The rebellion doesn't have much but, boy, do they have heart!
Agreed.
The Jedi, on the other hand, strike me as really a bunch or arrogant elite who seem to not be doing a very good job of anything.
Also agree, but are you saying this made Ep I/II bad? Granted, I and II had problems, but this is not one of them. Yes, the Jedi are a bunch of stuck-up, arrogant buttheads. That's one of the main points of the movie. We're likely to see this play out more in Ep III. Much of the Jedis' downfall is by their own hand. They got too used to their power and to the status quo to see more than a few inches in front of their face. You're supposed to doubt them at this point.
And Palpatine and Dooku have yet to do anything really horribly dispicable. It's hard to get worked up about these bad guys.
I think that's one of the reasons why people have trouble with Ep I/II. We're essentially seeing the story out-of-sequence. We started in the middle of the story, where the battle lines were very clearly drawn, and everyone had already put on their white or black hats. In Ep I/II, this has not happened yet. The ones that become or pave the way for the great villians of the later movies have no choice but to act in secret. To me, Palpatine's machinations in the Senate echo the events of the rise of the Nazi party to power and Hitler's ascension to Chancellor (hell, even the title is the same!) in Germany circa the 1930s.
I sometimes wonder how people might have reacted had the movies been produced and released in the actual chronological order that the events happen. It might have garnered a different reaction. Yeah, the screenplays could have been better written, but I think the overall story still plays well, and would have played better in the proper sequence.
Tolkien is dead. His estate is in charge now and they're very much a company.
And naturally, as a Big Evil Company now, they're not entitled to the same rights as everyone else. Now, if we were talking about a domain that had a generic name, like onering.com, I might buy the argument. But jrrtolkien.com is extremely specific.
What about that guy who was able to pick up hotmail.co.uk because Microsoft forgot to renew it? I say he should be under no obligation to return it.
Explain your logic to me. What other use would someone want with a domain called hotmail except to screw MS? Or is this one of those "anything that screws MS is good" things? Note this is NOT the same as creating a domain called hotmailsucks.com or screw.this.hotmail.crap.com. Those are very obvious alternate uses of the hotmail name and I would agree in that case that they should not be taken away. To use a more relevant example, if the domain we're talking about was jrrtolkiensucks.com, then I'd lean towards the owner of the domain. But there is no reason to hold jrrtolkien.com except to 1) screw over the Tolkien estate and/or 2) lure people to your site making them think they were going someplace that actually had something to do with the author.
Same with guys who register celebrity names as domains. If it was important to the celebrity they should have something in place to protect the domains.
I would agree if the site was not EXACTLY the same name as the celebrity. If it were, for example, fansof[celebrity-name].org, then I'd say okay.
I don't care for frivilous cases of strong-arming domain names from people. At the same time, however, the rules, whether they be actual laws or just plain ettiquete, should be equal for all. Registering other people's trademarks and names as domain names (and I do mean names that are clearly distinctive trademarks and not common names that just happen to be parts of trademarks), in my mind, is breaking the rules.
Sorry to pick on your specific post, this is more directed at the/. crowd in general.
Look everyone, get it through your heads right now: The SEC does not give a shit about this case. SCO is not big enough to warrant their time, SCO does not have enough shares out on the market to affect the market as a whole, and, like it or not people, SCO has not done anything wrong in the eyes of the SEC.
Now before I get flamed for stating that SCO has done nothing wrong, please reread what I just said: They have done nothing wrong in the eyes of the SEC. The SEC cares only about the big players of the market. Smaller companies like SCO do not show up on their radar unless they do something really horrendous. We can shout "pump and dump! pump and dump!" until we're blue in the face, but all the evidence to date is circumstantial.
Besides, we don't need the SEC. SCO's case has more holes in it than swiss cheese. IBM is going to stomp all over them and salt the earth over their remains. But don't expect any help from the government on this, folks, and frankly, we don't need it.
The Project Orion guys believed they could make
the explosions clean and as small as they wanted.
This scared the shit out of them. They
puposefully did not pursue that line of
development for fear of weapons applications.
I call bullshit.
Source, please. Some relevant links would be nice. If you turn out to be right, I withdraw my bullshit call, but otherwise it stands. I don't recall ever reading anything like this.
