Clooney's participation should come as no surprise, inasmuch as he previously did the voice of sparky the dog in the "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride" episode. He's been pals with Matt and Trey for a few years now and has supported them and their careers since the beginning.
I don't live in USA so I can hear 'bad' words on tv so I know this.
When I was last across the pond a year and a half or so ago, I was flipping through the channels and came across a promo for South Park episodes they were going to start broadcasting within a week or so. The promo consisted of having one of the characters standing there swearing with the swears bleeped out. The shock value was entirely lost on me, since I had just finished watching a show with fully uncensored profanity and was able to switch the channel to another show with full frontal nudity.
What passes for much of American entertainment, especially when taken out of context and in another land, is simply pathetic.
I never understood people's problems with the word "bitch". It's not officially one of the seven words, and yet I've seen morning-show-type shows where they bring in some lady from the American Kennel Club to talk about dogs, where they actually bleep out "bitch" when used to describe actual female dogs. The part of Carlin's routine where he talks about how you can get away with sentences like "In the morning, the cock crew" doesn't seem to apply anymore.
Some of these words might be genuinely vulgar, but it hardly takes a vulgar word to express a vulgar idea, and I personally find most of primetime television to be in poor taste as it is.
Yes, "nolo" refers to that, but it also means so much more: "We wanted a short domain name that can be easily remembered and associated with law, but lexis-nexis was already taken".
Keep in mind that Russian is adopting English words at a furious pace in matters of business and technology, so having a bald English word wouldn't pose too much of a problem as people would just accept it and deal with it. And don't forget the incredible influence French had on the language before this century.
With that in mind, some of the current tlds wouldn't pose much of a problem unmodified..COM maps well onto "kommercheskii",.ORG maps onto "organizatsia", and.MIL maps onto "militsia" (technically police, but it's close enough).
.NET is a problem, since "nyet" of course means "no". The word for network is "sjet'".
.EDU is hopeless. As is.GOV, since the root "gov" refers to speaking, not to anything related to government.
But again, these problems are nonissues. If you check out some.ru domains, you'll see them use "www" and "sex" and and all the usual sorts of naming conventions.
Basically, Parsec has always been planned to be a project for fun and educational purposes. So the decision to release it as freeware was actually quite an easy one. As soon as it became apparent that we didn't compare all that badly to commercial releases (at least in most respects, we certainly won't be able to compete with the breadth of the big releases, there being no missions and real story, for instance), we coined the term "commercial-quality freeware" to describe a freeware game that rivals commercial releases in quality. Since then, we're working on living up to this premise.
33. Will Parsec be open-source?
No. We're strong believers in a coordinated development effort for computer games which we don't think works with a large number of people involved. There are already plenty of really great open-source projects out there (have a look at Crystal Space and WorldForge for instance), so there isn't really anything missing. What we want to do is to create a game, for which art and music is also very important; we don't think you can create a consistent look-and-feel of a game in a hugely distributed approach. We are going to release some of the game source, though, to facilitate the creation of user extensions like mods, maybe even total conversions. We will decide on the license for this at a later time.
Sure, there's no need to opensource the artwork, but why keep the engine closed if it's all being done for educational reasons and for fun? Those two tend to be synonymous with open source. And the points about distributed development are both silly and inapplicable, since they don't actually have to accept any modifications that people would make. They could even release it under some silly "you get the source, but you can't distribute modified copies" sort of liscense that would encourage bugfixes but no forks. At least the second paragraph implies that this is all subject to change.
Let's just hope they don't screw up security-wise the way Quake 1 did. If they're writing the game from scratch, I hope they get it right instead of learning the hard way after the fact.
Antitrust law falls under criminal rather than civil law, and we all know of one too many examples of a large corporation getting off with just a Consent Decree that consisted of promising not to use anti-competitive tactics in the operating systems market. Ooops, did I give the company away?
As for the rest of criminal law, you're right. Particularly irksome is the obscenity convictions that were adjudicated under doctrines that didn't exist until the Supreme Court pulled them out of its collective ass and applied them to the pending case (Miller v. California).
If your post was meant to be funny, it didn't contain enough hyperbole to be blatently tongue-in-cheek. So I'll just treat it as ignorance.
