UPS delivered it, not to my daughter, but to the front desk of the dormitory, and got an signature that wasn't my daughter's signature and that couldn't be identified. My daughter called UPS. UPS insisted there was nothing they could/would do, they'd delivered the package and got a signature. She called L. L. Bean. They said, "Oh, that's too bad, we're sorry, we'll send another one out right away." L. L. Bean made several customers for life that day.
I've had the exact opposite experience. I ordered some DVDs and CDs online from betamonline.com through Google Checkout (I had never heard of them before, but found them through Google Checkout and they had the lowest price for the combination of stuff I wanted to buy). Anyway, they shipped it through USPS and it arrived at my apartment around 4pm, but by the time I got home around 6 or 7 it was gone. I contacted betamonline, google, the post office, and my credit card company; but no one would help me out. The post office claimed that the mailman made a judgment call that the porch was a safe place to leave a package, therefore they had no liability. My credit card has theft insurance on goods purchased with the card, but they claim because it was left outside the apartment ("out of arm's reach" I think was the phrase in the contract) it wasn't covered. The retailer claimed that since the package was successfully delivered they would have nothing more to do with it. And with Google it was pretty much impossible to get someone to talk with me.
So according the the post office, the porch was a safe place to leave the package so they weren't responsible; while according to my credit card company, the porch wasn't a safe place to leave the package so they also weren't responsible. If you take the cold black/white point of view of the situation's chain of responsibility then you could claim that none of the companies were responsible, but that's horrible customer service. If just one of the companies had stood up and taken the initiative to correct the problem they would have gained a customer for life (I guess the post office has me for life anyway, which explains their horrible service).
It's really more their loss than mine; I decided to repurchase the goods from a different retailer, without Google Checkout, with a different credit card, and with UPS instead of USPS; and will now avoid them as much as possible in the future.
Quite an interesting topic, but I prefer arguments that are contrary to the position opposite of that which counters the arguments against unbundling Windows. Or to put it another way: for unbundling windows. I know it's not quite a triple negative, but it's very unclear and I see this type of writing all the time in slashdot head-lines. If you're against someone who is not for undoing something, then just say you're for undoing something, or against doing something. Reduce it to its logical minimum. Why not use "Countering The Arguments For Keeping Windows Bundled", or "Countering the Bundled Windows Apologists"?
That one still gets me. The first time I saw it I swore up and down that the colors were different. I opened it up in the GIMP and used to color picker to check it out, and didn't even totally believe it when I saw the exact same color values. I couldn't convince myself until I cropped part of square 'A' out and dragged it down to square 'B'. But the demo from today's article just doesn't do it for me. I looked at the discs for a while and couldn't tell what the illusion was supposed to be, then I read the description and the two center squares just don't look different at all to me. Not even a little bit.
I'm not trying to sound like I have perfect vision and am 'above' simple optical illusions; like I said, to this day the cylinder-on-checkerboard illusion still gets me even though I _know_ they're the same color. Is there anyone else who just doesn't see the illusion in this optical illusion?
I read the summary and didn't understand a single part of it, but it sounded interesting and I though, "The article must explain things better." But after reading the article I still have no idea what is going on. Is there someone else that could maybe help explain what this story is all about?
Really? noshitsherlock... I suppose all of you just knew that birds were able to "see" magnetic fields. That's really impressive, I can't believe how smart you are, that you had this knowledge in the back of your brain like I've got the switches to ls memorized. Thank you so much for demonstrating your superior knowledge in the form of a slashdot story tag, that's really cool. Much better than publishing your findings in a science journal, you decided to save them up and use them in a condescending manner on a technology blog. Way to go... I guess when the article stated, "surprisingly little is known about the neuronal substrates underlying these navigational abilities" it actually meant, "a few slashdot readers know exactly how the neuronal substrates work, but won't tell anyone." Anyway, I'd just like to applaud your contributions to humanity.
Written on the back of the sweatshirt in what appeared to be gold magic marker was the phrase "socket to me" and below that was written "Course VI,"
I don't see what the big deal is... so the airport security personal are fans of emacs, do you expect emacs users not to be fascists?
Seriously though, I thought the way the city treated the entire ATHF "hoax device" ordeal was laughable. From beginning to end they reacted in the dumbest way possible. Especially to continue calling it a hoax device, well after they knew exactly what it was. This case is much different... she was at an airport with wires sticking out from a device attached to her chest and holding putty in her hand. Imagine for a second what a suicide bomber might look like, and that's pretty close.
