I concede the point regarding an incorrect interpretation in the summary, and I agree Gruen didn't increase the density by 10^6. To quote myself:
After rereading the article's paragraph (several times), I'll agree that it is talking about the size of crystal produced, rather than density.... but saying "fits inside" is a rather confusing phrase when talking about things at the atomic level. (Whereas talking about suns or planets "fitting inside" is much more clear, to me at least.)
However, I do wonder why you believe that having some quantity of carbon at a higher density than some other density would immediately change the effects of gravity on it... thus plumetting it through the planet.
Why do you say "obviously"? I didn't think it was that clear from that paragraph in the article...
After rereading the article's paragraph (several times), I'll agree that it is talking about the size of crystal produced, rather than density.... but saying "fits inside" is a rather confusing phrase when talking about things at the atomic level.
(Whereas talking about suns or planets "fitting inside" is much more clear, to me at least.)
Which means that the crystals are a million times SMALLER, not denser.
density = mass / volume
Thus, if volume increases, density increases.
If you had a cubic centimeter of the stuff, it would be very very heavy indeed, but it appears that the stuff is formed in sheets, thus very very thin.
I was just reading through the OECD's document cited above. I'm pretty fucking disgusted with it.
They go on and on about "Harmful tax practices", which is anything that might undermine the member countries tax base... such as tax havens. They talk about taxation as if it is a necessity to the proper functioning of the planet... assholes.
To make matters worse, this is being used as a pretty explicit threat against those countries that participate in "harmful tax practices". The threats are primarily financial, adding additional tax burdens on citizens of those countries who operate within/through member countries.
Ick. The more I think about them, the less I like international governmental organizations.
Brief info on OECD, etc.
OECD - Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development
Some members - Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, US, Japan, Australia, Mexica, Korea... among a dozen others.
Some havens - Andorra, Anguilla, Aruba, Barbados, Belize, British Virgin Islands, Cook Islands, Gibraltar, Grenada, Isle of Man, Liberia, Monaco, Montserrat, Panama, Samoa, Tonga, US Virgin Islands, Rep of Vanuatu... among a dozen others.
This is what made me think of this question in reading the book review was the "selfishness" aspect. I think that most
objectivists would refer to this as "enlightened selfishness", but as far as I've ever seen, it's just regular selfishness.
I believe the correct term is "rational self-interest". The distinction is that a lot of people can be irrationally self-interested, which is the traditional "selfish", where they consume, use, abuse, without regard for the long term consequences. Objectivism finds that offensive because it is an act of denying reality.
The reason is that the driver interfaces haven't stabilized to the point where it makes sense to define a binary interface for drivers. The interfaces are making signficant and sometimes radical changes that are necessary to keep the kernel improving.
Once the kernel has developed "enough", the driver interface (at least for certain types of drivers) will probably stabilize and become de facto standard or be blessed by Linus as standard.
But really this is beside the point. Kernel version 2.2 has been around now for what? 2 years? Version 2.4.0preX is out, so that api is stable now and it will certainly be around for quite some time. There is no big deal to make a single source base compatible with both 2.2 and 2.4 (and 2.0 for that matter) and release them all as binary.
This sort of situation is similar but far better than the Windows version where each driver is nearly an entirely different code base since the driver interfaces are often completely different between Win9x and NT.
And you obviously didn't really try to understand my comment, nor really understand "Captain Constitution"s post.
The quote he provides is regarding proper proceedure; the Supreme Court must be notified if information comes up regarding the jursdiction of the case. A "Writ of Certiorari" is a request for a hearing by the Supreme Court of a case. Not at all relevent to the GPL/LGPL licensing issue at hand.
What the HELL do either of those links or the random quote you selected have to do with Copyright and software licenses?!
The first link is to a case regarding patent infringment for locomotive wheels and the second is regarding a liquor license and specifically about an illegal search of the premises.
People, just because a post LOOKS like it might be informative, doesn't mean it is. That should NOT be modded up.
