are stuck with the job because if they don't do it no one else will.
Another common thing to see in rural areas is a single administrator for a entire district, which can contain a dozen schools spread out over a 1-5 thousand square mile area. Needless to say, they don't see the admin as often as they would like, and given local politics, it is often someone's relative who is not necisarrily the best person for the job.
Of course that's not always the case. One of our family friends is a teacher in in Las Vegas, NV and they have a full time IT administration team that is well-paid and competent. They also recognise the need for periodic upgrades and plan for it in their budget. Then again they are one of the more better funded school systems in the states.
Almost everyone I met in college had stories about how they knew more about computers than the people running them at their high school - it is the rule not the execption.
This is a perfect example of how the term Intellectual Property is complete garbage. He earned his wealth because of copyright, while dismissing patents as unjust, because he was intelligent enough to see the difference between the two.
One grants you control only over works that you create. The other grants you control over any similar work created by others. Alternately, the worst one can do with the powers granted by copyright is to hoard one's work as though it was never created. The worst one can do with the powers granted by a patent is to prevent anyone from creating any works that incorporate vague idea that you merely described.
This is a much, much greater power for the government to be handing out, and must be done with caution. Yet to date, no one has presented a workable means by which to decide who gets a patent and who doesn't. The guidelines in the law are novelty, obviousness, usefulness. Unfortunately, the last two are subjective, and the patent office has given up on them. It would take far more (experienced) man power than they have to determine the obviousness and the usefulness of a patent. Even if were to try and judge on those merits, the fact that this is an entirely subjective decision, on which rests potential revenues in the millions of dollars, guarantees that it will become unmanageable. The people making the decisions would be very susceptible to corruption, and corporations would challenge any decision they disagreed with. Those requirements, while necessary, are not practical to check. The novelty requirement is partially checked, and there are some practical ways that this checking could be improved, but it simply isn't enough. Granting patents on obvious ideas is still the root of the problem even if the idea being patented is new.
Of course it is impossible to speak for all slashdotters, but a large number are of the opinion that copyright in principle is good - it is just our implementation, in particular the drastic changes that have happened during just the last 30 years, that is flawed. Not even Richard Stallman would claim that all copyright should be revoked; he has stated on many occasions that different types of works (software, books, music, etc) need to be considered separately.
Muddling these issues together under the combined term Intellectual Property is a poor choice of words at best, and at worst it is intentionally misleading, and a staple for straw-man arguments.
True, but consider this example. You want to join a club. Their membership contract states that members of this club cannot have been born in August. You can't sign the contract and then say that you are a member of the club, and therefore your birthday is no longer in August. The fact that your birthday is in August would prevent you from joining the club, and thus from recieving any of the advantages that membership brings.
This is the same thing. If the software you wrote is an "effective technological protection measure", then you cannot release it under the GPL. Furthermore, this implies that you cannot link against any other software released under the GPL.
If you were to attempt to use GPL software (say an encryption library) to create a DRM package, you would be in violation of the GPL. At that point, you would be forced to stop using the encryption library in your package, and could be liable for damages.
At least that is the way I read it on first glance.
It means that you don't have to release Visual Studio, MFC, and the.Net runtime under the GPL, if you distribute a GPL application that requires those things to run. Unless your code is a compiler or object code intepretor, I don't see why you would think it is excluded.
The same reason that code is hard to read by non-programmers, or medical papers are hard to read by people without medical training. The law, like any field, needs precise language to communicate. Many words have special legal meanings that are subtly different from common speech (or not so subtle if language has diverged over time). This is necisarry for the same reason that you can't use plain english to write code - plain english leaves to much open for interpretation. When you write legal documents, you want the judge interpreting your document, should it ever go to court, to read it the way you intended it to be read. The best way to do this is to use the accepted legal terminology.
Actually, a human has been exposted to vacuum, at least partially, during a test (on accident). The link goes to Nasa's ask an astrophysicist answer to your question. It is an interesting read, even if it does dispell my childhood view of boiling blood and exploding eyeballs, ala Total Recall:)
While we are on the subject, would someone be so kind as to post the SP2 direct download link that works on non-explorer browers. I don't have a windows machine at home, but am preparing my windows clean-up disk in preparation for holiday travels, and my google skills are apparently lacking tonight.
