I once tried an original Indian sauce. If you thought chili peppers were hot, you were dead wrong.:)
It's their own damn fault if they have diarrhea.
Actually, like in Mexico, they use lots of spices since most people can't afford refridgerators. And it works most of the time, but not always. Many don't have reasonably clean water to drink either, and the climate spoils food quickly. If you were living under such circumstances, you would get diarrhea pretty soon as well, I guess.
I f***ing hate them, but I can't help joining them. 90% is emotional, polemical vitriol by people who're unable to make the simplest of distinctions. But who needs ratio if you can just sing the RIAA party line?
Another disclaimer: no, not one post here has said it is ok.
Yes! Tell them dense fucktards! I mean, the audience.
All that many slashdot users do is defend it by giving meaningless excuses like its too expensive or there are too many features that I don`t need.
I don't give excuses, I give explanations. This thread ought to have focused on the factual accuracy of the BSA study (which happens to be non-existent). Instead, it had to turn into another stinking pile of cheap flames about morality. People are so predictable.
Unfortunately, I don`t by any of these arguments about how so many people feel this software is crap.
People copy the most popular or feature-rich software, not because they would need the features, but because they want to have "the real thing". That's one reason why even people who know about OOo copy MS Office.
UT04 is worth 50 bucks, I just had the option of getting it for free, go figure what I`m going to do
I found the demo already such a big WoT that I didn't long for the full version.:)
Hey its the same with the movie theaters. If I want to check out a movie, I used to have to rent it. As I went to blockbuster, that was 4 dollars into their pocket, some of which makes its way back to the parent companies and movie studios. Well, every since I can get the movie for free, screw renting it, and when I find ultra high quality downloads, I don`t usually think about buying it either.
I would pay for the vastly better entertainment in a cinema, but unfortunately there is no such thing any more. You now pay 8 Euros (ca. $9.60) a seat, not including snacks and drinks which cost a small fortune, just to be forced through 30 minutes of advertisement. The final ad (in Germany, and I'm not kidding!) says that movie downloaders are criminals and get ass-raped in prison. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP! Cinema is about entertainment, and this is not the way to entertain me. Thus, I do not visit cinemas any more. Neither do I download movies, I just can't care any more about most of the stuff the film industry comes up with. Movies aren't necessarily bad, but I can't stand the attitude behind it. It's like seeing an ad for the US army after a US soldier threatened to shoot you and your Iraqi family in the heads. You just don't want to see that.
and of course, my sematics tidbit: is it theft, I`m not quite sure, but I`m damn sure if I wrote an amazing computer game with incredible code and my program was so well set up that it didn`t require support, I would want some compensation for it.
More money is made in software year by year. People do get compensated. They want more money, which is understandable, but it still doesn't justify the whining. Well, actually the games industry whines much less than RIAA and MPAA, I guess mostly because it's currently booming. If kids decide to spend more money on music than on computer games in 5 years, the RIAA will be complacent while the games industry will pressure politicians for more drastic copyright laws. It will always be P2P's fault, and not the fact that kids only have this much money to spend.
I would be one pissed off person because my pleasure from seeing people like my game sure as hell wouldn`t feed me.
The games industry is now a billions of dollars business and larger than the film industry, so there's not a tiny trace of evidence for these apocalyptic visions. Why doesn't the MPAA or RIAA ever blame computer games for their losses? The money has to come from somewhere, right?
Yeah, you know I'm pretty pissed off at Rolex. $1500 for a watch that does nothing more than a $10 Timex, and did you know that you can make a sundial to tell time for free?
I should feel justified stealing Rolexes from my local diamond shop because they don't offer enough for the money.
How much does a diamond-decorated Rolex cost to produce? How much does it cost Microsoft if someone who wouldn't afford MS Office anyway copies it to his local harddrive? D'oh.
Put an idiot in front of a computer and he thinks he's justified for whatever immoral thing he does, and right after claiming that filesharing WASN'T degrading the morals of today's youth.
Back in the days of the C64, I think I only ran across one original game disk ever. The percentage of people who pay for computer games has, in my experience, increased ever since. In the 1960s, copyright on software was practically unheard of. Even decades later, Bill Gates felt illegal copying was so widespread that he had to write his "open letter to hobbyists".