Allowing people to use "experimental" drugs is a good thing, as long as the people taking them understand the risks... it gives them treatment for things that they otherwise might not be able to afford or have ready access to.
The anecdotes you provide suggest doing tests covertly, which is unconditionally a Bad Thing.
But to be honest, it certainly isn't just the US government, nor just US companies. And it isn't done just on people of Central America, it's done on US citizens as well.
Not too long ago there was a flap about radiation experiments done at the University of Rochester in NY (a number of years ago now...) on unknowing subjects.
No need for US bashing... Personal accountability and individual rights are poorly understood and insufficiently protected or respected the world over.
You are confusing patents and copyrights. The preceeding comments regarding when any copyright(ed?) material last expired is reasonably accurate.
Given that, it should be a simple matter to look up more info on patents and copyright here to verify my claim.
Re:Uninspired on several points (some spoilers)
on
Review: 'Titan A.E.'
·
· Score: 1
I think they established that the map used waypoints and got more acurate as you got closer, so while the bad guys had an idea of where to start looking, Cale had a pointer that took them strait to the Titan.
In hindsight I agree, but it sure wasn't clear to me from just the film.
Never specifically explained, but not hard to imagine.
Well... I could imagine, but it seemed that using the Drej as a power source was an afterthought and incidental. That under normal circumstances Titan would have simply created a world using internal power. They did say that they ran low on energy BECAUSE they ran from the Drej.
enjoy the chase scenes for what they are.
I did like the early scenes, particularly the bar fight with the Drej.
The thing that puzzled me is: if you have the tech to build something like the Titan, and know that some aliens are not crazy about the idea and might come to wipe out humanity to stop you, why build only one? Wouldn't it make sense to invest in a fleet of them?
Not only did they not build a fleet of Titans, they DID have time and ability to build a huge fleet of escape ships...
I think they did mention that the Earthers didn't understand why the Drej attacked... so perhaps not enough time to build a second one.
Another thing about the movie was that it seemed pretty pessimistic about our future. 1000+ years to get there? Bah.
Uninspired on several points (some spoilers)
on
Review: 'Titan A.E.'
·
· Score: 1
When I saw the previews, I was looking forward to this film. I thought it would be entertaining, a fun movie, and it was Scifi which I'm pretty desperate for.
It took pieces of several movies: Tron (a hero with some special abilities relating to energy, the ships and creatures "de-rez", hero steals a ship/controls it with energy/difficult to control, similar to recognizer scene), Star Trek (genesis device), there are others which escape me at the moment.
Some other unbelievable/unexplained bits: The hero and misc humans successfully rebuild a spaceship and get it flying before either of the bad guys get to the Titan, even though the Drej have this "amazing technology" and even though the other bad guys have this head start and just as accurate a map.
They never explain why Titan is such a threat, they never explain why they couldn't use Titan when the Earth was attacked but could now. They never explain how the Drej are absorbed by the Titan (never REALLY), they never explain how Cale has all this knowledge about high energy weapons, energy system, propulsion, and navigation and stuff (he's been doing manual labor for the last 15 years, cutting up scrap ships!)...
It goes on, but you get the point.
I guess I'm echoing a lot of what Katz says... I was dissappointed.
I just had cable access installed a week or two ago, and I chatted with the guy doing the install regarding voice over IP. He told me that he was so happy with it that he canceled his long distance service.
I think the issue at stake here isn't whether the FCC will jump in on it's own and try to regulate or tax VoIP, but that the big long distance players will make demands regarding "unfair competition" or "theft of service" or "infrastructure failure" or "collapse of civilization" or whatever.
Similarly, the local providers might get involved, in the same way that there had been rumblings around charging for data access through phone lines.
Obviously the local players haven't been able to force the FCC to regulate data access, but now with both the long distance and local providers, that's a lot of money threatened.
If there is a bit of wiggle room, some group of corporations will probably throw their weight behind it and turn into a football field.
I realize that the long distance providers also are providing data access, but I doubt they are enlightened enough to just let go of the voice business and just do data.
