To make your analogy more accurate. The homeless man was going into the restraunt, goosing the waitresses, yelling and throwing stuff until the customers left.
Once you visit someone elses site you abide by THIER rules. You want free speach? Make your own site then you can say whatever you want.
1] The works of project guttenburg (all copyright expired public domain works) can be hosted on PTP. The amount of material without copyrights VASTLY exceeds the amount of material with considering we have the whole of human history to work with. ( http://promo.net/pg/ )
2] Europe's copyright laws aren't as long as those in the US meaning many popular songs, movies, and videos from the 50s and 60s are legal to copy and trade.
3] It's a wonderful life:)
4] Garage bands and home video enthusiansts can post their own work on the network and try to drum up some publicity.
5] Popular shareware authors who can't handle the crushing bandwidth costs have turned to ptp network.
And the list goes on. The LEGITIMATE uses of ptp networks are considerably larger than the ILLEGITIMATE uses, it's just that the RIAA would have us believe that the only thing kazaa users want to do is download their super-lame, no-skill teen whiner of the month.
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=california+s up reme+court+dvd+stay
Just a few weeks ago the Supreme Court reviewed the Pavlovich case to decide jurisdiction (Pavlovich posted his website in Indiana and is now a resident of Texas). The courts ruled that merely posting a website does not give California jurisdiction. The Supreme Court put a stay on that decision for a week and then let the stay expire -- reducing the chances the case would make it on appeal to the high court.
Based on the findings in this case and the Supreme Court's seeming approval, the ruling against Kazaa directly contradicts previous precedents.
Java really has no place in windows and it certainly sets a very dangerous precident IMHO. Windows is Windows, if I don't like it I can use Linux, or Solaris, or one of the other dozen operating systems.
While I appreciate the staggering power MS has because the vast majority of people have elected to use their platforms. I most certainly do not agree that the courts have the power to let other companies ride on that popularity.
This decision is nothing more than ordering McDonalds to put a burger king counter in all their restraunts, or requireing the NFL make room for MLB to play a game during halftime.
It's not unprecedented either. Drop in a modchip on your cable converter to get HBO for free and see how fast your cable company splices YOUR wire when they find out.
Hack YOUR copy of quake or unreal and see how many anti-cheat servers will let you log on if they discover you're not running the default client.
It's very, very simple. If you don't like the rules, don't join the service.
Today, IBM was forced to take a ten billion dollar charge on their pie in the sky scheme to charge people for computer time after two thirteen year old hackers released OPEN-SETY, which lets large corporations use their PC idletime to handle large computational tasks in the background approaching the computational speeds of even the fastest super computers.
It's estiamted that GM alone not only saved 15 billion dollars by using open-sety instead of IBM's.netscare, but was able to design the 2005 model lineup, calculate the last digit of pi, determine the meaning of life (13), as well as design a nifty new toilet for the IT executive washrooms, using nothing more than the computational time of their secretary's idle computers.
Farscape was super cool for a season or two when they really did romp around the universe and see what was out there.
Unfortunately near the end it degenerated into self-introspection and self-pitty that was made two billion times more annoying for criton's (sp) whining, indignant yelling.
If they could fire the writers and get people who had imagination and drive to explore the incredibly vast universe then sure, bringing farscape back would be a great thing. But as it stands now, it's a mercy killing, putting it down before it becomes a parody of itself and another star trek universe where they're more interested in psycoanalyzing everything than exploring.
Mozilla is already open source why do these guys need to re-invent the wheel when they could take the mail and news client already exists and expand on it to make it infinately more useable?
I mean isn't that the whole point of open source, not having to re-invent everything but to expand and improve on what's already out there?
Europe outstrips the US in cell phone usage and now internet because for years their governments have used the telcos to soak the consumer and several countries (the uk in particular) have never moved to flat rate service which is the standard in the US.
What the new cell phone service and internet service does is allow consumers to get around their outragiously high traditional land-line phone bills (especially if the net access is thru satalite or cable) at least partially. Using email and instant messaging for communication in europe is just a whole heck of a lot cheaper than reaching out and touching someone using a telephone.
