It hasn't been a mystery for a LONG time... Ridley revealed this same information in a Twilight Zone (the magazine) interview over 15 years ago (pre Legend, which, incidentally, was supposed to have been called Legends of Darkness). In this same interview, he talked about the excised unicorn scene, and the origami clue, and this was all before the Director's Cut.
Blade Runner is my favorite film of all time, in any genre, virtually the only film that I can watch again and again. Legend probably would have been a great film, but the version that we see, whether European or American, is the result of unfortunate editing that occurred after a fire destroyed the soundstage where it was being filmed, and they couldn't afford to re-shoot. Hence the name change (mentioned earlier) and the rather disjointed film that exists today.
I know that this is a troll, and not worthy of response, but I'm going to throw prudence to the wind and respond to this dumb motherfucker, anyway.
First, if you put this PC together yourself from mail-order parts, you _might_ be able to build it for under $1600 (excluding tax). Second, even if it _could_ be built for "like $800," that amount is NOT pocket change for most of us (it certainly isn't for me).
No, I'm not a "CHEAPASS MOFO," I just would never spend that much money to play games. Hell, I wouldn't spend "like $800" for a blow job from Natalie Portman, and that experience would certainly be more worthwhile than playing Diablo 2.
>One thing I can honestly say is - why the fuck would we want to put Genesis on this thing, in 300 languages???
Although the article mentions 1,000 languages, I agree with your sentiment entirely.
Few documents in the history of mankind are as overvalued and under-read as that collection of myth and history we call the "Bible." What an embarrassing legacy to leave to our descendants. I imagine they will say: "How quaint. We'd nearly forgotten that our ancestors had their beginnings in such superstition and silliness."
It _is_ a hoax. Whether the TOS and the hoax are in accord is irrelevant: Mirabilis sends system messages when it wishes to impart critical information. Further, it is currently IMPOSSIBLE, when registering as a new user, to enter a birth date which would indicate that a user was under 13 years of age. Mirabilis has effectively assumed that all users are 13 and over, eliminating any TOS entanglements.:-)
Oh, and the birth date is a purely voluntary entry, as is gender, country of origin, and spoken language(s).
>Three quotes, zero sources. Give us links or jump out a window.
Not quotes, really. just re-iterating sentiments and statements echoed here and elsewhere a thousand times during the last year. These are called generalizations, and it is perfectly valid, and common, to voice myriad stereotypical generalizations in a phantom quotation. You knew that when you posted your petty objection, so why did you bother?
How in the fuck did this earn a score of 5, Interesting?
It is entirely irrelevant, flamebait, a troll, though marginally humorous. But interesting? Katz disliked a bad movie (yes, I am agreeing with Katz. Does that make me a poseur, or just someone with a contrary opinion?).
If you don't like reading Katz, don't. If you like reading Katz, read him. However, Katz was not the topic here. The level of immaturity in the moderation of this anti-Katz diatribe is astounding.
Why wasn't Chuck Peddle nominated? He invented the 6502 microprocessor, and the Commodore PET, which, IMHO, was equally responsible for "[bringing] together all the elements of the modern personal computer."
The Commodore PET is oft-forgotten, and I hope that some of us remember it. It had a steel case, an internal cassette drive, and a 9" display. It even shipped with 8K of RAM, which was a lot in those days. Chuck Peddle was a god. He later invented the Motorola 68000, as I recall (I may be wrong. Corrections gratefully accepted).
I know, there is some argument whether the Apple II or the PET shipped first, but I vote for the PET. It was shown at a Radio Shack in January of 1977, a full 4 months before the Apple II was first shown at the West Coast Computer Faire.
Put Chuck Peddle in the inventors Hall of Fame! He certainly deserves to be there more than Walt Disney does, who, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" aside, certainly has not contributed as much as an inventor (again, IMHO, and I am a huge animation fan).
_I'm really skeptical about them getting something like this to work, I mean, I make typos in my 12 charachter password, but to be expected to type a sentence with the same rhythm?_
The typos are part of that rhythm.
If this were speech recognition, then every slur, drawl and lisp would be part of that rhythm. That's how biometric identification works: it doesn't measure and record EXACT patterns, it is looking for _rhythmic_ approximations that are typical, or representative, of user X. Further, it is amazingly effective. Think how often, when proofreading, that you discover exactly the same errors - teh instead of the - again and again and again. And that is just a trivial example. I'm sure there are many others.