It seems absolutely typical of Unix zealots that they should lie about the "capabilities" of their operating system in this way.
Very unfair. The term "lie" indicates that I was deliberately misinforming people. That is certainly not true. I was using the term that the people I've seen talk about this Linux feature use. I will admit I have not spent the time to really understand "capabilities" or "privileges".
You are welcome to cite references to your distinction between "privileges" and "capabilities".
Secure-programs-how to contains a lot of security related information, including references to the POSIX standards. The POSIX information looks a little dated though.
This link from kernel-traffic indicates that there are several different concepts of what "capabilites" are, and gives some details about what each style consists of.
Let me be clear, I don't know much about capabilities, but I know that they are talked a LOT about on lkml. Simply calling me a liar and saying that it's "privileges" not "caps" doesn't really help educate anyone.
Users/groups is far from a joke, although it does have problems and limitations. Capabilities are coming. Some people are pushing for them to be in 2.4 (at least as experimental), but definitely in 2.6.
It just bothers me that there is no organized group of users who are actually trying to make it the perfect OS instead of the perfect UNIX.
There are plenty of groups trying to make "the perfect OS", (of course, all with different opinions of what 'perfect' means...) but Linux is derived from the concepts in UNIX, asking it to become something else means that it is no longer Linux.
And some of us think that the fundemental concepts of Unix are pretty close to perfect as is.;)
Here we are in the year 2000 and our OS doesn't have a central, consistent, configuration database, for apps and system resources alike.
Why is this a "perfect" criteria? As other/.ers point out, a "registry" leads to a single point of failure, reduces maintainability, breaks lots of standards, etc... There has been lots of talk on lkml regarding this topic, and generally people seem to like the idea of a central repository, text based, but much of it is a userspace issue, and a HUGE undertaking at that.
The reason so called "Linux Zealots" go off the handle when people bring up registries ala win32, is because it's been talked to death, and the majority of people that know this stuff think it's a bad idea.
This is not an OS that leads.
This was a choice. They weren't out to build a completely new OS, they were out to build a free Unix-like OS. I would assume that once clonable features run dry, Linux will continue on at it's present pace, developing new features along the way.
I am absolutely certain that there are plenty of new features already in development or already built that HAVE led. I don't know what they are off hand, but I'm certain that other/.ers can give examples.
The limitation isn't in the copper, it's the switches and filters on your phone line. With this, you are taking advantage of the network in your house.
There is still a very low limit to the baud rate you can achieve via phone, it's just that the bps rate is significantly higher, higher still when you are on analog on one side of the switch and digital on the other (such as with 56k circuits connecting to your ISP).
I didn't say that it is a good or bad UI, I was specifically talking about the learning curve.
However, I disagree that VI is a bad UI just because there are no on-screen cues. Agreed that it is not "user-friendly", but a good UI possesses many characteristics, user-friendliness being just one.
I believe that knowing 12 commands, and being able to successfully use VI makes it easy. Being able to learn 100 commands that all do valuable operations make it powerful.
Every UI requires the user to memorize operations/procedures/keystrokes, otherwise it isn't providing any services at all. Even things like creating a new document in something like MSWord requires a fair bit of domain knowledge which must be memorized. Such as:
How do I create a new document in MSWord? Oh, you go into the File (file? Why "file"?) Menu (menu? Where are those?) and select "New". Or you click the "blank page" icon (Oh, is that what that is? And Oh, is that the same as the menu item?)...
Are either of these really all that "obvious" if you've not used a computer or MSWin before? Both of these methods may be poor designs in their own right, but I hope you agree that ANY interface requires contextual knowledge, and that that knowledge invariably is memorized.
And DAMN IT, I want to be able to REMAP those hot keys! Grrrr.
It irritates me to no end when some app has a function that I'm using all the time, but no hotkey and no way to map it.
