to cite Halo again, the world it's situated in is arguably as rich as any literary fantasy world.
Your kidding right? Maybe there is lots of background stuff at the Bungee offices, but the amount of stuff released about the Halo world (Including novels and I Love Bees) so far isn't nearly as much as something like, say, Middle Earth, which has it's entire history laid out and whole languages created.
If you want contenders for rich worlds in computer games, I'd look at ones based on pencil and paper RPGS. Settings like Forgotten Realms or the (old) World of Darkness have dozens of supplements with history and detail, novels and the like.
Setting depth of stunning graphics won't make people think of it as art, because there is a strong feeling in out culture that games aren't serious. A strange bias, but I've been around enough "can RPGs be art" debates on the net to know even many gamers feel that way.
When we observe things in space, it take time for the light to reach us. Observations of nearby things may be years old, observation of distant things may be hundred, thousands, or even millions of years old.
So we have observations for a much, much larger time period than we have actually been observing. We also assume that the laws of physics are consistent, we assume if things are moving one way they will keep moving unless we have reason to believe some force will act on them and change that.
So your analogy fails for several reasons.
Re:Question isn't just "Enforcable?", but "Provabl
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The Basics of EULAs
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Most EULAs are in the install process. You literally cannot install the software without it popping up. Ones for online games may pop up every time you connect.
Precident seems to be that courts do accept EULAs, so it sounds like that isn't an issue.
They are good laws... and yet, I've bought plenty of software with defects in the UK. I've never heard of anyone taking it to court. Anybody got any examples?
Re:An EULA is no real contract in Germany
on
The Basics of EULAs
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· Score: 1
If you agree every time you log on, and you have logged on enough times, isn't that going to be proof of the contract by any reasonable standard?
Particularly if at least once you have to put in credit card details to pay the subscription. Are you say that doesn't count in Germany? If so, how does buying anything via the web work?
Why would someone who buys something on ebay think that Blizzard is involved in anyway with the transaction?
The item "exists" on the server owned by Blizzard both before and after the trasnaction. It can be argued (and I think the EULAs do) that they own the virtual item anyway, not the sellter. That makes it rather different from the car example.
But if it cost more, there would be less demand (unless it became a status symbol, where costing more could up the demand).
When music cost more, there is less demand, when it cost less there is more, when it is free, there is even more. For different prices, different levels of demand. Very basic economics.
You're advocating the government seizure of private property without compensation here.
Private intellectual
property, which isn't the same thing at all. In fact, the only way to "seize" intellectual property is to seize the limited time monopoly. If the government just makes a copy, but the owner still has the rights, how can it be considered seized?
Granted, the damage you do to the value of intellectual property by copying it is much less than the damage done to the value of real estate by bulldozing it, by the underlying concept is very much the same.
It really isn't, because despite being called intellectual "property", the principles and concepts behind the forms of intellectual property are very different from physical property, and indeed between types of intellectual property.
Remember, the whole point of IP laws originally was for the public good. If a government keeping a record serves that it is in the original spirit of the laws.
Blogs have been badly skewing search engines for a while now, so it is just brining back some balance. The blog will still count, but not the comments.
How is an automated system going to recognise a blog? Or should they keep huge, wasteful, manual lists?
It is easy to say "implement a better system", but if it was that easy, don't you think all the web search companies would being doing it?
The fact that it isn't just Google involved should be a good inidicator that counting links is common practice in search engines these days, becuase it works better than what they had before (counting word occurances or looking in meta tags).
If you have a wonderful new search algorithm, go make you fortune with it.
I think the problem with a lot of those things is they must make it very hard to tell interesting stories. ST:TNG brought back Sc-Fi to the small screen, but watching it now, man a lot of it sucks, and is dull and predictable. It was already recycling it's own plots.
Characters need some flaws to be interesting, humans who are better than us, a lack of conflict between the main characters, a utopia Earth are all pretty dull. You can't get much out of them.