The Human Genome Project will do more to shape and alter the future of our species than any previous endeavor of humankind, and yet the Playstation 2 has gotten more ecstatic press. Gutenberg gave us moveable type, which led to an explosion of literacy and the expansion of the human mind. The HGP gives us moveable genotype, and this potentially allows the expansion of everything that makes us human.
Yes, some of the vistas are scary, but I also see the hope of exploring new worlds that both Kirk and Huxley failed to imagine.
Are we ready? I am. Bring on a future where perfect health and longevity are available to us all, the norm, the expected, where the brain has been mapped and the soul has retreated to superstition, where drugs are designed to enhance my individual physiology.
I am ready, Celera. I am ready, HGP. Modify, enhance, and augment me. Hell, exploit me. I am ready!
And, if these bots are re-written, what capacity for harm would they have? Assuming that they interract with each other in an environment requiring digital signatures to make them "safe," what happens when some self-proclaimed guardian of our security decides to show us the new flaw he has discovered and re-programs these bots to wreak havoc? All for the better good, of course.
How easy will they be to deactivate once someone else has the key? Let's suppose that we have become reliant on these bots (or their descendants), and that our ever noble, benovolent security experts (Cult of the Dead Cow IV, for example) have decided to re-define "unusual requests" as something which would normally be useful, and vice-versa? Denial of Service attacks are bad enough, but an attack from millions of bots - distributed and replicating WITH PERMISSION across a network - that would be horrific.
If this protocol is accepted and integrated into the system, I can imagine password sniffing bots, e-mail re-directing bots, etc., all written by the script kiddies of the day and reproducing as nightmare progency.
I suggest that, with such a threat, the safeguards need to be more formidable than any yet formulated. We would need to have -virtually - "viral inhibitors" keyed to destroy any interlopers on our system. Does such technology currently exist? Do we want to release these bots into the world before they do?
The U.S. Commerce Department favors this type of industry self-regulation, and President Clinton, together with EU officials, lauds the accord as a milestone in international e-commerce that will encourage economic growth.
The words e-commerce and economic growth should be emblazoned in red. Note that the word privacy does not appear in this paragraph. Privacy isn't important in the world of e-commerce, unless it is a product unto itself. Companies will sell you software to help violate someone else's privacy, and software to protect your privacy, which means that privacy itself is for sale.
The only interest of a commercial company is self-interest. Self-interest equals profit. Unless protecting my privacy becomes profitable, companies will sell my details to the highest bidder.
This leads to the question: is there a way to guarantee that it is in Company X's best interest to protect my privacy? Can public pressure and the threat of diminishing sales make all companies champions of privacy, hypocritically or otherwise?
Data havens will happen, but not at Sealand. There is far too much shady history tainting Sealand, and, other than a few amateur porn sites and "l33t d00dz" warez sites, no real investor will even think of storing secure data there.
Further, would terrorists locate their sites there? And outfits like Cult of the Dead Cow, who might benefit from migrating to a data haven? Would you trust your sensitive data to a location that the government (in this case, the UK government) might seize at any moment?
When real money builds a data haven in waters that are truly outside the jurisdiction of any nation (or in space, one day?), then we will look back at this Sealand escapade and laugh, and admire (yet again) the vision of Neal Stephenson.
As a last aside, what types of organizations _would_ legitimately benefit from the resources of a data haven? Do we _want_ thugs, punks, and criminals to be protected?
You are entirely and utterly in the wrong. Trademarks need to be defended, as you probably know, or the owners risk losing them. Why should a company which has spent hundreds of millions (or billions) of dollars building a trademark budge one inch when you or anyone else threatens to dilute it?
If this were a parody site, I might be sympathetic, but this is a personal vanity site, and you will benefit from the "barbie" connection, in that you will be providing your visitors an ironic and memorable URL, which Mattel, and not you, imbued with the cultural and iconic associations that it has today.
You are not being tormented, you are being reminded, rather politely, that you are diluting their trademark. As for claiming that your offer to sell the domain was merely a joke, I doubt it. Can you honestly say that if someone had sincerely met your price, that you would have declined?
Further, your Australian colloquial argument is disingenuous to the extreme. Most of the world was unaware of the Oz slang until 1986, when Crocodile Dundee hit the cinemas. Even then, I would be willing to bet that the greater majority of people associate the word "barbie" with the Mattel product, and not with Paul Hogan.
Remember that Linus adamantly defends "Linux," which he has not invested nearly as much energy building. What is fair for Linus is fair for Mattel.
