Umm, I don't see what's wrong with having her on the show, schmoozing or not. Unlike most infrequent characters on the show, she was not annoying at all and often added a certain quality to the show that I'm certain no other actor could. She was a fan of the original series, and I think her perfomance as Guinan was excellent.
While I don't agree with your assesment, I feel compelled to correct you on one minor aspect...
Its pretty clear that someone is trying to market the Roddenberry name pothumously.
That would be Paramount Pictures. And they are marketing the Star Trek franchise, not Roddenberry's name. Why? Only because it's the most successful television franchise to date.
" The other problem with the holodeck was that it was a technology so incongruous with everything else that it was "indistinguishable from magic" and totally destroyed the show's believability. "
This is actually the thing that I like most about Star Trek, and paradoxically, the thing that most people hate about Star Trek. (Referring to the technology, not specifically the holodeck, though I will get to that.)
Many people miss the point that the writers are deliberately vague on the specifics of the technology. For one thing, it's obviously difficult to just invent technology that might exist hundredes of years from now for the mere purpose of a television show. Secondly, the technology is explained vaguely so that the audience is free to use its imagination regarding the details. This was always Gene Roddenberry's principle: Create an entertaining story about interesting characters and let the future be the vehicle.
In a nutshell, you have to do a bit of thinking for yourself in order to make the technology on Star Trek seem believable. You have to make your own interpretation. Those who refuse to do so are just plain lazy and inevitably come to the conclusion that Star Trek is stupid because its technology is unbelievable.
"They could take a relatively small room and, through the magic of... magic, make it into a full-size baseball field (DS9) where individual crew members could look at each other and be a hundred yards apart. People could run and run and never hit a wall. They could walk the plank and fall 20 feet into water (TNG - movie). It could reproduce old B&W sci-fi movies (Voyager) and, miraculously, all of the "real people" would see themselves as B&W. But despite the fact that it could manipulate visual perception this way, you still had people parading around the hallways on the way to the holodeck dressed as pirates, cowboys, and 19th century Irishmen. If it could make you see B&W, why couldn't it put a costume on you?"
My interpretation is this is that the holodeck is able to project the illusion so that the actual illusion itself is, in reality, never beyond a few meters of each participant. That, coupled with force fields and artificial gravity generators (which were never mentioned in any show, but this is *my* interpretation) can easily make it seem to separate people that they are walking away from each other, in any direction, for any distance.
There are contradictions to this in the very first few TNG episodes... such as where Wesly comes off the holodeck dripping wet after falling into the illusion of a stream. Or when data throws a rock into the wall of the holodeck when the rock is supposedly part of the illusion. I merely attribute these to bad writing.
About the costume issue. I would think that it might be a bit more desirable to replicate your own costume and don it in the privacy of your own quaters than to go to the holodeck, strip naked, and have the holodeck "paint" some clothes on you.
What if you have to leave really quick because the Borg are attacking? What happens if the deck loses power and the captain walks in?
Regarding B&W, it's probably a simple matter of projecting certain visual wavelengths on top of the existing environment that cancel out "colors" of the surrounding area, resulting in a monochromatic illusion.
" And it was not simply the visual and physical issues. Why was it that the computer, normally barely smart enough to open lift doors on command, could suddenly create completely believable, intelligent, human characters in the holodeck?"
Once again, my interpretation: technically, the computer does not do this. Whoever programs the particular scenario is responsible for the behavior of the characters, with a little help from a bunch of pre-made subroutines. The holodeck is not capable of "creating" people, it can only emulate them within whatever set of parameters the user defined.
But this rule too has been broken before. Moriarity, for example. Just a really stupid decision on the part of the writers. (Though it was a nice plot.)
"I like science fiction to be science fiction and fantasy to be fantasy -- and never the twain should meet."
I'm sorry to disappoint you, but the former has always been a subset of the latter.
[And I apologize in advance for mozilla's splended job of misformatting this post.]
Hey, at last, an on-topic post that isn't flaming Gene Roddenbury's creation.