But again in this case, continuing to call it a hoax device is just insulting to everyone including yourself. It wasn't a hoax, it wasn't intended to be a hoax. How can you charge someone for possessing a hoax device if the true intention of the device and the user is completely not hoax related? If it's just up to the interpretation of the police officer, than what's to stop them from thinking my Blackberry is a hoax device.
Funnily enough, Theo posted a fairly decent and non-inflamatory respones in the early discussions. This is in stark contrast to the earlier GPL case (mentioned in your post) where his reaction was indefensible.
Really? Because this is what I read from Theo: It boggles the mind. One writes legal text which says "You may not delete this", and their approach is to delete it, and splatter GPL-gizm all over it. "Screw the everyone and theirlaws, we are GNU...". He sounds like an ass to me regardless of who's right or wrong.
Driver support for Free Software operating systems on laptops is traditionally somewhat hit and miss. If a large manufacturer is providing Linux pre-installed, then this means that they are going to be building laptops out of components that have Linux drivers.
The best part about this is you've got two separate companies (Lenovo and Dell), two different product lines (Thinkpads and Inspirons), and two different distributions of Linux (SUSE and Ubuntu). This means that both companies and both distros will be pushing to get laptop hardware support working well with Linux.
If you've just got Dell trying to buy compatible hardware for a single product line, then good Linux support for each laptop component might only come from a single manufacturer. Now that Lenovo's in the game, they'll be looking for Linux compatibility from their hardware manufacturers' as well; manufacturers which are bound to be different in many cases from Dell's. Let's also not forget software configuration, how many times have you been using one distro and just can't get some piece of hardware to work, you find a solution online, but come to find out it's only if you're using a certain distro with a certain kernel version.
This situation means better hardware support for everyone no matter the distro or company (or lack there of).
My problem with what they did though is that if they wanted to show him a piece of the movie, why not grab the movie trailer off the internet?
The only reason she needs is that she wants to. But in this case she probably thought the current scene being shown was pretty cool and wasn't necessarily in the trailer, she also just wanted to play with her new camcorder
There is no reason to record a movie while you're watching it in a theater.
That's just the thing, you don't have to have a reason to do something legal. If I were to spin around in my chair right now for no reason, should I be put in jail?
How does the theater know they were only planning to record a bit of the film? How do they know they weren't trying to film the whole movie?
Oh, I don't know, he could have asked them what they were up to. If a kid is walking around a store putting stuff in his pockets how do they know he wasn't trying to steal all of it? They law is pretty clear about this, you can't stop the kid until he's past the point of no return, ie. walking passed the register without paying. And even if they were planning on taping the whole movie, they probably would have lied and said it was just for a moment, but now they know they're being watched and wouldn't dare try and record any more, potential crime averted. And if the theater manager wanted to be tough about it, he can ask them to leave. It's the theater's property and they don't have to allow them to stay if they break the rules, but since there's also nothing illegal about what they did either he shouldn't be able to take their footage or delete the clip.
Umm, no. I use eMusic. For my $19.99/mo, I get 75 DRM-free LAME-encoded mp3's. It works out to about $0.27/song. When you run out of downloads and need to finish an album (I only buy albums) the booster packs can get as cheap as $0.40/song ($19.99 for 50).
I remember back in the day (about 5 years ago) when I was an eMusic subscriber. I joined because They Might Be Giants had their entire catalog on eMusic and I could get all the tracks I was missing, including the internet only "Long Tall Weekend". At that point it was $15 or $20 per month, but there was no cap on the amount you could download. And I was at college with big fat pipe leading right to my front door. They also used some sort of RealPlayer functionality where you could click on a link for an entire album and it would start downloading all the tracks in RealPlayer for you (they were all just mp3s as now, so it's not like I needed to use RealPlayer to listen to them). I remember you could even queue up as many albums as you wanted, so when I decided to end my subscription I queued up honestly maybe a 100 albums and just let it go over night. I got a lot of good ska and punk that way (also a whole lot of crappy ska and punk)... I think they even had like all of Elvis Costello's catalog available.
That was when I decided that it just wasn't right or worth it to steal songs off file trading networks. Ever since then the vast, vast, vast majority of my music has been legally purchased whether through eMusic, CDs, or iTunes. It was a really cool service, but I don't think I could see myself signing up for eMusic again if it's not unlimited considering the limited selection they had (still have?).
