I seriously want to kill whatever jackass made "shrink to fit" the default setting on Acrobat Reader. Anyone using Windows to read their files is going to get pages 4% smaller than they should be, unless that person is computer-savvy enough to notice the wrong setting and fix it every time he opens Acrobat.
The option is totally unnecessary in almost every case. For full-bleed documents, it would be an useful option to have, but the vast majority of documents have big fat margins that exceed the unprintable margin.
The other problem with Acrobat, previously mentioned, is the unprintably huge PDF size sometimes made with bitmap graphics, unless Distiller is set to reduce print quality or the printer timeout is set long. That's some real innovation there, Adobe.
Also, for Word, have you tried using Generic Postscript as a workaround? Any office printer from the last ten years or so understands postscript, so if you use the same printer driver on the same version of Word presumably you would get the same pagination. I assume your situation is something like a law office or government agency rather than a service bureau.
A typical, "yes, but..." is in play here. Additional registers also mean that you have more saves/loads to do on function entry/exit, as well as during thread and process context switches.
You only need to save and restore the registers you use, so there is zero loss on enter/leave from adding registers. Thread switches (userthreading is dead, even on elder operating systems like Solaris) are relatively infrequent and have huge overhead, so loading and storing eight more registers is a miniscule cost.
Adding registers to x86 is a huge win for code that can use it and doesn't hurt anything else.
Your knowledge of copyright law is grossly wrong. The copyright statute itself (you don't need to find court cases or federal regulations) sets out exceptions to the public performance monopolies, and a cellphone ringtone would fall squarely within it. One of the exceptions (there are several -- for church worship, etc.) is that a stereo no more powerful than a typical home stereo is acceptable, and we'd all agree that describes a cell phone speaker. A problem you didn't mention is that in documentary filmmaking, ringtones now need to be "cleared" while previously a telephone ringing did not. The reason isn't what you expect. It's not that documentary filmmakers are worried about losing a lawsuit and paying huge damages, it's that the film distributors won't touch a film if their lawyers see any potential liability. A documentary filmmaker (except for a few like Michael Moore) is likely to be flat broke and not be worth suing, but the distributors have deep, deep pockets and they don't want any liability. The filmmaking problem comes not from the public performance right of a cell phone, but making a derivative work (the movie) and showing that in theaters (the public performance). The issue of whether the standard copyright defenses (fair use, implied license, first sale, etc.) apply simply doesn't come up.
What's wrong with running Novell on the servers, mate? And what school district (not NYC, I presume) needs a rack full of blade servers?
(Running Win98 on new computers is a bit iffy, but it is more lightweight and in some respects more bug-free than Win2k. It's also easier to manage homogeneous installations, so Win98 might be good if there's already a well-managed Win98 base in place. From the sounds of it, this isn't true in your installation.)
You seem to want the newest tech for the sake of having the newest tech, which isn't always the way to work under limited staff/capital budgets.
The anecdote about buying P133's is a little odd; I'm not sure why the school would think students need computers outside a typing class. (It's also unclear what time frame this purchase occurred in.) If the teachers didn't need computers after all, I guess it's good they didn't waste money on more powerful machines?
designing web sites for broken browsers is like giving illegal immigrants drivers' licenses: it's stupid and it doesn't fix the underlying problem
It's stupid to give immigrants drivers' licenses, huh? Boy, you so succicently marshalled and analyzed the benefits and problems of the alternatives to having the law be blind to the existence of millions of people. With an intellect like yours, I'm sure we can expect the President to appoint you to a high-level position in Washington within the week. In fact, I'm forwarding your message to president@whitehouse.gov, because your message was so incisive and thought-provoking, that he needs to have it on his desk today, because it demonstrates that your intellect far surpasses any other candidate he might even be thinking of appointing for any of hundreds of positions.