Sorry, but people _are_ stupid. I agree wholeheartedly with the statement:
There are no stupid questions, just stupid people.
I don't want to argue semantics here, but if you haven't figured out, after three years of using a PC daily, how to do something as simple as format a floppy disk or rename a file (and under Windows, no less), then you are a fucking moron. I've worked tech support for many years, and most of the people I talk to are just ignorant, but some (several a week) are definitely stupid. I work with customers on a face-to-face basis, and these truly stupid customers are usually also the ones who are rude, pretentious bitches or complete assholes who expect you to automatically remember what printer you sold them five years ago. Conversely, they are the percentage of the population who walk into the store with greasy hair, fat asses, who haven't bathed, brushed their teeth, or changed their clothes in weeks. They have chewing tobacco falling out of their mouths, or reek of cigarette smoke, and their fingernails are yellow and deformed. They are too fucking _stupid_ to understand that the 386 that they bought ten years ago won't run Quake 3, even after dozens of polite explanations that they need to upgrade their computer before they can run _that_, and every fucking week these morons assault you with their body odor and stupidity.
Disclaimer: I haven't liked Cruise in anything since Risky Business (I haven't seen Magnolia), so it should come as no surprise that I consider his performance bland and underwhelming here. He is a pretty boy, though his looks are rapidly fading into a sort of roguish version of George Hamilton. However, looks alone do not an actor make, though they do, unfortunately, make many a star.
Thandie would look marvellous with or without the cleavage. I don't know whether she can act. I hadn't seen her previously, and nothing in this film tests her enough to pass any serious judgement.
As for Woo... I love everything he has done except for this, though I might be alone in considering Face/Off one of his weaker works. I attribute the failure of this work to the PG-13 restriction. The storyline was no better or worse than is usual in action-adventure fare, but, frankly, this film was still twice as exciting as the original (which isn't saying much, as I thought the first film sucked).
This ruling, if it stands, could have rather far-reaching consequences for the industry. Here are a few scenarios, both good and bad:
1. [Good?] Programs which sift the Internet for e-mail addresses (for later spamming) will be banned because such sifting "use[s] a portion of that property," wherein "that property" is defined as any webpage or newsgroup - ANY on-line resource - that can legally be defined as someone else's property.
This creates a puzzle: webpages can be defined as property, but a domain name can't? So, the address which signifies and, in the mind of the consumer, effectively "houses" said property isn't property itself? So, you can steal my property deed, which _isn't_ property so no theft has occurred, and sell it to someone else who then has the right to profit from the webspace or other virtual property which the URL represents?
2. [Bad?] Deep linking has been okayed by the courts. So, deep linking is okay, which inarguably "use[s] only a[n]... amount of [system X's] computer system capacity," but automated search systems aren't? They both use part of system X's capacity, but the automation makes it evil? Is this because the automated searches potentially use up more bandwidth? If so, will we see future rulings where judges determine that linking or searching is okay as long as it doesn't exhaust more than BLANK percent of a system's capacity?
3. [Good? Bad?] Search engines which use web spiders are now feasibly verboten. I know that robots.txt has long existed, but many millions of sites don't use it. Will they now be legally required to if they don't want to be searched? Can I sue, then, if you index my site and I don't want you to, because indexing my site uses up some portion of my bandwidth that I didn't want to give?
First, I have children in High School now, and the books you mention (excepting Clockwork Orange) _are_ required reading, at least where I live, and I am living in Podunk, Idaho. Further, they were required reading when I was in High School, some 20+ years ago.
Yes, they should be required reading. Fortunately, they _are_ (and, hopefully, in most locales).
However, and I a hope that I am not the only dissenter here, but F-451 I find to be the most boring and laboriously told of any of the Bradbury fables. There is no wit, as the point is beaten home with a sledgehammer. To introduce a young mind to Bradbury, choose The Illustrated Man, or Something Wicked This Way Comes, or any of his marvellous anthologies. Choose The Martian Chronicles (again, a fable a bit too obviously told, and tainted in my mind by Rock Hudson, but still wonderful).
_check out yesterday's Slashback about this, links to an explanation of the motives / methods of the hackers as well as the earlier coverage of the exploit in the Apache section. Is this censorship*?_
No, just an example of my own lack of observation. Sorry.:-(
_*And if a letter to the editor of any newspaper is not accepted for publication, is that censorship?_
Not always, but sometimes. There is definitely such a thing as censorship by omission, depending on the intent/ethics of the editor. However, as I made clear above, I acknowledge that no censorship occurred in this case.
