Correct, I was listing the items that would certainly not be in any version of this movie. I knew T.B. was out before I ever saw the movie. It's just an obvious thing to cut that only makes sense when you know a whole lot about the back-story (which is when T.B. starts to fit in with the wizards, balrog, Sauron, etc).
I've been explaining to folks in other threads that this movie was probably aimed at about 4 hours, and most of the "why couldn't they have this" complaints should wait until we know what got cut last minute.
I guess now, I'll get a chance to see.
There's still a lot like Tom Bombadil, the trolls, etc that I understand P.J. having removed. Some great big gobs of the book have to be cut, even if you make it a FIVE hour movie, and everything that he kept is, IMHO, either essential to the story or essential to getting the movie audience to understand the feel/background of the books. Even the expanded love intrest bit was a way to sneak in some info about the elves.
Several things: first, take off your list everything that you suggest would not have taken much extra time.
You have to stop and think about what a heart-breaking job the editor for this film had. It came in long, which almost certainly means that what was on film was about 3.5-4 hours. Even then you can't fit all your favorite stuff. You trim a phrase here, a reaction shot there, just to save time.
You say that the Saruman/Gandalf battle was not required? Step back and think about that. How do you introduce Saruman, and make him credible in the second movie? How do you explain the Eye's power? How do you get the audience to fear Sauron's reach over the world? The book did so by going on and on about the history of Middle Earth, but to have a droning naration in the movie would have destroyed it (it worked in the book because we are much more willing to read a history than watch it).
Go back to the movie. Wipe the book from your mind and look at what Jackson has done. There's a new generation of viewer who now understand the power of what Tolkien created. Not fully. Not who/what the elves really are. Not why there are wizards, and why they don't count as "men". Not the fact that there really is an Elvish language, and that's the whole reason he wrote the books in the first place. But far more than the Dune movie did for Dune. Far more than any movie has done for a classic, IMHO (though as I say, To Kill a Mockingbird was pretty darn good).
You point to where the moview changed the book, and you complain. I say, make a better adaptation and we'll talk. This is the best one yet, and I find it hard to imagine that someone could make better (perhaps you could as a play, but that's another matter).
A whole lot of what you point out are limitations in time. This was a three hour movie, and yet you're suggesting four or five sceens that you think should be added?!
I think that, given the limitations of time and the medium this is an astounding take on the books. Could you take this movie as a starting point and imrpove on it? Probably (or at least I imagine someone could), but that's not where P.J. started. He started from scratch. This is, IMHO, the best adaptation of a novel to hit the big screen. I can only think of a handful of other movies that even come close, but most of them set off in very different directions than the book(s) (Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Oddesy, To Kill A Mockingbird). To remain so faithful, and yet do so good a job... I've just never seen it.
Hopefully, the next two movies keep the same level of fidelity (which, since they were made at the same time, I imagine they will).
The review mentions that this book assumes too much background. If you're looking for a book that gives you or others that background, I heartily recommend Hackers by Steven Levy It's a wonderful tour throught what it meant to be a hacker right up to the mid 80s.
I imagine the Stallman book would make a lot more sense after reading it. Also, if you can get ahold of "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" by Neil Stephenson, its a wonderful guide to the history of OSes on personal computers, which plays into this as well.
I've heard of this before, and while it certainly has a "Star Wars Episode X: The Space Parasol" ring to it, the science behind the idea seems solid enough. The question of what kind of physical stresses you would have to overcome are still a bit up in the air, but I'd certainly be more willing to back a plan like this, that tackles the primary source of heat, rather than building more and more beuracracy around environmental controls that we don't fully understand.
Mind, you there are many environmentally concious efforts that I think are valuable. I would never suggest that we should go back to 1970-level auto emissions. I also think that stopping to consider before we plow down a forest is wise (though that's likely to be a moot point in 10 or so years when we figure out how to create strains of trees that grow rapidly, but form solid construction lumber; heck denatured hemp is already a viable alternative for paper).
But, in most of these cases, I favor environmentalism on the basis of short-to-medium-term, measurable factors like breathable air quality and forest re-growth rates. Environmentalists generally want to end-run the debate on these topics by trumping with global warming, but I don't think we need to do that. There's a significant agreement on many topics, and the ones where we disagree, we *should* be discussing the costs/benefits.
[PS: in case you don't understand, I'm saying that you have stated a paradox. If everybody makes the mistake, then you make it as well. Unless you're saying that you make this mistake as well, but only under certain circumstances, your statement does not resolve. If you wish to apply logic, you'll have to try avoiding the most obvious of logical pitfalls.]
