No, you are acknowledging that those writers existed and that they had an impact on human society. If a novel mentions Einstein or Plato or Hitler that doesn't mean it's "stealing ideas" from them. Some things (like relativity, the republic or silly moustaches) have a life of their own, and it's not relevant who invented them (they would have been invented by someone else). Asimov's "laws" are a perfect example of that. I figured them out long before I knew Asimov had written about them. Does that make me "unoriginal"?
What are the chances that, in the future, people will completely forget about those concepts (or stop calling them "Asimov's laws of robotics")? Pretty slim, I'd say. So any story that takes place in a future based on our present should acknowledge their existance.
What annoys me in some SF stories is the fact that, despite taking place on Earth, and sharing our "timeline", they seem to have "unlearned" a lof of stuff we know today.
Just because someone thought of something first doesn't mean people can't continue to think it in the future (as much as the patent offices would like that).
P.S. - Most of Asimov's books are pretty bad. He had some great ideas, but was not (IMO) a very good story-teller. I'm quite partial to Stanislaw Lem.
> The author's incorporating Asimov's Laws and the > Singularity into the story indicates to me that > he doesn't have a lot of original ideas.
So do the facts that he writes in an existing language, with an existing alphabet, and mentions un-original things such as "people", "computers", "time" and "space".
This has been used in Portugal for some time now
on
Cashless Society
·
· Score: 1
A similar card (called PMB, for "Porta-moedas Multi-Banco") has been used in Portugal for several years now. It's accepted by most shops, by phone booths and even by taxies. But I don't know anyone who uses it regularly, because it needs to be "charged" at ATMs. So people prefer to use their regular ATM card, that is also accepted almost anywhere (except taxies), and draws money directly from their bank account (after they enter their code). I suspect the same thing will happen in France; when faced with a choice between security and commodity, most people pick the latter.
Opera always includes "Opera" in the ID string (ex.: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 2000) Opera 6.05 [en]"). Which sort of defeats the whole point of identifying as a different browser. It'll only fool scripts that first check for "MSIE" and, if they find it, don't even bother looking for "Opera". All other scripts will still see it's Opera.
Ture, if the browser you're using does follow the standards. However, 95% of the browsers being used can't handle something as simple as "position:fixed" inside a stylesheet.
In other words, if you want pages to work in older browsers (Netscape 4.7, Opera 6) and / or in MSIE, you can't use that property. Changing that often means you then need to rearrange the whole page.
The alternatives are a) not use any of the more advanced CSS properties (but that's basically depriving Opera 7 and Mozilla users of features that are standard and supported by their browser, simply because MSIE doesn't support them) or b) use those features and get pages that look broken under MSIE (ie, over 90% of the market), which is also not acceptable.
Oh, I'm not stating my opinion I'm simply telling you what international copyright law says. You (or I, or anyone else) can disagree with it, but that's just the way it is. And unlike what you seem to think, it is quite clear. Without permission from the owner of the rights, any sort of editing is a breach of copyright. Doesn't matter if it's then distributed to a million people or just to you, in your home. They probably wouldn't go after you (the end user), but they would almost certainly go after the company making the "censorware" (either to forbid them or - more likely, if there was any market - to charge them a fee).
You are not being offered parts. You are being offered a whole. Don't like it? Don't buy it. Or if you already bought it, simply return it.
Imagine you create a website about World War II, where you describe how the Nazis killed millions of people and were then defeated by the allies. The site is public but the copyright belongs to you. One day, someone with a slightly peculiar view of History decides that all the bad things you wrote about the Nazis were lies, and writes a plug-in (that he distributes to the public in general) that removes those "offensive" parts. In other words, people seeing your page in a computer with his plug-in installed see only references to the great buildings of the 3rd Reich, the bombing of Dresden, the killing of Nazis, etc.
Do you still think that person has the right to develop and distribute that plug-in without your consent?
This is exactly the same situation as a software crack that removes the protection (or unlocks features, etc.) of another program. It's irrelevant that you find that protection "offensive". You don't get to pick parts. You can keep the "crap" with the jewels, or you can reject them both. In a society (or a relationship), you need to respect other people's freedom. If the author gives you the option of picking which parts you want to keep, fine. If not, your only choice (a perfectly free choice) is between "yes" and "no".
