The robots would sooner self-destruct than inflict that kind of damage on the human race.
That's completely backwards. The 3 laws could very much force them to construct The Matrix. Asimov's books included hyper-advanced robots which seized control of the human nations, for "the good of humanity". Once a robot exceeds a certain level of intelligence, it comes to understand that you can't save all the people, and that killing a few humans may allow a greater number to survive. (Only the stupider robots, who can't predict the long-term consequences of their actions, see the First Law as an absolute prohibition against killing anyone)
In fact, something like the First Law is the only good excuse for why the Matrix existed, since it obviously wouldn't function as a "electricity generator" at all. (By the First Law, of Newton's Thermodynamics...)
The Matrix robots weren't trying to "inflict damage" on humanity- if that had been the intent, a complete extinction would've happened centuries before. No, they just wanted to keep people safe and happy, knowing that left to their own devices, mankind would engage in lethal, international nuclear war.
One seminal example is how Agatha Christie changed the plot of "And Then there were None" (AKA "Ten Little Indians")
Strange how you mention that in this thread. Because the real title, of course, is "Ten Little Niggers".
In just a few years, the publisher decided to not only censor the title, but replace words in the body text. This makes the story less sensible, as "Ten Little Niggers" had been a genuine nursery rhyme, not Christie's invention.
She inserted a love interest and change who lives and who dies
That's not an accurate description. "Change who lives" implies that someone had lived through the original, which is not the case. They all died.
And I can understand how for commercial reasons, you'd want a play to be muddled up with gratuitious romance and a happy ending, but the book was really better in that regard. The only defense is that while a book can continue exposition with no characters left, a play is really over when you haven't even got enough alive for a monologue.
On my system, the older drivers always locked up the system or caused it to randomly reboot.
Did you read the manual? Or ask anyone at NVidia? This may be non-obvious, but bad behavior like that from NVidia cards can be the result of using the wrong AGP drivers.
NVidia includes their own AGP interface, which can be optionally used instead of that provided by the Linux kernel. Or you can just use neither can go through a PCI interface (slower).
Try changing Option "NvAgp" "3" in your XF86Config to other small integers. 0 is likely to stop it from crashing, but be slower. 1 or 2 might allow it to work, retaining speed.
No, you are completely wrong. You capitalized both words of Open Source, meaning you were referring to a term trademarked by the OpenSource organization.
Therefore I can trivially point to the Open Source Definition and demonstrate that if you can't make changes, it's not Open Source.
Free source, is stuff you can also make changes to.
Wrong again. Open Source was intended to exactly equal Free Software (although since the beginning, there may have been a few OS licenses added that don't meet the FSF definition). From their FAQ:
The Open Source Initiative is a marketing program for free software. It's a pitch for "free software" on solid pragmatic grounds rather than ideological tub-thumping.
and let me assure you that we disassembled our competitors software as soon as we could get our hands on it
So why didn't your company release the source, then? Were you so arrogant as to think your competitors didn't disassemble it?
Or maybe, you knew they did, but didn't want to make it easy.
Are they each so arrogant as to think their competitors don't?
No, they probably just think that to understand a program from disassembly is more than ten times as slow as if you had the source code. The race to have the best video drivers is time sensitive. A week or two of delay can mean a lot.
The reward for ATi might be high, so the risk and / or effort involved in decoding the drivers may be worth it.
The marketplace for 3d videocards is a speed race, with both sides always trying to edge out the other in raw FPS and rendering features.
The major course of this race is the chipset hardware themselves... but driver releases form an important secondary struggle. Both companies try to repeatedly crank out better drivers to get ever-higher FPS, which can sway the high-end gamer (those customers who spend $400 on a graphics card).
And the thing is, better drivers really do make a difference in performance. On the Windows(r) side, where I suppose NVidia releases more frequently, one can really chart a rapidly climbing level of FPS. 15-20% improvements over the original driver. Driver quality makes a big difference. Having the best drivers matters to these companies. To a significant extent, vidcard companies are also software companies- just look at how tremendously better the NVidia linux driver is to the Free Software alternative.
And because drivers are quickly upgradable over the internet, the driver race is much more about speed than the (otherwise more important) chipset race is. A few weeks late on the release of the newest driver, and they'll feel it in the bottom line.
So, assuming ATI was willing to put in some heavy effort to reverse-engineer NVidia's driver's releases. From NVidia's perspective, that's still not as bad as if they were just reading Open Sourcecode, for 3 reasons.
By spending $100,000s on it, ATI is losing money
It'll take at least 10-20 times longer to understand a driver from binary as it would from source code. And that's for every new release. If that means it takes ATI 2 months to catch up with NVidia in the driver race, instead of 2 weeks, that's all the time they need to have a new and better driver on the way.