Nope. Plastic blocks cannot cost much more than a few cents. It's simple injection molding, the same way they make CDs. Not much material in each block. The only reason lego charges such outrageous prices for them is because they can.
Nope. You're ignoring the cost of creating the moldings in the first place, maintaining them (anything that cranks out millions of blocks a year is going to wear out), the cost of the plastic itself, the cost to pay people to come up with new models since most children lose interest in the latest stuff after about 30 seconds, the cost to ship their product around the world, the cost of printing the manuals in such a way that they can be understood in fifty different languages, and so on.
I can see how parents with no experience with Lego might look at the Megablocks and Lego side by side, and question why the Lego were so much more expensive, but after buying one set of the Megablocks, I can definitely say that I'd never do that again.
While you didn't come right out and say it, it's implied in your post: Lego is about quality.
Producing Lego bricks is expensive. The person who originally founded the company years ago was big on quality, and that's carried over to today. Lego bricks are machined with a very low tolerance for error. The plastic used in them is high quality. The really tiny detail pieces aside, the stock building bricks are virtually indestructible. I've had bricks that have been run over by heavy pieces of furniture, been lost behind steam radiators for up to a year at a time, been sent through the laundry (with bleach), and become the latest "let's see how many walls and other solid objects I can bat this thing into" by the cat. Rarely did these things break or lose their color. Only the really, really old bricks I have show any color-fading.
I guess I'd better shell out the $300 for the Star Destroyer before it is dropped.
You better not take the last one before I get my order in or I'll be mighty pissed.
I think it's mostly likely that 50 years into the future we'll have 15-30% fewer spotted owls and white tigers and 15-30% more Velcro Sheep and Mice That Piss Vodka.
What's really sick is that someone modded this funny.
Movies are very different to music, music you can listen to one many things, without it being any worse (i.e Your home theater, computer, stereo, car). A movie on the other hand, why would you want to watch it on your computer instead of your home theater?
I personally agree with you on this score. I watch movies on the DVD player, not the DVD ROM drive. Now, if they restricted the DRM stuff to appliances like DVD players (which, actually, already have this, what with CSS and Macrovision), I don't care as much about that. But that is not what the MPAA is after. So long as people are ABLE to play movies on their DVD drives, or obtain a digital movie and play it on the various media players out there, they are going to want that DRM technology ON YOUR PC.
So, yes, I do agree with you, but you're not thinking like the MPAA is thinking.
Everybody reading the article needs to read between the lines pretty carefully on this one. While the MPAA is seemingly offering the olive branch with one hand, look at the following quotes from the article:
Along with the warning letters, the movie industry is paying for consumer education programs and technology research, and pushing for laws and regulations that executives hope will protect their wares.
The most important thing for Hollywood to do now, Johnson said, is to move faster to develop the kinds of licensing agreements and protective technology
The path to a successful service has to involve the kind of technology that protects copyright unobtrusively,
Hand in hand with developing legal digital services, he recommends the kind of tough security that is built into satellite television equipment,
This whole article reeks of DRM. They never mention it by name, but this is exactly what they have in mind, and some of the stuff highlighted above suggests DRM in hardware.
So I don't see where the MPAA has learned a damn thing, other than the blatant tactics of the RIAA don't work so they're going to try more underhanded ones. The agenda of the MPAA has NOT changed one iota.
Fear of financial ruin and possible incarceration are effective deterrents against copyright infringement and theft.
It's also a great deterrent against paying customers. There will be some people that, after having suffered at the hands of the industry in the very way you describe, are unlikely going to give that same industry any more money. Remember that most people being sued are being sued for sharing files, not downloading them. Many of those people attacked by these lawsuits will continue downloading but just won't share their files anymore.
Two factors that will lead to that. 1) long term sucess of such services as iTunes, and 2) Higher precentage of people with fast internet connections.
3) Agreements with cable companies to stop cutting off users for burning too much bandwidth.
It was not long ago that Slashdot had an article about people being cut off from their ISP because they were told they were using too much bandwidth. How does the MPAA expect to be able to get people to use their services unless they coordinate with the cable industry and prevent them from cutting off their customers?
Considering that SCO is on Microsoft and Sun's payroll, I'd think that EVERY non-MS or non-Sun OS product will be the subject of litigation, IF this travesty of a case succeeds.
