The notion of using humans for batteries was dumb, but it's wrong to call it part of the plot. The plot is something at a more vague high-level and than that. The plot way of looking at it is "humans are kept alive by the machines because they are useful for something". The fact that the specific something doesn't make sense is too low-level of a concern to call it a flaw in the plot. It's a flaw in the details.
Spiderman was popular amongst adults mostly for nostalga. It was cheesy, but it was cheesy in a way that precisely fits the original source material, and thus evokes nostalga. That's not a bad thing. Heck, this Sky captain movie, much like the Indiana Jones movies, is going for nostalgic capture of an old theme - the pulp adventure.
To most slashdotters, CGI means Common Gateway Interface, so CG is used for Computer Graphics to avoid confusion.
Crimson Skies was originally a paper hex-map-with-figures kind of game. (And it was a lot of fun in that format too - the tactics of the game were that you had limited moves to pick from, your opponent had limited moves to pick from, and you both had to write your move down in secret before the two of you moved. So getting behind the other guy to shoot was largely a matter of second-guessing what your opponent is going to do, while simultaneously surprising him with what you do.)
Great game - lots of fun. When the company sold the rights to the name to Microsoft so they could make a video game from it, the resulting video game was pretty cool too, and did an excellent job of mapping the theme into a video game and preserving the feel of the gameworld.
But if you want to reference the theme of the interesting imaginary setting in which the game took place (which is what it sounds like you're doing), then the video game wasn't where that game from. The credit for the theme and the gameworld goes to the original game.
I said "traditionally" and I did acknowledge that many so-called conservatives get addicted to the liberal government crack-pipe because they've figured out how to use it for their advantage.
Translation: X is true, except when it isn't.
I'm not impressed.
Re:Not to self-aggrandize...
on
Is IP Property?
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· Score: 1
By doing that, he, and others like him knocked the Republican out of the running, even though the Libertarian had no chance of beating the Democrat.
Only if the Republicans had their votes sorted as follows: 1: Repub, then Dem, then Lib.
If they had them sorted as follows, that would not be true: 2: Repub, then Lib, then Dem.
If the situation is #2, then knocking the Republicans out gives their votes to the Libertarian in the next round.
The alleged problem you are citing only occurs when it reflects that people really would want that - if people really do prefer two-party stability over having what they like, then republicans would vote R->D->L and Democrats would vote D->R->L. If they prefer choices closer to what they really want, and the assertion that Libs have more in common with Repubs that Dems is true*, then they will sort their votes as R->L->D and the problem you mention won't happen.
In both cases the system will do exactly what it is supposed to - reflect the will of the people. If the will of the people is "don't rock the boat", then that's what will happen. And if that's the case, then the problem lays not with the system, but with the voters themselves and they get what they deserve for it.
By the way, Australia isn't a republic. They have a parlimentary government. Their experiences with IRV don't make good analogies with a republic style of government
Re:Not to self-aggrandize...
on
Is IP Property?
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· Score: 1
The above post makes the exact same assertions that didn't make any sense to me the first time around, and it didn't change anything about how they were described, so I remain unconvinced.
If you use the premise that Libertarians have more draw from Republicans than from Democrats, then that should mean that people picking Republican as their first choice will pick Libertarians as their second, and thus knocking Republicans out of round 1 helps rather than hinders Libertarians.
To say that knocking Republicans out in round 1 will help the Democrats, it would have to be the case that most Republicans picked Democrats instead of Libertarians as their second choice. And that's directly contradictory to the premise that Libertarians have more in common with Republicans than Democrats. If the Republicans are voting in a pattern of R->D->L, then the Libertarian party doesn't really have the draw from the Republicans that it is being claimed they do, and so the scenario isn't the failure you claim.
Re:Not to self-aggrandize...
on
Is IP Property?
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· Score: 1
(Any real ex-democrats in the LP are probably ex-Republicans, and not ex-Democrats)
To clarify, I meant the party. There are ex-"D"emocrats in the Libertarian party. Plenty. Some people had loyalties to the Democratic party more because of their utter dislike of the Religious Right than becuase of fiscal policies.
Re:those statistics don't tell everything
on
Is IP Property?
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· Score: 1
the only person I've seen stringently taking a stand for online civil liberties is that old conservative Republican with whom I disagree on just about all other issues, Jesse Helms.
Wow, a slashdotter who's never heard of Russ Feingold.
Me? I'm a pragmatist. You're free to be idealists if you so choose.
The only difference between a pragmatist and an idealist is how far into the future they are looking. If you want to solve a small problem today, but in so doing propigate the larger problems into the future, then go right ahead and take the "pragmatic" approach.