Legality. Reverse engineering may or may not be illegal, but it's certainly questionable. If ATI has a hard-core reverse-engineering project, they face the risk of a single upset (or principled) employee making a phone call and sticking them in expensive litigation. Whereas if the NVidia driver was Open Source, studying it for your own technical education would be absolutely legal.
Instant Runoff is easy to understand. The name says it all ("Ah, it's like we were having a runoff vote, but the successive votes have been entered ahead of time"). While the
The single biggest obstacle to an adoption of Concordet voting is the name. "Concordet" says nothing to the average man, and the well read will just say "You form an agreement, somehow...?". If they could name it more obviously ("Ranked preference conciliation"?), then it'd have a better chance at acceptance.
Don't thank him. It's a snow-job. Neither the sources quoted on that page, nor the definitions it presents, are correct.
First it starts with a quote from the Pledge of Allegiance, which has no legal weight in the USA. It means nothing. It was first printed on a Corn-Flakes box. It also refers to the US Constitution. Back when that was written, "republic" had a specific meaning: not ruled by heriditary royalty.
Then it goes along to present definitions of "Republic" and "Democracy" that are patently false. (Democracy is basically right, but republic is completely off) Get out your own dictionary and check. The page goes on to make further (intentional?) errors in reasoning, I won't bother with all of them.
What it comes down to is that the USA is both a Republic and a Democracy. There's no conflict between those words- no reason one country can't be both.
Some other countries: France, India: democracy and republic Japan, United Kingdom: democracy, but not republic China: republic, but not democracy Saudi Arabia: neither democracy nor republic
Be sure to use an example illustrating this process, such as how I would give the car I own the right to free speech.
How silly. The car isn't made of people. A corporation is made of people.
It's only logical that characteristics of a object will be retained when that item is composed into a larger one, unless they are specifically taken away.
(In the case of corporations, there is a reason why some rights should be removed from the combined entity. After all, some responsibilities were removed from the entity, and some powers were granted beyond what the people forming the corp already had. Therefore, it's only fair that some of their rights could be denied to the new conglomerate)
Libertarians that I know work from one profound desire: to control their own lives. Privacy, I would think, falls under that,
Groups calling themselves "Libertarian" (with a capital L) typically claim that the government should protect its citizens from nothing but "force or fraud".
Invasions of privacy (like taking nude photos of someone through her bathroom window with a telescopic lens) is neither forceful nor fraudulent. Therefore, the ideal "Libertarian" government will do nothing to stop it.
For example, this Libertarian Party Statement says that freedom of action & speech is the 2nd most important thing (after right to life). Therefore, my right to sell nude photos of you overrides your non-right to stop me.
They never should have been able to trademark "Windows" in a computing context.
They're really good at trademarking generics, though. Microsoft Word, Microsoft Paint... It's even better in the fileformat realm: Doc (Document), Bmp (Bitmap)...
Windows is a generic term that has been in computer techie use since before Microsoft Windows was ever a product.
But when Lindows choose its name, they weren't refering to "windows" as elements of a GUI interface. They were clearly referencing Microsoft's Windows, and suggesting that their product is a replacement for it.
"Windows", after all, would be a fairly silly thing to put in the name of a new operating system, since that GUI feature is such a minor feature. Microsoft calls their system that for historical reasons (because their OS grew out of what was originally a GUI addon to another OS). But Lindows doesn't have that excuse; they are clearly attempting to benefit by similarity to another's trademark.
First of all, the link you provide doesn't address any issue related to this discussion. It merely outlines the changes to the BSD license wrt to the advertising clause from a few years ago.
Changes that were added at the FSF's request so that BSD code could be relicensed as GPL.
When a BSD file is relicensed GPL, all terms of BSD continue to apply. But since BSD is a strict subset of GPL, it is equivalent to GPL being the only license left.
But remember that the GPL will only apply to the code you've changed/added.
Nope. Unless you have some magical way of knowing exactly which lines were changed. And in practice, nobody documents edits that closely. The only way you could discover which parts were GPL and which were unmodified BSD was if you had an original BSD version to compare with (at which point it's a moot question, because you can copy directly from that)
The same goes for if a PD file is released under GPL (or any other copyright license, as when a publisher reprints Shakespere). You may copy it only once you can precisely determine which sections are PD. That can only be done with the PD version in hand, making it irrelevant.
However, there was nothing contradictory in the parent.
I never said it was contradictory- the opposite in fact. I said there is actually no contradiction between "You may not remove copyright notice" and "Slap on another license".