When I was a kid, trading cards packages would often have a special cards that could be combined to form a mural. I know that I was always excited to see the picture come together as I got the pieces. Having a very small allowance, the motivation wasn't enough to get me to buy more cards than I would have otherwise, but I am sure that it did have some effect for those kids with more disposable income.
Anyway that was the first thing that came to mind when I read the article, but there are tons of other examples, like the transformers that combine. Also the monopoly lottery game that McDonalds did - people got much more into that than other lottery games where the anticipation begins and ends as soon as you scratch the game piece.
Part of the success probably depends on if the individual pieces are usefull (or have percieved value) on their own or not. If you have to wait till you have all ten before you can watch any of the flick, then it probably wouldn't create as much anticipation. However, in general, "Gotta catch them all" has long been a successfull marketing gimmick, and will continue to be.
I concur that Charlize is not fat. However the one sentence that I do agree with in the GP's stupid rant is that she was not skinny enough to play aeon flux. Aeon Flux wasn't just skinny, muscular and skimpily dressed, she was ridiculously so. The strangeness and grotesqueness of that cartoon is half of what made it interesting. The whole artistic direction of this film doesn't appear to share anything in common with the cartoon. Of course, you would be hard pressed to find a real person with the same measurements as Aeon, however, they definitely could have done something more stylistically inline with the cartoon, compared to the standard slick futuristic feel which they went with.
Anyway, I'm planning on waiting to see the film when it comes out in the dollar theater or rental, but everything I've seen leads me to think that it will be a good action movie, with very little in common with the cartoon.
Slashdot Mirror
In that case wouldn't Tom be guilty of illicit insider trading, as he used confidential information when trading securities? In order to profit he had to initiate the trade either before the trade secret was public, or shortly afterwords - both of which are illegal. He might even be in violation of some market manipulation laws.
Note, this does not disprove your core point that if someone publishes trade secrets they are just as responsible for the damage caused by doing so as the leaker.
A question for those of you that use KWord heavily - How does the MS Word import compare to open office? About the same? More limited? Better perhaps?
.doc import feature is less exact than I need. Don't get me wrong, it does import just about every part of every document I read, and renders it pretty close to the way that MS does, which is very impressive given how horrible that file format is. However, for WYSIWYG programs, rendering things "pretty close" to the same often isn't good enough.
I have been using Open Office, and would like to ditch it, in part because it is too resource intensive (even with java disabled), but also because the
In particular it renders all the fonts slightly larger than Word does. This means that documents are often paginated differently that the original - a big problem when someone is trying to refer to information on a certain page of a manual. It means that documents that expect a line of text to fit on the page often don't, causing unacceptable wrapping. A large percentage of the Word documents I deal with are flyers and forms, where WYSIWYG is essential, and I have to end up reformating nearly all of them before converting to PDF to post on our (a non-profit's) website. If KWord is better at this, then I will be installing KDE pronto.
This is a cool little robot - a nice example of how much you can do with a simple design. However, I think it is a bit premature to declare that it has set any biped records, seeing as how it can't balance on two legs yet.
He didn't say that - this just another case of a horribly misleading summary. What he said is that someone who multitasks every day has a harder time focusing on a single task. The athlete quote is an analogy taken out of context, which caused it to loose all meaning.
Using this strategy, they managed to net second place, and they get a newspaper article for it.
:) It is not in the name, and historicaly, the term university, has been reserved for large schools that are divided into multiple colleges. We are a small engineering college and we like it that way. Bigger is not always better - stop trying to ruin the school with your illusions of grandure.
That is the administrations improved PR in work.
As a proud alumni, I'd like to point out, just because our adminstration hates it when we do so, that the name is New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, and it is not a University
</rant>
Sorry for that. Several years ago the administration decided make increasing enrollment it's biggest goal, which came with talks of improving freshmen retention. Tech already accepts almost anyone who applies (a good thing), and about half drop out after before completing their junior year. While a couple classes seemed to be "weeding-out classes", most were reasonably challenging for those willing to learn. So there is naturally concern that standards will drop as a result of the administrations direction.