I fully realize that everyone here is a skeptic as to how well another series is going to go over with the fans and the rest of the world+dog. My experience has been that Paramount, evil corporation that they are, is generally very capable of exceeding my expectations when it comes to my affinity for Trek.
I got into Star Trek midway through the TNG series. (I say blegh to TOS, it was a good idea but far too ahead of its time.) Then along came DS9, which I had doubts about. But they eventually gave the charaters some personality and it scored pretty well with me. By the time Voyager was announced, everyone was like, "What *another* Star Trek? This can't work!" But somewhere after the first season or two, Paramount brought in some highly skilled writers and staff, and has now taken over TNG's spot as my favourite Trek series yet.
I have little doubt that they may be able to do it again. As for the premise of this new series, I can't even speculate. But if they can turn the "federation starship stranded in the Delta quadrant" idea into a good series, I think they can pull off pretty much anything.
I'd like to see some more cross-series character and species appearances. I highly doubt they would do Q, but Guinan is a very distinct (and excellent, might I add) possiblity. We all know she hung around mostly with humans after her culture was decimated by the Borg. I wonder if Whoopie Goldberg would be willing to do it, though.
That is actually a valid point. However, I don't believe you can lump it into the seach & seizure group just yet.
I believe that Slashdot (ie: the editors) is falling more and more towards the yellow shade of journalism every month. Their news post made it sound as if, in a few years, the FBI can just drive past your house and automatically get an inventory of everything you own through radio tags. This is *so* far from fact that it's not even funny. The article specifically says that the ideal application for these tags would be for tracking retails goods. Right now, the tag reader has to be less than 1cm away from the tag in order to register anything.
I'm not an expert, of course, but I just don't see them suddenly increasing range to 50m over the course of a few years. Don't get me wrong, I'm a privacy advocate just as much as the next slashdotter, but I think it's funny how Slashdot can post subjective news like this and then have the balls to call 2600 fans "paranoia zealots."
Steve Halliday, vice president of technology at AIM, a trade association for manufacturers of tagging technology, says, "If I talk to companies and ask them if they want to replace the bar code with these tags, the answer can't be anything but yes. It's like giving them the opportunity to rule the world."
I stumbled upon something very neat the other day... if you're on a machine where you can't install any of the above (such as at work) or don't want to mess with the browser settings, just go to SafeWeb.
The nice thing is that it also encrypts everything you view with 128-bit SSL, so you can defeat those who sit around and read weblogs all day at your place of employ.
It has it's annoyances, but it works well for me. At work, I don't have to fear of accidentaly clicking on a link that takes me to pr0n. (Yes, completely unintentional, I assure you.:P)
The only thing is that it's a.com... I'm sure they have a plan for making money but I haven't quite figured out what it is yet. The only thing I can imagine is perhaps banner ads in the frame they put at the top. But hey, and extra frame I can deal with as long as my surfing is anonymous.
What? Silly me, I thought the kernel was GPL software. Imagine my disillusionment, I though that "Information wants to be free."
I never said it wasn't. In fact, I was referring to *his particular tree*, since that is the base issue of this whole slashdot thread anyway. It ought to have been implied, but I guess I should make such things more clear next time.
Anothing thing that I [failingly] implied was the existance of the GPL itself. What does one do if they have an uber-patch that increases kernel speed by 1400% but Linus won't accept it because he doesn't like the commenting style? You fork it. Or you just release your patch anyway, like the Reiser team did.
Apparently I have this all wrong - the kernel belongs to Linus. If I want to use it, I to ask him to use it.
You aren't going to make much of a point by emulating an extreme that is far detatched from the issue.
Linus simply maintains one of the Linux forks (currently about the only one, excepting patched versions). He maintains the fork that he wants to maintain, with the features that he likes. He controls this fork, but that does not mean that it belongs to him. It is GPLed software, after all.
That's just what I said! But you can GPL it all day long and you'll *never* change the fact that he is the only one that has the final say in what goes in it.