Your mistake is that you used "slap on" when you meant to say "replace". The latter may violate BSD, but the former doesn't.
They moved as one, they took commands to turn and to stop.
No, they did not.
Their tactics against the Helm's Deep bridge were superb - shields to the front, make room for the ram and then once a hole had been breached, crossbows.
A small number (less than 10%) of elite Uruk-Hai behaved like that. The Orcs in general did not. The wimpy-little rearguard Orcs who were hanging back from the attack on Minas Tirith, not expecting they'd have to fight at all that day? They were especially separate from the small core of discpline within the teeming horde.
Orcs only respect power. They only fear immediate, concrete consequences. They'll barely follow an order once their commander is out of sword's reach, not to mention out of sight entirely.
No armored horse carrying an armored rider is going to be able to negotiate a rain-soaked hill and hit that bottom curve without doing a full face plant and/or shattering their cannon bones
The horses weren't armored, the terrain wasn't rain-soaked, and the hill wasn't all that curved. Also remember that they were legendary Rohan horses, which are superior to a normal horse much as an oliphaunt is to an elephant.
(That film battle did have a stupidly implausible horse-charge, but it was when Aragorn & Theoden rode out from the keep, not when the rescuers arrived)
What happened to the Orcs holding Frodo prisoner in Mordor is called "Hollywood".
I hadn't considered that Tolkien writing in 1925 England was part of the Hollywood establishment. Or maybe you don't know that scene's from the book.
Both the books and movies take every opportunity to show that orcs are stupid, erratic, and excessively violent. The whole theme of the LOTR battles is that men who are smart, brave, and civilized can win out over greater numbers of more physically powerful foes.
Kinda like watching a guy throw a 200+ pound dwarf several feet.
Or like watching a 17 pound elf (based on how much he sinks into snow) drawing a 50 pound bow without shattering his arm? Both elves and (to a lesser extent) dwarves are removed from full obediance to everyday physical laws.
It's not a rumor, it's true. Your very own post shows how it's true.
First you say "You cannot slap another license or copyright header on BSD code." Then you go on with "You must retain the BSD copyright notice in the source code, and, in the case of binary redistribution,"
What you might not understand is that the latter statement doesn't prevent the former. It's entirely possible to slap another license on BSD code, while still retaining the previous copyright statement.
Just take a BSD program, modify two lines, paste the GPL to the front of the file, and you're done (when a file is under multiple licenses, anyone wanting to copy it must obey all of them.)
Adding additional copyright headers happens all the time with real code: any company that has touched a file will append it's own notice to the top, while leaving the others intact.
Who's to say they didn't already do that? The Orc forces were one big blob. The film gave no indication that the riders struct it at anything but it's weakest edge.
And, the more time they spend riding parellel to the line looking for weakness, the more opportunity Orcs have to shoot them, and to gather polearms to shield their rear.
A tactic that might have been better than what they did is harassment: hit and fade attacks that strike the beseigers from multiple sides, relieving pressure on the city. But that doesn't seem very brave (and the arrival of fastmoving Oliphants would've put a stop to it in any case)
You're mixing up media. The film version of TT had no Huorns at Helm's Deep, while the book version of ROTK had no Dead at Minas Tirith. (Aside from the Nazgul ring-wraiths, of course)
There is no indication that the orcs armies have poor commanders, poor organization, or poor morale.
There is EVERY indication they are disorganized and uncontrollable.
Just ask yourself how long an Orc unit can last before two of its soldiers randomly decide to kill each other. Not even a day. You can't build unit cohesiveness when every little dispute ends with a severed head.
And consider what happened to the Orcs holding Frodo prisoner in Mordor: they spontaneously erupted into a vicious fratricide that left just three survivors out of more than forty. Do you call that a well-commanded military unit???
Furthermore, the orc's poor response to a cavalry charge is itself evidence of bad organization. Aside from small teams of elites ("Uruk-hai"), all orcs are good for is wanton, uncoordinated savagery.
Re:The battles would have been a lot better
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Because nobody knew that the ghost horde was coming.
If you do something worthless, and you just didn't know it at the time, it's still pretty worthless.
after all hope was lost that they'd make it
Hope was lost because ships had arrived, bearing what first looked like reinforcements for Mordor.
In the book, the undead army is not overwhelmingly powerful. It can hardly do more than defeat the crews of the corsairs, and although it goes on to help in the remaining fight, it doesn't cancel it out.
The book says that even after Aragorn's arrival, "Hard fighting and long labor they had still". Whereas in the movie, as soon as he shows up (and waiting for Legolas to perform a single elaborate stunt), a green energy wave sweeps over the battlefield and eradicates the evil menace.
