This is perhaps slightly astray of the topic, but what's more important than noting that this study has been overhyped and stretched by the media into something it isn't, is Liberman's mention of Open Access journals. I'm overjoyed to read that the key scientists involved with some journals have rebelled against the overbearing corporate presence in the world of the scientific journal and have taken their expertise with them to found new journals based on principles of open access to all.
The point of journals is to provide a mechanism for peer review of research, to filter the copious amounts of research for the benefit of the reader. However, the trend has been to jack up the price so severely - both for subscribers and for accepted submitters - that access to peer-reviewed research has been hampered rather than enhanced by journals. The spirit of scientific research is that of the Creative Commons, and I am really hoping that the technology and cheap distributed bandwidth offered by the Internet will allow the interests of the scientific community to be separated from the interests of the corporate world. We would be much better off with journals that essentially provide digital signatures for the research articles they accept for "publication", allowing the researchers themselves or third parties to distribute the articles under a CC-type license, thus eliminating the need for a large publishing infrastructure, since any publishing could occur on the reader's or the library's printers.
That's okay, we learned from Enterprise that Klingon space is about four days away from Earth, and that's only at warp five. Klaa flying from the Klingon homeworld to blast our space junk would be like going out for a Sunday drive, and from there, the Great Barrier is just around the corner!
I can implement the mp3 file format without violating copyright, if I write all my own code. But I can't (currently) do it without incurring patent issues. The same goes with a protocol like BitTorrent - a patent could encumber it in terms of what I was talking about in an earlier post, but not copyright, because it's a protocol, not a copyrightable work.
If I don't use their code for implementing BitTorrent, then I don't have to agree to their license agreement, and thus I don't have to do jack crap that they say. That's why a patent is required to make it work, because under patent, I would have to license the patent for the BitTorrent technology if I wanted to implement it, even if I write all my own code.
The mother's attorney was defending her pro-bono, but she was still responsible for court costs.
The attorney says, in a comment to this blog post, that unofficially, part of the reason for this was likely to avoid setting up a cottage industry where attorneys defend the targets of unfounded RIAA lawsuits either pro-bono or at a reduced rate, but then when the RIAA loses, claim the court costs and/or attorney's fees that are awarded by federal statute to the prevailing party.
This wouldn't work unless the BitTorrent protocol were patented. Patent licensees would be required to comply with terms that required them not to attempt to poison tracker sites, as well as to include that requirement as part of an EULA for any software they produce that uses the patent license. Without the patent restriction, someone could just develop software that independently implements the BitTorrent protocol and be unencumbered by EULA terms.
And we all know that software patents are a Good Thing. </sarcasm>
Whether it's child pron or copied music, why should the onus be on software developers to prevent the end-user from doing something illegal? We don't put detectors/tasers on hammers to prevent people from using them to bash someone's head in, and P2P file sharing software is just as much a tool as a hammer is (though a hammer is much easier to use and can be applied to far more nefarious purposes).
Ah, yes, the ZPM. I forgot all about that. And the time machines - maybe I should reassess my take on that episode. Somehow it left me feeling unfulfilled, but perhaps that was because of the whirlwind timeline munging and the sheer confusion that created:)
And, yes, it's nice how Stargate has amazing continity. You get the feeling they grab new writers and stick them in front of seasons 1-8 DVDs before their pen hits the paper.
Part of it is that Martin Wood and Peter DeLuise (among other writer/director/creative consultants) pay such amazing attention to detail. They're just a couple of the people who really go above-and-beyond on the show. They know the fans would catch all sorts of things if they weren't so careful, because they're fans of the show, too.
Thank you for declaring this "flamebait." That you're doing it to supress somebody for badmouthing the President whose appointee is responsible for this is all the irony I need in one day.
Isn't is possible that the moderator felt that the comment added nothing productive to the discussion, but was rather designed to get other people to return flamage, hence "flamebait"?