Now we will see the same people who oppose RIAA/MPAA copyrights cheering the copyright action that enforces open source. Don't you see that you can't have it both ways?
That's bullshit and you know it. On several occasions, pretty much every story about file trading and copyright I see posts from slashdotters saying that they believe current copyright for songs is out of touch with reality, but still wouldn't participate in illegal file trading because of the ethical issues. You don't give people enough credit.
Plus, you're talking apples to oranges when you compare adhering to the GPL to adhering to what the RIAA wants with regards to songs. The GPL only lets you do more with the work than would otherwise be possible via copyright, the RIAA wants to restrict the rights of users even further than what current copyright does allow.
The point is that Alexa is flawed, without a doubt. But it seems more flawed from the point of view of a group which deliberately makes itself all but impossible to measure. And frankly, if we're not willing to provide the information necessary for advertisers to make informed choices, we're going to continue to be ignored, both on the web and on television. (Yes, I do realize that Nielsen is specifically flawed with respect to DVRs - but even if they weren't, how many members of this site would voluntarily install habit-tracking software on their TiVo? How many members of this site would call for a boycott of TiVo if it installed it for them?)
Yes, Alexa is flawed because they just take their numbers at face value, they don't do any statistical analysis of their numbers. Instead of just freaking out as taco suggests, show them numbers from a company that does care about demographic distribution and statistical analysis. Use Compete.com. Here's Alexa's graph for slashdot vs digg using Alexa's metric called reach which is apparently percent of people with their toolbar installed who visited the two sites; and here's Compete's using a statistically computed number of unique visitors in a month to each site. There are other metrics available from Compete as well, but this is the core metric.
This is a hard one for non-native English speakers, because "lose" is pronounced so bizarrely it sounds like it needs two Os.
i think "lose" should be spelled with two O's and a Z just like it sounds... like booze.
Something that may help you remember how to spell the-verb-that's-the-opposite-of-win, is to look at its past tense spelling: 'lost'. One 'o' in 'lost', therefore one 'o' in 'lose'.
Another poster put it better a couple of posts above, this is no different from a corn flakes company creating a contest in the lines of "write an essay with the word 'crunchy' and win such and such prize'", and getting 10 years old children to publish their essays. They will do for the prize, even if they hate that particular brand of flakes.
That's a horrible analogy. Bloggers claim they want to be taken seriously as legitimate news media. Yet they go and do things like slip paid for advertising in with the rest of their content. Children writing an essay for a contest aren't also writing essays for a profession and then slipping their contest essay in with the rest trying to pass it off as the same.
A better analogy would be that of a car with its hood welded shut... wait no, what I meant to say was that of a radio talk show host who does advertisements on air. This is something that really gets me, you'll hear a guy talk about some topic for a while and then all of a sudden he'll slip into advertising mode to hawk some product. I don't know how they get away with that kind of thing, there's no indication that it's an advertisement before they start talking (usually in magazines any ad looking remotely like an article usually had the word advertisement on it). Though most of the time you can kind of tell when they switch into advertising mode, and by the time they get around to mentioning the product you can tell that it's an ad. What it sounds like with these blogs is that the writers were paid to write stuff that looked like content without any indication that it wasn't their own opinion. And that's taking it much further than the talk show hosts, and it's unethical.
I believe all he was saying is that there isn't really any way to create something and then relinquish your rights to it before the copyright would naturally expire. Everything I've read about copyright leads me to believe that every work is automatically copyrighted upon creation, and that there is no legally recognized act that can unambiguously remove it from copyright.
Say a developer posted the source code for a program on his website for anyone to download with a big notice on the web page and in the source code that it was in the public domain. If the developer later attempted to reclaim his copyright, do you really believe there isn't a single court which might find in his favor? Especially given all the latest laws being passed recently making copyright stronger and stronger?
It is commonly believed by non-lawyers that it is impossible to put a work into the public domain. Although copyright law generally does not provide any statutory means to "abandon" copyright so that a work can enter the public domain, this does not mean that it is impossible or even difficult, only that the law is somewhat unclear. Congress may not have felt it necessary to codify this part of the law, because abandoning property (like a tract of land) to the public domain has traditionally been a matter of judge-made law, rather than statute
So, at the very best it's unclear how to release a work from copyright, and would in fact be up to the judicial system to work out. That uncertainty in my mind creates the likelihood that in today's atmosphere it would be very dangerous to rely on someone's dedication to the public domain. The article then discusses a section of the Computer Software Rental Amendments Act dealing with "public domain computer shareware" and a method of actually placing software into the public domain (this was *not* passed into law).
