Why can't some countries do something different than the US and prove that there is a better system out there.
Probably because those countried don't want to be accused of harbouring Weapons of Economic Destruction, and then tariffed to hell when trading with the US.
In South Australia now, your literary works can outlast your corpse - burial plots only last 50 years (Hopefully that's pretty much the same as death + 50 years)
the onanism of having your own name placed in such works
You mean like taking "The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet", by Arthur Brooke, and rewriting it as a play? It's called adaption, and it's a staple of how literature develops.
changing the ending into a happy one is something that I certainly consider disrespectful
How can it be disrespectful? Despite how they're performed now, Shakespeare's plays were originally done before a crowd of uncultured, common folk, who often talked and called out during the show, and consisted in large part of crude jokes and sexual innuendo. Shakespeare wrote for his audience. They wanted tragedy. He wrote tragedy. If Shakespeare was alive now, he'd be just as likely to write feel-good comedy or an action movie as the next scriptwriter.
Taking a classic and insisting nobody ever changes it is a brilliant way of making sure that classic dies a horrible death. Just think of the splash Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet made in the popular media. And regardless of what the intellectual feel about popular media, all great classics arise from it; either inspired by it, or constructed in opposition to it. Thinking a work should be immune to change just because it's old is stupid; it should be the opposite. Something so old, yet still so loved, should be tinkered with, fiddled with, changed, and added to, to try and get the most out of a great piece of art.
However, in a reply to the Yale Law Blog, they also state that:
"The historic 19th century photographs are not unique, and the intellectual property on our website to be protected is not simply scans of public domain images, but rather careful artistic restorations."
If they are to be believed, then they are not claiming copyrights on reproductions, but on restorations. And I don't know how copyright law stands on that.
What about BitTorrented Linux distros? Every time a major revision comes out, I see BitTorrents springing up all over the place.
Of course, BitTorrent isn't a file-sharing network, but it is a P2P network, so to some extent, it depends on your terminology.
Now, maybe I don't know enough about XSS vulnerabilites, but PHP provides a function that strips all HTML tags from an incoming string (You can provide an array of exceptions if you like), and I remember having seen somewhere an extension that also strips naughty attributes, like onMouse*.
If you simply pass all form text through these filters, wouldn't that totally get rid of XSS vulns?
It's easy enough to disable Javascript in Mozilla - just tick-a-box on the Tools->Options screen. Useful for stupid sites that use Javscript for "ultra-secure hi-tech right-click prevention technology".
More to the point, why doesn't the poster include a BitTorrent link, since that system is designed to accomodate transfers that generate a lot of sudden interest, rather than first slashdotting the HTTP source and waiting for posters to mention torrents.
One other little niggle from AOTC; it would have added much to the romantic thread of the story if Anakin had not looked like he was afraid of getting girl germs every time he went near his beloved.
"Only if you commercialize it. You are explicitly allowed to copy something in a patent for your own personal and/or research use. It's when you sell it that you need a license."
Really? Where does it say this? I don't disbelieve you, but I've never heard of this provision. Fair Use is a copyright issue, not a patent one. The consolidated rules explicitly say:
(Page 54, 271)
"Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States, or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent." (Emphasis mine)
I browsed through the exceptions in the law, and I couldn't find any for personal use.
Of course, companies are unlikely to sue people who rolled their own and used it, but that's not the point. The point is they are legally entitled to, and now have a lever against you that they can utilize whenever they wish.
Yes, because if you roll your own, and unknowingly implement a feature some company has patented, then you don't get the feature yanked out from under you - you get your bank account raided by litigation lawyers.
If something can be implemented by someone knowledgable in the field quickly and easily, it shouldn't be patentable. Anything like that isn't the sort of innovation that patents are supposed to protect. It is the most recent step, in a series of tiny steps. Innovation is a jump.
I don't know wether PVR time-shifting is innovative or not (I would suspect not - it seems to me it would just be like viewing a half-downloaded MPG file), but if some random slashdotter can knock up an equivelant in a few days, it doesn't deserve patenting.
Patenting wasn't designed to reward people for having a new idea. It was designed to compensate people for spending time, effort and money implementing a new idea. If something requires little time, minimal effort, and no money to develop, it doesn't deserve a patent.
As such, it is subject to people's recollections, personal prejudices, and the political realities of the day.
