Umm, no. Yes, I do understand that the Supreme Court has claimed the privilege to be the final arbiter on the Constitutionality of laws. But that is written nowhere in the Constitution.
Strict constructionists are like children with hands in front of their eyes. The brick wall doesn't exist until they've already run into it.
Sorry, it seems that Slashcode has removed the part of your post where you explain what the hell you mean by that.
(Seriously, as a foreigner I'm interested in what you perceive as the problems with "strict constructionists". Also, I'm not sure -- does that term refer to people who insist that all federal laws must fall within the purview of the federal government as defined by the US Constitution?)
Only Obama and McCain had any real chance of winning (sorry guys, the Green Party and Libertarians have been, and always will be, fringe groups run by potheads with a pro-drug agenda) and it was beyond obvious that McCain was willing to run this country into the ground for the sake of the almighty dollar. So I picked Obama, mainly because I love America and want the best for this country. But has he delivered?
i4i is a patent troll; this isn't a real 'invention', it's little more than an XML editor that allows you to edit data in the styled/transformed view. That isn't a "technology", it's just an obvious extension of how XML-based data editing should work for end-users. i4i are just more sophisticated than the average patent troll, so don't be fooled, but they remain just a patent troll.
I can't believe I'm having to defend someone with a software patent...
Look, when i4i was developing this there wasn't any such thing as an XML editor, okay? The XML wasn't even available yet. I'd argue that it wasn't obvious in the slightest at the time.
As the inventor of a patented method and apparatus for solving a problem with microwave radio direction finding, let me assure you that there are a whole bunch of problems out there that take weeks of blood, sweat and tears to solve, but when you show it to someone else they say, "Why didn't I think of that? That's obvious!"
So, yes, this may be a software patent, but don't be so quick to sneeringly dismiss it as a trivial innovation.
I can't for the life of me figure out how someone seems to have gotten a patent on XML that they've not been slamming the rest of the industry with.
They didn't. It's not a patent on XML -- it's a patent on a specific way of manipulating and processing structured data like XML. Most people don't use it (i4i have stated that they do not believe OpenOffice.org or KOffice are infringing, when they were asked). Microsoft do, and refused to pay for a patent license.
Microsoft are lieing in a bed they made for themselves, and no-one else need worry.
Something doesn't add up here. Why is i4i not simply willing to license the rights to use the patent to MS (for an exorbitant fee). Why ask for it to be removed? Seems like a license to print money.
If you read about the issue in more detail, you'll discover that i4i tried for several years to get MS to pay for a patent license, and MS stalled and delayed and equivocated about it. The lawsuit was a last resort, and AFAICT the damages are so high as a punitive measure. In theory, MS shouldn't be able to get away with ripping people off just because they're the big kid in town.
But yes, I'm sure i4i could have done things in a better way -- they're not completely free from blame for this mess.
On the one hand, it's bad for Microsoft, so slashbot=happy. But it's a Patent win, so slashbot=angry. But it's a win for a small company, so slashbot=happy. But the small company appears to be a patent troll, so slashbot=indignant. But it's band for Microsoft anyway, so slashbot=[error: Stack overflow. Exiting.]
As far as I can tell, i4i is not a patent troll -- that is, they developed the technology, and developed and marketed a product based in said technology. In fact, this almost looks like a poster boy case for the upside of patents -- the little boy is using his patent to stop the big boy ripping it off. It would look better if it wasn't for the glacial pace with which the trial and appeal have proceeded.
i4i's patent is basically XML (yes it really is, read the patent claims).
I think you're wrong. From the coverage I've read, it's a method of processing and manipulating XML documents, and they designed an piece of XML editing software around it which they showed to Microsoft and Microsoft then stole the ideas from.
It does not predate XML, and has nothing to do with XML-based standards. For instance, i4i have stated that they do not believe OpenOffice.org, KOffice, Symphony etc. infringe their patent.
I'm sure some kind person will come along and back me up on this one.
Also, unlike Italy and France, they don't have famous wines
Well there's Wolf Blass and Jacob's Creek for starters.
Unfortunately, in my experience all of the actually decent wines from Australia aren't famous. Jacob's Creek is overpriced piss, in my not-very-humble opinion. There are some really amazing Shiraz vineyards in Australia, for example, but you have to hunt them down.
The implication is that a Catholic politician is not really free to make his or her own decisions, as their bishop can instruct them to do things on threat of excommunication (look at Bishop Tobin's instruction to Rep. Kennedy in RI).