I have not found Microsoft paying any money to slam free software/open source.
You haven't been paying enough attention.
They've initiated a huge campaign against open source which as included: tailoring their sales pitch to convert oss customers back to Microsoft; using just about every high-profile member of the Microsoft staff (from Mundi to Balmer to Gates) to recite the reasons that they feel open source is harmful (using each one of these men costs the company a great deal of money in terms of the other efforts that they could be working on); trade show talks; creating "Shared Source"; etc.
Certainly, if you use a license that says that your users are entitled to the source code, you're really going to have to expect to get called on it.
From what I understand, theKompany is selling GPL software and not distributing it freely. The users have absolutely no right to demand access to their source code. The GPL does not say that the source code licensed under it has to be distributed to everyone freely.
I could not agree more. You're 100% correct.
However, my statement still stands. They're using the GPL in a way contrary to the spirit of the GPL. They should expect to get called on it. They should expect it to result in negative publicity (possibly their desire). An they most certainly have no right to act suprised that legions of whiners come knocking at their door. If they'd stopped and thought about it for more than a minute, they would certainly have known that was coming (I'm no more saying that this is a good thing, than when I tell someone that they should expect people to start trying to break into their system the moment they put it on the net).
Come on Aaaaaron (in your average dictionary proper names are not to be found)
I don't know who you're refering to, but my name (Aaron) appears in most dictionaries. It's a biblical name (that my mother chose for secular reasons, not that it matters), so the reference is almost always listed. Aaron was the grandfather of Eli, and the brother of Moses and the first high-priest of the Hebrew nation.
If you can't be bothered to check even a fact that exists at the very beginning of your dictionary, this conversation is really not worth having.
Re:The Earth's temperature has ALWAYS fluctuated.
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Larsen Ice Shelf Collapses
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Actually, we have NO CLUE how to measure such things.
We do not know the exact ammount of energy being released by the sun at any given time (our estimates get better and better, but we simply don't know for sure). We also do not know how that energy interacts with the earth's atmosphere. We also don't know how the climate will behave in response to that interaction. We also don't know the exact details surrounding the temperature change in pre-meteorological times (we know that the temperature fluctuated, and roughly by how much, and roughly when, that's it).
"there's always the possibility that his wild-assed guess is wrong"
"wild-assed guess" is a subjective term. You can brand all hypothesis as wild-ass guess if you wish, but the bottom line is that there is hard evidence that the earth heats up periodically. We have no evidence for the wild-assed guess that the current period of heating is human-related, and not part of the natural cylcle that is already in motion.
Look at it this way, if the earth were currently cooling, we would almost certainly have come up with a theory for how human beings could be responsible for that too. It's good that we come up with many competing hypothesies (this is how the scientific method operates), but to adhere to one such hypothesis with near-religious fervor cannot help the cause of understanding these phenomenon. Let us use all of the evidence and look at it with as critical and objective point of view as possible.
Who knows, maybe we're both very wrong. Perhaps there are forces at work here that we do not yet understand. That is certainly a scenario that climetologists should be used to by now;-)
Re:The Earth's temperature has ALWAYS fluctuated.
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Larsen Ice Shelf Collapses
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· Score: 5, Insightful
In this case, reputable scientist is defined how? Media coverage? There is massive debate in all of the sciences that this touches. A good friend of mine, a solar astrophysicist, has been pointing out for nearly a decade that we have HARD EVIDENCE in the ice records that a massive up-swing in temperature happened in the roughly 500-800AD period, and damaged much of the world's species (there are many human communities that were hurt badly by this).
This change in temperature could have had several causes, but the simplest explanation is that the power output of the sun fluctuates over time. We are most likely seeing the same sort of effect now. Will it get so hot that human civilization suffers? Possibly. Is there anything we can do about it? Probably not.
As the original poster said, it would be nice to think that we're so powerful that we can affect the climate more than the sun, but it's just not a very practical point of view.
My name is Aaron. Look it up. In your average dictionary, it comes pretty early, usually just after aardvark. Sorry for being snippy, but your next comment:
you seem to think that "Um..." means "I do not agree". You are mistaken. It means "I learned to speak by watching Friends"
was not appreciated. When I use "Um", I am attempting to convey a confused pause. Simply using ellipses would not suffice, e.g.: "... sorry, guy".
[Microsoft doesn't] fucking care what GPL-loving freeloaders say.
Heh... (used to indicate amusement). First off, Microsoft spends a very large ammount of money on countering the credibility of those "GPL-loving freeloaders" via their marketing and PR departments, so I think they care quite a lot.
