I agree that purposefully flooding the airwaves with interfering crap isn't a great idea, but someone needs to do something about the FCC. Do you realize that over-the-air broadcasts (both TV and radio) are pretty much the only forms of mass communication in the USA that are still subject to draconian censorship? I can say "fuck" out loud, in a book, in a movie, on a CD, on the internet, over the phone, but heaven forbid I say it over the airwaves! Ditto for nudity. I have Sirius satellite radio and on the hard rock stations I listen to not only do they not censor their music, but their DJs cuss regularly. It's clear that the vast majority of their fanbase does not, ahem, give a flying fuck. On TV, the situation is even more ridiculous because parents have access to the V-chip.
The FCC should not be in the business of censorship, period. The founding fathers explicitly gave us freedom of the press, and if they had known about radio waves they would have deemed those be free of censorship as well. The FCC has far overstepped its bounds (especially post-"wardrobe malfunction"), and if this is the only way to draw attention to the issue, so be it. I can only hope that these people operate their pirate radio stations in a responsible manner, on unused areas of the spectrum and at reasonable power levels. Provided they act responsibly, there's nothing wrong with breaking this law; indeed, I say that it needs breaking, it needs civil disobediance because it's a very ugly, glaring flaw splattered across one of the few freedoms the USA has actually protected quite well--better than most other Western nations, at least. (And before anyone starts ranting about how they allow nudity on British/French/German/Dutch/Australian broadcast TV, realize that more than a few movies and videogames have been outright banned in ALL of those countries. Other than child pornography and to a lesser extent beastiality, there's practically nothing you can't legally see/read/buy in America.)
Oh yeah, and the ownership rule relaxation is bullshit as well. It's not right that Clearchannel gets a government-approved (and protected) monopoly over half the fucking spectrum.
*basic, non-contractual copyright law. Copyright law without anything extra added, e.g. the copyright law that takes effect if the GPL is ever declared invalid.
It's worthwhile here mentioning that the speed of light, from the photon's "point of view", is nigh-meaningless because from it's point of view it's traveling instantaneously. Very few non-scientists, even those who know a bit about Relativity and think that the concept of Time Dilation is cool, understand the rammifications of Space Dilation as well. It's not just about time bending--space bends, too. The entire universe actually contracts on the axis on which the photon travels. This is not an "illusion"--from its own point of view, the photon actually doesn't "travel" at all because the universe has become two dimensional--up, down, right, and left still exist, but the universe has contracted so much that forward and back have no meaning anymore--from the photon's point of view. c as a measurement of velocity only has a meaning for those of us out here moving at non-Relativistic speeds. People say that it would take you millions of years to go from one side of the galaxy to the other even if you traveled at the speed of light, but that's blatantly false. If you could travel at the speed of light, it would be instantaneous... for you. For the rest of the galaxy, millions of years will have passed.
A bit tangential, maybe, but it's worth keeping in mind when people start talking about a photon's frame of reference.
Many people (apparently even those in charge of large companies) seem to have this very strange idea that the GPL is not valid, and that because of this they can do whatever they want with the work in question. The premise doesn't have any basis in reality, but the conclusion is sheer insanity. It's somewhat akin to walking into a liquor store, noticing that their liquor license has recently expired and then stealing on their booze, claiming that because it can't legally be sold it must be free. The GPL's validity as a license has nothing to do with copyright law, and those people who have licensed their work under the GPL have explicitly NOT placed their work in the public domain. Hell, D-Link doesn't have (to my knowledge) a publically availible license for their proprietary code at all! That must mean it's public domain, right?
As much as I'd like to see a legal test of the GPL (not because I think it's invalid, but because coporations will become much more willing to deal with it, once it's been proven in court), this is simply a very, very basic test of copyright law. It's amazingly basic, but apparently some people still don't get it: D-Link doesn't think the GPL is a valid contract? Fine, then they're not licensed to distribute the code at all!
In a freedom-loving society, public opinion is most certainly not important than everything else. In the 1950s and 60s, the overwhelming majority of people in many southern states believed in racial segregation and other discriminatory laws (e.g. the bus seating law Rosa Parks was arrested under.) That didn't make any of it right or beneficial for the country as a whole. Most democracies do have provisions to override the will of the people (in this case, the judicial system) and this are absolutely vital because let's face it, the general public is often irrational, oppressive and self-destructive. For a healthy democracy, you need both--the ability for the people to effectively choose their own government and prevent it from growing too powerful, and the ability for the government to ignore the people when they start frothing at the mouth. But if we had to give up one, I would rather live in a true monoarchy--where you at least have the chance of living in a decent society, if the monoarch is relatively intelligent and good-intentioned--than live in a direct democracy with no elected officials whatsoever--sorry, it might work in a perfect world where people aren't irrational, self-serving, overreactionary FUCKTARDS... but I'm sorry to say thatwe're a long way off from that.
Not that I'm in any way a fan of the power plays our government has pulled in the past 5 years, but if anything general public opinion is much worse. I respect the judicial branch of this country moreso than any other branch because they are the LEAST beholden to popular opinion.
Lately, I've seen the term being used more and more loosely and now this... Seriously, what the FUCK does this article have to do with Fear, Uncertanty, and Doubt?...or more importantly, what does it have to do with the original concept of systematic, negative propoganda through disinformation and fearmongering and general appeal to negative emotions? It's a perfectly valid (if pedantic) intellectual argument, nearly completely devoid of emotional or manipulative overtones.
If you want to say "wrong" or "bullshit" or "Idon'tagree" then just say so, damn it. FUD is not an acceptable synonym for these terms.
