"Taiwan is not a signatory to the Berne Treaty Convention, it is, technicaly, part of China"
Taiwan is a separate country at this time from mainland China. Both call themselves "China" in their names: Republic of China, and People's Republic of China, which causes some confusion.
Everyone treats Taiwan as a separate country from what is typicalled called "China" most of the time (PROC), except when the PROC demands it. Then when the PROC turns its back, it is time to treat Taiwan as a distinct Asian nation, just as Japan and the Phillipines are.
"To you, it may mean "enthusiastic anime fan", but to anyone who actually speaks Japanese, it means "pathetic loser with no life"."
This reminds me of Star Trek fans who get hung up on the difference between Trekkie and Trekker. Once they start to care about this distinction, all hope of obtaining a life is gone with the wind (or, gone with a stream of tachyon particles, as it may be)
"Anbody notice on the main page's Screenshots, the thumbnail for the ship going into (coming out of?) the wormhole is BIGGER than the actual picture?"
That is because of the singularity nature of wormholes. The closer to the wormhole, the smaller the image, as it is compressed to a single pixel in order to pass through.
The truth of the matter is that DeCSS is no more a burglary tool than a Dremel tool.
I think it is far less of one. During burglary, you can smash windows with the Dremel tool and maybe use it to cut out door locks or safes. It is much, much harder to use DeCSS in burglary... the easiest way would be to use it to distribute a "Burglar's How-To" DVD that was protected by DeCSS.
"How did this go from stealing copyrights to stealing trade secrets all of a sudden"
This topic involves (potential) violation of a copyright, not theft. Theft of a copyright is when someone claims a copyright as their own, which is not applicable to this DeCSS discussion.
This abuse of words without regard to their meaning (but with regard to emotional effect) is getting alarming. According to them, you can perform B&E in your own house if you do something wrong with a DVD.
It amounts to "A and B are crimes. B sounds much worse, so let's call all the A crimes B crimes so they look like worse fiends."
"The program DeCSS is a burglary tool,"
If this is the case, then I suppose it is a short matter of time before DeCSS is claimed to be a weapon used in crimes of murder and rape.
If this keeps up, sometime next year, some MPAA or RIAA flack will be the first to accuse a disc pirate of committing genocide.
Enough about the best and most useful keyboards. How about the worst ones?
Here's a couple to start with:
The first Macintosh. I think Apple was so awestruck with the new idea of the GUI that it looks like the keyboard was a mere afterthought with the the first Mac. What they ended up including was designed to encourage mouse-usage; with its heavy-force keystroke requirements and its almost rudimentary nature.
the Atari 400 Anyone remember saving $400 over the price of the full-keyboard Atari 800 by getting one of these things? It spawned a cottage industry of replacement keyboards.
TRS-80 Color Computer. The keyboard on the "ColorTRaSh" was eventually improved, but the earlier models had Fisher-Price written all over.
"get a Mac. OS X has an option for touchpad clicking"
I think it is more a situation of the hardware driver for the pad itself than the actual OS. In any case, no need to go Mac just to avoid the problem: most Wintel/LinAMD/whatever laptops and notebooks allow you to turn it off these days.
"I lament how trackpoints are disappearing off laptop keyboards these days"
I recall seeing the first "touchpads" appearing after being used to all kinds of Toshiba's and Thinkpad's with little rubber eraser trackpoints.
I was told that Toshiba owned the trackpoint technology, and charged a lot for it, so it was cheaper to put touchpads in laptops.
Touchpads would not be so bad if not for the "missfire glitch" where bumping the pad with your thumb acts like a mouse click. I've lost many lines of text due to this problem. In most, you can turn this off. I can't imagine why anyone would want a stray finger movement to fire off mouseclicks like this. IMHO, you should click something when you want to click a mouse button.
The most useful keyboard for me is a standard keyboard:
Nice standard wide space bar, without the never-used Windows keys
Backslash above a regular-height enter key (no double-high enter key with the backslash in any of 5 other locations).
Standard layout, not the "think before you hit every key" (un)natural keyboard.
The superior tactile click of the IBM keyboard from the PC-AT era. I don't think these are around any more, and nothing still even comes close.