Second, Microsoft gets these complaints from such varried sources as OEMs, third-party software developers and a number of states. They have been asked, at various times, to release the source to their APIs, implementations of proposed standards, implementations of other companies' proposed or existing standards (e.g. Java), browsers, etc, etc.
Choosing to avoid the GPL might not make you treat your customers like Microsoft does, but it removes the expectation of those customers that they are entitled to get your source code.
It depends on what license you use. Certainly, if you use a license that says that your users are entitled to the source code, you're really going to have to expect to get called on it.
That's really what got me about this article. This guy released code under a license that was intended to ensure that source code was available, modifiable and re-distributable... and then he expected people to understand when he didn't want to give up the source.
This man has a very skewed idea of what's going on here. He says that he gets regular complaints that they don't release the code, and then tries to jump from there to the idea that using the GPL has hurt them.
Um... sorry guy, but Microsoft gets this complaint EVERY DAY OF THE YEAR. Hell, they get that from much larger and more influential commers than poor little RMS.
As for RMS, if I had a dime for everyone who had a troubling conversation with RMS, I'd probably be providing dimes to the US Treasury... they would be out. RMS is a fanatic. This is neither good nor bad, really. He has done a lot of good because he cares a heck of a lot more than he should. He's also refused to back down from some ideas which are pathalogically idealistic, and that has caused any number of problems. In the end, I think we should all reality-check Open Source against RMS just to keep that perspective, but he should never be thought of as the ultimate voice of anything (including, oddly, his GPL).
The GPL is an amazingly good tool for protecting free software AS free software. If that's not your goal, you probably chose the wrong license:-/
I've admined both extensively, and I can make a couple of comments here. First, Clearcase is licensed software. Understand that when you get locked out because all of the licenses are in use, you cannot touch your source-code (though someone with a license can copy it into a sandbox for you). Also, Clearcase is a resource pig. It wants a pretty beefy central machine to run on, and if lots of people compile at the same time, the virtual filesystem is not very efficient.
Now on to CVS. CVS is most everything you want from revision control. It's biggest shortcomings are in branch management and the ease with which changes can be made incorrectly. Its ability to interface with well known and standard protocols like rsh, ssh and gzip (which is a format more than a protocol) make it painful to move to anything that's overly proprietary. Its use of your local diff is wonderful ("cvs diff -u" was a revelation for me).
Clearcase manages branches better and can handle non-realtime latency in updates (e.g. you can have two Clearcase repositories at different sites and you can connect them by mailing tapes around or by dialing up once a day). This can be invaluable when you're working in high-security environments, but is otherwise mostly a moot point.
Clearcase has improved in the last few years. They've added some local-checkout features where you don't have to work off of the virtual filesystem, and that helps.
Overall, I'd say CVS is the better system, but Clearcase will sometimes get jammed down your throat, and there are definitely worse fates than to have to get your project working under it.
My example was flawed, but I do not agree that her popularity as a Bunny^H^H^H^H^HMousketeer had anything to do with her overnight rise from no one to MTV sensation.
Really, that was because she had a video that MTV spent countless hours playing over and over.
And THAT was my point.
Re:MK-Ultra experiments on children
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How to Save PGP
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Sorry dude, try again. LSD doesn't cause any long term problems. What can cause long term problems is any tramautic situation
That's like saying that cars don't cause injury, getting into accidents in cars causes injury. True, but LSD puts the user into a state where they can become very agitated by even the most mundane of circumstances. It essentially creates traumatic situations.
LSD is not the demon drug that it has been labeled as, but having seen some friends take mental nose-dives on acid, that have lasted for months, I have to say that it's not exactly as safe as houses either. It's major saving grace is that it's not addictive. So, as long as you don't a) get locked into some "I need the drug to see the aliens" physchosis and b) don't use it as a gateway to other (addictive) drug use, it's easy enough to stop using it if there's a problem,and then seek help.
I think we're both basically on the same track here. I just don't belive in sugar-coating the dangers of mind-altering drugs of any kind (and I include drugs that doctors give out like candy without really understanding, here).
Re:MK-Ultra experiments on children
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How to Save PGP
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
CIA
A bad start.
Experiments with Mind Control
It gets worse
on Children
Yep, gotta save 'dem chilluns! Where's the bastard! We'll lynch 'im!
by Jon Rappoport
Ok, if you didn't stop before this, you can now. This is the man who claims that AIDS is not a virus, but a secret weapon of the drug companies!
He's a real tin-foil-hat kinda guy (or just found a market among that crowd).