I love how baseless accusations get modded +5. Hurray for Slashdot!
I might buy the bit about Microsoft helping fund it. They took a license from SCO soon after the lawsuit was announced, but even that is circumstantial evidence at best. But Sun? You're barking up the wrong tree. I work for Sun, and I can tell you that Sun already had mountains of rights to the UNIX code base. Even SCO stated in so many words (paraphrased here) that Sun has more rights to the code than any other company. And those rights were secured long before SCO ever came into the picture. True, Sun's marketing has taken advantage of the situation, but if the roles were reversed, and it was Sun that was the subject of the litigation, IBM would do the exact same thing.
So can we please put this baseless Sun-SCO conspiracy to rest? Thank you.
Yes, Perl makes it possible to write obfuscated code, but it does not enforce it. Perl makes it possible to write perfectly clear code.
But then again, even the most obfuscated code can be made clear with some well-placed comments, but comments in programs unfortunately appears to be a dying art.
If you're on call 24/7 while they're home sleeping, it sounds to me like they've got a lot better handle on where power resides than you do...
Until the people that provide that support decide they don't want to do it anymore and go off to another career, leaving a shortage of people to do the job. Not saying that this will happen anytime soon, it's mostly to make the point that people in power must derive their power from somewhere. Things don't happen in a vaccuum.
the RIAA can still subpoena your personal info. they just are prohibited from doing so without first formally filing a lawsuit against every john/jane doe they wish to sue.
True, but this just reverts things back to the way they are supposed to work. You have to file the lawsuit first and then subpoena the information you need. Otherwise, if you're simply allowed to subpoena outside of a formal lawsuit, you're just on a fishing expedition. Forcing the RIAA to file a lawsuit means they have to have some reasonable suspicion that a user is sharing files. Otherwise, it will get tossed out of court, and if they do this enough times, someone will come down on them hard.
It's only "open source" in the very loosest sense.
Technically, it IS open source because you can see the source and know what the code is doing. The restrictions mean that while it is Open Source Software, it is not Free Software.
So either way SETI is unlikely to find anything meaningful. I'm with the Christians on this one. The search for extra-terrestrial life is only a substitute for the search for meaning within one's self and with one's God.
Some people consider the search for extraterrestrial life to be an integral part of the search for meaning within one's self and with one's deity.
My wife, who had no idea what region codes were, started picking up a few DVDs that are not available in the US. (A couple of them were Eddie Izzard as I recall) She was very disappointed when I told her that these DVDs would not play in the DVD palayers at home without hacking them.
Hey, don't let that stop her. It didn't stop my wife.
My wife is nuts for the band Roxette, but they don't distribute their music in the States anymore because of how the recording industry in the US screwed them over. So when she heard Roxette was releasing new music videos on DVD, she asked me if she would be able to play European DVDs on our player, and I had to explain to her about the region coding.
One week later, we had a brand new DVD player, region free, auto-detecting PAL/NTSC, fresh from Ebay, and her coveted Roxette DVD a week later.
This thing about SCO wanting to keep the code a secret is a non-issue at the moment. In actuality, if you think about it, it makes perfect sense for SCO to want to do this.
Look at it this way: You have some code you claim is proprietary and you sue someone for using it. Now, if you can keep the code a secret save for the courtroom, and you lose the case, then you still can keep that code proprietary and continue to charge licenses from people who obtain it directly from you.
But say instead you're forced to reveal the code to the public and you lose the case. Now you're up shit's creek because you have this code that was proven not to be infringing, but you can't claim it to be proprietary anymore because now everyone can see it. Personally, I'd be more worried if SCO went the other way and was more than happy to show the public. They would not do that unless they thought they had the case all sewn up. The fact that they will not reveal it to the public means they're hedging their bets and want the opportunity to continue using the code if they lose the case (assuming there is anything left the company afterward, but that's another story).
So don't worry about this quite yet. The code WILL be shown to the party that needs to know, namely IBM. IBM is not stupid. The splendid conduct they have shown before and during these proceedings shows that they know what they are doing. They can shoot holes in SCO's argument almost as good as the FOSS community can. And if they need help, they can rightly argue that they should be allowed to have outside experts view the code (read: Linux kernel maintainers). And in the unlikely case that SCO wins, they will be forced to reveal the code, as it is the ONLY way that it can be removed from the offending software.