If I had to write with those limitations, I'd hate them too. What can you do? Another space-time anomaly solved by technobable? Another holodeck malfunction? Another peace negotiation (that always works, never falls through and turns into war)?. Another Q messes with the crew? About the only thing TNG did well was actuall scary Borg (before the movie and Voyager messed that up).
Once DS9 developed an ongoing plot it absolutely kicked arse. Darker, with some more flawed characters and a more flawed federation, it was much more interesting.
New music styles don't seem to originate in the charts either, or bust on the scene with big hits. Rather they come from clubs and gigs and gain a growing 'underground' popularity first, before they burst on the mainstream. You can't gauge these growing trends by comparing to past hit records, part of the popularity is the difference anyway.
The singles chart is already far, far less relevant than it used to be. The more efforts like this homogenise it, the smaller the group it will appeal to, and the less relevant it will be. I'm sure there will always be a market selling manufactured bands to teenage girls, but I would be happy if it was a smaller niche.
Right now I enjoy a largely ad free web, so I guess I'm "winning" There isn't any sign of adblockers having a much (or any) impact on ad revenues or site not being available either.
Just because someone works in an office or with computers, doesn't make it their life.
Some guy sitting in a queue for months hardly ranks up with artists and painters and writers. These thing all require a degree of technical skill, sitting in a queue doesn't. I don't know where you get the idea "Hackers and painters used to understand each other" from, since it is completely unsupported. If true though, I suspect it is because both deal with something that requires both technical skill and creativity.
Just because something has no point (and plenty of art does have a point, why do you think the history of art is so tied to religion and politics?) and provokes a reaction, doesn't make it art. Otherwise just about everything would be art. A pointless activity can really just be pointless, in if you count it as art because it proves the reaction "what a dumbass", you have much lower standards than many.
Telling someone to get a life doesn't mean the person saying it feels threatened by them or wants them to conform. Plenty of people make life choices I never would, or don't conform to my ideals but that's OK. The world would be boring otherwise. But some people not doing that also happen to be really wasting their time.
Likewise, saying it isn't showing disdain towards artists, because I bet these people don;t consider him an artist (I don't). I'd say claiming every piece of dumb ass activity as 'art' does much more to demein those people who are actually creative and skilled as well as producing something that proves and intellectual or emotional response.
Indeed, I think the term status of artist has lost respect, as now all you need to do is get anything in a museum and call it art, get a few critics to comment on it. Or, apparently, camp in a queue for months. If you don't have to be skilled to be an artist (except in convincing people your stuff is art), people won't hold artists in the same regard.
Wow, I'm impressed. It isn't like Asimov or any of the other writers working in his universe ever thought of first law conflicts and people lying to and manipulating robots, or robots faced with a conflict making bad choices based on faulty information. It isn't like whole stories are based on it.
The point of the law in the setting is to try to get the robot to make the 'right' choice. Humans, and later robots themselves, spend a lot of time thinking about how they should make that choice when faced with a conflict.
What would the robot do? Well the early, more privative ones would probably seize up on the spot as it couldn't find a way out and the same features that stop it breaking a law would basically turns it's brain into scrap (doesn't sound like a great design to me, but these are stories and it's dramatic.
More sophisticated robots would do what humans do, they would weight up the evidence (they don't believe something just because a human says it is true) and try whatever action they thought would minimise harm done, however they were programmed to rate 'harm'. They might or might not seize up or have problems afterwards depending on how much conflict they experienced.
Off topic and over-long, but I wanted to point out the first law is neither screwed up or pointless.
I'm pretty sure auto update is a seperate little program, as it downloads windows and IE (since they are now inseperable) updates in the background. AFAIK it isn't linked with IE's many security flaws and ways you can trick it's trust settings to get it to run your own code.