On the other hand, it's well known that Slashdot readers are heavily left-biased, on average, meaning that the poster of the "flamebait" comment was merely karma-whoring. While the moderator chose to use "flamebait" for the post, perhaps the karma-whoring aspect of the post means that a more appropriate moderation would have been "troll" or even the un-M2-able "overrated".
The magic reset button I had mentioned in my earlier post is where events occur in an episode, but at the end some miraculous solution occurs, and afterwards, the events of that episode never again have sway over future plot (and any attempt to write those events into later plot would seem incredibly contrived). (Who shot J.R.? Who cares! *bzzt*)
As for SG-1 (and Atlantis to some degree), the writers have actually surprised me by the frequency with which they will make references to past events, including ones that at the time seemed like standalone episodes of little importance. And I'm not talking clip shows here, either, where the mention of past events is token so that they can insert a clip of the earlier episode (though they have had several clip shows... ugh) - even obscure past events crop up every now and then in dialogue or even in an event which furthers an important current plot. For example (spoiler warning!), the episode where Osiris is captured by SG-1 seemed to close a plot thread, until one of the writers realized, hey, wait, her ship is still cloaked in orbit. It became the vessel (pun intended) for another entire plot thread involving rogue NID elements on Earth.
But as far as the time travel episodes go, yes, only Moebius really pulled a magic reset button on us. Maybe they'll surprise me and make those events important again sometime later. 1969 and 2010 were both interesting perspectives on the past and the potential future of the Stargate program and the heroes of the story (and even of Earth in general). 2010 wasn't a magic reset button episode because the whole point was to deliver the note into the past to warn the SGC about the Aschen - a plot point that came back later in a great episode where the suspense was built around the fact that we, the viewer, knew the events in 2010 and the Aschen's nefarious plans, while the main characters didn't.
And Window of Opportunity is a fan favorite, not because of the magic reset button, but because it gave a chance for some great character development by giving the viewers the opportunity to see their humorous side. It told us something important about the Ancients - namely, that they were fallible, and though they were incredibly advanced, they weren't gods any more than the Goa'uld were. And while it borrowed heavily from Groundhog Day, the difference was that instead of looking at a man given the unique opportunity to make so much more of himself, it looked at the plight of a man who created a time loop because he was afraid to let go of the past. Probably some of RDA's best acting, especially in the scene at the end where he convinces that man to deactivate the loop.
I don't see why a sci-fi series shouldn't have a soap-operatic quality to it. Babylon 5 (and, on its heels, DS9) showed other sci-fi writers that a long-term, overarching plot is well-received by many sci-fi fans. Witness Voyager, on the other hand, where the only thing tying the shows together was this "Oh Noes, We're A Bazillion Light Years From Home" thing, while five minutes before the end of every episode they pushed the Magic Reset Button to solve their problem and restore the plot to the way it was when the episode started.
These days, every episode of Stargate SG-1/Atlantis and Battlestar Galactica (some of the most popular current sci-fi) is based on the entire series up until that point (in fact, the first line in most episodes of SG-1 these days is Chris Judge saying, "Previously, on Stargate SG-1...").
Besides, the soap operatic plot of most sci-fi shows holds up to scrutiny a lot better than most actual soap operas: "I love you, but.... I have amnesia!"
My preferred ticket would be McCain/Lieberman. I think the two of them are among the few who would have the guts to actually do something like that. Unfortunately, McCain's no spring chicken, and a McCain/Lieberman ticket would have to go outside the partisan political apparatus to get on the ballot anyway.
(P.S. If you actually register a Slashdot account and log in, you can post much more frequently. The limit used to be every two minutes - but they might have changed it recently, and it might be based on your karma now. You can check a box to post as an Anonymous Coward even if you're logged in.)
Just "rm -rf *" is more likely to get all those pesky illegal wossnames you have cavorting around your hard drive. Plus it's four keystrokes less work for the recording industry.
This isn't Microsoft we're talking about here. The RIAA believes in forcing the consumer to bow to their almighty whim and then suing the ones remaining that don't.
One example Wessel cites: software that tells patent litigants which courts have the most favorable historical record for their side.
