Boxey. Later became "Troy" in Battlestar Galactica 1980. I'm terribly embarassed to admit that I not only know that, but remember it. Let's all play the when-I-was-a-kid-I-liked-bad-scifi humiliation game! Remember how k3wl we all thought it was when Count Iblis (Iblis is the Arabic name for the Devil) turned out to have the same voice as the Cylon Imperious Leader?
If you think Monet is half as good as Botticelli (The Calumny of Appelles, Primavera), Titian (Venus of Urbino, Flora), or Rembrandt (Storm on the Sea of Galilei, etc.) than that pretty much invalidates everything else you say.
You see - standards are always a sliding scale. Farscape is a decent fun show that on rare occasions can approach to being art. Monet is halfway decent art that can on occasion approach masterpiece status.
Saying that Farscape is good is a perfectly valid application of Sturgeon's Law: relative to what television is, it's in the 5%. You will never see a television analog to The Odyssey or to The Calumny of Apelles because the form isn't capable of sustanining that kind of sophistication. But then again, no viewer is really capable of sustaining that degree of attention and appreciation for fine art over every moment of every day. One needs to have a little light fun, and Farscape is perfect for that.
Looking down your nose at something you don't know much about is easy; really evaluating a work's intentions is hard.
At some point, seeing actual science fiction will be a rare oddity on SciFi, but hopefully by attracting more viewers and more advertisers with 'phony' scifi, they will be able to subsidize the production of REAL scifi to be published on other channels...hopefully.
Problem with that scenario is that you have to be committed to your genre to entertain the idea. The reality is that the current "leadership" at Sci Fi doesn't see the difference between SF and Element Press sort of stuff.
The show itself was in response to Babylon 5. JMS pitched B5 to Paramount as a ST series, iirc. But DS9 decided not to be as dark. Frankly, I think the last 4 or so seasons of DS9 were consistently better than all but the best B5 eps (Fall of Centauri Prime, for instance). For one thing, most of the acting was better, and all of the writing (the good actors in B5 got way too cliched lines to deal with).
It is in Fountains of Paradise. As you can guess from the handle, I've read the novel a couple of times. (I've also read the Indian playwright who was the real holder of the name, though only in translation; the real Sri Lankan prince the Kalidasa character in Clarke's novel is based upon had a different name, I think.)
If, theoretically, the USG saw all the source code, couldn't citizens then solicit that same information (the source code) under the Freedom of Information Act?
Government rights in commercial data are often quite seriously limited, even when the government pays for the data: usually there are "for Government Use Only" disclaimers and the like. IANAL.
Of course, all of these code peeks exclude the encryption, authentication, and other "secret" libraries, which is why MS is willing to (and able to) do this in the first place. I'd bet that any trade secret level code is unviewable.
If true, it won't do China any good, as part of their reason for seeing the source code is to make sure there aren't any hidden elint routines in Windows.
This agreement makes absolutely no sense to me: it's a lose-lose situation - MS risks having their source code leaked to every government contractor in China, and (unless they are given 100% code access and the right to compile their own copies) China gets no real assurances.
China is not at the moment a declared enemy of the US, a requirement for a treason conviction. Indeed, China has most-favored-nation trading status and normalized relations, which I am pretty sure would be mutually incompatible with enemy state status.
Remember, they didn't feel they could get a treason conviction for John Walker Lindh.
Worst they could get would be an ITAR violation, I suspect (IANAL).
The interesting point to me: what makes Redmond think that the Chinese government isn't going to just mine the code to create their own OS? Chinese copyright law is not as, well, forceful as US law; and we know that China has been considering creating home-grown computers, apps, and operating systems. What could they do (MS) if a Chinese corporation suddenly came out with a Windows clone that claimed to be based upon Wine but was really based upon the original Windows code? I can imagine a gray market Red Windows cropping up around 2006 to take MS's Asian market away from them.
That's a problem with closed source: the minute you open the door a crack, you're forced to rely upon law enforcement to give you any kind of IP protection - so then you're basically in the same IP position as open source, but without the moral high ground.
Gee, the anti-telezapper device sounds like a security defeating technology to me. Anybody care to try DMCA?