This is the weblog of a girl who clerks at an adult video store. The subject is rather interesting and its well written. It's probably, unfortunately, the pinacle of weblogs at least for me. The adult video store weblog was an intersting read, the one on salon made me wish I was reading an adult video store weblog:)
Some of us might remember The Spot A now defunct weblog that tried to make a go of commercializing this form of entertainment (they failed, they even manage to fail at the pinacle of the dot com craze). And they managed to fail with PICTURES!
I guess the moral of the story is, if you're going to do a weblog, make it something interesting like a clerk at an adult video store or maybe a massage parlor or something where you have a lot of quirky personalities to talk about.:-)
AOL already has the broadcasting infrastructure and the reciever infrastructure. Shoutcast uses streaming mp3s which do stream very well considering its not the best compression out there anymore. Winamp is probably still one of the best mp3 players out there.
The problem of course, if they want to kill real audio, is that AOL does NOT have the infrastructure to do video. Others might say the problem is that all this is bottled up in the mess which is currently time-warner. The company which bought up all the tools to destroy microsoft then failed to develop them.
But all this is a moot point because a sizable percentage of people haven't used any real audio product or service in ages because microsoft's media player is adaquate, free, and doesn't require installtion (since it's bundled with the os) or navigating past the "pay for something you already have!" screens to get to the "free" player.
Real audio is a dying format. All AOL has to do is either buy the company (doubtful given the current economic climate at time warner) or simply throw their support to quicktime or windows media. Eventually real audio will go the way of so many other dot.coms that tried to play in microsoft's sandbox.
Do people who create stuff have no rights at all?
on
Warcraft III Gone Gold
·
· Score: 1
I mean do slashdot editors and readers all believe that the moment something is written the authors immediately lose all rights to their creation? Is this just because intellectual property is intangible?
If a jewler created a great ring and someone took it, changed it a little, and sold it we'd call that theft. But if a programmer writes a progam and somebody decides to take it, modify it, stamp their name on it **EVEN IF THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR OBJECTS** then that's somehow OK?
Blizzard creates some AMAZING games but they're blizzard's game -- they're the product of blizard's vision and creativity and they have every right -- EVERY RIGHT, constitutionally protected no less and not by amendment either -- congress is MANDATED to protect their rights, to benefit from their work and vision).
If you don't want to play on battlenet then fine, don't buy blizard products. But it's incredibly stupid, shortsighted, and WRONG for people to believe that blizard is evil for defending it's intellectual property, something that wouldn't exist
In the beginning there was netscape the 6billion dollar company that had a nice shareware browser.
In the beginning there was novel a billion dollar network company -- hapilly selling their product, employing programmers, feeding wives and kids and providing great insurance benefits. Then the evil microsoft came along and made networking FREE as part of their operating system.
Soon there were many unemployed programmers.
Then there was netscape, a billion dollar browser company -- hapilly selling their product, eploying programmers, feeding wives and kids and providing great insurance benefits. Then the evil microsoft came along and made browsers FREE as part of their operating system.
Soon there were many unemployed programmers again.
Much of what people profess to hate about microsoft's business practice is their ability to shut down entire industries by making them part of the basic, core operating system -- in effect free.
Open source is very much like this especially the copyleft stuff. It just hasn't done as much damage as microsoft has done (yet, tho the faithful still dream of the day when microsoft itself is a casualty).
While it's a good thing to have an open source operating system and a nice, rich set of endlessly tweakable development tools the open source community has not stopped at this have they?
No they've come up with stuff like http://www.abisource.com/ abiword a MS Word clone and even http://www.freeciv.org/ freeciv a blatant ripoff of Sid Meyer's civilization. Now abiword might have the noble aspiration of toppling microsoft's monopoly of desktop publishing but why hurt Sid Meyer the man who single handedly brought us some of the best, most memorable video games ever introduced?
So the original article is right, even though open source has not SIGNIFICANTLY infringed on closed source at the present time, ultimately there will come a point where open source will be able to compete effectively with closed source products and when that day comes there are going to be a LOT of unemployed programmers looking for work and cursing linux and abiword and freeciv and whatever other project the open source community decides "needs to be free".