It depends. Many Christians hold that the Bible is the inspired word of God, and that as such, God would maintain the integrity of his word despite the vagaries of the people actually writing it. But that is somewhat of a circular argument; you have to believe the Bible is inspired before it proves anything.
don't claim to know the Truth, and I submit that neither you nor the Bible have the Truth either. If you can show me any evidence to prove that the Bible is anything more than an oral history, passed down, retranslated, and expurgated for political purposes over the generations, or that there was any involvement from extrahuman sources whatsoever, I will be more than happy to reconsider this statement.
The Bible is not really retranslated. When people set out to translate something, they usually go back to the original source and translate that. The same holds true for the Bible. The NIV isn't someone going back and re-wording the archaic Old King James, it's someone translating from the same Aramaic and Greek sources as the older version used. You've also got to realise that the Bible was only compiled as a whole fairly recently. Parts of it were written at different times, and in different ways. It's fairly obvious that, for instance, most of the New Testament is not an oral history. Most of it was written by people who claimed to be eye-witnesses of the event (except for Luke, who researched things after the fact). The first five books of the Old Testament, too, are unlikely to be oral history. They were written by Moses, who was involved in a lot of what he wrote (The four books after Genesis; Genesis was explaining how the Israelites got were they were). As to the veracity of the Bible, there have been cases were truths denounced as fiction in the Bible have later been archeologically verified (scholars thought the Bible had stuffed up the chronology of Babylonian kings, until some documents were found that demonstrated that a particular king was referenced by two names, and that the Biblical account was more accurate than the modern one).
Complex things evolve from simple ones all the time. Take a bunch of matter, some fundamental forces, a set of physical laws, and define some basic constants. Compress matter tightly, explode it in all directions such that it forms into different elements, fairly evenly distributed. Subject it to lots of energy from different sources.
Precisely. But who who took the matter, who set the physical laws, who defined the constants? No matter how far back scientists delve, they never find a "first cause", because science, which deals in chains of cause and effect, is inequipped to deal with first causes. If the universe ever began, then it had to be begun by an external force. Hawking says this in A Brief History of Time. What he also says is that the alternative is that the universe never began, that it always was, and it is this alternative he prefers. Neither can be proven. Personally I prefer believing the former.
I'm not an astrophysicist or an evolutionary biologist either, and am only an amateur Biblical scholar.
That being said, I beleive that people who think there is a logical basis for beleif in God to be either ignorant or fools. The preponderence of the evidence is against the existance of God. That is what faith is for. Faith is the acceptance of that which is beyond proof. If you think you have proof, not only are you mistaken, but also you don't have true faith.
Poor Luke. Luke 1:1 (ESV) "it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concering the things you have been taught."
Luke writes to offer evidence as to his beliefs. I find it foolish to believe that a God who cares for people would then set out to deliberately deceive them. God created an ordered, logical universe, where things follow consistent rules. Why would he act contrary to what he has created? I don't believe that we have irrefutable proof on the existance of God, but neither do I believe God has deliberately obfuscated his existance.
Furthermore I think that any mortal who thinks they understand the Truth of God. Who thinks they know what God wants, know God's reasons and know what is or isn't approved of by God are guilty of the sin of hubris. They presume way to much. I think somebody said something about "judge not" at one point, wonder who that cold have been?
What about God himself? If you take the Bible to be the word of God, then when the Bible says something about what God approves of, or disapproves of, you must acknowledge the truth of it. If someone disaproves of something because they say God disproves of it and back that up with reference to God's word, then I say they are justified in what they say. Of course, if you don't believe that the Bible is the word of God, it's pretty pointless me debating with you; we are of different religions.
That argument is actually fairly well reasoned. With pretty much every other ordered system, people assume there was someone, somewhere, who gave it order. Give someone a manufactured item, and they will *always* assume someone made it, and it didn't just pop into being. If you see an ordered universe, it is natural, and logical, to assume there was an orderer.
Nothing? Why not? Just because we don't know all of the mechanics that make the formation of the universe work, or even the fact that we might not like what what information do have tells us doesn't automatically mean that the scientific explination is wrong.
Acually, creationism (wether by the Judaeic God or not) is just as scientific as any other approach. Science relies on a system of cause and effect. For this reason, it's hard for it to deal with a "first cause", because that, by definition, cannot have a cause. Essentially, you have three options.
The universe was created by an external force
The universe was never created, it always was
The universe was never created, none of this exists.
Number 1 is the path taken by most religions. It usually comes down to arguing about the nature of the external force. Number 2 seems to be what most scientific-types want to believe. Nobody really roots for Number 3 much.
Both the "religious" and "scientific" approaches are unproven. The main difference is the scientists feel the need to prove theirs, the religious people just believe it.