(Yes, it's a BIG stretch, but why the hell not? Might get them lobbying against the DMCA...)
Actually, WordPerfect's UI was far superior to OpenOffice's (though OpenOffice's text handling is much better). It's a shame that Corel has left WordPerfect to stagnate all these years.
Well, you might tell them to stop the "audit" model they're using and the "disgruntled employee" model and instead just go with things like double registrations, requiring registration on protected software, etc. The audit model inconveniences even the innocent, and the disgruntled employee model encourages perjury.
Patents do not force you to license, no. But they do force you to publish the process that is patented, and that allows competitors to adopt the process at the end of the patent. Maybe patents for software wouldn't be such a bad idea, if the terms were limited enough (say 3 - 5 years?).
We are at war with East Asia!! We have always been at war with East Asia!! [[Announcement]] We are at war with Eurasia!! We have always been at war with Eurasia!!
and there is evidence that ancient cultures like the Athenians knew about them too,
Look up "Pythagoras." There isn't just evidence that the Greeks knew about the relationship between mathematical rhythyms and emotions, we've got fragments from their theses on the subject. And even a few surviving works on music (including the very, very important passages in Plato's Republic.
Depends upon who owns the set. If the set is actually owned by Whedon's production company, another network might have paid to take down the set and move it to their lot? (I'm no TV production genius, just a wild guess.)
The upgrade price directly from 6.0 to 6.5 was a lot more than $19, iirc. More like $49, I think, which is the price of the upgrade from 6.5 to 7.0. And many of us bought the program when there was an upgrade price from BBEdit Lite (free) to BBEdit ($79, or so).
BBEdit has a much shorter learning curve than emacs. OTOH, it's also much less powerful.
If you take Lisp out of emacs, BBEdit is only somewhat less powerful. For everyday text editor users, BBEdit is a nice way to go.
Still, I think it needs more features to compete with the editors I use on the Windows platform; which is a shame. Give BBEdit the kind of Unicode support found in TextEdit (in other words, thoroughly Cocoaize it) and include a nice little workspace pane like the one in HTML-Kit, and I'd never use Windows again.
Absolutely. Shalmaneser's absolute refusal to accept the data on Beninia is the best "waking up of the computer intelligence" moment in sf. (And of course the command that forces Shalmaneser to accept whatever data he's given without running it through his private litmus test is pretty funny, too.)
The best overall sf ai story, though, has to be Golem XIV. http://www.cyberiad.info/english/dziela/golem/gole mpl.htm
You see a posting that seems to elide the distinction between WWW and Internet, and it takes you a minute to realize that the poster does know the difference, he's just trying to be funny.
Either that, or it means that you read slashdot too much.
(PS: I did my final paper in script on an IBM mainframe. At home, I had an 8088 and thought I was the bee's knees. Beat that, gosand.)
False analogy. For one thing, you're not defining what you mean by "deciding the scope of the legal system."
The patent system is being screwed up by lobbying. The patent examiners so far as I know are the ones who are bolluxing everything up, and they're not lawyers. They're just bureaucrats who have been reined in yet. When they start firing patent examiners for gross incompetence, things will sharpen up. But the lobbyist, who represent the corporate interests, don't want that to happen, because an IP policy that favors monopolies favors the existing powers in the corporate world, the ones with the money to pay lobbyists (and make campaign contributions). It's not a matter of conspiracy, but of the nature of the kind of unregulated capitalism that has been developing since the Reagan years.
By serving members, I assume he means senator, congressmen, presidents, and judges. In other words, people with the direct power to create and change law. I suspect the 90% figure is close.
In other words, the people whose job it is to 1. write the laws (senators and congressmen), 2. enforce and execute the laws (the president), and 3. interpret the laws and oversee their execution (judges). Gee, why on EARTH would it be a good idea for them to be lawyers (you know, professional students of... the law).
Slashdot Mirror
Boxey. Later became "Troy" in Battlestar Galactica 1980. I'm terribly embarassed to admit that I not only know that, but remember it. Let's all play the when-I-was-a-kid-I-liked-bad-scifi humiliation game! Remember how k3wl we all thought it was when Count Iblis (Iblis is the Arabic name for the Devil) turned out to have the same voice as the Cylon Imperious Leader?
