Hello and may all the Gods of Everguest Bless Yuo!
I am writing because I know that yuo are a sincer and honest person who will hep out a preson in need.
My Everquest cahacter MINOLLY WEATHERALL was sadly kilt in a server crash leaving behind an account of $70,000,000 SEVENTY MILLION AMERICN DOLLARS with no claimant accessible.
If you wil assist me with your Everquest cahracter to recover this money I wil give you 15% plus expenses
This is a sincer offer and I know I can trust you with this verry sensitiv informations!
Perhaps if we could figure out where the initial universe got all that energy that eventually turned into little ol' us and a whole lot more of not-us, then we could copy the procedure to generate just a little more energy in a convenient format (subject to a lot of unpleasant scenarios, of course.)
Believe it or not, some companies may try to blundgeon workers with secrecy clauses. They may not be enforceable after a long court fight, but often sub-minimum-wage workers are not interested in taking the chance (...especially if their immigration status is in question...). Hence the purpose of the clause: to set up a contract violation if the company threatens their workers
The expense of detecting and suing over click-fraud could be greatly reduced by adding terms such as this to the ad contract:
1. The advertizer agrees not to [define prohibited conduct here]
2. Google may offer a bounty for truthful testimony by any person hired by advertizer to perform [prohibited conduct], and advertizer agrees to permit such truthful testimony on the subject of [prohibited conduct] notwithstanding any other agreement with any party.
Drones paid sub-minimum-wage for click-fraud would jump at a reasonable bounty, especially if advertizer has already agreed to allow it.
Per the article: I realized how important it was for us to allow OpenSolaris kernel source files to be compiled and linked with other open source files and even with proprietary source files in the kernel. GPL would not allow this. On Day 1 of OpenSolaris, because some OpenSolaris IP is encumbered by other companies (example - 3rd party drivers), we're going to have some source files in the kernel that will remain proprietary. Hence GPL was out of the running.
Does this mean that the reason OpenSolaris isn't GPL'd is that it needed to include some non-open stuff?
If that's the case, well fine, I support the right of anyone to license their stuff any way they want... but calling it "open" seems to re-define "open".
No matter what the official titles may be, the real design document is the test plan.
This is because if the product should accepted if and only if it satisfies the test plan. A good test plan will thoroughly exercise the conditions that the product will encounter, and specify the expected response. Once you know those things, generating a traditional design document is trivial (plus or minus nontrivial graphic design).
Because PHBs expect something called a Design Document, I suggest you build a database of Product Condition/Responses (e.g. "Condition: Push Red Button; Response: Sound Klaxon") which you can sort one way to produce a design document and another way to produce a test plan. This is not intended to be cynical; design documents may need to be organized differently than test plans.
As a money-grubbing piggie who thoroughly supports the right of anybody to give away their stuff using the GPL or by any other means they see fit.... let me suggest we be practical.
In any civil legal issue, the first practical question to ask about a possible violation of an agreement (such as the GPL) is "what is the remedy?"
Suppose VileWare Inc used the GPL'd software "gplGameEngine" as the basis of its megahit MMORPG UItimateGplViolatorOnline & distributed it in violation of the GPL, making $1 Gazillion before the courts blew the "TimeOut!" What is the remedy?
VileWare has to replace gplGameEngine with something else. The courts won't care what they replace it with, but VileWare will want something with equivalent functionality so that they stay in business. This is probably going to be expensive - otherwise why did they ripoff gplGameEngine in the first place?
VileWare has to pay damages to the software author they ripped off; this is probably the reasonable licensing fee for gplGameEngine, or the % of VileGame's profits reasonably attributable to gplGameEngine. (This is a fact-laden determination that might result, fairly, in a *lot* of money; the better gplGameEngine works, the more expensive this part of the remedy gets, and VileWare's own malfeasance is an endorsement of the product!)
These reasonable remedies can make the GPL an effective club for limiting VileWare's use of gplGameEngine to whatever the work's author freely gave away.
In contrast: Suppose VileWare used the GPL'd font "gplTimesNewRoman" for the game manual (printed and/or online), somehow violating the GPL in the use of the font. What's the remedy?
Use Another Font. The is not going to be expensive, because few if any GPL'd fonts have massive functionality advantages over numerous PD fonts.