Further, I don't like most hotkey layouts, and want to make things convienent FOR ME, not what the designers thought would be a good mapping. I also hate those layouts where, "Oh, you want to raise the object in the window, use ctrl-shift-PageUp." Not only is it hard to type, but I NEVER use PageUp/PageDown for anything, or Ctrl-U, Ctrl-D, or whatever. I'm not citing a speicific app here, just a general gripe about the style of problems I've run into with hotkey setups.
While I didn't say it in the reply to theMAGE (whom I agree with on this point), a good UI doesn't mean "simple" nor "easy for a novice". It is more complex than that.
I believe that a good UI is a powerful, easy to use, self consistent and configurable.
These ideas should be applicable whether or not you are a novice or expert at the given application, and allow the user to slowly (or fastly:) ) grow between the two.
Vi is a good example (not to slight Emacs, which is probably another good example, but I don't know Emacs) of a program with a very good learning curve. There are lots and lots of commands, which are all pretty independent, and can be used in any order, all of which (or almost all) will make your experience easier and make your performance improve.
Better still is the fact that once you understand perhaps a dozen commands (all trivially easy), you can successfully USE it. (Okay, fine, you HAVE to have a cheat sheet, but it can be as small as half a 3x5 card. )
I think this emphasizes a good point. A good UI provides a very small subset of commands (menu items, buttons, whatever) that you need to be able to work with the tool. (Minimalness) A good UI also provides lots of commands that build upon the basic ones. (Consistency/Intuitiveness and Power)
Certainly many of them would be impossible to reasonably track down, but from this explanation, it seems NO ATTEMPT was made. You didn't read enough of the article yesterday. CmdrTaco (I think) specifically said that he attempted to contact a group of people (he didn't specify how many) but was dismally unsuccessful. After that "trial run" he abandoned the effort of contacting people.
These are good points, but there is a legitimate issue that should have been addressed, IMO.
It seemed that many people here felt violated (or at least potentially violated, since none of them probably even knew if they had any quotes in the book), because they believe they possess certain rights which may have been violated. Worse, the arguments slashdot gave yesterday and cprincipe gives are about "convience".
Just because keeping to principles and upholding an individual's rights is difficult doesn't mean we should just ignore it for the sake of convenience. I'm not saying that/. did this, but I think others thought so, and felt (rightly) angered by it.
To make matters worse (well, maybe not), JonKatz and CmdrTaco appear to have ignored this topic entirely in todays postscript...
This is a public forum. There is a thing called fair use. Together I assume these to be sufficient, but IANAL. I think their addition of a flag to mark posts are repostable is a good idea, regardless.
Or perhaps you should have read the article more closely.
The key phrase is: Billington elaborated on why the Library will not put books online during the question and answer session.
The question and answer session is not part of the transcript posted to the LoC web page you cite above.
I doubt anyone here really believes this can be done instantly, but if they do, I'd agree that they are being childish. However, Mr. Billington is very clear that he does not want to place everything on the net, period. I agree with many of the other posters, that it will happen eventually, with or without his endorsement.
His comments strike me as being uneducated (about the internet).
I too made it through most of the way, I actually got up to book 8 of 10. After all that, I realized that all the books were pretty much the same plot structure and got bored.
At the time I read "Battlefield Earth", I really enjoyed it, but I was probably in my early teens, so perhaps 15+ years ago. I would like to see the film, just because I'm so desperate for SF films... but principles have to come first.
Slashdot Mirror
After rereading the article's paragraph (several times), I'll agree that it is talking about the size of crystal produced, rather than density.... but saying "fits inside" is a rather confusing phrase when talking about things at the atomic level. (Whereas talking about suns or planets "fitting inside" is much more clear, to me at least.)
However, I do wonder why you believe that having some quantity of carbon at a higher density than some other density would immediately change the effects of gravity on it... thus plumetting it through the planet.
After rereading the article's paragraph (several times), I'll agree that it is talking about the size of crystal produced, rather than density.... but saying "fits inside" is a rather confusing phrase when talking about things at the atomic level. (Whereas talking about suns or planets "fitting inside" is much more clear, to me at least.)