I'd tell you instead you are getting you models and names confused. Communism is a political model, the economic model is a command economy (also known as centrally planned). Democracy is a political model, free market is an economic one most commonly associated with it.
Now, it is true the political beliefs of Communism are against free-market economics, but you can have a command economy under, say, a democratic political system, quite common in wartime.
I'd also point out that the problem with Communist government is, based on the historical evidence, much more vulnerable to being subverted by greed and personal interest, on a larger scale, and with more drastic results. Also, the command economy has a weakness of inefficiency, and being controlled by the political structure, corruption there makes is worse.
This doesn't mean the democratic political system, and the free market economic ones, don't have problems with greed, corruption, lack of ethics and so on. Both systems though do assume a self-interest as a prime motivating factor right from the beginning, so they are a bit more robust. Individual bad things happen, but the whole system isn't thrown off kilter. So far they haven't produced anything like the suffering from Stalin's purges, farm collectivisation and the like.
Your three questions were not, in fact, actually questions, but here we go.
1) Yes, if it could work without costing too much. Not that it is my country or anything, but it wouldn't seem as stupid as it does now.
2) Food aid feeds people, big science discovers things. The non-functional missile shield does what?
3) It is true that people said "it will never work" about many things that did later work. However, they also said "it will never work" about lots of things that did not, in fact, ever work. There may be no unknown science, but it is a very hard problem, and one that can be countered relatively cheaply.
Doesn't the Pentagon count a Patriot intercept as a "success" if the Patriot detonates within a certain distance of the target? Even if that doesn't stop the incoming missile?
The failures of the Patriot have been pretty widely publicised (not actually taking out missiles, shooting down friendly aircraft because of the flaws in the automatic recognition system). Or maybe it is all the liberal media conipirercy?
I wonder if they will count nuke interceptors the same way? I'm sure that would be a great consolation if you were killed by an ICBM, that it was officially intercepted.
I think your confusing "happy unintended consequences" with "success". It wasn't like it was planned that that would happen, the coup could have had much worse results.
Technically SDI and it's current successor suck, and probably will for a long time. If they do start to work, the best way to defeat them is build more missiles, a not so great consequence.
Americans and Europeans have just done what humans have done to each other throughout history, they were just better at it.
Before the Europeans took control of other countries were they all peaceful and loving? No, they were killing each other. The Spanish destroyed the Aztecs with the help other local tribes that the Aztecs had conquered. The world's largest empire was created and ruled by the Mongols. Just look at the history of Africa or Asia and you will find plenty of wars before the nasty white Europeans showed up.
Just look at Africa now and you will find plenty of fighting, often driven by tribal or religious differences.
It's trendy to blame the white guys for playing "conquer the other guys" better than everyone else, but everyone else was playing too.
The idea that people just want to live in peace requires a wilful ignorance of human history. Humans naturally form groups (tribes, nations whatever). A person may not want violence, but a society tends to fear the other, and groups of humans have always turned on each other. Fear, greed, anger, prejudice, remembrance of past wrongs real or otherwise. Hostility may not come from thin air, but it comes easily enough.
Then there is the issue of respecting others. To respect someone, they have to behave in a way that earns it. Should we have respected the Taliban controlled Afghanistan and the way they treated people? Just chalk it up to cultural differences and ignore it?
Nice rant, with some quality straw men you beat the stuffing out of.
Yes, rebuilding to rediscover lost knowledge or find a better way of doing things is worthwhile. Asking why is very important to human progress. If ReactOS appeared to be doing those things it would appear worthwhile.
The Windows API isn't lost, although it may be guarded by Microsoft. If you want to know why you can join the company, or one in their shared source program. Nobody is reclaiming past glories by figuring it out. NT4 has been done before, not only that is has already been improved on. The ReactOS guys want something more stable, functional and still compatible? Windows 2000, or 2003. They still have a long way to go to get where MS was, and they don't appear to be headed anywhere new after that.
