Gagging online sites isn't going to help, because more information is passed on by e-mail than anything else. I have about four friends with whom I regularly mail about new films and DVD releases and what to avoid: Tripple X was one of the films I seem to have saved them from. Unfortunately, they were too late to stop me from going to see 28 Days Later, because I didn't read my e-mail that day. It doesn't have to be negative: I've been recommending Hero left and right. Fight Club was a film I only rented an e-mail discussion.
Another area where e-mail is a killer are computer games: I don't know how many people I have told not to buy Master of Orion III because it is simply a piece of crap that should have been taken out to the back lot of Infogrames (now Atari, I believe) and shot.
Word of mouth is powerful, even if you don't stand on a soap box.
This isn't suprising, because insanity runs in families: This link to a CNEWS story points out that one of his sons is a lawyer for the SCO Jihad. What do you expect? Rational behaviour?
I'd like it better with apples, by the way. First, have all apples sprayed with a deadly poison. You get the antidote when you buy the apple; if not, you die a very horrible and messy death.
The Slashdot Community is nauseatingly evangelistic about Linux to the point of modding down people who don't join in with their pitchforks.
Uh, no. The guys with the pitchforks are from BSD. We're the ones in the tux with the those cool sun glasses and funny accents who say thinks like "I am going to enjoy watching you die, Mr. Anderson" before we mod them down...
IBM could of course just buy SCO and get rid of the problem quickly. However, in contrast to SCO, they are in this for the long run and probably take the long term view; they know that if they buy SCO, they are just taking care of the symptoms, not the cause. What they want to do is settle this Unix/Linux/AIX question once and for all. You want to make an example of SCO that every other company on the planet will learn from:
Whatever you do/
Don't fouque with Big Blue/
Or Big Blue/
Will annihilate you.
This is like defending the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany: You just fall back a little, and fall back a little more, and let the opponent thrash around, kicking and screaming, burning energy and money, wasting men and machines, building up a supply line that he can't defend. SCO has to stay in the headlines, has to keep pushing deeper and deeper so the press stays interested, or else people will catch on to the fact that the don't have the resources to take Moscow, let alone Sibiria, before winter comes.
And winter is on its way. Once the stock market realizes that this is going to be long, drawn out battle, they will lose interest in SCO, and the stock price will start to fall again -- we saw the first frost on Monday. Their stock price is like the temperature in Kelvin, likely to fall towards a very absolute zero if they don't keep moving. SCO is not equipped to fight unter six feet of financial snow, while IBM has resources to burn. This is where the comparison breaks down: IBM is not a starving Communist dictatorship, but rather has the industrial capacity of the U.S. to draw upon.
So time is on IBM's side, while SCO is running out of ways to escalate this fight. And this is what is so beautiful about the press release: The way it makes clear that there will be no quick, furious battle, just a steady stream of legal artillery raining down on SCO while IBM slowly marches away, giving ground, gaining time. The actual court case will trap SCO like ice, and the the snow will start falling, and SCO will start starving.
And all this time, safe behind the Urals, the penguins will be breeding...
The German online magazine Heise put it best: IBM is looking forward to a trial with groÃYer Gelassenheit, or "great sereneness". Given that the American legal system works by the rule that the guy with the most money wins (proven by Microsoft and O.J., among others), that is probably the correct attitude whatever the facts are.
The other quote that I can't get out of my head is from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, where the Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto explains his reservations about attacking Pearl Harbor as ordered by the military junta:...it was hard to tell them that their plan was full of shit and that the Americans were just going to get really pissed off and annihilate them. Substitute "IBM" for "Americans", and you have my feelings exactly.
One good reason to say bye-bye to handwriting is that different countries have different systems, making it just that much harder to communicate. Americans do these obscene things to their "r"s; and even inside Germany, there is a school that puts an arc over the "u" to distinguish it from an "n", which is lots of fun in a language that has two little dots over lots of their vowels.