Why do people enjoy blaming the youth for all ills in the world? Because it's easier to blame others than to blame yourself? Who educated the kids, anyway? My father liked to lecture me about driving safety (I'm actually a very careful driver), and he scolded me for lighting candles now and then in my flat because he thinks the soot will cause lung cancer. Now what's funny about that? The funny thing is that he was once catapulted out of a taxi because he wasn't wearing a seat belt, and that he was a smoker for at least 10 years (I always buckle my seat-belt, and have never touched a cigarette). The moral of the lesson? I appreciate your constructive crticism, but would you please STFU about how much better "the youth" was in your days, you self-righteous jerks? There are people here in Germany who voted for the NSDAP back then, and now want to educate the youth about all things moral. I must have a brain disease since this can't be fucking real. Thanks for the attention.
Isn't the official expectation for student versions that the student will use it (not the parents)? I know, in practice nobody cares, but I would guess that's the official line.
Since copyright assigns rights of ownership to the copyright holder, any 'Unauthorized copying,' would be 'wrongful taking of property.'
I'm not sure whether this holds for convicted monopolists, though.
Just because you disagree with the list price of something does not give you the right to take it.
It's not a justification, but the high list price as opposed to the cheap cost of duplication explains why so many people pirate it. You have to be insane to deny that.
I don't have the right to download Office because I can't afford it any more then its my right to jack a BMW because its expensive but I still want one.
If I steal your BMW, you don't have it any more. What about copying your office software?
You can argue that piracy isn't stealing
It isn't. It's copyright infringement. Ask any lawyer.
doesn't change the fact its illegal
Nobody claimed otherwise. You're beating up a strawman.
and three, the meaning of words change, language is not a static entity
Which means there ought to be no societal discussion about these WIPO-induced changes? I see!
Theft: Any act of stealing, including robbery and burglary. The wrongful taking of the property of another.
Merriam-Webster: theft, n. 1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it [emphasis mine]
Since copyright assigns rights of ownership to the copyright holder
No they don't. They grant a duplication rights monopoly on your product, but the actual copy is my property. If I give it to a friend, or burn it and stomp all over it, there's nothing you can do about it, unless specified differently in a valid contract.
Would you people please stop using this as a justification to not pay for something! I can't beleive what I am reading,
Learn to read, if you will. He wasn't justifying illegal copying, but pointing out that despite the GGP's claim that the software industry was effectively dying.
There are 1000's of people downloading software at no cost to them, which is normally sold for a price, how can that not hurt a company?
How would it hurt your company if those people
hadn't bought your software otherwise? If someone copies Photoshop 8 in order to produce a few graphics on his personal homepage, is he stealing Adobe $1200? What do you think would've happened if he hadn't been able to pirate any image editing program?
He would've bought Photoshop (overkill for his purposes) for $1200.
He would've bought another company's simpler tool for $29.95.
He would've downloaded The GIMP for free.
Whether the correct answer is 2 or 3, it most certainly isn't 1. In both cases, he wouldn't have paid Adobe any more money than by pirating Photoshop. So in effect, piracy may hurt the competition, rather than the company whose product is illegaly copied.
So, based on all this crap people are trying to unload with regards to copyright and justifications based on prices or features, blah, blah. Let's just take the example of a Newspaper, there is copyrighted information in that and for the most part, this stuff is available online, so instead of reading the Times online, step into your local news stand, grab a copy and walk out, do you think that you will be stopped?
There is a real cost for printing a newspaper, and, more importantly, they might later run out of copies so they can't service paying customers any more. The same is not true for file sharing. Try stealing a hotdog. Do you think you will be stopped?
Lastly, have you seen the balance sheet on this company? they are making billions! How can they get away with this?
No, but if my company makes billions in software then I'm not supposed to whine all day about rip-offs, that's just ridiculous. Copying Photoshop or MS Office is illegal, but I'll spare my pity for those who're really in need, like kids in India whose parents can't afford $10 for diarrhea medication.
I posit that Adobe and Microsoft actually benefit greatly from piracy, and that it's the smaller competition instead which suffers. Why? If tomorrow was the day on which copying MS Office and Photoshop became impossible, what do you think would happen?