You know what Jupiter's made of, right? 92% hydrogen, 7% helium, mostly methane for the rest, those sorts of things. At the upper atmosphere, it's more than a thousand degrees celcius, and it's all whipping about rather harshly. And oh yeah, no water. If there is life there, it doesn't resemble anything we have on earth, and whatever we bring from earth wouldn't be able to survive if it got there. And then there's the little problem about how the spacecraft will burn up once it enters the planet's atmosphere, which is after all, all of it (except perhaps for the metalic hydrogen core, which if it exists wouldn't make a lick of difference here). This is in stark contrast to Europa, which doesn't have an appreciable atmosphere and so if we lob something at it, it'll remain intact until it hits the surface.
Soooooo.....What happens if the crash site is currently occupied with Life Forms that we DON'T suspect, hmm? So in an ironic ending to the life of Galileo, it crashes into a planet with life forms and introduces extra-Jupiterian life to divide and conquer.
Yes, it'd be perfeclty ironic, since it'd crap all over lots of our biological and astronomical theories, but that doesn't mean it's possible. You're also forgetting the little bit about how there is no "landing site" per se -- just a spot floating in the outer atmosphere.
Or, we could send it off into deep space, and discover it 300 years from now as a tremendous space probe named G'leo.
Except the whole problem in the first place is that this thing doesn't have any extra fuel lying around for such a purpose. If we could just go ahead and send it off into deep space, it'd still be useful and we'd use it for that. Heck, the Voyager 2 is still sending back data from outside the solar system, and we're praying it'll last another twenty years and make it to measure the helioshock out there. But escaping the gravity of Jupiter is not a simple thing to do without any propulsion. Have you stopped to wonder why Jupiter has so many moons and trojan asteroids in the first place?
I can see the conversation between NASA and the spacecraft now:
Galileo: Well, I've put in my long hard years for the company, and after having put it off for a few years, I think it's time to retire and start collecting social security.
NASA: That's good, because we were coming up with a spectacular retirement package for you.
Galileo: Great, so what does my golden parachute look like?
The police need more than probable cause: they need a warrant, which is issuable upon a showing of probable cause. Why go through all the hassle of going before a judge and asking for a warrant? To protect people's privacy.
The third ammendment protects citizens from having troops quartered in their homes during times of peace. Why? Privacy. It's quite easy to understand the fifth amendment protection from self-incrimination in the same way. And then of course there's the ninth amendment which explicitly says that just because the right isn't specifically enumerated, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Have you read Griswold v. Connecticut? Katz v. US? Pierce v. Society of Sisters? Stanley v. Georgia? Eisenstadt v. Baird? Are you aware of federal and state legislation that proscribes the invasion of privacy, as well as state constitutional amendments specifically enumerating it? Do you actually have any experience in this matter, or are you just railing away at a pet peeve that's perhaps itched by Roe v. Wade? Do you even care?
Yes we have a 5th amendment that is supposed to protect the accused from all self-incrimination in criminal trials. But we also have a Supreme Court that in recent years has been rather fond of undermining civil liberties like these. The 5th amendment won't protect you from having to submit a urine sample for chemical analysis, and that's the line of argument the government will likely use if the crypto-key issue gets tested. Something like "Revealing the key isn't the same as forcing you to incriminate yourself. It just lets us understand a document where you already committed the self incrimination." This stands in stark contrast to other systems of law (particularly Jewish Law) where all self-incriminations are disregarded, without regard for how or why they were made.
Remember, the "land of the free and the home of the brave" is the same place where the highest court of the land looks poised to rule that anonymous tips are sufficient for giving probable cause to government agents to stop and frisk citizens on the streets. "Hey Bob, the person over there who looks like he's a member of a disfavored racial minority group looks like he could be carrying some drugs (or even a bomb!). Why don't you step into that phonebooth and call the station and leave an anonymous tip so we can go over there and get medieval on his civil rights! And remember, anonymity means zero accountability."
We're also the country where, right after the Diallo verdict came back, police three blocks from Diallo's house went and shot another unarmed black man at point-blank. But at least this time he had a sketchy criminal record and the whole thing was just a big mistake, so that makes it justified, right? Right? I hate this place.