Fork over either the reasonable licensing fee for gplTimesNewRoman or the % of VileGame's profit reasonably attributable to the use of that font. I humbly suggest that this is not going to be a lot of money; reasonable font licensing fees are small and the contribution of a user manual's font to the desirability of an MMORPG is also small.
Under the above analysis, I suggest that trying to use the GPL to limit the use of the font to format documents is not well advised. (The use of the GPL to limit the sale of the font, is, of course, an entirely different matter.) As always, Your Lawyering May Vary!
Aren't you using the phrase "historical value" to mean something different than the parent's phrase "historically accurate"?
"Star Wars" is historically valuable in the sense of its impact on late 20th-century culture, but it's not very historically accurate.
Likewise, the Gospels are historically valuable in the sense that they had some measurable impact on history, but they are full of things that just plain never happened --->>> like the curtain in the Temple being torn top-to-bottom on the day of the crucifixtion. That, and tombs opening, and dead prophets coming forth and prophesying while Jesus' body was still on the cross, would surely have attracted some notice from the Jews & the Romans, who were a bit touchy about such things.
... what they think of all this... what business problems do they have that computer & communications technology might address?
While I can think of a lot of potential problems, to which a no-graphics "Craigslist for the 3rd World" would be a useful response, wouldn't it make sense to ask the potential customers first?
good television and/or theater is not about the plot as it is about the characters
Thank you for your kind words!
And I must agree with your point about the superiority of character over plot, as well as my own directly contradictory point. If that introduces a universe-threatening paradox, perhaps it can be sorted out in the initial episode of Star Trek: Epistomologist.
As a callow youth and a continuing SF devotee, I enjoyed a *lot* of puzzle-SF, so to me the first requirement of the genre (... as perhaps also of detective fiction...) seems to be a setting in which interesting things happen easily. Thereafter, it is still the writer's job to create interesting characters, without which the whole universe is wasted. While it is still *possible* to write interesting stories in any of the ST sub-universes, it seems difficult to invent new ones that don't contradict prior tenets of the series, and yet aren't just copies of the old. For example, a series about another ship exploring another galaxy would be just a variation on the TOS.
And yet... for the sake of audiences outside the limited numbers of puzzle-geeks... even on a blank stage, great characters with interesting relationships can make a story that people will pay good money to see, decade after decade, e.g. Satre's "No Exit". Is the problem in TV/SF that most writers have only a few top works in them, and the really prolific top writers don't want to tie themselves down to many scripts?
I modestly propose the next ST universe: Star Trek: Guest Writer, which consists entirely of stories by top writers, writing about any character in any situation, anywhere and anywhen in the ST universe, e.g. Stephen King, Maya Angelou, Tom Clancy, Jon Stewart. This would be an expensive undertaking, but truly great!
The Star Trek franchise has long struggled to escape the Teela Brown syndrome.
Teela Brown, from Larry Niven's "Known World" series, embodies the concept that after an SF Universe has developed enough really, really keen ideas, authors have trouble coming up with interesting plots. Teela Brown was so effectively bred for Good Luck that nothing really bad could happen to her, which is boring from a plot standpoint (Niven found a great one-time exception to the rule, but that won't work for a series.)
Original Star Trek: had a great sense of "Anything Can Happen" because no-one really knew what was Out There. And Anything DID happen, which was great for making stories! However, after the Treaty of Organia, the Gaurdian Of Time, the Doomsday Device, and Poor Lazarus jamming the door from alternate universes, it was getting harder and harder to come up with plausible threats. Thank goodness for the Klingons who were just powerful enough to be threatening whenever they were needed!
ST:TNG wisely ignored the Teela Brown stuff... for some reason the Organians didn't interfere with the Klingons, Cardassians, Borg, etc.... Creatures who could have been series-killers were given useful limitations, e.g. Q was a joker, the Borg both too far away to bother destroying the Federation in the near future and yet close enough to do it if they felt grouchy, and so on. A nice balance of threats kept open the possibilities.
ST:DS9 overtly balanced the great powers; in some sense it was all about balancing the various cosmic threats & opportunities for the Federation. And... most notably... once the major conflicts were resolved (the Dominion went home and the Wormhole Aliens finished writing their novel) the series ended! There was nothing more to say on the subject, and hopefully we won't get a movie from it.