And don't get me started on numbers. An American 7 is like a German 1, while the German 7 has a little horizontal bar through the middle, like one of those Russian Orthodox crosses. Germans don't regonize the American 1 as a numeral and think it is some kind of mistake. Now, the German postal service seems to know theses things and will get letters from the U.S. to you just fine. The American postal service, however...
Good riddance. You should know how to write by hand the same way you should be able to change a tire or do CPR: As a last-ditch resort.
The ability to digest milk after puberty is still only widespread in Caucasians and some parts of Africa, as I happen to know because I am one of the Caucasians who is not a mutant and had to give up my ice cream orgies with puberty (puberty did have its compensations). This is why lactase pills (which contain the emzyme required to break down the milk sugar lactose into glucose and (I believe) galactose) are selling like mad.
The BBC had one of their unevitably brilliant documentations about the rise of mankind a few weeks again on German television where they pointed out that humanity must have been really, really close to the gutter before it exploded. Then this big, black rectangle came and showed them how to use the thigh bone of a pig to kill...oh, never mind...
For these reasons, Linux in the US will likely suffer horribly over the next few months or perhaps even several years.
I think you have a good point here.
One aspect I think has been somewhat overlooked is that there are a heck of a lot of other countries that are using Linux and that are not going to give a rat's ass about some two-bit American company like SCO telling them the should stop using it. I just don't see the Chinese government going "oh well, then we'll just dump Red Flag Linux a switch to Microsoft" oder India halting their push towards Open Software.
If this actually goes through (unlikely) and it has any effect on Linux use (unlikely), it will be the U.S. that is hardest hit, because people there will follow those laws. Like what is SCO going to do, sue China?
Good grief. Do you actually have a life or why can't you remember
this article (and the followups) about the city of Munich, Bavaria, Germany. That was the first large crack in the dam, and now watch the pieces come flying out.
It shouldn't matter, but if you don't mind the moral question, rampant nationalism works wonders for space exploration.
Just let us assume for one moment that the European Mars Express with its Beagle 2 lander does find something they claim is a sure sign of life on Mars. It would mean that the first European planetary mission ever finds something that NASA has been looking for for decades. Somebody in Congress is going to take that as a personal insult and push the space program some more -- while the Europeans will find funding their probes a lot more interesting. More space exploration for all...
But this is just chicken feed. Can you imagine the U.S. watching China build and man a moon base? Even having Chinese astronauts ("taikonauts", I believe they are called) walking on the moon will make them nervous enough to push funding.
There is nothing like space exploration for a nation's scientific prestige. This hasn't been apparent for the last few decades because the U.S. and the Soviet Union both decided not to get into that kind of arms race again, and after the fall of communism, the U.S. has had a monopoly. If that is challenged, it is a good thing -- certainly better than trying to build the largest navy, the most atom bombs, or some of the other things we've had in the past.
You get to wonder if Ballmer didn't buy some RedHat stock with those billions that received from dumping Microsoft: His memo sent RedHat stock soaring by almost 10 percent. What's this called, "outsider trading"?
I was in China in 2001 (my honeymoon, in fact) and saw the thing being built. Our Chinese guide was from one of the river banks and pointed out, very matter of factly, where she had been assigned to live. Some people, she said, were getting sent to the western part of the country.
Yeah, the river was beautiful and there were lots of neat archeological thingies on the banks, but if I had this river that flooded high enough to kill thousands and thousands of people just about every second year, I'd be thinking about putting an end to it, too. Power is somewhat of a side benefit.
The other thing to remember is that this puts a few tens of million people at risk. A dam this size is a strategic nightmare and can't be defended in time of war. Take a look at the map, if somebody bombs that sucker, there are a couple of major cities that are going to go bye-bye.
Oops. It seems that the "few elite possitions" is a bit too general for some people, and after thinking it over for a while, they are probably right. For the record: U.S. federal judges are all appointed for life, not only those in the Supreme Court, as one could be led to believe by my original statement. This was misleading, and I am sorry.
