based on â" surprise â" good acceptance for KDE 4.
Definitely agree there. KDE4 is going to dramatically improve very quickly. They've made a huge development investment in the underlying libraries, and that will come to fruition this year (and already has somewhat with KDE 4.1). My impression is that it's going to get better. Couple that with a maturing X.org, and you have the makings of a beautiful desktop.
BSD's license is fairly open ended, allowing for redistribution under other licenses. Parts of OS X are GPL as well, but those are distributed with access to source. The package as a whole, which includes various libraries and utilities that are priprietary and have nothing to do with the underlying BSD and GPL software, should be covered by the EULA. That is assuming everything in the EULA is enforceable.
^ Written by someone who obviously never watched The Daily Show during Clinton's administration.
Hear hear! I remember in 2000 everyone asking what comedians would do without Clinton. I think they ended up fine, and they'll be fine after Bush. The Daily Show and Colbert Report are both perfectly happy to make fun of individuals of any party, even if the shows have a left slant to policy in general.
Apple probably spends 5 times as much on software development as hardware, while the clone makers spend 0.
Bring that statement to its logical conclusion: with clones in the wild, Apple will have spent a lot on software development, but will still make 100% of the profit licensing that software.
Realistically, time and investment are irrelevant to the conversation, though I'm sure both will get mentions in court. What really matters, though, is the legality surrounding the licensing. Each clone can run OS X, and OS X is mostly proprietary, requiring a valid license from Apple. What is likely to help Apple's case is Pystar's distribution of the OS, which may be a license violation even if Apple gets their $129. It remains to be seen if license restrictions requiring an approved piece of hardware are enforceable.
On an tangential note, I don't think a clone market would necessarily hurt Apple, but even if it did, that wouldn't necessarily make clones ilegall.
Re:And faint of heart
on
Bash Cookbook
·
· Score: 1, Funny
before threwing in the trowl.
I should of done the same. I don't like picking apart people's writings, but it's a doggy-dog world.
I'd put it another, sadder way: the first two movies were "broken" from what Lucas really wanted, and it wasn't until Jedi and the prequels that he started to exercise greater control. Or rather, what you like best about A New Hope and Empire is not what Lucas was really shooting for: these were all meant to be kid's movies, and that the first couple attracted adults and sci-fi lovers was a profitable accident.
The more control Lucas has over the story and filming, the worse the film ends up. Go see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and then read one of the leaked copies of Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods on the Internet. The latter is a professionally written screenplay by someone who loves the characters, the former is Lucas's "corrected" version. We need to stop having high expectations of the man.
Ah, obviously you haven't heard the back story of Return of the Jedi. No, I don't mean the bit where it was called Revenge of the Jedi. There's more.
I'll cite nothing because I have no idea where this information leaked from, and you can take it with a grain of salt because I heard it years ago. But apparently the original story for Jedi worked like this:
The forest moon isn't Endor, it's Kashyyyk. The furry friends aren't Eworks, they're Wookies. You can still see an echo of this in the final film, because the very word "Ewok" is an anagram for "Wookie" (with a couple letters dropped). No one knows why this happened, but it's a safe bet the Wookies would have been way cooler than the Ewoks were. Popular opinion has it that the merchandising for cute teddy bears was more attractive than that of Wookie action figures, but no one knows for sure. Perhaps Lucas felt burned by the negative reaction to the Wookies in the 1978 Christmas Special.
Anyway, the idea was that Kashyyyk was a slave planet. That the Empire had enslaved the Wookies was a preexisting concept, and it explainined why Chewbacca so hated the idea of wearing handcuffs in A New Hope: he was a former slave, and Han had rescued him years ago. The story of Jedi was originally to have involved the Wookie uprising. Instead we got Ewok booby traps. Also, Vader doesn't take Luke to the new Death Star. Instead, he takes him to the capital planet of the Empire, and it's there that Luke encounters the Emperor. The setting wasn't named "Coruscant" back then (that's Timothy Zahn's name for it) but Ralph McQuarrie concept art from the 1980s still exists for it.
Later versions differed from the final story in key ways as well. For example, Michael Pennington's character Moff Jerrjerod (the dude who meets Vader in the docking bay at the start of Jedi) originally had a more expanded role. At the film's climax, he realizes that the Emperor is dead and that the Rebellion is about to destroy the new Death Star, so he decides to aim the primary weapon at Endor. The idea is to generate an explosion that will destroy the entire Rebellion in one swift stroke (not to mention the Death Star and much of the Imperial fleet, but he decides that's a small price under the circumstances). This adds significant tension and makes the Rebellion's last-minute destruction of the Death Star that much more urgent.