The BSD license does grant the developer more liberty to use the code in any fashion they choose, including later restricting rights if they so choose. The GPL does not grant as much liberty, so BSD is more free (as in speech) than the GPL, since you can modify the free (as in beer) status of the code with BSD, whereas you cannot with the GPL.
In other words, the BSD license grants more liberty to the developer at the expense of potentially taking some liberty away from users further down the line, whereas the GPL grants more liberty to those users at the expense of some liberty from the developer.
It is ironic that the GPL, which really rattels the libery saber, is out libertied by the BSD licences, which generally do no such saber ratteling.
Not really. Some may argue that giving liberty to the masses is more important than to the developer. However, I am not arguing that point. I don't believe either license to be inherently "better" than the other. No matter which license you go with, you have a trade-off, which is why I hope both licenses stick around for awhile. Having a choice is better than no choice at all, and it's the choice that is what liberty is all about.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed.
The Jedi, on the other hand, strike me as really a bunch or arrogant elite who seem to not be doing a very good job of anything.Also agree, but are you saying this made Ep I/II bad? Granted, I and II had problems, but this is not one of them. Yes, the Jedi are a bunch of stuck-up, arrogant buttheads. That's one of the main points of the movie. We're likely to see this play out more in Ep III. Much of the Jedis' downfall is by their own hand. They got too used to their power and to the status quo to see more than a few inches in front of their face. You're supposed to doubt them at this point.
And Palpatine and Dooku have yet to do anything really horribly dispicable. It's hard to get worked up about these bad guys.I think that's one of the reasons why people have trouble with Ep I/II. We're essentially seeing the story out-of-sequence. We started in the middle of the story, where the battle lines were very clearly drawn, and everyone had already put on their white or black hats. In Ep I/II, this has not happened yet. The ones that become or pave the way for the great villians of the later movies have no choice but to act in secret. To me, Palpatine's machinations in the Senate echo the events of the rise of the Nazi party to power and Hitler's ascension to Chancellor (hell, even the title is the same!) in Germany circa the 1930s.
I sometimes wonder how people might have reacted had the movies been produced and released in the actual chronological order that the events happen. It might have garnered a different reaction. Yeah, the screenplays could have been better written, but I think the overall story still plays well, and would have played better in the proper sequence.
And naturally, as a Big Evil Company now, they're not entitled to the same rights as everyone else. Now, if we were talking about a domain that had a generic name, like onering.com, I might buy the argument. But jrrtolkien.com is extremely specific.
What about that guy who was able to pick up hotmail.co.uk because Microsoft forgot to renew it? I say he should be under no obligation to return it.Explain your logic to me. What other use would someone want with a domain called hotmail except to screw MS? Or is this one of those "anything that screws MS is good" things? Note this is NOT the same as creating a domain called hotmailsucks.com or screw.this.hotmail.crap.com. Those are very obvious alternate uses of the hotmail name and I would agree in that case that they should not be taken away. To use a more relevant example, if the domain we're talking about was jrrtolkiensucks.com, then I'd lean towards the owner of the domain. But there is no reason to hold jrrtolkien.com except to 1) screw over the Tolkien estate and/or 2) lure people to your site making them think they were going someplace that actually had something to do with the author.
Same with guys who register celebrity names as domains. If it was important to the celebrity they should have something in place to protect the domains.I would agree if the site was not EXACTLY the same name as the celebrity. If it were, for example, fansof[celebrity-name].org, then I'd say okay.
I don't care for frivilous cases of strong-arming domain names from people. At the same time, however, the rules, whether they be actual laws or just plain ettiquete, should be equal for all. Registering other people's trademarks and names as domain names (and I do mean names that are clearly distinctive trademarks and not common names that just happen to be parts of trademarks), in my mind, is breaking the rules.
Sorry to pick on your specific post, this is more directed at the /. crowd in general.
Look everyone, get it through your heads right now: The SEC does not give a shit about this case. SCO is not big enough to warrant their time, SCO does not have enough shares out on the market to affect the market as a whole, and, like it or not people, SCO has not done anything wrong in the eyes of the SEC.