Later on, a discussion of a court case concerning software in the public domain:
This decision holds that computer software may enter the public domain through "freely accessible program exchanges and the like," or by becoming "commonplace in the computer industry." Relying only on this decision, it is unclear whether an author can dedicate his work to the public domain simply by labeling it as such, or whether dedication to the public domain requires widespread dissemination.
Still unclear. Many people in industry and government would like to treat intellectual property exactly the same as real property. If I stood outside a tract of land that I owned and proclaimed that I was relinquishing my ownership of it, maybe even placed a sign, do you really think I wouldn't be responsible for the property tax and such?
In my day to day work I avoid using any software that is GPLed because of commercial concerns (out side of my control) I cannot release details of software. So I have to reinvent everything and the open source community loses out on anything beneficial I may have done. A lose lose situation.
I don't get it. If you're dealing with other commercial code, how could the open source community have ever benefited from "anything beneficial [you] may have done"? You can't release your code back to the community no matter what. The only person losing out is you because you've decided to deal with companies who are restricting you and preventing you from using GPL code. It sounds to me like you're just upset that you don't get someone else's code for free with no restrictions. If that's such a horrible situation, why aren't you just as upset with the "commercial concerns" for putting restrictions on the code that they give you?
And why cannot release details of the software? Because its encryption libraries and DRM. Well don't DRM I hear you say. The real world situation is this. Media companies want DRM. I agree that its not useful and doesn't actually benefit the media companies but until their minds are changes its here to stay. Whether that's right or wrong its a fact. There's nothing we can do about that.
No offense, but I don't think the free software community really wants your DRM code, we're not really losing out here.
You are trying to tell me that 3 is "more free" than 1. In reality, it's just a variation on 2, the most restrictive license possible. I'd accept the argument that it promotes open source, but stop conflating source code availability with freedom. Under license 3, the price of that particular freedom is somebody else's freedom. You may not care because you end up benefiting in some cases, but there is a freedom cost.
I think you're missing the point. When Joe Basementdweller develops a piece of software and distributes it under the terms of the GPL, he is giving the freedoms detailed in the GPL to every single end user of his software. The moment he attaches the GPL to his code, every single person on Earth who might some day receive a copy of his program automatically gets the rights enumerated in the GPL. These rights come from the original developer, when the code is first written (or at least the first time the GPL is placed with the code). Every potential end user now has these rights forever.
If a company or individual comes along later, uses Joe's code in their project, and don't respect the terms of the GPL (or find some loophole that violates the spirit of the GPL) they are taking away the freedoms of the users they then sell their product to. Richard Stallman believes that every person should have these rights for every piece of software written. He believes that these rights are individual rights that everyone is entitled to. You might disagree with this notion, but I don't necessarily think it's such a crazy idea.
Even if you don't think that these are necessarily inalienable rights, they were still given to the end user by the original developer in the case of the GPL. If someone doesn't abide by the terms of the GPL, then they are taking away rights from the end user. Tivo got an entire operating system including thousands of utilities and libraries for free; all they have to do is continue to respect the deal that the original developers of that software had already made with their end users, anything less than that is taking away freedoms that already exist.
Actually, Hicksville has only 5,003 people in it as of 2000
My Dad grew up near Hicksville, NY, and whenever he heard the common insulting phrases about "Hicksville" he always thought they were specifically about this actual town. It wasn't until later that he found out that "Hicksville" was a generic stand-in for the boonies (kind of ironic considering Hicksville's proximity to NYC). Hicksville, NY has Hicksville, OH beat out with a pop of 41,260.
Article 2 states "The great majority of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was put there by the developed world, with the US alone responsible for an estimated quarter of emissions since 1750"... How can anybody know what to believe in the face of such huge inconsistencies?
Just wanted to pipe back in here one last time with an update, the article now reads:
The great majority of the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was put there by the developed world...
Hmmm... I happen to know the actual numbers off the top of my head, and when I read the original statement, my instant reaction was "Hey, that's not right at all." I re-read it, trying to find some way to read it so that it was correct, and I couldn't. It was clearly a claim that humans have doubled the amount of atmospheric CO2.
