since they were granted the patent, it's pretty obvious that they had come up with a novel process which was straight-up copied. On the legal merits, they should certainly win.
Since you were arrested, it's pretty obvious that you must have murdered your wife. On the legal merits, you should certainly be executed. I mean, how could the police possibly arrest the wrong person? That would be like the patent office making a mistake! It simply can't happen!
He didn't say it wasn't illegal. Of course it's illegal. He said it's not a crime. Which is sometimes true, depending on whether it was done for commercial gain and what the total value was of the works on which copyright was infringed.
To put it simply: not everything that is illegal is a crime.
It disturbs me how many Americans appear to be ignorant of these fundamental concepts of the legal system that rules their lives...
AFAIK, in the US (which is where MIT is) it's not a crime, it's a civil offence.
Downloading, perhaps. But you need to be damn careful about uploading. Quoting 17 U.S.C section 506(a)(2):
Criminal Infringement.--Any person who infringes a copyright willfully [...] by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000, shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18.
Where the relevant punishments are:
Any person who commits an offense under section 506(a)(2) of title 17--
1. shall be imprisoned not more than 3 years, or fined in the amount set forth in this title, or both, if the offense consists of the reproduction or distribution of 10 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of $2,500 or more;
2. shall be imprisoned not more than 6 years, or fined in the amount set forth in this title, or both, if the offense is a second or subsequent offense under paragraph (1); and
3. shall be imprisoned not more than 1 year, or fined in the amount set forth in this title, or both, if the offense consists of the reproduction or distribution of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000.
So, be very careful. If you're going to share music you don't have a license to share, make sure the total retail value of what you share is under $1,000, or you're looking at jail time.
Because if they settle there, then not only do they open themselves up to the Helvetica and Palatino, but they'd have to stop the practice for the one they steal AFTER this one.
What "Helvetica"? If you're referring to Arial, then it's by no means a stolen Helvetica; they're totally different designs, and anyone who knows anything about type can tell them apart at a glance. People get annoyed about Arial because it's ugly, not because it's "stolen".
And what "Palatino"? Book Antiqua? Ancient history. Microsoft more than made up for it when they actually licensed the genuine Palatino from Linotype -- it's been bundled with Windows since Win2k.
By the way, this is nothing to do with "settling", "stealing", or "opening themselves up". This is a case of them being denied a trademark. There has been no lawsuit and no claim of damages or illegal activity: the only claim Linotype made was that Segoe was not an original design.
Check out some recent benchmarks involving Java if you don't believe me.
I'm not going to do the work of investigating your claims for you. You want me to check out benchmarks, you can damn well cite those benchmarks yourself.
Till someone actually provides reliable and scientifically constructed* benchmarks that demonstrate Java outperforming native code in a production environment, I'm going to carry on believing that it's slower... and it's the job of the Java advocates to convince me I'm wrong, not the other way round.
* That is, not the Great Computer Language Shootout, which is the antithesis of scientific benchmarking. Something academic and peer-reviewed, please.
Java is "heavier" than a native language/platform but for something like Freenet where privacy can be extremely important, reducing the possibility of stack smashing/bufer overrun type vulnerabilities to near zero - which Java helps do very well - is more than worth the execution overhead.
But there are plenty of natively compiled portable languages that have exactly the same stack and buffer safety, but less overhead than Java.
There's the ML family, for example - fast implementations like OCaml and MLton are usually more efficient and more concise than C++. OCaml has already been used to implement other P2P applications (MLDonkey). And if you absolutely must have braces, there are things like D and Felix, which bring the same benefits to a familiar C++/Java-style syntax.
Judging all compiled languages by C++ is like judging all interpreted languages by Python. Deciding to use an interpreted language because compiled languages "suffer from buffer overflows" is exactly like deciding to use a compiled language because interpreted languages "have significant whitespace", i.e. it's complete and utter bullshit.
In order for a DRM'd work to receive legal copyright protection it must be required to submit a non-DRM'd copy to the Library of Congress and 2 other public Libraries.
But what if terrorist pedophile pirates broke into the Library of Congress and stole the non-DRM'd copy? The consequences could destroy America and harm our children! We cannot afford to weaken our resolve: if we are to win the War on Freedom, we must fight on bravely and never, NEVER make ANY concession to the forces of evil who would try to force our God-given intellectual property to be released into the so-called "public domain".
my phone can take pictures but the interface is clunky and the quality sucks. i dont know anyone who wouldn't prefer using a simple digital camera.
Nor do I. And yet, most people (apart from photography enthusiasts) just seem to use their phone instead anyway. It's more convenient. Why carry a camera around when you've got one in your phone? Take a camera if you know you'll be taking photos, sure - to a wedding or whatever. But if you've got one in your phone, suddenly you have a camera with you all the time, and you don't need to make any special effort to bring one.