It's a lithium ion rechargeable, and they claim both "Extended battery life through advanced" (whatever that means) and "Extended battery life through advanced MP3 buffering" to 12 megs of dram. But it would've been nice to know how much people will have to plug this thing in between plays (unless it really is just a glorified luggable).
And ten ounces, while still less than a pound, is not what I consider lightweight.
And is anyone else rendering the page as a gross combination of purple and yellow backgrounds? (White text on yellow background, what a wonderful idea!)
This is not a troll or flamebait. I respect SuSE. I really do. Anyone who can win a landwar in Europe the way they have against RedHat has to be doing something right.
With that said, I must now vent against SuSE's mascot, which to me (and lots of other people, I assume) looks like a green turd with legs and a face. Everyone knows Shakespeare's quote that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and most people know the common variation on that quote about excrement smelling just as sweet, and I for one find it quite appropos here.
RedHat's shadowman is somehow mysterious. Tux is adorable. The idea of a chameleon has a lot of promise, both for its symbolism and because it has a lot of untapped cuteness-value that could be unearthed and exploited (and maybe plush stuffed-animals is a step in the right direction). But please, SuSE, give the lizard a makeover.
And lest anyone think it's just a crappy slashdot rendition, here's the actual logo from SuSE's website). For comparison, an actual green chameleon from Kenya. Real chameleons are adroit climbers and skillful hunters with long strong muscular legs. SuSE's chameleon is perched on two pairs of stubby little legs (grossly out of proportion with the rest of its body) and sadly looks like it's about to fall over and die from asphyxiation like a sheep lying on its back. SuSE's chameleon wouldn't have a chance in hell of surviving in the wild (compared with, say, Tux as portrayed on extremelinux.com), which is not the message that we'd like to send about SuSE's distribution in particular or about Linux in general.
And as for the name, that issue's been beaten to death already. Alas, crappy ideas never die in the minds of marketers.
I can't stand lines of reasoning like yours, since it's the same sort of reasoning that encourages some people to keep things like sodomy laws on the books: "Sodomy laws aren't ever enforced against people who merely commit sodomy. They're only used as an additional charge to bring against violent rapists."
Quite frankly, it's a bullshit sort of reasoning. If it's so important to increase the penalty for the act in question, go ahead and increase the penalty for the act in question. Don't surrepticiously contrive additional unnecessary charges. If a person can be punished for committing a crime, then it's simply redundant to charge him with possessing the means by which he committed that crime -- of course you had the means, since, after all, you were successful in committing the crime. Laws that aren't uniformly applied reek tyrranical abuse of power.
The only thing that can be accomplished by having this additional statute is letting the state punish individuals for the mere possession of the tool in question. In fact, if you go ahead and look at history, you'll find countless examples of how states have found it much easier to punish possession of the means or knowledge of the method of committing crimes than punishing the crime itself -- for the most part, honest citizens won't put up much resistance since, after all, they don't consider themselves criminals and feel no need to possess things that are overtly associated with criminals.
Before you jump to the conclusion that no one will outlaw mere possession of these sorts of tools, ask yourself why there's so many gun-control laws and why, until recently (and technically, currently), you need special permission to export encryption software, which is, after all, just a tool.
The statute in question can be found here. Other statutes can be found at this parent site for the legislature, or specifically at this one for the general laws.
I know this isn't the response you're looking for, but if you want a really powerful symbolic math package that's released under the GPL, take a look at Erable (by Bernard Parisse), for the HP48G line of calculators. It can do lots of things (especially certain types of symbolic integration) that even Maple can't touch, and at a fraction of the speed!
And the fact that it only runs on saturn processors is easily outweighed by the small footprint: only 100k! You couldn't find anything sexier than this if you had Tux in a g-string.
After all, Xmas doesn't have support for the X Window System, either. I hear someone might be doing a port, but Tux is miffed that Santa hasn't relocated to the south pole to take advantage of the large number of linux-literate penguins there, and let's not even get started on what the BSD d[a]emon thinks.
We all know that the average slashdotter doesn't think highly of copyright law, but all this mirroring and redistribution of copyrighted material is nevertheless a violation of that body of law.