That seems like an issue with the ability of litigants to go forum shopping in the first place (a problem with the judicial system), rather than the fault of information and processing tools.
All I see is a bunch of assertions regarding campaign finance reform with no evidence to back those assertions up. How have third parties been negatively affected by recent reforms, for example? Any references to support that statement?
If you really really want ultimate campaign finance regulation, you have to eliminate the connection between money and speech altogether. Presidential campaigns shouldn't cost millions of dollars to run. People who feel passionately about a candidate should be able to volunteer to go door-to-door collecting ballot petition signatures, and then candidates who have their names on the ballots in most (or all) of the states would be invited to participate in a series of governmentally-funded (but independently-controlled) debates.
Gone would be political advertising for pay. You could stump for a candidate all you want, as long as your endorsement was given freely (as in speech and as in beer). Volunteerism would be the new vessel of political speech, not money. Third parties and truly independent candidates would be put on the same playing field, because today's true power centers (the Republican and Democratic parties) would be rendered pointless.
Not that CmdrTaco will be any more likely to answer a question from the unwashed masses than the Blizzard devs are, but one of the things being argued about on the official WoW forums is whether there was an actual agreement between Blizzard and Slashdot that indicated that Blizzard would have developers answer the questions rather than just whoever. Was there actually such an agreement that Blizzard reneged on, or was it just a big misunderstanding?
I'm the other way around - I'd be all over digital cable if I could get a CableCard-ready PCI card to slap in my PVR.
Unfortunately, the industry has the license wrapped up in various requirements, ones that somehow don't violate antitrust laws, that pretty much make it impossible for a company that's unwilling to fellate the entertainment industry to produce such a device.
Slashdot Mirror
Even the squeakiest voice in American voice acting can't compete with 95% of the original Japanese female cast.
This is perhaps slightly astray of the topic, but what's more important than noting that this study has been overhyped and stretched by the media into something it isn't, is Liberman's mention of Open Access journals. I'm overjoyed to read that the key scientists involved with some journals have rebelled against the overbearing corporate presence in the world of the scientific journal and have taken their expertise with them to found new journals based on principles of open access to all.
The point of journals is to provide a mechanism for peer review of research, to filter the copious amounts of research for the benefit of the reader. However, the trend has been to jack up the price so severely - both for subscribers and for accepted submitters - that access to peer-reviewed research has been hampered rather than enhanced by journals. The spirit of scientific research is that of the Creative Commons, and I am really hoping that the technology and cheap distributed bandwidth offered by the Internet will allow the interests of the scientific community to be separated from the interests of the corporate world. We would be much better off with journals that essentially provide digital signatures for the research articles they accept for "publication", allowing the researchers themselves or third parties to distribute the articles under a CC-type license, thus eliminating the need for a large publishing infrastructure, since any publishing could occur on the reader's or the library's printers.
Quick, send them something newer, like Britney Sp... oh, nevermind, what's the difference.
Bigger breasts.
That's okay, we learned from Enterprise that Klingon space is about four days away from Earth, and that's only at warp five. Klaa flying from the Klingon homeworld to blast our space junk would be like going out for a Sunday drive, and from there, the Great Barrier is just around the corner!
I can implement the mp3 file format without violating copyright, if I write all my own code. But I can't (currently) do it without incurring patent issues. The same goes with a protocol like BitTorrent - a patent could encumber it in terms of what I was talking about in an earlier post, but not copyright, because it's a protocol, not a copyrightable work.
If I don't use their code for implementing BitTorrent, then I don't have to agree to their license agreement, and thus I don't have to do jack crap that they say. That's why a patent is required to make it work, because under patent, I would have to license the patent for the BitTorrent technology if I wanted to implement it, even if I write all my own code.
The mother's attorney was defending her pro-bono, but she was still responsible for court costs.
The attorney says, in a comment to this blog post, that unofficially, part of the reason for this was likely to avoid setting up a cottage industry where attorneys defend the targets of unfounded RIAA lawsuits either pro-bono or at a reduced rate, but then when the RIAA loses, claim the court costs and/or attorney's fees that are awarded by federal statute to the prevailing party.