This is not actually true. As far as I am aware, Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical Deus Caritas Est is the authority on this, and it says:
It is not the Church's... responsibility to make this teaching prevail in political life. Rather, the Church wishes to help form consciences in political life and to stimulate greater insight into the authentic requirements of justice as well as greater readiness to act accordingly...
As citizens of the State, they are called to take part in public life... The mission of the lay faithful is therefore to configure social life correctly, respecting its legitimate autonomy and cooperating with other citizens according to their respective competences and fulfilling their own responsibility.
I interpret this to mean that Catholic politicians are not expected to prescribe Catholic morals through legislation. Rather, their responsibility is to block legislation that would make it difficult or impossible for the faithful to live a Catholic life.
We had a classic example in the UK recently. Many of the largest and most successful adoption agencies in the UK were Catholic (i.e. founded by Catholics, funded by charitable donations from Catholics, run by Catholics, and often caring for children of Catholic parents).
Some same-sex couples wished to use these agencies to find a child to adopt, and were turned down. This is broadly analogous to going to a halal butcher and ordering some pork chops. Just as there are plenty of butchers which sell pork, there were at the time plenty of adoption agencies that accepted applications from same-sex couples.
A big fuss having been made, the government introduced legislation forbidding adoption agencies from rejecting applications on the basis that the applicants were a same-sex couple.
This is an example of legislation that a Catholic politician would probably be expected to either vote against or abstain from voting on.
(The upshot of this episode was that the Catholic Church in the UK has had to separate itself entirely from the funding and operation of adoption agencies. Sadly, no-one has stepped in to make up the shortfall caused by this short-sighted and reactionary meddling. Least of all gay rights groups.)
The Labor party (Current government) was meant to be liberal and reformist. The alternative is the Liberal party who despite there name are mostly socially conservative Christians.
I refuse to believe that there is a whole continent-sized country with two and only two political parties. If you can confidently vote for neither the Labour nor Liberal parties, why not try one of the following options:
Vote for a third party;
Run as a third party candidate if no third party candidates are available in your district;
Spoil your ballot paper.
Don't vote for the "not quite the worst" party: use your vote responsibly.
OTOH KDE4's UI seems more VISTA-inspired than anything else. Only its still KDE and rather less organized and neat than a typical Vista installation...
The general KDE4 UI and look was fairly well established before the first set of Vista screenshots and tech. demos became widely available, IIRC. One of the things I was most bemused by when I first saw Vista previews was, "Hey, they've totally ripped off KDE 4!" Windows 7 even more so, TBH.
In fairness to both sides of the story, I suspect there's some cross-pollination in terms of ideas going on between the evolutions of the Windows and KDE approaches to the desktop.
Clutter, gnome shell, zeitgeist, telepathy, tracker. And many totally cross-DE projects have a much stronger connection to the Gnome community, even if KDE is using them: dbus, the *kits, PA, etc.
Let's think logically about this. Several years ago now, in the dark days when KDE 3 was in its infancy, several major distributions decided to make GNOME the default desktop environment. A bit later on, someone decided to develop some cross-DE projects such as the ones you mentioned. And the major distributions looked on them, and saw that they were good, and put some paid manpower into making sure that said projects worked well with their default desktop environment, i.e. GNOME. Looking at where we stand now, yes, many cross-DE projects have stronger connections to the GNOME community, but it seems to me that that doesn't say anything about the relative qualities of KDE and GNOME.
I mean, if you develop something and try to get it used by a distro but the say, "We're not going to ship it unless it integrates more nicely with our default desktop," what are you going to do?
KDE's memory footprint at rest (e.g. just after login) is over 400MB (total system memory, not process RSS). Even though you may characterize it as "technically better", that still doesn't make it good. GNOMEs memory footprint on the same machine is 250MB; that's a 40% difference in overhead.
I thought that this kind of specious comparison had been thoroughly debunked.
But, that is GTK software, not Gnome software.
Aside from it looking a bit ugly (solvable) you can use those programs in KDE without issues at all.
I use plenty of GTK apps in my KDE desktop, even Gnome ones. One thing doesn't nullify the other.
Indeed. In fact, Qt uses the GLib main loop nowadays.
This supposed "incompatibility" between apps designed for the two environments is a complete myth.