Lots of people would shell out the last $1700 hidden under their pillow in order to buy the most recent versions of Office and Photoshop.
Lots of people would switch to competitors' products, including free alternatives such as OpenOffice and The GIMP.
In the short term, MS and Adobe might see more profits, but in the long term, a lack of a private user base would hurt their business sales dramatically. Just consider that Microsoft is currently promoting MS Office over the OOo/SO competition by pointing out that people are already used to MSO and would need to be retrained expensively. Wouldn't this argument be reversed if home users actually preferred OOo? And then consider Microsoft's statement that they do not plan to enforce their copyright towards private users. Why not? Simply because a "stolen" MS product is still more useful to them than a legally purchased competitor's product. By far!
Who do you think hurts Microsoft more? A student who pirated Windows XP, or myself? I'm not running XP at all, I'm running Gentoo Linux. Moreover, I'm a software developer. Switching from Windows to Linux has made me aware of portability issues. All applications that I produce now (at least if I'm given the choice) are portable to just about any platform of your preferrence, or easily made so. I use wxWidgets for GUI, mult
You'll probably never come to realize that the exact same algorithm that you just figured out in an afternoon and then built an application around it has been patented years before by IBM, right? I did (fortunately it's not valid in Europe). You, on the contrary, are probably too lazy and spoiled to come up with any useful algorithms.
Today's compression algos are a lot more elaborate than LZW, but that isn't the point. Neither is it of any relevance how easy it is to come up with a better algo than LZW. A thousand better algos already existed at the time that GIF became popular.
The problem is that contrary to claims of software patent proponents, those do not only server to monopolize "mechanisms", but also formats. It is simply not possible to write a GIF file without touching Unisys' (well, now IBM's) patent. There is no point outputting a GIF-like file that uses an improved non-patented compression format, because no browser and no image editing tool in the world will be able to read it. This means patents not only restrict you in how to write your software, but also what your software is able to achieve. Patents on things critical for interoperability (e.g. protocols and formats) are even increasingly focused on by patent applicants. For example, Microsoft has patented parts of its XML office formats, as well as its Sender ID spam reduction protocol. These kinds of patents allow patent holders to disallow competitors to achieve basic interoperability with their products.
It's a given that GIF would never have become so widespread if anybody had had a clue that it was a patent time-bomb. People would have figured out another format without the patent problematic, or at least one which doesn't seem to infringe on patents, because you can never know, and this would've become the new quasi-standard for 8-bit web graphics. I had numerous books describing GIF back then, and none of these mentioned the patent. IMO patents should at the very least be subjected to a "use it or lose it" provision similar to trademarks. That is, once you're aware of an infringement, you must act on it by at least contacting the infringer (who will often not be aware of any patents) and informing him of your patent. Unisys did not start to enforce LZW patents on GIF until 1999. By this time, they had to run across GIF if they did any research on possible infringement. In fact, Unisys knew that GIF software infringed upon their patent at least since 1995, or 4 years before they made any fuss about it. Why didn't they act then? Simple. To allow GIF to become more wide-spread so they could cash in on their patent later - that's the behavior of a typical patent waylayer and should not be legally enforcable.
hoping to impress the ladies with a reimplementation of Minix.
Come on, you made this up. The only lady you could impress with that is the mythical geek girl.
Re:Copyright confusion
on
Who Wrote Linux?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's possible that Linus requires you to agree to assign copyright to him to submit code, but I doubt it.
They (the kernel devs) don't, all they want is your permission to release it under the GPL. The FSF, though, demands the copyright on all contributions to GNU software.
Nothing "evolves" through the process, merely "adapts".
Nope. This is one and the same thing. E.g. there is plenty of molecular evidence that the blood clotting proteins forked off of pancreatic digestive enzymes by means of gene duplication and mutation. In embryonic development, some muscle cells are chemically activated to turn into bone cells. Archaeopteryx is still a tell-tale example of a gradual transition between bipedal dinosaurs and birds.