Who will take the first photos and videos of the next major unexpected newsworthy event? Members of the general public, that's who - and they'll take them on their mobile phones. That's what happened with the bombings in London last July. Welcome to the future.
And there are people who use their phone to take photos who would never have considered buying a digital camera. There's a huge market of people who will refuse to buy a dedicated device just to try out a new service, but who might well use the service if it was supported by a device they're going to buy anyway.
BTW, here are some capital letters for you: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ. Sprinking them into your comments in appropriate places will make what you write easier to read. If copying and pasting is too much effort, I believe you can also generate them by holding down the "shift" key while typing a letter.
Cell phone companies seem to want to LOCK people into buying songs over their networks.
So, how many online music stores can you buy music for your iPod from?
And, the two phones out that work with iTunes limit you to 100 songs.
Quick question for you: do you think that this is because
(a) the phone companies are stupid and want to provide you with a crap experience, or (b) Apple refused to let them compete with the iPod on a level playing-field?
Oh, sure, Apple has every right to decide how much access they give other people to their store. It's theirs, after all. I just find it vaguely amusing that people are so quick to assume that the iPod is sustained by any sort of technical advantage, rather than by vendor lock-in. (ITMS is popular, so people go there first, and then they discover they have to buy an iPod because nothing else will play the music they've bought. If Microsoft pulled that one, they'd be crucified...)
In other words, videogames TRAIN the players to become better and more effective criminals. I don't know about you, but the thought gives me the creeps.
Sorry, I don't buy it. I've played hours of video games. In games, I've killed thousands of people. In real life, I get all squeamish about the thought of squashing a spider. And I couldn't use a gun to save my life. The only weapons I've ever used are the plastic sort with two buttons and a little wheel on top, and a little ball thingy underneath, that you roll around on your desk to aim. In real life, I could make a good guess as to which bit's the trigger and where the bullets come out, but I wouldn't even know where to look to find that "safety catch" thing I've heard of.
If you want to stop gun crime, make shooting ranges illegal. THOSE are the things that train people to hit targets with guns. Video games just train you to line up pixels on a monitor, which isn't actually all that useful if you want to commit a real-life crime, you know?
(And no, as it happens I don't believe shooting ranges should be banned.)
Maybe not in that regard, but let's see the XBox run Mario or classic Zelda without using some illegal emu and roms that takes chips and crap to make it happen.
Nitpick: emulators are not illegal. The roms usually are - I'm not sure that it's actually been tested in court whether it's fair use to transfer software from a cartridge you own in order to play it on a different platform, but even if it is, we all know that's not how most people get their roms. But the emulator itself is not illegal.
(Unless it violates patents or makes use of illegally copied firmware code. But I somehow doubt either of those applies to the NES. And it's worth noting that when Sony sued Connectix for copyright and patent infringements in their Playstation emulator, the lawsuit was unsuccessful and Connectix' reverse-engineering was found to be fair use.)
Have you considered that email lists like that might just be a bad idea in general? It seems to me that that kind of thing would be better implemented using RSS instead.
No. For infrequent security alerts, you want to use a push technology like email: the advantages are that (a) it's everywhere (even the most stripped-down BSD server will have a basic email client), and (b) it saves bandwidth (because you don't have people's aggregators constantly probing your site for changes).
But he did say that it would only be useful for mediocre directors.
He would presumably say that a machine such as you describe would be useful only to mediocre sculptors. But I prefer to keep my mind open to the possibility that Rodin might have produced even greater works, or a greater number of works of equal genius, if he had been able to use such a device to translate his vision into sculpture. Of course, he might equally have found it limiting and rejected it. That's part of what being an artist is: knowing which tools are the best for you.
The point is that we cannot simply declare that it would not have been useful on arbitrary grounds. The fact that a tool is most obviously useful to the mediocre does not automatically make it useless for a genius. The guitar is widely perceived as an instrument for casual musicians, while the violin is thought of as more suitable for "serious" music... but I know which I'd rather listen to a Hendrix play.
But when you hear the company that stole VMS to create Windows NT,
Only in the sense that Linus Torvalds stole Unix to create Linux. Windows NT was a new OS. It was designed by many of the same people who had designed VMS, built on the same principles, and uses the same techniques and in some cases the same algorithms to do very similar things. But that doesn't make it stolen.
that stole the design for the Microsoft mouse,
What, Key Tronic? That's the name of the company that stole trade secrets and illegally passed them on to Microsoft, who used them for the Intellimouse (not the "Microsoft mouse"). Key Tronic was sued; Microsoft wasn't. That usually gives you a good hint about who the victim thought was responsible for the wrongdoing, you know?
and that regularly gets caught stealing ideas from partners,
Such as?