If there is one thing that should be standard, it is a keyboard layout. Extras are fine, as long as they are outside of the regular key area, which should be left alone. It is pretty unreasonable to have to learn different touch typing for different keyboards: the basics should stay the same. Nothing more frustrating than trying to hit the blackslash and then realizing it is one of those perverse Logitech or E-One keyboards that has "more enter key" where the backslash is.
Odd that you should mention Darth Vader. James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth and CNN, had a stuttering problem that he struggled to overcome in childhood.
I don't recall seeing the CIA anywhere in Stephen King's "IT". However, it would not surprise me if they now employed Pennywise the Clown in their espionage efforts.
I think, if the standards get in the way of innovation, the would-be innovators buck the standard.
Remember the standardized user interface that was one of the early Mac OS's strengths over the other OS's out there? One of the big players back then, I think it was Adobe, "broke" Apple's GUI standards where the designers deemed it to be necessary; neither their product nor the Mac OS suffered as a result.
Standards are good where they are needed, but when they hold things back....
Who needs a MUD when you have Slashdot?
on
Saving MUDs?
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Who needs a mud when you have Slashdot, our beloved MTF (Multi-Troll Forum)?
"Argh! I just took 3 points of mental damage from a Jon Katz post!"
"Does the vorpal sword work against the ravening Goetse?"
"Yeah! That's the real reason the govt wants to extend the DMCA ban third-party inkjet refills, so they can keep tracing printer output back to its source! Tinfoil hat time...:)"
Printing is one way you can get around copyright/trademark restrictions.
Consider the simple example of Disney. They want to get a cut every time you buy a Mickey Mouse T-Shirt, and they crack down on unauthorized knock-offs. Now, there is nothing stopping you from scanning a pic of Mick and printing it to iron on to your T-shirt. This is just a simple example. There are many other ways to "enjoy" printing copyrighted materials and pictures like this.
With the DMCA, it is conceivable to curtail this. Imagine if each image produced had a digital value ID based on how it looked. When you print anything, the image would go through a section of the printer driver that would boil your image down to a value ID, and this would be checked through the Internet against registered ID's to see if it was close.
So, when you try to print that cool Wolverine picture (scanned from a comic book or movie ad in a magazine) to hang on your wall, you get an alert "Printing aborted. Attempted unauthorized printing of copyrighted material detected".
Far fetched? Yeah. Far off too: I think it would need much more bandwidth and a more ubiquitous Internet. However, if some of the worst predictions about the DMCA come true, I think "they" would eventually want to stop "ability to scan and print anything you want without copyright holder's permission".
"A woman was charged $2.12 at a Diary Queen drive-through in Danville, Kentucky, and she was given $197.88 in change for her $200 bill. In case a clerk might not know that a $200 bill isn't legal tender, this taped-together bill was clearly marked as a 'moral reserve note' and featured George W. Bush's portrait. The White House picture on the bill's back has yard signs reading 'We like broccoli'and 'Rooms not for rent'. Police were notified as to the woman's presence shortly after she left. They do not consider the bill to be a counterfeit one."
"Was when they visited the photocopy place and tried to copy dollars, then tried to pay the copy guy with their printed money. Ahh, I miss that show."They were using a xerox machine inside the 7-11 (or whatever), right in front of the clerk.
They were xeroxing nickels.
The spent 25 cents for each xeroxed nickel.
After they got a bunch, they raggedly tore the extra paper from around their fake paper "nickels" and tried to buy candy from the clerk.
Slashdot Mirror
"Taiwan is not a signatory to the Berne Treaty Convention, it is, technicaly, part of China"
Taiwan is a separate country at this time from mainland China. Both call themselves "China" in their names: Republic of China, and People's Republic of China, which causes some confusion.
Everyone treats Taiwan as a separate country from what is typicalled called "China" most of the time (PROC), except when the PROC demands it. Then when the PROC turns its back, it is time to treat Taiwan as a distinct Asian nation, just as Japan and the Phillipines are.
"To you, it may mean "enthusiastic anime fan", but to anyone who actually speaks Japanese, it means "pathetic loser with no life"."