Similarly, no code existed in nature for "micro-evolution" to "mutate" lungs, electrical impulse handling, circulatory systems, etc. Either there are properties to "micro-evolution" that have not yet been revealed, or some other (possibly related) mechanism must be responsible.
The first fossil traces of lungs consist of a pair of small pharyngeal sacs in Actinopterygii. They may have populated oxygen-depleted pools and supplemented their oxygen supply by "gulping" air like some extant fish species do. Any slight increase in pharyngeal skin surface area and volume would have been of value to them, even if it just consisted of two tiny sacs at first. Tissue sensitive to electricity is found even in the lowliest of critters. Vertebrate circulatory systems serve to speed up diffusion of oxygen and nutrients, and likely started out as a simple linear transport in chordates (the link between invertebrates and vertebrates).
For example, if humans lack the genome for an exoskeleton, and exoskeletons are "nature's selection" for space survivability, then the "micro-evolutionary theory" says that humans who live in space should eventually experience genetic mutations from which exoskeleton code will appear.
"All too often creationists spend their time arguing with a straw-man caricature of evolution."
Natural selection is one of the methods (the other being sexual selection) by which all evolution (macro and micro) proceeds.
Mutation and genetic drift. Also, the term natural selection as Darwin used it included sexual selection (besides ecological selection). The term is used to distinguish these kinds of naturally occuring selection from intentional breeding, which is called artificial selection.
He's probably spoiled. Windows provides a consistent, logical and easy to understand control panel which makes it especially easy to install and configure new hardware. That, and the fact that a pink elephant ate my grandma, makes me prefer Windows XP.
Too bad that the Phatbot author did bother to write a Linux "interface" (allowing the worm to cross-infect different OSes), targeting an sshd vulnerability. Still, it had close to zero relevance (never heard of an infected Linux machine), probably because
a) Most Linux boxes were already patched.
b) Others don't even run sshd (e.g. Gentoo and Linspire in the default install)
c) The Linux installations were too inhomogenous causing "compatibility problems".
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever TRIED Indian food?
I once tried an original Indian sauce. If you thought chili peppers were hot, you were dead wrong. :)
It's their own damn fault if they have diarrhea.
Actually, like in Mexico, they use lots of spices since most people can't afford refridgerators. And it works most of the time, but not always. Many don't have reasonably clean water to drink either, and the climate spoils food quickly. If you were living under such circumstances, you would get diarrhea pretty soon as well, I guess.
I love copyright arguments on Slashdot
I f***ing hate them, but I can't help joining them. 90% is emotional, polemical vitriol by people who're unable to make the simplest of distinctions. But who needs ratio if you can just sing the RIAA party line?
Another disclaimer: no, not one post here has said it is ok.
Yes! Tell them dense fucktards! I mean, the audience.
All that many slashdot users do is defend it by giving meaningless excuses like its too expensive or there are too many features that I don`t need.
I don't give excuses, I give explanations. This thread ought to have focused on the factual accuracy of the BSA study (which happens to be non-existent). Instead, it had to turn into another stinking pile of cheap flames about morality. People are so predictable.
Unfortunately, I don`t by any of these arguments about how so many people feel this software is crap.
People copy the most popular or feature-rich software, not because they would need the features, but because they want to have "the real thing". That's one reason why even people who know about OOo copy MS Office.
UT04 is worth 50 bucks, I just had the option of getting it for free, go figure what I`m going to do
I found the demo already such a big WoT that I didn't long for the full version. :)
Hey its the same with the movie theaters. If I want to check out a movie, I used to have to rent it. As I went to blockbuster, that was 4 dollars into their pocket, some of which makes its way back to the parent companies and movie studios. Well, every since I can get the movie for free, screw renting it, and when I find ultra high quality downloads, I don`t usually think about buying it either.
I would pay for the vastly better entertainment in a cinema, but unfortunately there is no such thing any more. You now pay 8 Euros (ca. $9.60) a seat, not including snacks and drinks which cost a small fortune, just to be forced through 30 minutes of advertisement. The final ad (in Germany, and I'm not kidding!) says that movie downloaders are criminals and get ass-raped in prison. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP! Cinema is about entertainment, and this is not the way to entertain me. Thus, I do not visit cinemas any more. Neither do I download movies, I just can't care any more about most of the stuff the film industry comes up with. Movies aren't necessarily bad, but I can't stand the attitude behind it. It's like seeing an ad for the US army after a US soldier threatened to shoot you and your Iraqi family in the heads. You just don't want to see that.
and of course, my sematics tidbit: is it theft, I`m not quite sure, but I`m damn sure if I wrote an amazing computer game with incredible code and my program was so well set up that it didn`t require support, I would want some compensation for it.