If volume decreases, density increases.
density = mass / volume
Thus, if volume increases, density increases.
If you had a cubic centimeter of the stuff, it would be very very heavy indeed, but it appears that the stuff is formed in sheets, thus very very thin.
I was just reading through the OECD's document cited above. I'm pretty fucking disgusted with it.
They go on and on about "Harmful tax practices", which is anything that might undermine the member countries tax base... such as tax havens. They talk about taxation as if it is a necessity to the proper functioning of the planet... assholes.
To make matters worse, this is being used as a pretty explicit threat against those countries that participate in "harmful tax practices". The threats are primarily financial, adding additional tax burdens on citizens of those countries who operate within/through member countries.
Ick. The more I think about them, the less I like international governmental organizations.
Brief info on OECD, etc.
OECD - Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development
Some members - Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, US, Japan, Australia, Mexica, Korea... among a dozen others.
Some havens - Andorra, Anguilla, Aruba, Barbados, Belize, British Virgin Islands, Cook Islands, Gibraltar, Grenada, Isle of Man, Liberia, Monaco, Montserrat, Panama, Samoa, Tonga, US Virgin Islands, Rep of Vanuatu... among a dozen others.
I believe the correct term is "rational self-interest". The distinction is that a lot of people can be irrationally self-interested, which is the traditional "selfish", where they consume, use, abuse, without regard for the long term consequences. Objectivism finds that offensive because it is an act of denying reality.
Once the kernel has developed "enough", the driver interface (at least for certain types of drivers) will probably stabilize and become de facto standard or be blessed by Linus as standard.
But really this is beside the point. Kernel version 2.2 has been around now for what? 2 years? Version 2.4 .0preX is out, so that api is stable now and it will certainly be around for quite some time. There is no big deal to make a single source base compatible with both 2.2 and 2.4 (and 2.0 for that matter) and release them all as binary.
This sort of situation is similar but far better than the Windows version where each driver is nearly an entirely different code base since the driver interfaces are often completely different between Win9x and NT.
The quote he provides is regarding proper proceedure; the Supreme Court must be notified if information comes up regarding the jursdiction of the case. A "Writ of Certiorari" is a request for a hearing by the Supreme Court of a case. Not at all relevent to the GPL/LGPL licensing issue at hand.
I stick by my observation.
The first link is to a case regarding patent infringment for locomotive wheels and the second is regarding a liquor license and specifically about an illegal search of the premises.
People, just because a post LOOKS like it might be informative, doesn't mean it is. That should NOT be modded up.
The anecdotes you provide suggest doing tests covertly, which is unconditionally a Bad Thing.
But to be honest, it certainly isn't just the US government, nor just US companies. And it isn't done just on people of Central America, it's done on US citizens as well.
Not too long ago there was a flap about radiation experiments done at the University of Rochester in NY (a number of years ago now...) on unknowing subjects.
No need for US bashing... Personal accountability and individual rights are poorly understood and insufficiently protected or respected the world over.
Given that, it should be a simple matter to look up more info on patents and copyright here to verify my claim.
In hindsight I agree, but it sure wasn't clear to me from just the film.
Never specifically explained, but not hard to imagine.
Well... I could imagine, but it seemed that using the Drej as a power source was an afterthought and incidental. That under normal circumstances Titan would have simply created a world using internal power. They did say that they ran low on energy BECAUSE they ran from the Drej.
enjoy the chase scenes for what they are.
I did like the early scenes, particularly the bar fight with the Drej.
The thing that puzzled me is: if you have the tech to build something like the Titan, and know that some aliens are not crazy about the idea and might come to wipe out humanity to stop you, why build only one? Wouldn't it make sense to invest in a fleet of them?
Not only did they not build a fleet of Titans, they DID have time and ability to build a huge fleet of escape ships...
I think they did mention that the Earthers didn't understand why the Drej attacked... so perhaps not enough time to build a second one.