The CIA mind-control apparatus has been well known since 1975
Obviously, I failed to stop. Pardon me, but what is your definition of well known?
when 10 large boxes of documents were released pursuant to Freedom of Information Act requests.
Oh, well that's certainly an interesting metric for well known! (later he claims that J.R. is a highly respected journalist, but fails to indicate who respects him....)
Several good books were then written on the subject of the CIA program known as MK-ULTRA.
They were good books of course. Not like those powdery, tasteless books you serve your relatives!
LSD and more powerful compounds
I live that line. I'm going to have it framed.
In case you're wondering, as with most nutters, J.R. has hit on a thread of truth, and then run with it to the mythalogical end-zone of his own creation.
There really were CIA experiments on CIA agents and civilians alike with LSD in the 60s. The CIA thought that it might work out as a truth serum of sorts, but it was not very effective, and had very dangerous long-term consenquences.
However, much of the rest of this theory is based on these axioms: 1) If you testify about something to a government panel, it must be true 2) the CIA has nothing better to do with its time than recruit children to perform missions that there are scads of willing volunteers in the military for 3) events which have common themes are obviously linked.
I recommend that you do your own research here. Books like this one are aimed to scare and shock (that's how they sell). If the facts don't fit, they are often... re-shaped.
If you want to play "spot the loonies" just look for key phrases like "in [document/testemony/etc] the name [government or corporate figure] came up" cited as "proof" that linkage exists between an event and a group that the author wishes to accuse of wrong-doing.
Obvious point about MPAA vs RIAA asside, this is an excellent overview of the problem vis. radio. The article that Slashdot references here also point out some others in the retail area.
However, I think you're ignoring the number one problem in the music marketing industry today: the labels are free to pay MTV as much as they like. They're also free to pay the teenie show of the week on WB as much as they like. So they do, in exchange for featuring their bands.
This leads us down the road where there's a constant assualt on TV viewers with paid ads (videos, interviews, guest appearances). This gives the labels huge power to invent fads. N'Sync (you UNIX types may know them as XNSync()), Brittany, Christina, Spice Girls, etc, etc were created this way. I find Brittany to be the most illuminating example. Most young girls are attracted to her as a role model because she's famous and seems happy and comfortable with her fame. Try to find someone who will say "I was a Brittany fan before she was famous" (and doesn't just mean they saw her on TV before their friends) and you'll be looking for a long time. Why? Because she was introduced with a massive media blitz that was designed to make her seem "already famous".
So, the payola situation in the Radio industry is silly (even more silly because of the very tiny number of independant stations), but TV makes it look like an honest day's work.
Re:Source code = preferred form for modification
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Abusing the GPL?
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I do think this is an ethically dubious act, and possibly an illegal one too.
Let's be clear here (just as we are when talking about the RIAA): violating the GPL is not illegal. What's illegal is copyright violation, which is what you're committing if you distribute someone's copyrighted work without a license. Since you have no license that allows you this sort of distribution, you are in violation of copyright law.
Yeah, I agree with the comments on prefered version of source. It seems to me that the pre-processed version is the output of a compilation stage, and is not suitable as source code. Thus, it is not the prefered version. This would be a much stronger stance than simply not distributing source at all, but ultimately seems flawed.
It's funny that perhaps the most elegant hack to ever come out of the FSF was a legal document....
Best open source browser with no Mozilla dependencies? Well, Mozilla, of course! You can always install Mozilla, even if you don't have Mozilla installed already.
Seriously, I've used most of the browsers out there, and the smoothest experience I've had continues to be Mozilla. It used to be that there were always one or two "gee, that's annoying" bugs for every release. But, since 0.9.6 or so, I've been a happy camper.
Galeon tries to do a lot cool stuff, but falls down on reliability. I'm hoping their next generation comes on strong, gets stable and takes over my desktop, but for now....
Konqueror is fine if you only run KDE, but loading the KDE and GNOME libraries really hurts, even on a beefy machine. That said, Evolution virtual mailboxes are even better than VM's (an EMACS-based mail reader), so I cannot possibly switch to KDE exclusively.
Netscape 6.x is a nicely packaged installation of Mozilla (the best I've seen), but adds in too much junk and too many promotional tie-ins.
Netscape 4.x was ok in it's day, but the Web is a different world now, and it's just not usable anymore.
Lynx is my fallback, of course. Good, solid browser with just enough features to get me some google results;-)
Enshrined in a popular play, movie and a game involving actor Kevin Bacon, the notion that disparate people are connected by a short chain of mutual friends caught on after 1967 research by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram.