And the "underlying problem" you're referring to, I totally agree, you are so right. The seven million undocumented immigrants in the United States need to be gotten rid of. Immediately. Clearly, we can't deport so many people, given how slow it took to evacuate New Orleans, so the best answer (the "final solution" you might say) to this "seven million" is to execute them and use them as landfill in low-lying flood-prone areas. It will be difficult to distinguish American citizens, given that the children of undocumented immigrants are full citizens just like you and me and undocumented immigrants often marry citizens but cannot get their green card for legal reasons, but by gum, we can do it. With some American know-how, we could convert the Astrodome (once the refugees leave) into a high-performance landfill factory like the Germans used to have, only more advanced. Undocumented immigrants go in, landfill comes out. We would have the problem of what to do with all those American citizens who suddenly no longer have parents or spouses, and crime would dramatically increase by breaking up families, but that is a secondary concern to "fixing the underlying problem."
I feel that my mind has grown just being exposed to your brilliant ideas.
Please give a citation for the proposition that Sony sold the PS1, PS2, and PSP at a loss. I am willing to believe it, if I see numbers. But I have never seen an authority say Sony is selling its units at a loss. In fact, I have seen dissections of SEC filings showing the profits that Sony makes from its consoles, on a per-unit basis. The most I have seen that would support you is jealous guesstimation from outsiders who don't vertically integrate production.
It's a myth spread by undergraduate business majors that videogame consoles are sold at a loss. Some were (famously the Xbox, the Saturn, the Gamecube at a very slight loss for a little while after the price cut to $99), but generally console makers profit from the console, the games, and the developer licenses.
Well, this math geek that I was certain worked for some three-letter outfit turned around and looked at me like I was spewing nuclear launch codes! After I assured him that the Air Force open sourced it (and brought up a download URL on his laptop), he seemed to get the clue...
Why didn't you let the fucker twist in the wind? I've looked at DCFLDD, and although it can be useful it's just about the most trivial modification to a GPL tool there is. If some low-level tool wants to have a heart attack over thinking state secrets are on the Internet, I certainly wouldn't be the one to disabuse him.
The drive had been recovered, and my task was to determine what he had done with it and whether he had taken or tampered with any of the intellectual property on the drive.
I assume he had left evidence of touching the drive, because if he hadn't there would be no way to prove that he had or hadn't "taken" the "intellectual property." (using both words loosely, of course)
They just want to protect their own specific method of inciting character insanity in the video game engine.
Protecting themselves, my ass. You know how software patent opponents often trot out the strawman of literary patents? Richard Stallman, for example, pointed out that if literary patents existed, someone might have previously claimed "a communication process that represents, in the mind of a reader, the concept of a character who has been in jail for a long time and becomes bitter towards society and humankind." etc. and then we'd get whatever lousy forgotten novel the first guy had written rather than Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.
Well, this is another kind of art patent, a videogame plot patent. If you think a patent on a videogame plot device is okay, why not a movie plot device? We could have patents on "sleepless in seattle" plots, "genetic engineering sci-fi" plots, etc. Or a television plot device. Don't you think CBS would have loved to patent the idea of tropical paradise reality TV? For that matter, why didn't Nintendo patent the side-scrolling platform game when they wrote Super Mario Bros.? The answer is: It has always been against the rules.
This Nintendo patent is a little different than a design for an exhaust manifold or a windshield wiper, which are more usual examples of utility patents.
You need to get out of the mindset that someone has the right to make money doing something simply because he was doing that first. It's perverse, it's not capitalistic, and most of us don't share that view.
Whether emeralds and rubies are rarer than diamonds is not determinative; as any Econ 1 student knows, it is supply and demand that determines the market price.
Debeers doesn't have nearly the market share that they used to. It's not simply a matter of artificial scarcity holding up the price, although we all know the tricks they used to play.
One could argue that the demand is artificial, created by clever advertising, but then what's it to you? If you don't want it, don't buy it. If you do want it, are you just complaining that your tastes and preferences were altered by advertising? That's a pretty weak thing to whine about.
There are lots of pretty baubles to spend your money on. If you think emeralds and rubies are better simply because they're rarer, you should be happy that the price is "artificially" low because all those schmucks are off buying their wives semi-precious diamonds instead.
Personally, I suspect the demand is genuine. People like the fire in their eyes and the ice in their hands. You don't get fire and ice from anything besides diamonds. We are fortunate to live on a planet where something so pretty is common.