Sometimes I think that forking the Linux kernel might be one of the best things to happen to Linux. We are getting close to the need, since it will begin to be difficult to maintain a full kernel that will run on everything from a palm-top to a mutiple-processor server.
I agree completely. It will be neccessary eventually.
Competition encourages development, and if you add GPL to the mix, the competition benifits everyone.
The GPL was never in question. I am just fairly tired of people saying what Linus *ought* to do with the kernel he maintains. In particular relevance to this/. post, if the LinuxPPC people feel abandoned, they should be the ones working for support on their hardware, not simply sitting around and asking Linus to do it.
Out of all the posts so far, I think I can agree with yours the most. You said it a lot more bluntly than I would have, but hey. The idea's the same. (Oh, and try to ignore all those Cowards below that refer to you as a troll. I despise AC posts because they are always flamebait.)
Anyway, back to the point. I see a lot of other posts that say, "Well, I'm sure Linus has his reasons..." Indeed he does. He probably doesn't give much of a shit. His experience obviously lies in the x86 arena, so why should he be bothered to make his kernel compatible with every architecture known to mankind?
I repect Linus as a master programmer, and I really wish people would get it through their heads that the Linux kernel belongs to Linus. He owes the Linux community no favours, yet everyone and their mongrel is yammering away with stupid statments like, "Why doesn't Linus add this filesystem?" or "How come [random bug] isn't fixed yet?" or "Why don't I have support for my 524,288-way SMP ARM system?"
For those mentioning ReiserFS, (and still remain in the realm of cluelessness) Linus did not include it in 2.4.0 because he wanted a *code-freeze* which meant *fixing bugs* whilest being absolutely certain not to introduce new ones. It had nothing to do with Linus's opinion of the FS nor the quality of the patch itself. And really, why complain at all? Adding the code to your favorite kernel is a single command away, do you really need Linus' blessing just to run the thing?
As a side note, I recently purchased a logitech mouse from Best Buy using a gift card of theirs that I got for christmas. A few weeks down the road, I get this letter from Best Buy saying something to the effect of, "sorry we screwed up, here's a free $10 gift card."
I was like, "eh?" I certainly don't remember having any problems buying that mouse. Still, it's a free $10. However, I am keen to point out that it still works out in their favor, since Best Buy is in the habit of selling electronics and appliances, not $10 items, so I still have to pay them some cash. Oh well. I was thinking of buying another one of them mice (optical wheel mouse, very nice) for my laptop as well.
Now lessee. Windows was conceived first as OS/2 in 1985.
Erm, nooooo....
However Linux folks have taken a mere four years to provide the same from scratch. Remember that MS has had 25 years and has only recently produced an OS that doesn't crash at least once a week.
You may be right about the stability issue. But when we talk about GUIs and fonts, and anti-aliasing, you have to talk about X, not Linux. X has been around far longer, and is maintained on something over a dozen different operating systems... you may even buy a commercial X server for Windows. Linux is an operating system kernel only. Not a single program nor its libraries are considered to be "Linux," as the vast majority of them were/are developed completely separate of any system bearing the Linux kernel.
This is particularly the case with X. X was begun in 1984 by some clever folk at MIT. Anti-aliased fonts in Windows were introduced around 1996 (IIRC). Therefore a far more accurate calculation shows that it took X far longer than Windows to introduce this bit of eye candy.
Even if the above weren't true, your suppososition of it taking "Linux" a mere 4 years would be way off. This year is 2001 (IIRC) and the first version of Linux, 0.01, was released in August of 1991. That would make Linux nearly 10 years old, more than double the four years you claim. Linux history does not begin the instant J. Random User installs Red Hat for the first time on his desktop.
One district court judge in the pocket of Time Warner made one ruling in the MPAA's favor. OTOH, Dow Corning was forced to settle for millions when sued over a product that had no harmful effects except in the overexcited imaginations of the scientifically illiterate.
Key words there: "In the pocket of Time Warner." With the nearly recent merger of Time Warner and AOL, they've got the vast majority of the mass media in their pocket. Once you have that, almost nothing is beyond their grasp.