This does not change my basic argument, however, that the German system is superiour in this regard because all judges, state and federal, are appointed, and therefore are not put in a position where they have to fight for re-election, leading to the temptation of bending justice to fit the tastes of the public.
German courts, good laws
on
Today's SCO News
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This is a very intelligent law, not a strange law. Translated from legal German, it means: Shit, or get the hell off of the can. Compare this to the American legal system that lets SCO get away with spreading FUD long enough for people to start believing in it.
Germany has the advantage of a 20th Century legal system that in many aspects -- though certainly not all -- is vastly superiour the 18th Century hack that the U.S. is hobbled by (for the record: I'm an American). This starts with the basic philosophy: The American system is adversarial, which means that you don't even pretend to care about what really happened, you just let both parties slug it out and declare one side a winner at the end. In constrast, the German system at least pretends to be interested in the truth. This means for example that procecutors are required by law to list all the evidence they think shows that the accused is innocent.
Also: The court calls the scientific experts, which means that German cases are almost completely free of the junk science that makes the U.S. legal system so bizarre. Lawyers are paid the same (by fixed rates) if they win or lose and law students do not aspire to become millionaires. The guy with the most money doesn't automatically win -- while most Americans will not even consider going to court against entities with deep pockets anymore. All judges are appointed, not elected, and then they are basically untouchable; note the U.S. only uses this system for a few elite positions like the Supreme Court.
More differences: Laws are written down in books, not make up as you go along by creative interpretations of older rulings. This provides Germany with Rechtssicherheit ("legal security"), so the legal environment has a certain degree of stability, a very, very alien concept to the U.S., where anybody can sue anybody else for anything at any time, stupid or not. As a result, there is basically no such thing as a "tactical lawsuit" in Germany. You don't get "laughed out of court" -- they don't let the clowns in in the first place.
Like in any modern legal system, the lottery of trial-by-jury has been replaced by a panel of professional judges who know what DNA is and don't show up in Star Trek uniforms when considering a murder case -- remember OJ? People are assumed to be of average intelligence, not morons like in the U.S., and so you can't sue McDonald's if you are such a dumb fuck that you burn you tongue on their coffee (the mentally handicapped are treated on a case-by-case basis).
The German legal system has also proven itself to be fiercely independant of government influence (compared to the Microsoft trial in the U.S., for example). German judges ruled flat out that Libya was behind the bombings in Berlin that killed U.S. soldiers at the same time the German administration was kissing up to Ghaddafi for economic reasons.
There are, of course, disadvantages, like a tendency to give murders 20 years and then let them out after 15. However, the German system on the whole is far, far more sane than the American one, and so it doesn't surprise me one bit that SCO is not getting away with this crap in Germany.
I've had one or two postings to that effect, all with rather unimaginative insults, but yes, at least you did sign with your name. Let me return the favor, as Karma is a renewable resource...
Reloaded has been out for about what now, a month? in the U.S., which I think is quite long enough to have a discussion ban. How long do you think we should wait before talking about the film in a public forum? Two months? Half year? A year? Until you tell us it is okay?
The number of viewers has peaked, in fact, Reloaded is already on its way down the box office charts with Bruce Almighty or whatever it is called in first place. It is not a new film anymore. If I had made a reference to the end of Reloaded before the film was out or even up to a week or two later, I would have understood your criticism. This way -- well, sorry, but you can't expect people to hide the plots of films that have been out that long, especially when the Internet is full of
discussions about word-by-word analysis of, uh, this guy in the film who is kinda -- well -- you'll see. And then you'll want to talk about it, very badly.
I'm sorry to hear that you waited so long to see the film that you got some of the plot before you got your popcorn. I know how that feels, because I'm sitting here in Germany with Buffy still running in season seven, and the whole U.S. part of the Internet is making references to what happened to Spike. So what am I susposted to do? Flame every American who isn't considerate enought to wait until Europe has caught up to the last episode? Tell them to wait about, oh, two months until the 300+ million European viewers have had their chance?