Of course, the last story element to drastically change was the loss of the Millennium Falcon. Originally Lando does not manage to escape with the Falcon (why did you think Han and Chewie weren't on it?), making Han's last moment with his favorite ship the scene in the docking bay where Lando promises to return it without a scratch. Remember how Han comments to Leia that he feels like he'll never see it again? Originally he didn't. Lando redeems himself for turning Han over to Vader by sacrificing himself to save the Rebellion. Han loses the Falcon, but in a way this is good for his character's development because it means he finally gives up his old ways and lands the princess.
Rumor has it that they filmed Lando's death but it bothered test audiences (who do they get for these idiot test audiences, anyway?) so Lucas and director Richard Marquand decided to change it.
While I like Jedi, I've always believed that something fundamental snapped between the glorious Empire Strikes Back and the final film. Lucas lost track of what was good about the universe and the characters, and it only got worse from there.
I completely agree. There may also be legal provisions for investigations of chemical compounds on an emergency basis, sans-warrant, that would absolve these authorities from honoring the usual Fourth Amendment protections if they had reason to believe something nefarious was going on and thought they needed to act without delay for public safety reasons. I have no idea. That's why I think the hoopla around this article is embarassingly premature, and the MAKE article is way too alarmist for my taste.
Mod points be damned - I'll ditch them to get in on this thread. There's nothing about this story that is intrinsically left- or right-leaning, despite the temptation to apply that often imaginary dichotomy to everything under the sun. It's also not some indication that both liberals and conservatives are out to destroy chemistry as we know it, violating our rights as they go along. I ask the Libertarians to at least tentatively withdraw your attack dogs. Let's examine what we know.
The meat of the case against Mr. Deeb is in this statement, which was not fully quoted in the summary because it comes from the MAKE article, which truncates it:
Pamela A. Wilderman, Marlboro's code enforcement officer, said Mr. Deeb was doing scientific research and development in a residential area, which is a violation of zoning laws.
That's from the source article in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. It indicates that this wasn't just some dude with a home chemistry set and a nifty hobby; Deebs was doing "research and development." This doesn't make him dangerous, but it's entirely possible that he really was violating local zoning laws. Neither the MAKE article nor the Worcester Telegram & Gazette article specifies which zoning laws were violated, nor which chemicals were involved.
So this may be a case of law enforcement overstepping its authority (and either liberalism or conservatism run amok, depending on whose adherents you think are more likely to try to convince us that chemists in basements are scary), but it may also be a case of Marlboro's "code enforcement" officers following perfectly valid (albeit annoying) zoning laws. Whether or not the laws are overly strict, I don't see anything in this article to indicate that Deeb's fundamental rights were violated... except the bit about a lack of warrant. The MAKE article has this to say about that alleged Fourth Amendment infraction:
In effect, the Massachusetts authorities have invaded Deeb's lab, apparently without a warrant, and stolen his property. Deeb, presumably under at least the implied threat of further action, has not objected to the warrantless search and the confiscation of his property.
However, the original Worcester Telegram & Gazette article doesn't say anything about the absence of a warrant, and the MAKE article does not cite any other source. If that allegation is true, the Marlboro authorities have some explaining to do. But these sources are too limited to know for sure. I did a search on Google News and found this article, which was the only one about these events that I cound find. While it also mentions that Deeb is cooperating with authorities, it doesn't mention warrants. Fourth Amendment violation? Who knows. Let's all get on with what we were doing before this "firestorm" erupted and reconvene when we have something solid and legitimate to complain about.
Why is it that every time I read about the EFF or Lesig I hear about how they are going down in flames in once case or another? Are we taking about the Washington generals here? Whats it going to take for them to actually win something for a change.
I say, this is intolerable! You Slashdottian ragamuffins should remove the hyperlink to that MIT-hosted court document post haste, or I shall be forced to request that these truckless tubes be cleansed of it... in court! (There, that will put a decisive end to their meddling.)
True, this won't go well for them. And with fuel prices as they are, the airlines really don't need to be pointing guns at their own feet and telling Legal to pull the trigger. This move is nonsensical.
Air travel is an industry where the pricing simply makes no sense. The person sitting next to you on a flight may have paid $500 more or less than you did, for no reason. The newfound ability to use aggregator sites to compare prices was the one thing that made it bearable to book flights. Airlines should accept that the market answered their customers' demands without their help.
All right, clever people of Slashdot, answer me this:
If instead of making a balloon out of this atom-thick material you simply made a large sheet (say, the size of a sheet of A4 paper) could a person fold this super-thin sheet in half more than twelve times? That's the current record, shattering the previously accepted limit of eight folds.*
* Regarding the latter link: I know. (Ouch! My eyes!)