Come on, you're making the accusations, you're the one who has to back them up with examples. So far you haven't done so. What are you expecting? Am I supposed to say "ooh, some guy on Slashdot says Microsoft does bad things, he must know something I don't!" or something? Sorry, doesn't work that way. Pony up, I want facts - hard evidence if possible, but I'd settle for specific allegations that I could at least find out about for myself.
and that is funding the SCO lawsuite against IBM and after years of nasty litigation can't find a single line of stolen code
First, as I've already pointed out above, if Microsoft stole VMS then Linus did steal Unix. You can't have it both ways - either both stole or neither did. Please make up your mind.:)
That aside, again, where is your evidence that Microsoft is funding this lawsuit? They paid a license fee. Big deal. They pay lots of license fees. Sun also paid SCO a license fee. So did a handful of other people. Baystar gave SCO a huge cash injection and didn't even get a license out of it. Etcetera.
By the way, it's SCO that can't find any stolen code in Linux, not Microsoft. Well, Microsoft probably can't find any either, but nor has Microsoft ever claimed they could. Even in the FUD that this article is wallowing in (the one point where I actually agree with you), Ballmer carefully does not say that he believes Linux is definitely infringing. Merely that he thinks it is possible.
and when you see the clear history of who contributed what lines of code to what tools in Linux's changelogs so that there's complete transparency of who brought in what in the Linux world
How does that have any bearing whatsoever on the question of whether or not Linux could be found to be infringing Microsoft patents? The whole problem with software patents is that it's possible for me to sit down with a problem, come up with a solution entirely by myself (having worked it all out from first principles), and still be found to have infringed someone's patents. Transparency makes it very easy to tell whether copyright infringement is occurring, and very easy to identify who is responsible if it does. But it does absolutely nothing to protect against patents.
What, so we can have a version that's not just of questionable accuracy, but also ruined by poor writing, faulty grammar, and a perplexing refusal to translate basic terms for family relations?:P
> There is a school of thought that, even if the writer didn't consciously mean it, he still meant it subconsciously.
Utter bullshit. It translates to "I think this interpretation is cool, so I'm going to pretend its right wether it is or not". If you used logic like that in the sciences, you'd be laughed out of academia.
I find it amusing that you, who are so quick to accuse other people of logical fallacies, are yourself so fond of strawmen. Please, before you decide arbitrarily to attack an entire body of scholarship, at least make some basic efforts to find out what it is you're attacking?
In the study of literature, one never says "this interpretation is right" -- just as in the sciences, one never says "this theory is true". One says "this interpretation is consistent, fits the text, and raises interesting points that a reader can consider to enhance his/her enjoyment of the work" -- just as in the sciences, one says "this theory is consistent, fits the observed facts, and makes predictions that we can test to further our understanding of the universe".
If you don't think the interpretations enhance your enjoyment of the work, then ignore them. Nobody's making you broaden your mind: that's up to you to embrace or reject.
Dear god, when you read the book did you totally skip the introduction? The part where he says there is NO allegory or symbolism in the book? THis is an example of the worst kind of lit bullshit- the author friggin TELLS YOU that there is no symbolism, and you try and add it to try and prove your point. WHich goes back to my point that 90% of all symbolism you guys talk about doesn't exist.
On the contrary. It absolutely is true that a text can say things that the author did not consciously "intend". That doesn't mean they're not there, any more than Mars ceases to exist if you stop believing that the gods put it there to control our destiny. Mars i s still there whether you believe in horoscopes or not; subtexts are still there whether you believe the author intended them or not.
And consider that authors are, in fact, allowed to lie. I've lost count of the number of works of fiction that begin with words along the lines of "this is a true story". The author friggin TELLS US it's a true story, but we DARE to call it fiction just because it involves supernatural events that we don't believe in! Oh, the bullshit we must wallow in!
Or, moving things into a context you seem to find more comfortable: if I were to write a book with the intention that you should hate it, are you obliged to hate it, or are you permitted to enjoy reading it if it's written in a way you like and has a story that interests you? If I put in the preface "this book is boring", does that mean it's boring, or are you still allowed to decide that to you it is not boring?
If you are allowed to enjoy a book that the author considered boring, then I am allowed to find symbolism in a book that the author considered to contain none, am I not?
Incidentally, if we look at what Tolkien actually wrote rather than the part you misquoted, he actually says "As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none" (emphasis mine). Reading on: "I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. [...] 'applicability' [...] resides in the freedom of the reader", which I find difficult to read as saying "don't you dare interpret my text".
In other words, he is denying very specifically the charge that LoTR was written for the purpose of being a political or allegorical work. He is not trying to deny his readers the freedom to interpret its characters and events as they please.