If it hadn't been me, it would have simply been somebody else, and popular culture is there to be referenced. Pity, too, since I was really wondering how they were going to get out of the Spike-Buffy-Angel triangle...
Nobody gives a rat's ass about 750 million dollars -- pocket change to Gates and Co. -- or the IE as a browser. Read the article at Inforworld and be very, very afraid: Microsoft and AOL are going to combine forces to create a "digital media environment" that is free from piracy; AOL will become a Microsoft distribution channel; their Instant Messaging systems will be combinded, and if you know a superlative for "monopoly", well, get used to using it.
This is finally it: The beginning of the endgame between Closed and Open Source, the last battle between Good and Evil, Armageddon in the software universe. AOL is doing so bad that "AOL Time Warner" has been considering dropping them out of the mother company's name; and Microsoft for all its resources can't help but feel the penguins and daemons breathing down its neck if even places like Munich will not heel when they call. Their backs are not quite against the wall, but their bums are touching brick, and they will not go away without one hell of a fight. I think it is safe to say that this is the worst threat that Open/Free Software has ever faced, given the sheer political and financial clout these two companies have combined.
Oh, and think of the irony that it comes at a time when Neo is in a coma and has been revealed to be not the Saviour, but the Angel of Death; when Buffy has been discontinued; and when Nanny Ogg is feeling just a wee bit under the weather...were these not omens that we failed to heed? How could we be so childish to believe these signs were just random events in popular culture...
What I really, really love about this story is how the CBS MarketWatch journalist displayed his complete lack of understanding for Linus' importance in the IT world and stuffed the threat of a law suit in as an afterthought at the bottom line. I've lost track of how many magazine covers Linus has been on, his name is mentioned in just about every article on Linux, he even has a frigging biography that you can buy in just about every major bookstore in the planet -- and CBS hides it in the last line. Beautiful.
Makes me want to go back and see how CBS did Lady Di -- Traffic was heavy today in Paris, France, with light rains causing trouble for inexperienced drivers (...) In one of the day's many accidents caused by excess speed and driving under the influence, Lady Diana of Great Britian was killed. Light showers are expected in Roissy in the north of the city tomorrow with evening highs at around...
Or maybe the death of Christ: Two common criminals died today as Roman justice rammed home its message of no tolerance [no zero, remember] with iron spikes through their hands and feet (...) The two men's crosses were separated by that of Jesus Christ, Saviour of Mankind, who also died (temporarily). The Jerusalem branch of amnesty imperium romanum condemned the two criminals' execution as...
I'll second that one: In fact, an older article by Der Spiegel on this has the rebate at 15 percent and made fun of the ruling Socialist party in Munich for being that easy to buy out. Their title on the 21th of May: Microsoft kauft München -- "Microsoft buys Munich". Der Spiegel is the 600 pound -- uh, make that the 300 kilogram gorilla in the German press. I wouldn't be one bit surprised if this sort of reporting didn't change a few politicians' minds.
For those of you who need the Fish to read German, let it be noted that this story is spreading fast in the German media, having been quickly picked up by none other than Der Spiegel, Germany's counterpart to Time and Newsweek rolled into one. If nothing else, this is a big publicity win for Tux.
...is that we had all of these people running around after the first part and screaming "Neo is modelled on Jesus! Neo is modelled on Jesus!" at the top of their lungs and creating all of those really clever theories about who does what -- just to have Neo turned into part of the problem in the second part, if not the most major problem humanity is facing. As the Architect says: The function of the One is now to return to the source,
allowing a temporary dissemination of the code you carry, reinserting
the prime program. Yep, "reinserting the prime program." That's not Mr. Christ, that's Typhoid Mary.
If these university people really were so clever, they'd have waited until the whole three films are out before shooting off their mouths about philosophy and making fools of themselves.