Now before I get flamed for stating that SCO has done nothing wrong, please reread what I just said: They have done nothing wrong in the eyes of the SEC. The SEC cares only about the big players of the market. Smaller companies like SCO do not show up on their radar unless they do something really horrendous. We can shout "pump and dump! pump and dump!" until we're blue in the face, but all the evidence to date is circumstantial.
Besides, we don't need the SEC. SCO's case has more holes in it than swiss cheese. IBM is going to stomp all over them and salt the earth over their remains. But don't expect any help from the government on this, folks, and frankly, we don't need it.
I call bullshit.
Source, please. Some relevant links would be nice. If you turn out to be right, I withdraw my bullshit call, but otherwise it stands. I don't recall ever reading anything like this.
Nope. You're ignoring the cost of creating the moldings in the first place, maintaining them (anything that cranks out millions of blocks a year is going to wear out), the cost of the plastic itself, the cost to pay people to come up with new models since most children lose interest in the latest stuff after about 30 seconds, the cost to ship their product around the world, the cost of printing the manuals in such a way that they can be understood in fifty different languages, and so on.
While you didn't come right out and say it, it's implied in your post: Lego is about quality.
Producing Lego bricks is expensive. The person who originally founded the company years ago was big on quality, and that's carried over to today. Lego bricks are machined with a very low tolerance for error. The plastic used in them is high quality. The really tiny detail pieces aside, the stock building bricks are virtually indestructible. I've had bricks that have been run over by heavy pieces of furniture, been lost behind steam radiators for up to a year at a time, been sent through the laundry (with bleach), and become the latest "let's see how many walls and other solid objects I can bat this thing into" by the cat. Rarely did these things break or lose their color. Only the really, really old bricks I have show any color-fading.
I guess I'd better shell out the $300 for the Star Destroyer before it is dropped.You better not take the last one before I get my order in or I'll be mighty pissed.
What's really sick is that someone modded this funny.
You don't live in Colorado and its maze of twisty little water rights regulations, do you? :)
I personally agree with you on this score. I watch movies on the DVD player, not the DVD ROM drive. Now, if they restricted the DRM stuff to appliances like DVD players (which, actually, already have this, what with CSS and Macrovision), I don't care as much about that. But that is not what the MPAA is after. So long as people are ABLE to play movies on their DVD drives, or obtain a digital movie and play it on the various media players out there, they are going to want that DRM technology ON YOUR PC.
So, yes, I do agree with you, but you're not thinking like the MPAA is thinking.
Everybody reading the article needs to read between the lines pretty carefully on this one. While the MPAA is seemingly offering the olive branch with one hand, look at the following quotes from the article:
Along with the warning letters, the movie industry is paying for consumer education programs and technology research, and pushing for laws and regulations that executives hope will protect their wares.
The most important thing for Hollywood to do now, Johnson said, is to move faster to develop the kinds of licensing agreements and protective technology
The path to a successful service has to involve the kind of technology that protects copyright unobtrusively,
Hand in hand with developing legal digital services, he recommends the kind of tough security that is built into satellite television equipment,
This whole article reeks of DRM. They never mention it by name, but this is exactly what they have in mind, and some of the stuff highlighted above suggests DRM in hardware.
So I don't see where the MPAA has learned a damn thing, other than the blatant tactics of the RIAA don't work so they're going to try more underhanded ones. The agenda of the MPAA has NOT changed one iota.
It's also a great deterrent against paying customers. There will be some people that, after having suffered at the hands of the industry in the very way you describe, are unlikely going to give that same industry any more money. Remember that most people being sued are being sued for sharing files, not downloading them. Many of those people attacked by these lawsuits will continue downloading but just won't share their files anymore.
3) Agreements with cable companies to stop cutting off users for burning too much bandwidth.
It was not long ago that Slashdot had an article about people being cut off from their ISP because they were told they were using too much bandwidth. How does the MPAA expect to be able to get people to use their services unless they coordinate with the cable industry and prevent them from cutting off their customers?
I love how baseless accusations get modded +5. Hurray for Slashdot!
I might buy the bit about Microsoft helping fund it. They took a license from SCO soon after the lawsuit was announced, but even that is circumstantial evidence at best. But Sun? You're barking up the wrong tree. I work for Sun, and I can tell you that Sun already had mountains of rights to the UNIX code base. Even SCO stated in so many words (paraphrased here) that Sun has more rights to the code than any other company. And those rights were secured long before SCO ever came into the picture. True, Sun's marketing has taken advantage of the situation, but if the roles were reversed, and it was Sun that was the subject of the litigation, IBM would do the exact same thing.