A previous poster in a previous thread mentioned that having AI able to generate text in real time (an emotion/information driven AI), coupled with text-to-voice synthesizers would drive interactive storytelling. That combined with voice recognition software (voice to text) would be the holy grail of storytelling. Big time developers and publishers really should be investing in these technologies right now!!!
Unfortunately, that's an AI-hard problem. Nobody can do text generation. Nobody even knows how to approach it. With current technology, generated text always ends up as gibberish.
Even text-to-voice is horribly difficult. I don't know where current research stands, but I do know that when I hear a current commercial text-to-voice system, it is instantly recognisable as such. There's a reason why the railways and suchlike are still using the awful system of splicing together recordings of people reading the various words. Because awful as it is, it still sounds more human than a fully synthetic voice.
But don't worry - if anyone does solve these problems, we'll know about it. Because a computer passing the Turing test will make world headlines.
Especially given Shakespeare's dominance in English literature, it's not surprising that "realism" has become a kind of critical gold standard for all forms of literature.
Why? What's realistic about, oh, the Dream, or the Tempest? And what's representational about the Sonnets?
Believe it or not, there's more to Shakespeare than Hamlet and Henry V. There is no fundamental difference, plotwise, between LoTR and Shakespeare's more fantastic works.
Oh dear, does Linux practice this awful act as well? I'm an opponent of capital punishment, so it's now clear to me that I can't, in all conscience, use a Mac or Linux. No application, however detestable a crime it may be accused of, should ever face what is no more than state-sanctioned murder!
My question to Slashdot, therefore, is what operating system should I choose?
I've heard good things about FreeBSD's jails, which are apparently very secure without being inhumane. But on the other hand, Windows also has some advantages - I understand it opposes the death penalty so strongly that that it's been known to commit suicide in protest when a user attempts to execute too many applications?
Would it make you happier if copyright infringement was finally defined as theft in the criminal code and not simply in legislation? ( The NET Act, No Electronic Theft)
That's the name of the law, which has no legal meaning. The word "theft" does not appear in the text of the law itself.
And the name was chosen to be emotive, not descriptive, in order to make it harder to vote against it: compare the PATRIOT act (which has nothing to do with patriotism), and the way laws are named after abducted children to emotionally blackmail people into supporting them (e.g. "Megan's Law" - regardless of whether you support it or not, you cannot possibly believe the name was chosen to be descriptive!)
OS 9 screamed in comparison to OS X. It had its problems, sure, but at the time it was the only mainstream OS that was not built on technology besides itself.
It was also the only mainstream OS that could not handle filenames more than 31 letters long, the only mainstream OS that didn't have protected memory, and the only mainstream OS that didn't have any form of preemptive multitasking.
The first of these is the most ironic. Back in 1999, Mac users were still ridiculing "Micros~1", while in fact it was their operating system, not Microsoft's, which could not handle adequately long filenames!
But it was the second and third, the lack of basic features essential for the stability of modern desktop applications, which led to it being such an unreliable system. No surprise that Apple were so keen to ditch the whole crufty thing in favour of the modern platform that became OS X. OS 9 was totally failing to salvage their rapidly declining reputation. OS X was their salvation.
So, yes, OS 9 screamed in comparison to OS X. But so did its unfortunate users... loudly and regularly.
I don't think there are many people who consider it a crime for me to loan a friend a CD (or a book or a DVD for that matter). If we could extend that model somehow to P2P, keeping it easy to share with people we have "direct contact" with, but more difficult to share with people on another continent, I think that would be a more balanced approach.
But if it's OK to lend a CD or a book to a friend who lives in the same city as you, surely it's OK to lend one to a friend who lives further away?
It doesn't even have to cross continents - if I live in London and you live in Edinburgh and we only physically meet a couple of times in a decade, then it's going to be very inconvenient for us to meet specially to set up a sharing link. And as soon as you allow any form of remoting (even sending a physical token by post), you open things up again for people sharing with people on a different continent who they don't know in the slightest and couldn't even describe as a passing acquaintance, let alone a friend..
And how do you stop people passing things on to all their friends, and so on? Six degrees of separation, and all that: however you set the system up, someone would come up with a filesharing program that would work with it. It might be slower than current systems, with a lot more steps required to transfer a file between continents. But it'll work.
ScramJet is the work of Australians Ray Stalker and Allan Paull who achieved the phenomenon with a budget of tins cans, string and glue
RTFA: "The scramjet engine, known as Hyshot III, has been designed by British defence firm Qinetiq."
There's this concept called "international collaboration". It's not actually impossible for a project to involve people from more than one country. Yes, and one of the Australians you name is in charge. But the scramjet engine that's being tested on Friday was designed by the British. A few days later they'll be testing another one that was designed in Japan. After that, there's an Australian-designed one lined up too.
We're talking big money international collaboration here. Stalker and Paull aren't working with a budget of tin cans any more.