[mods: This is NOT offtopic, as this is an article about a linguist complaining about the distortion of a word's original definition.]
Can't comment on the books (though I was under the impression they were written after the original trilogy had run its course), but I don't see the rationale for taking Lucas's word on his supposed grand vision. This is a man who stated repeatedly that the changes in the Special Edition (including Greedo shooting first) were part of his original artistic vision--I don't see how anyone with half a brain can believe that... he was the director, was he not? Then why didn't he shoot the scene that way originally? He's also tried using his Jedi Mind Trick on his hands numerous times--there were always meant to be 6 movies! No, wait, 9 movies! No, wait, 6 movies!
He simply strikes me as a generally arrogant, pretentious man. I remember a couple years back Sci-Fi channel ran a Star Wars home movie contest judged by Lucas himself. There were tons of extremely funny parodies, but which one did he choose as the winner? A horrific, pseudo-cutesy cgi girl standing around singing about how she wants to collect all of the Star Wars action figures (especially a Millenium Falcon.) This is especially nausiating when you consider how much Lucas personally gets from the sale of Star Wars merchandise (when the first movie came out he somehow got the studio to agree to give him virtually all of the royalties, IIRC) and how he's attempted to exploit this contractual benefit with over-the-top cutesy crap like Ewoks and Jar-Jar, intended (possibly not successfully, at least in the latter's case) to appeal directly to children.
I don't know why this myth is still alive. Yeah, it was true back in the day--very, VERY true when you compared a $100 Nintendo with a $2000+ lower end PC--but the price of consoles keep rising while the price of a PC has been in a freefall for years now.
Do the math. If you save the chassis/ps, monitor, hard drive (really, a 5 year old 60-80 giger is just fine for gaming--any more is necessarly only for media collection) and peripherals from your current box and pick up a good mobo+proc deal on Outpost.com or Newegg.com along with some value ram, you can easily have a modern machine for under $200, even under $150. (If you're skiddish about DIY boxes, you can troll a site like Fatwallet.com and within a month I'll guarantee you'll see a very respectable box for under $300 shipped--probably a Dell or eMachines--but for the moment let's assume you're not technophobic.)
So how much was the 360 again... with a hard drive? Oh look, that leaves you with $200 for a shiny new graphics card, which is good enough to easily play games for many years to come. No, in 3 or 4 years' time you probably won't be able to set the resolution and antialiasing features to the max without some slowdown, but you'll still kick the crap out of console graphics, if indeed graphics is your sole reason for PC gaming--me, I'm more inclined to buy a $100 graphics card. (I'm a PC gamer not for the graphics, but because the games I like--RTSes/TBSes, FPSes, non-Final Fantasy style RPGs--have very crappy/nonexistent console equivalents. Morrowind for the PC is a completely different game from Morrowind for the Xbox, and Halo isn't even remotely close to HL2 or Battlefield 1942/Vietnam/2. And yes, there was HL2 for the Xbox, but it was an utter joke.)
And hell, most of the time you won't even have to spend the $200 to upgrade your mobo/proc/ram. Mine are 3 year old and still more than enough for today's games. Moore's Law might not be dead (depends on whom you ask), but the need for exponentially faster CPUs for gaming certainly is. I wouldn't be too shocked if a mid-range system of today can run games in 2012 so long as you've got a couple gigs of ram and a video card that's only 1-2 years old.
So yeah, console gamers you keep telling yourselves that your $400 Xbox 360 and the extra $10/month you spend for the privlege of playing it over the internet (I didn't even take this into account--this is an additional $120 a year, thus rendering any price quibbing moot. An additional $500-$600 spent between console generations means a PC will *always* be cheaper.\) saves you sooooo much money. Just pardon us if us stereotypical, elitist PC gamers laugh our asses off at you and your crazy delusions.
Now, for the caveats: I'm willing to grant the Wii an exception to all this because 1) It's going to be cheap. 2) Online play will be free. 3) The Gamecube had tons of wonderful games that simply have no PC equivalent (Mario Party, Smash Bros. Melee, platformers, etc.) and I expect the same will be true of the Wii. I'm also willing to grant an exception for the techno-phobic who absolutely do not want to open their box even to swap out a graphics card--for these people, it'll always be cheaper to buy a new console. But I do NOT think this is an acceptable excuse here, amongst my fellow geeks. If you prefer platformers and party games and FF-style RPGs and thus you prefer consoles then say so, but enough with the "OMG PCS ARE SO EXPENSIVE!!!11" bullshit. It's not true, and it hasn't been true for years now.
Nah, plastic can be made from vegetable oils. It'll be a bit more expensive than petroleum plastic at first, but it'll never be worth enough to justify landfill raiding.
I call BS. I've heard from several sources that the murder and general crime rates in the 20s were sky-high--higher than they've ever been since. It was the birth of the modern archtypical mafia, for fuck's sake. Organized crime would've never got such a solid foothold in this country if we didn't give them an illicit substance they could sell that was 1) Easy to make/import and 2) In extremely high demand. The Prohibition drastically reduced the supply, thus the price skyrocketed. It's the EXACT same situation that's happened with the war on drugs--the crackdown only drives up the prices (both by decreasing supply and by increasing the risk/cost of doing business), but the end result is instead of hundreds of thousands of small-time petty suppliers making a couple bucks on the side, you get a few major suppliers who are OBSCENELY rich from their nearly limitless profit margins. They then turn around and use that money to buy weapons, hire hitmen, etc. If you could get crack for $1.50/pound and supply was plentiful, do you think ANYONE would be killing each other over it? Do you think that the junkies would be robbing people in order to get the money to pay for it? Ok, some still would, but most of 'em would simply get a shit part-time job at e.g. McDonalds or hell, beg for money. The destitute addicts would quickly burn out and/or OD and die (a few might hit bottom and decide to turn their lives around) and that's fucking fine by me--keep the drugs cheap so no one has to wave a gun in my face in order to take my money so they can afford their shit.