Now, before I get flamed for being a 'stick-in-the-mud' (or worse)... I really don't care if you want to take your own stuff in. The only reason the theaters have that rule is to prevent patrons from "stealing" potential profits from them. (which is just as valid an argument as saying TV viewers are "stealing" the shows because they don't sit and watch the commercials with rapt attention.;) )
That's not true. The movie theater makes it a condition of serving you that you won't bring food in. If the manager's around, they won't let you in with food or they will make you throw it away.
Television is shown to you (hence the word "broadcast") regardless of whether any individual tapes it, goes to the bathroom, etc.
Nobody but you is calling it "theft" to take food into a theater, but you are entering private property under false pretenses. I believe it could be considered trespassing.
It isn't hard to understand, and you are 100% wrong. You might want to read section 1008 of the Audio Home Recording Act once school gets out. In brief, it is perfectly acceptable under U.S. law to make a copy of a recording for a friend, whether analog or digital. The same is true for many other countries.
Apple's behaviour apparently wasn't breaking any law as such but it was the equivalent of some kid leaning over your shoulder and copying your homework.
What? I know that Slashdotters aren't all on the same page, but most people here generally agree that software patents are bad. Especially the vague, hazy, and overbroad ones that look like obsfucated user manuals (claiming entire kinds of software or user interfaces) rather than looking like nice detailed technical USENIX conference papers. Only Konfabulator wasn't patented.
Now you're saying that even though Konfabulator wasn't patented, wasn't a trade secret, Apple isn't a monopolist, and no part of the Konfabulator code was used by Apple, Apple should be barred from making a similar product? Pray tell, what is this argument based? Should Apple's product suck just so that these small fry can make a couple bucks? Are you saying Apple should do it just to be nice? (It would be nice if Apple sent me a check for $50k so I could buy a Lexus. Just to be nice.) Comparing the free market of the software industry to an elementary school math test is a little facile, eh?
Surely you know, since you pointed to the daringfireball website, that there was nothing in Konfabulator, other than the general idea of JavaScript desktop accessories, that would have been useful to Apple. The reason Apple chose to write Dashboard from scratch is that it could save a lot of system resources and make a more polished product by leveraging existing parts of OS X like Web Kit. Konfabulator was a monstrously heavyweight framework based on Mozilla -- each desktop accessory was bigger than many Mac applications. The people at Apple aren't stupid. If buying Konfabulator would have saved them time and money, they would have done it, just like they bought SoundJam.
Konfabulator made a lot of money on Windows, as well as Mac, and now they got their payday from Yahoo!. No tears shed there, I'm sure.
The difference is really that in state-run system everybody shares the cost, while for the US carmakers they are stuck with the bill for a lot of workers all by themselves.
More precisely, as I understand it, is that when an industry shrinks its domestic footprint (like the steel and auto industries), underfunded private pension and health plans are in huge trouble. It doesn't matter if there's "a lot of workers," because they're working and able to pay their own way (the benefits are just a form of compensation), it matters if there's a lot of retirees compared to the number of workers.
Cheaper, more efficient, faster (Disk I/O wise), more stable, more flexible (apt-get) than the Mac Mini.
Come again? I'll give you cheaper and more energy efficient but let's not get carried away. I bet you lose the energy efficiency once you plug in an external USB hard drive too.
This would assume further abusing & depleting your ground water reserves, which are already drying up.
You're talking about Iowa? I have never heard about a water shortage in Iowa. If you visited in the summer you would find it to be unbearably hot and muggy. Erosion tends to be a bigger problem, but with no-till farming that's not so much an issue anymore.
Disregarding the racist humor in this post, it does raise a good point: How do we as a nation, any nation balance the rights of competing interests? In this case the interest of free speech versus Rowling and her publisher's right to IP.
Jesus christ on a popsicle stick.
First, Canadians are not a race, last time I checked.
Second, here's a tip: Don't use the word "balance," because it signals that what you mean is that you don't like the way the law is and it ought to move towards the other (i.e. your) side. But the word "balance" doesn't actually make any kind of argument for you. (Or it means the case at issue concerns a set of the 10 commandments, in which case the word "balance" means "flip a coin.")
Third, what in Sam Hill do you mean by "her publisher's right to IP"? This is exactly what Richard Stallman warned about. It's one thing for, say, a legislative committee that specializes in patent and copyright to call itself an "IP committee," or for a legal academic to call himself an "IP professor" because patent and copyright are areas of law that are somewhat related.