Slashdot Mirror
since they were granted the patent, it's pretty obvious that they had come up with a novel process which was straight-up copied. On the legal merits, they should certainly win.
Since you were arrested, it's pretty obvious that you must have murdered your wife. On the legal merits, you should certainly be executed. I mean, how could the police possibly arrest the wrong person? That would be like the patent office making a mistake! It simply can't happen!
He didn't say it wasn't illegal. Of course it's illegal. He said it's not a crime. Which is sometimes true, depending on whether it was done for commercial gain and what the total value was of the works on which copyright was infringed.
To put it simply: not everything that is illegal is a crime.
It disturbs me how many Americans appear to be ignorant of these fundamental concepts of the legal system that rules their lives...
Downloading, perhaps. But you need to be damn careful about uploading. Quoting 17 U.S.C section 506(a)(2):
Where the relevant punishments are:
So, be very careful. If you're going to share music you don't have a license to share, make sure the total retail value of what you share is under $1,000, or you're looking at jail time.
And there is NO true rpg (RPG with the definition of rpgcodex.com) on a fucking console.
What, Oblivion doesn't count? I see an awful lot of Oblivion coverage on that site you mention...
In the console you don't have true adventure games like The Longest Journey, Day of the Tentacle.
In what sense were, for example, Maniac Mansion and Broken Sword not "true adventure games"?
Because if they settle there, then not only do they open themselves up to the Helvetica and Palatino, but they'd have to stop the practice for the one they steal AFTER this one.
What "Helvetica"? If you're referring to Arial, then it's by no means a stolen Helvetica; they're totally different designs, and anyone who knows anything about type can tell them apart at a glance. People get annoyed about Arial because it's ugly, not because it's "stolen".
And what "Palatino"? Book Antiqua? Ancient history. Microsoft more than made up for it when they actually licensed the genuine Palatino from Linotype -- it's been bundled with Windows since Win2k.
By the way, this is nothing to do with "settling", "stealing", or "opening themselves up". This is a case of them being denied a trademark. There has been no lawsuit and no claim of damages or illegal activity: the only claim Linotype made was that Segoe was not an original design.
Check out some recent benchmarks involving Java if you don't believe me.
I'm not going to do the work of investigating your claims for you. You want me to check out benchmarks, you can damn well cite those benchmarks yourself.
Till someone actually provides reliable and scientifically constructed* benchmarks that demonstrate Java outperforming native code in a production environment, I'm going to carry on believing that it's slower... and it's the job of the Java advocates to convince me I'm wrong, not the other way round.
* That is, not the Great Computer Language Shootout, which is the antithesis of scientific benchmarking. Something academic and peer-reviewed, please.
Java is "heavier" than a native language/platform but for something like Freenet where privacy can be extremely important, reducing the possibility of stack smashing/bufer overrun type vulnerabilities to near zero - which Java helps do very well - is more than worth the execution overhead.
But there are plenty of natively compiled portable languages that have exactly the same stack and buffer safety, but less overhead than Java.
There's the ML family, for example - fast implementations like OCaml and MLton are usually more efficient and more concise than C++. OCaml has already been used to implement other P2P applications (MLDonkey). And if you absolutely must have braces, there are things like D and Felix, which bring the same benefits to a familiar C++/Java-style syntax.
Judging all compiled languages by C++ is like judging all interpreted languages by Python. Deciding to use an interpreted language because compiled languages "suffer from buffer overflows" is exactly like deciding to use a compiled language because interpreted languages "have significant whitespace", i.e. it's complete and utter bullshit.
In order for a DRM'd work to receive legal copyright protection it must be required to submit a non-DRM'd copy to the Library of Congress and 2 other public Libraries.
But what if terrorist pedophile pirates broke into the Library of Congress and stole the non-DRM'd copy? The consequences could destroy America and harm our children! We cannot afford to weaken our resolve: if we are to win the War on Freedom, we must fight on bravely and never, NEVER make ANY concession to the forces of evil who would try to force our God-given intellectual property to be released into the so-called "public domain".
my phone can take pictures but the interface is clunky and the quality sucks. i dont know anyone who wouldn't prefer using a simple digital camera.
Nor do I. And yet, most people (apart from photography enthusiasts) just seem to use their phone instead anyway. It's more convenient. Why carry a camera around when you've got one in your phone? Take a camera if you know you'll be taking photos, sure - to a wedding or whatever. But if you've got one in your phone, suddenly you have a camera with you all the time, and you don't need to make any special effort to bring one.
Who will take the first photos and videos of the next major unexpected newsworthy event? Members of the general public, that's who - and they'll take them on their mobile phones. That's what happened with the bombings in London last July. Welcome to the future.