I know it's not politically correct on slashdot but free really doesn't feed the wife and kids.
The problem with time travel...
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 1
The problem with time travel is that you have to master space travel as well. Lets say you decide to go back to september 11 to warn everybody about the twin tower attacks.
You press the magic button.
The machine whrils.
You're wisked into the past.
And you die because you're in the middle of space and the earth is on the other side of the sun.
The earth turns, the earth rotates around the sun, the sun rotates around the galactic core, the galaxy is hurtling thru space at a phenominal rate. So any machine which moves you through time must also move you through space.
Given this rather simple fact does anybody STILL believe this guy can make a time machine?
The Earth's temperature has ALWAYS fluctuated -- massively. Only in the past thousand years or so has the temperature leveled out at a rather warm plateau. But if you look at a statistical chart of the earth's history over the past few million years you'll see wide temperature swings that have absolutely nothing at all to do with humanities actions or inaction.
I know it's nice to think we've become so powerful we can disintigrate millions of billions of tons of ice just by driving to the quick-e-mart, but in reality it's probably nothing more than the sun outputting a little more energy than normal.
You can't have the orbital part without a counterweight otherwise you have gravity pulling down on the vast majority of the cable and the whole thing falls out of the sky. So you need a mass at the end of the cable so angular momentum holds everything up. Last I heard you needed a lot of mass to do that -- like a trapped asteroid or something -- far more mass than we havet he technology to put into orbit.
Only a fool discounts voice recognition. I haven't dialed my sprint phone for the past six months, instead I simply tell it who to call and it does.
I'm sure Douglas Adams would be giggling uncontrollably but that's OK, I think that's pretty neat technology.
Voice recognition has come to high-end cars (remember the "rain stop" commercials?" And it's come to TV remotes. When it's put into microwaves I'll be one of the first to buy it.
There was a time not ten years ago where nobody would dream of doing stuff like this but now we're on the verge of getting rid of the clunky typewriter keyboard and our children may look at our use of these devices as quaintly as we look upon our great great grandparents as they huddled around the radio listening to broadcasts of the lone rangers.
So while you may stop reading future trend articles because they talk about voice recognition I won't read one that doesn't because like it or not, it IS the wave of the future and every year the technology entrenches itself a little more into our lives.
Congress has not declared war so technically this is just a police action. If we're to lose our liberties then congress should actually stop making grand political statements by running away from the capitol and hiding and actually declare war.
FLASH! All patents are declared null and void because all patents previously awarded have been found to exist within PI. Although mathematicians have not proven yet that PI has existed since the beginning of the universe, they have conceeded that not only has PI been around "a very long time" but that it has probably been around longer than Compuserve's GIF patents.
An anonymous scientist has even gone so far as to say it has probably been around longer than the human genome, rendering new drug company patents on human DNA void for the prior art contained within PI.
A roman catholic biship was overheard to have said, "Not only does this prove that there is a God, but it finally proves once and for all that he hates lawyers."
An anonymous lawyer who wondered if God's prior art could be nullified for His refusal to defend His prior art was killed by a stray lightning bolt in the middle of the Sahara desert in a highly unusual but unrelated incident.
I love KazaA... It's the best of the gnutella offspring providing reliable results and more important I can actually download stuff without being putt on infinite hold (and if I am, the client starts looking for alternative connects).
However during the install there was ONE step that asked me to install a bunch of browser plugins and seeing has how the "install KazaA" software was perma checked and there were a bunch of plugins that looked pretty useless I simply unchecked them. The result is that my experience with KazaA has been remarkably pleasant.
I think it's unfortunate that Kazaa choses to squander their good will by installing stuff liket his on the unsuspeting, but in these days of declining internet revenue apparently even good companies with good products can't escape the sleeze of the worst of the Internet Advertizers.
There's a banner add in the client and when it flashes something I'm interested in I click on it. I don't begrudge them the ad, it's a good and worthwhile product. But I do agree installing browser plugins which are nothing more than ways to inflict ads on you even when you're on someone elses content is way beyond the bounds of good taste.