...because I'm not particularly concerned about snooping and it's an easy way to keep out the casual leechers without affecting bandwidth in the slightest?
Instead of an analogy of someone's boogers (which are unlikely to be seen as objects of value by anyone), let's take another example: rare baseball cards. Now, it's entirely possible to take an old baseball card worth hundreds or thousands of dollars and print an exact replica for only a few cents per copy (assuming you order enough copies for a bulk order.) Let's disregard copyright and EULA issues for a moment here and consider the parallels with the matter at hand. With virtual items, there is really no cost at all to duplicate, only an artificially imposed restriction, but then what's the restriction against counterfeit rare baseball cards; why can't we duplicate these items for virtually nothing (a few cents) and sell them for the full value of the originals? Again, it's an artificial restriction, a bias against reproductions (no matter how perfect they may be) for the "original" of something. Rationally speaking, it makes no more sense than the artificial restriction against rare items in an MMORPG yet a theft or fraud of a rare baseball card is likely to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Again, disregarding copyright and EULA issues (which may not exist at all in future games, or perhaps not even in current games such as Second Life) what's the difference? I hardly think the few cents it takes to copy a baseball card matters at all.
You say that a few bits on a hard drive are not worth anything; I say neither is a bit of ink sprayed on $0.0002 worth of cardboard. Neither one is really useful; neither one is in intrinsically valueable, and yet both have become valuable, have been imbued with value via the keen interest of hobbiests/gamers and that value is protected against via arbitrary restrictions, whether it be a bit of computer code or an obsession with originals/disdain of perfect reproductions.
Let me hasten to say that I despise the concept of intellectual property and most attempts to control information like we control property, but at the same time I don't think that means we can completely discount any attempt to put a real life monetary value on "just bits stored on a hard drive." Your bank account is just bits stored on a hard drive, yet it directly translates to cold hard cash. So does the virtual money in Second Life. One could even argue that the currency of Second Life is more stable than many national currencies, e.g. the Iraqi Dinar (if you believed, for instance, that Iraq stands a greater chance of undergoing major civil war than the company behind Second Life does of going bankrupt. I'm not inimately familiar with Second Life or the company behind it, but my gut tells me this isn't a completely off-the-wall belief.)
EULAs and copyrights might make this particular issue moot, but don't think for one moment that similar issues involving theft or fraud of virtual objects are automatically pointless or asinine or moot, because we're *already* treating theft of virtual objects (dollars in a bank account illictly transferred to another bank account) as serious felonies. The day may come when there are more people agreeing that a super rare item in Diablo 6 is worth serious, real-life money than there are people agreeing that a Babe Ruth rookie card is worth serious, real-life money, so disregarding IP/EULA issues and given that it's trivially cheap to duplicate the Babe Ruth card, who's to say that only the latter deserves legal protection against theft and fraud?
I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea myself, but it's definitely something we need to keep in mind.
Re:Old Dos Music Apps Can't Be Beat
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FreeDOS 1.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Doubtless part of it, but I suspect it has more to do with the fact that 50-60 years ago short hair was in vogue and very long hair was frowned upon. I've seen a handful (mostly on TV, with a couple exceptions) of very old women with long hair and it looks just fine. Much better than what looks like gray carpeting superglued to their heads, IMO. But in any case, that's just an example. Anyone who's ever known a decent amount of elderly people (and I'm in the healthcare field, so I've worked with them) will come to the same bias--they're generally very conservative, embracing roughly the same set of aethetic/social/moral sensibilities whereas those who're 20+ years younger tend to be much more diverse.
But like I said, I'm not attacking old people so much as offering a counterpoint to the "most young people are irresponsible whippersnappers therefore we're justified discriminating against them" sentiment. The irresponsible behavior of the youth might be more obvious, but I would argue that social/moral/political stagnation foisted upon us by our elders (unfortunately, the irresponsible youth don't bother to vote nearly as often as the seniors) is even more harmful.
I think that thousands of years has shown that people at the older end of the spectrum (60+) tend to be very resistent to change, self-expression and the assimilation of new ideas. There are exceptions, of course, but it's like your 12 year old example... how many 70 year olds do you know that can roll their own Linux distro from scratch? How many 70 year olds do you know that have very liberal attitudes towards love or hell, how many of them wear their hair longer than shoulder length? I can't remember the last time I saw an old woman who did not have very short, permed hair (and I live in Florida, so believe me when I say that I see a *lot* of little old women.)
Now, do I think that this justifies laws or policies that discriminate against the elderly? Absolutely not, but at least I don't blithely dismiss one end of the age discrimination spectrum while rallying strongly against another. If the youth (I'm talking about 18-30 here, not preteens damnit) can be sterotyped as irresponsible and discriminated against, then the elderly can be equally stereotyped as heartless and imperceptive and dare I say it, stagnate. I'd prefer no discrimination at all, but if we must let's at least be, er, fair about it.
I despise Monsanto, but to their credit they have not used their patented sterilization gene... yet. They spent good money developing it, so odds are they'd use it in a heartbeat if they thought they could get away with it.
You can't flush the toilet if the power's off and you have an electric water pump (such is the case with people on well water or people above floor X in a building.)