More money is made in software year by year. People do get compensated. They want more money, which is understandable, but it still doesn't justify the whining. Well, actually the games industry whines much less than RIAA and MPAA, I guess mostly because it's currently booming. If kids decide to spend more money on music than on computer games in 5 years, the RIAA will be complacent while the games industry will pressure politicians for more drastic copyright laws. It will always be P2P's fault, and not the fact that kids only have this much money to spend.
I would be one pissed off person because my pleasure from seeing people like my game sure as hell wouldn`t feed me.
The games industry is now a billions of dollars business and larger than the film industry, so there's not a tiny trace of evidence for these apocalyptic visions. Why doesn't the MPAA or RIAA ever blame computer games for their losses? The money has to come from somewhere, right?
Yeah, you know I'm pretty pissed off at Rolex. $1500 for a watch that does nothing more than a $10 Timex, and did you know that you can make a sundial to tell time for free?
I should feel justified stealing Rolexes from my local diamond shop because they don't offer enough for the money.
How much does a diamond-decorated Rolex cost to produce? How much does it cost Microsoft if someone who wouldn't afford MS Office anyway copies it to his local harddrive? D'oh.
Put an idiot in front of a computer and he thinks he's justified for whatever immoral thing he does, and right after claiming that filesharing WASN'T degrading the morals of today's youth.
Back in the days of the C64, I think I only ran across one original game disk ever. The percentage of people who pay for computer games has, in my experience, increased ever since. In the 1960s, copyright on software was practically unheard of. Even decades later, Bill Gates felt illegal copying was so widespread that he had to write his "open letter to hobbyists".
Why do people enjoy blaming the youth for all ills in the world? Because it's easier to blame others than to blame yourself? Who educated the kids, anyway? My father liked to lecture me about driving safety (I'm actually a very careful driver), and he scolded me for lighting candles now and then in my flat because he thinks the soot will cause lung cancer. Now what's funny about that? The funny thing is that he was once catapulted out of a taxi because he wasn't wearing a seat belt, and that he was a smoker for at least 10 years (I always buckle my seat-belt, and have never touched a cigarette). The moral of the lesson? I appreciate your constructive crticism, but would you please STFU about how much better "the youth" was in your days, you self-righteous jerks? There are people here in Germany who voted for the NSDAP back then, and now want to educate the youth about all things moral. I must have a brain disease since this can't be fucking real. Thanks for the attention.
Isn't the official expectation for student versions that the student will use it (not the parents)? I know, in practice nobody cares, but I would guess that's the official line.
Since copyright assigns rights of ownership to the copyright holder, any 'Unauthorized copying,' would be 'wrongful taking of property.'
I'm not sure whether this holds for convicted monopolists, though.
Just because you disagree with the list price of something does not give you the right to take it.
It's not a justification, but the high list price as opposed to the cheap cost of duplication explains why so many people pirate it. You have to be insane to deny that.
I don't have the right to download Office because I can't afford it any more then its my right to jack a BMW because its expensive but I still want one.
If I steal your BMW, you don't have it any more. What about copying your office software?
You can argue that piracy isn't stealing
It isn't. It's copyright infringement. Ask any lawyer.
doesn't change the fact its illegal
Nobody claimed otherwise. You're beating up a strawman.
and three, the meaning of words change, language is not a static entity
Which means there ought to be no societal discussion about these WIPO-induced changes? I see!
Theft: Any act of stealing, including robbery and burglary. The wrongful taking of the property of another.
Merriam-Webster: theft, n. 1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it [emphasis mine]
Since copyright assigns rights of ownership to the copyright holder
No they don't. They grant a duplication rights monopoly on your product, but the actual copy is my property. If I give it to a friend, or burn it and stomp all over it, there's nothing you can do about it, unless specified differently in a valid contract.