You might as well say that if you decide to install a cracked version of Windows XP it's nobody else's business but your own. Microsoft (and the FBI, and few other law enforcement entities) might disagree, though. And as much as I dislike them, I have to agree with their point of view.
Please note that it's irrelevant if you paid for it or not. Reverse-engineering, cracking or altering it is forbidden by the license agreement, regardless of whether you paid for it or not.
Re-editing a movie without the authors' / producers' consent is also illegal. A (legal) "automatic censor" would only be able to operate on movies that it has been licensed to operate on. Which is essentially the same as releasing a censored version of the movie (most US movies are already censored - compared to the European versions - and some are even released in a "Spanish Inquisition" version with even more cuts and sound edits; what I call the "freaking heck" syndrome).
Personally, I think that anyone who supports censorship in any form "for the good of society" has a serious flaw in their logic circuits. If you want to change society, let other people know what you think; don't just accept things as they are and then hide the parts you don't like.
But as I said, that's not the issue here. The issue is IP. Any automatic editing of a work (be it a movie or a book, a software application, etc.), needs to be authorised by whoever owns the rights. If you want the jewels, you have to take the crap. You're absolutely free to reject both and go on looking.
So, do you also expect to be able to use "3rd party" (ex., TSR-style) programs to "censor" parts of software that you don't like (such as copy protection, EULAs, nag screens on unregistered software, etc.)? Or what about automatically "censoring" the credits and copyright information on movies?
It's bad enough that US versions of so many movies come pre-censored (compared to the continental European versions), but at least that's done with the producers' (and usually also directors') consent. It's not done by some 3rd party company that decides what's "immoral" and what's not.
If you don't want to watch the movie, don't watch the movie. If enough people that do not like violence or sex or whatever stop buying movies with that kind of scenes, perhaps you'll see more producers making movies without that kind of scene / subject to begin with.
In other words, it's not only wrong from a moral and legal point of view, it's also stupid, because it combats the symptoms instead of the cause.
I am not necessairly your friend. And please read my message again; apparently you missed some (relevant) bits.
By closing your eyes (or pressing fast-forward), or deliberately omitting some parts when you re-tell a story to others, you are acknowledging the existence of those parts, and it is your decision to ignore them (just as you can choose to ignore a law or a program's EULA). It is not the same as using a cracked version of the same program that does not display the EULA at all, or a system that automatically censors the movie without the author's consent. If a company wants to distribute censored (or "alternate-version" movies), they are free to do so as long as they have the agreement of the author(s). Without that, there's no deal (just as you cannot resell censored or "alternate" versions of books, replacing the author's opinion with your own and passing them off as his).
And if you're so concerned about exposing your children to "vulgar language", why would you read them a book that uses such language to begin with...?
Yes, I'm afraid that with IP (as with marriage, and life in general), you have to put up with the crap if you want the jewels. It's up to you to decide if it's worth it.
While I don't agree with censorship in general, I do believe its everyone's right to do what they wish with their own media
No, it's not. Just as you cannot remove parts of code that you "don't like" from closed-source software. If you don't want to watch the movie, don't watch the movie. You do not have the right to use a movie's (copyrighted) footage to create what is essentially a different movie. What you have is a license to watch the movie, not to change it. If someone wants to release "open-source" movies , fine, let people do what they want, add scenes, remove scenes, whatever. As long as they're someone's IP, they cannot be changed without the author's consent. If you want to skip a scene, you can skip it by pressing fast-forward, but in doing so you acknowledge the scene exists.
Since we're at it, why don't we make some boxes to automatically censor inconvenient parts of History? Or inconvenient news? Wait... the USA already has that, it's called TV.
NASA managers found a way to convince the goverment to fund this mission: they told Bush that the martians are developing weapons of mass destruction. They have reliable intelligence: a complete report from secret agent Herbert G. Wells.
In short, take a power4, lop off core #2, reduce the amount of L2 cache, add an altivec execution unit, change the bus interface and make it on a smaller (.13 rather than.18) process, and eh voila, PowerPC 970
And will I need a soldering iron or do you think I'll manage with some tape, a conductive ink pen and a sharp knife...?
Girls statistically outperform boys overall in grade school
Perhaps because most grade school teachers are women, and teach things the way they make sense to them (which does not necessarily make sense to boys). Most IT teachers (and most college teachers in science / technology areas) are men, and that could explain why males seem to learn those subjects better.