But now we have people who have no idea what the law is using the word "property" as a magic wand to say that content providers have unlimited rights as a kind of mental shortcut, rather than making an educated statement about the boundaries of copyright, patent, trade secret, trademark, etc. Right here, the publisher has no rights to the books. They have been rightfully sold in the ordinary course of business. And the publisher sure as heck doesn't have a right to keeping the plot a secret!
Fuck, I feel the need to send a check to the FSF in the morning. Clearly RMS's outreach efforts need more support.
IBM licensed their PC design to a large number of companies, did they not? Because of patents they recouped the money they invested in PC development and allowed for competitors -- promoting innovation.
That's news to me. Please give me a citation. As I recall, the PC design was available royalty-free, while IBM's attempt at controlling the architecture (the MicroChannel Architecture): 1) flopped in the marketplace, 2) did not have substantially better performance, 3) cost a hell of a lot of money, and 4) led to the downfall of IBM in the PC market as people shunned its PS/2 line.
So unless I'm mistaken, your pro-patent argument is precisely wrong.
To get rid of the patent system is to throw the baby out with the bath water.
What baby? Aside from solving Arrow's information paradox, which is completely irrelevant to a company the size of IBM, the only time I've seen actual proof of the benefit of patents is in the pharmaceutical industry. Even there the gross price disparity between the US and the rest of the world shows that the system is not optimal.
The Businessweek story here is a truly amazing example of how patents stifle creativity, even outside the software industry.
I don't think many people are going drop TV as the medium in favor of something that's unreliable. I know I sure didn't tune in to the Daily Show on TV when ShunTV was around...but now, without a consistently reliable source for it I watch it on TV.
Comedy Central has the latest show on its website the day after it airs. They seem to leave out the less-funny segments sometimes, but they always seem to have the monologue, and sometimes the whole show if it was really great.
Your sandwich shop story made even less sense than the "Microsoft program" analogy the original story had. Could you please state your arguments in terms of the facts we have, and the law we have, rather than inventing different facts that don't even apply to the same law?
I sure hope the guy has a good lawyer. He's going to find himself in a world if hurt if the trial comes down to whether the judge likes the prosecutor's analogy or the defense's analogy better.
Actually, you wouldn't believe the analogies that get used in high-stakes patent litigation. Tens of millions of dollars will hinge on whether the jury thinks the product at hand was more like a mailman or an orchestra conductor. I'm not making this up.
But the facts here (how APs and DHCP work, the common practice of leaving APs open specifically for others to use) are simple enough that hopefully a good attorney can just set the story straight.
If a good attorney gets involved early enough, he'll put enough of a good case to the DA that the DA will cut a really easy plea bargain just to avoid the risk of losing an expensive trial on an alleged crime that didn't really affect anybody. (The prosecutor's office has a fixed budget just like anybody else.) The man will pay a small fine and save the money he would have wasted on defending himself at trial.
And that's the original main page, and the original video! Quite stunning. I wonder if there's a "I survived a/.ing" club?
The video is hosted on his university account, not his blog ISP account. Universities are known for having web server farms and more bandwidth than $god.
I think it's pretty unusual for a university (not departmental) web server be slashdotted. I don't remember that ever happening.
Slashdot Mirror
The option is totally unnecessary in almost every case. For full-bleed documents, it would be an useful option to have, but the vast majority of documents have big fat margins that exceed the unprintable margin.
The other problem with Acrobat, previously mentioned, is the unprintably huge PDF size sometimes made with bitmap graphics, unless Distiller is set to reduce print quality or the printer timeout is set long. That's some real innovation there, Adobe.
Also, for Word, have you tried using Generic Postscript as a workaround? Any office printer from the last ten years or so understands postscript, so if you use the same printer driver on the same version of Word presumably you would get the same pagination. I assume your situation is something like a law office or government agency rather than a service bureau.
You only need to save and restore the registers you use, so there is zero loss on enter/leave from adding registers. Thread switches (userthreading is dead, even on elder operating systems like Solaris) are relatively infrequent and have huge overhead, so loading and storing eight more registers is a miniscule cost.
