Come on, people, take a look at the membership of this organization... the CCIA's opposition to MS software is NOT news.
Reporting even the mundane serves a vital function: to confirm that the expected has occurred... because sometimes it doesn't, and because sometimes people don't know what to expect even when others suppose they do. This action by the CCIA is exciting to some people because of their perceptions that on a fundamental level the struggle between open source and closed systems is anything but decided, with politics playing a potentially huge role and the dept of homeland security being a decidely political player.
If we adopt the convention that "news" must be surprising or counterintuitive, then by my standards of such we would have no coverage of:
George Bush giving government money to religious organizations
Mostly successful space shuttle launches with the occassional disaster
sport team A beating sport team B by X points in their latest matchup
... and so on.
If someone wants to declare that the media organizations are generally monolithic money-grubbing non-objectivists then I'm right there with them. I'd even be good with the statement that the vast majority of what gets reported is not worth knowing, and in fact is designed to foster cultures of fear and consumerism. But those are different positions from saying that predictability is uniformly knowable, and unwelcome when recognized.
Wonder how this would affect shoplifting? Just wear the watch and walk out $0 deducted from your bank account?!
Reminds me of my sophisticated dine n dash technique at fancy restaurants. When the bill shows up I hand the waiter my credit card, then hightail it out the door before he can return with a receipt for my signature. Suckers.
MSBlaster Author: Hey, why are you guys sneaking into my cell? Big Burt: To teach you a little lesson. Here in the pen, there are two types we don't like: child molesters and computer virus writers. (Others): *menacing mutters of assent* MSBlaster Author: But MY virus attacked Windows systems! Large Larry: Oh! Hey, that's cool. We thought you were attacking linux. We're very sorry to bother you, we'll be leaving now.
No, he's right. The Internet is dead. In fact, I've already dismantled my computer and set it out by the street. The Internet is over. Now, who wants to go get a pizza?
If only that were possible. Pizza is dead. No more toppings, no more cheese... it's all gone, bye bye. I've already placed my boxes of unused stridex pads out on the street. Now, who wants to go out to a disco?
Uh, that had nothing to do with copyright. Comeone somewhere (probably a teacher) told this girl not to do the same thing... in a originality/creativity/thinking for yourself sense.
There's a difference between thinking for one's self to arrive at a rational conclusion vs disallowing the indulgence of imitating something that is fun or beautiful. There's no reason someone shouldn't be able to deliver a line from The Simpsons in the right social atmosphere, get a healthy laugh, and move on without giving attribution if they don't feel like it. If someone wants to adopt wholesale the persona of Homer and act in accordance with that fulltime, they should be allowed to... and people should be allowed to decide whether they feel it's fun to witness such a spectacle without niggling over whether the person doing it happened to "think of Homer's personality first" or not. There's too much territorialism when it comes to emulating neat things, and it holds back the healthy transmission of culture. And this burdensome stigma prevents many people from being independent thinkers about copyright... because they have been conditioned so long to believe that someone who discovers an idea should be granted an authority to control it.
I don't know enough about the Linux dev process to comment on it, but in software I've worked on there's typically time tacked onto the end of the schedule to do performance testing and tweaking.
I couldn't agree more. I'm glad to find evidence - like this message - that people are finding the time to think for themselves about copyright. And it takes courage to say this stuff, even in a relatively anonymous forum... but that's what we have to do, we have to create the awareness that we are not alone in our thinking. Fascism throughout the ages has relied on dividing people and making them think they're alone. But every day I'm meeting more people who do not believe in copyright. Not people who simply want to rationalize downloading, but people who understand that copyright laws have recreated the situation in old England of the lords who had property and the serfs who never would.
A week ago I was at a party where several six-year-old children were running around. They started painting things on paper. One of them came up to me and showed me a painting she liked that had been done by another child. It was of a bear. She said "I like this painting, I wish I could do a bear." When I asked her why she didn't, she said "oh no, I can't, Laura already painted a bear so only she can do it." I told her that she could go ahead and paint the same bear, a different bear, or anything she wanted. She was delighted.
It is unfair to have [producers of free products] spend the time and money, and you reap the benefits.
It's essentially a transient economic dislocation... similar to how it was unfair to people who invested time creating horse and buggy operations when the automobile came along. One way to see it is not as fair or unfair but simply the way things are.
if you're sick of these stories, stop looking for them
I wish the slashdot editors would create a "SCO" checkbox on the homepage so that these stories could be filtered out, just like Star Wars prequels and JK pieces. I wouldn't personally choose to filter them out, but I think many people would and they should be allowed to do so.