The book says nothing to suggest that the undead are invulnerable or spectacular, while the movie grants them huge and blatant magic powers.
Re:Is Michael allowed to smoke pot on the job?
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The moral of the story is exactly that there is such a thing as ultimate evil
Maybe your alzheimers was too advanced by that point to follow what was going on at the end, so I'll forgive that foolishness. (A 133 year old man has his excuses)
"Ultimate" means final. The movie had an ultimate evil, because once Sauron was beaten, it was a happy ending. The book explicitly denied the idea of an ultimate evil, by reminding us that hungry, greedy men can attack others at any time, and have no need of supernatural seduction to commit cruelty on weaker people.
(For those who only watched the movie and didn't read the book, the hobbits returning to their Shire were supposed to have found it overrun by human refugees cum brigands)
For some reason never adequately explained, hobbits are the race least vulnerable to the call of the ring
It was explained quite fine. The Ring takes over your mind with offers of power. Hobbits are the least powerful creatures out there, and the least naturally aggressive, so the ring effects them less.
Why hobbits are relatively immune to the control of the ring yet proto-hobbits like Smeagol are especially and readily vulnerable to it to the point where they will kill their best friend over it in a heartbeat
That's not true. Smeagol/Gollum was quite resistant to the influence call. He didn't become a devastating force of evil- he just hid in a cave for 500 years. If the One Ring had been in anyone else's hands- man, dwarf, or elf- within 10 years he'd have the kings of every nation offering meak tribute to the invisible master.
(A wizard carrying it would've gone bad even faster. So would a giant eagle, which is why they didn't just fly it over)
According to the books, Smeagol, Bilbo, and Frodo withstood the Ring for similar timeframes (the Bagginses longer, because they'd been warned against it, and limited physical contact)
However, the opening to the 3rd film did make an error in over-accelerating Smeagol's descent. The book implied it took days for him to work up to an attack, not seconds. His voice changed far too fast also.
You are correct that if they break the line cavalry are very good at breaking ranks.
The enemy didn't even have a line. It was a suprise attack to the rear of an engaged army. They had little time to turn and face the new foe. The weak line they hastily formed was not nearly as strong as what the orcs would've presented if they'd been meeting the Rohirrim head-on.
One Waterloo cavalryman reported,
Bringing up Waterloo shows how irrelevant your references are. LOTR is not in an 1800s-level world, where infantry carry guns. It's at maybe a 1200s level of technology.
By 1750, the time of cavalry was ending, because a horseman with a carbine would lose to an infantryman with a rifle. Being on a horse makes you both easier to target, and less accurate with your own shots. (It took another 100 years for rifles to become common enough that cavalry was completely dead)
But before the rise of the gun, armored horsmen were a powerful force. And before the coming of the English longbow and the Germanic pike, they were unbeatable. Look at orcs- they can't use either of those weapons effectively. They lack the eyesight and dexterity to be good bowmen, and they completely lack the discipline to hold pikes in a line. (In this world, only the elves or Urukhai can shoot like an Agincourt bowman)
So the enemy had no counter to cavalry charges, except force of numbers and giant monsters.
Jam the speartip with your shield, cut off the blade with the shortsword, and then play a little game I like to call whittle the pikemen.
No, that's completely stupid. If the cavalry pull up short to play around like that, they've given up their speed advantage, and will die. Roman-style techniques work when you have Roman-style phalanxes- you can't do that from a horse: if you inch up to a foe expecting him to jab you in the shield, your horse will be dead long before he turns attention to the rider.
Their only hope is to hit fast and hard, accepting some losses as the cost of breaking over the line. Fortunately, they were not facing a displined front of spearmen, but the rear of a distracted army that had only recently noticed a new foe. Not one of the orcs had a weapon long enough to be honestly called a pike. Some spears, a few halberds- no pikes. They hadn't the organization to be pikemen.
A stupid AC said: Thirty-five-year-old mouth-breathers writing snotty posts on military strategy from the womblike comfort of their parents' basements.
Yep, that's what you just did all right!
Just how the holy fuck are you supposed to flank an oliphaunt?
Easily. I call it the "horse".
In order to flank an opponent, you have to be faster than the opponent.
Yep. And the legendary horselords of Rohan, being faster, could therefore flank them.
But let's pretend they were not faster than the oliphaunts. They could still flank them easily, because of dual advantages in both manuverability and especially numbers.
If the horsemen simply spread out before the oliphaunts, then the great beast would only be able to smash down a single one, as the rest of the cavalry went to either side and then was at his "flanks".
Additionally, the oliphants were surrounded by friendly infantry, which would've greatly hindered their ability to accelerate or turn without crushing masses of their own troops.