And there are people who use their phone to take photos who would never have considered buying a digital camera. There's a huge market of people who will refuse to buy a dedicated device just to try out a new service, but who might well use the service if it was supported by a device they're going to buy anyway.
BTW, here are some capital letters for you: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ. Sprinking them into your comments in appropriate places will make what you write easier to read. If copying and pasting is too much effort, I believe you can also generate them by holding down the "shift" key while typing a letter.
Cell phone companies seem to want to LOCK people into buying songs over their networks.
So, how many online music stores can you buy music for your iPod from?
And, the two phones out that work with iTunes limit you to 100 songs.
Quick question for you: do you think that this is because
(a) the phone companies are stupid and want to provide you with a crap experience, or
(b) Apple refused to let them compete with the iPod on a level playing-field?
Oh, sure, Apple has every right to decide how much access they give other people to their store. It's theirs, after all. I just find it vaguely amusing that people are so quick to assume that the iPod is sustained by any sort of technical advantage, rather than by vendor lock-in. (ITMS is popular, so people go there first, and then they discover they have to buy an iPod because nothing else will play the music they've bought. If Microsoft pulled that one, they'd be crucified...)
In other words, videogames TRAIN the players to become better and more effective criminals. I don't know about you, but the thought gives me the creeps.
Sorry, I don't buy it. I've played hours of video games. In games, I've killed thousands of people. In real life, I get all squeamish about the thought of squashing a spider. And I couldn't use a gun to save my life. The only weapons I've ever used are the plastic sort with two buttons and a little wheel on top, and a little ball thingy underneath, that you roll around on your desk to aim. In real life, I could make a good guess as to which bit's the trigger and where the bullets come out, but I wouldn't even know where to look to find that "safety catch" thing I've heard of.
If you want to stop gun crime, make shooting ranges illegal. THOSE are the things that train people to hit targets with guns. Video games just train you to line up pixels on a monitor, which isn't actually all that useful if you want to commit a real-life crime, you know?
(And no, as it happens I don't believe shooting ranges should be banned.)
Maybe not in that regard, but let's see the XBox run Mario or classic Zelda without using some illegal emu and roms that takes chips and crap to make it happen.
Nitpick: emulators are not illegal. The roms usually are - I'm not sure that it's actually been tested in court whether it's fair use to transfer software from a cartridge you own in order to play it on a different platform, but even if it is, we all know that's not how most people get their roms. But the emulator itself is not illegal.
(Unless it violates patents or makes use of illegally copied firmware code. But I somehow doubt either of those applies to the NES. And it's worth noting that when Sony sued Connectix for copyright and patent infringements in their Playstation emulator, the lawsuit was unsuccessful and Connectix' reverse-engineering was found to be fair use.)
Have you considered that email lists like that might just be a bad idea in general? It seems to me that that kind of thing would be better implemented using RSS instead.
No. For infrequent security alerts, you want to use a push technology like email: the advantages are that (a) it's everywhere (even the most stripped-down BSD server will have a basic email client), and (b) it saves bandwidth (because you don't have people's aggregators constantly probing your site for changes).
He did'n said that visualization is not useful.
But he did say that it would only be useful for mediocre directors.
He would presumably say that a machine such as you describe would be useful only to mediocre sculptors. But I prefer to keep my mind open to the possibility that Rodin might have produced even greater works, or a greater number of works of equal genius, if he had been able to use such a device to translate his vision into sculpture. Of course, he might equally have found it limiting and rejected it. That's part of what being an artist is: knowing which tools are the best for you.
The point is that we cannot simply declare that it would not have been useful on arbitrary grounds. The fact that a tool is most obviously useful to the mediocre does not automatically make it useless for a genius. The guitar is widely perceived as an instrument for casual musicians, while the violin is thought of as more suitable for "serious" music... but I know which I'd rather listen to a Hendrix play.
But when you hear the company that stole VMS to create Windows NT,
:)
Only in the sense that Linus Torvalds stole Unix to create Linux. Windows NT was a new OS. It was designed by many of the same people who had designed VMS, built on the same principles, and uses the same techniques and in some cases the same algorithms to do very similar things. But that doesn't make it stolen.
that stole the design for the Microsoft mouse,
What, Key Tronic? That's the name of the company that stole trade secrets and illegally passed them on to Microsoft, who used them for the Intellimouse (not the "Microsoft mouse"). Key Tronic was sued; Microsoft wasn't. That usually gives you a good hint about who the victim thought was responsible for the wrongdoing, you know?
and that regularly gets caught stealing ideas from partners,
Such as?