I can see two results: either the USB people are going to realize that it's silly to try to hoard this sort of information, or they're going to send out a hardy "fuck you" to the community and redouble their efforts to charge for the info. Let's just hope they'll choose the former.
The Self-made Critic on Brunching Shuttlecocks had a review of Scream 3 a little while back. His conclusion was that, although all the evidence pointed to the fact that this movie ought to have sucked, in fact it ended up being, well, fun.
As for my own opinion, needless to say, Scream 3 fails one of the prerequisites of a good film: it relies on too many popular culture references. Lasting films are self-contained, and if they have to lampoon something, it's a universal aspect of human nature or some such. Just look at the Princess Bride, for example. It's timeless, except for the opening scene where Fred Savage is playing the nintendo game "Bases Loaded". Some things are best left out, but clearly Scream 3 isn't aiming for that.
Amazon.co.uk has some wacky prices sometimes, especially with textbook prices. The same textbook might cost only 22 pounds at amazon.co.uk (~ $35US) and $83 at amazon.com.
Perhaps amazon is trying to dump products in the UK in an attempt to drive out competition and underhandedly achieve market dominance. If true, it's just another reason to boycot them.
Tim O'Reilly is clearly jealous of Amazon's market-leading dominance in the field of losing money, while O'Reilly Associates stubbornly insists on remaining in the black. The intellectual effect of his argument is simply too powerful to be plausible.
I actually like some software that has someone to be held accountable for things just like that. Who would I take to court if some loser added that 'functionality' to an open source program?
You'd have to hold yourself liable, since you have the source and can compile it yourself. You could find some lawyer to initiate a stock-holder lawsuit on behalf of your household and with yourself as chief stock holder: "Hey everyone! Watch me pay someone else to take money out of my left pocket and put it into my right pocket!"
If the market demands it, some company will spring up and charge people for GnuCash on the promise that they have audited it for bugs and assume the burden of any financial losses acrued owing to bugs. Don't you worry.
At least in the Boston area, it'll be hard to catch this movie, as it won't be shown at the Boston Museum of Science. Why (one asks naively)? Money of course. Disney has been a real bitch and set unfavorable demands: a large percentage (can't remember the exact number) of the receipts go to Disney, and no other films can be shown during the complete run of Fantasia. Needless to say, many theaters have balked.
Cookies - Delete it and recreate a new unreadable cookies file.
Well, since you're posting on slashdot as a logged in user, you're obviously hypocritical on this one. Why not instead tell them to run something like junkbusters that'll actually let them control what cookies they want instead of just blindly and across-the-board killing them all?
Slashdot Mirror
Clooney's participation should come as no surprise, inasmuch as he previously did the voice of sparky the dog in the "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride" episode. He's been pals with Matt and Trey for a few years now and has supported them and their careers since the beginning.
I don't live in USA so I can hear 'bad' words on tv so I know this.
When I was last across the pond a year and a half or so ago, I was flipping through the channels and came across a promo for South Park episodes they were going to start broadcasting within a week or so. The promo consisted of having one of the characters standing there swearing with the swears bleeped out. The shock value was entirely lost on me, since I had just finished watching a show with fully uncensored profanity and was able to switch the channel to another show with full frontal nudity.
What passes for much of American entertainment, especially when taken out of context and in another land, is simply pathetic.
I never understood people's problems with the word "bitch". It's not officially one of the seven words, and yet I've seen morning-show-type shows where they bring in some lady from the American Kennel Club to talk about dogs, where they actually bleep out "bitch" when used to describe actual female dogs. The part of Carlin's routine where he talks about how you can get away with sentences like "In the morning, the cock crew" doesn't seem to apply anymore.
Some of these words might be genuinely vulgar, but it hardly takes a vulgar word to express a vulgar idea, and I personally find most of primetime television to be in poor taste as it is.
Yes, "nolo" refers to that, but it also means so much more: "We wanted a short domain name that can be easily remembered and associated with law, but lexis-nexis was already taken".
Keep in mind that Russian is adopting English words at a furious pace in matters of business and technology, so having a bald English word wouldn't pose too much of a problem as people would just accept it and deal with it. And don't forget the incredible influence French had on the language before this century.
