The point still stands: the INS process alienates us and makes us feel somewhat "worthless". Especially the "guilty until proven innocent" bits they put on the
forms.
Like I mentioned before, I agree with all of your other points (just not the use of the word "alien." The INS (as many governmental agencies tend to be) are quite adept at making people feel less than human. Most (not all) people are better kept in check that way. The down side (long term) is that eventually someone comes along who isn't willing to bend over and then revolution happens.
For a country that supposedly recognizes certain self-evident and inalienable rights, the good ole US of A is remarkably adept at crushing the individual.
www Jesus Christ, this is arrogance at it's best...
Hardly arrogance. I didn't mention that it took me six years to finish my two degree because I was working full time and supporting a wife on disability and my oldest daughter during that same period.
My only arrogance is in assuming that if I can put myself through night school at a community college while holding down a full time job then so can most other people.
First off, let me say that if you can afford college AT ALL in this country (yes even the $5k/yr variety), you're kinda lucky. Even if it is commonplace to be
able to afford that, a lot of people CAN'T, having other priorities to take care of.
Actually, Uncle Sam will pick up the entire tab at a reasonably priced school (its called a Pell grant) for anyone whose parents are not staunchly middle class, in which case, those parents ought to pay for the education of their children. And if they don't, then those children can work their way through a junior college as myself and hundreds of thousands (if not hundreds of millions) of other US citizens have done.
And I won't even start on some of the excellent internship programs many four year colleges have. My brother in law was makeing more per year his last two years of college than I was for several years after graduating with a two year degree.
I tried several times as Netscape's fine browser crashes relatively frequently for me. After restarting Netscape more than once, I'm forced to the conclusion that whatever the linked page looks like, it makes Communicator blow chunks in a rather messy manner
Here I am, being called an "alien". I don't in fact come from somewhere in the vicinity of
Alioth, I come from planet Earth. Strip off the skin - whether it's white, yellow, black or brown - and we are all exactly the same underneath.
To quote the Giant, 'you keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.'
alien adj. 1. foreign; strange 2. of aliens n. 1. a foreigner 2. a foreign-born resident who is not naturalized 3. a hypothetical being from outer space
It appears we have yet another victim of the Hollywoodization of US culture.
BTW, I agree with all of your other points. Diversity is strength and the US has been built on the strength of immigrants ever since the first Europeans gave smallpox to the natives.
A year in American University: 30,000+ US Dollars
A year in Australian University: 4,000 Australian Dollars (2,500 - 3000 US dollars)
Most US schools are quite a bit cheaper than 30K per year. Especially, if one starts at a junior college and transfers to a four year university. When I was at Wright State University (back in 1990), the cost was US $90 per credit hour, which makes 3 quarters of 18 credit hours something like 5k (books and dorm not included). However cheap that might be, I dropped out and only finished a two year degree from Sinclair Community College where the tuition for in county residents was $30 per credit hour.
Typically only private schools charge those figures over 10k. Also, most (not all) of the big name schools in the states are state universities which means that residents of that state will pay little for the education while folks from other states will pay through the nose, so in those instances you might have someone paying big bucks for a sheep-skin, but when you consider they could have moved to the state, worked for a year to get residence status and saved tens of thousands, I'm not very sympathetic.
There are plenty of younger
programmers who don't know what the heck they are doing; there are also plenty of really smart people who happy to be fairly light in their years (take
Linus Torvalds, for example; he's well under 30).
If memory serves me correctly, Linus is either 30 or 31.
Now, he was well under the age of thirty when he wrote the first Linux kernel....
mp3.com did broadcast the music, albeit to a selected audience. However, according to current copyright law, it does not matter whether the person being distributed to has a valid license. It only matters whether the person doing the distributing has a valid license.
I repeat: under current copyright law, there is no such thing as a 'right to listen.' The only right that copyright law effects is the 'right to distribute.' And without an explicit right to distribute (such as that purchased through ASCAP or a similiar group), the only distribution rights that anybody has are those that fall under the notion of 'fair use.'
I don't buy for one second that my.mp3.com falls under any sort of fair use. And apparently, the courts did not either.
My understanding was that Beam-It software only provided MP3's for CD's users already had. It confirmed the users' ownership by having them place
the CD's in and verify the serial number.