The computer part might be asinine, but built-in bidets and/or blow dryers are not. Laugh all you want, but I think it'd be rather nice to actually clean my ass instead of smearing it around, ripping out hairs when necessary (curse all you hairless fucks, curse you I say) and hopefully getting most of it. I'm not sure if computer control is strictly necessary, but it might be a welcome addition if it could e.g. control the aim and power of the water jets or even program a specific pattern to use every time.
Actually it's my understanding that from the very beginning the movie was intended to be completely serious. Now, it's possible that Sam Jackson purposefully injected some tongue-in-cheek moments into some scenes (because from what I hear, he never took the movie seriously), and I heard that the producers actually went back and shot additional footage (including the "motherfucking snakes" line) after they noticed the huge commotion the movie was making and perhaps this additional footage was somewhat tongue-in-cheek as well, but the fact remains that at least *originally* the movie was NOT intended to be humorous and therefore at the very least, the original wave of laughter was AT them, not WITH them because they simply weren't laughing themselves.
Personally, after watching the steaming pile of shit that was Anaconda, I don't think I can bear to watch another Hollywood snake-based horror film. I don't understand why they can get away with such obscenely unrealistic portrayals. Anyone who's EVER seen a snake knows that's not how they move or act, and they DAMN sure can't move that fast except for a fraction of a second (when striking.) If it was purposefully done for comic effect it might be OK, but in Anaconda and the SoaP trailers it's clear that they're trying to be all scary and dramatic. Tell me, would it be scary or dramatic if an obstensibly normal bear managed to chase down a car driving at 120 MPH and smack it into the air with one swipe of its paw? No, that would be STUPID because everyone knows bears can't do that. If it was done in an intentionally comical way, I might find it funny but not if there's dramatic music in the background playing and such... of course, many people do get a huge kick out of unintentionally funny movies (my best friend thinks that Anaconda is one of the greatest comedies ever made), but I think most people, me included, find intentional comedies to be much funnier. From what I've seen and heard SoaP takes itself WAY too seriously, and that is why I will not be seeing it.
Re:Flat or closed universe, open ruled out ?
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Dark Matter Exists
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· Score: 2, Informative
Errr, last I heard they were pretty sure we're open. It was on the edge for a while, but the discovery of Dark Energy (NOT the same thing as Dark Matter, btw) made the open/heat death ending a virtual certainty. They had already taken the gravitational effects of Dark Matter into account for these equasions, so this discovery (which merely shows that Dark Matter can/does exist in distinct regions away from Baryonic matter) changes nothing.
I'm surprised there aren't more Windows stories. Sure, the hardware stories are funny but virtually every truly bizare computer experience I've ever had has been strictly Windows-related. The one that immediately leaps to mind is this:
A few years back I was installing XP on my sister's computer and the network card didn't work out of the box. The driver disk was long gone, the search-for-a-driver-on-the-XP-installation-CD wizard didn't work, so I was downloading every driver I could think of on my laptop and copying them over via USB key... nothing worked. An hour or so passes and I've now tried every driver I've found that even remotely stands a chance of working, including several drivers from sites written in Bulgarian.
So, out of sheer frustration, the next time I reboot (a just-for-the-hell-of-it reboot--not because I actually installed anything new) and see that damn "Found new hardware!" crap I hit "yes" when Windows asks me if I want to allow it to connect to the internet to search for a driver.
And I'll be damned if it didn't somehow connect to the internet and download the appropriate driver. I was stupified... there wasn't any other form of net connection on her computer. I fired up Firefox and Windows Update to check--why yes indeed, they were both seeing the internet now.
I dunno, perhaps there's some sort of Zen lesson to be learned here, but at the time I was quite livid. My sister was like "cool, it's working now" and started surfing while I sat in a corner waving my hands around and gibbering quietly.
I doubt that any Muslims (radical or otherwise) give a shit about world domination. A few might, but they aren't the ones trying to kill us. Islamic 'terrorists' generally want three things:
1. Israel to be wiped off the face of the Earth. To be fair, this is a pretty evil and unreasonable desire... but also in the interests of fairness, it's not as if the founders of Israel couldn't see this kind of thing coming. Pretty much anywhere on the planet would've been a safer place to found the Jewish homeland, so my sympathy for Israel is somewhat limited--if you start a nation in Antartica and you pretend to be all surprised and paniced when your balls freeze and fall off, I'm going to say yes that does indeed suck, but .
They target the USA and Western Europe because we support Israel politically, economically, and militarily. This is probably the biggest reason for Islamic 'terrorism' by far.
2. They want Western nations to withdrawl all military presence from the Middle East. I dunno what the deal here is, maybe they just don't trust us, whatever.
3. They want to be free to resist and outlaw Western ideology within their own boarders according to their own rules. Yes, this probably entails a bunch of draconian censorship laws and horrible punishments e.g. stoning women if they do something very outrageous like going outside in a miniskirt.
Personally, I don't agree with any three of these things (though I don't care too much about #2), but the fact of the matter is extremist Muslims just want to live simple (e.g. repressed) lifestyles like they have for thousands of years before without any pesky outside influence mucking things up. They aren't some monolithic evil bent on world domination, they're just a bunch of uptight, backwards country bumpkins that resort to the most primative of techniques to get their message across.
I'm assuming that the vast majority of these alleged vulnerabilities came about as a result of them examining the source code. Since Microsoft Office is closed source, it may have just as many potential exploits or more. The difference is OO.o's vulnerabilities are known and thus can be guarded against or even patched by a third party. MS Office's potential exploits are unknown and thus may be released as zero-day exploits, and even when they are known we're at the mercy of MS to release a timely and effective patch.
I fail to see how this is a black mark against OpenOffice.org.