If you think that depriving someone of something is an equal offense to letting them keep it, but copying it, then we are at an impasse. In one case you got something without paying it's price *AND* you also deprived someone else of that something. In the other case you only did one of those two things, not both.
In my mind, the difference is gigantic, in terms of how much of a wrong has occurred.
What? Was this an attempt at sarcasm? It failed, since "every school has these items" is in no way contradictory with "they are a very minor part of the budget".
Guess what? Every school has doors too. I doubt the budget for doors even shows up as a narrow sliver on a pie chart of the budget.
Your first statement was that faith cannot exist in public school. Now you're saying faith cannot be *taught* in public school. That's a very different claim. It's still entirely wrong, mind you, since there *are* some things in public school that are taught on faith. For example, the axioms of Algebra. It's just that religious faith isn't taught. Other forms are.
This way everyone gets what they want.
Eventually, yes. At first, no. (It would take time for the private schools industry to grow to where they could take on the influx of students, and have the wide enough range of choices available that everyone would find their niche to be happy with.)
Therefore it's not the sort of thing that could be done in one fell swoop. What would work better would be to start with the following intermediate step: If you don't send your kid to public school, and instead you homeschool or use a private school, then you get a tax break such that your taxes aren't funding the public school. (I much prefer this system to the 'voucher' solution, because it avoids the constitutional problem of spending public money on religion, something I am very adamantly against.)
To say a patent isn't granted if there is prior art is ...is entirely unlike the situation as it exists today. The notion that a patent won't be given if there is prior art is a notion that exists on paper but is obviously NOT really being enforced, given the sorts of patents being awarded.
You are lying when you say it's the liberals that want to exapand the government. It's BOTH. Want Proof? The PATRIOT act. Your slanderous bullshit about liberals makes no sense given that the only senator that opposed the PATRIOT act, who wasn't afraid to stand up and say it's not a good idea to expand government survielence for alleged protection, was a liberal.
If this comes across as insulting to you, then I'm sorry but your false accusations deserved it.
Your blinders are refusing to notice the same sort of thing from the republicans: not being allowed to marry whom you want (violation of property since it prevents the special union of lifetime property that marriage entails). And taking my property and spending it on religion.
Now, it has more to do with marketing... corporations think they're the only ones allowed to operate under common word names.
A fix for this that I'd like to see would be this: If you want to register a trademark in the US, the registrar first does a dictionary search against a large dictionary of normal English language, and then after that checks it against previous registered trademarks. You're only allowed to register it as a trademark if it doesn't show up in either search. I really hate it when common, normal, generic words get hijacked for use by one company only. When I use an OS, and that OS has a gui that opens up a bunch of rectangular subsections of the screen, then dammit I'm using "windows", and I should be allowed to say so in print. I might not be using "Windows", but I'm using "windows".
Hey, Mister Coroporate Marketer: If you want it to be your brand name and you want it to be disallowed for people to use it other ways, then make up a new word for crying out loud. Don't hijack existing words.
Strong IP laws are what allow little companies to turn into big companies without existing big companies simply stealing their ideas and using their market presence to dominate.
Not when it costs money to excercise those laws in your favor - i.e. it costs money to file a patent in the first place. It costs money to sue somebody. It costs money to be sued by somebody. The end result is that these attempts to turn publicly obvious ideas into private IP are things that favor the big guy over the little guy. The abuse of IP is not the practice of patenting and copyrighting *your* ideas, but the practice of patenting and copyrighting *common* ideas and abusing the holes in the system that allow this to work.
And *that* is a practice where the big guy wins out over the little guy.
Re:Not to self-aggrandize...
on
Is IP Property?
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· Score: 1
For your scenario to make any sense at all, there would have to exist people who voted republican in round 1, but would switch to Democrat in round 2 if round 2 was Libertarian vs Democrat. I really don't see that happening.
And there are quite a few ex-democrats in the libertarian party as well. Don't ignore them. The Libertarian party is more in agreement with the Republicans on trade and business issues, but it is more in agreement with the Democrats on being laissez-faire about personal lifestyle (i.e. religion or lack thereof, sexual orientation, etc). It's possible for someone to come to the libertarian party from either direction.
The horribly complex and difficult problem you bring up is fixable using an advanced technology called "cut and paste", in which, horror of horrors, you have to make one configuration line per usb port you wich to have capable of bring active at once.
A lot of modern computers are using USB mice and USB keyboards right out of the box. I expect the psaux port keyboards and mice will go the way of the serial mouse, and no longer be available after a couple of years.
Good luck using such a computer at all if you disable the USB controller.
Slashdot Mirror
The notion of using humans for batteries was dumb, but it's wrong to call it part of the plot. The plot is something at a more vague high-level and than that. The plot way of looking at it is "humans are kept alive by the machines because they are useful for something". The fact that the specific something doesn't make sense is too low-level of a concern to call it a flaw in the plot. It's a flaw in the details.