This reminds me of Star Trek fans who get hung up on the difference between Trekkie and Trekker. Once they start to care about this distinction, all hope of obtaining a life is gone with the wind (or, gone with a stream of tachyon particles, as it may be)
"He tells that his daughter now knows, in very simple terms of course, what nanotechnology and implants are"
Perfect way to introduce young future drones to the Collective.
I wonder if the father speaks Klingon?
I was about to replace my Powerbook keyboard with one from an old Atari 400. Now I won't have to.
See the usual Slashdot Microsoft icon for a visual example of the results of this.
"Anbody notice on the main page's Screenshots, the thumbnail for the ship going into (coming out of?) the wormhole is BIGGER than the actual picture?"
That is because of the singularity nature of wormholes. The closer to the wormhole, the smaller the image, as it is compressed to a single pixel in order to pass through.
Enough "Wing Commander", which will always be in the shadow of the Man-Kzin wars it ripped off: I'd rather see "Zero-Wing".
"Time will tell, but since Funny Cide is a gelding, and can't stud, I predict he'll be cloned"
Based on experiences, clones are often sickly animals; not really tolerable in a race-horse.
How will they take advantage of Funny Cide's winning bloodline? They are selling the stud services of Cide's sire, Distorted Humor.
For those of you using AOL, Funny Cide's father is not a gelding.
If you think 6 is too few, clone your own reasons!
------------------
6. Doesn't everyone need a Mini Me?
5. It would be kind of cool to go to a Halloween party as the Matrix ghost twins, wouldn't it?
4. If someone clones you without permission, sue them under the DMCA.
3. You can still sleep in and miss that exam, and take the exam too.
2. With enough clones, some weapons, and a camcorder, anyone can make a better "Attack of the Clones" movie than George Lucas did
1. Halle Barry's for everyone!
The truth of the matter is that DeCSS is no more a burglary tool than a Dremel tool.
I think it is far less of one. During burglary, you can smash windows with the Dremel tool and maybe use it to cut out door locks or safes. It is much, much harder to use DeCSS in burglary... the easiest way would be to use it to distribute a "Burglar's How-To" DVD that was protected by DeCSS.
"How did this go from stealing copyrights to stealing trade secrets all of a sudden"
This topic involves (potential) violation of a copyright, not theft. Theft of a copyright is when someone claims a copyright as their own, which is not applicable to this DeCSS discussion.
"breaking, entering and stealing"
This abuse of words without regard to their meaning (but with regard to emotional effect) is getting alarming. According to them, you can perform B&E in your own house if you do something wrong with a DVD.
It amounts to "A and B are crimes. B sounds much worse, so let's call all the A crimes B crimes so they look like worse fiends."
"The program DeCSS is a burglary tool,"
If this is the case, then I suppose it is a short matter of time before DeCSS is claimed to be a weapon used in crimes of murder and rape.
If this keeps up, sometime next year, some MPAA or RIAA flack will be the first to accuse a disc pirate of committing genocide.
Here's a couple to start with:
The first Macintosh. I think Apple was so awestruck with the new idea of the GUI that it looks like the keyboard was a mere afterthought with the the first Mac. What they ended up including was designed to encourage mouse-usage; with its heavy-force keystroke requirements and its almost rudimentary nature.
the Atari 400
Anyone remember saving $400 over the price of the full-keyboard Atari 800 by getting one of these things? It spawned a cottage industry of replacement keyboards.
TRS-80 Color Computer. The keyboard on the "ColorTRaSh" was eventually improved, but the earlier models had Fisher-Price written all over.
"get a Mac. OS X has an option for touchpad clicking"
I think it is more a situation of the hardware driver for the pad itself than the actual OS. In any case, no need to go Mac just to avoid the problem: most Wintel/LinAMD/whatever laptops and notebooks allow you to turn it off these days.
"I lament how trackpoints are disappearing off laptop keyboards these days"
I recall seeing the first "touchpads" appearing after being used to all kinds of Toshiba's and Thinkpad's with little rubber eraser trackpoints.
I was told that Toshiba owned the trackpoint technology, and charged a lot for it, so it was cheaper to put touchpads in laptops.