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I agree that purposefully flooding the airwaves with interfering crap isn't a great idea, but someone needs to do something about the FCC. Do you realize that over-the-air broadcasts (both TV and radio) are pretty much the only forms of mass communication in the USA that are still subject to draconian censorship? I can say "fuck" out loud, in a book, in a movie, on a CD, on the internet, over the phone, but heaven forbid I say it over the airwaves! Ditto for nudity. I have Sirius satellite radio and on the hard rock stations I listen to not only do they not censor their music, but their DJs cuss regularly. It's clear that the vast majority of their fanbase does not, ahem, give a flying fuck. On TV, the situation is even more ridiculous because parents have access to the V-chip.
The FCC should not be in the business of censorship, period. The founding fathers explicitly gave us freedom of the press, and if they had known about radio waves they would have deemed those be free of censorship as well. The FCC has far overstepped its bounds (especially post-"wardrobe malfunction"), and if this is the only way to draw attention to the issue, so be it. I can only hope that these people operate their pirate radio stations in a responsible manner, on unused areas of the spectrum and at reasonable power levels. Provided they act responsibly, there's nothing wrong with breaking this law; indeed, I say that it needs breaking, it needs civil disobediance because it's a very ugly, glaring flaw splattered across one of the few freedoms the USA has actually protected quite well--better than most other Western nations, at least. (And before anyone starts ranting about how they allow nudity on British/French/German/Dutch/Australian broadcast TV, realize that more than a few movies and videogames have been outright banned in ALL of those countries. Other than child pornography and to a lesser extent beastiality, there's practically nothing you can't legally see/read/buy in America.)
Oh yeah, and the ownership rule relaxation is bullshit as well. It's not right that Clearchannel gets a government-approved (and protected) monopoly over half the fucking spectrum.
*basic, non-contractual copyright law. Copyright law without anything extra added, e.g. the copyright law that takes effect if the GPL is ever declared invalid.
It's worthwhile here mentioning that the speed of light, from the photon's "point of view", is nigh-meaningless because from it's point of view it's traveling instantaneously. Very few non-scientists, even those who know a bit about Relativity and think that the concept of Time Dilation is cool, understand the rammifications of Space Dilation as well. It's not just about time bending--space bends, too. The entire universe actually contracts on the axis on which the photon travels. This is not an "illusion"--from its own point of view, the photon actually doesn't "travel" at all because the universe has become two dimensional--up, down, right, and left still exist, but the universe has contracted so much that forward and back have no meaning anymore--from the photon's point of view. c as a measurement of velocity only has a meaning for those of us out here moving at non-Relativistic speeds. People say that it would take you millions of years to go from one side of the galaxy to the other even if you traveled at the speed of light, but that's blatantly false. If you could travel at the speed of light, it would be instantaneous... for you. For the rest of the galaxy, millions of years will have passed.
A bit tangential, maybe, but it's worth keeping in mind when people start talking about a photon's frame of reference.
Many people (apparently even those in charge of large companies) seem to have this very strange idea that the GPL is not valid, and that because of this they can do whatever they want with the work in question. The premise doesn't have any basis in reality, but the conclusion is sheer insanity. It's somewhat akin to walking into a liquor store, noticing that their liquor license has recently expired and then stealing on their booze, claiming that because it can't legally be sold it must be free. The GPL's validity as a license has nothing to do with copyright law, and those people who have licensed their work under the GPL have explicitly NOT placed their work in the public domain. Hell, D-Link doesn't have (to my knowledge) a publically availible license for their proprietary code at all! That must mean it's public domain, right?
As much as I'd like to see a legal test of the GPL (not because I think it's invalid, but because coporations will become much more willing to deal with it, once it's been proven in court), this is simply a very, very basic test of copyright law. It's amazingly basic, but apparently some people still don't get it: D-Link doesn't think the GPL is a valid contract? Fine, then they're not licensed to distribute the code at all!
In a freedom-loving society, public opinion is most certainly not important than everything else. In the 1950s and 60s, the overwhelming majority of people in many southern states believed in racial segregation and other discriminatory laws (e.g. the bus seating law Rosa Parks was arrested under.) That didn't make any of it right or beneficial for the country as a whole. Most democracies do have provisions to override the will of the people (in this case, the judicial system) and this are absolutely vital because let's face it, the general public is often irrational, oppressive and self-destructive. For a healthy democracy, you need both--the ability for the people to effectively choose their own government and prevent it from growing too powerful, and the ability for the government to ignore the people when they start frothing at the mouth. But if we had to give up one, I would rather live in a true monoarchy--where you at least have the chance of living in a decent society, if the monoarch is relatively intelligent and good-intentioned--than live in a direct democracy with no elected officials whatsoever--sorry, it might work in a perfect world where people aren't irrational, self-serving, overreactionary FUCKTARDS... but I'm sorry to say thatwe're a long way off from that.
Not that I'm in any way a fan of the power plays our government has pulled in the past 5 years, but if anything general public opinion is much worse. I respect the judicial branch of this country moreso than any other branch because they are the LEAST beholden to popular opinion.
That applies to Microsoft's GWA strategy, not the linguist's objection.
Lately, I've seen the term being used more and more loosely and now this... Seriously, what the FUCK does this article have to do with Fear, Uncertanty, and Doubt? ...or more importantly, what does it have to do with the original concept of systematic, negative propoganda through disinformation and fearmongering and general appeal to negative emotions? It's a perfectly valid (if pedantic) intellectual argument, nearly completely devoid of emotional or manipulative overtones.
If you want to say "wrong" or "bullshit" or "Idon'tagree" then just say so, damn it. FUD is not an acceptable synonym for these terms.