So can we please put this baseless Sun-SCO conspiracy to rest? Thank you.
Well, then just go to CPAN and download the ID::NeverLose and Snake::Repellent modules and you'll be set.
Only if you write your code that way.
Yes, Perl makes it possible to write obfuscated code, but it does not enforce it. Perl makes it possible to write perfectly clear code.
But then again, even the most obfuscated code can be made clear with some well-placed comments, but comments in programs unfortunately appears to be a dying art.
Until the people that provide that support decide they don't want to do it anymore and go off to another career, leaving a shortage of people to do the job. Not saying that this will happen anytime soon, it's mostly to make the point that people in power must derive their power from somewhere. Things don't happen in a vaccuum.
True, but this just reverts things back to the way they are supposed to work. You have to file the lawsuit first and then subpoena the information you need. Otherwise, if you're simply allowed to subpoena outside of a formal lawsuit, you're just on a fishing expedition. Forcing the RIAA to file a lawsuit means they have to have some reasonable suspicion that a user is sharing files. Otherwise, it will get tossed out of court, and if they do this enough times, someone will come down on them hard.
Technically, it IS open source because you can see the source and know what the code is doing. The restrictions mean that while it is Open Source Software, it is not Free Software.
Not before they attempt to lobby Congress to pass laws banning encryption use by the masses.
Some people consider the search for extraterrestrial life to be an integral part of the search for meaning within one's self and with one's deity.
Oh great, this means I can start expecting "Fr1st P0st!!"'s from Bill Gates ...
Hey, don't let that stop her. It didn't stop my wife.
My wife is nuts for the band Roxette, but they don't distribute their music in the States anymore because of how the recording industry in the US screwed them over. So when she heard Roxette was releasing new music videos on DVD, she asked me if she would be able to play European DVDs on our player, and I had to explain to her about the region coding.
One week later, we had a brand new DVD player, region free, auto-detecting PAL/NTSC, fresh from Ebay, and her coveted Roxette DVD a week later.
This thing about SCO wanting to keep the code a secret is a non-issue at the moment. In actuality, if you think about it, it makes perfect sense for SCO to want to do this.
Look at it this way: You have some code you claim is proprietary and you sue someone for using it. Now, if you can keep the code a secret save for the courtroom, and you lose the case, then you still can keep that code proprietary and continue to charge licenses from people who obtain it directly from you.
But say instead you're forced to reveal the code to the public and you lose the case. Now you're up shit's creek because you have this code that was proven not to be infringing, but you can't claim it to be proprietary anymore because now everyone can see it. Personally, I'd be more worried if SCO went the other way and was more than happy to show the public. They would not do that unless they thought they had the case all sewn up. The fact that they will not reveal it to the public means they're hedging their bets and want the opportunity to continue using the code if they lose the case (assuming there is anything left the company afterward, but that's another story).
So don't worry about this quite yet. The code WILL be shown to the party that needs to know, namely IBM. IBM is not stupid. The splendid conduct they have shown before and during these proceedings shows that they know what they are doing. They can shoot holes in SCO's argument almost as good as the FOSS community can. And if they need help, they can rightly argue that they should be allowed to have outside experts view the code (read: Linux kernel maintainers). And in the unlikely case that SCO wins, they will be forced to reveal the code, as it is the ONLY way that it can be removed from the offending software.
You forgot the part about two feet of snow, with a headwind, and you were grateful.
In other words, the BSD license grants more liberty to the developer at the expense of potentially taking some liberty away from users further down the line, whereas the GPL grants more liberty to those users at the expense of some liberty from the developer.
It is ironic that the GPL, which really rattels the libery saber, is out libertied by the BSD licences, which generally do no such saber ratteling.Not really. Some may argue that giving liberty to the masses is more important than to the developer. However, I am not arguing that point. I don't believe either license to be inherently "better" than the other. No matter which license you go with, you have a trade-off, which is why I hope both licenses stick around for awhile. Having a choice is better than no choice at all, and it's the choice that is what liberty is all about.