Come on, you're making the accusations, you're the one who has to back them up with examples. So far you haven't done so. What are you expecting? Am I supposed to say "ooh, some guy on Slashdot says Microsoft does bad things, he must know something I don't!" or something? Sorry, doesn't work that way. Pony up, I want facts - hard evidence if possible, but I'd settle for specific allegations that I could at least find out about for myself.
and that is funding the SCO lawsuite against IBM and after years of nasty litigation can't find a single line of stolen code
First, as I've already pointed out above, if Microsoft stole VMS then Linus did steal Unix. You can't have it both ways - either both stole or neither did. Please make up your mind.
That aside, again, where is your evidence that Microsoft is funding this lawsuit? They paid a license fee. Big deal. They pay lots of license fees. Sun also paid SCO a license fee. So did a handful of other people. Baystar gave SCO a huge cash injection and didn't even get a license out of it. Etcetera.
By the way, it's SCO that can't find any stolen code in Linux, not Microsoft. Well, Microsoft probably can't find any either, but nor has Microsoft ever claimed they could. Even in the FUD that this article is wallowing in (the one point where I actually agree with you), Ballmer carefully does not say that he believes Linux is definitely infringing. Merely that he thinks it is possible.
and when you see the clear history of who contributed what lines of code to what tools in Linux's changelogs so that there's complete transparency of who brought in what in the Linux world
How does that have any bearing whatsoever on the question of whether or not Linux could be found to be infringing Microsoft patents? The whole problem with software patents is that it's possible for me to sit down with a problem, come up with a solution entirely by myself (having worked it all out from first principles), and still be found to have infringed someone's patents. Transparency makes it very easy to tell whether copyright infringement is occurring, and very easy to identify who is responsible if it does. But it does absolutely nothing to protect against patents.
Fan sub, anyone?
:P
What, so we can have a version that's not just of questionable accuracy, but also ruined by poor writing, faulty grammar, and a perplexing refusal to translate basic terms for family relations?
> There is a school of thought that, even if the writer didn't consciously mean it, he still meant it subconsciously.
Utter bullshit. It translates to "I think this interpretation is cool, so I'm going to pretend its right wether it is or not". If you used logic like that in the sciences, you'd be laughed out of academia.
I find it amusing that you, who are so quick to accuse other people of logical fallacies, are yourself so fond of strawmen. Please, before you decide arbitrarily to attack an entire body of scholarship, at least make some basic efforts to find out what it is you're attacking?
In the study of literature, one never says "this interpretation is right" -- just as in the sciences, one never says "this theory is true". One says "this interpretation is consistent, fits the text, and raises interesting points that a reader can consider to enhance his/her enjoyment of the work" -- just as in the sciences, one says "this theory is consistent, fits the observed facts, and makes predictions that we can test to further our understanding of the universe".
If you don't think the interpretations enhance your enjoyment of the work, then ignore them. Nobody's making you broaden your mind: that's up to you to embrace or reject.
Dear god, when you read the book did you totally skip the introduction? The part where he says there is NO allegory or symbolism in the book? THis is an example of the worst kind of lit bullshit- the author friggin TELLS YOU that there is no symbolism, and you try and add it to try and prove your point. WHich goes back to my point that 90% of all symbolism you guys talk about doesn't exist.
On the contrary. It absolutely is true that a text can say things that the author did not consciously "intend". That doesn't mean they're not there, any more than Mars ceases to exist if you stop believing that the gods put it there to control our destiny. Mars i s still there whether you believe in horoscopes or not; subtexts are still there whether you believe the author intended them or not.
And consider that authors are, in fact, allowed to lie. I've lost count of the number of works of fiction that begin with words along the lines of "this is a true story". The author friggin TELLS US it's a true story, but we DARE to call it fiction just because it involves supernatural events that we don't believe in! Oh, the bullshit we must wallow in!
Or, moving things into a context you seem to find more comfortable: if I were to write a book with the intention that you should hate it, are you obliged to hate it, or are you permitted to enjoy reading it if it's written in a way you like and has a story that interests you? If I put in the preface "this book is boring", does that mean it's boring, or are you still allowed to decide that to you it is not boring?
If you are allowed to enjoy a book that the author considered boring, then I am allowed to find symbolism in a book that the author considered to contain none, am I not?
Incidentally, if we look at what Tolkien actually wrote rather than the part you misquoted, he actually says "As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none" (emphasis mine). Reading on: "I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. [...] 'applicability' [...] resides in the freedom of the reader", which I find difficult to read as saying "don't you dare interpret my text".
In other words, he is denying very specifically the charge that LoTR was written for the purpose of being a political or allegorical work. He is not trying to deny his readers the freedom to interpret its characters and events as they please.
A previous poster in a previous thread mentioned that having AI able to generate text in real time (an emotion/information driven AI), coupled with text-to-voice synthesizers would drive interactive storytelling. That combined with voice recognition software (voice to text) would be the holy grail of storytelling. Big time developers and publishers really should be investing in these technologies right now!!!
