"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
No, sorry, "restrictive" is, in fact, relative. A 32" high chain-link fence with an unlocked gate is restrictive. Solitary confinement in a supermaximum security is restrictive. But one of these things is not like the other.
Your position is doctrinaire and has no bearing on reality. It expresses your opinion well, but that just emphasizes that your position is extreme and absolutist.
I dislike DRM intensely. But I do, in fact, draw the line somewhere to the right of never.
("USian" if you're one of those "which country in America?" types)
I am... discomfited.. at the fact that several cities in former Warsaw Pact nations have nearly DOUBLE the residential downlink bandwidth that the heart of Silicon Valley has. WTF?
The funny thing is that you don't have to alter the Bible at all in order for parts of it to be considered "objectionable" by these sorts of people.
You're not the first to notice. Such luminaries as Noah Webster undertook to purify the Holy Bible. I wonder if the irony was lost on him? I'm sure many devout ones were conflicted at the time.
Good idea. Too bad the Earth will be destroyed next month to clear the way for a hyperspace bypass. But if you can hitch a ride on a passing spacecraft before then, by all means, take your calendar and your towel and Bob's your semi-uncle.
1) People who don't infringe media copyrights but post pictures to Facebook et al. Not a vanishing minority, btw. 2) People who infringe media copyrights, post pictures, and don't see it as hypocritical for any number of fractionally-assed reasons (or shallow rationales, if you wish).
The former category, you are obviously not addressing. So either you lack sympathy for them for some other unspecified reason, or don't care about them because their existence doesn't support the logic of your assertion. In the latter case, they're precisely what you're talking about, but they don't think they do. And denial is a powerful force.
Hell, a truly rational observer would conclude that hypocrisy might not be bad; that, in fact, it's an absolute requirement for social interaction. If you can act politely to someone you'd just as soon strangle, that's a mild (and socially necessary) form of hypocrisy.
And as I pointed out, that makes traditional organized crime a more selective "elite" organization, since a patent pool will cheerfully accept anyone who can stop drooling long enough to acquire a purportedly applicable patent. Not to mention that an actual organized crime gang will protect you from their competitors, not invite them in to participate in the racket.
Clearly, you're getting much greater value for your extortion money with the Mob.
There is no chilling effect. Now move along, Citizen. The next Rendell-cast starts in 15 minutes. You do not want to miss it.</Combine Civil Protection voice>
MPEG-LA ensures that H.264 and you are free from any patent violations.
Free of any patent violations of any patent in their pool. Once you pay for their protection. If someone outside the pool asserts a patent, sorry, that's not covered. You're only paying Mr. Guido and his organization for protection. If Mr. Vinny decides to burn down your warehouse because you didn't pay HIM, well, that's just unfortunate.
This is where patent pool organizations are more worthless than real organized crime. In the real protection racket, if some shopkeeper is paying you off on schedule, you prevent other punks from trying to horn in on your territory. In a patent pool, once you've got the developer's license money, if someone else declares that they want in on the action, you can either ignore them and let your licensee deal with it, or invite the new patent holder into the pool and jack up the rates to make sure he gets his cut of the racket too.
so it's a patent bomb waiting to happen and any company that uses it takes risks.
Don't kid yourself. In computers, everything is either patented or is about to be. If you do anything creative you're exposed. Suck up the risk and proceed, or shut yourself in your room and accomplish nothing.
Yeah, religious iconoclasm was mostly a thing of the past (a couple of generations) by the time of the initial British colonization. Political iconoclasm, not so much: you see it every time you have a violent regime change. US patriots pulled down a lot of public representations of the British monarch and government at the time of the Revolution. And, in our time, the gigantic statue of Saddam being pulled down represents the same political impulse.
I wonder if there's really anything that gets passed back... Code samples? Flowcharts? Theory of operations? Punch cards? I would guess in most cases zip gets transferred - and not the compression algorithm...
It's IP. If you were thinking about anything tangible, or even sensible (as in, detectable to the senses), UR DOIN IT RONG (to quote Ceiling Cat).