It doesn't matter whether or not the users of Beam-It had the 'right to listen' to the music, what matters is whether or not mp3.com had the right to distribute the music. Your 'right to listen' is non-existent as a legal concept. The only right the court is concerning itself with is the right to broadcast, which mp3.com (rather stupidly) neglected to acquire.
Think about it, when radio stations broadcast, they don't care whether or not the listeners already have a license to listen to the tunes, but you can bet your sweet hind end that they care about whether or not they have a right to broadcast those same tunes over the air
What so many people miss in all the squablling over mp3.com and Napster (the corporation) fail to realize is that the whole controversy would have been squelched if the people doing the broadcasting had paid dues to an association like ASCAP for the permission to broadcast.
For example, if Napster had notified each installation of Napster (the software) as a server that people serving up files were liable for securing permission for broadcast of the music (and if Napster servers had secured permission) then there would be no basis for any lawsuit.
The problem, IMHO, is not that people want free tunes (just turn on the radio or fire up Real player and point it at your favorite online radio station). The problem is that these organizations like mp3.com and Napster think that they can get out of the costs of doing business.
Under present law, broadcasters need to secure the right to broadcast copywrited media and that is all there is to the story.
What nationality would you consider a man born in South Africa to English parents (they moved to South Africa because Tolkien's father took a job there) who spent most of his life in living in England?
'Micks'? I'm English, and I've never heard that word..
FYI, Mick is an American slang derogatory term for a person of Irish descent. IIRC, its usage goes back the influx of Irish immigrants into the US during the Irish potato famine.
Main Entry: mick
Pronunciation: 'mik
Function: noun
Usage: often capitalized
Etymology: Mick, nickname for Michael, common Irish given name
Date: 1856
often offensive : IRISHMAN
What would have been realistic to me would have made the movie boring for all. If agents were necessary to keep people in line, why then not just give
everyone a frontal lobotomy for a first birthday present? Problem solved. Body keeps working, but none of that pesky individuality.
Well, my theory is that the machines aren't just using the people for heat. The real purpose behind keeping millions upon millions of people alive is to use their brains for a giant beowulf cluster. So the Matrix is simply the collective consciousness of humanity.
saying that fantasy and science fiction need to be totally realistic seems to me to miss the point.
I concur, what fiction needs is not realism, but believability.
A real life example. A friend of mine in high school had one of those weird old Chevrolet's with the engine in the back (Chevelle?). While out and about one evening, he was driving over a bridge with a marvelous sunset and decided to stop and watch, so he stopped and put the hood up in back of the car so that the people stuck behind him would think he had car trouble while he was busy watching the sunset. His friend who was with him said that maybe he should open up the trunk as not many people would think they were having car trouble while what looks like the trunk is open.
Or consider the Matrix. If the Matrix would have been 'realistic' to most of us geeks, it would not have been 'believable' to the average movie viewer.
Fiction needs to be believable, which in some but not all cases is also realistic.
Galeon IS Mozilla so the original comparison between Konqueror and Mozilla is a valid one.
Galeon IS NOT Mozilla. Saying that Galeon is Mozilla because they share an html widget is like saying that my friend's old Dodge Aspen sedan is an old Dodge pickup truck because they share the same engine.
The KDE project did write its own HTML widget, Galeon uses Mozilla's Gecko.
For the sake of this comparisson, it doesn't matter who wrote which widget. The comparisson is about how easy it is to write an application of a specific sort with the available tools. Why reinvent the wheel? Isn't that what using QT/KDE or GTK/Gnome is all about, re-use?
The actual recording of an artist performing a song belongs to that artist (or the behemoth record company). But for Weird Al Yankovic to do a cover, that's a parody and is protected by the first ammendment. Even if it's not Weird Al, but instead is Poison Idea doing a cover of 'We Got the Beat' by the Go-Go's, that's perfectly legal, too. Even though the words and song structure are exactly the same (read: the html formatting is the same), it's a different rendition because it's different musicians (read: the text / graphics of the website are different).
There are actually two related, but distinct, situations here:
Parody (but not satire) in the US is a court recognized form of free speech.
Any artist that belongs to ASCAP (or any other similiar group) implicitly gives permission to other artists to perform their work. Both venues that host live music and any record labels that put out product with 'covers' are subject to copyright infringement suits if they don't pay royalties via membership in ASCAP or some similiar organization
On the other hand, how many bands are there that sound like Black Sabbath, Motley Crue, Amy Grant, or 10,000 Maniacs? You can copyright the lyrics, the chord progressions, the notes, etc. But you can't copyright the 'feel' of the music.