Out of curiosity, what makes expensive shoes better than cheap shoes? I don't think I've ever spent more than $30-40 on a pair of shoes, and I tend to wear them at least a couple years before they wear out. I do a lot of walking too, so if my shoes were not up to the task I think I'd notice. What do you get for your extra $100?
Find yourself just the right back problem and you'll soon find out. I used to buy shoes based solely on their basic appearance and comfort at the time of purchase, but impact from poor walking runs right up the legs, and can cause big problems for the lower back. I now spend a lot more on shoes. The right shoes are worth whatever is being changed (especially considering that in the wrong shoes, I can't even walk).
I wonder if the Chinese government is aware of MediaSentry's track record
I wonder if MediaSentry is aware of the Chinese government's track record?
Meh. They're perfect bed fellows and we all know it. They both excel at exploiting an ignorant public.
No kidding - I've no need of organizations that exploit an ignorant public like China and MediaSentry. I'm perfectly content with the US government and Apple.
This is way, way off topic, but logic is basically valueless without premises. The point of logic is to establish a framework of reasoning, which you then apply to a set of known true premises (or at least, assumed true premises). The original poster's argument, that logic alone can prove the existence of rights, is a non sequitur (in fact, it's a non sequitur that describes another non sequitur, since both the statement and the principle it's pushing do not follow). Logic alone doesn't do anything. It's like a computer without electricity.
That is false. Explain how logic can explain the right to free speech, to pick an example. Without proof, I'd be hard-pressed to believe that such rights are anything other than axioms.
Agreed. Neither God, logic nor His Noodly Appendage provides basic rights in any empirically demonstrable way. Your question applies just as well to all three. Rights are simply ideas that make convenient sense to us. If the Constitution doesn't explicitly provide a right, the Libertarian view is that it exists by default. But this is a legal opinion, and while it is one that I like, it doesn't come from any particular authority that I have seen.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure if we've exchanged comments before, but I have some genuine replica watches of the finest quality.
Oh ... so you're address is bill@billrocks.org? Interesting ...
based on â" surprise â" good acceptance for KDE 4.
Definitely agree there. KDE4 is going to dramatically improve very quickly. They've made a huge development investment in the underlying libraries, and that will come to fruition this year (and already has somewhat with KDE 4.1). My impression is that it's going to get better. Couple that with a maturing X.org, and you have the makings of a beautiful desktop.
BSD's license is fairly open ended, allowing for redistribution under other licenses. Parts of OS X are GPL as well, but those are distributed with access to source. The package as a whole, which includes various libraries and utilities that are priprietary and have nothing to do with the underlying BSD and GPL software, should be covered by the EULA. That is assuming everything in the EULA is enforceable.
^ Written by someone who obviously never watched The Daily Show during Clinton's administration.
Hear hear! I remember in 2000 everyone asking what comedians would do without Clinton. I think they ended up fine, and they'll be fine after Bush. The Daily Show and Colbert Report are both perfectly happy to make fun of individuals of any party, even if the shows have a left slant to policy in general.
Apple probably spends 5 times as much on software development as hardware, while the clone makers spend 0.
Bring that statement to its logical conclusion: with clones in the wild, Apple will have spent a lot on software development, but will still make 100% of the profit licensing that software.
Realistically, time and investment are irrelevant to the conversation, though I'm sure both will get mentions in court. What really matters, though, is the legality surrounding the licensing. Each clone can run OS X, and OS X is mostly proprietary, requiring a valid license from Apple. What is likely to help Apple's case is Pystar's distribution of the OS, which may be a license violation even if Apple gets their $129. It remains to be seen if license restrictions requiring an approved piece of hardware are enforceable.
On an tangential note, I don't think a clone market would necessarily hurt Apple, but even if it did, that wouldn't necessarily make clones ilegall.
before threwing in the trowl.
I should of done the same. I don't like picking apart people's writings, but it's a doggy-dog world.
I'd put it another, sadder way: the first two movies were "broken" from what Lucas really wanted, and it wasn't until Jedi and the prequels that he started to exercise greater control. Or rather, what you like best about A New Hope and Empire is not what Lucas was really shooting for: these were all meant to be kid's movies, and that the first couple attracted adults and sci-fi lovers was a profitable accident.
The more control Lucas has over the story and filming, the worse the film ends up. Go see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and then read one of the leaked copies of Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods on the Internet. The latter is a professionally written screenplay by someone who loves the characters, the former is Lucas's "corrected" version. We need to stop having high expectations of the man.
Ewoks were cool, and Lucas hadnt sold out then.