You're absolutely correct. If you read that sentence by itself, it is blatantly false. Heck, even if you read it in context, it is literally not true. But even if you only read that one article out of the 25, it becomes obvious that the author simply phrased what he wanted to say badly. Perhaps he had written something similar to the qualification I had added in my previous post and he decided to edit it out without re-reading the sentence to make sure it still made sense. Or maybe that's just how he had written it the first time. Either way, if you read it in the full context of that article and the others you can tell that what was literally written was not what was meant.
If you'd like to take the author and editor to task for not fully vetting what was written, then please do. Write a letter to the editor, I'm sure you'll receive a response, and probably a correction in their next edition. But, you're being intellectually dishonest if you're trying to push the idea that the author either truly believed that humans were responsible for *most* of the C02 in the air, or knew it to be false and knowingly published false information.
Article 2 states "The great majority of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was put there by the developed world, with the US alone responsible for an estimated quarter of emissions since 1750" right after the first article states "It is true that human emissions of CO2 are small compared with natural sources."
Which it is ? How can anybody know what to believe in the face of such huge inconsistencies ?
There is no inconsistency there, at most it was bad phrasing. What article to meant was that "Of all the carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere by humans, the great majority was put there by the developed world, with the US alone responsible for an estimated quarter of emissions since 1750." I admit that it was very badly stated, but anyone with the slightest reading comprehension would understand that they were talking about portions of human emissions. Especially when combined with the second half of the sentence which discussed the United States' percent of emissions.
If you have actual evidence, please bring it up. I will promise (to try) to not nit pick at typos or badly phrased sentences.
Problem 5: Google's Picasa does not work. Every time I launch Picasa it locks up my computer and sends the CPU utilization to 100%. The problem is Google, not Ubuntu. Instead of writing real Linux software, all Google did was take their Windows version and wrap it in WINE (fake Windows) to make it work in Linux. I expected Google to do better than that.
I tried Google's Picasa offering for Linux a week ago when I wanted to upload like 50 pictures to a web album. It ran fine, but the version Google decided to Linux-ify with wine didn't have web album upload support. I downloaded the latest windows version and installed it with wine and it runs wonderfully. I was able to upload the photos to my picasa web albums and haven't had a single problem. Everything that I tried just worked, it was a lot slicker than the version specifically for Linux.
This is with: Ubuntu 7.04; wine 0.9.33; picasa 2.7 (build 36.4000,0)
Slashdot Mirror
I've had the exact opposite experience. I ordered some DVDs and CDs online from betamonline.com through Google Checkout (I had never heard of them before, but found them through Google Checkout and they had the lowest price for the combination of stuff I wanted to buy). Anyway, they shipped it through USPS and it arrived at my apartment around 4pm, but by the time I got home around 6 or 7 it was gone. I contacted betamonline, google, the post office, and my credit card company; but no one would help me out. The post office claimed that the mailman made a judgment call that the porch was a safe place to leave a package, therefore they had no liability. My credit card has theft insurance on goods purchased with the card, but they claim because it was left outside the apartment ("out of arm's reach" I think was the phrase in the contract) it wasn't covered. The retailer claimed that since the package was successfully delivered they would have nothing more to do with it. And with Google it was pretty much impossible to get someone to talk with me.
So according the the post office, the porch was a safe place to leave the package so they weren't responsible; while according to my credit card company, the porch wasn't a safe place to leave the package so they also weren't responsible. If you take the cold black/white point of view of the situation's chain of responsibility then you could claim that none of the companies were responsible, but that's horrible customer service. If just one of the companies had stood up and taken the initiative to correct the problem they would have gained a customer for life (I guess the post office has me for life anyway, which explains their horrible service).
It's really more their loss than mine; I decided to repurchase the goods from a different retailer, without Google Checkout, with a different credit card, and with UPS instead of USPS; and will now avoid them as much as possible in the future.
Quite an interesting topic, but I prefer arguments that are contrary to the position opposite of that which counters the arguments against unbundling Windows. Or to put it another way: for unbundling windows. I know it's not quite a triple negative, but it's very unclear and I see this type of writing all the time in slashdot head-lines. If you're against someone who is not for undoing something, then just say you're for undoing something, or against doing something. Reduce it to its logical minimum. Why not use "Countering The Arguments For Keeping Windows Bundled", or "Countering the Bundled Windows Apologists"?