Remember that DOS's command.com was a user interface, albeit command-line driven. And it was definitely scriptable: what DOS guru can ever forget the joy of batch files (extended tremendously for the real geeks by 4DOS)?
Scripting is wonderful, but in this era of GUI dominance, I would hardly call scripting "necesary' (sic). I can't think of any tasks that I perform daily or even weekly which actually require scripting, which is implicit in any definition of necessity.
I love the Windows interface. It seems intuitive to me, which is a detail of UI design that I find "necessary." I like Alt-TAB'ing between applications, I enjoy stepping through forms by pressing the TAB key, and reversing through those same forms with the Shift-TAB combination. I'm glad that "File" is always on the left side of the screen, and that "Help" is always on the right. I'm glad that applications don't entirely take over my screen (as MacOS seems to do), and I don't need three mouse buttons, thank you. Ctrl X, Ctrl C, and Ctrl V work just fine. I find the Start bar a useful tool, and I like the convenience of the tray.
A lot of users here condemn the Windows GUI as "crap" without ever providing concrete examples. And no, adjectives such as "ugly" or "unfriendly" are too subjective to be convincing. They may be true, from your perspective, but they are wasted as constructive critiques.
_1) The guy was busted not only for linking to pornographic sites, but also for providing software that he had written that allows people to remove the "mosaic" used on the pr0n._
As a matter of clarification, why the variant spelling of porn?
...obnoxious GMs are roaming the worlds and forcing people to change their nicks to crappy D&Dish names.
Verant have had a strict naming policy since the very start: (http://everquest.station.sony.com/s_naming.html), and I see nothing _obnoxious_ about harried GM's enforcing this policy. Further, when you have losers choosing names like _Analprobe_ and _Vaginalot_ is their really any question that it is inappropriate? I know, some will bitch about free speech violations, and others about anal retentives, but why should the majority have to tolerate the juveniles? Go play someplace else if you have never grown up.
That depends on how far they go. I could be jumping the gun here, but It strikes me that they will probably go the doubleclick route - profiling individual users to target banner adds.
There is nothing in the Talk City announcement that should logically lead you to that conclusion.
So not supporting Linux means that they immediatly loose a big chunk of the brightest section of the populace as potential users.
I probably shouldn't respond to a such an elitist, glaringly unsupported claim, but I will throw prudence to the wind and point out that the percentage of Linux users on the 'net is statistically insignificant, so Talk City loses nothing, "big chunk" or otherwise.
It's a common misconception that lack of source code makes you safe. It doesn't - it just gives you a false sense of security.
Nor did I imply that lack of source code makes you safe. Talk City took their action because of the exploits of a cretinous few, who might have been using Open Source toys, or maybe not. Hell, they might have been using BeOs or MacOS, it doesn't matter. Flood attacks can be easily accomplished whether the client is open or closed, no dissasembly required.
Talk City is not shooting itself in the foot. First, it is entirely irrelevant which client one uses when connecting to an IRC channel, as long as that client provides adequate (or better) functionality. Second, most Talk City members use the browser-accessible software, so the few dissenters who will now whine (on cue) about their loss of freedom will not harm Talk City one bit. Third, the only flavors that are important in a chat room are the flavors of content, not of the OS or the client. Lastly, anything which limits the disruptive abilities of script kiddies and other losers is welcome.
"Ray Kurzweil spoke first, and he spoke of how rapidly increasing CPU speeds would result in intelligent, spiritual machines."
Ray evidentally has a different understanding of the word "spiritual" than I do. Spirit, to me, is nonexistant, at least in the traditional religious sense, but, even if we are talking about those noncorporeal things such as man's need for love, and hope, charity, compassion, etc., how can we ever expect a CPU, or software, to experience those those things in the same way that we as meat machines can't yet adequately explain?
Man experiences awe because his own existance is lost in the fog of birth, and the exact date of his own demise is unknownable. A machine does not have the benefit of these mysteries. I find "spiritual" much too big, and loaded, a word to describe what Ray Kurzweil is apparently claiming (I didn't attend the lecture to _know_ what he is claiming, so I use the qualifier "apparently").
Why this mad desire to force spirituality into everything? Isn't it time that we put away our childish, outdated labels and faced the world without superstition or anthromorphizing?
Slashdot Mirror
It hasn't been a mystery for a LONG time... Ridley revealed this same information in a Twilight Zone (the magazine) interview over 15 years ago (pre Legend, which, incidentally, was supposed to have been called Legends of Darkness). In this same interview, he talked about the excised unicorn scene, and the origami clue, and this was all before the Director's Cut.