Ah, obviously you haven't heard the back story of Return of the Jedi. No, I don't mean the bit where it was called Revenge of the Jedi. There's more.
I'll cite nothing because I have no idea where this information leaked from, and you can take it with a grain of salt because I heard it years ago. But apparently the original story for Jedi worked like this:
The forest moon isn't Endor, it's Kashyyyk. The furry friends aren't Eworks, they're Wookies. You can still see an echo of this in the final film, because the very word "Ewok" is an anagram for "Wookie" (with a couple letters dropped). No one knows why this happened, but it's a safe bet the Wookies would have been way cooler than the Ewoks were. Popular opinion has it that the merchandising for cute teddy bears was more attractive than that of Wookie action figures, but no one knows for sure. Perhaps Lucas felt burned by the negative reaction to the Wookies in the 1978 Christmas Special.
Anyway, the idea was that Kashyyyk was a slave planet. That the Empire had enslaved the Wookies was a preexisting concept, and it explainined why Chewbacca so hated the idea of wearing handcuffs in A New Hope: he was a former slave, and Han had rescued him years ago. The story of Jedi was originally to have involved the Wookie uprising. Instead we got Ewok booby traps. Also, Vader doesn't take Luke to the new Death Star. Instead, he takes him to the capital planet of the Empire, and it's there that Luke encounters the Emperor. The setting wasn't named "Coruscant" back then (that's Timothy Zahn's name for it) but Ralph McQuarrie concept art from the 1980s still exists for it.
Later versions differed from the final story in key ways as well. For example, Michael Pennington's character Moff Jerrjerod (the dude who meets Vader in the docking bay at the start of Jedi) originally had a more expanded role. At the film's climax, he realizes that the Emperor is dead and that the Rebellion is about to destroy the new Death Star, so he decides to aim the primary weapon at Endor. The idea is to generate an explosion that will destroy the entire Rebellion in one swift stroke (not to mention the Death Star and much of the Imperial fleet, but he decides that's a small price under the circumstances). This adds significant tension and makes the Rebellion's last-minute destruction of the Death Star that much more urgent.
Of course, the last story element to drastically change was the loss of the Millennium Falcon. Originally Lando does not manage to escape with the Falcon (why did you think Han and Chewie weren't on it?), making Han's last moment with his favorite ship the scene in the docking bay where Lando promises to return it without a scratch. Remember how Han comments to Leia that he feels like he'll never see it again? Originally he didn't. Lando redeems himself for turning Han over to Vader by sacrificing himself to save the Rebellion. Han loses the Falcon, but in a way this is good for his character's development because it means he finally gives up his old ways and lands the princess.
Rumor has it that they filmed Lando's death but it bothered test audiences (who do they get for these idiot test audiences, anyway?) so Lucas and director Richard Marquand decided to change it.
While I like Jedi, I've always believed that something fundamental snapped between the glorious Empire Strikes Back and the final film. Lucas lost track of what was good about the universe and the characters, and it only got worse from there.
I completely agree. There may also be legal provisions for investigations of chemical compounds on an emergency basis, sans-warrant, that would absolve these authorities from honoring the usual Fourth Amendment protections if they had reason to believe something nefarious was going on and thought they needed to act without delay for public safety reasons. I have no idea. That's why I think the hoopla around this article is embarassingly premature, and the MAKE article is way too alarmist for my taste.
Mod points be damned - I'll ditch them to get in on this thread. There's nothing about this story that is intrinsically left- or right-leaning, despite the temptation to apply that often imaginary dichotomy to everything under the sun. It's also not some indication that both liberals and conservatives are out to destroy chemistry as we know it, violating our rights as they go along. I ask the Libertarians to at least tentatively withdraw your attack dogs. Let's examine what we know.
The meat of the case against Mr. Deeb is in this statement, which was not fully quoted in the summary because it comes from the MAKE article, which truncates it:
Pamela A. Wilderman, Marlboro's code enforcement officer, said Mr. Deeb was doing scientific research and development in a residential area, which is a violation of zoning laws.
That's from the source article in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. It indicates that this wasn't just some dude with a home chemistry set and a nifty hobby; Deebs was doing "research and development." This doesn't make him dangerous, but it's entirely possible that he really was violating local zoning laws. Neither the MAKE article nor the Worcester Telegram & Gazette article specifies which zoning laws were violated, nor which chemicals were involved.