The practice of slapping the word Univerity into all the press releases started at the same time, and the two are linked in my mind, hence the rant.
Anyway, sounds like a fun competition, and best regards to the materials students that designed the project.
It is unfortunate that people are so self-righteous and hostile when attempting to explain why our rights are important - it just confirms people's preconceptions that the ideas are just conspiracy theories.
I definitely agree that CD's are better. When I buy music I am creating a collection that I plan on keeping for decades. CD's win on every mark for this. The fact that it is a wide-spread industry-standard means that I will never have to worry about finding a drive to read the data. Because it is an open standard I will never have to break the law to listen to it on the OS of my choice. Since it has not been encoded using lossy compression, I can encode it into whatever format is convenient for me without the artifacts that come from transcoding. Pressed CD's last a long time if you take care of them, which gives me a second level of backups in addition to my normal computer backups. Plus I like the jacket covers - I enjoy laying on my bed, reading and thinking about the lyrics, while listening to the music. For the advantages, the extra $3 that a CD costs is worth it to me.
Why should I settle for DRM? Sure the lossy-encoding is good enough for listening. But why buy music whose quality is inferior, but good enough. Sure iTMS has the most lenient DRM policy than any of the other DRM schemes. But why give up any rights at all, when not only is there a completely open standard available, but it is also widely used? Why settle for second best, just because it is "the future"? There is one significant advantage to buying music on iTunes - the price of a single. I can understand that, although I have never had a desire to buy singles myself.
It is frustrating to me that people are so eager to switch to a format that is inferior in both sound quality and consumer rights. Not because I am a control freak who wants to dictate peoples lives, but because once the majority decide that proprietary DRM'ed formats are good enough, companies will stop selling CD's. Then I won't have a choice. Eventually even the independent artists will switch to whatever the dominant format is, because that is what is easiest for most of their fans. I don't want to loose that choice.
I can't seem to find the article right now, but I remember reading about researchers who were looking at incorporating non-newtonian fluids like this into kevlar jackets. The material was basically cosmetic wax mixed with nano-silicate particles, and became solid under pressure. When you worked the material into a fabric it would act as armor, and what better fabric to work it into than kevlar. Most bullet-proof jackets are not entirely kevlar, and have solid plates over critical areas. The preliminary tests done showed that if you worked this material into the kevlar, you could get rid of the plates, and almost half the thickness, and it would offer the same protection as current jackets. Alternately, you could keep the thickness and improve the level of protection.
Obligatory: That is what I recall from reading, human memory is not perfect.
There seems to be a half a beat pause after I first click a link (during the "contacting the website" phase), then the page almost instantly appears. In contrast, Safari begins rendering almost immediately, but takes half a beat to finish.
If you have a preference about how long the browser waits for data before it starts to render the data it already has, you can play with it in Camino (and Firefox) by typing about:config into the address window and editing "nglayout.initialpaint.delay". The value is in milliseconds and defaults to 250. If the parameter doesn't already exist create it by right-clicking and selecting New->Integer.
Obviously, this is one of those settings that is far too fine grained to put into a config box, so you just have to make a decision about what you think most users would want and go with it. But the about:config settings are there for the adventureous.
Curious. I know that it is in Snowcrash, as I just read that recently. However, while reading that part in Snowcrash, I could have sworn that I had read it before in Cryptinomicon (the only book of his that I have read). Now perhaps I am mistaken, and I had encountered the quote it on the internet somewhere, which is why it was familiar, but I am starting to get the feeling that he really likes that quote, and has used it in multiple novels :)
When I heard about Mozilla, I tried Milestone 8 (around 1999), and it was slow as a snail on my poor machine. WTF were they thinking? The Netscape code might have been difficult to maintain, but what really needed a revamp was the html renderer.
The reason Firefox did get a huge market share is not because of the XUL framework, but because it was finished. I'm sure all that delay could've been avoided.
Except that the main reason that Mozilla was so slow was because the XPCOM/XUL, not gecko. And improving that framework, in particular, the user interface portion is what made firefox more usable (Mozilla Suite, SeaMonkey, whatever, also incorporates many of those improvements too now).