I have no knowledge of the Dow Corning case, but that seems to have more to do with our overexuberant media than anything else. I was arguing that, yes, huge corporate entities do have too much power over the consumer. Overexcited scientists and the media in general do not fit my definition of "consumer."
Er, he isn't in the U.S. The writer didn't say anything about Norway.
My point exactly. The MPAA (An alliance of US companies) *should've* had no say whatsoever in what kind of programming a teenager in Norway chooses to do. Yet they did, soley on might alone.
Let's see -- the revocations were by the UN's WIPO, under a resolution policy promulgated by a nonprofit corporation, affecting only root servers operated by one specific for-profit corporation.
Some non-profit organization that is, acting on the whim of for-profit organizations.
Lots of corporations are ordered to cease and desist from legal activities temporarily when there is a question of legality raised.
Fine, I'll buy that. But the point was that the RIAA wanted Napster shut down by any means neccessary. Probably with the intent to scare Napster Inc into doing it the RIAA's way or no way at all. They succeeded.
So, if corporate power is so great, why couldn't they have been stomped out by the much larger blue-chip IBM?
Because IBM had no interest in stomping them out until it was too late. Besides, IBM was always primarily a hardware company. While IBM was a great stepping stone, had Apple or someone else become the dominant PC maker, Bill Gates might have done just as well on any other system with the kinds of rules he played by.
And the Americans with Disabilities Act wass instituted for the protection of corporate profits...
I have to agree completely. You cannot live in today's world and not happen to notice the stranglehold that insurance companies have on the public. Medical and life insurance can be justified, yes. And as I get older, they are certainly things that I'm going to require.
HOWEVER, (and this is getting a wee bit offtopic) my main problem is with insurance companies that screw the customer. And they do. Hell, their entire business model revolves around taking people's money and not giving it back. For instance, I was rear-ended in my dad's truck, an accident that I was CLEARLY not even REMOTELY at fault for. And the insurance agent just refused to pay up. (The situation was settled privately, in case you're wondering. And yes, my rates did go up even though the insurance company did absolutely nothing for me.)
And while we're on the topic of car insurance, I'm just dying to know why it is mandatory in [almost] every state. Why, dammit, why? If I want to drive my car around and run the risk of banging it all up, that's my business. If I run into some poor fool that doesn't have car insurance, that's his problem. Shoulda bought car insurange. But he shouldn't have to go to jail or have his car taken away because of it.
I've asked a great many people this very question, even a former insurance agent and have yet to get a straight and reasonable answer. Perhaps *someone* can enlighten me.
Well, you fail to see that it was actually a money-grubbing corporation that was infringing on human rights, not the government. And as I understood the article, it was some PhDs and the insurance committee that stepped in to put a halt to it. And they were the ones urging government action against genetic discrimination by the insurance company.
I think the main thing that mislead you was Andrew Leonard's interchanging of the words "geek" and "hacker". I would certainly qualify most PC gamers at the lanparties I go to as geeks, but almost none of them as "hackers," because they don't really hack anything. They all obviously love computers in general, as most of them are hardware geeks as well, but I don't think you can be called a "hacker" until you start tinkering around with the underlying substance that makes things work. (Be it source code or whatever.)
But, for the most part, I think being a "geek" is a resonable requirement for being able to configure, compile, and install a brand-new Linux kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
What? Won't take place in space?! That, like, violates the prime directive and stuff!
And, of course, Roddenberry's widow will play a bit part. She will appear on alternate episodes to feed the cow.
Eh? What's wrong with that? She's already on pretty much every single episode as the voice of the computer.
Umm, I don't see what's wrong with having her on the show, schmoozing or not. Unlike most infrequent characters on the show, she was not annoying at all and often added a certain quality to the show that I'm certain no other actor could. She was a fan of the original series, and I think her perfomance as Guinan was excellent.
While I don't agree with your assesment, I feel compelled to correct you on one minor aspect...
Its pretty clear that someone is trying to market the Roddenberry name pothumously.