Blade Runner is my favorite film of all time, in any genre, virtually the only film that I can watch again and again. Legend probably would have been a great film, but the version that we see, whether European or American, is the result of unfortunate editing that occurred after a fire destroyed the soundstage where it was being filmed, and they couldn't afford to re-shoot. Hence the name change (mentioned earlier) and the rather disjointed film that exists today.
I know that this is a troll, and not worthy of response, but I'm going to throw prudence to the wind and respond to this dumb motherfucker, anyway.
First, if you put this PC together yourself from mail-order parts, you _might_ be able to build it for under $1600 (excluding tax). Second, even if it _could_ be built for "like $800," that amount is NOT pocket change for most of us (it certainly isn't for me).
No, I'm not a "CHEAPASS MOFO," I just would never spend that much money to play games. Hell, I wouldn't spend "like $800" for a blow job from Natalie Portman, and that experience would certainly be more worthwhile than playing Diablo 2.
>One thing I can honestly say is - why the fuck would we want to put Genesis on this thing, in 300 languages???
Although the article mentions 1,000 languages, I agree with your sentiment entirely.
Few documents in the history of mankind are as overvalued and under-read as that collection of myth and history we call the "Bible." What an embarrassing legacy to leave to our descendants. I imagine they will say: "How quaint. We'd nearly forgotten that our ancestors had their beginnings in such superstition and silliness."
It _is_ a hoax. Whether the TOS and the hoax are in accord is irrelevant: Mirabilis sends system messages when it wishes to impart critical information. Further, it is currently IMPOSSIBLE, when registering as a new user, to enter a birth date which would indicate that a user was under 13 years of age. Mirabilis has effectively assumed that all users are 13 and over, eliminating any TOS entanglements. :-)
Oh, and the birth date is a purely voluntary entry, as is gender, country of origin, and spoken language(s).
>Three quotes, zero sources. Give us links or jump out a window.
Not quotes, really. just re-iterating sentiments and statements echoed here and elsewhere a thousand times during the last year. These are called generalizations, and it is perfectly valid, and common, to voice myriad stereotypical generalizations in a phantom quotation. You knew that when you posted your petty objection, so why did you bother?
How in the fuck did this earn a score of 5, Interesting?
It is entirely irrelevant, flamebait, a troll, though marginally humorous. But interesting? Katz disliked a bad movie (yes, I am agreeing with Katz. Does that make me a poseur, or just someone with a contrary opinion?).
If you don't like reading Katz, don't. If you like reading Katz, read him. However, Katz was not the topic here. The level of immaturity in the moderation of this anti-Katz diatribe is astounding.
Why wasn't Chuck Peddle nominated? He invented the 6502 microprocessor, and the Commodore PET, which, IMHO, was equally responsible for "[bringing] together all the elements of the modern personal computer."
The Commodore PET is oft-forgotten, and I hope that some of us remember it. It had a steel case, an internal cassette drive, and a 9" display. It even shipped with 8K of RAM, which was a lot in those days. Chuck Peddle was a god. He later invented the Motorola 68000, as I recall (I may be wrong. Corrections gratefully accepted).
I know, there is some argument whether the Apple II or the PET shipped first, but I vote for the PET. It was shown at a Radio Shack in January of 1977, a full 4 months before the Apple II was first shown at the West Coast Computer Faire.
Put Chuck Peddle in the inventors Hall of Fame! He certainly deserves to be there more than Walt Disney does, who, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" aside, certainly has not contributed as much as an inventor (again, IMHO, and I am a huge animation fan).
_I'm really skeptical about them getting something like this to work, I mean, I make typos in my 12 charachter password, but to be expected to type a sentence with the same rhythm?_
The typos are part of that rhythm.
If this were speech recognition, then every slur, drawl and lisp would be part of that rhythm. That's how biometric identification works: it doesn't measure and record EXACT patterns, it is looking for _rhythmic_ approximations that are typical, or representative, of user X. Further, it is amazingly effective. Think how often, when proofreading, that you discover exactly the same errors - teh instead of the - again and again and again. And that is just a trivial example. I'm sure there are many others.
The Human Genome Project will do more to shape and alter the future of our species than any previous endeavor of humankind, and yet the Playstation 2 has gotten more ecstatic press. Gutenberg gave us moveable type, which led to an explosion of literacy and the expansion of the human mind. The HGP gives us moveable genotype, and this potentially allows the expansion of everything that makes us human.