.COM maps well onto "kommercheskii", .ORG maps onto "organizatsia", and .MIL maps onto "militsia" (technically police, but it's close enough).
.GOV, since the root "gov" refers to speaking, not to anything related to government.
.ru domains, you'll see them use "www" and "sex" and and all the usual sorts of naming conventions.
With that in mind, some of the current tlds wouldn't pose much of a problem unmodified.
.NET is a problem, since "nyet" of course means "no". The word for network is "sjet'".
.EDU is hopeless. As is
But again, these problems are nonissues. If you check out some
Sure, there's no need to opensource the artwork, but why keep the engine closed if it's all being done for educational reasons and for fun? Those two tend to be synonymous with open source. And the points about distributed development are both silly and inapplicable, since they don't actually have to accept any modifications that people would make. They could even release it under some silly "you get the source, but you can't distribute modified copies" sort of liscense that would encourage bugfixes but no forks. At least the second paragraph implies that this is all subject to change.
Let's just hope they don't screw up security-wise the way Quake 1 did. If they're writing the game from scratch, I hope they get it right instead of learning the hard way after the fact.
Antitrust law falls under criminal rather than civil law, and we all know of one too many examples of a large corporation getting off with just a Consent Decree that consisted of promising not to use anti-competitive tactics in the operating systems market. Ooops, did I give the company away?
As for the rest of criminal law, you're right. Particularly irksome is the obscenity convictions that were adjudicated under doctrines that didn't exist until the Supreme Court pulled them out of its collective ass and applied them to the pending case (Miller v. California).
If your post was meant to be funny, it didn't contain enough hyperbole to be blatently tongue-in-cheek. So I'll just treat it as ignorance.
You know what Jupiter's made of, right? 92% hydrogen, 7% helium, mostly methane for the rest, those sorts of things. At the upper atmosphere, it's more than a thousand degrees celcius, and it's all whipping about rather harshly. And oh yeah, no water. If there is life there, it doesn't resemble anything we have on earth, and whatever we bring from earth wouldn't be able to survive if it got there. And then there's the little problem about how the spacecraft will burn up once it enters the planet's atmosphere, which is after all, all of it (except perhaps for the metalic hydrogen core, which if it exists wouldn't make a lick of difference here). This is in stark contrast to Europa, which doesn't have an appreciable atmosphere and so if we lob something at it, it'll remain intact until it hits the surface.
Soooooo.....What happens if the crash site is currently occupied with Life Forms that we DON'T suspect, hmm? So in an ironic ending to the life of Galileo, it crashes into a planet with life forms and introduces extra-Jupiterian life to divide and conquer.
Yes, it'd be perfeclty ironic, since it'd crap all over lots of our biological and astronomical theories, but that doesn't mean it's possible. You're also forgetting the little bit about how there is no "landing site" per se -- just a spot floating in the outer atmosphere.
Or, we could send it off into deep space, and discover it 300 years from now as a tremendous space probe named G'leo.
Except the whole problem in the first place is that this thing doesn't have any extra fuel lying around for such a purpose. If we could just go ahead and send it off into deep space, it'd still be useful and we'd use it for that. Heck, the Voyager 2 is still sending back data from outside the solar system, and we're praying it'll last another twenty years and make it to measure the helioshock out there. But escaping the gravity of Jupiter is not a simple thing to do without any propulsion. Have you stopped to wonder why Jupiter has so many moons and trojan asteroids in the first place?
The police need more than probable cause: they need a warrant, which is issuable upon a showing of probable cause. Why go through all the hassle of going before a judge and asking for a warrant? To protect people's privacy.
The third ammendment protects citizens from having troops quartered in their homes during times of peace. Why? Privacy. It's quite easy to understand the fifth amendment protection from self-incrimination in the same way. And then of course there's the ninth amendment which explicitly says that just because the right isn't specifically enumerated, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Have you read Griswold v. Connecticut? Katz v. US? Pierce v. Society of Sisters? Stanley v. Georgia? Eisenstadt v. Baird? Are you aware of federal and state legislation that proscribes the invasion of privacy, as well as state constitutional amendments specifically enumerating it? Do you actually have any experience in this matter, or are you just railing away at a pet peeve that's perhaps itched by Roe v. Wade? Do you even care?