If you think Monet is half as good as Botticelli (The Calumny of Appelles, Primavera), Titian (Venus of Urbino, Flora), or Rembrandt (Storm on the Sea of Galilei, etc.) than that pretty much invalidates everything else you say.
You see - standards are always a sliding scale. Farscape is a decent fun show that on rare occasions can approach to being art. Monet is halfway decent art that can on occasion approach masterpiece status.
Saying that Farscape is good is a perfectly valid application of Sturgeon's Law: relative to what television is, it's in the 5%. You will never see a television analog to The Odyssey or to The Calumny of Apelles because the form isn't capable of sustanining that kind of sophistication. But then again, no viewer is really capable of sustaining that degree of attention and appreciation for fine art over every moment of every day. One needs to have a little light fun, and Farscape is perfect for that.
Looking down your nose at something you don't know much about is easy; really evaluating a work's intentions is hard.
At some point, seeing actual science fiction will be a rare oddity on SciFi, but hopefully by attracting more viewers and more advertisers with 'phony' scifi, they will be able to subsidize the production of REAL scifi to be published on other channels...hopefully.
Problem with that scenario is that you have to be committed to your genre to entertain the idea. The reality is that the current "leadership" at Sci Fi doesn't see the difference between SF and Element Press sort of stuff.
The show itself was in response to Babylon 5. JMS pitched B5 to Paramount as a ST series, iirc. But DS9 decided not to be as dark. Frankly, I think the last 4 or so seasons of DS9 were consistently better than all but the best B5 eps (Fall of Centauri Prime, for instance). For one thing, most of the acting was better, and all of the writing (the good actors in B5 got way too cliched lines to deal with).
You folks do realize that the name "Starbuck" comes from Melville's *Moby Dick*, right?
It is in Fountains of Paradise. As you can guess from the handle, I've read the novel a couple of times. (I've also read the Indian playwright who was the real holder of the name, though only in translation; the real Sri Lankan prince the Kalidasa character in Clarke's novel is based upon had a different name, I think.)
If, theoretically, the USG saw all the source code, couldn't citizens then solicit that same information (the source code) under the Freedom of Information Act?
Government rights in commercial data are often quite seriously limited, even when the government pays for the data: usually there are "for Government Use Only" disclaimers and the like. IANAL.
Of course, all of these code peeks exclude the encryption, authentication, and other "secret" libraries, which is why MS is willing to (and able to) do this in the first place. I'd bet that any trade secret level code is unviewable.
If true, it won't do China any good, as part of their reason for seeing the source code is to make sure there aren't any hidden elint routines in Windows.
This agreement makes absolutely no sense to me: it's a lose-lose situation - MS risks having their source code leaked to every government contractor in China, and (unless they are given 100% code access and the right to compile their own copies) China gets no real assurances.
China is not at the moment a declared enemy of the US, a requirement for a treason conviction. Indeed, China has most-favored-nation trading status and normalized relations, which I am pretty sure would be mutually incompatible with enemy state status. Remember, they didn't feel they could get a treason conviction for John Walker Lindh. Worst they could get would be an ITAR violation, I suspect (IANAL).
The interesting point to me: what makes Redmond think that the Chinese government isn't going to just mine the code to create their own OS? Chinese copyright law is not as, well, forceful as US law; and we know that China has been considering creating home-grown computers, apps, and operating systems. What could they do (MS) if a Chinese corporation suddenly came out with a Windows clone that claimed to be based upon Wine but was really based upon the original Windows code? I can imagine a gray market Red Windows cropping up around 2006 to take MS's Asian market away from them.
That's a problem with closed source: the minute you open the door a crack, you're forced to rely upon law enforcement to give you any kind of IP protection - so then you're basically in the same IP position as open source, but without the moral high ground.
Gee, the anti-telezapper device sounds like a security defeating technology to me. Anybody care to try DMCA? (Yes, it's a BIG stretch, but why the hell not? Might get them lobbying against the DMCA...)