Touchpads would not be so bad if not for the "missfire glitch" where bumping the pad with your thumb acts like a mouse click. I've lost many lines of text due to this problem. In most, you can turn this off. I can't imagine why anyone would want a stray finger movement to fire off mouseclicks like this. IMHO, you should click something when you want to click a mouse button.
Nice standard wide space bar, without the never-used Windows keys
Backslash above a regular-height enter key (no double-high enter key with the backslash in any of 5 other locations).
Standard layout, not the "think before you hit every key" (un)natural keyboard.
The superior tactile click of the IBM keyboard from the PC-AT era. I don't think these are around any more, and nothing still even comes close.
If there is one thing that should be standard, it is a keyboard layout. Extras are fine, as long as they are outside of the regular key area, which should be left alone. It is pretty unreasonable to have to learn different touch typing for different keyboards: the basics should stay the same. Nothing more frustrating than trying to hit the blackslash and then realizing it is one of those perverse Logitech or E-One keyboards that has "more enter key" where the backslash is.
Just the other day I read on Slashdot how Everquest was wiping out all the MUDs. It is heartening to find out about a new one, on Mars even!
Odd that you should mention Darth Vader. James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth and CNN, had a stuttering problem that he struggled to overcome in childhood.
I don't recall seeing the CIA anywhere in Stephen King's "IT". However, it would not surprise me if they now employed Pennywise the Clown in their espionage efforts.
I think, if the standards get in the way of innovation, the would-be innovators buck the standard.
Remember the standardized user interface that was one of the early Mac OS's strengths over the other OS's out there? One of the big players back then, I think it was Adobe, "broke" Apple's GUI standards where the designers deemed it to be necessary; neither their product nor the Mac OS suffered as a result.
Standards are good where they are needed, but when they hold things back....
Who needs a mud when you have Slashdot, our beloved MTF (Multi-Troll Forum)?
"Argh! I just took 3 points of mental damage from a Jon Katz post!"
"Does the vorpal sword work against the ravening Goetse?"
"In Soviet Russia, orcs stab YOU!"
"http://www.bartercard.co.nz/"
"Who run Bartercard?"
"MastercardBlaster run Bartercard"
"Yeah! That's the real reason the govt wants to extend the DMCA ban third-party inkjet refills, so they can keep tracing printer output back to its source! Tinfoil hat time... :)"
Printing is one way you can get around copyright/trademark restrictions.
Consider the simple example of Disney. They want to get a cut every time you buy a Mickey Mouse T-Shirt, and they crack down on unauthorized knock-offs. Now, there is nothing stopping you from scanning a pic of Mick and printing it to iron on to your T-shirt. This is just a simple example. There are many other ways to "enjoy" printing copyrighted materials and pictures like this.
With the DMCA, it is conceivable to curtail this. Imagine if each image produced had a digital value ID based on how it looked. When you print anything, the image would go through a section of the printer driver that would boil your image down to a value ID, and this would be checked through the Internet against registered ID's to see if it was close.
So, when you try to print that cool Wolverine picture (scanned from a comic book or movie ad in a magazine) to hang on your wall, you get an alert "Printing aborted. Attempted unauthorized printing of copyrighted material detected".
Far fetched? Yeah. Far off too: I think it would need much more bandwidth and a more ubiquitous Internet. However, if some of the worst predictions about the DMCA come true, I think "they" would eventually want to stop "ability to scan and print anything you want without copyright holder's permission".
From Anna's News Clippings
"A woman was charged $2.12 at a Diary Queen drive-through in Danville, Kentucky, and she was given $197.88 in change for her $200 bill. In case a clerk might not know that a $200 bill isn't legal tender, this taped-together bill was clearly marked as a 'moral reserve note' and featured George W. Bush's portrait. The White House picture on the bill's back has yard signs reading 'We like broccoli'and 'Rooms not for rent'. Police were notified as to the woman's presence shortly after she left. They do not consider the bill to be a counterfeit one."
They were xeroxing nickels.
The spent 25 cents for each xeroxed nickel.
After they got a bunch, they raggedly tore the extra paper from around their fake paper "nickels" and tried to buy candy from the clerk.