Unfortunately, that's an AI-hard problem. Nobody can do text generation. Nobody even knows how to approach it. With current technology, generated text always ends up as gibberish.
Even text-to-voice is horribly difficult. I don't know where current research stands, but I do know that when I hear a current commercial text-to-voice system, it is instantly recognisable as such. There's a reason why the railways and suchlike are still using the awful system of splicing together recordings of people reading the various words. Because awful as it is, it still sounds more human than a fully synthetic voice.
But don't worry - if anyone does solve these problems, we'll know about it. Because a computer passing the Turing test will make world headlines.
Especially given Shakespeare's dominance in English literature, it's not surprising that "realism" has become a kind of critical gold standard for all forms of literature.
Why? What's realistic about, oh, the Dream, or the Tempest? And what's representational about the Sonnets?
Believe it or not, there's more to Shakespeare than Hamlet and Henry V. There is no fundamental difference, plotwise, between LoTR and Shakespeare's more fantastic works.
Oh dear, does Linux practice this awful act as well? I'm an opponent of capital punishment, so it's now clear to me that I can't, in all conscience, use a Mac or Linux. No application, however detestable a crime it may be accused of, should ever face what is no more than state-sanctioned murder!
My question to Slashdot, therefore, is what operating system should I choose?
I've heard good things about FreeBSD's jails, which are apparently very secure without being inhumane. But on the other hand, Windows also has some advantages - I understand it opposes the death penalty so strongly that that it's been known to commit suicide in protest when a user attempts to execute too many applications?
The 1970s began at midnight on 1 January 1971 and ended at 23:59 on 31 December 1980. There was no year zero .....
You're thinking of the 198th decade, which overlaps with the 1970s but is not exactly the same period of time.
Would it make you happier if copyright infringement was finally defined as theft in the criminal code and not simply in legislation? ( The NET Act, No Electronic Theft)
That's the name of the law, which has no legal meaning. The word "theft" does not appear in the text of the law itself.
And the name was chosen to be emotive, not descriptive, in order to make it harder to vote against it: compare the PATRIOT act (which has nothing to do with patriotism), and the way laws are named after abducted children to emotionally blackmail people into supporting them (e.g. "Megan's Law" - regardless of whether you support it or not, you cannot possibly believe the name was chosen to be descriptive!)
OS 9 screamed in comparison to OS X. It had its problems, sure, but at the time it was the only mainstream OS that was not built on technology besides itself.
It was also the only mainstream OS that could not handle filenames more than 31 letters long, the only mainstream OS that didn't have protected memory, and the only mainstream OS that didn't have any form of preemptive multitasking.
The first of these is the most ironic. Back in 1999, Mac users were still ridiculing "Micros~1", while in fact it was their operating system, not Microsoft's, which could not handle adequately long filenames!
But it was the second and third, the lack of basic features essential for the stability of modern desktop applications, which led to it being such an unreliable system. No surprise that Apple were so keen to ditch the whole crufty thing in favour of the modern platform that became OS X. OS 9 was totally failing to salvage their rapidly declining reputation. OS X was their salvation.
So, yes, OS 9 screamed in comparison to OS X. But so did its unfortunate users... loudly and regularly.
I don't think there are many people who consider it a crime for me to loan a friend a CD (or a book or a DVD for that matter). If we could extend that model somehow to P2P, keeping it easy to share with people we have "direct contact" with, but more difficult to share with people on another continent, I think that would be a more balanced approach.
But if it's OK to lend a CD or a book to a friend who lives in the same city as you, surely it's OK to lend one to a friend who lives further away?
It doesn't even have to cross continents - if I live in London and you live in Edinburgh and we only physically meet a couple of times in a decade, then it's going to be very inconvenient for us to meet specially to set up a sharing link. And as soon as you allow any form of remoting (even sending a physical token by post), you open things up again for people sharing with people on a different continent who they don't know in the slightest and couldn't even describe as a passing acquaintance, let alone a friend..
And how do you stop people passing things on to all their friends, and so on? Six degrees of separation, and all that: however you set the system up, someone would come up with a filesharing program that would work with it. It might be slower than current systems, with a lot more steps required to transfer a file between continents. But it'll work.
ScramJet is the work of Australians Ray Stalker and Allan Paull who achieved the phenomenon with a budget of tins cans, string and glue
RTFA: "The scramjet engine, known as Hyshot III, has been designed by British defence firm Qinetiq."
There's this concept called "international collaboration". It's not actually impossible for a project to involve people from more than one country. Yes, and one of the Australians you name is in charge. But the scramjet engine that's being tested on Friday was designed by the British. A few days later they'll be testing another one that was designed in Japan. After that, there's an Australian-designed one lined up too.
We're talking big money international collaboration here. Stalker and Paull aren't working with a budget of tin cans any more.