One thing to add to the submitter's list of precautions is to either us a POBox for receiving mail or to have a lock on the one outside your house. A few years back our neighborhood was hit by the rather low-tech approach of a person going mailbox to mailbox and simply rifling through for sensitive data.
My post may be a tad OT, but I thought I'd comment on the following:
Linux[sic] and Stallman are staunch representatives of the freedom to code and share your code
Stallman is definitely a staunch proponent of the freedom to code. By contrast, the interviews I've read with Linus suggest that he (Linus) really stays out of politics and confines himself to the role of an engineer making as generally useful a product as possible. There is some overlap between "freedom to code" and "general useability", though they're not the same. Linus' advocacy of "freedom to code" goes as far as his licensing linux under Stallman's GPL, and not much further. Stallman's commitment to "freedom to code" includes non-stop lectures and appearances designed to educate the public about such issues, meticulously upgrading the GPL, and even butting heads with Linus over actions by Linus that may call code freedom into question, e.g. use of bitkeeper (and Linus generally dismisses these confrontations with statements to the effect of "I've got work to do").
I wonder how much of this information a search engine like Google could get for free by paying attention to these factors:
a) which results actually get loaded by a user
b) the gap in time between successive result load
c) the last result a user loads
I can imagine useful interpretations of each factor such as (a) links that get loaded were more useful than those that were skipped, (b) longer times between loads might mean richer relevance to user's search, and (c) user definitively found what they were looking for upon viewing the result. Granted there are common load patterns that would throw these interpretations askew, but the very same thing could be said of the information that google currently uses to rank links, and there is still enough statistically valuable data there to make them a great search engine.
The fog screen enables many novel applications indoors. Interesting applications include walk-thru advertisements on shops or malls, or a walk-thru screen in world-class museums, corporate showrooms, trade fairs, theme parks, special events, spas, theatres, science centers, lobbies, etc.... We will also present some intriguing new concepts later.
One of our favorite uses: an image that people can walk through which looks just like a solid brick wall... exactly six inches in front of a real brick wall. Get your webcams ready.
Does anyone else find it find it very disturbing that the first application they suggest is advertising?
On an ongoing basis I do find it somewhat disturbing how many people reflexively think of any phenomenon in terms of commerce. I recently stood with a friend in a beautiful 400-year-old chapel. We were both impressed with the atmospheric music and subtle lighting that had been set up. My friend then commented - without a trace of humor - "Wow this is great marketing!" I don't know if the comment bordered on blasphemy, and wouldn't care if it did, but its roots in an overcommercialized world did not seem in doubt to me.
I have a great mobile setup for voip: I run voip software on my zaurus. Then when I'm away from home, I simply connect my zaurus to the internet by using my cellphone as a modem... so I can make voip calls from anywhere!
Taylor says he plans to focus on (and fund) studies that 'will highlight Microsoft's advantages in areas such as security, feature-completeness and total cost of ownership.'
You just right click, choose "Image->Transforms->Rotate->90 Degrees" and it does exactly what you'd expect. If you rotate a _layer_ then you have to make sure it will fit on a canvas
Ah, perhaps this is the root of my difficulty. Thank you for helping me.:)
To do a simple 90-degree rotation of an image in gimp, you must:
expand the canvas so that nothing gets cropped out during the rotation, then
invoke the rotation command, then
re-crop so that no extra canvas remains
I'm kind of curious as to how such a simple operation as a rotation could have been implemented so counterintuitively for so long. (Please, no "quite whining and do it yourself" posts, I'm busy with other things and I would have done it right the first time anyway).
Stealing X from Bob deprives Bob of the use of X. Infringing Bob's copyright on X deprives Bob of potential profits from exclusive possession of X.
and why it's bad
Here's the rub: some people don't believe it's bad. Copyright infringement is illegal, but many people don't equate legality with morality. Distinguishing between the legal and moral uses of "bad" is therefor important.
Before the printing press, the cost of replicating an idea on a large scale was prohibitive. The printing press brought that cost down to something commercial feasible. The internet brings the cost down to nearly zero, which throws issues like the legality vs morality of copyright infringement into the spotlight.
Even before the printing press, an idea could be replicated through the simple act of describing it to another person. The replication of an idea has - per se - never cost the originator of the idea anything monetary except in the context of copyright where potential profits (from exclusivity of distribution rights) are reduced through free replication of the idea. But copyright was conceived as a way to increase the public's access to ideas, the notion being that the limited-time monopolies granted by copyright might spur people to create more useful or beautiful ideas. Given today's technology, a key question is: are we really getting greater access to works because of copyright, or is copyright resulting in fewer people getting access to works than otherwise would?