[mods: This is NOT offtopic, as this is an article about a linguist complaining about the distortion of a word's original definition.]
Can't comment on the books (though I was under the impression they were written after the original trilogy had run its course), but I don't see the rationale for taking Lucas's word on his supposed grand vision. This is a man who stated repeatedly that the changes in the Special Edition (including Greedo shooting first) were part of his original artistic vision--I don't see how anyone with half a brain can believe that... he was the director, was he not? Then why didn't he shoot the scene that way originally? He's also tried using his Jedi Mind Trick on his hands numerous times--there were always meant to be 6 movies! No, wait, 9 movies! No, wait, 6 movies!
He simply strikes me as a generally arrogant, pretentious man. I remember a couple years back Sci-Fi channel ran a Star Wars home movie contest judged by Lucas himself. There were tons of extremely funny parodies, but which one did he choose as the winner? A horrific, pseudo-cutesy cgi girl standing around singing about how she wants to collect all of the Star Wars action figures (especially a Millenium Falcon.) This is especially nausiating when you consider how much Lucas personally gets from the sale of Star Wars merchandise (when the first movie came out he somehow got the studio to agree to give him virtually all of the royalties, IIRC) and how he's attempted to exploit this contractual benefit with over-the-top cutesy crap like Ewoks and Jar-Jar, intended (possibly not successfully, at least in the latter's case) to appeal directly to children.
I don't know why this myth is still alive. Yeah, it was true back in the day--very, VERY true when you compared a $100 Nintendo with a $2000+ lower end PC--but the price of consoles keep rising while the price of a PC has been in a freefall for years now.
Do the math. If you save the chassis/ps, monitor, hard drive (really, a 5 year old 60-80 giger is just fine for gaming--any more is necessarly only for media collection) and peripherals from your current box and pick up a good mobo+proc deal on Outpost.com or Newegg.com along with some value ram, you can easily have a modern machine for under $200, even under $150. (If you're skiddish about DIY boxes, you can troll a site like Fatwallet.com and within a month I'll guarantee you'll see a very respectable box for under $300 shipped--probably a Dell or eMachines--but for the moment let's assume you're not technophobic.)
So how much was the 360 again... with a hard drive? Oh look, that leaves you with $200 for a shiny new graphics card, which is good enough to easily play games for many years to come. No, in 3 or 4 years' time you probably won't be able to set the resolution and antialiasing features to the max without some slowdown, but you'll still kick the crap out of console graphics, if indeed graphics is your sole reason for PC gaming--me, I'm more inclined to buy a $100 graphics card. (I'm a PC gamer not for the graphics, but because the games I like--RTSes/TBSes, FPSes, non-Final Fantasy style RPGs--have very crappy/nonexistent console equivalents. Morrowind for the PC is a completely different game from Morrowind for the Xbox, and Halo isn't even remotely close to HL2 or Battlefield 1942/Vietnam/2. And yes, there was HL2 for the Xbox, but it was an utter joke.)
And hell, most of the time you won't even have to spend the $200 to upgrade your mobo/proc/ram. Mine are 3 year old and still more than enough for today's games. Moore's Law might not be dead (depends on whom you ask), but the need for exponentially faster CPUs for gaming certainly is. I wouldn't be too shocked if a mid-range system of today can run games in 2012 so long as you've got a couple gigs of ram and a video card that's only 1-2 years old.
So yeah, console gamers you keep telling yourselves that your $400 Xbox 360 and the extra $10/month you spend for the privlege of playing it over the internet (I didn't even take this into account--this is an additional $120 a year, thus rendering any price quibbing moot. An additional $500-$600 spent between console generations means a PC will *always* be cheaper.\) saves you sooooo much money. Just pardon us if us stereotypical, elitist PC gamers laugh our asses off at you and your crazy delusions.
Now, for the caveats: I'm willing to grant the Wii an exception to all this because 1) It's going to be cheap. 2) Online play will be free. 3) The Gamecube had tons of wonderful games that simply have no PC equivalent (Mario Party, Smash Bros. Melee, platformers, etc.) and I expect the same will be true of the Wii. I'm also willing to grant an exception for the techno-phobic who absolutely do not want to open their box even to swap out a graphics card--for these people, it'll always be cheaper to buy a new console. But I do NOT think this is an acceptable excuse here, amongst my fellow geeks. If you prefer platformers and party games and FF-style RPGs and thus you prefer consoles then say so, but enough with the "OMG PCS ARE SO EXPENSIVE!!!11" bullshit. It's not true, and it hasn't been true for years now.
Nah, plastic can be made from vegetable oils. It'll be a bit more expensive than petroleum plastic at first, but it'll never be worth enough to justify landfill raiding.
I call BS. I've heard from several sources that the murder and general crime rates in the 20s were sky-high--higher than they've ever been since. It was the birth of the modern archtypical mafia, for fuck's sake. Organized crime would've never got such a solid foothold in this country if we didn't give them an illicit substance they could sell that was 1) Easy to make/import and 2) In extremely high demand. The Prohibition drastically reduced the supply, thus the price skyrocketed. It's the EXACT same situation that's happened with the war on drugs--the crackdown only drives up the prices (both by decreasing supply and by increasing the risk/cost of doing business), but the end result is instead of hundreds of thousands of small-time petty suppliers making a couple bucks on the side, you get a few major suppliers who are OBSCENELY rich from their nearly limitless profit margins. They then turn around and use that money to buy weapons, hire hitmen, etc. If you could get crack for $1.50/pound and supply was plentiful, do you think ANYONE would be killing each other over it? Do you think that the junkies would be robbing people in order to get the money to pay for it? Ok, some still would, but most of 'em would simply get a shit part-time job at e.g. McDonalds or hell, beg for money. The destitute addicts would quickly burn out and/or OD and die (a few might hit bottom and decide to turn their lives around) and that's fucking fine by me--keep the drugs cheap so no one has to wave a gun in my face in order to take my money so they can afford their shit.