So if you're the Eddie Van Halen of the html design world, how do you turn your back to the audience during live performances of 'Eruption' so that those young upstarts don't steal your guitar riffs?
.
Eddie doesn't (or shouldn't) mind when those young upstarts steal his guitar riffs, because everytime someone hears it and thinks it cool and says something to a friend about that awsome lick, the friend, who is in the know, points out, 'hey dude, that is Eddie Van Halen's riff from Eruption.' Next thing you know Mr. Van Halen has one new additional customer of his albums.
All quotes are from the quotation of Mathias Ettrich by shaughran. I have not checked for accurary.
First there is a bit of inconsistancy...
KDE is a true open source project that consists mainly of voluntary work. ...
Programming with Qt is extreme fun...
How many volunteers work on the QT project?
There are also some stabs at Gnome
While you can easily make programmers work with inferior technologies and let them reinvent everything from scratch
Better tools promise more fun
f Netscape used Qt, they would have release a modern cross-platform browser two years ago. Now we are still waiting for a final release of Mozilla
While neither Gnome, nor GTK is specifically mentioned, it seems to me that the context implies that Gnome and GTK are the 'inferior tools' being refered too. Attacking Gnome and GTK as being inferior technology and implying that working with them is not fun is not a rational point of argumentation.
Also in the unrational realm is the constant intermixing of the idea of programming in QT with the idea of programming in KDE. KDE developers can not insist both that KDE is not affiliated with any corporation and that KDE is superior because it is built on QT.
I would also say that Mathias is cherry-picking his examples.
Compare Mozilla with Konqueror
Or compare Galeon to Konqueror....
And there is also what seems to me to be a rather spurious correlation
If Netscape used Qt, they would have release a modern cross-platform
browser two years ago.
There may very well be something to the the point that underlies this assertion. It may be quicker to develop apps with QT than with GTK. OTOH, I hardly think it appropriate to blame a problem that appears to have at its source, the incompetence of management at Netscape/AOL, on using a non-QT toolset.
To start off, the KDE response is that the Gnome foundation doesn't matter to KDE. What a crock! Aything that helps free software gain in popularity will help KDE.
Think about this, people hear the Gnome announcement and want to check out Gnome. The (arguably) easiest way to check out Gnome is to install Linux. If the person wanting to experience Gnom chooses Caldera, Storm, Corel, Mandrake or any other of the dozens of Linux distributions that make KDE the default desktop environment, more users will be introduced to KDE.
Also, provided that Gnome and KDE get component compatibility going between Kparts and Bonobo, then every Gnome component that can be embedded or hosted becomes a tool in the KDE toolkit. More tools, more power....
I also think that there is a bit of misunderstanding on the part of the KDE folks on just what the Gnome foundation is.
Now we have been asked "Will KDE ever create a KDE Foundation in the same sense as the GNOME
Foundation?" The answer to this is no, absolutely not. KDE has always been and always will be
controlled by the developers that work on it and are willing to do the code. We will resist any and all
attempts to change this.
This is no different than the Gnome foundation. The only difference is one of scale, Sun's 'fifty developers' will have a unified voice on the board of the Gnome foundation in the Sun person on the board. The same is true for Eazel, Helix-Code, or any of the independant developers that have joined the Gnome foundation
Looking at the issue from another standpoint, the KDE Project is possibly the only large Open Source
project that has neither a "benevolent dictator" nor an elected governing board (or any voting at all). In
a sense, we are the only large "pure" Bazaar-style project out there... and it works. We have no
intention of changing an obviously winning formula.
This train of reasoning implies to me the opposite of what the KDE folks intend it to mean.
There are many succssful free software projects.
With the exception of KDE, all of these successful free software projects have a 'benevolent dictator' or a 'board' of some type.
therefore
The 'pure bizzare' KDE model is the best
I don't get it.
There are also some poorly supported assertions of fact.
First, the decision to use GNOME on Sun and HP desktops doesn't change much in itself. Sun may be
well known for its servers, but it doesn't seem to be doing that great as a desktop. There are likely
many many more BSD and Linux computers running KDE than there are new Solaris workstations
running CDE. We don't anticipate that this will change very much in the future.