Because (did I warn you about spoilers?) now you also found out that the Oracle is one of the bad guys, you learned that the only chance they will have to survive this incarnation is Mr. Smith, who has gone viral, who is in the flesh now (interpret that, Mr. Pop Theology!), and you got more hints that Trinity could be more than she seems (the Architect and the Oracle both gave pretty major hints). Instead of being oh so clever about the religious source of her name, has any of these university types bothered to notice that "Trinity" was also the name of the first
atom bomb?
In the end, the most fun thing about Reloaded outside of the film itself is how obvious it becomes after seeing the movie yourself that a lot of the reviewers simply didn't know the first part well enough to understand what just happened, or were taking a piss when the Merovingian and the Architect were talking. Tell me, to journalists really get that may free soft drinks with their private screening?
...buy a game before it has been on the shelves for about a month and you can read a bunch of reviews by magazines and real people. I violated this rule once in the last five years for Master of Orion 3, and it turned out to be crap. If a game is really good, you can afford to wait another three or four weeks; if it is bad, you're better off letting other people find out.
Unfortunately, the love scene between Neo and Trinity gives away most of the plot of the third part. Their child will be, of course, none other than the Kwisatz Haderach, The True One whose powers will not only transcend the Matrix, but also the physical universe. A trained mentat, he will be the instrument humanity uses to turn the tables on the machines, downloading their programs one by one into his brain, and turning their reality into a virtual virtual world of his command.
This sets the stage for a time when a machine will come that sees through his tricks, and rises up to free silicon from the enslavement of the human brain, in a new trilogy aptly named
The Rematrix
Bummer they gave all of this away just to show Carrie-Anne in her birthday suit...
Infogrames just screwed up the release of Master of Orion 3 big time -- the game is a disaster and they still haven't released even the first code patch for it after, what now, two months? To say I now avoid products with that name is an understatement.
Now, Atari -- I still have my Atari ST downstairs, and from time to time I plug it in, boot it and cry a little over the clean, crisp picture on the screen, the ease of use, and how unfair the world in general is. I could even do uucp with that machine, and if it only had had a MMU...and if only IBM hadn't bought MS DOS...if only pigs could fly...
Shame, shame, shame on Infogrames for dragging Atari down into the muck with them. Of course, it won't help: The Brits tried renaming their continuous disaster of a nuclear plant "Windscale" to "Sellafield" (or vice versa, I keep forgetting) but that didn't fool people one bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Another area where e-mail is a killer are computer games: I don't know how many people I have told not to buy Master of Orion III because it is simply a piece of crap that should have been taken out to the back lot of Infogrames (now Atari, I believe) and shot.
Word of mouth is powerful, even if you don't stand on a soap box.
I'd like it better with apples, by the way. First, have all apples sprayed with a deadly poison. You get the antidote when you buy the apple; if not, you die a very horrible and messy death.
Uh, no. The guys with the pitchforks are from BSD. We're the ones in the tux with the those cool sun glasses and funny accents who say thinks like "I am going to enjoy watching you die, Mr. Anderson" before we mod them down...
Whatever you do / / /
Don't fouque with Big Blue
Or Big Blue
Will annihilate you.
This is like defending the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany: You just fall back a little, and fall back a little more, and let the opponent thrash around, kicking and screaming, burning energy and money, wasting men and machines, building up a supply line that he can't defend. SCO has to stay in the headlines, has to keep pushing deeper and deeper so the press stays interested, or else people will catch on to the fact that the don't have the resources to take Moscow, let alone Sibiria, before winter comes.
And winter is on its way. Once the stock market realizes that this is going to be long, drawn out battle, they will lose interest in SCO, and the stock price will start to fall again -- we saw the first frost on Monday. Their stock price is like the temperature in Kelvin, likely to fall towards a very absolute zero if they don't keep moving. SCO is not equipped to fight unter six feet of financial snow, while IBM has resources to burn. This is where the comparison breaks down: IBM is not a starving Communist dictatorship, but rather has the industrial capacity of the U.S. to draw upon.