That one still gets me. The first time I saw it I swore up and down that the colors were different. I opened it up in the GIMP and used to color picker to check it out, and didn't even totally believe it when I saw the exact same color values. I couldn't convince myself until I cropped part of square 'A' out and dragged it down to square 'B'. But the demo from today's article just doesn't do it for me. I looked at the discs for a while and couldn't tell what the illusion was supposed to be, then I read the description and the two center squares just don't look different at all to me. Not even a little bit.
I'm not trying to sound like I have perfect vision and am 'above' simple optical illusions; like I said, to this day the cylinder-on-checkerboard illusion still gets me even though I _know_ they're the same color. Is there anyone else who just doesn't see the illusion in this optical illusion?
I read the summary and didn't understand a single part of it, but it sounded interesting and I though, "The article must explain things better." But after reading the article I still have no idea what is going on. Is there someone else that could maybe help explain what this story is all about?
Really? noshitsherlock... I suppose all of you just knew that birds were able to "see" magnetic fields. That's really impressive, I can't believe how smart you are, that you had this knowledge in the back of your brain like I've got the switches to ls memorized. Thank you so much for demonstrating your superior knowledge in the form of a slashdot story tag, that's really cool. Much better than publishing your findings in a science journal, you decided to save them up and use them in a condescending manner on a technology blog. Way to go... I guess when the article stated, "surprisingly little is known about the neuronal substrates underlying these navigational abilities" it actually meant, "a few slashdot readers know exactly how the neuronal substrates work, but won't tell anyone." Anyway, I'd just like to applaud your contributions to humanity.
From the article:
I don't see what the big deal is... so the airport security personal are fans of emacs, do you expect emacs users not to be fascists?
Seriously though, I thought the way the city treated the entire ATHF "hoax device" ordeal was laughable. From beginning to end they reacted in the dumbest way possible. Especially to continue calling it a hoax device, well after they knew exactly what it was. This case is much different... she was at an airport with wires sticking out from a device attached to her chest and holding putty in her hand. Imagine for a second what a suicide bomber might look like, and that's pretty close.
But again in this case, continuing to call it a hoax device is just insulting to everyone including yourself. It wasn't a hoax, it wasn't intended to be a hoax. How can you charge someone for possessing a hoax device if the true intention of the device and the user is completely not hoax related? If it's just up to the interpretation of the police officer, than what's to stop them from thinking my Blackberry is a hoax device.
Really? Because this is what I read from Theo: It boggles the mind. One writes legal text which says "You may not delete this", and their approach is to delete it, and splatter GPL-gizm all over it. "Screw the everyone and theirlaws, we are GNU...". He sounds like an ass to me regardless of who's right or wrong.
The best part about this is you've got two separate companies (Lenovo and Dell), two different product lines (Thinkpads and Inspirons), and two different distributions of Linux (SUSE and Ubuntu). This means that both companies and both distros will be pushing to get laptop hardware support working well with Linux.
If you've just got Dell trying to buy compatible hardware for a single product line, then good Linux support for each laptop component might only come from a single manufacturer. Now that Lenovo's in the game, they'll be looking for Linux compatibility from their hardware manufacturers' as well; manufacturers which are bound to be different in many cases from Dell's. Let's also not forget software configuration, how many times have you been using one distro and just can't get some piece of hardware to work, you find a solution online, but come to find out it's only if you're using a certain distro with a certain kernel version.
This situation means better hardware support for everyone no matter the distro or company (or lack there of).
The only reason she needs is that she wants to. But in this case she probably thought the current scene being shown was pretty cool and wasn't necessarily in the trailer, she also just wanted to play with her new camcorder
That's just the thing, you don't have to have a reason to do something legal. If I were to spin around in my chair right now for no reason, should I be put in jail?
Oh, I don't know, he could have asked them what they were up to. If a kid is walking around a store putting stuff in his pockets how do they know he wasn't trying to steal all of it? They law is pretty clear about this, you can't stop the kid until he's past the point of no return, ie. walking passed the register without paying. And even if they were planning on taping the whole movie, they probably would have lied and said it was just for a moment, but now they know they're being watched and wouldn't dare try and record any more, potential crime averted. And if the theater manager wanted to be tough about it, he can ask them to leave. It's the theater's property and they don't have to allow them to stay if they break the rules, but since there's also nothing illegal about what they did either he shouldn't be able to take their footage or delete the clip.