Of course, men and women do have different tastes (or so say cannibals), but I suspect the gender of the teacher plays an important role as well. I know I tend to understand (study / technical) books written by men (or men and women) better than I understand books written (exclusively) by women, even when they are teaching basically the same thing.
Starting with the "butterfly picture", this article is so biased it would even shock Apple's marketing department (and possibly even Microsoft's legal department, although they have an even wilder imagination).
A multi-layered sensor is a great thing as long as they manage to make it with more than one third of the size of competing "traditional" sensors. If you compare a "X3" sensor with 2000x1500 pixels with a traditional "RG/GB" sensor with 4000x3000 pixels, the traditional sensor still gives you better resolution (you can simply scale it down to 2000x1500, getting one sample of each colour per pixel - in fact two green samples, which gives you even better colour fidelity and less noise). And then there's the fact that the Foveon sensor tens to lose colour in areas with high luminance. In other words, you get gray pixels around highlights.
The SD9 is promising, but it's still no real competition for Canon's EOS-D1s or Kodak's DCS Pro 14n.
If you want to read an objective review of the SD9 (with tons of example pictures, and a comparison with other high-end cameras), go to DPReview.
And this has nothing to do with "the way our eyes see". Our eyes don't see at all. It's our brain that sees. If the camera worked like our eyes, it would have a ridiculously high resolution in the centre of the image, and a terrible resolution near the edges (not to mention all the other differences).
Slashdot Mirror
No, you are acknowledging that those writers existed and that they had an impact on human society. If a novel mentions Einstein or Plato or Hitler that doesn't mean it's "stealing ideas" from them. Some things (like relativity, the republic or silly moustaches) have a life of their own, and it's not relevant who invented them (they would have been invented by someone else). Asimov's "laws" are a perfect example of that. I figured them out long before I knew Asimov had written about them. Does that make me "unoriginal"?
What are the chances that, in the future, people will completely forget about those concepts (or stop calling them "Asimov's laws of robotics")? Pretty slim, I'd say. So any story that takes place in a future based on our present should acknowledge their existance.
What annoys me in some SF stories is the fact that, despite taking place on Earth, and sharing our "timeline", they seem to have "unlearned" a lof of stuff we know today.
Just because someone thought of something first doesn't mean people can't continue to think it in the future (as much as the patent offices would like that).
P.S. - Most of Asimov's books are pretty bad. He had some great ideas, but was not (IMO) a very good story-teller. I'm quite partial to Stanislaw Lem.
RMN
~~~
Spend the next 15 years thinking of something really smart to tell your 12-year-old self.
RMN
~~~
I don't like american "football", but if he did explode down the field... then it was a (literally) incredible touchdown.
RMN
~~~
> The author's incorporating Asimov's Laws and the
> Singularity into the story indicates to me that
> he doesn't have a lot of original ideas.
So do the facts that he writes in an existing language, with an existing alphabet, and mentions un-original things such as "people", "computers", "time" and "space".
RMN
~~~
> within the matter of days it is said we will be as cockroaches
> to them as cockroaches are to us (atleast, intellectually).
You mean female computers will scream and jump on top of chairs when they see us?
RMN
~~~
Yes, after all, Florida's local authorities are clearly anti-Bush...
RMN
~~~
Any message that suggests THG is insightful, reliable or even remotely credible deserves a +5, Funny.
RMN
~~~
AMD's answer to the Centrino is... the Lehmon XP.
Ok, it's a bad joke, but someone had to do it.
RMN
~~~
A similar card (called PMB, for "Porta-moedas Multi-Banco") has been used in Portugal for several years now. It's accepted by most shops, by phone booths and even by taxies. But I don't know anyone who uses it regularly, because it needs to be "charged" at ATMs. So people prefer to use their regular ATM card, that is also accepted almost anywhere (except taxies), and draws money directly from their bank account (after they enter their code). I suspect the same thing will happen in France; when faced with a choice between security and commodity, most people pick the latter.
RMN
~~~
The page looks exactly the same on Opera and MSIE. Make sure you haven't manually changed IE's "text size".
RMN
~~~
Opera always includes "Opera" in the ID string (ex.: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 2000) Opera 6.05 [en]"). Which sort of defeats the whole point of identifying as a different browser. It'll only fool scripts that first check for "MSIE" and, if they find it, don't even bother looking for "Opera". All other scripts will still see it's Opera.