Adding registers to x86 is a huge win for code that can use it and doesn't hurt anything else.
Your knowledge of copyright law is grossly wrong. The copyright statute itself (you don't need to find court cases or federal regulations) sets out exceptions to the public performance monopolies, and a cellphone ringtone would fall squarely within it. One of the exceptions (there are several -- for church worship, etc.) is that a stereo no more powerful than a typical home stereo is acceptable, and we'd all agree that describes a cell phone speaker. A problem you didn't mention is that in documentary filmmaking, ringtones now need to be "cleared" while previously a telephone ringing did not. The reason isn't what you expect. It's not that documentary filmmakers are worried about losing a lawsuit and paying huge damages, it's that the film distributors won't touch a film if their lawyers see any potential liability. A documentary filmmaker (except for a few like Michael Moore) is likely to be flat broke and not be worth suing, but the distributors have deep, deep pockets and they don't want any liability.
The filmmaking problem comes not from the public performance right of a cell phone, but making a derivative work (the movie) and showing that in theaters (the public performance). The issue of whether the standard copyright defenses (fair use, implied license, first sale, etc.) apply simply doesn't come up.
(Running Win98 on new computers is a bit iffy, but it is more lightweight and in some respects more bug-free than Win2k. It's also easier to manage homogeneous installations, so Win98 might be good if there's already a well-managed Win98 base in place. From the sounds of it, this isn't true in your installation.)
You seem to want the newest tech for the sake of having the newest tech, which isn't always the way to work under limited staff/capital budgets.
The anecdote about buying P133's is a little odd; I'm not sure why the school would think students need computers outside a typing class. (It's also unclear what time frame this purchase occurred in.) If the teachers didn't need computers after all, I guess it's good they didn't waste money on more powerful machines?
It's stupid to give immigrants drivers' licenses, huh? Boy, you so succicently marshalled and analyzed the benefits and problems of the alternatives to having the law be blind to the existence of millions of people. With an intellect like yours, I'm sure we can expect the President to appoint you to a high-level position in Washington within the week. In fact, I'm forwarding your message to president@whitehouse.gov, because your message was so incisive and thought-provoking, that he needs to have it on his desk today, because it demonstrates that your intellect far surpasses any other candidate he might even be thinking of appointing for any of hundreds of positions.
And the "underlying problem" you're referring to, I totally agree, you are so right. The seven million undocumented immigrants in the United States need to be gotten rid of. Immediately. Clearly, we can't deport so many people, given how slow it took to evacuate New Orleans, so the best answer (the "final solution" you might say) to this "seven million" is to execute them and use them as landfill in low-lying flood-prone areas. It will be difficult to distinguish American citizens, given that the children of undocumented immigrants are full citizens just like you and me and undocumented immigrants often marry citizens but cannot get their green card for legal reasons, but by gum, we can do it. With some American know-how, we could convert the Astrodome (once the refugees leave) into a high-performance landfill factory like the Germans used to have, only more advanced. Undocumented immigrants go in, landfill comes out. We would have the problem of what to do with all those American citizens who suddenly no longer have parents or spouses, and crime would dramatically increase by breaking up families, but that is a secondary concern to "fixing the underlying problem."
I feel that my mind has grown just being exposed to your brilliant ideas.
Look ma! We found a crybaby capitalist, who wants the government to enforce whatever monopolistic business model he dreams up!
You have a very shallow understanding of the case, as well as a very similar case that came down in a different circuit not too long ago.
Please give a citation for the proposition that Sony sold the PS1, PS2, and PSP at a loss. I am willing to believe it, if I see numbers. But I have never seen an authority say Sony is selling its units at a loss. In fact, I have seen dissections of SEC filings showing the profits that Sony makes from its consoles, on a per-unit basis. The most I have seen that would support you is jealous guesstimation from outsiders who don't vertically integrate production.
It's a myth spread by undergraduate business majors that videogame consoles are sold at a loss. Some were (famously the Xbox, the Saturn, the Gamecube at a very slight loss for a little while after the price cut to $99), but generally console makers profit from the console, the games, and the developer licenses.
Why didn't you let the fucker twist in the wind? I've looked at DCFLDD, and although it can be useful it's just about the most trivial modification to a GPL tool there is. If some low-level tool wants to have a heart attack over thinking state secrets are on the Internet, I certainly wouldn't be the one to disabuse him.