As for the relationship with plants and animals, why would a sane god make a plant that tricks an insect into mating with it in order to get it's flower polinated?
If you look only a little deeper into Christian theology, you'll find your answer to these sorts of questions. The perfect creation was ruined by the introduction of sin. The original order of things was God rules Man rules Nature. But when man rebelled against God, it stuffed everything up, and nature is just as much ruined by sin as man is.
Nothing? Why not? Just because we don't know all of the mechanics that make the formation of the universe work, or even the fact that we might not like what what information do have tells us doesn't automatically mean that the scientific explination is wrong.
Acually, creationism (wether by the Judaeic God or not) is just as scientific as any other approach. Science relies on a system of cause and effect. For this reason, it's hard for it to deal with a "first cause", because that, by definition, cannot have a cause. Essentially, you have three options.
The universe was created by an external force
The universe was never created, it always was
The universe was never created, none of this exists.
Number 1 is the path taken by most religions. It usually comes down to arguing about the nature of the external force. Number 2 seems to be what most scientific-types want to believe. Nobody really roots for Number 3 much.
Both the "religious" and "scientific" approaches are unproven. The main difference is the scientists feel the need to prove theirs, the religious people just believe it.
Because we all know that all those truths are equally true, don't we? It's not like any of them are mutually exclusive. And I thought geeks were supposed to be logical.
The Wayfarer Redemption (published in Australia as Battleaxe) is the first part of a series called "The Axis Trilogy", and has a sequel series called "The Wayfarer Redemption" (American publishers made this so confusing. It was also her first fantasy book. I liked the second series much more than the first, but try reading her latest book, The Troy Game. The writing is incredibly improved over the Axis books, it has an interesting premise, it's a lot darker than her first books, and incredibly well-researched (her degree in Medival European History really shows through). Her earlier series, "The Crucible" (The Nameless Day, The Wounded Hawk, The Crippled Angel) also looks to be much better, but I stopped reading that after the first book. It was much too dark for my tastes.
Slashdot Mirror
Why can't some countries do something different than the US and prove that there is a better system out there.
Probably because those countried don't want to be accused of harbouring Weapons of Economic Destruction, and then tariffed to hell when trading with the US.
In South Australia now, your literary works can outlast your corpse - burial plots only last 50 years (Hopefully that's pretty much the same as death + 50 years)
the onanism of having your own name placed in such works
You mean like taking "The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet", by Arthur Brooke, and rewriting it as a play? It's called adaption, and it's a staple of how literature develops.
changing the ending into a happy one is something that I certainly consider disrespectful
How can it be disrespectful? Despite how they're performed now, Shakespeare's plays were originally done before a crowd of uncultured, common folk, who often talked and called out during the show, and consisted in large part of crude jokes and sexual innuendo. Shakespeare wrote for his audience. They wanted tragedy. He wrote tragedy. If Shakespeare was alive now, he'd be just as likely to write feel-good comedy or an action movie as the next scriptwriter.
Taking a classic and insisting nobody ever changes it is a brilliant way of making sure that classic dies a horrible death. Just think of the splash Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet made in the popular media. And regardless of what the intellectual feel about popular media, all great classics arise from it; either inspired by it, or constructed in opposition to it. Thinking a work should be immune to change just because it's old is stupid; it should be the opposite. Something so old, yet still so loved, should be tinkered with, fiddled with, changed, and added to, to try and get the most out of a great piece of art.
about $10.00 per member
You crack me up.
probably went to great lengths
That was deliberate, right?
However, in a reply to the Yale Law Blog, they also state that:
"The historic 19th century photographs are not unique, and the intellectual property on our website to be protected is not simply scans of public domain images, but rather careful artistic restorations."
If they are to be believed, then they are not claiming copyrights on reproductions, but on restorations. And I don't know how copyright law stands on that.
What about BitTorrented Linux distros? Every time a major revision comes out, I see BitTorrents springing up all over the place. Of course, BitTorrent isn't a file-sharing network, but it is a P2P network, so to some extent, it depends on your terminology.
Now, maybe I don't know enough about XSS vulnerabilites, but PHP provides a function that strips all HTML tags from an incoming string (You can provide an array of exceptions if you like), and I remember having seen somewhere an extension that also strips naughty attributes, like onMouse*.
If you simply pass all form text through these filters, wouldn't that totally get rid of XSS vulns?