Yes we have a 5th amendment that is supposed to protect the accused from all self-incrimination in criminal trials. But we also have a Supreme Court that in recent years has been rather fond of undermining civil liberties like these. The 5th amendment won't protect you from having to submit a urine sample for chemical analysis, and that's the line of argument the government will likely use if the crypto-key issue gets tested. Something like "Revealing the key isn't the same as forcing you to incriminate yourself. It just lets us understand a document where you already committed the self incrimination." This stands in stark contrast to other systems of law (particularly Jewish Law) where all self-incriminations are disregarded, without regard for how or why they were made.
Remember, the "land of the free and the home of the brave" is the same place where the highest court of the land looks poised to rule that anonymous tips are sufficient for giving probable cause to government agents to stop and frisk citizens on the streets. "Hey Bob, the person over there who looks like he's a member of a disfavored racial minority group looks like he could be carrying some drugs (or even a bomb!). Why don't you step into that phonebooth and call the station and leave an anonymous tip so we can go over there and get medieval on his civil rights! And remember, anonymity means zero accountability."
We're also the country where, right after the Diallo verdict came back, police three blocks from Diallo's house went and shot another unarmed black man at point-blank. But at least this time he had a sketchy criminal record and the whole thing was just a big mistake, so that makes it justified, right? Right? I hate this place.
It's a lithium ion rechargeable, and they claim both "Extended battery life through advanced" (whatever that means) and "Extended battery life through advanced MP3 buffering" to 12 megs of dram. But it would've been nice to know how much people will have to plug this thing in between plays (unless it really is just a glorified luggable).
And ten ounces, while still less than a pound, is not what I consider lightweight.
And is anyone else rendering the page as a gross combination of purple and yellow backgrounds? (White text on yellow background, what a wonderful idea!)
This is not a troll or flamebait. I respect SuSE. I really do. Anyone who can win a landwar in Europe the way they have against RedHat has to be doing something right.
With that said, I must now vent against SuSE's mascot, which to me (and lots of other people, I assume) looks like a green turd with legs and a face. Everyone knows Shakespeare's quote that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and most people know the common variation on that quote about excrement smelling just as sweet, and I for one find it quite appropos here.
RedHat's shadowman is somehow mysterious. Tux is adorable. The idea of a chameleon has a lot of promise, both for its symbolism and because it has a lot of untapped cuteness-value that could be unearthed and exploited (and maybe plush stuffed-animals is a step in the right direction). But please, SuSE, give the lizard a makeover.
And lest anyone think it's just a crappy slashdot rendition, here's the actual logo from SuSE's website).
For comparison, an actual green chameleon from Kenya. Real chameleons are adroit climbers and skillful hunters with long strong muscular legs. SuSE's chameleon is perched on two pairs of stubby little legs (grossly out of proportion with the rest of its body) and sadly looks like it's about to fall over and die from asphyxiation like a sheep lying on its back. SuSE's chameleon wouldn't have a chance in hell of surviving in the wild (compared with, say, Tux as portrayed on extremelinux.com), which is not the message that we'd like to send about SuSE's distribution in particular or about Linux in general.
And as for the name, that issue's been beaten to death already. Alas, crappy ideas never die in the minds of marketers.
I can't stand lines of reasoning like yours, since it's the same sort of reasoning that encourages some people to keep things like sodomy laws on the books: "Sodomy laws aren't ever enforced against people who merely commit sodomy. They're only used as an additional charge to bring against violent rapists."
Quite frankly, it's a bullshit sort of reasoning. If it's so important to increase the penalty for the act in question, go ahead and increase the penalty for the act in question. Don't surrepticiously contrive additional unnecessary charges. If a person can be punished for committing a crime, then it's simply redundant to charge him with possessing the means by which he committed that crime -- of course you had the means, since, after all, you were successful in committing the crime. Laws that aren't uniformly applied reek tyrranical abuse of power.