RMN
~~~
Ture, if the browser you're using does follow the standards. However, 95% of the browsers being used can't handle something as simple as "position:fixed" inside a stylesheet.
In other words, if you want pages to work in older browsers (Netscape 4.7, Opera 6) and / or in MSIE, you can't use that property. Changing that often means you then need to rearrange the whole page.
The alternatives are a) not use any of the more advanced CSS properties (but that's basically depriving Opera 7 and Mozilla users of features that are standard and supported by their browser, simply because MSIE doesn't support them) or b) use those features and get pages that look broken under MSIE (ie, over 90% of the market), which is also not acceptable.
RMN
~~~
Oh, I'm not stating my opinion I'm simply telling you what international copyright law says. You (or I, or anyone else) can disagree with it, but that's just the way it is. And unlike what you seem to think, it is quite clear. Without permission from the owner of the rights, any sort of editing is a breach of copyright. Doesn't matter if it's then distributed to a million people or just to you, in your home. They probably wouldn't go after you (the end user), but they would almost certainly go after the company making the "censorware" (either to forbid them or - more likely, if there was any market - to charge them a fee).
RMN
~~~
You are not being offered parts. You are being offered a whole. Don't like it? Don't buy it. Or if you already bought it, simply return it.
Imagine you create a website about World War II, where you describe how the Nazis killed millions of people and were then defeated by the allies. The site is public but the copyright belongs to you. One day, someone with a slightly peculiar view of History decides that all the bad things you wrote about the Nazis were lies, and writes a plug-in (that he distributes to the public in general) that removes those "offensive" parts. In other words, people seeing your page in a computer with his plug-in installed see only references to the great buildings of the 3rd Reich, the bombing of Dresden, the killing of Nazis, etc.
Do you still think that person has the right to develop and distribute that plug-in without your consent?
This is exactly the same situation as a software crack that removes the protection (or unlocks features, etc.) of another program. It's irrelevant that you find that protection "offensive". You don't get to pick parts. You can keep the "crap" with the jewels, or you can reject them both. In a society (or a relationship), you need to respect other people's freedom. If the author gives you the option of picking which parts you want to keep, fine. If not, your only choice (a perfectly free choice) is between "yes" and "no".
RMN
~~~
You might as well say that if you decide to install a cracked version of Windows XP it's nobody else's business but your own. Microsoft (and the FBI, and few other law enforcement entities) might disagree, though. And as much as I dislike them, I have to agree with their point of view.
Please note that it's irrelevant if you paid for it or not. Reverse-engineering, cracking or altering it is forbidden by the license agreement, regardless of whether you paid for it or not.
Re-editing a movie without the authors' / producers' consent is also illegal. A (legal) "automatic censor" would only be able to operate on movies that it has been licensed to operate on. Which is essentially the same as releasing a censored version of the movie (most US movies are already censored - compared to the European versions - and some are even released in a "Spanish Inquisition" version with even more cuts and sound edits; what I call the "freaking heck" syndrome).
Personally, I think that anyone who supports censorship in any form "for the good of society" has a serious flaw in their logic circuits. If you want to change society, let other people know what you think; don't just accept things as they are and then hide the parts you don't like.
But as I said, that's not the issue here. The issue is IP. Any automatic editing of a work (be it a movie or a book, a software application, etc.), needs to be authorised by whoever owns the rights. If you want the jewels, you have to take the crap. You're absolutely free to reject both and go on looking.
RMN
~~~
So, do you also expect to be able to use "3rd party" (ex., TSR-style) programs to "censor" parts of software that you don't like (such as copy protection, EULAs, nag screens on unregistered software, etc.)? Or what about automatically "censoring" the credits and copyright information on movies?
It's bad enough that US versions of so many movies come pre-censored (compared to the continental European versions), but at least that's done with the producers' (and usually also directors') consent. It's not done by some 3rd party company that decides what's "immoral" and what's not.
If you don't want to watch the movie, don't watch the movie. If enough people that do not like violence or sex or whatever stop buying movies with that kind of scenes, perhaps you'll see more producers making movies without that kind of scene / subject to begin with.
In other words, it's not only wrong from a moral and legal point of view, it's also stupid, because it combats the symptoms instead of the cause.