The progress of science, technology, and free markets have produced an end to many kinds of scarcity. A hundred years ago, more than 99% of Americans were still using outhouses, and one out of every ten children died in infancy. Now even the poorest Americans have cars, television, telephones, heat, clean water, sanitary sewers -- things that the richest millionaires of 1900 could not buy. These technologies promise an end to physical want in the near future.
We should be rejoicing in mutually creating a heaven on earth! Instead, those crabbed souls who make their living from perpetuating scarcity are sneaking around, convincing co-conspirators to chain our cheap duplication technology so that it won't make copies -- at least not of the kind of goods they want to sell us. This is the worst sort of economic protectionism -- beggaring your own society for the benefit of an inefficient local industry. The record and movie distribution companies are careful not to point this out to us, but that is what is happening.
If by 2030 we have invented a matter duplicator that's as cheap as copying a CD today, will we outlaw it and drive it underground? So that farmers can make a living keeping food expensive, so that furniture makers can make a living preventing people from having beds and chairs that would cost a dollar to duplicate, so that builders won't be reduced to poverty because a comfortable house can be duplicated for a few hundred dollars? Yes, such developments would cause economic dislocations for sure. But should we drive them underground and keep the world impoverished to save these peoples' jobs? And would they really stay underground, or would the natural advantages of the technology cause the "underground" to rapidly overtake the rest of society?
Slashdot Mirror
Reporting even the mundane serves a vital function: to confirm that the expected has occurred... because sometimes it doesn't, and because sometimes people don't know what to expect even when others suppose they do. This action by the CCIA is exciting to some people because of their perceptions that on a fundamental level the struggle between open source and closed systems is anything but decided, with politics playing a potentially huge role and the dept of homeland security being a decidely political player.
If we adopt the convention that "news" must be surprising or counterintuitive, then by my standards of such we would have no coverage of:
If someone wants to declare that the media organizations are generally monolithic money-grubbing non-objectivists then I'm right there with them. I'd even be good with the statement that the vast majority of what gets reported is not worth knowing, and in fact is designed to foster cultures of fear and consumerism. But those are different positions from saying that predictability is uniformly knowable, and unwelcome when recognized.
Reminds me of my sophisticated dine n dash technique at fancy restaurants. When the bill shows up I hand the waiter my credit card, then hightail it out the door before he can return with a receipt for my signature. Suckers.
That's ok... your tears say more than real evidence *ever* could.
Another irony: the decompiler pages are translated on that site into one other language: Italian, Ivor's native language.
Scene: lockdown time in fed pen.
MSBlaster Author: Hey, why are you guys sneaking into my cell?
Big Burt: To teach you a little lesson. Here in the pen, there are two types we don't like: child molesters and computer virus writers.
(Others): *menacing mutters of assent*
MSBlaster Author: But MY virus attacked Windows systems!
Large Larry: Oh! Hey, that's cool. We thought you were attacking linux. We're very sorry to bother you, we'll be leaving now.
If only that were possible. Pizza is dead. No more toppings, no more cheese... it's all gone, bye bye. I've already placed my boxes of unused stridex pads out on the street. Now, who wants to go out to a disco?
There's a difference between thinking for one's self to arrive at a rational conclusion vs disallowing the indulgence of imitating something that is fun or beautiful. There's no reason someone shouldn't be able to deliver a line from The Simpsons in the right social atmosphere, get a healthy laugh, and move on without giving attribution if they don't feel like it. If someone wants to adopt wholesale the persona of Homer and act in accordance with that fulltime, they should be allowed to... and people should be allowed to decide whether they feel it's fun to witness such a spectacle without niggling over whether the person doing it happened to "think of Homer's personality first" or not. There's too much territorialism when it comes to emulating neat things, and it holds back the healthy transmission of culture. And this burdensome stigma prevents many people from being independent thinkers about copyright... because they have been conditioned so long to believe that someone who discovers an idea should be granted an authority to control it.
I don't know enough about the Linux dev process to comment on it, but in software I've worked on there's typically time tacked onto the end of the schedule to do performance testing and tweaking.
A week ago I was at a party where several six-year-old children were running around. They started painting things on paper. One of them came up to me and showed me a painting she liked that had been done by another child. It was of a bear. She said "I like this painting, I wish I could do a bear." When I asked her why she didn't, she said "oh no, I can't, Laura already painted a bear so only she can do it." I told her that she could go ahead and paint the same bear, a different bear, or anything she wanted. She was delighted.