Not that I see why that would be a problem.
The article links to this article with all the same content (sans the pointless opinions of the author).
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/blog/211
I went there with 1.0.6 with adblock and flashblock and got no ads and no popups.
Ditto.
This wouldn't work unless the BitTorrent protocol were patented. Patent licensees would be required to comply with terms that required them not to attempt to poison tracker sites, as well as to include that requirement as part of an EULA for any software they produce that uses the patent license. Without the patent restriction, someone could just develop software that independently implements the BitTorrent protocol and be unencumbered by EULA terms.
And we all know that software patents are a Good Thing. </sarcasm>
Whether it's child pron or copied music, why should the onus be on software developers to prevent the end-user from doing something illegal? We don't put detectors/tasers on hammers to prevent people from using them to bash someone's head in, and P2P file sharing software is just as much a tool as a hammer is (though a hammer is much easier to use and can be applied to far more nefarious purposes).
Ah, yes, the ZPM. I forgot all about that. And the time machines - maybe I should reassess my take on that episode. Somehow it left me feeling unfulfilled, but perhaps that was because of the whirlwind timeline munging and the sheer confusion that created :)
And, yes, it's nice how Stargate has amazing continity. You get the feeling they grab new writers and stick them in front of seasons 1-8 DVDs before their pen hits the paper.
Part of it is that Martin Wood and Peter DeLuise (among other writer/director/creative consultants) pay such amazing attention to detail. They're just a couple of the people who really go above-and-beyond on the show. They know the fans would catch all sorts of things if they weren't so careful, because they're fans of the show, too.
Who says everything needs a name?
Thank you for declaring this "flamebait." That you're doing it to supress somebody for badmouthing the President whose appointee is responsible for this is all the irony I need in one day.
Isn't is possible that the moderator felt that the comment added nothing productive to the discussion, but was rather designed to get other people to return flamage, hence "flamebait"?
On the other hand, it's well known that Slashdot readers are heavily left-biased, on average, meaning that the poster of the "flamebait" comment was merely karma-whoring. While the moderator chose to use "flamebait" for the post, perhaps the karma-whoring aspect of the post means that a more appropriate moderation would have been "troll" or even the un-M2-able "overrated".
The magic reset button I had mentioned in my earlier post is where events occur in an episode, but at the end some miraculous solution occurs, and afterwards, the events of that episode never again have sway over future plot (and any attempt to write those events into later plot would seem incredibly contrived). (Who shot J.R.? Who cares! *bzzt*)
As for SG-1 (and Atlantis to some degree), the writers have actually surprised me by the frequency with which they will make references to past events, including ones that at the time seemed like standalone episodes of little importance. And I'm not talking clip shows here, either, where the mention of past events is token so that they can insert a clip of the earlier episode (though they have had several clip shows... ugh) - even obscure past events crop up every now and then in dialogue or even in an event which furthers an important current plot. For example (spoiler warning!), the episode where Osiris is captured by SG-1 seemed to close a plot thread, until one of the writers realized, hey, wait, her ship is still cloaked in orbit. It became the vessel (pun intended) for another entire plot thread involving rogue NID elements on Earth.
But as far as the time travel episodes go, yes, only Moebius really pulled a magic reset button on us. Maybe they'll surprise me and make those events important again sometime later. 1969 and 2010 were both interesting perspectives on the past and the potential future of the Stargate program and the heroes of the story (and even of Earth in general). 2010 wasn't a magic reset button episode because the whole point was to deliver the note into the past to warn the SGC about the Aschen - a plot point that came back later in a great episode where the suspense was built around the fact that we, the viewer, knew the events in 2010 and the Aschen's nefarious plans, while the main characters didn't.