I remember back in the day (about 5 years ago) when I was an eMusic subscriber. I joined because They Might Be Giants had their entire catalog on eMusic and I could get all the tracks I was missing, including the internet only "Long Tall Weekend". At that point it was $15 or $20 per month, but there was no cap on the amount you could download. And I was at college with big fat pipe leading right to my front door. They also used some sort of RealPlayer functionality where you could click on a link for an entire album and it would start downloading all the tracks in RealPlayer for you (they were all just mp3s as now, so it's not like I needed to use RealPlayer to listen to them). I remember you could even queue up as many albums as you wanted, so when I decided to end my subscription I queued up honestly maybe a 100 albums and just let it go over night. I got a lot of good ska and punk that way (also a whole lot of crappy ska and punk)... I think they even had like all of Elvis Costello's catalog available.
That was when I decided that it just wasn't right or worth it to steal songs off file trading networks. Ever since then the vast, vast, vast majority of my music has been legally purchased whether through eMusic, CDs, or iTunes. It was a really cool service, but I don't think I could see myself signing up for eMusic again if it's not unlimited considering the limited selection they had (still have?).
or one.
That's bullshit and you know it. On several occasions, pretty much every story about file trading and copyright I see posts from slashdotters saying that they believe current copyright for songs is out of touch with reality, but still wouldn't participate in illegal file trading because of the ethical issues. You don't give people enough credit.
Plus, you're talking apples to oranges when you compare adhering to the GPL to adhering to what the RIAA wants with regards to songs. The GPL only lets you do more with the work than would otherwise be possible via copyright, the RIAA wants to restrict the rights of users even further than what current copyright does allow.
Yes, Alexa is flawed because they just take their numbers at face value, they don't do any statistical analysis of their numbers. Instead of just freaking out as taco suggests, show them numbers from a company that does care about demographic distribution and statistical analysis. Use Compete.com. Here's Alexa's graph for slashdot vs digg using Alexa's metric called reach which is apparently percent of people with their toolbar installed who visited the two sites; and here's Compete's using a statistically computed number of unique visitors in a month to each site. There are other metrics available from Compete as well, but this is the core metric.
I've always wondered what God is... Now I know, God is 'cussions'. Now if only I knew what a 'cussion' is. Is it like a cushion?
Something that may help you remember how to spell the-verb-that's-the-opposite-of-win, is to look at its past tense spelling: 'lost'. One 'o' in 'lost', therefore one 'o' in 'lose'.
COP 1: He's got a gun!
DIALLO: Wait! Wait! I swear it's just a video camera.
COPS 1-4: Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
COP 2: Why does his gun have a rewind button?
COP 3: Crap... not again...
That's a horrible analogy. Bloggers claim they want to be taken seriously as legitimate news media. Yet they go and do things like slip paid for advertising in with the rest of their content. Children writing an essay for a contest aren't also writing essays for a profession and then slipping their contest essay in with the rest trying to pass it off as the same.
A better analogy would be that of a car with its hood welded shut... wait no, what I meant to say was that of a radio talk show host who does advertisements on air. This is something that really gets me, you'll hear a guy talk about some topic for a while and then all of a sudden he'll slip into advertising mode to hawk some product. I don't know how they get away with that kind of thing, there's no indication that it's an advertisement before they start talking (usually in magazines any ad looking remotely like an article usually had the word advertisement on it). Though most of the time you can kind of tell when they switch into advertising mode, and by the time they get around to mentioning the product you can tell that it's an ad. What it sounds like with these blogs is that the writers were paid to write stuff that looked like content without any indication that it wasn't their own opinion. And that's taking it much further than the talk show hosts, and it's unethical.
I believe all he was saying is that there isn't really any way to create something and then relinquish your rights to it before the copyright would naturally expire. Everything I've read about copyright leads me to believe that every work is automatically copyrighted upon creation, and that there is no legally recognized act that can unambiguously remove it from copyright.
Say a developer posted the source code for a program on his website for anyone to download with a big notice on the web page and in the source code that it was in the public domain. If the developer later attempted to reclaim his copyright, do you really believe there isn't a single court which might find in his favor? Especially given all the latest laws being passed recently making copyright stronger and stronger?
Looking through Public Domain on Wikipedia, I found the following passages interesting:
So, at the very best it's unclear how to release a work from copyright, and would in fact be up to the judicial system to work out. That uncertainty in my mind creates the likelihood that in today's atmosphere it would be very dangerous to rely on someone's dedication to the public domain. The article then discusses a section of the Computer Software Rental Amendments Act dealing with "public domain computer shareware" and a method of actually placing software into the public domain (this was *not* passed into law).