4. Threesome with Cowboy Neal
It's essentially a transient economic dislocation... similar to how it was unfair to people who invested time creating horse and buggy operations when the automobile came along. One way to see it is not as fair or unfair but simply the way things are.
Agreed.
if you're sick of these stories, stop looking for them
I wish the slashdot editors would create a "SCO" checkbox on the homepage so that these stories could be filtered out, just like Star Wars prequels and JK pieces. I wouldn't personally choose to filter them out, but I think many people would and they should be allowed to do so.
One thing to add to the submitter's list of precautions is to either us a POBox for receiving mail or to have a lock on the one outside your house. A few years back our neighborhood was hit by the rather low-tech approach of a person going mailbox to mailbox and simply rifling through for sensitive data.
Linux[sic] and Stallman are staunch representatives of the freedom to code and share your code
Stallman is definitely a staunch proponent of the freedom to code. By contrast, the interviews I've read with Linus suggest that he (Linus) really stays out of politics and confines himself to the role of an engineer making as generally useful a product as possible. There is some overlap between "freedom to code" and "general useability", though they're not the same. Linus' advocacy of "freedom to code" goes as far as his licensing linux under Stallman's GPL, and not much further. Stallman's commitment to "freedom to code" includes non-stop lectures and appearances designed to educate the public about such issues, meticulously upgrading the GPL, and even butting heads with Linus over actions by Linus that may call code freedom into question, e.g. use of bitkeeper (and Linus generally dismisses these confrontations with statements to the effect of "I've got work to do").
- a) which results actually get loaded by a user
- b) the gap in time between successive result load
- c) the last result a user loads
I can imagine useful interpretations of each factor such as (a) links that get loaded were more useful than those that were skipped, (b) longer times between loads might mean richer relevance to user's search, and (c) user definitively found what they were looking for upon viewing the result. Granted there are common load patterns that would throw these interpretations askew, but the very same thing could be said of the information that google currently uses to rank links, and there is still enough statistically valuable data there to make them a great search engine.One of our favorite uses: an image that people can walk through which looks just like a solid brick wall... exactly six inches in front of a real brick wall. Get your webcams ready.
On an ongoing basis I do find it somewhat disturbing how many people reflexively think of any phenomenon in terms of commerce. I recently stood with a friend in a beautiful 400-year-old chapel. We were both impressed with the atmospheric music and subtle lighting that had been set up. My friend then commented - without a trace of humor - "Wow this is great marketing!" I don't know if the comment bordered on blasphemy, and wouldn't care if it did, but its roots in an overcommercialized world did not seem in doubt to me.
<cartmanesque>Kick Ass!</cartmanesque>
And I thought MY job sucked. ;)
Ah, perhaps this is the root of my difficulty. Thank you for helping me. :)
- expand the canvas so that nothing gets cropped out during the rotation, then
- invoke the rotation command, then
- re-crop so that no extra canvas remains
I'm kind of curious as to how such a simple operation as a rotation could have been implemented so counterintuitively for so long. (Please, no "quite whining and do it yourself" posts, I'm busy with other things and I would have done it right the first time anyway).A single 4G CF-card can be much more useful as a volume in a zaurus than 4 1G cards.
Stealing X from Bob deprives Bob of the use of X. Infringing Bob's copyright on X deprives Bob of potential profits from exclusive possession of X.
and why it's bad
Here's the rub: some people don't believe it's bad. Copyright infringement is illegal, but many people don't equate legality with morality. Distinguishing between the legal and moral uses of "bad" is therefor important.
Before the printing press, the cost of replicating an idea on a large scale was prohibitive. The printing press brought that cost down to something commercial feasible. The internet brings the cost down to nearly zero, which throws issues like the legality vs morality of copyright infringement into the spotlight.
Even before the printing press, an idea could be replicated through the simple act of describing it to another person. The replication of an idea has - per se - never cost the originator of the idea anything monetary except in the context of copyright where potential profits (from exclusivity of distribution rights) are reduced through free replication of the idea. But copyright was conceived as a way to increase the public's access to ideas, the notion being that the limited-time monopolies granted by copyright might spur people to create more useful or beautiful ideas. Given today's technology, a key question is: are we really getting greater access to works because of copyright, or is copyright resulting in fewer people getting access to works than otherwise would?
In his interesting essay What's Wrong With Copy Protection, John Gilmore raises these points:
Food for thought.Let's all put the "pee" in "pee 2 pee networks".