RMN
~~~
Since when do DVDs include ads...?
And it seems like you need to read what I wrote again, because you still haven't go it. Redo from start at line 0.
RMN
~~~
I am not necessairly your friend. And please read my message again; apparently you missed some (relevant) bits.
By closing your eyes (or pressing fast-forward), or deliberately omitting some parts when you re-tell a story to others, you are acknowledging the existence of those parts, and it is your decision to ignore them (just as you can choose to ignore a law or a program's EULA). It is not the same as using a cracked version of the same program that does not display the EULA at all, or a system that automatically censors the movie without the author's consent. If a company wants to distribute censored (or "alternate-version" movies), they are free to do so as long as they have the agreement of the author(s). Without that, there's no deal (just as you cannot resell censored or "alternate" versions of books, replacing the author's opinion with your own and passing them off as his).
And if you're so concerned about exposing your children to "vulgar language", why would you read them a book that uses such language to begin with...?
Yes, I'm afraid that with IP (as with marriage, and life in general), you have to put up with the crap if you want the jewels. It's up to you to decide if it's worth it.
RMN
~~~
While I don't agree with censorship in general, I do believe its everyone's right to do what they wish with their own media
No, it's not. Just as you cannot remove parts of code that you "don't like" from closed-source software. If you don't want to watch the movie, don't watch the movie. You do not have the right to use a movie's (copyrighted) footage to create what is essentially a different movie. What you have is a license to watch the movie, not to change it. If someone wants to release "open-source" movies , fine, let people do what they want, add scenes, remove scenes, whatever. As long as they're someone's IP, they cannot be changed without the author's consent. If you want to skip a scene, you can skip it by pressing fast-forward, but in doing so you acknowledge the scene exists.
Since we're at it, why don't we make some boxes to automatically censor inconvenient parts of History? Or inconvenient news? Wait... the USA already has that, it's called TV.
RMN
~~~
NASA managers found a way to convince the goverment to fund this mission: they told Bush that the martians are developing weapons of mass destruction. They have reliable intelligence: a complete report from secret agent Herbert G. Wells.
RMN
~~~
In short, take a power4, lop off core #2, reduce the amount of L2 cache, add an altivec execution unit, change the bus interface and make it on a smaller (.13 rather than .18) process, and eh voila, PowerPC 970
And will I need a soldering iron or do you think I'll manage with some tape, a conductive ink pen and a sharp knife...?
RMN
~~~
#include
// (+ 749992 empty lines)
void main(void)
{
_spawnl( _P_OVERLAY,"Opera.exe", NULL );
}
Girls statistically outperform boys overall in grade school
Perhaps because most grade school teachers are women, and teach things the way they make sense to them (which does not necessarily make sense to boys). Most IT teachers (and most college teachers in science / technology areas) are men, and that could explain why males seem to learn those subjects better.
Of course, men and women do have different tastes (or so say cannibals), but I suspect the gender of the teacher plays an important role as well. I know I tend to understand (study / technical) books written by men (or men and women) better than I understand books written (exclusively) by women, even when they are teaching basically the same thing.
RMN
~~~
Starting with the "butterfly picture", this article is so biased it would even shock Apple's marketing department (and possibly even Microsoft's legal department, although they have an even wilder imagination).
A multi-layered sensor is a great thing as long as they manage to make it with more than one third of the size of competing "traditional" sensors. If you compare a "X3" sensor with 2000x1500 pixels with a traditional "RG/GB" sensor with 4000x3000 pixels, the traditional sensor still gives you better resolution (you can simply scale it down to 2000x1500, getting one sample of each colour per pixel - in fact two green samples, which gives you even better colour fidelity and less noise). And then there's the fact that the Foveon sensor tens to lose colour in areas with high luminance. In other words, you get gray pixels around highlights.
The SD9 is promising, but it's still no real competition for Canon's EOS-D1s or Kodak's DCS Pro 14n.
If you want to read an objective review of the SD9 (with tons of example pictures, and a comparison with other high-end cameras), go to DPReview.
And this has nothing to do with "the way our eyes see". Our eyes don't see at all. It's our brain that sees. If the camera worked like our eyes, it would have a ridiculously high resolution in the centre of the image, and a terrible resolution near the edges (not to mention all the other differences).
RMN
~~~
Looks like it's back to the good ol' entangled particles, then.
RMN
~~~