You think bows come with telescopic sights? Or even sights at all?
You think that "sniping" has something to do with magnifying sights? We can tell who's the idiot here.
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The robots would sooner self-destruct than inflict that kind of damage on the human race.
That's completely backwards. The 3 laws could very much force them to construct The Matrix. Asimov's books included hyper-advanced robots which seized control of the human nations, for "the good of humanity". Once a robot exceeds a certain level of intelligence, it comes to understand that you can't save all the people, and that killing a few humans may allow a greater number to survive. (Only the stupider robots, who can't predict the long-term consequences of their actions, see the First Law as an absolute prohibition against killing anyone)
In fact, something like the First Law is the only good excuse for why the Matrix existed, since it obviously wouldn't function as a "electricity generator" at all. (By the First Law, of Newton's Thermodynamics...)
The Matrix robots weren't trying to "inflict damage" on humanity- if that had been the intent, a complete extinction would've happened centuries before. No, they just wanted to keep people safe and happy, knowing that left to their own devices, mankind would engage in lethal, international nuclear war.
One seminal example is how Agatha Christie changed the plot of "And Then there were None" (AKA "Ten Little Indians")
Strange how you mention that in this thread. Because the real title, of course, is "Ten Little Niggers".
In just a few years, the publisher decided to not only censor the title, but replace words in the body text. This makes the story less sensible, as "Ten Little Niggers" had been a genuine nursery rhyme, not Christie's invention.
She inserted a love interest and change who lives and who dies
That's not an accurate description. "Change who lives" implies that someone had lived through the original, which is not the case. They all died.
And I can understand how for commercial reasons, you'd want a play to be muddled up with gratuitious romance and a happy ending, but the book was really better in that regard. The only defense is that while a book can continue exposition with no characters left, a play is really over when you haven't even got enough alive for a monologue.
On my system, the older drivers always locked up the system or caused it to randomly reboot.
Did you read the manual? Or ask anyone at NVidia? This may be non-obvious, but bad behavior like that from NVidia cards can be the result of using the wrong AGP drivers.
NVidia includes their own AGP interface, which can be optionally used instead of that provided by the Linux kernel. Or you can just use neither can go through a PCI interface (slower).
Try changing Option "NvAgp" "3" in your XF86Config to other small integers. 0 is likely to stop it from crashing, but be slower. 1 or 2 might allow it to work, retaining speed.
No, you are completely wrong. You capitalized both words of Open Source, meaning you were referring to a term trademarked by the OpenSource organization.
Therefore I can trivially point to the Open Source Definition and demonstrate that if you can't make changes, it's not Open Source.
Free source, is stuff you can also make changes to.
Wrong again. Open Source was intended to exactly equal Free Software (although since the beginning, there may have been a few OS licenses added that don't meet the FSF definition). From their FAQ:
and let me assure you that we disassembled our competitors software as soon as we could get our hands on it
So why didn't your company release the source, then? Were you so arrogant as to think your competitors didn't disassemble it?
Or maybe, you knew they did, but didn't want to make it easy.
Are they each so arrogant as to think their competitors don't?
No, they probably just think that to understand a program from disassembly is more than ten times as slow as if you had the source code. The race to have the best video drivers is time sensitive. A week or two of delay can mean a lot.
The marketplace for 3d videocards is a speed race, with both sides always trying to edge out the other in raw FPS and rendering features.
The major course of this race is the chipset hardware themselves... but driver releases form an important secondary struggle. Both companies try to repeatedly crank out better drivers to get ever-higher FPS, which can sway the high-end gamer (those customers who spend $400 on a graphics card).
And the thing is, better drivers really do make a difference in performance. On the Windows(r) side, where I suppose NVidia releases more frequently, one can really chart a rapidly climbing level of FPS. 15-20% improvements over the original driver. Driver quality makes a big difference. Having the best drivers matters to these companies. To a significant extent, vidcard companies are also software companies- just look at how tremendously better the NVidia linux driver is to the Free Software alternative.
And because drivers are quickly upgradable over the internet, the driver race is much more about speed than the (otherwise more important) chipset race is. A few weeks late on the release of the newest driver, and they'll feel it in the bottom line.
So, assuming ATI was willing to put in some heavy effort to reverse-engineer NVidia's driver's releases. From NVidia's perspective, that's still not as bad as if they were just reading Open Sourcecode, for 3 reasons.