Spiderman was popular amongst adults mostly for nostalga. It was cheesy, but it was cheesy in a way that precisely fits the original source material, and thus evokes nostalga. That's not a bad thing. Heck, this Sky captain movie, much like the Indiana Jones movies, is going for nostalgic capture of an old theme - the pulp adventure.
To most slashdotters, CGI means Common Gateway Interface, so CG is used for Computer Graphics to avoid confusion.
Crimson Skies was originally a paper hex-map-with-figures kind of game.
(And it was a lot of fun in that format too - the tactics of the game were that you had limited moves to pick from, your opponent had limited moves to pick from, and you both had to write your move down in secret before the two of you moved. So getting behind the other guy to shoot was largely a matter of second-guessing what your opponent is going to do, while simultaneously surprising him with what you do.)
Great game - lots of fun. When the company sold the rights to the name to Microsoft so they could make a video game from it, the resulting video game was pretty cool too, and did an excellent job of mapping the theme into a video game and preserving the feel of the gameworld.
But if you want to reference the theme of the interesting imaginary setting in which the game took place (which is what it sounds like you're doing), then the video game wasn't where that game from. The credit for the theme and the gameworld goes to the original game.
Monolithic kernel != monolithic OS.
IE is built in to windows at deep levels. The GDI is set up such that a crash in the video routines kills the whole kernel.
By contrast, it is possible to run Linux without a single line of browser code anywhere on the system, or without any gui of any kind if you like.
Monolithic kernel != monolithic OS.
I said "traditionally" and I did acknowledge that many so-called conservatives get addicted to the liberal government crack-pipe because they've figured out how to use it for their advantage.
Translation: X is true, except when it isn't.
I'm not impressed.
By doing that, he, and others like him knocked the Republican out of the running, even though the Libertarian had no chance of beating the Democrat.
Only if the Republicans had their votes sorted as follows:
1: Repub, then Dem, then Lib.
If they had them sorted as follows, that would not be true:
2: Repub, then Lib, then Dem.
If the situation is #2, then knocking the Republicans out gives their votes to the Libertarian in the next round.
The alleged problem you are citing only occurs when it reflects that people really would want that - if people really do prefer two-party stability over having what they like, then republicans would vote R->D->L and Democrats would vote D->R->L. If they prefer choices closer to what they really want, and the assertion that Libs have more in common with Repubs that Dems is true*, then they will sort their votes as R->L->D and the problem you mention won't happen.
In both cases the system will do exactly what it is supposed to - reflect the will of the people. If the will of the people is "don't rock the boat", then that's what will happen. And if that's the case, then the problem lays not with the system, but with the voters themselves and they get what they deserve for it.
By the way, Australia isn't a republic. They have a parlimentary government. Their experiences with IRV don't make good analogies with a republic style of government
The above post makes the exact same assertions that didn't make any sense to me the first time around, and it didn't change anything about how they were described, so I remain unconvinced.
If you use the premise that Libertarians have more draw from Republicans than from Democrats, then that should mean that people picking Republican as their first choice will pick Libertarians as their second, and thus knocking Republicans out of round 1 helps rather than hinders Libertarians.
To say that knocking Republicans out in round 1 will help the Democrats, it would have to be the case that most Republicans picked Democrats instead of Libertarians as their second choice. And that's directly contradictory to the premise that Libertarians have more in common with Republicans than Democrats. If the Republicans are voting in a pattern of R->D->L, then the Libertarian party doesn't really have the draw from the Republicans that it is being claimed they do, and so the scenario isn't the failure you claim.
(Any real ex-democrats in the LP are probably ex-Republicans, and not ex-Democrats)
To clarify, I meant the party. There are ex-"D"emocrats in the Libertarian party. Plenty. Some people had loyalties to the Democratic party more because of their utter dislike of the Religious Right than becuase of fiscal policies.
the only person I've seen stringently taking a stand for online civil liberties is that old conservative Republican with whom I disagree on just about all other issues, Jesse Helms.
Wow, a slashdotter who's never heard of Russ Feingold.
Me? I'm a pragmatist. You're free to be idealists if you so choose.
The only difference between a pragmatist and an idealist is how far into the future they are looking. If you want to solve a small problem today, but in so doing propigate the larger problems into the future, then go right ahead and take the "pragmatic" approach.
If you think that depriving someone of something is an equal offense to letting them keep it, but copying it, then we are at an impasse. In one case you got something without paying it's price *AND* you also deprived someone else of that something. In the other case you only did one of those two things, not both.
In my mind, the difference is gigantic, in terms of how much of a wrong has occurred.