As you can see, Malcolm Gladwel(author of The Tipping Point) did not introduce this concept.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct, I was listing the items that would certainly not be in any version of this movie. I knew T.B. was out before I ever saw the movie. It's just an obvious thing to cut that only makes sense when you know a whole lot about the back-story (which is when T.B. starts to fit in with the wizards, balrog, Sauron, etc).
I've been explaining to folks in other threads that this movie was probably aimed at about 4 hours, and most of the "why couldn't they have this" complaints should wait until we know what got cut last minute.
I guess now, I'll get a chance to see.
There's still a lot like Tom Bombadil, the trolls, etc that I understand P.J. having removed. Some great big gobs of the book have to be cut, even if you make it a FIVE hour movie, and everything that he kept is, IMHO, either essential to the story or essential to getting the movie audience to understand the feel/background of the books. Even the expanded love intrest bit was a way to sneak in some info about the elves.
Several things: first, take off your list everything that you suggest would not have taken much extra time.
You have to stop and think about what a heart-breaking job the editor for this film had. It came in long, which almost certainly means that what was on film was about 3.5-4 hours. Even then you can't fit all your favorite stuff. You trim a phrase here, a reaction shot there, just to save time.
You say that the Saruman/Gandalf battle was not required? Step back and think about that. How do you introduce Saruman, and make him credible in the second movie? How do you explain the Eye's power? How do you get the audience to fear Sauron's reach over the world? The book did so by going on and on about the history of Middle Earth, but to have a droning naration in the movie would have destroyed it (it worked in the book because we are much more willing to read a history than watch it).
Go back to the movie. Wipe the book from your mind and look at what Jackson has done. There's a new generation of viewer who now understand the power of what Tolkien created. Not fully. Not who/what the elves really are. Not why there are wizards, and why they don't count as "men". Not the fact that there really is an Elvish language, and that's the whole reason he wrote the books in the first place. But far more than the Dune movie did for Dune. Far more than any movie has done for a classic, IMHO (though as I say, To Kill a Mockingbird was pretty darn good).
You point to where the moview changed the book, and you complain. I say, make a better adaptation and we'll talk. This is the best one yet, and I find it hard to imagine that someone could make better (perhaps you could as a play, but that's another matter).
A whole lot of what you point out are limitations in time. This was a three hour movie, and yet you're suggesting four or five sceens that you think should be added?!
I think that, given the limitations of time and the medium this is an astounding take on the books. Could you take this movie as a starting point and imrpove on it? Probably (or at least I imagine someone could), but that's not where P.J. started. He started from scratch. This is, IMHO, the best adaptation of a novel to hit the big screen. I can only think of a handful of other movies that even come close, but most of them set off in very different directions than the book(s) (Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Oddesy, To Kill A Mockingbird). To remain so faithful, and yet do so good a job... I've just never seen it.
Hopefully, the next two movies keep the same level of fidelity (which, since they were made at the same time, I imagine they will).
Yep, that's where I first saw it. I now own the soft-cover. The car-dealership/crossroads thing is really great!
;-)
Glad someone else has heard of it
The review mentions that this book assumes too much background. If you're looking for a book that gives you or others that background, I heartily recommend Hackers by Steven Levy It's a wonderful tour throught what it meant to be a hacker right up to the mid 80s.
I imagine the Stallman book would make a lot more sense after reading it. Also, if you can get ahold of "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" by Neil Stephenson, its a wonderful guide to the history of OSes on personal computers, which plays into this as well.
I've heard of this before, and while it certainly has a "Star Wars Episode X: The Space Parasol" ring to it, the science behind the idea seems solid enough. The question of what kind of physical stresses you would have to overcome are still a bit up in the air, but I'd certainly be more willing to back a plan like this, that tackles the primary source of heat, rather than building more and more beuracracy around environmental controls that we don't fully understand.
Mind, you there are many environmentally concious efforts that I think are valuable. I would never suggest that we should go back to 1970-level auto emissions. I also think that stopping to consider before we plow down a forest is wise (though that's likely to be a moot point in 10 or so years when we figure out how to create strains of trees that grow rapidly, but form solid construction lumber; heck denatured hemp is already a viable alternative for paper).
But, in most of these cases, I favor environmentalism on the basis of short-to-medium-term, measurable factors like breathable air quality and forest re-growth rates. Environmentalists generally want to end-run the debate on these topics by trumping with global warming, but I don't think we need to do that. There's a significant agreement on many topics, and the ones where we disagree, we *should* be discussing the costs/benefits.
True, but to start a discussion with a sweeping, paradoxical statement is a sure way to get your audience to stop reading.