The only thing that passes back is permission. And perhaps the opportunity for a little revenge.
MS: "Here's your $200 million." VirnetX: "Great, I now give you permission to carry on doing what you were doing earlier." MS: "Oh, by the way, part of that $200 million means I'm your boss. Pick up my dry cleaning and detail my BMW. And get Ballmer a new chair."
That's operating on the assumption of a first- or third-person POV (shooters, MMOs), where typically you re-orient your field of view so items of immediate interest are always front and center. This isn't necessarily true of an RTS; having to scroll the playfield around defeats a lot of the advantage of extra display real estate, compared to seamlessly viewing and mousing to more of the playfield for more clicks-per-second.
So, I suppose if you're smarter than the average bear, you'll master those disparate skill sets in two lifetimes instead of the three to four the normal mortal slug would take.
And let's be honest. When you say "skills that above average minds can master much quicker", what you really mean (even if you don't say it, even if you don't believe it) is "master to his own satisfaction, and not to some practical and externally satisfactory level." As in, only you think you're a master silversmith; everyone else understands your work rises only to the level of advanced apprenticeship. Really, only adequate for DIY.
Everyone thinks they're the next Da Vinci; in fact, Da Vinci-level humans are vanishingly rare. If you think you are one, you're probably wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
No, sorry, "restrictive" is, in fact, relative. A 32" high chain-link fence with an unlocked gate is restrictive. Solitary confinement in a supermaximum security is restrictive. But one of these things is not like the other.
Your position is doctrinaire and has no bearing on reality. It expresses your opinion well, but that just emphasizes that your position is extreme and absolutist.
I dislike DRM intensely. But I do, in fact, draw the line somewhere to the right of never.
IANAL. I suspect almost no one commenting on this thread is AL. So this is pretty much speculative.
But I suspect that once DMCA is invoked by one party, its full cycle of provisions of response and safe-harbor take precedence over "small print".
We don't care about your sick perverted little secret fetishes.
Oh, "tyranny." Never mind.
Oh for the love of humanity the things people will do in the name of wasting time.
Quoth second poster on a slashdot gaming article...
to try to capture "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
Good luck with that.
Mittens knows all about the stem cells.
If you try to interfere, she'll just look at you and say "I can haz stem cellZ!" and then om nom nom the placentaburgerz.
("USian" if you're one of those "which country in America?" types)
I am... discomfited.. at the fact that several cities in former Warsaw Pact nations have nearly DOUBLE the residential downlink bandwidth that the heart of Silicon Valley has. WTF?
Oh, yeah, we definitely won that Cold War.
The funny thing is that you don't have to alter the Bible at all in order for parts of it to be considered "objectionable" by these sorts of people.
You're not the first to notice. Such luminaries as Noah Webster undertook to purify the Holy Bible. I wonder if the irony was lost on him? I'm sure many devout ones were conflicted at the time.
Good idea. Too bad the Earth will be destroyed next month to clear the way for a hyperspace bypass. But if you can hitch a ride on a passing spacecraft before then, by all means, take your calendar and your towel and Bob's your semi-uncle.
If you chose to connect your network to a pre-existing military network, that's your mistake.
This breaking news just in: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
C'mon. It may be a legitimate comparison on the continuum of platform comparision.
"Sony, you've made the PS3 so closed and restrictive that you make the Mac look like Richard Stallman's promised land."
CURSE OF MCINTOSH!!!!
Geez, I can't believe you actually named it. You're supposed to refer to it as "the Scottish Apple".
Yes, but this leaves out two important factors:
1) People who don't infringe media copyrights but post pictures to Facebook et al. Not a vanishing minority, btw.
2) People who infringe media copyrights, post pictures, and don't see it as hypocritical for any number of fractionally-assed reasons (or shallow rationales, if you wish).
The former category, you are obviously not addressing. So either you lack sympathy for them for some other unspecified reason, or don't care about them because their existence doesn't support the logic of your assertion. In the latter case, they're precisely what you're talking about, but they don't think they do. And denial is a powerful force.