So this may be a case of law enforcement overstepping its authority (and either liberalism or conservatism run amok, depending on whose adherents you think are more likely to try to convince us that chemists in basements are scary), but it may also be a case of Marlboro's "code enforcement" officers following perfectly valid (albeit annoying) zoning laws. Whether or not the laws are overly strict, I don't see anything in this article to indicate that Deeb's fundamental rights were violated ... except the bit about a lack of warrant. The MAKE article has this to say about that alleged Fourth Amendment infraction:
In effect, the Massachusetts authorities have invaded Deeb's lab, apparently without a warrant, and stolen his property. Deeb, presumably under at least the implied threat of further action, has not objected to the warrantless search and the confiscation of his property.
However, the original Worcester Telegram & Gazette article doesn't say anything about the absence of a warrant, and the MAKE article does not cite any other source. If that allegation is true, the Marlboro authorities have some explaining to do. But these sources are too limited to know for sure. I did a search on Google News and found this article, which was the only one about these events that I cound find. While it also mentions that Deeb is cooperating with authorities, it doesn't mention warrants. Fourth Amendment violation? Who knows. Let's all get on with what we were doing before this "firestorm" erupted and reconvene when we have something solid and legitimate to complain about.
Why is it that every time I read about the EFF or Lesig I hear about how they are going down in flames in once case or another? Are we taking about the Washington generals here? Whats it going to take for them to actually win something for a change.
http://www.eff.org/victories
Bat's breath! I forgot to include this in my backwards, Victorian-eque Interweb rant: get off my lawn!
I say, this is intolerable! You Slashdottian ragamuffins should remove the hyperlink to that MIT-hosted court document post haste, or I shall be forced to request that these truckless tubes be cleansed of it ... in court! (There, that will put a decisive end to their meddling.)
I forget where I heard this, but 64K addresses ought to be enough for anyone.
He also says Shut up!
True, this won't go well for them. And with fuel prices as they are, the airlines really don't need to be pointing guns at their own feet and telling Legal to pull the trigger. This move is nonsensical.
Air travel is an industry where the pricing simply makes no sense. The person sitting next to you on a flight may have paid $500 more or less than you did, for no reason. The newfound ability to use aggregator sites to compare prices was the one thing that made it bearable to book flights. Airlines should accept that the market answered their customers' demands without their help.
All right, clever people of Slashdot, answer me this:
If instead of making a balloon out of this atom-thick material you simply made a large sheet (say, the size of a sheet of A4 paper) could a person fold this super-thin sheet in half more than twelve times? That's the current record, shattering the previously accepted limit of eight folds.*
* Regarding the latter link: I know. (Ouch! My eyes!)
Note that in order to pop this balloon you need to find a pin that is at least two atoms thick.
Out of curiosity, what makes expensive shoes better than cheap shoes? I don't think I've ever spent more than $30-40 on a pair of shoes, and I tend to wear them at least a couple years before they wear out. I do a lot of walking too, so if my shoes were not up to the task I think I'd notice. What do you get for your extra $100?
Find yourself just the right back problem and you'll soon find out. I used to buy shoes based solely on their basic appearance and comfort at the time of purchase, but impact from poor walking runs right up the legs, and can cause big problems for the lower back. I now spend a lot more on shoes. The right shoes are worth whatever is being changed (especially considering that in the wrong shoes, I can't even walk).
I wonder if the Chinese government is aware of MediaSentry's track record
I wonder if MediaSentry is aware of the Chinese government's track record?
Meh. They're perfect bed fellows and we all know it. They both excel at exploiting an ignorant public.
No kidding - I've no need of organizations that exploit an ignorant public like China and MediaSentry. I'm perfectly content with the US government and Apple.
This is way, way off topic, but logic is basically valueless without premises. The point of logic is to establish a framework of reasoning, which you then apply to a set of known true premises (or at least, assumed true premises). The original poster's argument, that logic alone can prove the existence of rights, is a non sequitur (in fact, it's a non sequitur that describes another non sequitur, since both the statement and the principle it's pushing do not follow). Logic alone doesn't do anything. It's like a computer without electricity.
That is false. Explain how logic can explain the right to free speech, to pick an example. Without proof, I'd be hard-pressed to believe that such rights are anything other than axioms.
Agreed. Neither God, logic nor His Noodly Appendage provides basic rights in any empirically demonstrable way. Your question applies just as well to all three. Rights are simply ideas that make convenient sense to us. If the Constitution doesn't explicitly provide a right, the Libertarian view is that it exists by default. But this is a legal opinion, and while it is one that I like, it doesn't come from any particular authority that I have seen.
Extended warranties are rip-offs - no exceptions.
Trust me on this: not buying the extended warranty on an Apple product is a good way to get it to break after 91 days.
You know who else didn't own laptops? The Nazis.
What about ENIGMA? It was rather compct --- could fit on every submarine...
You know who else rationalized the ENIGMA device ...? :)