This quote shows an incomplete understanding of market dynamics. There are several overlapping categories of workstations to consider.
Workstations running Gnome
Workstations running KDE
Workstations running other desktop environments
Given that there is a good deal of overlap between one and two, the real questions to ask are
What percentage of Sun workstations already run Gnome or KDE?
In the pool of Workstations that run X, how many are Sun workstaions that don't run Gnome or KDE?
Given that Sun, HP and other Unix vendors will begin shipping workstations with Gnome as the default desktop environment, will the number of new workstations with KDE as the default desktop keep pace with the number of new workstations with Gnome as the default desktop (which are not restricted to only Sun and HP machines)?
What effect, if any, will marketshare have on the Gnome and KDE projects?
I'm not a Gnome only kind of guy. I think that both KDE and Gnome are very good environments. However, I do think that the official KDE position is a bit short-sighted. The Gnome foundation could very well benefit KDE. To say that the foundation is totally irrelevant is to misunderstand the way things work in the real world. For KDE to ignore the Gnome foundation would be to repeat the mistake of Unix vendors ignoring Windows NT in the early nineties.
Women didn't do combat. Why? Women were not strong enough.
Look at William of Wallace (the subject of Mel Gibson's Braveheart). Despite Mel wanting the title role, the real William of Wallace was somewhere around 6 foot 10 inches tall and weighed more than 300 pounds. When King Edward the Great had poor old William hung, they built a special gallows to make certain it would not break under his weight.
My point? Memorable events in history typically surround exceptional people and events. History is chock full of events that are improbable and not very likely to happen at all, the sorts of events that intelligent people immediately right off as urban legends when they hear a modern day equivalent.
So, given that today there exist women who are into body building that could likely kick the tush of some of the best mercenaries around in the 15th century, it is not all that unbelievable that a woman could have existed back then that had more or less the same physique as William of Wallace. Heck, compare the women's weight lifting world records today with the men's world records from fifty years ago. Which means, that the genotype is there for women to develop into mighty warriors, if they are exposed to the proper environmental condiditions.
Women typically didn't get the same type of
physical labor that men did and consequently didn't build muscle in the same way that men did.
Here, I think you show your ignorance of history. While women may have been regarded as baby-factories throughout large portions of medeival Europe, that did not mean that they did not also engage in physical labor.
As an example, in Industrial Era Britain, women were expected to work 12 and 14 hour days in factories, even when pregnant. Many women would work, go over to a corner to give birth and a mid-wife would take care of the child while the mother went back to work on the assembly line
And as a final point, I suppose that Joan of Arc couldn't fight worth or lead troops worth anything?
At first glance I thought it was about the mighty Ash from the Evil Dead movies. Now, there would be a secret history worth reading, but I doubt it would fill 1K of sheets of dead tree.
On the other hand, it could have been worse, it could have been a secret history of Ash, the Pokemon trainer....
Considering that I already have my laptop, one or two technical books, a few files, a few notepads and my lunch stuffed into my briefcase, I think I'll gladly spend more money to read the slimmer tomes sequentially while riding the bus to work.
Of course I'd also be willing to pay far more for a laptop with a far less powerful CPU if it could rival my Palm Pro for battery life...
Just because the book is cheaper in one volume doesn't mean that one volume is better (and that works the other way around as well, I'm sure that some people would place a higher value on one volume for reasons other than price).
me: "The fact is that one of your points (not your only point) was that the lawsuit was ridiculous simply because it dealt with coffee. By taking your words
and putting them in a different scenario, it shows the silliness of that line of reasoning."
AbbyNormal: No. Not just coffee. See words in bold in my post "ACCIDENT".
Well, lets go back to the post where the flawed line of reasoning occurs.
Right, but my point is that its silly. Laws and lawsuits are meant to PROTECT the consumer. How is McD not playing nice by warming its coffee? ITS
COFFEE FOR GODS SAKE! Its supposed to be hot and no it will not stay hot for hours. That is exactly my point.
What I have been attempting to illustrate is the use of a very poor line of reasoning. AbbyNormal implies that the incident in question could not have been at all serious in nature because, after all, its only about coffee. It doesn't matter that the coffee was hot enough to cause flesh to blister, its supposed to be hot. It doesn't matter if people have complained about the coffee being too hot, because after all, its just coffee.