Even if they do find, say, a better way of implementing a registry, hardly anyone benefits because it isn't like this goes back into windows as the vast, vast majority of people use it.
I'm all for pushing the limits and learning about new and better ways, but for all your waxing poetic about pyramids and aqueducts (and here is a hint, your house is worse quality because of cost and quality not lost secret building techniques) none of it seems relevant to the fact that I can't see ReactOS going anywhere new that benefits people.
I can see it as a useful learning experience for the developers, and if they enjoy it, more power to them. The use seems to be entirely in the process, not the result. Nothing wrong with that, but it does leave some people baffled.
The only unique thing ReactOS seems to offer is possibility, one day, of offering the combination of open source, Windows compatibility (without WINE or similar) and that seems a stretch. I can see it ever getting to 100% compatibility, and that means it is going to be less stable when it comes to actually running programs. If they actually got anywhere close to Windows I'm sure MS would lawyer them into oblivion.
Just because some people doing what has been done before leads to progress doesn't mean it all does, or all attempts to do so should be immune from criticism. This is the flaw in your rant's logic. I hope the ReactOS guys have lots of fun, and learn lots, but I completely get why people see the actual results as a bit pointless.
Off topic I know, but the following has to be one of the most stupid ways to try and defend something.
Please don't knock other people's work until you do something more worthwhile yourself. If you have, feel free to submit your own articles...
I've never made a movie or TV show, written a book, or written a (serious) computer game. So, I'm not allowed to criticise any of those things? By your logic, almost nobody could criticise anything.
As for how impressive ReatOS is, the amount they have done for the resources maybe impressive, but that doesn't mean the results, on their own merits are. I hope the developers are enjoying their work, but it doesn't seem very worth while to me, they may want an open source windows clone, but what they have is an open source OS that runs some limited subset of things an old version of windows does, sometimes.
What they want seems useful, but what they have, or are ever likely to have, doesn't. Of course, if they enjoy it, it is perfectly worthwhile to do.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the Great Dying, about 250 million years ago. The dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago.
to cite Halo again, the world it's situated in is arguably as rich as any literary fantasy world.
Your kidding right? Maybe there is lots of background stuff at the Bungee offices, but the amount of stuff released about the Halo world (Including novels and I Love Bees) so far isn't nearly as much as something like, say, Middle Earth, which has it's entire history laid out and whole languages created.
If you want contenders for rich worlds in computer games, I'd look at ones based on pencil and paper RPGS. Settings like Forgotten Realms or the (old) World of Darkness have dozens of supplements with history and detail, novels and the like.
Setting depth of stunning graphics won't make people think of it as art, because there is a strong feeling in out culture that games aren't serious. A strange bias, but I've been around enough "can RPGs be art" debates on the net to know even many gamers feel that way.
You are forgetting the speed of light
When we observe things in space, it take time for the light to reach us. Observations of nearby things may be years old, observation of distant things may be hundred, thousands, or even millions of years old.
So we have observations for a much, much larger time period than we have actually been observing. We also assume that the laws of physics are consistent, we assume if things are moving one way they will keep moving unless we have reason to believe some force will act on them and change that.
So your analogy fails for several reasons.
Most EULAs are in the install process. You literally cannot install the software without it popping up. Ones for online games may pop up every time you connect.
Precident seems to be that courts do accept EULAs, so it sounds like that isn't an issue.
They are good laws... and yet, I've bought plenty of software with defects in the UK. I've never heard of anyone taking it to court. Anybody got any examples?
If you agree every time you log on, and you have logged on enough times, isn't that going to be proof of the contract by any reasonable standard?
Particularly if at least once you have to put in credit card details to pay the subscription. Are you say that doesn't count in Germany? If so, how does buying anything via the web work?
Why would someone who buys something on ebay think that Blizzard is involved in anyway with the transaction?