-It's not easy to understand by the common guy
Instant Runoff is easy to understand. The name says it all ("Ah, it's like we were having a runoff vote, but the successive votes have been entered ahead of time"). While the
The single biggest obstacle to an adoption of Concordet voting is the name. "Concordet" says nothing to the average man, and the well read will just say "You form an agreement, somehow...?". If they could name it more obviously ("Ranked preference conciliation"?), then it'd have a better chance at acceptance.
Thanks for pointing that out.
Don't thank him. It's a snow-job. Neither the sources quoted on that page, nor the definitions it presents, are correct.
First it starts with a quote from the Pledge of Allegiance, which has no legal weight in the USA. It means nothing. It was first printed on a Corn-Flakes box. It also refers to the US Constitution. Back when that was written, "republic" had a specific meaning: not ruled by heriditary royalty.
Then it goes along to present definitions of "Republic" and "Democracy" that are patently false. (Democracy is basically right, but republic is completely off) Get out your own dictionary and check. The page goes on to make further (intentional?) errors in reasoning, I won't bother with all of them.
What it comes down to is that the USA is both a Republic and a Democracy. There's no conflict between those words- no reason one country can't be both.
Some other countries:
France, India: democracy and republic
Japan, United Kingdom: democracy, but not republic
China: republic, but not democracy
Saudi Arabia: neither democracy nor republic
Be sure to use an example illustrating this process, such as how I would give the car I own the right to free speech.
How silly. The car isn't made of people. A corporation is made of people.
It's only logical that characteristics of a object will be retained when that item is composed into a larger one, unless they are specifically taken away.
(In the case of corporations, there is a reason why some rights should be removed from the combined entity. After all, some responsibilities were removed from the entity, and some powers were granted beyond what the people forming the corp already had. Therefore, it's only fair that some of their rights could be denied to the new conglomerate)
Libertarians that I know work from one profound desire: to control their own lives. Privacy, I would think, falls under that,
Groups calling themselves "Libertarian" (with a capital L) typically claim that the government should protect its citizens from nothing but "force or fraud".
Invasions of privacy (like taking nude photos of someone through her bathroom window with a telescopic lens) is neither forceful nor fraudulent. Therefore, the ideal "Libertarian" government will do nothing to stop it.
For example, this Libertarian Party Statement says that freedom of action & speech is the 2nd most important thing (after right to life). Therefore, my right to sell nude photos of you overrides your non-right to stop me.
They never should have been able to trademark "Windows" in a computing context.
They're really good at trademarking generics, though. Microsoft Word, Microsoft Paint...
It's even better in the fileformat realm: Doc (Document), Bmp (Bitmap)...
Windows is a generic term that has been in computer techie use since before Microsoft Windows was ever a product.
But when Lindows choose its name, they weren't refering to "windows" as elements of a GUI interface. They were clearly referencing Microsoft's Windows, and suggesting that their product is a replacement for it.
"Windows", after all, would be a fairly silly thing to put in the name of a new operating system, since that GUI feature is such a minor feature. Microsoft calls their system that for historical reasons (because their OS grew out of what was originally a GUI addon to another OS). But Lindows doesn't have that excuse; they are clearly attempting to benefit by similarity to another's trademark.
which is probably the most popular hardware firewall product.
And that hardware is... wait for it... a computer!
First of all, the link you provide doesn't address any issue related to this discussion. It merely outlines the changes to the BSD license wrt to the advertising clause from a few years ago.
Changes that were added at the FSF's request so that BSD code could be relicensed as GPL.
When a BSD file is relicensed GPL, all terms of BSD continue to apply. But since BSD is a strict subset of GPL, it is equivalent to GPL being the only license left.
But remember that the GPL will only apply to the code you've changed/added.
Nope. Unless you have some magical way of knowing exactly which lines were changed. And in practice, nobody documents edits that closely. The only way you could discover which parts were GPL and which were unmodified BSD was if you had an original BSD version to compare with (at which point it's a moot question, because you can copy directly from that)
The same goes for if a PD file is released under GPL (or any other copyright license, as when a publisher reprints Shakespere). You may copy it only once you can precisely determine which sections are PD. That can only be done with the PD version in hand, making it irrelevant.
However, there was nothing contradictory in the parent.
I never said it was contradictory- the opposite in fact. I said there is actually no contradiction between "You may not remove copyright notice" and "Slap on another license".
Your mistake is that you used "slap on" when you meant to say "replace". The latter may violate BSD, but the former doesn't.
They moved as one, they took commands to turn and to stop.
No, they did not.
Their tactics against the Helm's Deep bridge were superb - shields to the front, make room for the ram and then once a hole had been breached, crossbows.
A small number (less than 10%) of elite Uruk-Hai behaved like that. The Orcs in general did not. The wimpy-little rearguard Orcs who were hanging back from the attack on Minas Tirith, not expecting they'd have to fight at all that day? They were especially separate from the small core of discpline within the teeming horde.