Hell, a truly rational observer would conclude that hypocrisy might not be bad; that, in fact, it's an absolute requirement for social interaction. If you can act politely to someone you'd just as soon strangle, that's a mild (and socially necessary) form of hypocrisy.
And as I pointed out, that makes traditional organized crime a more selective "elite" organization, since a patent pool will cheerfully accept anyone who can stop drooling long enough to acquire a purportedly applicable patent. Not to mention that an actual organized crime gang will protect you from their competitors, not invite them in to participate in the racket.
Clearly, you're getting much greater value for your extortion money with the Mob.
There is no chilling effect. Now move along, Citizen. The next Rendell-cast starts in 15 minutes. You do not want to miss it.</Combine Civil Protection voice>
MPEG-LA ensures that H.264 and you are free from any patent violations.
Free of any patent violations of any patent in their pool. Once you pay for their protection. If someone outside the pool asserts a patent, sorry, that's not covered. You're only paying Mr. Guido and his organization for protection. If Mr. Vinny decides to burn down your warehouse because you didn't pay HIM, well, that's just unfortunate.
This is where patent pool organizations are more worthless than real organized crime. In the real protection racket, if some shopkeeper is paying you off on schedule, you prevent other punks from trying to horn in on your territory. In a patent pool, once you've got the developer's license money, if someone else declares that they want in on the action, you can either ignore them and let your licensee deal with it, or invite the new patent holder into the pool and jack up the rates to make sure he gets his cut of the racket too.
so it's a patent bomb waiting to happen and any company that uses it takes risks.
Don't kid yourself. In computers, everything is either patented or is about to be. If you do anything creative you're exposed. Suck up the risk and proceed, or shut yourself in your room and accomplish nothing.
Think of it as natural selection in action.
-- Larry Niven
Yeah, religious iconoclasm was mostly a thing of the past (a couple of generations) by the time of the initial British colonization. Political iconoclasm, not so much: you see it every time you have a violent regime change. US patriots pulled down a lot of public representations of the British monarch and government at the time of the Revolution. And, in our time, the gigantic statue of Saddam being pulled down represents the same political impulse.
I wonder if there's really anything that gets passed back... Code samples? Flowcharts? Theory of operations? Punch cards? I would guess in most cases zip gets transferred - and not the compression algorithm...
It's IP. If you were thinking about anything tangible, or even sensible (as in, detectable to the senses), UR DOIN IT RONG (to quote Ceiling Cat).
The only thing that passes back is permission. And perhaps the opportunity for a little revenge.
MS: "Here's your $200 million."
VirnetX: "Great, I now give you permission to carry on doing what you were doing earlier."
MS: "Oh, by the way, part of that $200 million means I'm your boss. Pick up my dry cleaning and detail my BMW. And get Ballmer a new chair."
That's operating on the assumption of a first- or third-person POV (shooters, MMOs), where typically you re-orient your field of view so items of immediate interest are always front and center. This isn't necessarily true of an RTS; having to scroll the playfield around defeats a lot of the advantage of extra display real estate, compared to seamlessly viewing and mousing to more of the playfield for more clicks-per-second.
There's an app for that!
Shakespeare asserted that "Brevity is the soul of wit."
Your rejoinder was quite brief.
Therefore, your rejoinder is quite witty. QED.
When they outlaw radio, only outlaws will have radio.
So, I suppose if you're smarter than the average bear, you'll master those disparate skill sets in two lifetimes instead of the three to four the normal mortal slug would take.
And let's be honest. When you say "skills that above average minds can master much quicker", what you really mean (even if you don't say it, even if you don't believe it) is "master to his own satisfaction, and not to some practical and externally satisfactory level." As in, only you think you're a master silversmith; everyone else understands your work rises only to the level of advanced apprenticeship. Really, only adequate for DIY.
Everyone thinks they're the next Da Vinci; in fact, Da Vinci-level humans are vanishingly rare. If you think you are one, you're probably wrong.