Yes, some of the vistas are scary, but I also see the hope of exploring new worlds that both Kirk and Huxley failed to imagine.
Are we ready? I am. Bring on a future where perfect health and longevity are available to us all, the norm, the expected, where the brain has been mapped and the soul has retreated to superstition, where drugs are designed to enhance my individual physiology.
I am ready, Celera. I am ready, HGP. Modify, enhance, and augment me. Hell, exploit me. I am ready!
And, if these bots are re-written, what capacity for harm would they have? Assuming that they interract with each other in an environment requiring digital signatures to make them "safe," what happens when some self-proclaimed guardian of our security decides to show us the new flaw he has discovered and re-programs these bots to wreak havoc? All for the better good, of course.
How easy will they be to deactivate once someone else has the key? Let's suppose that we have become reliant on these bots (or their descendants), and that our ever noble, benovolent security experts (Cult of the Dead Cow IV, for example) have decided to re-define "unusual requests" as something which would normally be useful, and vice-versa? Denial of Service attacks are bad enough, but an attack from millions of bots - distributed and replicating WITH PERMISSION across a network - that would be horrific.
If this protocol is accepted and integrated into the system, I can imagine password sniffing bots, e-mail re-directing bots, etc., all written by the script kiddies of the day and reproducing as nightmare progency.
I suggest that, with such a threat, the safeguards need to be more formidable than any yet formulated. We would need to have -virtually - "viral inhibitors" keyed to destroy any interlopers on our system. Does such technology currently exist? Do we want to release these bots into the world before they do?
A quote from the article:
The U.S. Commerce Department favors this type of industry self-regulation, and President Clinton, together with EU officials, lauds the accord as a milestone in international e-commerce that will encourage economic growth.
The words e-commerce and economic growth should be emblazoned in red. Note that the word privacy does not appear in this paragraph. Privacy isn't important in the world of e-commerce, unless it is a product unto itself. Companies will sell you software to help violate someone else's privacy, and software to protect your privacy, which means that privacy itself is for sale.
The only interest of a commercial company is self-interest. Self-interest equals profit. Unless protecting my privacy becomes profitable, companies will sell my details to the highest bidder.
This leads to the question: is there a way to guarantee that it is in Company X's best interest to protect my privacy? Can public pressure and the threat of diminishing sales make all companies champions of privacy, hypocritically or otherwise?
If not, I see privacy crumbling before our eyes.
Data havens will happen, but not at Sealand. There is far too much shady history tainting Sealand, and, other than a few amateur porn sites and "l33t d00dz" warez sites, no real investor will even think of storing secure data there.
Further, would terrorists locate their sites there? And outfits like Cult of the Dead Cow, who might benefit from migrating to a data haven? Would you trust your sensitive data to a location that the government (in this case, the UK government) might seize at any moment?
When real money builds a data haven in waters that are truly outside the jurisdiction of any nation (or in space, one day?), then we will look back at this Sealand escapade and laugh, and admire (yet again) the vision of Neal Stephenson.
As a last aside, what types of organizations _would_ legitimately benefit from the resources of a data haven? Do we _want_ thugs, punks, and criminals to be protected?
You are entirely and utterly in the wrong. Trademarks need to be defended, as you probably know, or the owners risk losing them. Why should a company which has spent hundreds of millions (or billions) of dollars building a trademark budge one inch when you or anyone else threatens to dilute it?
If this were a parody site, I might be sympathetic, but this is a personal vanity site, and you will benefit from the "barbie" connection, in that you will be providing your visitors an ironic and memorable URL, which Mattel, and not you, imbued with the cultural and iconic associations that it has today.
You are not being tormented, you are being reminded, rather politely, that you are diluting their trademark. As for claiming that your offer to sell the domain was merely a joke, I doubt it. Can you honestly say that if someone had sincerely met your price, that you would have declined?
Further, your Australian colloquial argument is disingenuous to the extreme. Most of the world was unaware of the Oz slang until 1986, when Crocodile Dundee hit the cinemas. Even then, I would be willing to bet that the greater majority of people associate the word "barbie" with the Mattel product, and not with Paul Hogan.
Remember that Linus adamantly defends "Linux," which he has not invested nearly as much energy building. What is fair for Linus is fair for Mattel.
Sorry, but people _are_ stupid. I agree wholeheartedly with the statement:
There are no stupid questions, just stupid people.