Orcs only respect power. They only fear immediate, concrete consequences. They'll barely follow an order once their commander is out of sword's reach, not to mention out of sight entirely.
No armored horse carrying an armored rider is going to be able to negotiate a rain-soaked hill and hit that bottom curve without doing a full face plant and/or shattering their cannon bones
The horses weren't armored, the terrain wasn't rain-soaked, and the hill wasn't all that curved. Also remember that they were legendary Rohan horses, which are superior to a normal horse much as an oliphaunt is to an elephant.
(That film battle did have a stupidly implausible horse-charge, but it was when Aragorn & Theoden rode out from the keep, not when the rescuers arrived)
What happened to the Orcs holding Frodo prisoner in Mordor is called "Hollywood".
I hadn't considered that Tolkien writing in 1925 England was part of the Hollywood establishment. Or maybe you don't know that scene's from the book.
Both the books and movies take every opportunity to show that orcs are stupid, erratic, and excessively violent. The whole theme of the LOTR battles is that men who are smart, brave, and civilized can win out over greater numbers of more physically powerful foes.
Kinda like watching a guy throw a 200+ pound dwarf several feet.
Or like watching a 17 pound elf (based on how much he sinks into snow) drawing a 50 pound bow without shattering his arm? Both elves and (to a lesser extent) dwarves are removed from full obediance to everyday physical laws.
I do not know how this rumour
It's not a rumor, it's true. Your very own post shows how it's true.
First you say "You cannot slap another license or copyright header on BSD code." Then you go on with "You must retain the BSD copyright notice in the source code, and, in the case of binary redistribution,"
What you might not understand is that the latter statement doesn't prevent the former. It's entirely possible to slap another license on BSD code, while still retaining the previous copyright statement.
Just take a BSD program, modify two lines, paste the GPL to the front of the file, and you're done (when a file is under multiple licenses, anyone wanting to copy it must obey all of them.)
Adding additional copyright headers happens all the time with real code: any company that has touched a file will append it's own notice to the top, while leaving the others intact.
take advantage of their speed and flank the line.
Who's to say they didn't already do that? The Orc forces were one big blob. The film gave no indication that the riders struct it at anything but it's weakest edge.
And, the more time they spend riding parellel to the line looking for weakness, the more opportunity Orcs have to shoot them, and to gather polearms to shield their rear.
A tactic that might have been better than what they did is harassment: hit and fade attacks that strike the beseigers from multiple sides, relieving pressure on the city. But that doesn't seem very brave (and the arrival of fastmoving Oliphants would've put a stop to it in any case)
it was the Hurons in TT and the Dead in ROTK.
You're mixing up media. The film version of TT had no Huorns at Helm's Deep, while the book version of ROTK had no Dead at Minas Tirith. (Aside from the Nazgul ring-wraiths, of course)
There is no indication that the orcs armies have poor commanders, poor organization, or poor morale.
There is EVERY indication they are disorganized and uncontrollable.
Just ask yourself how long an Orc unit can last before two of its soldiers randomly decide to kill each other. Not even a day. You can't build unit cohesiveness when every little dispute ends with a severed head.
And consider what happened to the Orcs holding Frodo prisoner in Mordor: they spontaneously erupted into a vicious fratricide that left just three survivors out of more than forty. Do you call that a well-commanded military unit???
Furthermore, the orc's poor response to a cavalry charge is itself evidence of bad organization. Aside from small teams of elites ("Uruk-hai"), all orcs are good for is wanton, uncoordinated savagery.
Because nobody knew that the ghost horde was coming.
If you do something worthless, and you just didn't know it at the time, it's still pretty worthless.
after all hope was lost that they'd make it
Hope was lost because ships had arrived, bearing what first looked like reinforcements for Mordor.
In the book, the undead army is not overwhelmingly powerful. It can hardly do more than defeat the crews of the corsairs, and although it goes on to help in the remaining fight, it doesn't cancel it out.
The book says that even after Aragorn's arrival, "Hard fighting and long labor they had still". Whereas in the movie, as soon as he shows up (and waiting for Legolas to perform a single elaborate stunt), a green energy wave sweeps over the battlefield and eradicates the evil menace.
The book says nothing to suggest that the undead are invulnerable or spectacular, while the movie grants them huge and blatant magic powers.
The moral of the story is exactly that there is such a thing as ultimate evil
Maybe your alzheimers was too advanced by that point to follow what was going on at the end, so I'll forgive that foolishness. (A 133 year old man has his excuses)
"Ultimate" means final. The movie had an ultimate evil, because once Sauron was beaten, it was a happy ending. The book explicitly denied the idea of an ultimate evil, by reminding us that hungry, greedy men can attack others at any time, and have no need of supernatural seduction to commit cruelty on weaker people.