I assume he had left evidence of touching the drive, because if he hadn't there would be no way to prove that he had or hadn't "taken" the "intellectual property." (using both words loosely, of course)
Protecting themselves, my ass. You know how software patent opponents often trot out the strawman of literary patents? Richard Stallman, for example, pointed out that if literary patents existed, someone might have previously claimed "a communication process that represents, in the mind of a reader, the concept of a character who has been in jail for a long time and becomes bitter towards society and humankind." etc. and then we'd get whatever lousy forgotten novel the first guy had written rather than Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.
Well, this is another kind of art patent, a videogame plot patent. If you think a patent on a videogame plot device is okay, why not a movie plot device? We could have patents on "sleepless in seattle" plots, "genetic engineering sci-fi" plots, etc. Or a television plot device. Don't you think CBS would have loved to patent the idea of tropical paradise reality TV? For that matter, why didn't Nintendo patent the side-scrolling platform game when they wrote Super Mario Bros.? The answer is: It has always been against the rules.
This Nintendo patent is a little different than a design for an exhaust manifold or a windshield wiper, which are more usual examples of utility patents.
You need to get out of the mindset that someone has the right to make money doing something simply because he was doing that first. It's perverse, it's not capitalistic, and most of us don't share that view.
How's that? I can think of at least one patent (the cross-shaped control pad) which they kept to themselves for the full length of the patent.
Debeers doesn't have nearly the market share that they used to. It's not simply a matter of artificial scarcity holding up the price, although we all know the tricks they used to play.
One could argue that the demand is artificial, created by clever advertising, but then what's it to you? If you don't want it, don't buy it. If you do want it, are you just complaining that your tastes and preferences were altered by advertising? That's a pretty weak thing to whine about.
There are lots of pretty baubles to spend your money on. If you think emeralds and rubies are better simply because they're rarer, you should be happy that the price is "artificially" low because all those schmucks are off buying their wives semi-precious diamonds instead.
Personally, I suspect the demand is genuine. People like the fire in their eyes and the ice in their hands. You don't get fire and ice from anything besides diamonds. We are fortunate to live on a planet where something so pretty is common.
That's not true. The movie theater makes it a condition of serving you that you won't bring food in. If the manager's around, they won't let you in with food or they will make you throw it away.
Television is shown to you (hence the word "broadcast") regardless of whether any individual tapes it, goes to the bathroom, etc.
Nobody but you is calling it "theft" to take food into a theater, but you are entering private property under false pretenses. I believe it could be considered trespassing.
It isn't hard to understand, and you are 100% wrong. You might want to read section 1008 of the Audio Home Recording Act once school gets out. In brief, it is perfectly acceptable under U.S. law to make a copy of a recording for a friend, whether analog or digital. The same is true for many other countries.
What? I know that Slashdotters aren't all on the same page, but most people here generally agree that software patents are bad. Especially the vague, hazy, and overbroad ones that look like obsfucated user manuals (claiming entire kinds of software or user interfaces) rather than looking like nice detailed technical USENIX conference papers. Only Konfabulator wasn't patented.
Now you're saying that even though Konfabulator wasn't patented, wasn't a trade secret, Apple isn't a monopolist, and no part of the Konfabulator code was used by Apple, Apple should be barred from making a similar product? Pray tell, what is this argument based? Should Apple's product suck just so that these small fry can make a couple bucks? Are you saying Apple should do it just to be nice? (It would be nice if Apple sent me a check for $50k so I could buy a Lexus. Just to be nice.) Comparing the free market of the software industry to an elementary school math test is a little facile, eh?
Surely you know, since you pointed to the daringfireball website, that there was nothing in Konfabulator, other than the general idea of JavaScript desktop accessories, that would have been useful to Apple. The reason Apple chose to write Dashboard from scratch is that it could save a lot of system resources and make a more polished product by leveraging existing parts of OS X like Web Kit. Konfabulator was a monstrously heavyweight framework based on Mozilla -- each desktop accessory was bigger than many Mac applications. The people at Apple aren't stupid. If buying Konfabulator would have saved them time and money, they would have done it, just like they bought SoundJam.