So I guess the moral is, download KaZaA, enjoy it, but pay extra special attention when you're installint the product.:-)
The major news outlets are all owned by the big media companies. CNN is time/warner, ABC is disney, yada yada yada. The big media companies all have their fingers in the news outlets in one way or another and they'll gladly sacrifice their news divisions freedom a little if they can force you to shell over an extra $20.00 to listen to what they're calling music these days.
That's why most of the useful news I get these days comes from Slashdot and not CNN.
Unfortunately YOU, the game review community, rolled over and played dead. Gamespy, gamespot, all the other magazines I depend on to keep me from wasting $50.00 and hours of my time on inferioir products clammed up and said nothing while thousands of their customers shelled out cash on a defective and shoddy product.
Mandates like this mean NOTHING without game sites willing to implement them.
It's time for a REAL game site/magazine since the established brands have proven themselves pawns of the publishers and not champions of the people. I mean really -- gamespy and gamespot scooped by somethingawful?
Let us assume you write a story -- a really wonderful and remarkable story -- and you post it on Usenet through google in an obscure little group. Never-the-less a major publisher sees it and loves it and wants to publish it and you're gonna be rich and famous.
Well now there's a problem because google can publish it too. They can use your own material to publish in competition with you.
Of course this is a mountain out of a molehill, the price of using google for important posts is too high so you use another service (like your ISP). Of far greater concern is, like deja before it, Google is nothing but a giant copyright suit waiting to happen because it stores, in perpetuity the posts of hundreds of thousands of people without their consent, publishing, altering them, bannerizing them, and republishing them every single day.
Even if you have never used the google service and granted them permission to use your post. No matter how strongly you feel that your words are your own and that you have the right to decide how those words are used now and in the future, google has decideed that all your posts belong to them to use as they see fit.
Google is a great service yes, but then so was Napster. The only difference is that this time its US making the "music".
Slashdot Mirror
To make your analogy more accurate. The homeless man was going into the restraunt, goosing the waitresses, yelling and throwing stuff until the customers left.
Once you visit someone elses site you abide by THIER rules. You want free speach? Make your own site then you can say whatever you want.
1] The works of project guttenburg (all copyright expired public domain works) can be hosted on PTP. The amount of material without copyrights VASTLY exceeds the amount of material with considering we have the whole of human history to work with. ( http://promo.net/pg/ )
:)
2] Europe's copyright laws aren't as long as those in the US meaning many popular songs, movies, and videos from the 50s and 60s are legal to copy and trade.
3] It's a wonderful life
4] Garage bands and home video enthusiansts can post their own work on the network and try to drum up some publicity.
5] Popular shareware authors who can't handle the crushing bandwidth costs have turned to ptp network.
And the list goes on. The LEGITIMATE uses of ptp networks are considerably larger than the ILLEGITIMATE uses, it's just that the RIAA would have us believe that the only thing kazaa users want to do is download their super-lame, no-skill teen whiner of the month.
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=california+
Just a few weeks ago the Supreme Court reviewed the Pavlovich case to decide jurisdiction (Pavlovich posted his website in Indiana and is now a resident of Texas). The courts ruled that merely posting a website does not give California jurisdiction. The Supreme Court put a stay on that decision for a week and then let the stay expire -- reducing the chances the case would make it on appeal to the high court.
Based on the findings in this case and the Supreme Court's seeming approval, the ruling against Kazaa directly contradicts previous precedents.
Java really has no place in windows and it certainly sets a very dangerous precident IMHO. Windows is Windows, if I don't like it I can use Linux, or Solaris, or one of the other dozen operating systems.
While I appreciate the staggering power MS has because the vast majority of people have elected to use their platforms. I most certainly do not agree that the courts have the power to let other companies ride on that popularity.
This decision is nothing more than ordering McDonalds to put a burger king counter in all their restraunts, or requireing the NFL make room for MLB to play a game during halftime.
It's stupid and very illconsidered.
No modchips to let you cheat :-)
It's not unprecedented either. Drop in a modchip on your cable converter to get HBO for free and see how fast your cable company splices YOUR wire when they find out.