It's easy enough to disable Javascript in Mozilla - just tick-a-box on the Tools->Options screen. Useful for stupid sites that use Javscript for "ultra-secure hi-tech right-click prevention technology".
So...stop trying to hack the black box. Pay the owners of the box for a user account, and get yourself a few adwords. TANSTAAFL
Well, it really depends on whether they end up winning doesn't it?
More to the point, why doesn't the poster include a BitTorrent link, since that system is designed to accomodate transfers that generate a lot of sudden interest, rather than first slashdotting the HTTP source and waiting for posters to mention torrents.
One other little niggle from AOTC; it would have added much to the romantic thread of the story if Anakin had not looked like he was afraid of getting girl germs every time he went near his beloved.
No way, two classes is bad enough, but do you know how long it takes a Fighter/Cleric/Thief to level up?
Cool. Next time I go to a concert that's being broadcast, I'm gonna pack a radio receiver so I can be the first in my aisle with the sound.
And also .net.au domains. In fact, it is impossible to get a personnal .au domain. Which is why I'm stuck with howsfamily.net instead of hows.net.au
Apparantly, the new ".id" TLD is going to be available to individuals. When they get around to making it.
"Only if you commercialize it. You are explicitly allowed to copy something in a patent for your own personal and/or research use. It's when you sell it that you need a license."
Really? Where does it say this? I don't disbelieve you, but I've never heard of this provision. Fair Use is a copyright issue, not a patent one. The consolidated rules explicitly say:
(Page 54, 271)
"Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States, or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent." (Emphasis mine)
I browsed through the exceptions in the law, and I couldn't find any for personal use.
Of course, companies are unlikely to sue people who rolled their own and used it, but that's not the point. The point is they are legally entitled to, and now have a lever against you that they can utilize whenever they wish.
Yes, because if you roll your own, and unknowingly implement a feature some company has patented, then you don't get the feature yanked out from under you - you get your bank account raided by litigation lawyers.
If something can be implemented by someone knowledgable in the field quickly and easily, it shouldn't be patentable. Anything like that isn't the sort of innovation that patents are supposed to protect. It is the most recent step, in a series of tiny steps. Innovation is a jump.
I don't know wether PVR time-shifting is innovative or not (I would suspect not - it seems to me it would just be like viewing a half-downloaded MPG file), but if some random slashdotter can knock up an equivelant in a few days, it doesn't deserve patenting.
Patenting wasn't designed to reward people for having a new idea. It was designed to compensate people for spending time, effort and money implementing a new idea. If something requires little time, minimal effort, and no money to develop, it doesn't deserve a patent.
As such, it is subject to people's recollections, personal prejudices, and the political realities of the day.
It depends. Many Christians hold that the Bible is the inspired word of God, and that as such, God would maintain the integrity of his word despite the vagaries of the people actually writing it. But that is somewhat of a circular argument; you have to believe the Bible is inspired before it proves anything.
don't claim to know the Truth, and I submit that neither you nor the Bible have the Truth either. If you can show me any evidence to prove that the Bible is anything more than an oral history, passed down, retranslated, and expurgated for political purposes over the generations, or that there was any involvement from extrahuman sources whatsoever, I will be more than happy to reconsider this statement.
The Bible is not really retranslated. When people set out to translate something, they usually go back to the original source and translate that. The same holds true for the Bible. The NIV isn't someone going back and re-wording the archaic Old King James, it's someone translating from the same Aramaic and Greek sources as the older version used. You've also got to realise that the Bible was only compiled as a whole fairly recently. Parts of it were written at different times, and in different ways. It's fairly obvious that, for instance, most of the New Testament is not an oral history. Most of it was written by people who claimed to be eye-witnesses of the event (except for Luke, who researched things after the fact). The first five books of the Old Testament, too, are unlikely to be oral history. They were written by Moses, who was involved in a lot of what he wrote (The four books after Genesis; Genesis was explaining how the Israelites got were they were). As to the veracity of the Bible, there have been cases were truths denounced as fiction in the Bible have later been archeologically verified (scholars thought the Bible had stuffed up the chronology of Babylonian kings, until some documents were found that demonstrated that a particular king was referenced by two names, and that the Biblical account was more accurate than the modern one).
Complex things evolve from simple ones all the time. Take a bunch of matter, some fundamental forces, a set of physical laws, and define some basic constants. Compress matter tightly, explode it in all directions such that it forms into different elements, fairly evenly distributed. Subject it to lots of energy from different sources.