ST: Voyager got a balance of problems by throwing the ship far far away from the Federation. Once again Anything Could Happen: Federation technology could be either useless or the perfect McGuffin, whenever it was needed. But once the underlying problem was solved --- the ship got Home --- the series was over, no movies please!
ST: Enterprise got the only remaining really large era of uncertainty in the ST Universe: the past, prior to the Federation. However, we know how the story arc must end: The Federation is created. That puts a limit on the stories, e.g. the Earth can't really get blown up because someone would just have to re-build it so Kirk can get born there.
ST: Canada So what is left? Where in the ST Universe is there enough uncertainty to make interesting plots?
Good question - but I think the answer centers around the question whether an environment can be stable enough for an organism to not bother evolving for a while, or whether the presence of competitors forces organisms to continue to evolve.
For example, if you are the only thing filling a particular ecological niche and nothing is gnawing on your leg, then you (as a population, not as an individual) don't have a particular need to get stronger, smarter, more efficient, or laden with additional features.
OTOH if something starts competing for your prey items (say, a vicious little penguin or a cute fox with a firey tale) or perhaps virusses attack your system internally, you can't just sit around... the Red Queen forces you to evolve just to maintain marketshare!
Uh... we are talking about critters, and not software, aren't we?
What's wrong about printing a fake quote, and then admitting it's a fake?
Everything!
It's not nearly as clever as the author thinks, it's not terribly funny nor very illuminative of the issue, and it imposes a burden on the person falsely quoted.
But most of all, it erodes the trust in the publisher. Most of us have limited time, so we need to be able to assume that the publisher of a serious site tries to quote accurately. A reasonable number of mistakes are unavoidable, but unless the site is intended to be a humor site, the content must be trustworthy.
When a publisher deliberately publishes a fake quote, it doesn't help to say, "Ha-ha! Just kidding!" or "RTFA". The trust is weakened already.
Slashdot Mirror
Hello and may all the Gods of Everguest Bless Yuo!
I am writing because I know that yuo are a sincer and honest person who will hep out a preson in need.
My Everquest cahacter MINOLLY WEATHERALL was sadly kilt in a server crash leaving behind an account of $70,000,000 SEVENTY MILLION AMERICN DOLLARS with no claimant accessible.
If you wil assist me with your Everquest cahracter to recover this money I wil give you 15% plus expenses
This is a sincer offer and I know I can trust you with this verry sensitiv informations!
By waiting about 33.2 Billion years
>the Spirit of God was hovering over the face
God's Chosen Spirit is, IIRC, aqua vit. But whose was the face?
Perhaps if we could figure out where the initial universe got all that energy that eventually turned into little ol' us and a whole lot more of not-us, then we could copy the procedure to generate just a little more energy in a convenient format (subject to a lot of unpleasant scenarios, of course.)
how could the company NOT allow testimony
Excellent, real-world question!
Believe it or not, some companies may try to blundgeon workers with secrecy clauses. They may not be enforceable after a long court fight, but often sub-minimum-wage workers are not interested in taking the chance (...especially if their immigration status is in question...). Hence the purpose of the clause: to set up a contract violation if the company threatens their workers
Then what? You go testify that you worked for your competitor. Your competitors says, "OK, show me a pay stub."
The judge finds you lied under oath. Go to jail. Go directly to jail.
... resulting in Big Splat.
The expense of detecting and suing over click-fraud could be greatly reduced by adding terms such as this to the ad contract:
1. The advertizer agrees not to [define prohibited conduct here]
2. Google may offer a bounty for truthful testimony by any person hired by advertizer to perform [prohibited conduct], and advertizer agrees to permit such truthful testimony on the subject of [prohibited conduct] notwithstanding any other agreement with any party.
Drones paid sub-minimum-wage for click-fraud would jump at a reasonable bounty, especially if advertizer has already agreed to allow it.
Does it depend on how you look at it?
Per the article: I realized how important it was for us to allow OpenSolaris kernel source files to be compiled and linked with other open source files and even with proprietary source files in the kernel. GPL would not allow this. On Day 1 of OpenSolaris, because some OpenSolaris IP is encumbered by other companies (example - 3rd party drivers), we're going to have some source files in the kernel that will remain proprietary. Hence GPL was out of the running.