Hack YOUR copy of quake or unreal and see how many anti-cheat servers will let you log on if they discover you're not running the default client.
It's very, very simple. If you don't like the rules, don't join the service.
Today, IBM was forced to take a ten billion dollar charge on their pie in the sky scheme to charge people for computer time after two thirteen year old hackers released OPEN-SETY, which lets large corporations use their PC idletime to handle large computational tasks in the background approaching the computational speeds of even the fastest super computers.
.netscare, but was able to design the 2005 model lineup, calculate the last digit of pi, determine the meaning of life (13), as well as design a nifty new toilet for the IT executive washrooms, using nothing more than the computational time of their secretary's idle computers.
It's estiamted that GM alone not only saved 15 billion dollars by using open-sety instead of IBM's
Farscape was super cool for a season or two when they really did romp around the universe and see what was out there.
Unfortunately near the end it degenerated into self-introspection and self-pitty that was made two billion times more annoying for criton's (sp) whining, indignant yelling.
If they could fire the writers and get people who had imagination and drive to explore the incredibly vast universe then sure, bringing farscape back would be a great thing. But as it stands now, it's a mercy killing, putting it down before it becomes a parody of itself and another star trek universe where they're more interested in psycoanalyzing everything than exploring.
It's arguably the first RPG in the universe, the first game with a bonified easter egg, and it's retro.
;-)
Slashdot is news for nerds and this is...
1] eclectic
2] stuff we did before nerds became "cool"
3] just plain fun!
This counts as news in my book -- it counts as a bookmark too
Mozilla is already open source why do these guys need to re-invent the wheel when they could take the mail and news client already exists and expand on it to make it infinately more useable?
I mean isn't that the whole point of open source, not having to re-invent everything but to expand and improve on what's already out there?
Maybe I'm missing something.
There was an easter egg in the original advanture, just a silly blinking dot but it's what I remember most from the game.
I certainly hope it makes the transition to the modern map & either way I can't wait to try it!
Europe outstrips the US in cell phone usage and now internet because for years their governments have used the telcos to soak the consumer and several countries (the uk in particular) have never moved to flat rate service which is the standard in the US.
What the new cell phone service and internet service does is allow consumers to get around their outragiously high traditional land-line phone bills (especially if the net access is thru satalite or cable) at least partially. Using email and instant messaging for communication in europe is just a whole heck of a lot cheaper than reaching out and touching someone using a telephone.
This is the weblog of a girl who clerks at an adult video store. The subject is rather interesting and its well written. It's probably, unfortunately, the pinacle of weblogs at least for me. The adult video store weblog was an intersting read, the one on salon made me wish I was reading an adult video store weblog :)
:-)
Some of us might remember The Spot A now defunct weblog that tried to make a go of commercializing this form of entertainment (they failed, they even manage to fail at the pinacle of the dot com craze). And they managed to fail with PICTURES!
I guess the moral of the story is, if you're going to do a weblog, make it something interesting like a clerk at an adult video store or maybe a massage parlor or something where you have a lot of quirky personalities to talk about.
AOL already has the broadcasting infrastructure and the reciever infrastructure. Shoutcast uses streaming mp3s which do stream very well considering its not the best compression out there anymore. Winamp is probably still one of the best mp3 players out there.
The problem of course, if they want to kill real audio, is that AOL does NOT have the infrastructure to do video. Others might say the problem is that all this is bottled up in the mess which is currently time-warner. The company which bought up all the tools to destroy microsoft then failed to develop them.
But all this is a moot point because a sizable percentage of people haven't used any real audio product or service in ages because microsoft's media player is adaquate, free, and doesn't require installtion (since it's bundled with the os) or navigating past the "pay for something you already have!" screens to get to the "free" player.
Real audio is a dying format. All AOL has to do is either buy the company (doubtful given the current economic climate at time warner) or simply throw their support to quicktime or windows media. Eventually real audio will go the way of so many other dot.coms that tried to play in microsoft's sandbox.
I mean do slashdot editors and readers all believe that the moment something is written the authors immediately lose all rights to their creation? Is this just because intellectual property is intangible?