Later on, a discussion of a court case concerning software in the public domain:
Still unclear. Many people in industry and government would like to treat intellectual property exactly the same as real property. If I stood outside a tract of land that I owned and proclaimed that I was relinquishing my ownership of it, maybe even placed a sign, do you really think I wouldn't be responsible for the property tax and such?
I don't get it. If you're dealing with other commercial code, how could the open source community have ever benefited from "anything beneficial [you] may have done"? You can't release your code back to the community no matter what. The only person losing out is you because you've decided to deal with companies who are restricting you and preventing you from using GPL code. It sounds to me like you're just upset that you don't get someone else's code for free with no restrictions. If that's such a horrible situation, why aren't you just as upset with the "commercial concerns" for putting restrictions on the code that they give you?
No offense, but I don't think the free software community really wants your DRM code, we're not really losing out here.
I think you're missing the point. When Joe Basementdweller develops a piece of software and distributes it under the terms of the GPL, he is giving the freedoms detailed in the GPL to every single end user of his software. The moment he attaches the GPL to his code, every single person on Earth who might some day receive a copy of his program automatically gets the rights enumerated in the GPL. These rights come from the original developer, when the code is first written (or at least the first time the GPL is placed with the code). Every potential end user now has these rights forever.
If a company or individual comes along later, uses Joe's code in their project, and don't respect the terms of the GPL (or find some loophole that violates the spirit of the GPL) they are taking away the freedoms of the users they then sell their product to. Richard Stallman believes that every person should have these rights for every piece of software written. He believes that these rights are individual rights that everyone is entitled to. You might disagree with this notion, but I don't necessarily think it's such a crazy idea.
Even if you don't think that these are necessarily inalienable rights, they were still given to the end user by the original developer in the case of the GPL. If someone doesn't abide by the terms of the GPL, then they are taking away rights from the end user. Tivo got an entire operating system including thousands of utilities and libraries for free; all they have to do is continue to respect the deal that the original developers of that software had already made with their end users, anything less than that is taking away freedoms that already exist.
My Dad grew up near Hicksville, NY, and whenever he heard the common insulting phrases about "Hicksville" he always thought they were specifically about this actual town. It wasn't until later that he found out that "Hicksville" was a generic stand-in for the boonies (kind of ironic considering Hicksville's proximity to NYC). Hicksville, NY has Hicksville, OH beat out with a pop of 41,260.
Just wanted to pipe back in here one last time with an update, the article now reads:
You're absolutely correct. If you read that sentence by itself, it is blatantly false. Heck, even if you read it in context, it is literally not true. But even if you only read that one article out of the 25, it becomes obvious that the author simply phrased what he wanted to say badly. Perhaps he had written something similar to the qualification I had added in my previous post and he decided to edit it out without re-reading the sentence to make sure it still made sense. Or maybe that's just how he had written it the first time. Either way, if you read it in the full context of that article and the others you can tell that what was literally written was not what was meant.
If you'd like to take the author and editor to task for not fully vetting what was written, then please do. Write a letter to the editor, I'm sure you'll receive a response, and probably a correction in their next edition. But, you're being intellectually dishonest if you're trying to push the idea that the author either truly believed that humans were responsible for *most* of the C02 in the air, or knew it to be false and knowingly published false information.
There is no inconsistency there, at most it was bad phrasing. What article to meant was that "Of all the carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere by humans, the great majority was put there by the developed world, with the US alone responsible for an estimated quarter of emissions since 1750." I admit that it was very badly stated, but anyone with the slightest reading comprehension would understand that they were talking about portions of human emissions. Especially when combined with the second half of the sentence which discussed the United States' percent of emissions.
If you have actual evidence, please bring it up. I will promise (to try) to not nit pick at typos or badly phrased sentences.
I tried Google's Picasa offering for Linux a week ago when I wanted to upload like 50 pictures to a web album. It ran fine, but the version Google decided to Linux-ify with wine didn't have web album upload support. I downloaded the latest windows version and installed it with wine and it runs wonderfully. I was able to upload the photos to my picasa web albums and haven't had a single problem. Everything that I tried just worked, it was a lot slicker than the version specifically for Linux.
This is with: Ubuntu 7.04; wine 0.9.33; picasa 2.7 (build 36.4000,0)