They likely would have saved some time by going with an existing crossplatform libraries - if they did so from the begining. However, given the option of ripping out all the Netscape in-house cross-platform libraries and replacing them with stuff like ACE, Boost or QT, or improving upon what they already had, I think they made the right choice.
Here is the actuall paper[PDF], at the University of Washington website.
I tracked it down because I was wondering if malicious cookies were concidered malware in the 1 in 62 statistic, which would make it not so surprizing. I actually found that the metric they were using was much more limited the blurb suggestests. The number of sites merely distributing spyware was actually 1 in 20. The 1 in 62 statistic refered to sites that went further and used drive-by infection techniques, ie sites that used a flaw in the browser to modify files or registry items when you visited the site! See section 4, starting on page 9 for detailed methodology.
If the police can convince a judge that certain information is necisarry evidence in a criminal investigation, and they document the justification, then the police can access any information or property they need. In all other cases, releasing my private information to anyone other than me is simply unacceptable. (In the case of a company cell phone used on company time, it is the company's private information.)
You don't need to trade away your freedom for security - ever. The due process of law that we have had for hundreds of years already provides the all the powers (and "tools") needed to maintain the peace.
If you do webdesign, you need to check your pages in Explorer.
If you do application software, and your users are on windows.
If you do embedded software, and the dev kits are windows only.
If you do electrical design, you will probably need to run OrCAD.
If you do drafting, you will probably need to run AutoCAD.
If you teach and your school requires a specific application for grades.
Since MS Office was ported to the Mac, most business people will probably be able to get by without using windows. For graphics work, all the professional tools are also on the Mac, so they can get by just fine as well. There are also many good audio tools as well, although most professionals use a mix of Mac and Windows software (plus that one that boots up without a seprate OS).
However for many people, they really don't have that option. Even if there are replacements apps on the Mac that are as good or better than the windows based industry standards, compatibility with others pretty much forces you to have a copy around.
So that site is obviously wrong
For games dual booting is the way to go. For everything else, I'd rather have the app be a little more slugish than to be constantly rebooting. For example, I work on websites in my spare time, it would be really nice to be able to check a page in both IE5win and IE6win on my mac (two vmware images) rather than having to use a seperate computer with two different installs of windows.
there is a time gap between the last episode, and the movie. Plenty of room for more.
Only six months, and the comic books already covered some of that.
Here in the US, it is very rare for public schools to have competent network administrators. They don't have the money to attract people who know what they are doing, and the schools are slow to adapt to change. In rural areas it is not uncommon for the main tech support guy to be one of the teachers, who does it all in his spare time. Usually they don't have any training in IT administration, and never had any intention of doing that kind of work, but are stuck with the job because if they don't do it no one else will.
Another common thing to see in rural areas is a single administrator for a entire district, which can contain a dozen schools spread out over a 1-5 thousand square mile area. Needless to say, they don't see the admin as often as they would like, and given local politics, it is often someone's relative who is not necisarrily the best person for the job.
Of course that's not always the case. One of our family friends is a teacher in in Las Vegas, NV and they have a full time IT administration team that is well-paid and competent. They also recognise the need for periodic upgrades and plan for it in their budget. Then again they are one of the more better funded school systems in the states.
Almost everyone I met in college had stories about how they knew more about computers than the people running them at their high school - it is the rule not the execption.
This is a perfect example of how the term Intellectual Property is complete garbage. He earned his wealth because of copyright, while dismissing patents as unjust, because he was intelligent enough to see the difference between the two.
One grants you control only over works that you create. The other grants you control over any similar work created by others. Alternately, the worst one can do with the powers granted by copyright is to hoard one's work as though it was never created. The worst one can do with the powers granted by a patent is to prevent anyone from creating any works that incorporate vague idea that you merely described.
This is a much, much greater power for the government to be handing out, and must be done with caution. Yet to date, no one has presented a workable means by which to decide who gets a patent and who doesn't. The guidelines in the law are novelty, obviousness, usefulness. Unfortunately, the last two are subjective, and the patent office has given up on them. It would take far more (experienced) man power than they have to determine the obviousness and the usefulness of a patent. Even if were to try and judge on those merits, the fact that this is an entirely subjective decision, on which rests potential revenues in the millions of dollars, guarantees that it will become unmanageable. The people making the decisions would be very susceptible to corruption, and corporations would challenge any decision they disagreed with. Those requirements, while necessary, are not practical to check. The novelty requirement is partially checked, and there are some practical ways that this checking could be improved, but it simply isn't enough. Granting patents on obvious ideas is still the root of the problem even if the idea being patented is new.