I don't want to argue semantics here, but if you haven't figured out, after three years of using a PC daily, how to do something as simple as format a floppy disk or rename a file (and under Windows, no less), then you are a fucking moron. I've worked tech support for many years, and most of the people I talk to are just ignorant, but some (several a week) are definitely stupid. I work with customers on a face-to-face basis, and these truly stupid customers are usually also the ones who are rude, pretentious bitches or complete assholes who expect you to automatically remember what printer you sold them five years ago. Conversely, they are the percentage of the population who walk into the store with greasy hair, fat asses, who haven't bathed, brushed their teeth, or changed their clothes in weeks. They have chewing tobacco falling out of their mouths, or reek of cigarette smoke, and their fingernails are yellow and deformed. They are too fucking _stupid_ to understand that the 386 that they bought ten years ago won't run Quake 3, even after dozens of polite explanations that they need to upgrade their computer before they can run _that_, and every fucking week these morons assault you with their body odor and stupidity.
Disclaimer: I haven't liked Cruise in anything since Risky Business (I haven't seen Magnolia), so it should come as no surprise that I consider his performance bland and underwhelming here. He is a pretty boy, though his looks are rapidly fading into a sort of roguish version of George Hamilton. However, looks alone do not an actor make, though they do, unfortunately, make many a star.
.02 cents worth.
Thandie would look marvellous with or without the cleavage. I don't know whether she can act. I hadn't seen her previously, and nothing in this film tests her enough to pass any serious judgement.
As for Woo... I love everything he has done except for this, though I might be alone in considering Face/Off one of his weaker works. I attribute the failure of this work to the PG-13 restriction. The storyline was no better or worse than is usual in action-adventure fare, but, frankly, this film was still twice as exciting as the original (which isn't saying much, as I thought the first film sucked).
Just my
This ruling, if it stands, could have rather far-reaching consequences for the industry. Here are a few scenarios, both good and bad:
... amount of [system X's] computer system capacity," but automated search systems aren't? They both use part of system X's capacity, but the automation makes it evil? Is this because the automated searches potentially use up more bandwidth? If so, will we see future rulings where judges determine that linking or searching is okay as long as it doesn't exhaust more than BLANK percent of a system's capacity?
.02 cents worth.
1. [Good?] Programs which sift the Internet for e-mail addresses (for later spamming) will be banned because such sifting "use[s] a portion of that property," wherein "that property" is defined as any webpage or newsgroup - ANY on-line resource - that can legally be defined as someone else's property.
This creates a puzzle: webpages can be defined as property, but a domain name can't? So, the address which signifies and, in the mind of the consumer, effectively "houses" said property isn't property itself? So, you can steal my property deed, which _isn't_ property so no theft has occurred, and sell it to someone else who then has the right to profit from the webspace or other virtual property which the URL represents?
2. [Bad?] Deep linking has been okayed by the courts. So, deep linking is okay, which inarguably "use[s] only a[n]
3. [Good? Bad?] Search engines which use web spiders are now feasibly verboten. I know that robots.txt has long existed, but many millions of sites don't use it. Will they now be legally required to if they don't want to be searched? Can I sue, then, if you index my site and I don't want you to, because indexing my site uses up some portion of my bandwidth that I didn't want to give?
Just my
First, I have children in High School now, and the books you mention (excepting Clockwork Orange) _are_ required reading, at least where I live, and I am living in Podunk, Idaho. Further, they were required reading when I was in High School, some 20+ years ago.
.02 cents worth.
Yes, they should be required reading. Fortunately, they _are_ (and, hopefully, in most locales).
However, and I a hope that I am not the only dissenter here, but F-451 I find to be the most boring and laboriously told of any of the Bradbury fables. There is no wit, as the point is beaten home with a sledgehammer. To introduce a young mind to Bradbury, choose The Illustrated Man, or Something Wicked This Way Comes, or any of his marvellous anthologies. Choose The Martian Chronicles (again, a fable a bit too obviously told, and tainted in my mind by Rock Hudson, but still wonderful).
Just my
So, this is a troll, but earlier messages about poison gas fumes and Cedar Rapids, IO ports and Voodoo 3, geysers and Yellowstone were FUNNY?
I would moderate you up, technos, if only in the interest of consistency.
_check out yesterday's Slashback about this, links to an explanation of the motives / methods of the hackers as well as the earlier coverage of the exploit in the Apache section. Is this censorship*?_
:-(
No, just an example of my own lack of observation. Sorry.