You make the mistake here that everybody makes.
All Cretins are liars.
Try starting over.
[PS: in case you don't understand, I'm saying that you have stated a paradox. If everybody makes the mistake, then you make it as well. Unless you're saying that you make this mistake as well, but only under certain circumstances, your statement does not resolve. If you wish to apply logic, you'll have to try avoiding the most obvious of logical pitfalls.]
You haven't been paying enough attention.
They've initiated a huge campaign against open source which as included: tailoring their sales pitch to convert oss customers back to Microsoft; using just about every high-profile member of the Microsoft staff (from Mundi to Balmer to Gates) to recite the reasons that they feel open source is harmful (using each one of these men costs the company a great deal of money in terms of the other efforts that they could be working on); trade show talks; creating "Shared Source"; etc.
From what I understand, theKompany is selling GPL software and not distributing it freely. The users have absolutely no right to demand access to their source code. The GPL does not say that the source code licensed under it has to be distributed to everyone freely.
I could not agree more. You're 100% correct.
However, my statement still stands. They're using the GPL in a way contrary to the spirit of the GPL. They should expect to get called on it. They should expect it to result in negative publicity (possibly their desire). An they most certainly have no right to act suprised that legions of whiners come knocking at their door. If they'd stopped and thought about it for more than a minute, they would certainly have known that was coming (I'm no more saying that this is a good thing, than when I tell someone that they should expect people to start trying to break into their system the moment they put it on the net).
Come on Aaaaaron (in your average dictionary proper names are not to be found)
I don't know who you're refering to, but my name (Aaron) appears in most dictionaries. It's a biblical name (that my mother chose for secular reasons, not that it matters), so the reference is almost always listed. Aaron was the grandfather of Eli, and the brother of Moses and the first high-priest of the Hebrew nation.
you will find several references to it in on-line dictionaries as well....
If you can't be bothered to check even a fact that exists at the very beginning of your dictionary, this conversation is really not worth having.
Actually, we have NO CLUE how to measure such things.
;-)
We do not know the exact ammount of energy being released by the sun at any given time (our estimates get better and better, but we simply don't know for sure). We also do not know how that energy interacts with the earth's atmosphere. We also don't know how the climate will behave in response to that interaction. We also don't know the exact details surrounding the temperature change in pre-meteorological times (we know that the temperature fluctuated, and roughly by how much, and roughly when, that's it).
"there's always the possibility that his wild-assed guess is wrong"
"wild-assed guess" is a subjective term. You can brand all hypothesis as wild-ass guess if you wish, but the bottom line is that there is hard evidence that the earth heats up periodically. We have no evidence for the wild-assed guess that the current period of heating is human-related, and not part of the natural cylcle that is already in motion.
Look at it this way, if the earth were currently cooling, we would almost certainly have come up with a theory for how human beings could be responsible for that too. It's good that we come up with many competing hypothesies (this is how the scientific method operates), but to adhere to one such hypothesis with near-religious fervor cannot help the cause of understanding these phenomenon. Let us use all of the evidence and look at it with as critical and objective point of view as possible.
Who knows, maybe we're both very wrong. Perhaps there are forces at work here that we do not yet understand. That is certainly a scenario that climetologists should be used to by now
In this case, reputable scientist is defined how? Media coverage? There is massive debate in all of the sciences that this touches. A good friend of mine, a solar astrophysicist, has been pointing out for nearly a decade that we have HARD EVIDENCE in the ice records that a massive up-swing in temperature happened in the roughly 500-800AD period, and damaged much of the world's species (there are many human communities that were hurt badly by this).
This change in temperature could have had several causes, but the simplest explanation is that the power output of the sun fluctuates over time. We are most likely seeing the same sort of effect now. Will it get so hot that human civilization suffers? Possibly. Is there anything we can do about it? Probably not.
As the original poster said, it would be nice to think that we're so powerful that we can affect the climate more than the sun, but it's just not a very practical point of view.
Your "unknown source" is known as The Sun.
The last time the earth heated up, humans were not the leading source of CO2.
Sorry to have to tell you this Aaaaaron
My name is Aaron. Look it up. In your average dictionary, it comes pretty early, usually just after aardvark. Sorry for being snippy, but your next comment:
you seem to think that "Um..." means "I do not agree". You are mistaken. It means "I learned to speak by watching Friends"
was not appreciated. When I use "Um", I am attempting to convey a confused pause. Simply using ellipses would not suffice, e.g.: "... sorry, guy".
[Microsoft doesn't] fucking care what GPL-loving freeloaders say.