...because I'm not particularly concerned about snooping and it's an easy way to keep out the casual leechers without affecting bandwidth in the slightest?
Instead of an analogy of someone's boogers (which are unlikely to be seen as objects of value by anyone), let's take another example: rare baseball cards. Now, it's entirely possible to take an old baseball card worth hundreds or thousands of dollars and print an exact replica for only a few cents per copy (assuming you order enough copies for a bulk order.) Let's disregard copyright and EULA issues for a moment here and consider the parallels with the matter at hand. With virtual items, there is really no cost at all to duplicate, only an artificially imposed restriction, but then what's the restriction against counterfeit rare baseball cards; why can't we duplicate these items for virtually nothing (a few cents) and sell them for the full value of the originals? Again, it's an artificial restriction, a bias against reproductions (no matter how perfect they may be) for the "original" of something. Rationally speaking, it makes no more sense than the artificial restriction against rare items in an MMORPG yet a theft or fraud of a rare baseball card is likely to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Again, disregarding copyright and EULA issues (which may not exist at all in future games, or perhaps not even in current games such as Second Life) what's the difference? I hardly think the few cents it takes to copy a baseball card matters at all.
You say that a few bits on a hard drive are not worth anything; I say neither is a bit of ink sprayed on $0.0002 worth of cardboard. Neither one is really useful; neither one is in intrinsically valueable, and yet both have become valuable, have been imbued with value via the keen interest of hobbiests/gamers and that value is protected against via arbitrary restrictions, whether it be a bit of computer code or an obsession with originals/disdain of perfect reproductions.
Let me hasten to say that I despise the concept of intellectual property and most attempts to control information like we control property, but at the same time I don't think that means we can completely discount any attempt to put a real life monetary value on "just bits stored on a hard drive." Your bank account is just bits stored on a hard drive, yet it directly translates to cold hard cash. So does the virtual money in Second Life. One could even argue that the currency of Second Life is more stable than many national currencies, e.g. the Iraqi Dinar (if you believed, for instance, that Iraq stands a greater chance of undergoing major civil war than the company behind Second Life does of going bankrupt. I'm not inimately familiar with Second Life or the company behind it, but my gut tells me this isn't a completely off-the-wall belief.)
EULAs and copyrights might make this particular issue moot, but don't think for one moment that similar issues involving theft or fraud of virtual objects are automatically pointless or asinine or moot, because we're *already* treating theft of virtual objects (dollars in a bank account illictly transferred to another bank account) as serious felonies. The day may come when there are more people agreeing that a super rare item in Diablo 6 is worth serious, real-life money than there are people agreeing that a Babe Ruth rookie card is worth serious, real-life money, so disregarding IP/EULA issues and given that it's trivially cheap to duplicate the Babe Ruth card, who's to say that only the latter deserves legal protection against theft and fraud?
I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea myself, but it's definitely something we need to keep in mind.
Why not Linux + Dosbox instead?
Doubtless part of it, but I suspect it has more to do with the fact that 50-60 years ago short hair was in vogue and very long hair was frowned upon. I've seen a handful (mostly on TV, with a couple exceptions) of very old women with long hair and it looks just fine. Much better than what looks like gray carpeting superglued to their heads, IMO. But in any case, that's just an example. Anyone who's ever known a decent amount of elderly people (and I'm in the healthcare field, so I've worked with them) will come to the same bias--they're generally very conservative, embracing roughly the same set of aethetic/social/moral sensibilities whereas those who're 20+ years younger tend to be much more diverse.
But like I said, I'm not attacking old people so much as offering a counterpoint to the "most young people are irresponsible whippersnappers therefore we're justified discriminating against them" sentiment. The irresponsible behavior of the youth might be more obvious, but I would argue that social/moral/political stagnation foisted upon us by our elders (unfortunately, the irresponsible youth don't bother to vote nearly as often as the seniors) is even more harmful.
I think that thousands of years has shown that people at the older end of the spectrum (60+) tend to be very resistent to change, self-expression and the assimilation of new ideas. There are exceptions, of course, but it's like your 12 year old example... how many 70 year olds do you know that can roll their own Linux distro from scratch? How many 70 year olds do you know that have very liberal attitudes towards love or hell, how many of them wear their hair longer than shoulder length? I can't remember the last time I saw an old woman who did not have very short, permed hair (and I live in Florida, so believe me when I say that I see a *lot* of little old women.)
Now, do I think that this justifies laws or policies that discriminate against the elderly? Absolutely not, but at least I don't blithely dismiss one end of the age discrimination spectrum while rallying strongly against another. If the youth (I'm talking about 18-30 here, not preteens damnit) can be sterotyped as irresponsible and discriminated against, then the elderly can be equally stereotyped as heartless and imperceptive and dare I say it, stagnate. I'd prefer no discrimination at all, but if we must let's at least be, er, fair about it.
I despise Monsanto, but to their credit they have not used their patented sterilization gene... yet. They spent good money developing it, so odds are they'd use it in a heartbeat if they thought they could get away with it.
You can't flush the toilet if the power's off and you have an electric water pump (such is the case with people on well water or people above floor X in a building.)