Does this mean that the reason OpenSolaris isn't GPL'd is that it needed to include some non-open stuff?
If that's the case, well fine, I support the right of anyone to license their stuff any way they want ... but calling it "open" seems to re-define "open".
Correct me if I'm wrong, please!
No matter what the official titles may be, the real design document is the test plan.
This is because if the product should accepted if and only if it satisfies the test plan. A good test plan will thoroughly exercise the conditions that the product will encounter, and specify the expected response. Once you know those things, generating a traditional design document is trivial (plus or minus nontrivial graphic design).
Because PHBs expect something called a Design Document, I suggest you build a database of Product Condition/Responses (e.g. "Condition: Push Red Button; Response: Sound Klaxon") which you can sort one way to produce a design document and another way to produce a test plan. This is not intended to be cynical; design documents may need to be organized differently than test plans.
As a money-grubbing piggie who thoroughly supports the right of anybody to give away their stuff using the GPL or by any other means they see fit .... let me suggest we be practical.
In any civil legal issue, the first practical question to ask about a possible violation of an agreement (such as the GPL) is "what is the remedy?"
Suppose VileWare Inc used the GPL'd software "gplGameEngine" as the basis of its megahit MMORPG UItimateGplViolatorOnline & distributed it in violation of the GPL, making $1 Gazillion before the courts blew the "TimeOut!" What is the remedy?
These reasonable remedies can make the GPL an effective club for limiting VileWare's use of gplGameEngine to whatever the work's author freely gave away.
In contrast: Suppose VileWare used the GPL'd font "gplTimesNewRoman" for the game manual (printed and/or online), somehow violating the GPL in the use of the font. What's the remedy?Under the above analysis, I suggest that trying to use the GPL to limit the use of the font to format documents is not well advised. (The use of the GPL to limit the sale of the font, is, of course, an entirely different matter.) As always, Your Lawyering May Vary!
Obi-Wan: Take the Red Pill, Luke!
Emperor: We need Clones. Lots of clones!
Jar-Jar: Meesa knowum Gung-fu!
... is not effective against charging penguins!
Aren't you using the phrase "historical value" to mean something different than the parent's phrase "historically accurate"?
"Star Wars" is historically valuable in the sense of its impact on late 20th-century culture, but it's not very historically accurate.
Likewise, the Gospels are historically valuable in the sense that they had some measurable impact on history, but they are full of things that just plain never happened --->>> like the curtain in the Temple being torn top-to-bottom on the day of the crucifixtion. That, and tombs opening, and dead prophets coming forth and prophesying while Jesus' body was still on the cross, would surely have attracted some notice from the Jews & the Romans, who were a bit touchy about such things.
Let's hope they don't do something so boring as make 3 movies and call it a triology. A triology of 2 movies or 4 would be much better!
If a book trilogy can consistent of 5 books, why can't a movie trilogy consist of 1 movie?
... what they think of all this ... what business problems do they have that computer & communications technology might address?
While I can think of a lot of potential problems, to which a no-graphics "Craigslist for the 3rd World" would be a useful response, wouldn't it make sense to ask the potential customers first?
good television and/or theater is not about the plot as it is about the characters
Thank you for your kind words!
And I must agree with your point about the superiority of character over plot, as well as my own directly contradictory point. If that introduces a universe-threatening paradox, perhaps it can be sorted out in the initial episode of Star Trek: Epistomologist.
As a callow youth and a continuing SF devotee, I enjoyed a *lot* of puzzle-SF, so to me the first requirement of the genre (... as perhaps also of detective fiction ...) seems to be a setting in which interesting things happen easily. Thereafter, it is still the writer's job to create interesting characters, without which the whole universe is wasted. While it is still *possible* to write interesting stories in any of the ST sub-universes, it seems difficult to invent new ones that don't contradict prior tenets of the series, and yet aren't just copies of the old. For example, a series about another ship exploring another galaxy would be just a variation on the TOS.
And yet ... for the sake of audiences outside the limited numbers of puzzle-geeks ... even on a blank stage, great characters with interesting relationships can make a story that people will pay good money to see, decade after decade, e.g. Satre's "No Exit". Is the problem in TV/SF that most writers have only a few top works in them, and the really prolific top writers don't want to tie themselves down to many scripts?