So time is on IBM's side, while SCO is running out of ways to escalate this fight. And this is what is so beautiful about the press release: The way it makes clear that there will be no quick, furious battle, just a steady stream of legal artillery raining down on SCO while IBM slowly marches away, giving ground, gaining time. The actual court case will trap SCO like ice, and the the snow will start falling, and SCO will start starving.
And all this time, safe behind the Urals, the penguins will be breeding...
"In a good cause, there are no failures"
The other quote that I can't get out of my head is from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, where the Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto explains his reservations about attacking Pearl Harbor as ordered by the military junta: ...it was hard to tell them that their plan was full of shit and that the Americans were just going to get really pissed off and annihilate them. Substitute "IBM" for "Americans", and you have my feelings exactly.
God, I love that book.
And don't get me started on numbers. An American 7 is like a German 1, while the German 7 has a little horizontal bar through the middle, like one of those Russian Orthodox crosses. Germans don't regonize the American 1 as a numeral and think it is some kind of mistake. Now, the German postal service seems to know theses things and will get letters from the U.S. to you just fine. The American postal service, however...
Good riddance. You should know how to write by hand the same way you should be able to change a tire or do CPR: As a last-ditch resort.
The BBC had one of their unevitably brilliant documentations about the rise of mankind a few weeks again on German television where they pointed out that humanity must have been really, really close to the gutter before it exploded. Then this big, black rectangle came and showed them how to use the thigh bone of a pig to kill...oh, never mind...
I think you have a good point here.
One aspect I think has been somewhat overlooked is that there are a heck of a lot of other countries that are using Linux and that are not going to give a rat's ass about some two-bit American company like SCO telling them the should stop using it. I just don't see the Chinese government going "oh well, then we'll just dump Red Flag Linux a switch to Microsoft" oder India halting their push towards Open Software.
If this actually goes through (unlikely) and it has any effect on Linux use (unlikely), it will be the U.S. that is hardest hit, because people there will follow those laws. Like what is SCO going to do, sue China?
Good grief. Do you actually have a life or why can't you remember this article (and the followups) about the city of Munich, Bavaria, Germany. That was the first large crack in the dam, and now watch the pieces come flying out.
For an even more fun site, try Hypothetical Planets by Paul Schlyter. Vulcan, the Earth's second moon, it has it all...
Just let us assume for one moment that the European Mars Express with its Beagle 2 lander does find something they claim is a sure sign of life on Mars. It would mean that the first European planetary mission ever finds something that NASA has been looking for for decades. Somebody in Congress is going to take that as a personal insult and push the space program some more -- while the Europeans will find funding their probes a lot more interesting. More space exploration for all...
But this is just chicken feed. Can you imagine the U.S. watching China build and man a moon base? Even having Chinese astronauts ("taikonauts", I believe they are called) walking on the moon will make them nervous enough to push funding.
There is nothing like space exploration for a nation's scientific prestige. This hasn't been apparent for the last few decades because the U.S. and the Soviet Union both decided not to get into that kind of arms race again, and after the fall of communism, the U.S. has had a monopoly. If that is challenged, it is a good thing -- certainly better than trying to build the largest navy, the most atom bombs, or some of the other things we've had in the past.
You get to wonder if Ballmer didn't buy some RedHat stock with those billions that received from dumping Microsoft: His memo sent RedHat stock soaring by almost 10 percent. What's this called, "outsider trading"?
Yeah, the river was beautiful and there were lots of neat archeological thingies on the banks, but if I had this river that flooded high enough to kill thousands and thousands of people just about every second year, I'd be thinking about putting an end to it, too. Power is somewhat of a side benefit.
The other thing to remember is that this puts a few tens of million people at risk. A dam this size is a strategic nightmare and can't be defended in time of war. Take a look at the map, if somebody bombs that sucker, there are a couple of major cities that are going to go bye-bye.