_*And if a letter to the editor of any newspaper is not accepted for publication, is that censorship?_
Not always, but sometimes. There is definitely such a thing as censorship by omission, depending on the intent/ethics of the editor. However, as I made clear above, I acknowledge that no censorship occurred in this case.
Remember that DOS's command.com was a user interface, albeit command-line driven. And it was definitely scriptable: what DOS guru can ever forget the joy of batch files (extended tremendously for the real geeks by 4DOS)?
Scripting is wonderful, but in this era of GUI dominance, I would hardly call scripting "necesary' (sic). I can't think of any tasks that I perform daily or even weekly which actually require scripting, which is implicit in any definition of necessity.
I love the Windows interface. It seems intuitive to me, which is a detail of UI design that I find "necessary." I like Alt-TAB'ing between applications, I enjoy stepping through forms by pressing the TAB key, and reversing through those same forms with the Shift-TAB combination. I'm glad that "File" is always on the left side of the screen, and that "Help" is always on the right. I'm glad that applications don't entirely take over my screen (as MacOS seems to do), and I don't need three mouse buttons, thank you. Ctrl X, Ctrl C, and Ctrl V work just fine. I find the Start bar a useful tool, and I like the convenience of the tray.
A lot of users here condemn the Windows GUI as "crap" without ever providing concrete examples. And no, adjectives such as "ugly" or "unfriendly" are too subjective to be convincing. They may be true, from your perspective, but they are wasted as constructive critiques.
_1) The guy was busted not only for linking to pornographic sites, but also for providing software that he had written that allows people to remove the "mosaic" used on the pr0n._
As a matter of clarification, why the variant spelling of porn?
...obnoxious GMs are roaming the worlds and forcing people to change their nicks to crappy D&Dish names.
,
Verant have had a strict naming policy since the very start: (http://everquest.station.sony.com/s_naming.html)
and I see nothing _obnoxious_ about harried GM's enforcing this policy. Further, when you have losers choosing names like _Analprobe_ and _Vaginalot_ is their really any question that it is inappropriate? I know, some will bitch about free speech violations, and others about anal retentives, but why should the majority have to tolerate the juveniles? Go play someplace else if you have never grown up.
That depends on how far they go. I could be jumping the gun here, but It strikes me that they will probably go the doubleclick route - profiling individual users to target banner adds.
There is nothing in the Talk City announcement that should logically lead you to that conclusion.
So not supporting Linux means that they immediatly loose a big chunk of the brightest section of the populace as potential users.
I probably shouldn't respond to a such an elitist, glaringly unsupported claim, but I will throw prudence to the wind and point out that the percentage of Linux users on the 'net is statistically insignificant, so Talk City loses nothing, "big chunk" or otherwise.
It's a common misconception that lack of source code makes you safe. It doesn't - it just gives you a false sense of security.
Nor did I imply that lack of source code makes you safe. Talk City took their action because of the exploits of a cretinous few, who might have been using Open Source toys, or maybe not. Hell, they might have been using BeOs or MacOS, it doesn't matter. Flood attacks can be easily accomplished whether the client is open or closed, no dissasembly required.
Talk City is not shooting itself in the foot. First, it is entirely irrelevant which client one uses when connecting to an IRC channel, as long as that client provides adequate (or better) functionality. Second, most Talk City members use the browser-accessible software, so the few dissenters who will now whine (on cue) about their loss of freedom will not harm Talk City one bit. Third, the only flavors that are important in a chat room are the flavors of content, not of the OS or the client. Lastly, anything which limits the disruptive abilities of script kiddies and other losers is welcome.
"Ray Kurzweil spoke first, and he spoke of how rapidly increasing CPU speeds would result in intelligent, spiritual machines."
Ray evidentally has a different understanding of the word "spiritual" than I do. Spirit, to me, is nonexistant, at least in the traditional religious sense, but, even if we are talking about those noncorporeal things such as man's need for love, and hope, charity, compassion, etc., how can we ever expect a CPU, or software, to experience those those things in the same way that we as meat machines can't yet adequately explain?
Man experiences awe because his own existance is lost in the fog of birth, and the exact date of his own demise is unknownable. A machine does not have the benefit of these mysteries. I find "spiritual" much too big, and loaded, a word to describe what Ray Kurzweil is apparently claiming (I didn't attend the lecture to _know_ what he is claiming, so I use the qualifier "apparently").
Why this mad desire to force spirituality into everything? Isn't it time that we put away our childish, outdated labels and faced the world without superstition or anthromorphizing?