Heh... (used to indicate amusement). First off, Microsoft spends a very large ammount of money on countering the credibility of those "GPL-loving freeloaders" via their marketing and PR departments, so I think they care quite a lot.
Second, Microsoft gets these complaints from such varried sources as OEMs, third-party software developers and a number of states. They have been asked, at various times, to release the source to their APIs, implementations of proposed standards, implementations of other companies' proposed or existing standards (e.g. Java), browsers, etc, etc.
Choosing to avoid the GPL might not make you treat your customers like Microsoft does, but it removes the expectation of those customers that they are entitled to get your source code.
It depends on what license you use. Certainly, if you use a license that says that your users are entitled to the source code, you're really going to have to expect to get called on it.
That's really what got me about this article. This guy released code under a license that was intended to ensure that source code was available, modifiable and re-distributable... and then he expected people to understand when he didn't want to give up the source.
Odd.
Have a nice day, Mr. Coward.
This man has a very skewed idea of what's going on here. He says that he gets regular complaints that they don't release the code, and then tries to jump from there to the idea that using the GPL has hurt them.
:-/
Um... sorry guy, but Microsoft gets this complaint EVERY DAY OF THE YEAR. Hell, they get that from much larger and more influential commers than poor little RMS.
As for RMS, if I had a dime for everyone who had a troubling conversation with RMS, I'd probably be providing dimes to the US Treasury... they would be out. RMS is a fanatic. This is neither good nor bad, really. He has done a lot of good because he cares a heck of a lot more than he should. He's also refused to back down from some ideas which are pathalogically idealistic, and that has caused any number of problems. In the end, I think we should all reality-check Open Source against RMS just to keep that perspective, but he should never be thought of as the ultimate voice of anything (including, oddly, his GPL).
The GPL is an amazingly good tool for protecting free software AS free software. If that's not your goal, you probably chose the wrong license
Sorry man.
I've admined both extensively, and I can make a couple of comments here. First, Clearcase is licensed software. Understand that when you get locked out because all of the licenses are in use, you cannot touch your source-code (though someone with a license can copy it into a sandbox for you). Also, Clearcase is a resource pig. It wants a pretty beefy central machine to run on, and if lots of people compile at the same time, the virtual filesystem is not very efficient.
Now on to CVS. CVS is most everything you want from revision control. It's biggest shortcomings are in branch management and the ease with which changes can be made incorrectly. Its ability to interface with well known and standard protocols like rsh, ssh and gzip (which is a format more than a protocol) make it painful to move to anything that's overly proprietary. Its use of your local diff is wonderful ("cvs diff -u" was a revelation for me).
Clearcase manages branches better and can handle non-realtime latency in updates (e.g. you can have two Clearcase repositories at different sites and you can connect them by mailing tapes around or by dialing up once a day). This can be invaluable when you're working in high-security environments, but is otherwise mostly a moot point.
Clearcase has improved in the last few years. They've added some local-checkout features where you don't have to work off of the virtual filesystem, and that helps.
Overall, I'd say CVS is the better system, but Clearcase will sometimes get jammed down your throat, and there are definitely worse fates than to have to get your project working under it.
Yes, you're right.
My example was flawed, but I do not agree that her popularity as a Bunny^H^H^H^H^HMousketeer had anything to do with her overnight rise from no one to MTV sensation.
Really, that was because she had a video that MTV spent countless hours playing over and over.
And THAT was my point.
Sorry dude, try again. LSD doesn't cause any long term problems. What can cause long term problems is any tramautic situation
That's like saying that cars don't cause injury, getting into accidents in cars causes injury. True, but LSD puts the user into a state where they can become very agitated by even the most mundane of circumstances. It essentially creates traumatic situations.
LSD is not the demon drug that it has been labeled as, but having seen some friends take mental nose-dives on acid, that have lasted for months, I have to say that it's not exactly as safe as houses either. It's major saving grace is that it's not addictive. So, as long as you don't a) get locked into some "I need the drug to see the aliens" physchosis and b) don't use it as a gateway to other (addictive) drug use, it's easy enough to stop using it if there's a problem,and then seek help.
I think we're both basically on the same track here. I just don't belive in sugar-coating the dangers of mind-altering drugs of any kind (and I include drugs that doctors give out like candy without really understanding, here).
CIA
A bad start.
Experiments with Mind Control
It gets worse
on Children
Yep, gotta save 'dem chilluns! Where's the bastard! We'll lynch 'im!
by Jon Rappoport
Ok, if you didn't stop before this, you can now. This is the man who claims that AIDS is not a virus, but a secret weapon of the drug companies!