Would you people please stop using this as a justification to not pay for something! I can't beleive what I am reading,
Learn to read, if you will. He wasn't justifying illegal copying, but pointing out that despite the GGP's claim that the software industry was effectively dying.
There are 1000's of people downloading software at no cost to them, which is normally sold for a price, how can that not hurt a company?
How would it hurt your company if those people hadn't bought your software otherwise? If someone copies Photoshop 8 in order to produce a few graphics on his personal homepage, is he stealing Adobe $1200? What do you think would've happened if he hadn't been able to pirate any image editing program?
Whether the correct answer is 2 or 3, it most certainly isn't 1. In both cases, he wouldn't have paid Adobe any more money than by pirating Photoshop. So in effect, piracy may hurt the competition, rather than the company whose product is illegaly copied.
So, based on all this crap people are trying to unload with regards to copyright and justifications based on prices or features, blah, blah. Let's just take the example of a Newspaper, there is copyrighted information in that and for the most part, this stuff is available online, so instead of reading the Times online, step into your local news stand, grab a copy and walk out, do you think that you will be stopped?
There is a real cost for printing a newspaper, and, more importantly, they might later run out of copies so they can't service paying customers any more. The same is not true for file sharing. Try stealing a hotdog. Do you think you will be stopped?
Lastly, have you seen the balance sheet on this company? they are making billions! How can they get away with this?
No, but if my company makes billions in software then I'm not supposed to whine all day about rip-offs, that's just ridiculous. Copying Photoshop or MS Office is illegal, but I'll spare my pity for those who're really in need, like kids in India whose parents can't afford $10 for diarrhea medication.
I posit that Adobe and Microsoft actually benefit greatly from piracy, and that it's the smaller competition instead which suffers. Why? If tomorrow was the day on which copying MS Office and Photoshop became impossible, what do you think would happen?
In the short term, MS and Adobe might see more profits, but in the long term, a lack of a private user base would hurt their business sales dramatically. Just consider that Microsoft is currently promoting MS Office over the OOo/SO competition by pointing out that people are already used to MSO and would need to be retrained expensively. Wouldn't this argument be reversed if home users actually preferred OOo? And then consider Microsoft's statement that they do not plan to enforce their copyright towards private users. Why not? Simply because a "stolen" MS product is still more useful to them than a legally purchased competitor's product. By far!
Who do you think hurts Microsoft more? A student who pirated Windows XP, or myself? I'm not running XP at all, I'm running Gentoo Linux. Moreover, I'm a software developer. Switching from Windows to Linux has made me aware of portability issues. All applications that I produce now (at least if I'm given the choice) are portable to just about any platform of your preferrence, or easily made so. I use wxWidgets for GUI, mult
Tritium isnt used for fusion bombs.
And what about this?
Or perhaps that was after I licked that toad...
Either way, definately ultra powerful.
I became ultra powerful after listening to the advice of three frogs. But why, sir?
You'll probably never come to realize that the exact same algorithm that you just figured out in an afternoon and then built an application around it has been patented years before by IBM, right? I did (fortunately it's not valid in Europe). You, on the contrary, are probably too lazy and spoiled to come up with any useful algorithms.
Today's compression algos are a lot more elaborate than LZW, but that isn't the point. Neither is it of any relevance how easy it is to come up with a better algo than LZW. A thousand better algos already existed at the time that GIF became popular.
The problem is that contrary to claims of software patent proponents, those do not only server to monopolize "mechanisms", but also formats. It is simply not possible to write a GIF file without touching Unisys' (well, now IBM's) patent. There is no point outputting a GIF-like file that uses an improved non-patented compression format, because no browser and no image editing tool in the world will be able to read it. This means patents not only restrict you in how to write your software, but also what your software is able to achieve. Patents on things critical for interoperability (e.g. protocols and formats) are even increasingly focused on by patent applicants. For example, Microsoft has patented parts of its XML office formats, as well as its Sender ID spam reduction protocol. These kinds of patents allow patent holders to disallow competitors to achieve basic interoperability with their products.