The item "exists" on the server owned by Blizzard both before and after the trasnaction. It can be argued (and I think the EULAs do) that they own the virtual item anyway, not the sellter. That makes it rather different from the car example.
But if it cost more, there would be less demand (unless it became a status symbol, where costing more could up the demand).
When music cost more, there is less demand, when it cost less there is more, when it is free, there is even more. For different prices, different levels of demand. Very basic economics.
You're advocating the government seizure of private property without compensation here.
Private intellectual
property, which isn't the same thing at all. In fact, the only way to "seize" intellectual property is to seize the limited time monopoly. If the government just makes a copy, but the owner still has the rights, how can it be considered seized?Granted, the damage you do to the value of intellectual property by copying it is much less than the damage done to the value of real estate by bulldozing it, by the underlying concept is very much the same.
It really isn't, because despite being called intellectual "property", the principles and concepts behind the forms of intellectual property are very different from physical property, and indeed between types of intellectual property.
Remember, the whole point of IP laws originally was for the public good. If a government keeping a record serves that it is in the original spirit of the laws.
Blogs have been badly skewing search engines for a while now, so it is just brining back some balance. The blog will still count, but not the comments.
How is an automated system going to recognise a blog? Or should they keep huge, wasteful, manual lists?
It is easy to say "implement a better system", but if it was that easy, don't you think all the web search companies would being doing it?
The fact that it isn't just Google involved should be a good inidicator that counting links is common practice in search engines these days, becuase it works better than what they had before (counting word occurances or looking in meta tags).
If you have a wonderful new search algorithm, go make you fortune with it.
I think the problem with a lot of those things is they must make it very hard to tell interesting stories. ST:TNG brought back Sc-Fi to the small screen, but watching it now, man a lot of it sucks, and is dull and predictable. It was already recycling it's own plots.
Characters need some flaws to be interesting, humans who are better than us, a lack of conflict between the main characters, a utopia Earth are all pretty dull. You can't get much out of them.
If I had to write with those limitations, I'd hate them too. What can you do? Another space-time anomaly solved by technobable? Another holodeck malfunction? Another peace negotiation (that always works, never falls through and turns into war)?. Another Q messes with the crew? About the only thing TNG did well was actuall scary Borg (before the movie and Voyager messed that up).
Once DS9 developed an ongoing plot it absolutely kicked arse. Darker, with some more flawed characters and a more flawed federation, it was much more interesting.
New music styles don't seem to originate in the charts either, or bust on the scene with big hits. Rather they come from clubs and gigs and gain a growing 'underground' popularity first, before they burst on the mainstream. You can't gauge these growing trends by comparing to past hit records, part of the popularity is the difference anyway.
The singles chart is already far, far less relevant than it used to be. The more efforts like this homogenise it, the smaller the group it will appeal to, and the less relevant it will be. I'm sure there will always be a market selling manufactured bands to teenage girls, but I would be happy if it was a smaller niche.
Usually a couple of whackos show up on these sort of topics and spout off about how adblocking is a naughty thing to do.
Right now I enjoy a largely ad free web, so I guess I'm "winning" There isn't any sign of adblockers having a much (or any) impact on ad revenues or site not being available either.
Just because someone works in an office or with computers, doesn't make it their life.
Some guy sitting in a queue for months hardly ranks up with artists and painters and writers. These thing all require a degree of technical skill, sitting in a queue doesn't. I don't know where you get the idea "Hackers and painters used to understand each other" from, since it is completely unsupported. If true though, I suspect it is because both deal with something that requires both technical skill and creativity.
Just because something has no point (and plenty of art does have a point, why do you think the history of art is so tied to religion and politics?) and provokes a reaction, doesn't make it art. Otherwise just about everything would be art. A pointless activity can really just be pointless, in if you count it as art because it proves the reaction "what a dumbass", you have much lower standards than many.