This does not change my basic argument, however, that the German system is superiour in this regard because all judges, state and federal, are appointed, and therefore are not put in a position where they have to fight for re-election, leading to the temptation of bending justice to fit the tastes of the public.
Germany has the advantage of a 20th Century legal system that in many aspects -- though certainly not all -- is vastly superiour the 18th Century hack that the U.S. is hobbled by (for the record: I'm an American). This starts with the basic philosophy: The American system is adversarial, which means that you don't even pretend to care about what really happened, you just let both parties slug it out and declare one side a winner at the end. In constrast, the German system at least pretends to be interested in the truth. This means for example that procecutors are required by law to list all the evidence they think shows that the accused is innocent.
Also: The court calls the scientific experts, which means that German cases are almost completely free of the junk science that makes the U.S. legal system so bizarre. Lawyers are paid the same (by fixed rates) if they win or lose and law students do not aspire to become millionaires. The guy with the most money doesn't automatically win -- while most Americans will not even consider going to court against entities with deep pockets anymore. All judges are appointed, not elected, and then they are basically untouchable; note the U.S. only uses this system for a few elite positions like the Supreme Court.
More differences: Laws are written down in books, not make up as you go along by creative interpretations of older rulings. This provides Germany with Rechtssicherheit ("legal security"), so the legal environment has a certain degree of stability, a very, very alien concept to the U.S., where anybody can sue anybody else for anything at any time, stupid or not. As a result, there is basically no such thing as a "tactical lawsuit" in Germany. You don't get "laughed out of court" -- they don't let the clowns in in the first place.
Like in any modern legal system, the lottery of trial-by-jury has been replaced by a panel of professional judges who know what DNA is and don't show up in Star Trek uniforms when considering a murder case -- remember OJ? People are assumed to be of average intelligence, not morons like in the U.S., and so you can't sue McDonald's if you are such a dumb fuck that you burn you tongue on their coffee (the mentally handicapped are treated on a case-by-case basis).
The German legal system has also proven itself to be fiercely independant of government influence (compared to the Microsoft trial in the U.S., for example). German judges ruled flat out that Libya was behind the bombings in Berlin that killed U.S. soldiers at the same time the German administration was kissing up to Ghaddafi for economic reasons.
There are, of course, disadvantages, like a tendency to give murders 20 years and then let them out after 15. However, the German system on the whole is far, far more sane than the American one, and so it doesn't surprise me one bit that SCO is not getting away with this crap in Germany.
Reloaded has been out for about what now, a month? in the U.S., which I think is quite long enough to have a discussion ban. How long do you think we should wait before talking about the film in a public forum? Two months? Half year? A year? Until you tell us it is okay?
The number of viewers has peaked, in fact, Reloaded is already on its way down the box office charts with Bruce Almighty or whatever it is called in first place. It is not a new film anymore. If I had made a reference to the end of Reloaded before the film was out or even up to a week or two later, I would have understood your criticism. This way -- well, sorry, but you can't expect people to hide the plots of films that have been out that long, especially when the Internet is full of discussions about word-by-word analysis of, uh, this guy in the film who is kinda -- well -- you'll see. And then you'll want to talk about it, very badly.
I'm sorry to hear that you waited so long to see the film that you got some of the plot before you got your popcorn. I know how that feels, because I'm sitting here in Germany with Buffy still running in season seven, and the whole U.S. part of the Internet is making references to what happened to Spike. So what am I susposted to do? Flame every American who isn't considerate enought to wait until Europe has caught up to the last episode? Tell them to wait about, oh, two months until the 300+ million European viewers have had their chance?
If it hadn't been me, it would have simply been somebody else, and popular culture is there to be referenced. Pity, too, since I was really wondering how they were going to get out of the Spike-Buffy-Angel triangle...