We know that this is a poor line of reasoning, because if we take the reasoning and insert it into another scenario it seems ludicrous.
And to further illustrate his keen use of logic and reason, AbbyNormal goes back to tried and true ad hominem attacks.
You're obviously trying to get a rise out of me as is obvious from your lack of reading my replies. I'm tired of battling an unarmed man.
I wonder if AbbyNormal understand reasoning at all. AbbyNormal has yet to present one argument which uses logic. Every single one of his arguments is an appeal to emotion or a personal attack.
Lets think about this, the coffee being served was hot enought to cause third degree burns with absolutely no warning. Further, people were complaining that the coffee was too hot. In a case like that, it is only a matter of time before someone gets seriously injured. And if you think my point about a small child dying is so incredible, think about it for a second. I can't imagine a 12 oz cup of coffee hot enough to cause third degree burns to an adult would have a very good effect if accidentally dropped on an infant. That scenario is entirely possible and given enough time and given the restaruants prediliction for ignoring complaints, the scenario even becomes probable if the practice is not stopped by means of a lawsuit.
The teddy bear analogy is pointless and comparing Apples and Oranges.
The teddy bear analogy was not pointless, nor was it comparing apples to oranges. The fact is that one of your points (not your only point) was that the lawsuit was ridiculous simply because it dealt with coffee. By taking your words and putting them in a different scenario, it shows the silliness of that line of reasoning.
You have an obsession with death:
Hmm. I've been accused of that before. But honestly, ad hominem attacks do not increase the esteem with which I hold your debating skills. What possible bearing could an alleged obsession with death of mine have on the discussion?
Laws and lawsuits are meant to PROTECT the consumer.
I completely agree, which is why the McDonald's coffee judgement was not unreasonable.
How is McD not playing nice by warming its coffee?
Well, had you followed the case instead of simply scanning the headlines, the coffee in question was hot enough to cause third degree burns. Sure, serving warm coffee is a nice thing to do, but when the coffee is 'warm' enough to make my flesh blister, its perhaps not so nice.
ITS
COFFEE FOR GODS SAKE!
So in a case where a parent uses a teddy bear to suffocate a newborn, the parent should get off scott free because ITS A TEDDY BEAR FOR GOD'S SAKE!!....
In this case, a restaurant was punished because, despite repeated warnings and complaints, they exhibited criminal negligence that threatened the general public with bodily harm. And if McDonald's had not been sued, that particular restaurant would probably still be serving coffee hot enough to kill a small child with.
So, in this particular case, it appears that justice was served and served well.
Slashdot Mirror
Like I mentioned before, I agree with all of your other points (just not the use of the word "alien." The INS (as many governmental agencies tend to be) are quite adept at making people feel less than human. Most (not all) people are better kept in check that way. The down side (long term) is that eventually someone comes along who isn't willing to bend over and then revolution happens.
For a country that supposedly recognizes certain self-evident and inalienable rights, the good ole US of A is remarkably adept at crushing the individual.
Hardly arrogance. I didn't mention that it took me six years to finish my two degree because I was working full time and supporting a wife on disability and my oldest daughter during that same period.
My only arrogance is in assuming that if I can put myself through night school at a community college while holding down a full time job then so can most other people.
Actually, Uncle Sam will pick up the entire tab at a reasonably priced school (its called a Pell grant) for anyone whose parents are not staunchly middle class, in which case, those parents ought to pay for the education of their children. And if they don't, then those children can work their way through a junior college as myself and hundreds of thousands (if not hundreds of millions) of other US citizens have done.
And I won't even start on some of the excellent internship programs many four year colleges have. My brother in law was makeing more per year his last two years of college than I was for several years after graduating with a two year degree.
I tried several times as Netscape's fine browser crashes relatively frequently for me. After restarting Netscape more than once, I'm forced to the conclusion that whatever the linked page looks like, it makes Communicator blow chunks in a rather messy manner
Quoth Alioth:
Here I am, being called an "alien". I don't in fact come from somewhere in the vicinity of Alioth, I come from planet Earth. Strip off the skin - whether it's white, yellow, black or brown - and we are all exactly the same underneath.
To quote the Giant, 'you keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.'
It appears we have yet another victim of the Hollywoodization of US culture.