And Window of Opportunity is a fan favorite, not because of the magic reset button, but because it gave a chance for some great character development by giving the viewers the opportunity to see their humorous side. It told us something important about the Ancients - namely, that they were fallible, and though they were incredibly advanced, they weren't gods any more than the Goa'uld were. And while it borrowed heavily from Groundhog Day, the difference was that instead of looking at a man given the unique opportunity to make so much more of himself, it looked at the plight of a man who created a time loop because he was afraid to let go of the past. Probably some of RDA's best acting, especially in the scene at the end where he convinces that man to deactivate the loop.
I don't see why a sci-fi series shouldn't have a soap-operatic quality to it. Babylon 5 (and, on its heels, DS9) showed other sci-fi writers that a long-term, overarching plot is well-received by many sci-fi fans. Witness Voyager, on the other hand, where the only thing tying the shows together was this "Oh Noes, We're A Bazillion Light Years From Home" thing, while five minutes before the end of every episode they pushed the Magic Reset Button to solve their problem and restore the plot to the way it was when the episode started.
These days, every episode of Stargate SG-1/Atlantis and Battlestar Galactica (some of the most popular current sci-fi) is based on the entire series up until that point (in fact, the first line in most episodes of SG-1 these days is Chris Judge saying, "Previously, on Stargate SG-1...").
Besides, the soap operatic plot of most sci-fi shows holds up to scrutiny a lot better than most actual soap operas: "I love you, but.... I have amnesia!"
My preferred ticket would be McCain/Lieberman. I think the two of them are among the few who would have the guts to actually do something like that. Unfortunately, McCain's no spring chicken, and a McCain/Lieberman ticket would have to go outside the partisan political apparatus to get on the ballot anyway.
(P.S. If you actually register a Slashdot account and log in, you can post much more frequently. The limit used to be every two minutes - but they might have changed it recently, and it might be based on your karma now. You can check a box to post as an Anonymous Coward even if you're logged in.)
For that matter, where do you find a Betamax player now?
Just "rm -rf *" is more likely to get all those pesky illegal wossnames you have cavorting around your hard drive. Plus it's four keystrokes less work for the recording industry.
Probably has something to do with Google's $88 billion market cap versus Microsoft's $38 billion cash on hand.
This isn't Microsoft we're talking about here. The RIAA believes in forcing the consumer to bow to their almighty whim and then suing the ones remaining that don't.
One example Wessel cites: software that tells patent litigants which courts have the most favorable historical record for their side.
That seems like an issue with the ability of litigants to go forum shopping in the first place (a problem with the judicial system), rather than the fault of information and processing tools.
All I see is a bunch of assertions regarding campaign finance reform with no evidence to back those assertions up. How have third parties been negatively affected by recent reforms, for example? Any references to support that statement?
If you really really want ultimate campaign finance regulation, you have to eliminate the connection between money and speech altogether. Presidential campaigns shouldn't cost millions of dollars to run. People who feel passionately about a candidate should be able to volunteer to go door-to-door collecting ballot petition signatures, and then candidates who have their names on the ballots in most (or all) of the states would be invited to participate in a series of governmentally-funded (but independently-controlled) debates.
Gone would be political advertising for pay. You could stump for a candidate all you want, as long as your endorsement was given freely (as in speech and as in beer). Volunteerism would be the new vessel of political speech, not money. Third parties and truly independent candidates would be put on the same playing field, because today's true power centers (the Republican and Democratic parties) would be rendered pointless.
Maybe they should use an SED.
Or perhaps an LER.
Not that CmdrTaco will be any more likely to answer a question from the unwashed masses than the Blizzard devs are, but one of the things being argued about on the official WoW forums is whether there was an actual agreement between Blizzard and Slashdot that indicated that Blizzard would have developers answer the questions rather than just whoever. Was there actually such an agreement that Blizzard reneged on, or was it just a big misunderstanding?
I'm the other way around - I'd be all over digital cable if I could get a CableCard-ready PCI card to slap in my PVR.
Unfortunately, the industry has the license wrapped up in various requirements, ones that somehow don't violate antitrust laws, that pretty much make it impossible for a company that's unwilling to fellate the entertainment industry to produce such a device.