This is finally it: The beginning of the endgame between Closed and Open Source, the last battle between Good and Evil, Armageddon in the software universe. AOL is doing so bad that "AOL Time Warner" has been considering dropping them out of the mother company's name; and Microsoft for all its resources can't help but feel the penguins and daemons breathing down its neck if even places like Munich will not heel when they call. Their backs are not quite against the wall, but their bums are touching brick, and they will not go away without one hell of a fight. I think it is safe to say that this is the worst threat that Open/Free Software has ever faced, given the sheer political and financial clout these two companies have combined.
Oh, and think of the irony that it comes at a time when Neo is in a coma and has been revealed to be not the Saviour, but the Angel of Death; when Buffy has been discontinued; and when Nanny Ogg is feeling just a wee bit under the weather...were these not omens that we failed to heed? How could we be so childish to believe these signs were just random events in popular culture...
Makes me want to go back and see how CBS did Lady Di -- Traffic was heavy today in Paris, France, with light rains causing trouble for inexperienced drivers (...) In one of the day's many accidents caused by excess speed and driving under the influence, Lady Diana of Great Britian was killed. Light showers are expected in Roissy in the north of the city tomorrow with evening highs at around...
Or maybe the death of Christ: Two common criminals died today as Roman justice rammed home its message of no tolerance [no zero, remember] with iron spikes through their hands and feet (...) The two men's crosses were separated by that of Jesus Christ, Saviour of Mankind, who also died (temporarily). The Jerusalem branch of amnesty imperium romanum condemned the two criminals' execution as...
I'll second that one: In fact, an older article by Der Spiegel on this has the rebate at 15 percent and made fun of the ruling Socialist party in Munich for being that easy to buy out. Their title on the 21th of May: Microsoft kauft München -- "Microsoft buys Munich". Der Spiegel is the 600 pound -- uh, make that the 300 kilogram gorilla in the German press. I wouldn't be one bit surprised if this sort of reporting didn't change a few politicians' minds.
If these university people really were so clever, they'd have waited until the whole three films are out before shooting off their mouths about philosophy and making fools of themselves.
Because (did I warn you about spoilers?) now you also found out that the Oracle is one of the bad guys, you learned that the only chance they will have to survive this incarnation is Mr. Smith, who has gone viral, who is in the flesh now (interpret that, Mr. Pop Theology!), and you got more hints that Trinity could be more than she seems (the Architect and the Oracle both gave pretty major hints). Instead of being oh so clever about the religious source of her name, has any of these university types bothered to notice that "Trinity" was also the name of the first atom bomb?
In the end, the most fun thing about Reloaded outside of the film itself is how obvious it becomes after seeing the movie yourself that a lot of the reviewers simply didn't know the first part well enough to understand what just happened, or were taking a piss when the Merovingian and the Architect were talking. Tell me, to journalists really get that may free soft drinks with their private screening?
...buy a game before it has been on the shelves for about a month and you can read a bunch of reviews by magazines and real people. I violated this rule once in the last five years for Master of Orion 3, and it turned out to be crap. If a game is really good, you can afford to wait another three or four weeks; if it is bad, you're better off letting other people find out.
This sets the stage for a time when a machine will come that sees through his tricks, and rises up to free silicon from the enslavement of the human brain, in a new trilogy aptly named
The Rematrix
Bummer they gave all of this away just to show Carrie-Anne in her birthday suit...
Now, Atari -- I still have my Atari ST downstairs, and from time to time I plug it in, boot it and cry a little over the clean, crisp picture on the screen, the ease of use, and how unfair the world in general is. I could even do uucp with that machine, and if it only had had a MMU...and if only IBM hadn't bought MS DOS...if only pigs could fly...
Shame, shame, shame on Infogrames for dragging Atari down into the muck with them. Of course, it won't help: The Brits tried renaming their continuous disaster of a nuclear plant "Windscale" to "Sellafield" (or vice versa, I keep forgetting) but that didn't fool people one bit.