Another thing about the movie was that it seemed pretty pessimistic about our future. 1000+ years to get there? Bah.
It took pieces of several movies: Tron (a hero with some special abilities relating to energy, the ships and creatures "de-rez", hero steals a ship/controls it with energy/difficult to control, similar to recognizer scene), Star Trek (genesis device), there are others which escape me at the moment.
Some other unbelievable/unexplained bits: The hero and misc humans successfully rebuild a spaceship and get it flying before either of the bad guys get to the Titan, even though the Drej have this "amazing technology" and even though the other bad guys have this head start and just as accurate a map.
They never explain why Titan is such a threat, they never explain why they couldn't use Titan when the Earth was attacked but could now. They never explain how the Drej are absorbed by the Titan (never REALLY), they never explain how Cale has all this knowledge about high energy weapons, energy system, propulsion, and navigation and stuff (he's been doing manual labor for the last 15 years, cutting up scrap ships!)...
It goes on, but you get the point.
I guess I'm echoing a lot of what Katz says... I was dissappointed.
I think the issue at stake here isn't whether the FCC will jump in on it's own and try to regulate or tax VoIP, but that the big long distance players will make demands regarding "unfair competition" or "theft of service" or "infrastructure failure" or "collapse of civilization" or whatever.
Similarly, the local providers might get involved, in the same way that there had been rumblings around charging for data access through phone lines.
Obviously the local players haven't been able to force the FCC to regulate data access, but now with both the long distance and local providers, that's a lot of money threatened.
If there is a bit of wiggle room, some group of corporations will probably throw their weight behind it and turn into a football field.
I realize that the long distance providers also are providing data access, but I doubt they are enlightened enough to just let go of the voice business and just do data.
Very unfair. The term "lie" indicates that I was deliberately misinforming people. That is certainly not true. I was using the term that the people I've seen talk about this Linux feature use. I will admit I have not spent the time to really understand "capabilities" or "privileges".
You are welcome to cite references to your distinction between "privileges" and "capabilities".
A few links:
Pavel's capabilities page
Linux Weekly News listing of Linux capabilities as of 2.2.13.
Secure-programs-how to contains a lot of security related information, including references to the POSIX standards. The POSIX information looks a little dated though.
This link from kernel-traffic indicates that there are several different concepts of what "capabilites" are, and gives some details about what each style consists of.
Let me be clear, I don't know much about capabilities, but I know that they are talked a LOT about on lkml. Simply calling me a liar and saying that it's "privileges" not "caps" doesn't really help educate anyone.
Users/groups is far from a joke, although it does have problems and limitations. Capabilities are coming. Some people are pushing for them to be in 2.4 (at least as experimental), but definitely in 2.6.
It just bothers me that there is no organized group of users who are actually trying to make it the perfect OS instead of the perfect UNIX.
There are plenty of groups trying to make "the perfect OS", (of course, all with different opinions of what 'perfect' means...) but Linux is derived from the concepts in UNIX, asking it to become something else means that it is no longer Linux.
And some of us think that the fundemental concepts of Unix are pretty close to perfect as is. ;)
Here we are in the year 2000 and our OS doesn't have a central, consistent, configuration database, for apps and system resources alike.
Why is this a "perfect" criteria? As other /.ers point out, a "registry" leads to a single point of failure, reduces maintainability, breaks lots of standards, etc... There has been lots of talk on lkml regarding this topic, and generally people seem to like the idea of a central repository, text based, but much of it is a userspace issue, and a HUGE undertaking at that.
The reason so called "Linux Zealots" go off the handle when people bring up registries ala win32, is because it's been talked to death, and the majority of people that know this stuff think it's a bad idea.
This is not an OS that leads.
This was a choice. They weren't out to build a completely new OS, they were out to build a free Unix-like OS. I would assume that once clonable features run dry, Linux will continue on at it's present pace, developing new features along the way.
I am absolutely certain that there are plenty of new features already in development or already built that HAVE led. I don't know what they are off hand, but I'm certain that other /.ers can give examples.