The only thing that can be accomplished by having this additional statute is letting the state punish individuals for the mere possession of the tool in question. In fact, if you go ahead and look at history, you'll find countless examples of how states have found it much easier to punish possession of the means or knowledge of the method of committing crimes than punishing the crime itself -- for the most part, honest citizens won't put up much resistance since, after all, they don't consider themselves criminals and feel no need to possess things that are overtly associated with criminals.
Before you jump to the conclusion that no one will outlaw mere possession of these sorts of tools, ask yourself why there's so many gun-control laws and why, until recently (and technically, currently), you need special permission to export encryption software, which is, after all, just a tool.
The statute in question can be found here. Other statutes can be found at this parent site for the legislature, or specifically at this one for the general laws.
I know this isn't the response you're looking for, but if you want a really powerful symbolic math package that's released under the GPL, take a look at Erable (by Bernard Parisse), for the HP48G line of calculators. It can do lots of things (especially certain types of symbolic integration) that even Maple can't touch, and at a fraction of the speed!
And the fact that it only runs on saturn processors is easily outweighed by the small footprint: only 100k! You couldn't find anything sexier than this if you had Tux in a g-string.
There is a single universal definition of obscenity
The unexamined administrative opinion of a random bureaucrat is sufficient for the prior restriction of otherwise free speech.
Censorship cannot work because of the above two problems (in addition to others), not in spite of them.
After all, Xmas doesn't have support for the X Window System, either. I hear someone might be doing a port, but Tux is miffed that Santa hasn't relocated to the south pole to take advantage of the large number of linux-literate penguins there, and let's not even get started on what the BSD d[a]emon thinks.
We all know that the average slashdotter doesn't think highly of copyright law, but all this mirroring and redistribution of copyrighted material is nevertheless a violation of that body of law.
I can see two results: either the USB people are going to realize that it's silly to try to hoard this sort of information, or they're going to send out a hardy "fuck you" to the community and redouble their efforts to charge for the info. Let's just hope they'll choose the former.
The Self-made Critic on Brunching Shuttlecocks had a review of Scream 3 a little while back. His conclusion was that, although all the evidence pointed to the fact that this movie ought to have sucked, in fact it ended up being, well, fun.
As for my own opinion, needless to say, Scream 3 fails one of the prerequisites of a good film: it relies on too many popular culture references. Lasting films are self-contained, and if they have to lampoon something, it's a universal aspect of human nature or some such. Just look at the Princess Bride, for example. It's timeless, except for the opening scene where Fred Savage is playing the nintendo game "Bases Loaded". Some things are best left out, but clearly Scream 3 isn't aiming for that.
Amazon.co.uk has some wacky prices sometimes, especially with textbook prices. The same textbook might cost only 22 pounds at amazon.co.uk (~ $35US) and $83 at amazon.com.
Perhaps amazon is trying to dump products in the UK in an attempt to drive out competition and underhandedly achieve market dominance. If true, it's just another reason to boycot them.
Tim O'Reilly is clearly jealous of Amazon's market-leading dominance in the field of losing money, while O'Reilly Associates stubbornly insists on remaining in the black. The intellectual effect of his argument is simply too powerful to be plausible.
I actually like some software that has someone to be held accountable for things just like that. Who would I take to court if some loser added that 'functionality' to an open source program?
You'd have to hold yourself liable, since you have the source and can compile it yourself. You could find some lawyer to initiate a stock-holder lawsuit on behalf of your household and with yourself as chief stock holder: "Hey everyone! Watch me pay someone else to take money out of my left pocket and put it into my right pocket!"
If the market demands it, some company will spring up and charge people for GnuCash on the promise that they have audited it for bugs and assume the burden of any financial losses acrued owing to bugs. Don't you worry.
At least in the Boston area, it'll be hard to catch this movie, as it won't be shown at the Boston Museum of Science. Why (one asks naively)? Money of course. Disney has been a real bitch and set unfavorable demands: a large percentage (can't remember the exact number) of the receipts go to Disney, and no other films can be shown during the complete run of Fantasia. Needless to say, many theaters have balked.
Cookies - Delete it and recreate a new unreadable cookies file.
Well, since you're posting on slashdot as a logged in user, you're obviously hypocritical on this one. Why not instead tell them to run something like junkbusters that'll actually let them control what cookies they want instead of just blindly and across-the-board killing them all?