Precisely. But who who took the matter, who set the physical laws, who defined the constants? No matter how far back scientists delve, they never find a "first cause", because science, which deals in chains of cause and effect, is inequipped to deal with first causes. If the universe ever began, then it had to be begun by an external force. Hawking says this in A Brief History of Time. What he also says is that the alternative is that the universe never began, that it always was, and it is this alternative he prefers. Neither can be proven. Personally I prefer believing the former.
I'm not an astrophysicist or an evolutionary biologist either, and am only an amateur Biblical scholar.
That being said, I beleive that people who think there is a logical basis for beleif in God to be either ignorant or fools. The preponderence of the evidence is against the existance of God. That is what faith is for. Faith is the acceptance of that which is beyond proof. If you think you have proof, not only are you mistaken, but also you don't have true faith.
Poor Luke. Luke 1:1 (ESV) "it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concering the things you have been taught."
Luke writes to offer evidence as to his beliefs. I find it foolish to believe that a God who cares for people would then set out to deliberately deceive them. God created an ordered, logical universe, where things follow consistent rules. Why would he act contrary to what he has created? I don't believe that we have irrefutable proof on the existance of God, but neither do I believe God has deliberately obfuscated his existance.
Furthermore I think that any mortal who thinks they understand the Truth of God. Who thinks they know what God wants, know God's reasons and know what is or isn't approved of by God are guilty of the sin of hubris. They presume way to much. I think somebody said something about "judge not" at one point, wonder who that cold have been?
What about God himself? If you take the Bible to be the word of God, then when the Bible says something about what God approves of, or disapproves of, you must acknowledge the truth of it. If someone disaproves of something because they say God disproves of it and back that up with reference to God's word, then I say they are justified in what they say. Of course, if you don't believe that the Bible is the word of God, it's pretty pointless me debating with you; we are of different religions.
Oh, yes. The "if x then y" argument. Very clever.
That argument is actually fairly well reasoned. With pretty much every other ordered system, people assume there was someone, somewhere, who gave it order. Give someone a manufactured item, and they will *always* assume someone made it, and it didn't just pop into being. If you see an ordered universe, it is natural, and logical, to assume there was an orderer.
Nothing? Why not? Just because we don't know all of the mechanics that make the formation of the universe work, or even the fact that we might not like what what information do have tells us doesn't automatically mean that the scientific explination is wrong.
Acually, creationism (wether by the Judaeic God or not) is just as scientific as any other approach. Science relies on a system of cause and effect. For this reason, it's hard for it to deal with a "first cause", because that, by definition, cannot have a cause. Essentially, you have three options.
Number 1 is the path taken by most religions. It usually comes down to arguing about the nature of the external force. Number 2 seems to be what most scientific-types want to believe. Nobody really roots for Number 3 much.
Both the "religious" and "scientific" approaches are unproven. The main difference is the scientists feel the need to prove theirs, the religious people just believe it.
As for the relationship with plants and animals, why would a sane god make a plant that tricks an insect into mating with it in order to get it's flower polinated?
If you look only a little deeper into Christian theology, you'll find your answer to these sorts of questions. The perfect creation was ruined by the introduction of sin. The original order of things was God rules Man rules Nature. But when man rebelled against God, it stuffed everything up, and nature is just as much ruined by sin as man is.
Acually, creationism (wether by the Judaeic God or not) is just as scientific as any other approach. Science relies on a system of cause and effect. For this reason, it's hard for it to deal with a "first cause", because that, by definition, cannot have a cause. Essentially, you have three options.
Number 1 is the path taken by most religions. It usually comes down to arguing about the nature of the external force. Number 2 seems to be what most scientific-types want to believe. Nobody really roots for Number 3 much.
Both the "religious" and "scientific" approaches are unproven. The main difference is the scientists feel the need to prove theirs, the religious people just believe it.
Because we all know that all those truths are equally true, don't we? It's not like any of them are mutually exclusive. And I thought geeks were supposed to be logical.
The Wayfarer Redemption (published in Australia as Battleaxe) is the first part of a series called "The Axis Trilogy", and has a sequel series called "The Wayfarer Redemption" (American publishers made this so confusing. It was also her first fantasy book. I liked the second series much more than the first, but try reading her latest book, The Troy Game. The writing is incredibly improved over the Axis books, it has an interesting premise, it's a lot darker than her first books, and incredibly well-researched (her degree in Medival European History really shows through). Her earlier series, "The Crucible" (The Nameless Day, The Wounded Hawk, The Crippled Angel) also looks to be much better, but I stopped reading that after the first book. It was much too dark for my tastes.