Actually, WordPerfect's UI was far superior to OpenOffice's (though OpenOffice's text handling is much better). It's a shame that Corel has left WordPerfect to stagnate all these years.
Well, you might tell them to stop the "audit" model they're using and the "disgruntled employee" model and instead just go with things like double registrations, requiring registration on protected software, etc. The audit model inconveniences even the innocent, and the disgruntled employee model encourages perjury.
Patents do not force you to license, no. But they do force you to publish the process that is patented, and that allows competitors to adopt the process at the end of the patent. Maybe patents for software wouldn't be such a bad idea, if the terms were limited enough (say 3 - 5 years?).
(I fully expect to be modded down for this, but what the hell. I have karma to burn)
Kalidasa's first law of slashdot: any poster who mentions that he expects to be modded down will invariably be modded +5 insightful.
We are at war with East Asia!! We have always been at war with East Asia!! [[Announcement]] We are at war with Eurasia!! We have always been at war with Eurasia!!
How about the machines in the Ministry of Information in 1984? The ones that churn out pop hits for the proles?
and there is evidence that ancient cultures like the Athenians knew about them too,
Look up "Pythagoras." There isn't just evidence that the Greeks knew about the relationship between mathematical rhythyms and emotions, we've got fragments from their theses on the subject. And even a few surviving works on music (including the very, very important passages in Plato's Republic.
Depends upon who owns the set. If the set is actually owned by Whedon's production company, another network might have paid to take down the set and move it to their lot? (I'm no TV production genius, just a wild guess.)
The upgrade price directly from 6.0 to 6.5 was a lot more than $19, iirc. More like $49, I think, which is the price of the upgrade from 6.5 to 7.0. And many of us bought the program when there was an upgrade price from BBEdit Lite (free) to BBEdit ($79, or so).
BBEdit has a much shorter learning curve than emacs. OTOH, it's also much less powerful.
If you take Lisp out of emacs, BBEdit is only somewhat less powerful. For everyday text editor users, BBEdit is a nice way to go.
Still, I think it needs more features to compete with the editors I use on the Windows platform; which is a shame. Give BBEdit the kind of Unicode support found in TextEdit (in other words, thoroughly Cocoaize it) and include a nice little workspace pane like the one in HTML-Kit, and I'd never use Windows again.
Absolutely. Shalmaneser's absolute refusal to accept the data on Beninia is the best "waking up of the computer intelligence" moment in sf. (And of course the command that forces Shalmaneser to accept whatever data he's given without running it through his private litmus test is pretty funny, too.)
The best overall sf ai story, though, has to be Golem XIV. http://www.cyberiad.info/english/dziela/golem/gole mpl.htm
You know you are old when:
You see a posting that seems to elide the distinction between WWW and Internet, and it takes you a minute to realize that the poster does know the difference, he's just trying to be funny.
Either that, or it means that you read slashdot too much.
(PS: I did my final paper in script on an IBM mainframe. At home, I had an 8088 and thought I was the bee's knees. Beat that, gosand.)
False analogy. For one thing, you're not defining what you mean by "deciding the scope of the legal system." The patent system is being screwed up by lobbying. The patent examiners so far as I know are the ones who are bolluxing everything up, and they're not lawyers. They're just bureaucrats who have been reined in yet. When they start firing patent examiners for gross incompetence, things will sharpen up. But the lobbyist, who represent the corporate interests, don't want that to happen, because an IP policy that favors monopolies favors the existing powers in the corporate world, the ones with the money to pay lobbyists (and make campaign contributions). It's not a matter of conspiracy, but of the nature of the kind of unregulated capitalism that has been developing since the Reagan years.
By serving members, I assume he means senator, congressmen, presidents, and judges. In other words, people with the direct power to create and change law. I suspect the 90% figure is close.
In other words, the people whose job it is to 1. write the laws (senators and congressmen), 2. enforce and execute the laws (the president), and 3. interpret the laws and oversee their execution (judges). Gee, why on EARTH would it be a good idea for them to be lawyers (you know, professional students of ... the law).
You have no idea what you're talking about. Go back, read some Karl Popper, and then get back to me.