That would be Paramount Pictures. And they are marketing the Star Trek franchise, not Roddenberry's name. Why? Only because it's the most successful television franchise to date.
" The other problem with the holodeck was that it was a technology so incongruous with everything else that it was "indistinguishable from magic" and totally destroyed the show's believability. "
This is actually the thing that I like most about Star Trek, and paradoxically, the thing that most people hate about Star Trek. (Referring to the technology, not specifically the holodeck, though I will get to that.)
Many people miss the point that the writers are deliberately vague on the specifics of the technology. For one thing, it's obviously difficult to just invent technology that might exist hundredes of years from now for the mere purpose of a television show. Secondly, the technology is explained vaguely so that the audience is free to use its imagination regarding the details. This was always Gene Roddenberry's principle: Create an entertaining story about interesting characters and let the future be the vehicle.
In a nutshell, you have to do a bit of thinking for yourself in order to make the technology on Star Trek seem believable. You have to make your own interpretation. Those who refuse to do so are just plain lazy and inevitably come to the conclusion that Star Trek is stupid because its technology is unbelievable.
"They could take a relatively small room and, through the magic of... magic, make it into a full-size baseball field (DS9) where individual crew members could look at each other and be a hundred yards apart. People could run and run and never hit a wall. They could walk the plank and fall 20 feet into water (TNG - movie). It could reproduce old B&W sci-fi movies (Voyager) and, miraculously, all of the "real people" would see themselves as B&W. But despite the fact that it could manipulate visual perception this way, you still had people parading around the hallways on the way to the holodeck dressed as pirates, cowboys, and 19th century Irishmen. If it could make you see B&W, why couldn't it put a costume on you?"
My interpretation is this is that the holodeck is able to project the illusion so that the actual illusion itself is, in reality, never beyond a few meters of each participant. That, coupled with force fields and artificial gravity generators (which were never mentioned in any show, but this is *my* interpretation) can easily make it seem to separate people that they are walking away from each other, in any direction, for any distance.
There are contradictions to this in the very first few TNG episodes... such as where Wesly comes off the holodeck dripping wet after falling into the illusion of a stream. Or when data throws a rock into the wall of the holodeck when the rock is supposedly part of the illusion. I merely attribute these to bad writing.
About the costume issue. I would think that it might be a bit more desirable to replicate your own costume and don it in the privacy of your own quaters than to go to the holodeck, strip naked, and have the holodeck "paint" some clothes on you.
What if you have to leave really quick because the Borg are attacking? What happens if the deck loses power and the captain walks in?
Regarding B&W, it's probably a simple matter of projecting certain visual wavelengths on top of the existing environment that cancel out "colors" of the surrounding area, resulting in a monochromatic illusion.
" And it was not simply the visual and physical issues. Why was it that the computer, normally barely smart enough to open lift doors on command, could suddenly create completely believable, intelligent, human characters in the holodeck?"
Once again, my interpretation: technically, the computer does not do this. Whoever programs the particular scenario is responsible for the behavior of the characters, with a little help from a bunch of pre-made subroutines. The holodeck is not capable of "creating" people, it can only emulate them within whatever set of parameters the user defined.
But this rule too has been broken before. Moriarity, for example. Just a really stupid decision on the part of the writers. (Though it was a nice plot.)
"I like science fiction to be science fiction and fantasy to be fantasy -- and never the twain should meet."
I'm sorry to disappoint you, but the former has always been a subset of the latter.
[And I apologize in advance for mozilla's splended job of misformatting this post.]
Hey, at last, an on-topic post that isn't flaming Gene Roddenbury's creation.
I fully realize that everyone here is a skeptic as to how well another series is going to go over with the fans and the rest of the world+dog. My experience has been that Paramount, evil corporation that they are, is generally very capable of exceeding my expectations when it comes to my affinity for Trek.
I got into Star Trek midway through the TNG series. (I say blegh to TOS, it was a good idea but far too ahead of its time.) Then along came DS9, which I had doubts about. But they eventually gave the charaters some personality and it scored pretty well with me. By the time Voyager was announced, everyone was like, "What *another* Star Trek? This can't work!" But somewhere after the first season or two, Paramount brought in some highly skilled writers and staff, and has now taken over TNG's spot as my favourite Trek series yet.