Of course it is impossible to speak for all slashdotters, but a large number are of the opinion that copyright in principle is good - it is just our implementation, in particular the drastic changes that have happened during just the last 30 years, that is flawed. Not even Richard Stallman would claim that all copyright should be revoked; he has stated on many occasions that different types of works (software, books, music, etc) need to be considered separately.
Muddling these issues together under the combined term Intellectual Property is a poor choice of words at best, and at worst it is intentionally misleading, and a staple for straw-man arguments.
True, but consider this example. You want to join a club. Their membership contract states that members of this club cannot have been born in August. You can't sign the contract and then say that you are a member of the club, and therefore your birthday is no longer in August. The fact that your birthday is in August would prevent you from joining the club, and thus from recieving any of the advantages that membership brings.
This is the same thing. If the software you wrote is an "effective technological protection measure", then you cannot release it under the GPL. Furthermore, this implies that you cannot link against any other software released under the GPL.
If you were to attempt to use GPL software (say an encryption library) to create a DRM package, you would be in violation of the GPL. At that point, you would be forced to stop using the encryption library in your package, and could be liable for damages.
At least that is the way I read it on first glance.
It means that you don't have to release Visual Studio, MFC, and the .Net runtime under the GPL, if you distribute a GPL application that requires those things to run. Unless your code is a compiler or object code intepretor, I don't see why you would think it is excluded.
The same reason that code is hard to read by non-programmers, or medical papers are hard to read by people without medical training. The law, like any field, needs precise language to communicate. Many words have special legal meanings that are subtly different from common speech (or not so subtle if language has diverged over time). This is necisarry for the same reason that you can't use plain english to write code - plain english leaves to much open for interpretation. When you write legal documents, you want the judge interpreting your document, should it ever go to court, to read it the way you intended it to be read. The best way to do this is to use the accepted legal terminology.
Actually, a human has been exposted to vacuum, at least partially, during a test (on accident). The link goes to Nasa's ask an astrophysicist answer to your question. It is an interesting read, even if it does dispell my childhood view of boiling blood and exploding eyeballs, ala Total Recall :)
While we are on the subject, would someone be so kind as to post the SP2 direct download link that works on non-explorer browers. I don't have a windows machine at home, but am preparing my windows clean-up disk in preparation for holiday travels, and my google skills are apparently lacking tonight.
thanks
When I was a kid, trading cards packages would often have a special cards that could be combined to form a mural. I know that I was always excited to see the picture come together as I got the pieces. Having a very small allowance, the motivation wasn't enough to get me to buy more cards than I would have otherwise, but I am sure that it did have some effect for those kids with more disposable income.
Anyway that was the first thing that came to mind when I read the article, but there are tons of other examples, like the transformers that combine. Also the monopoly lottery game that McDonalds did - people got much more into that than other lottery games where the anticipation begins and ends as soon as you scratch the game piece.
Part of the success probably depends on if the individual pieces are usefull (or have percieved value) on their own or not. If you have to wait till you have all ten before you can watch any of the flick, then it probably wouldn't create as much anticipation. However, in general, "Gotta catch them all" has long been a successfull marketing gimmick, and will continue to be.
I concur that Charlize is not fat. However the one sentence that I do agree with in the GP's stupid rant is that she was not skinny enough to play aeon flux. Aeon Flux wasn't just skinny, muscular and skimpily dressed, she was ridiculously so. The strangeness and grotesqueness of that cartoon is half of what made it interesting. The whole artistic direction of this film doesn't appear to share anything in common with the cartoon. Of course, you would be hard pressed to find a real person with the same measurements as Aeon, however, they definitely could have done something more stylistically inline with the cartoon, compared to the standard slick futuristic feel which they went with.
Anyway, I'm planning on waiting to see the film when it comes out in the dollar theater or rental, but everything I've seen leads me to think that it will be a good action movie, with very little in common with the cartoon.