'Probably' less than 10% of the male population as a whole have social skills any better than an 11-year-old girl's. It's unreasonable to hold men and women to the same standard in this area.
My Athlon XP2100+ (1733MHz, 133MHz FSB times 13) started crapping out in recent hot weather - not that hot, only 30 degrees Celsius or so - and I had to underclock it to 700MHz (100MHz FSB times 7) to stop things randomly dying. Oh, and take the lid off my PC. I am wondering whether there is any Socket A Athlon that can run safely with only a passive heatsink and no case fan, and whether my BIOS would allow me to clock it slowly enough.
Windows 2.0 had this pretty funky file browser called the 'MS-DOS Executive'... obviously Executive is not far away from Explorer. (It was called msdos.exe, a filename nowadays used by trojans.)
Trade Marking or Copyrighting a character, book, website or any form of media is the act of stopping others from taking credit, or otherwise benefitting for the creation of that media, or making a profit from the hard work and effort of other people.
Stopping someone from benefiting from the creation of a character sounds like a bad thing. Even if the original creation was someone else's work, why is it good to stop other people from benefiting from it? How does that serve the public interest?
If I do not protect him, you or someone else can create alternate storylines for him that have him behaving terribly or way off course.
Well, of course. And no doubt you would be terribly upset about that. But why is that an argument about the public interest, or progress of science and the useful arts? Why does the 'artistic integrity' of one person justify blocking the artistic impulses of others? After all, if you're offended by some storyline in which Picard is killed off, you're free not to read it.
Arguments about 'abusing' the character are begging the question, since you are assuming that the original author knows best what storylines are 'appropriate'. Who is to decide that?
You see, I don't get the argument that we should grant strong monopoly rights on particular characters to the copyright or trademark holder to prevent them from being 'abused' or to preserve artistic integrity. I'd prefer to see your Picard toilet bowl go on sale, and let the market decide whether it is successful or not.
Besides, a large company is not the best bet to ensure that merchandising stays true to the original author's intent or to some measure of good taste. Look at what Disney has done to the Winnie-the-Pooh characters. Would leaving it to the free market produce a worse result?
Trademarks are enforcable on fictional characters. Witness Disney forcing a day care center to remove its characters from its walls.
I am not sure this proves anything about trademarks; the visual appearance of Mickey is copyrightable. Now, if I wrote the story:
'One day Mickey Mouse met Minnie. They lived happily every after. The end.'
Can I be sued for trademark infringement?
Of course the question of whether fictional characters can be the subject of a trademark is a question of fact. But the parent post used the word 'should', so I was asking what was meant by that.
Are you advocating that trademarks should be enforceable on fictional characters? Or just saying that a company that wants to make the most money possible should file for trademarks on everything in sight (true, obviously)?
Is there a net benefit to 'science and the useful arts' from trademark protection on Captain Jean-Luc Picard (TM)? Does it prevent unwary consumers being ripped off?
Wasn't Disney animation in the same situation at the beginning of the 90s? Reduced to output like 'The Black Cauldron' (rated Worst. Feature. Cartoon. Ever. at the time). How did they get out of the trough last time?
I think you are being a little unfair in comparing the early RISC chips with processors from today. Instead you should compare them with non-RISC processors of the same era, such as the 80286.
They shouldn't share a common password. If they did then getting access to the password on one system would give access to all the others.
Okay, this is also true if you get hold of the private key - but while password authentication requires you to send your password to the remote system, with keypair authentication the other system or an eavesdropper can't find out your private key.
Graydon Hoare wrote a password generator that makes a new password depending on the hostname of the website and a master passphrase - so you the user remember only one thing but each site gets a different password. I can't find the link to it now, however.
If web browsers had this functionality built in I would certainly use it. Otherwise, I'm too lazy.
They shouldn't share a common password. If they did then getting access to the password on one system would give access to all the others.