I have little doubt that they may be able to do it again. As for the premise of this new series, I can't even speculate. But if they can turn the "federation starship stranded in the Delta quadrant" idea into a good series, I think they can pull off pretty much anything.
I'd like to see some more cross-series character and species appearances. I highly doubt they would do Q, but Guinan is a very distinct (and excellent, might I add) possiblity. We all know she hung around mostly with humans after her culture was decimated by the Borg. I wonder if Whoopie Goldberg would be willing to do it, though.
That is actually a valid point. However, I don't believe you can lump it into the seach & seizure group just yet.
I believe that Slashdot (ie: the editors) is falling more and more towards the yellow shade of journalism every month. Their news post made it sound as if, in a few years, the FBI can just drive past your house and automatically get an inventory of everything you own through radio tags. This is *so* far from fact that it's not even funny. The article specifically says that the ideal application for these tags would be for tracking retails goods. Right now, the tag reader has to be less than 1cm away from the tag in order to register anything.
I'm not an expert, of course, but I just don't see them suddenly increasing range to 50m over the course of a few years. Don't get me wrong, I'm a privacy advocate just as much as the next slashdotter, but I think it's funny how Slashdot can post subjective news like this and then have the balls to call 2600 fans "paranoia zealots."
Steve Halliday, vice president of technology at AIM, a trade association for manufacturers of tagging technology, says, "If I talk to companies and ask them if they want to replace the bar code with these tags, the answer can't be anything but yes. It's like giving them the opportunity to rule the world."
Ironic.
I stumbled upon something very neat the other day... if you're on a machine where you can't install any of the above (such as at work) or don't want to mess with the browser settings, just go to SafeWeb.
The nice thing is that it also encrypts everything you view with 128-bit SSL, so you can defeat those who sit around and read weblogs all day at your place of employ.
It has it's annoyances, but it works well for me. At work, I don't have to fear of accidentaly clicking on a link that takes me to pr0n. (Yes, completely unintentional, I assure you.
The only thing is that it's a
A portal nonetheless. Unless my definition of "portal" is misled.
"The Linux kernel belongs to Linus."
/. post, if the LinuxPPC people feel abandoned, they should be the ones working for support on their hardware, not simply sitting around and asking Linus to do it.
What? Silly me, I thought the kernel was GPL software. Imagine my disillusionment, I though that "Information wants to be free."
I never said it wasn't. In fact, I was referring to *his particular tree*, since that is the base issue of this whole slashdot thread anyway. It ought to have been implied, but I guess I should make such things more clear next time.
Anothing thing that I [failingly] implied was the existance of the GPL itself. What does one do if they have an uber-patch that increases kernel speed by 1400% but Linus won't accept it because he doesn't like the commenting style? You fork it. Or you just release your patch anyway, like the Reiser team did.
Apparently I have this all wrong - the kernel belongs to Linus. If I want to use it, I to ask him to use it.
You aren't going to make much of a point by emulating an extreme that is far detatched from the issue.
Linus simply maintains one of the Linux forks (currently about the only one, excepting patched versions). He maintains the fork that he wants to maintain, with the features that he likes. He controls this fork, but that does not mean that it belongs to him. It is GPLed software, after all.
That's just what I said! But you can GPL it all day long and you'll *never* change the fact that he is the only one that has the final say in what goes in it.
Sometimes I think that forking the Linux kernel might be one of the best things to happen to Linux. We are getting close to the need, since it will begin to be difficult to maintain a full kernel that will run on everything from a palm-top to a mutiple-processor server.
I agree completely. It will be neccessary eventually.
Competition encourages development, and if you add GPL to the mix, the competition benifits everyone.