Konfabulator made a lot of money on Windows, as well as Mac, and now they got their payday from Yahoo!. No tears shed there, I'm sure.
More precisely, as I understand it, is that when an industry shrinks its domestic footprint (like the steel and auto industries), underfunded private pension and health plans are in huge trouble. It doesn't matter if there's "a lot of workers," because they're working and able to pay their own way (the benefits are just a form of compensation), it matters if there's a lot of retirees compared to the number of workers.
Come again? I'll give you cheaper and more energy efficient but let's not get carried away. I bet you lose the energy efficiency once you plug in an external USB hard drive too.
You're talking about Iowa? I have never heard about a water shortage in Iowa. If you visited in the summer you would find it to be unbearably hot and muggy. Erosion tends to be a bigger problem, but with no-till farming that's not so much an issue anymore.
If his "lipsync and mimic [are] better than average," as you say, then he has a good chance of landing work which is what his intent was.
Jesus christ on a popsicle stick.
First, Canadians are not a race, last time I checked.
Second, here's a tip: Don't use the word "balance," because it signals that what you mean is that you don't like the way the law is and it ought to move towards the other (i.e. your) side. But the word "balance" doesn't actually make any kind of argument for you. (Or it means the case at issue concerns a set of the 10 commandments, in which case the word "balance" means "flip a coin.")
Third, what in Sam Hill do you mean by "her publisher's right to IP"? This is exactly what Richard Stallman warned about. It's one thing for, say, a legislative committee that specializes in patent and copyright to call itself an "IP committee," or for a legal academic to call himself an "IP professor" because patent and copyright are areas of law that are somewhat related.
But now we have people who have no idea what the law is using the word "property" as a magic wand to say that content providers have unlimited rights as a kind of mental shortcut, rather than making an educated statement about the boundaries of copyright, patent, trade secret, trademark, etc. Right here, the publisher has no rights to the books. They have been rightfully sold in the ordinary course of business. And the publisher sure as heck doesn't have a right to keeping the plot a secret!
Fuck, I feel the need to send a check to the FSF in the morning. Clearly RMS's outreach efforts need more support.
That's news to me. Please give me a citation. As I recall, the PC design was available royalty-free, while IBM's attempt at controlling the architecture (the MicroChannel Architecture): 1) flopped in the marketplace, 2) did not have substantially better performance, 3) cost a hell of a lot of money, and 4) led to the downfall of IBM in the PC market as people shunned its PS/2 line.
So unless I'm mistaken, your pro-patent argument is precisely wrong.
To get rid of the patent system is to throw the baby out with the bath water.
What baby? Aside from solving Arrow's information paradox, which is completely irrelevant to a company the size of IBM, the only time I've seen actual proof of the benefit of patents is in the pharmaceutical industry. Even there the gross price disparity between the US and the rest of the world shows that the system is not optimal.
The Businessweek story here is a truly amazing example of how patents stifle creativity, even outside the software industry.
Comedy Central has the latest show on its website the day after it airs. They seem to leave out the less-funny segments sometimes, but they always seem to have the monologue, and sometimes the whole show if it was really great.
I sure hope the guy has a good lawyer. He's going to find himself in a world if hurt if the trial comes down to whether the judge likes the prosecutor's analogy or the defense's analogy better.
Actually, you wouldn't believe the analogies that get used in high-stakes patent litigation. Tens of millions of dollars will hinge on whether the jury thinks the product at hand was more like a mailman or an orchestra conductor. I'm not making this up.
But the facts here (how APs and DHCP work, the common practice of leaving APs open specifically for others to use) are simple enough that hopefully a good attorney can just set the story straight.
If a good attorney gets involved early enough, he'll put enough of a good case to the DA that the DA will cut a really easy plea bargain just to avoid the risk of losing an expensive trial on an alleged crime that didn't really affect anybody. (The prosecutor's office has a fixed budget just like anybody else.) The man will pay a small fine and save the money he would have wasted on defending himself at trial.
The video is hosted on his university account, not his blog ISP account. Universities are known for having web server farms and more bandwidth than $god.
I think it's pretty unusual for a university (not departmental) web server be slashdotted. I don't remember that ever happening.