If a jewler created a great ring and someone took it, changed it a little, and sold it we'd call that theft. But if a programmer writes a progam and somebody decides to take it, modify it, stamp their name on it **EVEN IF THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR OBJECTS** then that's somehow OK?
Blizzard creates some AMAZING games but they're blizzard's game -- they're the product of blizard's vision and creativity and they have every right -- EVERY RIGHT, constitutionally protected no less and not by amendment either -- congress is MANDATED to protect their rights, to benefit from their work and vision).
If you don't want to play on battlenet then fine, don't buy blizard products. But it's incredibly stupid, shortsighted, and WRONG for people to believe that blizard is evil for defending it's intellectual property, something that wouldn't exist
In the beginning there was netscape the 6billion dollar company that had a nice shareware browser.
In the beginning there was novel a billion dollar network company -- hapilly selling their product, employing programmers, feeding wives and kids and providing great insurance benefits. Then the evil microsoft came along and made networking FREE as part of their operating system.
Soon there were many unemployed programmers.
Then there was netscape, a billion dollar browser company -- hapilly selling their product, eploying programmers, feeding wives and kids and providing great insurance benefits. Then the evil microsoft came along and made browsers FREE as part of their operating system.
Soon there were many unemployed programmers again.
Much of what people profess to hate about microsoft's business practice is their ability to shut down entire industries by making them part of the basic, core operating system -- in effect free.
Open source is very much like this especially the copyleft stuff. It just hasn't done as much damage as microsoft has done (yet, tho the faithful still dream of the day when microsoft itself is a casualty).
While it's a good thing to have an open source operating system and a nice, rich set of endlessly tweakable development tools the open source community has not stopped at this have they?
No they've come up with stuff like http://www.abisource.com/ abiword a MS Word clone and even http://www.freeciv.org/ freeciv a blatant ripoff of Sid Meyer's civilization. Now abiword might have the noble aspiration of toppling microsoft's monopoly of desktop publishing but why hurt Sid Meyer the man who single handedly brought us some of the best, most memorable video games ever introduced?
So the original article is right, even though open source has not SIGNIFICANTLY infringed on closed source at the present time, ultimately there will come a point where open source will be able to compete effectively with closed source products and when that day comes there are going to be a LOT of unemployed programmers looking for work and cursing linux and abiword and freeciv and whatever other project the open source community decides "needs to be free".
I know it's not politically correct on slashdot but free really doesn't feed the wife and kids.
The problem with time travel is that you have to master space travel as well. Lets say you decide to go back to september 11 to warn everybody about the twin tower attacks.
You press the magic button.
The machine whrils.
You're wisked into the past.
And you die because you're in the middle of space and the earth is on the other side of the sun.
The earth turns, the earth rotates around the sun, the sun rotates around the galactic core, the galaxy is hurtling thru space at a phenominal rate. So any machine which moves you through time must also move you through space.
Given this rather simple fact does anybody STILL believe this guy can make a time machine?
The Earth's temperature has ALWAYS fluctuated -- massively. Only in the past thousand years or so has the temperature leveled out at a rather warm plateau. But if you look at a statistical chart of the earth's history over the past few million years you'll see wide temperature swings that have absolutely nothing at all to do with humanities actions or inaction.
I know it's nice to think we've become so powerful we can disintigrate millions of billions of tons of ice just by driving to the quick-e-mart, but in reality it's probably nothing more than the sun outputting a little more energy than normal.
You can't have the orbital part without a counterweight otherwise you have gravity pulling down on the vast majority of the cable and the whole thing falls out of the sky. So you need a mass at the end of the cable so angular momentum holds everything up. Last I heard you needed a lot of mass to do that -- like a trapped asteroid or something -- far more mass than we havet he technology to put into orbit.
Only a fool discounts voice recognition. I haven't dialed my sprint phone for the past six months, instead I simply tell it who to call and it does.
:-)
I'm sure Douglas Adams would be giggling uncontrollably but that's OK, I think that's pretty neat technology.
Voice recognition has come to high-end cars (remember the "rain stop" commercials?" And it's come to TV remotes. When it's put into microwaves I'll be one of the first to buy it.