I modestly propose the next ST universe: Star Trek: Guest Writer, which consists entirely of stories by top writers, writing about any character in any situation, anywhere and anywhen in the ST universe, e.g. Stephen King, Maya Angelou, Tom Clancy, Jon Stewart. This would be an expensive undertaking, but truly great!
"...from Larry Niven's "Known World" series..." I believe Niven's universe was/is called "Known Space".
Ooops, thanks; I just mixed up SF and SCA ... they are stored in overlapping brain cells
The Star Trek franchise has long struggled to escape the Teela Brown syndrome.
Teela Brown, from Larry Niven's "Known World" series, embodies the concept that after an SF Universe has developed enough really, really keen ideas, authors have trouble coming up with interesting plots. Teela Brown was so effectively bred for Good Luck that nothing really bad could happen to her, which is boring from a plot standpoint (Niven found a great one-time exception to the rule, but that won't work for a series.)
Original Star Trek: had a great sense of "Anything Can Happen" because no-one really knew what was Out There. And Anything DID happen, which was great for making stories! However, after the Treaty of Organia, the Gaurdian Of Time, the Doomsday Device, and Poor Lazarus jamming the door from alternate universes, it was getting harder and harder to come up with plausible threats. Thank goodness for the Klingons who were just powerful enough to be threatening whenever they were needed!
ST:TNG wisely ignored the Teela Brown stuff ... for some reason the Organians didn't interfere with the Klingons, Cardassians, Borg, etc.... Creatures who could have been series-killers were given useful limitations, e.g. Q was a joker, the Borg both too far away to bother destroying the Federation in the near future and yet close enough to do it if they felt grouchy, and so on. A nice balance of threats kept open the possibilities.
ST:DS9 overtly balanced the great powers; in some sense it was all about balancing the various cosmic threats & opportunities for the Federation. And ... most notably ... once the major conflicts were resolved (the Dominion went home and the Wormhole Aliens finished writing their novel) the series ended! There was nothing more to say on the subject, and hopefully we won't get a movie from it.
ST: Voyager got a balance of problems by throwing the ship far far away from the Federation. Once again Anything Could Happen: Federation technology could be either useless or the perfect McGuffin, whenever it was needed. But once the underlying problem was solved --- the ship got Home --- the series was over, no movies please!
ST: Enterprise got the only remaining really large era of uncertainty in the ST Universe: the past, prior to the Federation. However, we know how the story arc must end: The Federation is created. That puts a limit on the stories, e.g. the Earth can't really get blown up because someone would just have to re-build it so Kirk can get born there.
ST: Canada So what is left? Where in the ST Universe is there enough uncertainty to make interesting plots?
... my car keys. So what good is it?
How is the Red Queen hypothesis any different?
Good question - but I think the answer centers around the question whether an environment can be stable enough for an organism to not bother evolving for a while, or whether the presence of competitors forces organisms to continue to evolve.
For example, if you are the only thing filling a particular ecological niche and nothing is gnawing on your leg, then you (as a population, not as an individual) don't have a particular need to get stronger, smarter, more efficient, or laden with additional features.
OTOH if something starts competing for your prey items (say, a vicious little penguin or a cute fox with a firey tale) or perhaps virusses attack your system internally, you can't just sit around ... the Red Queen forces you to evolve just to maintain marketshare!
Uh ... we are talking about critters, and not software, aren't we?
$ is often speech
Money Talks ???
Literally or figuratively, a "standard" is a flag that the troops rally around as we head into battle.
If we're lucky, we rally 'round because the standard inspires us and represents something we love.
If we're unlucky, we rally 'round because the Commissars are standing behind us with sidearms ... literally or figuratively.
What's wrong about printing a fake quote, and then admitting it's a fake?
Everything!
It's not nearly as clever as the author thinks, it's not terribly funny nor very illuminative of the issue, and it imposes a burden on the person falsely quoted.
But most of all, it erodes the trust in the publisher. Most of us have limited time, so we need to be able to assume that the publisher of a serious site tries to quote accurately. A reasonable number of mistakes are unavoidable, but unless the site is intended to be a humor site, the content must be trustworthy.
When a publisher deliberately publishes a fake quote, it doesn't help to say, "Ha-ha! Just kidding!" or "RTFA". The trust is weakened already.
What a boo-boo!