The GPL was never in question. I am just fairly tired of people saying what Linus *ought* to do with the kernel he maintains. In particular relevance to this
Out of all the posts so far, I think I can agree with yours the most. You said it a lot more bluntly than I would have, but hey. The idea's the same. (Oh, and try to ignore all those Cowards below that refer to you as a troll. I despise AC posts because they are always flamebait.)
Anyway, back to the point. I see a lot of other posts that say, "Well, I'm sure Linus has his reasons..." Indeed he does. He probably doesn't give much of a shit. His experience obviously lies in the x86 arena, so why should he be bothered to make his kernel compatible with every architecture known to mankind?
I repect Linus as a master programmer, and I really wish people would get it through their heads that the Linux kernel belongs to Linus. He owes the Linux community no favours, yet everyone and their mongrel is yammering away with stupid statments like, "Why doesn't Linus add this filesystem?" or "How come [random bug] isn't fixed yet?" or "Why don't I have support for my 524,288-way SMP ARM system?"
For those mentioning ReiserFS, (and still remain in the realm of cluelessness) Linus did not include it in 2.4.0 because he wanted a *code-freeze* which meant *fixing bugs* whilest being absolutely certain not to introduce new ones. It had nothing to do with Linus's opinion of the FS nor the quality of the patch itself. And really, why complain at all? Adding the code to your favorite kernel is a single command away, do you really need Linus' blessing just to run the thing?
I [don't | didn't].
with no conventionally moving parts
As opposed to, say, unconventionally-moving parts??
... because google already has a portal:
Google Web Directory
Haha, nice subtle WarGames reference.
As a side note, I recently purchased a logitech mouse from Best Buy using a gift card of theirs that I got for christmas. A few weeks down the road, I get this letter from Best Buy saying something to the effect of, "sorry we screwed up, here's a free $10 gift card."
I was like, "eh?" I certainly don't remember having any problems buying that mouse. Still, it's a free $10. However, I am keen to point out that it still works out in their favor, since Best Buy is in the habit of selling electronics and appliances, not $10 items, so I still have to pay them some cash. Oh well. I was thinking of buying another one of them mice (optical wheel mouse, very nice) for my laptop as well.
Now lessee. Windows was conceived first as OS/2 in 1985.
Erm, nooooo....
However Linux folks have taken a mere four years to provide the same from scratch. Remember that MS has had 25 years and has only recently produced an OS that doesn't crash at least once a week.
You may be right about the stability issue. But when we talk about GUIs and fonts, and anti-aliasing, you have to talk about X, not Linux. X has been around far longer, and is maintained on something over a dozen different operating systems... you may even buy a commercial X server for Windows. Linux is an operating system kernel only. Not a single program nor its libraries are considered to be "Linux," as the vast majority of them were/are developed completely separate of any system bearing the Linux kernel.
This is particularly the case with X. X was begun in 1984 by some clever folk at MIT. Anti-aliased fonts in Windows were introduced around 1996 (IIRC). Therefore a far more accurate calculation shows that it took X far longer than Windows to introduce this bit of eye candy.
Even if the above weren't true, your suppososition of it taking "Linux" a mere 4 years would be way off. This year is 2001 (IIRC) and the first version of Linux, 0.01, was released in August of 1991. That would make Linux nearly 10 years old, more than double the four years you claim. Linux history does not begin the instant J. Random User installs Red Hat for the first time on his desktop.
One district court judge in the pocket of Time Warner made one ruling in the MPAA's favor. OTOH, Dow Corning was forced to settle for millions when sued over a product that had no harmful effects except in the overexcited imaginations of the scientifically illiterate.
Key words there: "In the pocket of Time Warner." With the nearly recent merger of Time Warner and AOL, they've got the vast majority of the mass media in their pocket. Once you have that, almost nothing is beyond their grasp.
I have no knowledge of the Dow Corning case, but that seems to have more to do with our overexuberant media than anything else. I was arguing that, yes, huge corporate entities do have too much power over the consumer. Overexcited scientists and the media in general do not fit my definition of "consumer."
Er, he isn't in the U.S. The writer didn't say anything about Norway.