However, they could share a common authentication mechanism such as using a public/private key pair. At least the three Unix boxes can be accessed using ssh and a keypair; it's a shame that there is no real equivalent for Windows (unless you do something very funky with Samba and domain controllers).
Of course Perl isn't better than OCaml. But it has a larger developer base and a somewhat bigger collection of useful libraries. There are other languages, in turn, which are even more whizz-bang than OCaml and have yet smaller developer communities.
If we were starting from scratch and picking things on technical merit would we really use Unix and C?
You're thinking of ROX. It looks like a polished bit of software, but IMHO the last thing the world needs is another desktop environment. It would be better to concentrate on adding drag-and-drop saving and the other neat things to GNOME or to KDE.
SELECT FIRST_NAME, LAST_NAME, ORDER_ID FROM CUSTOMER JOIN ORDER USING CUSTOMER_ID
I agree about the 'SELECT * FROM' crap though. It wouldn't be a big extension to SQL to let you just say 'CUSTOMER'.
All customers who have bought at least one of every product? Not too hard, surely:
SELECT * FROM CUSTOMER C WHERE NOT EXISTS (
SELECT *
FROM PRODUCT PROD
WHERE NOT EXISTS (
SELECT *
FROM PURCHASE PUR
WHERE PUR.PRODUCT_ID = PROD.PRODUCT_ID
AND PUR.CUSTOMER_ID = C.CUSTOMER_ID
) )
OK, a bit cumbersome - 'where does not exist any product he didn't buy' - but you get used to it after a while. A true set difference operator would be useful, or perhaps you could rewrite part of the above using outer joins and testing for a null value in the result of the join.
Why do people need more than one password? Why can't websites and applications authenticate you using your PGP public key? Then there would only be one thing to remember - the passphrase for that key - or at most two, if you need a password to log in to the OS at the start of the day.
It's not needed that users know how to use PGP to encrypt and decrypt messages, only that there is some means for the public key to be automatically uploaded when you first create an account. An SSH public key would work just as well.
But it's the sort of thing that nobody will bother with because until it becomes commonplace it would just look strange. Much easier to add yet another password to the list users must remember.
Slashdot Mirror
A list of all MEPs with their phone numbers at Brussels and Strasbourg.
Sounds like a great idea for a weekly sitcom!
'Probably' less than 10% of the male population as a whole have social skills any better than an 11-year-old girl's. It's unreasonable to hold men and women to the same standard in this area.
My Athlon XP2100+ (1733MHz, 133MHz FSB times 13) started crapping out in recent hot weather - not that hot, only 30 degrees Celsius or so - and I had to underclock it to 700MHz (100MHz FSB times 7) to stop things randomly dying. Oh, and take the lid off my PC. I am wondering whether there is any Socket A Athlon that can run safely with only a passive heatsink and no case fan, and whether my BIOS would allow me to clock it slowly enough.
See the evil finder to generate this sort of thing.
Windows 2.0 had this pretty funky file browser called the 'MS-DOS Executive'... obviously Executive is not far away from Explorer. (It was called msdos.exe, a filename nowadays used by trojans.)
Arguments about 'abusing' the character are begging the question, since you are assuming that the original author knows best what storylines are 'appropriate'. Who is to decide that?
You see, I don't get the argument that we should grant strong monopoly rights on particular characters to the copyright or trademark holder to prevent them from being 'abused' or to preserve artistic integrity. I'd prefer to see your Picard toilet bowl go on sale, and let the market decide whether it is successful or not.
Besides, a large company is not the best bet to ensure that merchandising stays true to the original author's intent or to some measure of good taste. Look at what Disney has done to the Winnie-the-Pooh characters. Would leaving it to the free market produce a worse result?
I am not sure this proves anything about trademarks; the visual appearance of Mickey is copyrightable. Now, if I wrote the story:
'One day Mickey Mouse met Minnie. They lived happily every after. The end.'