There is still a very low limit to the baud rate you can achieve via phone, it's just that the bps rate is significantly higher, higher still when you are on analog on one side of the switch and digital on the other (such as with 56k circuits connecting to your ISP).
I didn't say that it is a good or bad UI, I was specifically talking about the learning curve.
However, I disagree that VI is a bad UI just because there are no on-screen cues. Agreed that it is not "user-friendly", but a good UI possesses many characteristics, user-friendliness being just one.
I believe that knowing 12 commands, and being able to successfully use VI makes it easy. Being able to learn 100 commands that all do valuable operations make it powerful.
Every UI requires the user to memorize operations/procedures/keystrokes, otherwise it isn't providing any services at all. Even things like creating a new document in something like MSWord requires a fair bit of domain knowledge which must be memorized. Such as:
How do I create a new document in MSWord? Oh, you go into the File (file? Why "file"?) Menu (menu? Where are those?) and select "New". Or you click the "blank page" icon (Oh, is that what that is? And Oh, is that the same as the menu item?)...
Are either of these really all that "obvious" if you've not used a computer or MSWin before? Both of these methods may be poor designs in their own right, but I hope you agree that ANY interface requires contextual knowledge, and that that knowledge invariably is memorized.
It irritates me to no end when some app has a function that I'm using all the time, but no hotkey and no way to map it.
Further, I don't like most hotkey layouts, and want to make things convienent FOR ME, not what the designers thought would be a good mapping. I also hate those layouts where, "Oh, you want to raise the object in the window, use ctrl-shift-PageUp." Not only is it hard to type, but I NEVER use PageUp/PageDown for anything, or Ctrl-U, Ctrl-D, or whatever. I'm not citing a speicific app here, just a general gripe about the style of problems I've run into with hotkey setups.
I believe that a good UI is a powerful, easy to use, self consistent and configurable.
These ideas should be applicable whether or not you are a novice or expert at the given application, and allow the user to slowly (or fastly :) ) grow between the two.
Better still is the fact that once you understand perhaps a dozen commands (all trivially easy), you can successfully USE it. (Okay, fine, you HAVE to have a cheat sheet, but it can be as small as half a 3x5 card. )
I think this emphasizes a good point. A good UI provides a very small subset of commands (menu items, buttons, whatever) that you need to be able to work with the tool. (Minimalness) A good UI also provides lots of commands that build upon the basic ones. (Consistency/Intuitiveness and Power)
It seemed that many people here felt violated (or at least potentially violated, since none of them probably even knew if they had any quotes in the book), because they believe they possess certain rights which may have been violated. Worse, the arguments slashdot gave yesterday and cprincipe gives are about "convience".
Just because keeping to principles and upholding an individual's rights is difficult doesn't mean we should just ignore it for the sake of convenience. I'm not saying that /. did this, but I think others thought so, and felt (rightly) angered by it.
To make matters worse (well, maybe not), JonKatz and CmdrTaco appear to have ignored this topic entirely in todays postscript...
This is a public forum. There is a thing called fair use. Together I assume these to be sufficient, but IANAL. I think their addition of a flag to mark posts are repostable is a good idea, regardless.
The key phrase is: Billington elaborated on why the Library will not put books online during the question and answer session.
The question and answer session is not part of the transcript posted to the LoC web page you cite above.
I doubt anyone here really believes this can be done instantly, but if they do, I'd agree that they are being childish. However, Mr. Billington is very clear that he does not want to place everything on the net, period. I agree with many of the other posters, that it will happen eventually, with or without his endorsement.
His comments strike me as being uneducated (about the internet).
I too made it through most of the way, I actually got up to book 8 of 10. After all that, I realized that all the books were pretty much the same plot structure and got bored.
At the time I read "Battlefield Earth", I really enjoyed it, but I was probably in my early teens, so perhaps 15+ years ago. I would like to see the film, just because I'm so desperate for SF films... but principles have to come first.