The computer part might be asinine, but built-in bidets and/or blow dryers are not. Laugh all you want, but I think it'd be rather nice to actually clean my ass instead of smearing it around, ripping out hairs when necessary (curse all you hairless fucks, curse you I say) and hopefully getting most of it. I'm not sure if computer control is strictly necessary, but it might be a welcome addition if it could e.g. control the aim and power of the water jets or even program a specific pattern to use every time.
Actually it's my understanding that from the very beginning the movie was intended to be completely serious. Now, it's possible that Sam Jackson purposefully injected some tongue-in-cheek moments into some scenes (because from what I hear, he never took the movie seriously), and I heard that the producers actually went back and shot additional footage (including the "motherfucking snakes" line) after they noticed the huge commotion the movie was making and perhaps this additional footage was somewhat tongue-in-cheek as well, but the fact remains that at least *originally* the movie was NOT intended to be humorous and therefore at the very least, the original wave of laughter was AT them, not WITH them because they simply weren't laughing themselves.
Personally, after watching the steaming pile of shit that was Anaconda, I don't think I can bear to watch another Hollywood snake-based horror film. I don't understand why they can get away with such obscenely unrealistic portrayals. Anyone who's EVER seen a snake knows that's not how they move or act, and they DAMN sure can't move that fast except for a fraction of a second (when striking.) If it was purposefully done for comic effect it might be OK, but in Anaconda and the SoaP trailers it's clear that they're trying to be all scary and dramatic. Tell me, would it be scary or dramatic if an obstensibly normal bear managed to chase down a car driving at 120 MPH and smack it into the air with one swipe of its paw? No, that would be STUPID because everyone knows bears can't do that. If it was done in an intentionally comical way, I might find it funny but not if there's dramatic music in the background playing and such... of course, many people do get a huge kick out of unintentionally funny movies (my best friend thinks that Anaconda is one of the greatest comedies ever made), but I think most people, me included, find intentional comedies to be much funnier. From what I've seen and heard SoaP takes itself WAY too seriously, and that is why I will not be seeing it.
Errr, last I heard they were pretty sure we're open. It was on the edge for a while, but the discovery of Dark Energy (NOT the same thing as Dark Matter, btw) made the open/heat death ending a virtual certainty. They had already taken the gravitational effects of Dark Matter into account for these equasions, so this discovery (which merely shows that Dark Matter can/does exist in distinct regions away from Baryonic matter) changes nothing.
I'm surprised there aren't more Windows stories. Sure, the hardware stories are funny but virtually every truly bizare computer experience I've ever had has been strictly Windows-related. The one that immediately leaps to mind is this:
A few years back I was installing XP on my sister's computer and the network card didn't work out of the box. The driver disk was long gone, the search-for-a-driver-on-the-XP-installation-CD wizard didn't work, so I was downloading every driver I could think of on my laptop and copying them over via USB key... nothing worked. An hour or so passes and I've now tried every driver I've found that even remotely stands a chance of working, including several drivers from sites written in Bulgarian.
So, out of sheer frustration, the next time I reboot (a just-for-the-hell-of-it reboot--not because I actually installed anything new) and see that damn "Found new hardware!" crap I hit "yes" when Windows asks me if I want to allow it to connect to the internet to search for a driver.
And I'll be damned if it didn't somehow connect to the internet and download the appropriate driver. I was stupified... there wasn't any other form of net connection on her computer. I fired up Firefox and Windows Update to check--why yes indeed, they were both seeing the internet now.
I dunno, perhaps there's some sort of Zen lesson to be learned here, but at the time I was quite livid. My sister was like "cool, it's working now" and started surfing while I sat in a corner waving my hands around and gibbering quietly.
+4 Insightful? Who mods this shit up?
I doubt that any Muslims (radical or otherwise) give a shit about world domination. A few might, but they aren't the ones trying to kill us. Islamic 'terrorists' generally want three things:
1. Israel to be wiped off the face of the Earth. To be fair, this is a pretty evil and unreasonable desire... but also in the interests of fairness, it's not as if the founders of Israel couldn't see this kind of thing coming. Pretty much anywhere on the planet would've been a safer place to found the Jewish homeland, so my sympathy for Israel is somewhat limited--if you start a nation in Antartica and you pretend to be all surprised and paniced when your balls freeze and fall off, I'm going to say yes that does indeed suck, but .
They target the USA and Western Europe because we support Israel politically, economically, and militarily. This is probably the biggest reason for Islamic 'terrorism' by far.
2. They want Western nations to withdrawl all military presence from the Middle East. I dunno what the deal here is, maybe they just don't trust us, whatever.
3. They want to be free to resist and outlaw Western ideology within their own boarders according to their own rules. Yes, this probably entails a bunch of draconian censorship laws and horrible punishments e.g. stoning women if they do something very outrageous like going outside in a miniskirt.
Personally, I don't agree with any three of these things (though I don't care too much about #2), but the fact of the matter is extremist Muslims just want to live simple (e.g. repressed) lifestyles like they have for thousands of years before without any pesky outside influence mucking things up. They aren't some monolithic evil bent on world domination, they're just a bunch of uptight, backwards country bumpkins that resort to the most primative of techniques to get their message across.
Seriously. Why aren't the major news outlets making a big deal out of shit like this?
I'm assuming that the vast majority of these alleged vulnerabilities came about as a result of them examining the source code. Since Microsoft Office is closed source, it may have just as many potential exploits or more. The difference is OO.o's vulnerabilities are known and thus can be guarded against or even patched by a third party. MS Office's potential exploits are unknown and thus may be released as zero-day exploits, and even when they are known we're at the mercy of MS to release a timely and effective patch.
I fail to see how this is a black mark against OpenOffice.org.