BTW, I agree with all of your other points. Diversity is strength and the US has been built on the strength of immigrants ever since the first Europeans gave smallpox to the natives.
Oops, that's another discussion all together...
Most US schools are quite a bit cheaper than 30K per year. Especially, if one starts at a junior college and transfers to a four year university. When I was at Wright State University (back in 1990), the cost was US $90 per credit hour, which makes 3 quarters of 18 credit hours something like 5k (books and dorm not included). However cheap that might be, I dropped out and only finished a two year degree from Sinclair Community College where the tuition for in county residents was $30 per credit hour.
Typically only private schools charge those figures over 10k. Also, most (not all) of the big name schools in the states are state universities which means that residents of that state will pay little for the education while folks from other states will pay through the nose, so in those instances you might have someone paying big bucks for a sheep-skin, but when you consider they could have moved to the state, worked for a year to get residence status and saved tens of thousands, I'm not very sympathetic.
If memory serves me correctly, Linus is either 30 or 31.
Now, he was well under the age of thirty when he wrote the first Linux kernel....
My, how time flies....
mp3.com did broadcast the music, albeit to a selected audience. However, according to current copyright law, it does not matter whether the person being distributed to has a valid license. It only matters whether the person doing the distributing has a valid license.
I repeat: under current copyright law, there is no such thing as a 'right to listen.' The only right that copyright law effects is the 'right to distribute.' And without an explicit right to distribute (such as that purchased through ASCAP or a similiar group), the only distribution rights that anybody has are those that fall under the notion of 'fair use.'
I don't buy for one second that my.mp3.com falls under any sort of fair use. And apparently, the courts did not either.
It doesn't matter whether or not the users of Beam-It had the 'right to listen' to the music, what matters is whether or not mp3.com had the right to distribute the music. Your 'right to listen' is non-existent as a legal concept. The only right the court is concerning itself with is the right to broadcast, which mp3.com (rather stupidly) neglected to acquire.
Think about it, when radio stations broadcast, they don't care whether or not the listeners already have a license to listen to the tunes, but you can bet your sweet hind end that they care about whether or not they have a right to broadcast those same tunes over the air
What so many people miss in all the squablling over mp3.com and Napster (the corporation) fail to realize is that the whole controversy would have been squelched if the people doing the broadcasting had paid dues to an association like ASCAP for the permission to broadcast.
For example, if Napster had notified each installation of Napster (the software) as a server that people serving up files were liable for securing permission for broadcast of the music (and if Napster servers had secured permission) then there would be no basis for any lawsuit.
The problem, IMHO, is not that people want free tunes (just turn on the radio or fire up Real player and point it at your favorite online radio station). The problem is that these organizations like mp3.com and Napster think that they can get out of the costs of doing business.
Under present law, broadcasters need to secure the right to broadcast copywrited media and that is all there is to the story.
What nationality would you consider a man born in South Africa to English parents (they moved to South Africa because Tolkien's father took a job there) who spent most of his life in living in England?
FYI, Mick is an American slang derogatory term for a person of Irish descent. IIRC, its usage goes back the influx of Irish immigrants into the US during the Irish potato famine.
Mirriam-Webster's online dictionary says this about the word:
The ones I can think of off the top of my head are:
How many more do you need?
Well, my theory is that the machines aren't just using the people for heat. The real purpose behind keeping millions upon millions of people alive is to use their brains for a giant beowulf cluster. So the Matrix is simply the collective consciousness of humanity.
Someone made a reasonable and rational reply on /.
Thank you.
I our biggest quibble is the gray area between the subjective definitions of 'petty and unnecessary' and 'unrealistic and irrational'
I usually categorize 'petty and unnecessary' cheap shots as being 'irrational.' But that's me.
I concur, what fiction needs is not realism, but believability.
A real life example. A friend of mine in high school had one of those weird old Chevrolet's with the engine in the back (Chevelle?). While out and about one evening, he was driving over a bridge with a marvelous sunset and decided to stop and watch, so he stopped and put the hood up in back of the car so that the people stuck behind him would think he had car trouble while he was busy watching the sunset. His friend who was with him said that maybe he should open up the trunk as not many people would think they were having car trouble while what looks like the trunk is open.
Or consider the Matrix. If the Matrix would have been 'realistic' to most of us geeks, it would not have been 'believable' to the average movie viewer.