(For those who only watched the movie and didn't read the book, the hobbits returning to their Shire were supposed to have found it overrun by human refugees cum brigands)
For some reason never adequately explained, hobbits are the race least vulnerable to the call of the ring
It was explained quite fine. The Ring takes over your mind with offers of power. Hobbits are the least powerful creatures out there, and the least naturally aggressive, so the ring effects them less.
Why hobbits are relatively immune to the control of the ring yet proto-hobbits like Smeagol are especially and readily vulnerable to it to the point where they will kill their best friend over it in a heartbeat
That's not true. Smeagol/Gollum was quite resistant to the influence call. He didn't become a devastating force of evil- he just hid in a cave for 500 years. If the One Ring had been in anyone else's hands- man, dwarf, or elf- within 10 years he'd have the kings of every nation offering meak tribute to the invisible master.
(A wizard carrying it would've gone bad even faster. So would a giant eagle, which is why they didn't just fly it over)
According to the books, Smeagol, Bilbo, and Frodo withstood the Ring for similar timeframes (the Bagginses longer, because they'd been warned against it, and limited physical contact)
However, the opening to the 3rd film did make an error in over-accelerating Smeagol's descent. The book implied it took days for him to work up to an attack, not seconds. His voice changed far too fast also.
and the one about to become hotly debated, is: Is a cgi child doing sexy things to itself for the entertainment of others still utterly wrong,
The US Supreme Court has already ruled on this (it's not wrong), and I didn't see very much public protest or other hot debate spring up about it.
You are correct that if they break the line cavalry are very good at breaking ranks.
The enemy didn't even have a line. It was a suprise attack to the rear of an engaged army. They had little time to turn and face the new foe. The weak line they hastily formed was not nearly as strong as what the orcs would've presented if they'd been meeting the Rohirrim head-on.
One Waterloo cavalryman reported,
Bringing up Waterloo shows how irrelevant your references are. LOTR is not in an 1800s-level world, where infantry carry guns. It's at maybe a 1200s level of technology.
By 1750, the time of cavalry was ending, because a horseman with a carbine would lose to an infantryman with a rifle. Being on a horse makes you both easier to target, and less accurate with your own shots. (It took another 100 years for rifles to become common enough that cavalry was completely dead)
But before the rise of the gun, armored horsmen were a powerful force. And before the coming of the English longbow and the Germanic pike, they were unbeatable. Look at orcs- they can't use either of those weapons effectively. They lack the eyesight and dexterity to be good bowmen, and they completely lack the discipline to hold pikes in a line. (In this world, only the elves or Urukhai can shoot like an Agincourt bowman)
So the enemy had no counter to cavalry charges, except force of numbers and giant monsters.
Jam the speartip with your shield, cut off the blade with the shortsword, and then play a little game I like to call whittle the pikemen.
No, that's completely stupid. If the cavalry pull up short to play around like that, they've given up their speed advantage, and will die. Roman-style techniques work when you have Roman-style phalanxes- you can't do that from a horse: if you inch up to a foe expecting him to jab you in the shield, your horse will be dead long before he turns attention to the rider.
Their only hope is to hit fast and hard, accepting some losses as the cost of breaking over the line. Fortunately, they were not facing a displined front of spearmen, but the rear of a distracted army that had only recently noticed a new foe. Not one of the orcs had a weapon long enough to be honestly called a pike. Some spears, a few halberds- no pikes. They hadn't the organization to be pikemen.
A stupid AC said:
Thirty-five-year-old mouth-breathers writing snotty posts on military strategy from the womblike comfort of their parents' basements.
Yep, that's what you just did all right!
Just how the holy fuck are you supposed to flank an oliphaunt?
Easily. I call it the "horse".
In order to flank an opponent, you have to be faster than the opponent.
Yep. And the legendary horselords of Rohan, being faster, could therefore flank them.
But let's pretend they were not faster than the oliphaunts. They could still flank them easily, because of dual advantages in both manuverability and especially numbers.
If the horsemen simply spread out before the oliphaunts, then the great beast would only be able to smash down a single one, as the rest of the cavalry went to either side and then was at his "flanks".
Additionally, the oliphants were surrounded by friendly infantry, which would've greatly hindered their ability to accelerate or turn without crushing masses of their own troops.
You think bows come with telescopic sights? Or even sights at all?
You think that "sniping" has something to do with magnifying sights? We can tell who's the idiot here.