Can I be sued for trademark infringement?
Of course the question of whether fictional characters can be the subject of a trademark is a question of fact. But the parent post used the word 'should', so I was asking what was meant by that.
Are you advocating that trademarks should be enforceable on fictional characters? Or just saying that a company that wants to make the most money possible should file for trademarks on everything in sight (true, obviously)?
Is there a net benefit to 'science and the useful arts' from trademark protection on Captain Jean-Luc Picard (TM)? Does it prevent unwary consumers being ripped off?
Wasn't Disney animation in the same situation at the beginning of the 90s? Reduced to output like 'The Black Cauldron' (rated Worst. Feature. Cartoon. Ever. at the time). How did they get out of the trough last time?
I think you are being a little unfair in comparing the early RISC chips with processors from today. Instead you should compare them with non-RISC processors of the same era, such as the 80286.
BTW: ARM is the biggest selling processor family.
You can try this at home with the Gimp: Refocus.
Homer: Here's good news! According to this eye-catching article, SAT scores are declining at a slower rate!
Yes, and for the same reasons a one-button mouse is better!
Surely they've broken one of the founding rules of Google: Don't Be Eval.
Graydon Hoare wrote a password generator that makes a new password depending on the hostname of the website and a master passphrase - so you the user remember only one thing but each site gets a different password. I can't find the link to it now, however.
If web browsers had this functionality built in I would certainly use it. Otherwise, I'm too lazy.
They shouldn't share a common password. If they did then getting access to the password on one system would give access to all the others.
However, they could share a common authentication mechanism such as using a public/private key pair. At least the three Unix boxes can be accessed using ssh and a keypair; it's a shame that there is no real equivalent for Windows (unless you do something very funky with Samba and domain controllers).
Of course Perl isn't better than OCaml. But it has a larger developer base and a somewhat bigger collection of useful libraries. There are other languages, in turn, which are even more whizz-bang than OCaml and have yet smaller developer communities.
If we were starting from scratch and picking things on technical merit would we really use Unix and C?
You're thinking of ROX. It looks like a polished bit of software, but IMHO the last thing the world needs is another desktop environment. It would be better to concentrate on adding drag-and-drop saving and the other neat things to GNOME or to KDE.
In recent SQL versions you can at least say
SELECT FIRST_NAME, LAST_NAME, ORDER_ID
FROM CUSTOMER
JOIN ORDER USING CUSTOMER_ID
I agree about the 'SELECT * FROM' crap though. It wouldn't be a big extension to SQL to let you just say 'CUSTOMER'.
All customers who have bought at least one of every product? Not too hard, surely:
SELECT *
FROM CUSTOMER C
WHERE NOT EXISTS (
SELECT *
FROM PRODUCT PROD
WHERE NOT EXISTS (
SELECT *
FROM PURCHASE PUR
WHERE PUR.PRODUCT_ID = PROD.PRODUCT_ID
AND PUR.CUSTOMER_ID = C.CUSTOMER_ID
)
)
OK, a bit cumbersome - 'where does not exist any product he didn't buy' - but you get used to it after a while. A true set difference operator would be useful, or perhaps you could rewrite part of the above using outer joins and testing for a null value in the result of the join.
Why do people need more than one password? Why can't websites and applications authenticate you using your PGP public key? Then there would only be one thing to remember - the passphrase for that key - or at most two, if you need a password to log in to the OS at the start of the day.
It's not needed that users know how to use PGP to encrypt and decrypt messages, only that there is some means for the public key to be automatically uploaded when you first create an account. An SSH public key would work just as well.
But it's the sort of thing that nobody will bother with because until it becomes commonplace it would just look strange. Much easier to add yet another password to the list users must remember.
'Control over one's ideas really constitutes control over other people's lives, and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult.'
Though to be fair, rms was talking about useful knowledge like computer software or scientific discoveries, not artworks like music or a web page.