Fiction needs to be believable, which in some but not all cases is also realistic.
Galeon IS NOT Mozilla. Saying that Galeon is Mozilla because they share an html widget is like saying that my friend's old Dodge Aspen sedan is an old Dodge pickup truck because they share the same engine.
For the sake of this comparisson, it doesn't matter who wrote which widget. The comparisson is about how easy it is to write an application of a specific sort with the available tools. Why reinvent the wheel? Isn't that what using QT/KDE or GTK/Gnome is all about, re-use?
There are actually two related, but distinct, situations here:
On the other hand, how many bands are there that sound like Black Sabbath, Motley Crue, Amy Grant, or 10,000 Maniacs? You can copyright the lyrics, the chord progressions, the notes, etc. But you can't copyright the 'feel' of the music.
.Eddie doesn't (or shouldn't) mind when those young upstarts steal his guitar riffs, because everytime someone hears it and thinks it cool and says something to a friend about that awsome lick, the friend, who is in the know, points out, 'hey dude, that is Eddie Van Halen's riff from Eruption.' Next thing you know Mr. Van Halen has one new additional customer of his albums.
All quotes are from the quotation of Mathias Ettrich by shaughran. I have not checked for accurary.
First there is a bit of inconsistancy...
How many volunteers work on the QT project?
There are also some stabs at Gnome
While neither Gnome, nor GTK is specifically mentioned, it seems to me that the context implies that Gnome and GTK are the 'inferior tools' being refered too. Attacking Gnome and GTK as being inferior technology and implying that working with them is not fun is not a rational point of argumentation.
Also in the unrational realm is the constant intermixing of the idea of programming in QT with the idea of programming in KDE. KDE developers can not insist both that KDE is not affiliated with any corporation and that KDE is superior because it is built on QT.
I would also say that Mathias is cherry-picking his examples.
Or compare Galeon to Konqueror ....
And there is also what seems to me to be a rather spurious correlation
There may very well be something to the the point that underlies this assertion. It may be quicker to develop apps with QT than with GTK. OTOH, I hardly think it appropriate to blame a problem that appears to have at its source, the incompetence of management at Netscape/AOL, on using a non-QT toolset.
To start off, the KDE response is that the Gnome foundation doesn't matter to KDE. What a crock! Aything that helps free software gain in popularity will help KDE.
Think about this, people hear the Gnome announcement and want to check out Gnome. The (arguably) easiest way to check out Gnome is to install Linux. If the person wanting to experience Gnom chooses Caldera, Storm, Corel, Mandrake or any other of the dozens of Linux distributions that make KDE the default desktop environment, more users will be introduced to KDE.
Also, provided that Gnome and KDE get component compatibility going between Kparts and Bonobo, then every Gnome component that can be embedded or hosted becomes a tool in the KDE toolkit. More tools, more power....
I also think that there is a bit of misunderstanding on the part of the KDE folks on just what the Gnome foundation is.
This is no different than the Gnome foundation. The only difference is one of scale, Sun's 'fifty developers' will have a unified voice on the board of the Gnome foundation in the Sun person on the board. The same is true for Eazel, Helix-Code, or any of the independant developers that have joined the Gnome foundation
This train of reasoning implies to me the opposite of what the KDE folks intend it to mean.
therefore
I don't get it.
There are also some poorly supported assertions of fact.
This quote shows an incomplete understanding of market dynamics. There are several overlapping categories of workstations to consider.
Given that there is a good deal of overlap between one and two, the real questions to ask are
I'm not a Gnome only kind of guy. I think that both KDE and Gnome are very good environments. However, I do think that the official KDE position is a bit short-sighted. The Gnome foundation could very well benefit KDE. To say that the foundation is totally irrelevant is to misunderstand the way things work in the real world. For KDE to ignore the Gnome foundation would be to repeat the mistake of Unix vendors ignoring Windows NT in the early nineties.
Look at William of Wallace (the subject of Mel Gibson's Braveheart). Despite Mel wanting the title role, the real William of Wallace was somewhere around 6 foot 10 inches tall and weighed more than 300 pounds. When King Edward the Great had poor old William hung, they built a special gallows to make certain it would not break under his weight.