Telling someone to get a life doesn't mean the person saying it feels threatened by them or wants them to conform. Plenty of people make life choices I never would, or don't conform to my ideals but that's OK. The world would be boring otherwise. But some people not doing that also happen to be really wasting their time.
Likewise, saying it isn't showing disdain towards artists, because I bet these people don;t consider him an artist (I don't). I'd say claiming every piece of dumb ass activity as 'art' does much more to demein those people who are actually creative and skilled as well as producing something that proves and intellectual or emotional response.
Indeed, I think the term status of artist has lost respect, as now all you need to do is get anything in a museum and call it art, get a few critics to comment on it. Or, apparently, camp in a queue for months. If you don't have to be skilled to be an artist (except in convincing people your stuff is art), people won't hold artists in the same regard.
Wow, I'm impressed. It isn't like Asimov or any of the other writers working in his universe ever thought of first law conflicts and people lying to and manipulating robots, or robots faced with a conflict making bad choices based on faulty information. It isn't like whole stories are based on it.
The point of the law in the setting is to try to get the robot to make the 'right' choice. Humans, and later robots themselves, spend a lot of time thinking about how they should make that choice when faced with a conflict.
What would the robot do? Well the early, more privative ones would probably seize up on the spot as it couldn't find a way out and the same features that stop it breaking a law would basically turns it's brain into scrap (doesn't sound like a great design to me, but these are stories and it's dramatic.
More sophisticated robots would do what humans do, they would weight up the evidence (they don't believe something just because a human says it is true) and try whatever action they thought would minimise harm done, however they were programmed to rate 'harm'. They might or might not seize up or have problems afterwards depending on how much conflict they experienced.
Off topic and over-long, but I wanted to point out the first law is neither screwed up or pointless.
I'm pretty sure auto update is a seperate little program, as it downloads windows and IE (since they are now inseperable) updates in the background. AFAIK it isn't linked with IE's many security flaws and ways you can trick it's trust settings to get it to run your own code.
I'd tell you instead you are getting you models and names confused. Communism is a political model, the economic model is a command economy (also known as centrally planned). Democracy is a political model, free market is an economic one most commonly associated with it.
Now, it is true the political beliefs of Communism are against free-market economics, but you can have a command economy under, say, a democratic political system, quite common in wartime.
I'd also point out that the problem with Communist government is, based on the historical evidence, much more vulnerable to being subverted by greed and personal interest, on a larger scale, and with more drastic results. Also, the command economy has a weakness of inefficiency, and being controlled by the political structure, corruption there makes is worse.
This doesn't mean the democratic political system, and the free market economic ones, don't have problems with greed, corruption, lack of ethics and so on. Both systems though do assume a self-interest as a prime motivating factor right from the beginning, so they are a bit more robust. Individual bad things happen, but the whole system isn't thrown off kilter. So far they haven't produced anything like the suffering from Stalin's purges, farm collectivisation and the like.
Your three questions were not, in fact, actually questions, but here we go.
1) Yes, if it could work without costing too much. Not that it is my country or anything, but it wouldn't seem as stupid as it does now.
2) Food aid feeds people, big science discovers things. The non-functional missile shield does what?
3) It is true that people said "it will never work" about many things that did later work. However, they also said "it will never work" about lots of things that did not, in fact, ever work. There may be no unknown science, but it is a very hard problem, and one that can be countered relatively cheaply.
Doesn't the Pentagon count a Patriot intercept as a "success" if the Patriot detonates within a certain distance of the target? Even if that doesn't stop the incoming missile?
The failures of the Patriot have been pretty widely publicised (not actually taking out missiles, shooting down friendly aircraft because of the flaws in the automatic recognition system). Or maybe it is all the liberal media conipirercy?
I wonder if they will count nuke interceptors the same way? I'm sure that would be a great consolation if you were killed by an ICBM, that it was officially intercepted.
I think your confusing "happy unintended consequences" with "success". It wasn't like it was planned that that would happen, the coup could have had much worse results.