It's a given that GIF would never have become so widespread if anybody had had a clue that it was a patent time-bomb. People would have figured out another format without the patent problematic, or at least one which doesn't seem to infringe on patents, because you can never know, and this would've become the new quasi-standard for 8-bit web graphics. I had numerous books describing GIF back then, and none of these mentioned the patent. IMO patents should at the very least be subjected to a "use it or lose it" provision similar to trademarks. That is, once you're aware of an infringement, you must act on it by at least contacting the infringer (who will often not be aware of any patents) and informing him of your patent. Unisys did not start to enforce LZW patents on GIF until 1999. By this time, they had to run across GIF if they did any research on possible infringement. In fact, Unisys knew that GIF software infringed upon their patent at least since 1995, or 4 years before they made any fuss about it. Why didn't they act then? Simple. To allow GIF to become more wide-spread so they could cash in on their patent later - that's the behavior of a typical patent waylayer and should not be legally enforcable.
You can always download the MNG extension. (If you can install it?)
Are you sure you don't mean ActiveX?
I don't care about submarines as long as they never surface.
hoping to impress the ladies with a reimplementation of Minix.
Come on, you made this up. The only lady you could impress with that is the mythical geek girl.
It's possible that Linus requires you to agree to assign copyright to him to submit code, but I doubt it.
They (the kernel devs) don't, all they want is your permission to release it under the GPL. The FSF, though, demands the copyright on all contributions to GNU software.
Nothing "evolves" through the process, merely "adapts".
Nope. This is one and the same thing. E.g. there is plenty of molecular evidence that the blood clotting proteins forked off of pancreatic digestive enzymes by means of gene duplication and mutation. In embryonic development, some muscle cells are chemically activated to turn into bone cells. Archaeopteryx is still a tell-tale example of a gradual transition between bipedal dinosaurs and birds.
Similarly, no code existed in nature for "micro-evolution" to "mutate" lungs, electrical impulse handling, circulatory systems, etc. Either there are properties to "micro-evolution" that have not yet been revealed, or some other (possibly related) mechanism must be responsible.
The first fossil traces of lungs consist of a pair of small pharyngeal sacs in Actinopterygii. They may have populated oxygen-depleted pools and supplemented their oxygen supply by "gulping" air like some extant fish species do. Any slight increase in pharyngeal skin surface area and volume would have been of value to them, even if it just consisted of two tiny sacs at first. Tissue sensitive to electricity is found even in the lowliest of critters. Vertebrate circulatory systems serve to speed up diffusion of oxygen and nutrients, and likely started out as a simple linear transport in chordates (the link between invertebrates and vertebrates).
For example, if humans lack the genome for an exoskeleton, and exoskeletons are "nature's selection" for space survivability, then the "micro-evolutionary theory" says that humans who live in space should eventually experience genetic mutations from which exoskeleton code will appear.
"All too often creationists spend their time arguing with a straw-man caricature of evolution."
Well put.
Natural selection is one of the methods (the other being sexual selection) by which all evolution (macro and micro) proceeds.
Mutation and genetic drift. Also, the term natural selection as Darwin used it included sexual selection (besides ecological selection). The term is used to distinguish these kinds of naturally occuring selection from intentional breeding, which is called artificial selection.
In garbage collection it is not correct to throw out something that will not be used in the future unless it is also unreachable.
It is correct to do so, but in practice, you cannot be certain that the data will not be used, unless it's unreachable.
There are already a lot of people who can do this. Well, without the first blank, that is.
He's probably spoiled. Windows provides a consistent, logical and easy to understand control panel which makes it especially easy to install and configure new hardware. That, and the fact that a pink elephant ate my grandma, makes me prefer Windows XP.
Too bad that the Phatbot author did bother to write a Linux "interface" (allowing the worm to cross-infect different OSes), targeting an sshd vulnerability. Still, it had close to zero relevance (never heard of an infected Linux machine), probably because
a) Most Linux boxes were already patched.
b) Others don't even run sshd (e.g. Gentoo and Linspire in the default install)
c) The Linux installations were too inhomogenous causing "compatibility problems".
Next time I'll use irony tags. ;)
It's Z and Y and I don't see why any layout is necessarily better rsp. "normal".