Funny, that's the main thing that stops me from using KDE (that and the continued instability of plasma). I have a hard time finding nice simple kde equivalents to audacious, deluge (vastly prefer it to ktorrent), gimp, pidgin and of course firefox (and now chrome). Since all my productive apps are GTK based, it is very hard for me to justify switching to KDE4.
You do realise that KDE do not intend to NIH every application that doesn't use Qt, right? You do realise that GTK+ apps still run perfectly fine on a KDE4 desktop? You do realise that both GNOME and KDE developers work together in order to make sure that KDE and GNOME apps can happily coexist, to the extent of holding their annual developer conferences together in 2009?
There's even plugins available for GNOME (Qt) to make it look like Qt (GNOME).
If you want to use GTK+ apps on a KDE desktop, go for it. The Desktop Homogeneity Inquisition aren't going to break down your door for doing so.
You miss the point. Google is keeping track of us anyway. That we're using google means we're already ok with that. What I'm not ok with is with them messing with my search results. I want the same results from the same query no matter where I am. This makes Google a lot less useful.
Suppose I have a large search history built up at home. One day I google a new term, and get a new and interesting result. The next day I go out of town and want to revisit that site on a public computer. I google the same term I did the night before, and get nothing. That's bad.
Well, then do both sets of searches while logged in to your Google account!
You can't "prove" anything in the natural world. At some point, we should stop beating dead horses and pursue more promising (or pressing) lines of inquiry.
Read some great science fiction novels: Frank Herbert's "Dune", Greg Bear's "Eon", Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game", Asimov's "The End of Eternity", Poul Anderson's "Tau Zero".
Zounds! Add Niven's "Ringworld" to that and it would make a fine intro-to-hard-SF syllabus.
Interestingly enough, it's sitting next to "Dune" on my bookshelf. Maybe it's time it got another read!
Got four books in the backburner, looking for a publisher. If you keep telling them Sci-Fi is dead, you think they're gonna wanna publish my damn books?
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, no. Yes, I do understand that the Supreme Court has claimed the privilege to be the final arbiter on the Constitutionality of laws. But that is written nowhere in the Constitution.
Strict constructionists are like children with hands in front of their eyes. The brick wall doesn't exist until they've already run into it.
Sorry, it seems that Slashcode has removed the part of your post where you explain what the hell you mean by that.
(Seriously, as a foreigner I'm interested in what you perceive as the problems with "strict constructionists". Also, I'm not sure -- does that term refer to people who insist that all federal laws must fall within the purview of the federal government as defined by the US Constitution?)
So if your expecting the second year to be the equivalent of a MMORPG Miracle Build I think you will be disappointed.
That's ok. I don't have much choice at this point but to hope and wait until 2012. I'm a patient man, I can do that.
And who are you going to vote for then, then?
Only Obama and McCain had any real chance of winning (sorry guys, the Green Party and Libertarians have been, and always will be, fringe groups run by potheads with a pro-drug agenda) and it was beyond obvious that McCain was willing to run this country into the ground for the sake of the almighty dollar. So I picked Obama, mainly because I love America and want the best for this country. But has he delivered?
Good question. How about some data?
(As a Briton, I have no particular opinion on the matter).
200 months=16+ years The game wasn't on for that long
You do realise that EVE is a multi-player game, right? And that the efforts of hundreds of players go into producing one titan?
i4i is a patent troll; this isn't a real 'invention', it's little more than an XML editor that allows you to edit data in the styled/transformed view. That isn't a "technology", it's just an obvious extension of how XML-based data editing should work for end-users. i4i are just more sophisticated than the average patent troll, so don't be fooled, but they remain just a patent troll.
I can't believe I'm having to defend someone with a software patent...
Look, when i4i was developing this there wasn't any such thing as an XML editor, okay? The XML wasn't even available yet. I'd argue that it wasn't obvious in the slightest at the time.
As the inventor of a patented method and apparatus for solving a problem with microwave radio direction finding, let me assure you that there are a whole bunch of problems out there that take weeks of blood, sweat and tears to solve, but when you show it to someone else they say, "Why didn't I think of that? That's obvious!"
So, yes, this may be a software patent, but don't be so quick to sneeringly dismiss it as a trivial innovation.
I can't for the life of me figure out how someone seems to have gotten a patent on XML that they've not been slamming the rest of the industry with.
They didn't. It's not a patent on XML -- it's a patent on a specific way of manipulating and processing structured data like XML. Most people don't use it (i4i have stated that they do not believe OpenOffice.org or KOffice are infringing, when they were asked). Microsoft do, and refused to pay for a patent license.