He's a real tin-foil-hat kinda guy (or just found a market among that crowd).
The CIA mind-control apparatus has been well known since 1975
Obviously, I failed to stop. Pardon me, but what is your definition of well known?
when 10 large boxes of documents were released pursuant to Freedom of Information Act requests.
Oh, well that's certainly an interesting metric for well known! (later he claims that J.R. is a highly respected journalist, but fails to indicate who respects him....)
Several good books were then written on the subject of the CIA program known as MK-ULTRA.
They were good books of course. Not like those powdery, tasteless books you serve your relatives!
LSD and more powerful compounds
I live that line. I'm going to have it framed.
In case you're wondering, as with most nutters, J.R. has hit on a thread of truth, and then run with it to the mythalogical end-zone of his own creation.
There really were CIA experiments on CIA agents and civilians alike with LSD in the 60s. The CIA thought that it might work out as a truth serum of sorts, but it was not very effective, and had very dangerous long-term consenquences.
However, much of the rest of this theory is based on these axioms: 1) If you testify about something to a government panel, it must be true 2) the CIA has nothing better to do with its time than recruit children to perform missions that there are scads of willing volunteers in the military for 3) events which have common themes are obviously linked.
I recommend that you do your own research here. Books like this one are aimed to scare and shock (that's how they sell). If the facts don't fit, they are often... re-shaped.
If you want to play "spot the loonies" just look for key phrases like "in [document/testemony/etc] the name [government or corporate figure] came up" cited as "proof" that linkage exists between an event and a group that the author wishes to accuse of wrong-doing.
Obvious point about MPAA vs RIAA asside, this is an excellent overview of the problem vis. radio. The article that Slashdot references here also point out some others in the retail area.
However, I think you're ignoring the number one problem in the music marketing industry today: the labels are free to pay MTV as much as they like. They're also free to pay the teenie show of the week on WB as much as they like. So they do, in exchange for featuring their bands.
This leads us down the road where there's a constant assualt on TV viewers with paid ads (videos, interviews, guest appearances). This gives the labels huge power to invent fads. N'Sync (you UNIX types may know them as XNSync()), Brittany, Christina, Spice Girls, etc, etc were created this way. I find Brittany to be the most illuminating example. Most young girls are attracted to her as a role model because she's famous and seems happy and comfortable with her fame. Try to find someone who will say "I was a Brittany fan before she was famous" (and doesn't just mean they saw her on TV before their friends) and you'll be looking for a long time. Why? Because she was introduced with a massive media blitz that was designed to make her seem "already famous".
So, the payola situation in the Radio industry is silly (even more silly because of the very tiny number of independant stations), but TV makes it look like an honest day's work.
I do think this is an ethically dubious act, and possibly an illegal one too.
Let's be clear here (just as we are when talking about the RIAA): violating the GPL is not illegal. What's illegal is copyright violation, which is what you're committing if you distribute someone's copyrighted work without a license. Since you have no license that allows you this sort of distribution, you are in violation of copyright law.
Yeah, I agree with the comments on prefered version of source. It seems to me that the pre-processed version is the output of a compilation stage, and is not suitable as source code. Thus, it is not the prefered version. This would be a much stronger stance than simply not distributing source at all, but ultimately seems flawed.
It's funny that perhaps the most elegant hack to ever come out of the FSF was a legal document....
Best open source browser with no Mozilla dependencies? Well, Mozilla, of course! You can always install Mozilla, even if you don't have Mozilla installed already.
;-)
Seriously, I've used most of the browsers out there, and the smoothest experience I've had continues to be Mozilla. It used to be that there were always one or two "gee, that's annoying" bugs for every release. But, since 0.9.6 or so, I've been a happy camper.
Galeon tries to do a lot cool stuff, but falls down on reliability. I'm hoping their next generation comes on strong, gets stable and takes over my desktop, but for now....
Konqueror is fine if you only run KDE, but loading the KDE and GNOME libraries really hurts, even on a beefy machine. That said, Evolution virtual mailboxes are even better than VM's (an EMACS-based mail reader), so I cannot possibly switch to KDE exclusively.
Netscape 6.x is a nicely packaged installation of Mozilla (the best I've seen), but adds in too much junk and too many promotional tie-ins.
Netscape 4.x was ok in it's day, but the Web is a different world now, and it's just not usable anymore.
Lynx is my fallback, of course. Good, solid browser with just enough features to get me some google results
Yep, re-read your post and I see that you're correct. Oh well. Was fun doing the reasearch ;-)
As you can see, Malcolm Gladwel(author of The Tipping Point) did not introduce this concept.