Technically SDI and it's current successor suck, and probably will for a long time. If they do start to work, the best way to defeat them is build more missiles, a not so great consequence.
Americans and Europeans have just done what humans have done to each other throughout history, they were just better at it.
Before the Europeans took control of other countries were they all peaceful and loving? No, they were killing each other. The Spanish destroyed the Aztecs with the help other local tribes that the Aztecs had conquered. The world's largest empire was created and ruled by the Mongols. Just look at the history of Africa or Asia and you will find plenty of wars before the nasty white Europeans showed up.
Just look at Africa now and you will find plenty of fighting, often driven by tribal or religious differences.
It's trendy to blame the white guys for playing "conquer the other guys" better than everyone else, but everyone else was playing too.
The idea that people just want to live in peace requires a wilful ignorance of human history. Humans naturally form groups (tribes, nations whatever). A person may not want violence, but a society tends to fear the other, and groups of humans have always turned on each other. Fear, greed, anger, prejudice, remembrance of past wrongs real or otherwise. Hostility may not come from thin air, but it comes easily enough.
Then there is the issue of respecting others. To respect someone, they have to behave in a way that earns it. Should we have respected the Taliban controlled Afghanistan and the way they treated people? Just chalk it up to cultural differences and ignore it?
Nice rant, with some quality straw men you beat the stuffing out of.
Yes, rebuilding to rediscover lost knowledge or find a better way of doing things is worthwhile. Asking why is very important to human progress. If ReactOS appeared to be doing those things it would appear worthwhile.
The Windows API isn't lost, although it may be guarded by Microsoft. If you want to know why you can join the company, or one in their shared source program. Nobody is reclaiming past glories by figuring it out. NT4 has been done before, not only that is has already been improved on. The ReactOS guys want something more stable, functional and still compatible? Windows 2000, or 2003. They still have a long way to go to get where MS was, and they don't appear to be headed anywhere new after that.
Even if they do find, say, a better way of implementing a registry, hardly anyone benefits because it isn't like this goes back into windows as the vast, vast majority of people use it.
I'm all for pushing the limits and learning about new and better ways, but for all your waxing poetic about pyramids and aqueducts (and here is a hint, your house is worse quality because of cost and quality not lost secret building techniques) none of it seems relevant to the fact that I can't see ReactOS going anywhere new that benefits people.
I can see it as a useful learning experience for the developers, and if they enjoy it, more power to them. The use seems to be entirely in the process, not the result. Nothing wrong with that, but it does leave some people baffled.
The only unique thing ReactOS seems to offer is possibility, one day, of offering the combination of open source, Windows compatibility (without WINE or similar) and that seems a stretch. I can see it ever getting to 100% compatibility, and that means it is going to be less stable when it comes to actually running programs. If they actually got anywhere close to Windows I'm sure MS would lawyer them into oblivion.
Just because some people doing what has been done before leads to progress doesn't mean it all does, or all attempts to do so should be immune from criticism. This is the flaw in your rant's logic. I hope the ReactOS guys have lots of fun, and learn lots, but I completely get why people see the actual results as a bit pointless.
Off topic I know, but the following has to be one of the most stupid ways to try and defend something.
Please don't knock other people's work until you do something more worthwhile yourself. If you have, feel free to submit your own articles...
I've never made a movie or TV show, written a book, or written a (serious) computer game. So, I'm not allowed to criticise any of those things? By your logic, almost nobody could criticise anything.
As for how impressive ReatOS is, the amount they have done for the resources maybe impressive, but that doesn't mean the results, on their own merits are. I hope the developers are enjoying their work, but it doesn't seem very worth while to me, they may want an open source windows clone, but what they have is an open source OS that runs some limited subset of things an old version of windows does, sometimes.
What they want seems useful, but what they have, or are ever likely to have, doesn't. Of course, if they enjoy it, it is perfectly worthwhile to do.