Microsoft are lieing in a bed they made for themselves, and no-one else need worry.
Something doesn't add up here. Why is i4i not simply willing to license the rights to use the patent to MS (for an exorbitant fee). Why ask for it to be removed? Seems like a license to print money.
If you read about the issue in more detail, you'll discover that i4i tried for several years to get MS to pay for a patent license, and MS stalled and delayed and equivocated about it. The lawsuit was a last resort, and AFAICT the damages are so high as a punitive measure. In theory, MS shouldn't be able to get away with ripping people off just because they're the big kid in town.
But yes, I'm sure i4i could have done things in a better way -- they're not completely free from blame for this mess.
On the one hand, it's bad for Microsoft, so slashbot=happy. But it's a Patent win, so slashbot=angry. But it's a win for a small company, so slashbot=happy. But the small company appears to be a patent troll, so slashbot=indignant. But it's band for Microsoft anyway, so slashbot=[error: Stack overflow. Exiting.]
As far as I can tell, i4i is not a patent troll -- that is, they developed the technology, and developed and marketed a product based in said technology. In fact, this almost looks like a poster boy case for the upside of patents -- the little boy is using his patent to stop the big boy ripping it off. It would look better if it wasn't for the glacial pace with which the trial and appeal have proceeded.
i4i's patent is basically XML (yes it really is, read the patent claims).
I think you're wrong. From the coverage I've read, it's a method of processing and manipulating XML documents, and they designed an piece of XML editing software around it which they showed to Microsoft and Microsoft then stole the ideas from.
It does not predate XML, and has nothing to do with XML-based standards. For instance, i4i have stated that they do not believe OpenOffice.org, KOffice, Symphony etc. infringe their patent.
I'm sure some kind person will come along and back me up on this one.
Also, unlike Italy and France, they don't have famous wines
Well there's Wolf Blass and Jacob's Creek for starters.
Unfortunately, in my experience all of the actually decent wines from Australia aren't famous. Jacob's Creek is overpriced piss, in my not-very-humble opinion. There are some really amazing Shiraz vineyards in Australia, for example, but you have to hunt them down.
In my experience, people generally will accept a personal cheque for an automobile, but will wait for it to clear before handing over the keys.
"Spoil your ballot paper." - How does this help?
It's a poor man's vote for "none of the above."
The implication is that a Catholic politician is not really free to make his or her own decisions, as their bishop can instruct them to do things on threat of excommunication (look at Bishop Tobin's instruction to Rep. Kennedy in RI).
This is not actually true. As far as I am aware, Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical Deus Caritas Est is the authority on this, and it says:
It is not the Church's... responsibility to make this teaching prevail in political life. Rather, the Church wishes to help form consciences in political life and to stimulate greater insight into the authentic requirements of justice as well as greater readiness to act accordingly...
As citizens of the State, they are called to take part in public life... The mission of the lay faithful is therefore to configure social life correctly, respecting its legitimate autonomy and cooperating with other citizens according to their respective competences and fulfilling their own responsibility.
I interpret this to mean that Catholic politicians are not expected to prescribe Catholic morals through legislation. Rather, their responsibility is to block legislation that would make it difficult or impossible for the faithful to live a Catholic life.
We had a classic example in the UK recently. Many of the largest and most successful adoption agencies in the UK were Catholic (i.e. founded by Catholics, funded by charitable donations from Catholics, run by Catholics, and often caring for children of Catholic parents).
Some same-sex couples wished to use these agencies to find a child to adopt, and were turned down. This is broadly analogous to going to a halal butcher and ordering some pork chops. Just as there are plenty of butchers which sell pork, there were at the time plenty of adoption agencies that accepted applications from same-sex couples.
A big fuss having been made, the government introduced legislation forbidding adoption agencies from rejecting applications on the basis that the applicants were a same-sex couple.
This is an example of legislation that a Catholic politician would probably be expected to either vote against or abstain from voting on.
(The upshot of this episode was that the Catholic Church in the UK has had to separate itself entirely from the funding and operation of adoption agencies. Sadly, no-one has stepped in to make up the shortfall caused by this short-sighted and reactionary meddling. Least of all gay rights groups.)
The Labor party (Current government) was meant to be liberal and reformist. The alternative is the Liberal party who despite there name are mostly socially conservative Christians.