There was a time not ten years ago where nobody would dream of doing stuff like this but now we're on the verge of getting rid of the clunky typewriter keyboard and our children may look at our use of these devices as quaintly as we look upon our great great grandparents as they huddled around the radio listening to broadcasts of the lone rangers.
So while you may stop reading future trend articles because they talk about voice recognition I won't read one that doesn't because like it or not, it IS the wave of the future and every year the technology entrenches itself a little more into our lives.
And that is a very good thing IMHO
Congress has not declared war so technically this is just a police action. If we're to lose our liberties then congress should actually stop making grand political statements by running away from the capitol and hiding and actually declare war.
FLASH! All patents are declared null and void because all patents previously awarded have been found to exist within PI. Although mathematicians have not proven yet that PI has existed since the beginning of the universe, they have conceeded that not only has PI been around "a very long time" but that it has probably been around longer than Compuserve's GIF patents.
An anonymous scientist has even gone so far as to say it has probably been around longer than the human genome, rendering new drug company patents on human DNA void for the prior art contained within PI.
A roman catholic biship was overheard to have said, "Not only does this prove that there is a God, but it finally proves once and for all that he hates lawyers."
An anonymous lawyer who wondered if God's prior art could be nullified for His refusal to defend His prior art was killed by a stray lightning bolt in the middle of the Sahara desert in a highly unusual but unrelated incident.
I love KazaA... It's the best of the gnutella offspring providing reliable results and more important I can actually download stuff without being putt on infinite hold (and if I am, the client starts looking for alternative connects).
:-)
However during the install there was ONE step that asked me to install a bunch of browser plugins and seeing has how the "install KazaA" software was perma checked and there were a bunch of plugins that looked pretty useless I simply unchecked them. The result is that my experience with KazaA has been remarkably pleasant.
I think it's unfortunate that Kazaa choses to squander their good will by installing stuff liket his on the unsuspeting, but in these days of declining internet revenue apparently even good companies with good products can't escape the sleeze of the worst of the Internet Advertizers.
There's a banner add in the client and when it flashes something I'm interested in I click on it. I don't begrudge them the ad, it's a good and worthwhile product. But I do agree installing browser plugins which are nothing more than ways to inflict ads on you even when you're on someone elses content is way beyond the bounds of good taste.
So I guess the moral is, download KaZaA, enjoy it, but pay extra special attention when you're installint the product.
The major news outlets are all owned by the big media companies. CNN is time/warner, ABC is disney, yada yada yada. The big media companies all have their fingers in the news outlets in one way or another and they'll gladly sacrifice their news divisions freedom a little if they can force you to shell over an extra $20.00 to listen to what they're calling music these days.
That's why most of the useful news I get these days comes from Slashdot and not CNN.
Unfortunately YOU, the game review community, rolled over and played dead. Gamespy, gamespot, all the other magazines I depend on to keep me from wasting $50.00 and hours of my time on inferioir products clammed up and said nothing while thousands of their customers shelled out cash on a defective and shoddy product.
Mandates like this mean NOTHING without game sites willing to implement them.
It's time for a REAL game site/magazine since the established brands have proven themselves pawns of the publishers and not champions of the people. I mean really -- gamespy and gamespot scooped by somethingawful?
Let us assume you write a story -- a really wonderful and remarkable story -- and you post it on Usenet through google in an obscure little group. Never-the-less a major publisher sees it and loves it and wants to publish it and you're gonna be rich and famous.
Well now there's a problem because google can publish it too. They can use your own material to publish in competition with you.
Of course this is a mountain out of a molehill, the price of using google for important posts is too high so you use another service (like your ISP). Of far greater concern is, like deja before it, Google is nothing but a giant copyright suit waiting to happen because it stores, in perpetuity the posts of hundreds of thousands of people without their consent, publishing, altering them, bannerizing them, and republishing them every single day.
Even if you have never used the google service and granted them permission to use your post. No matter how strongly you feel that your words are your own and that you have the right to decide how those words are used now and in the future, google has decideed that all your posts belong to them to use as they see fit.
Google is a great service yes, but then so was Napster. The only difference is that this time its US making the "music".