My point exactly. The MPAA (An alliance of US companies) *should've* had no say whatsoever in what kind of programming a teenager in Norway chooses to do. Yet they did, soley on might alone.
Let's see -- the revocations were by the UN's WIPO, under a resolution policy promulgated by a nonprofit corporation, affecting only root servers operated by one specific for-profit corporation.
Some non-profit organization that is, acting on the whim of for-profit organizations.
Lots of corporations are ordered to cease and desist from legal activities temporarily when there is a question of legality raised.
Fine, I'll buy that. But the point was that the RIAA wanted Napster shut down by any means neccessary. Probably with the intent to scare Napster Inc into doing it the RIAA's way or no way at all. They succeeded.
So, if corporate power is so great, why couldn't they have been stomped out by the much larger blue-chip IBM?
Because IBM had no interest in stomping them out until it was too late. Besides, IBM was always primarily a hardware company. While IBM was a great stepping stone, had Apple or someone else become the dominant PC maker, Bill Gates might have done just as well on any other system with the kinds of rules he played by.
And the Americans with Disabilities Act wass instituted for the protection of corporate profits...
I don't see the comparison.
There is no trend of companies having absolute power in the US.
Yeah, and the MPAA didn't have the courts inhibit 2600's freedom of the press.
And that Jon Johanson kid's house was never raided.
Various companies didn't get *sucks.com internet domains transferred to them due to "trademark infringement."
Napster was never [temporarily] shut down due to consumers doing their own file sharing.
Microsoft rules the desktop due to fair licensing tactics.
The DCMA was institued into law for the protection of consumers and artists.
Riiiiight.
I have to agree completely. You cannot live in today's world and not happen to notice the stranglehold that insurance companies have on the public. Medical and life insurance can be justified, yes. And as I get older, they are certainly things that I'm going to require.
HOWEVER, (and this is getting a wee bit offtopic) my main problem is with insurance companies that screw the customer. And they do. Hell, their entire business model revolves around taking people's money and not giving it back. For instance, I was rear-ended in my dad's truck, an accident that I was CLEARLY not even REMOTELY at fault for. And the insurance agent just refused to pay up. (The situation was settled privately, in case you're wondering. And yes, my rates did go up even though the insurance company did absolutely nothing for me.)
And while we're on the topic of car insurance, I'm just dying to know why it is mandatory in [almost] every state. Why, dammit, why? If I want to drive my car around and run the risk of banging it all up, that's my business. If I run into some poor fool that doesn't have car insurance, that's his problem. Shoulda bought car insurange. But he shouldn't have to go to jail or have his car taken away because of it.
I've asked a great many people this very question, even a former insurance agent and have yet to get a straight and reasonable answer. Perhaps *someone* can enlighten me.
Well, you fail to see that it was actually a money-grubbing corporation that was infringing on human rights, not the government. And as I understood the article, it was some PhDs and the insurance committee that stepped in to put a halt to it. And they were the ones urging government action against genetic discrimination by the insurance company.
Irony of all ironies...
Why hasn't somebody modded this up? Stupid moderators.
Good question. I had some mod points for this article, but I decided not to use them because I'm a "stupid moderator".
The question is whether this is the "professional" image one wants to retain?
I'm admittedly not a hacker in the sense of writing a new kernel next thursday and having it ship on sunday, but...
I am very comfortable in my geekdom and pseudo-hackerdom and hope to continue to be so until I draw my dying breath.
Mwahaha, this is one of the best
if your fingers make unix go, a hacker you be
This qualifies as "inspirational quote of the day" for me.
I think the main thing that mislead you was Andrew Leonard's interchanging of the words "geek" and "hacker". I would certainly qualify most PC gamers at the lanparties I go to as geeks, but almost none of them as "hackers," because they don't really hack anything. They all obviously love computers in general, as most of them are hardware geeks as well, but I don't think you can be called a "hacker" until you start tinkering around with the underlying substance that makes things work. (Be it source code or whatever.)
But, for the most part, I think being a "geek" is a resonable requirement for being able to configure, compile, and install a brand-new Linux kernel.