I refuse to believe that there is a whole continent-sized country with two and only two political parties. If you can confidently vote for neither the Labour nor Liberal parties, why not try one of the following options:
Don't vote for the "not quite the worst" party: use your vote responsibly.
OTOH KDE4's UI seems more VISTA-inspired than anything else. Only its still KDE and rather less organized and neat than a typical Vista installation...
The general KDE4 UI and look was fairly well established before the first set of Vista screenshots and tech. demos became widely available, IIRC. One of the things I was most bemused by when I first saw Vista previews was, "Hey, they've totally ripped off KDE 4!" Windows 7 even more so, TBH.
In fairness to both sides of the story, I suspect there's some cross-pollination in terms of ideas going on between the evolutions of the Windows and KDE approaches to the desktop.
Clutter, gnome shell, zeitgeist, telepathy, tracker. And many totally cross-DE projects have a much stronger connection to the Gnome community, even if KDE is using them: dbus, the *kits, PA, etc.
Let's think logically about this. Several years ago now, in the dark days when KDE 3 was in its infancy, several major distributions decided to make GNOME the default desktop environment. A bit later on, someone decided to develop some cross-DE projects such as the ones you mentioned. And the major distributions looked on them, and saw that they were good, and put some paid manpower into making sure that said projects worked well with their default desktop environment, i.e. GNOME. Looking at where we stand now, yes, many cross-DE projects have stronger connections to the GNOME community, but it seems to me that that doesn't say anything about the relative qualities of KDE and GNOME.
I mean, if you develop something and try to get it used by a distro but the say, "We're not going to ship it unless it integrates more nicely with our default desktop," what are you going to do?
KDE's memory footprint at rest (e.g. just after login) is over 400MB (total system memory, not process RSS). Even though you may characterize it as "technically better", that still doesn't make it good. GNOMEs memory footprint on the same machine is 250MB; that's a 40% difference in overhead.
I thought that this kind of specious comparison had been thoroughly debunked.
But, that is GTK software, not Gnome software.
Aside from it looking a bit ugly (solvable) you can use those programs in KDE without issues at all.
I use plenty of GTK apps in my KDE desktop, even Gnome ones. One thing doesn't nullify the other.
Indeed. In fact, Qt uses the GLib main loop nowadays.
This supposed "incompatibility" between apps designed for the two environments is a complete myth.
Funny, that's the main thing that stops me from using KDE (that and the continued instability of plasma). I have a hard time finding nice simple kde equivalents to audacious, deluge (vastly prefer it to ktorrent), gimp, pidgin and of course firefox (and now chrome). Since all my productive apps are GTK based, it is very hard for me to justify switching to KDE4.
You do realise that KDE do not intend to NIH every application that doesn't use Qt, right? You do realise that GTK+ apps still run perfectly fine on a KDE4 desktop? You do realise that both GNOME and KDE developers work together in order to make sure that KDE and GNOME apps can happily coexist, to the extent of holding their annual developer conferences together in 2009?
There's even plugins available for GNOME (Qt) to make it look like Qt (GNOME).
If you want to use GTK+ apps on a KDE desktop, go for it. The Desktop Homogeneity Inquisition aren't going to break down your door for doing so.
You miss the point. Google is keeping track of us anyway. That we're using google means we're already ok with that. What I'm not ok with is with them messing with my search results. I want the same results from the same query no matter where I am. This makes Google a lot less useful.
Suppose I have a large search history built up at home. One day I google a new term, and get a new and interesting result. The next day I go out of town and want to revisit that site on a public computer. I google the same term I did the night before, and get nothing. That's bad.
Well, then do both sets of searches while logged in to your Google account!
[Citation needed]
But there are already laws against tortuous interference.
You can't "prove" anything in the natural world. At some point, we should stop beating dead horses and pursue more promising (or pressing) lines of inquiry.
No argument there!
Read some great science fiction novels: Frank Herbert's "Dune", Greg Bear's "Eon", Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game", Asimov's "The End of Eternity", Poul Anderson's "Tau Zero".
Zounds! Add Niven's "Ringworld" to that and it would make a fine intro-to-hard-SF syllabus.
Interestingly enough, it's sitting next to "Dune" on my bookshelf. Maybe it's time it got another read!
Got four books in the backburner, looking for a publisher. If you keep telling them Sci-Fi is dead, you think they're gonna wanna publish my damn books?
Have you approached Baen Books?