My point? Memorable events in history typically surround exceptional people and events. History is chock full of events that are improbable and not very likely to happen at all, the sorts of events that intelligent people immediately right off as urban legends when they hear a modern day equivalent.
So, given that today there exist women who are into body building that could likely kick the tush of some of the best mercenaries around in the 15th century, it is not all that unbelievable that a woman could have existed back then that had more or less the same physique as William of Wallace. Heck, compare the women's weight lifting world records today with the men's world records from fifty years ago. Which means, that the genotype is there for women to develop into mighty warriors, if they are exposed to the proper environmental condiditions.
Here, I think you show your ignorance of history. While women may have been regarded as baby-factories throughout large portions of medeival Europe, that did not mean that they did not also engage in physical labor.
As an example, in Industrial Era Britain, women were expected to work 12 and 14 hour days in factories, even when pregnant. Many women would work, go over to a corner to give birth and a mid-wife would take care of the child while the mother went back to work on the assembly line
And as a final point, I suppose that Joan of Arc couldn't fight worth or lead troops worth anything?
At first glance I thought it was about the mighty Ash from the Evil Dead movies. Now, there would be a secret history worth reading, but I doubt it would fill 1K of sheets of dead tree.
On the other hand, it could have been worse, it could have been a secret history of Ash, the Pokemon trainer....
Considering that I already have my laptop, one or two technical books, a few files, a few notepads and my lunch stuffed into my briefcase, I think I'll gladly spend more money to read the slimmer tomes sequentially while riding the bus to work.
Of course I'd also be willing to pay far more for a laptop with a far less powerful CPU if it could rival my Palm Pro for battery life...
Just because the book is cheaper in one volume doesn't mean that one volume is better (and that works the other way around as well, I'm sure that some people would place a higher value on one volume for reasons other than price).
Well, lets go back to the post where the flawed line of reasoning occurs.
What I have been attempting to illustrate is the use of a very poor line of reasoning. AbbyNormal implies that the incident in question could not have been at all serious in nature because, after all, its only about coffee. It doesn't matter that the coffee was hot enough to cause flesh to blister, its supposed to be hot. It doesn't matter if people have complained about the coffee being too hot, because after all, its just coffee.
We know that this is a poor line of reasoning, because if we take the reasoning and insert it into another scenario it seems ludicrous.
And to further illustrate his keen use of logic and reason, AbbyNormal goes back to tried and true ad hominem attacks.
I wonder if AbbyNormal understand reasoning at all. AbbyNormal has yet to present one argument which uses logic. Every single one of his arguments is an appeal to emotion or a personal attack.
Lets think about this, the coffee being served was hot enought to cause third degree burns with absolutely no warning. Further, people were complaining that the coffee was too hot. In a case like that, it is only a matter of time before someone gets seriously injured. And if you think my point about a small child dying is so incredible, think about it for a second. I can't imagine a 12 oz cup of coffee hot enough to cause third degree burns to an adult would have a very good effect if accidentally dropped on an infant. That scenario is entirely possible and given enough time and given the restaruants prediliction for ignoring complaints, the scenario even becomes probable if the practice is not stopped by means of a lawsuit.
The teddy bear analogy was not pointless, nor was it comparing apples to oranges. The fact is that one of your points (not your only point) was that the lawsuit was ridiculous simply because it dealt with coffee. By taking your words and putting them in a different scenario, it shows the silliness of that line of reasoning.
Hmm. I've been accused of that before. But honestly, ad hominem attacks do not increase the esteem with which I hold your debating skills. What possible bearing could an alleged obsession with death of mine have on the discussion?
regards,
-l
I completely agree, which is why the McDonald's coffee judgement was not unreasonable.
Well, had you followed the case instead of simply scanning the headlines, the coffee in question was hot enough to cause third degree burns. Sure, serving warm coffee is a nice thing to do, but when the coffee is 'warm' enough to make my flesh blister, its perhaps not so nice.
So in a case where a parent uses a teddy bear to suffocate a newborn, the parent should get off scott free because ITS A TEDDY BEAR FOR GOD'S SAKE!! ....
In this case, a restaurant was punished because, despite repeated warnings and complaints, they exhibited criminal negligence that threatened the general public with bodily harm. And if McDonald's had not been sued, that particular restaurant would probably still be serving coffee hot enough to kill a small child with.
So, in this particular case, it appears that justice was served and served well.