What? Was this an attempt at sarcasm? It failed, since "every school has these items" is in no way contradictory with "they are a very minor part of the budget".
Guess what? Every school has doors too. I doubt the budget for doors even shows up as a narrow sliver on a pie chart of the budget.
Your first statement was that faith cannot exist in public school. Now you're saying faith cannot be *taught* in public school. That's a very different claim. It's still entirely wrong, mind you, since there *are* some things in public school that are taught on faith. For example, the axioms of Algebra. It's just that religious faith isn't taught. Other forms are.
This way everyone gets what they want.
Eventually, yes. At first, no. (It would take time for the private schools industry to grow to where they could take on the influx of students, and have the wide enough range of choices available that everyone would find their niche to be happy with.)
Therefore it's not the sort of thing that could be done in one fell swoop. What would work better would be to start with the following intermediate step: If you don't send your kid to public school, and instead you homeschool or use a private school, then you get a tax break such that your taxes aren't funding the public school. (I much prefer this system to the 'voucher' solution, because it avoids the constitutional problem of spending public money on religion, something I am very adamantly against.)
To say a patent isn't granted if there is prior art is
You are lying when you say it's the liberals that want to exapand the government. It's BOTH. Want Proof? The PATRIOT act. Your slanderous bullshit about liberals makes no sense given that the only senator that opposed the PATRIOT act, who wasn't afraid to stand up and say it's not a good idea to expand government survielence for alleged protection, was a liberal.
If this comes across as insulting to you, then I'm sorry but your false accusations deserved it.
Your blinders are refusing to notice the same sort of thing from the republicans: not being allowed to marry whom you want (violation of property since it prevents the special union of lifetime property that marriage entails). And taking my property and spending it on religion.
Now, it has more to do with marketing... corporations think they're the only ones allowed to operate under common word names.
A fix for this that I'd like to see would be this: If you want to register a trademark in the US, the registrar first does a dictionary search against a large dictionary of normal English language, and then after that checks it against previous registered trademarks. You're only allowed to register it as a trademark if it doesn't show up in either search. I really hate it when common, normal, generic words get hijacked for use by one company only. When I use an OS, and that OS has a gui that opens up a bunch of rectangular subsections of the screen, then dammit I'm using "windows", and I should be allowed to say so in print. I might not be using "Windows", but I'm using "windows".
Hey, Mister Coroporate Marketer: If you want it to be your brand name and you want it to be disallowed for people to use it other ways, then make up a new word for crying out loud. Don't hijack existing words.
Strong IP laws are what allow little companies to turn into big companies without existing big companies simply stealing their ideas and using their market presence to dominate.
Not when it costs money to excercise those laws in your favor - i.e. it costs money to file a patent in the first place. It costs money to sue somebody. It costs money to be sued by somebody. The end result is that these attempts to turn publicly obvious ideas into private IP are things that favor the big guy over the little guy. The abuse of IP is not the practice of patenting and copyrighting *your* ideas, but the practice of patenting and copyrighting *common* ideas and abusing the holes in the system that allow this to work.
And *that* is a practice where the big guy wins out over the little guy.
For your scenario to make any sense at all, there would have to exist people who voted republican in round 1, but would switch to Democrat in round 2 if round 2 was Libertarian vs Democrat. I really don't see that happening.
And there are quite a few ex-democrats in the libertarian party as well. Don't ignore them. The Libertarian party is more in agreement with the Republicans on trade and business issues, but it is more in agreement with the Democrats on being laissez-faire about personal lifestyle (i.e. religion or lack thereof, sexual orientation, etc). It's possible for someone to come to the libertarian party from either direction.
No. If you want to go back to core definitions, "conservative" and "liberal" are not actually opposites.
"conservative" and "revolutionary" are opposites.
In a country that is already quite liberal, it can be conservative to promote liberalism as "they way it's always been".
American politics has muddied the terms.
The horribly complex and difficult problem you bring up is fixable using an advanced technology called "cut and paste", in which, horror of horrors, you have to make one configuration line per usb port you wich to have capable of bring active at once.
You *are* talking about the one where I can edit fstab w/o being root, right?
No. It's about root being able to edit fstab to open things up to other people. Next time try reading the manpage.
The number of posts I see complaining about this alleged slashdot attitude outnumber the number of posts I see that actually exhibit this attitude.
Stop tilting at windmills.
A lot of modern computers are using USB mice and USB keyboards right out of the box. I expect the psaux port keyboards and mice will go the way of the serial mouse, and no longer be available after a couple of years.
Good luck using such a computer at all if you disable the USB controller.
Hey, why doesn't my keyboard and mouse work anymore? Oh, yeah, I disabled the USB drivers...
USB isn't just for storage devices. Disabling the usbcore disables more than you want. You need to disable the usb storage module.