The Wii appeals to a broader audience than just gadget freaks who buy all the latest HDMI-3D-HD-everything. The little white box has a huge market share, especially among people who don't play "typical" video games. That's why it's a smart move for Netflix, it brings them much a wider audience for not very much effort.
I just don't see what's wrong with not wanting health insurance. I'm healthy, I take care of myself, and I live an extremely low-risk lifestyle. I get sick maybe once every few years. I've never broken a bone, ever. I have health insurance through my job, but I feel that I should have the option of saying, "no, I'll take the risk of having a huge hospital bill on the extremely rare chance that I contract a sudden illness or break something." It's not a free country when you're legally forced to purchase and own something you don't need.
Universal health care will be a boon to many who are less fortunate than me in terms of their genetic and situational (i.e. hit by a bus) health. But a great many more will see this as an opportunity to be even less responsible with their health than they already are.
I'm not saying there's not a lot of good in the bill. But I am saying there is a lot of bad. Chief among them the fact that the health insurance industry just the whole country's money handed to them for comparatively minor concessions. As I said in my post, I would have ultimately been fine with it if I knew my new healthcare "tax" was going towards subsidizing a low-income insurance plan run by a government agency or non-profit. Instead, a non-trivial cut is going straight into the pockets of insurance executives.
It tuns out if you look at Intel's and OCZ's new offerings, they're inexpensive simply because they chintz out on storage capacity. Intel's $125 SSD stores 40GB. OCZ's sub-$100 SSD is 32GB. So the cost per gigabyte hasn't really gone down - it's still about $3/GB. At that price, that sub-$200 1 Terabyte Western Digital hard drive would cost you $3,000 using similar SSD technology.
This has always been the argument against SSDs, and it's always been wrong. Pundits are under the impression that it should be possible to get speed, capacity, and affordability all in one go. To use a car analogy, they're asking for a 12-cylinder sports car that gets 40mpg and costs under $30k.
For as long as there have been SSDs, consumers have been waiting for lower-capacity versions that were affordable. It's not that hard to do: just take your "low-end" 160GB version, leave a few chips off the PCB, and voila. The manufacturers so far have been hitting the overclocker and enthusiast crowd who will pay any amount of money for the latest and greatest and the companies are just now realizing that hey, average Joes might buy these things too if we can meet a reasonable price point.
I've personally been waiting for an affordable SSD for my laptop and desktop machines but so far the options have been:
1) A mini-PCIe thing that barely holds an OS and doesn't perform any better than a mechanical disk 2) A fast 2.5" SATA SSD with about 4x more space than I need and costs 2x more than I'm willing to pay
I'm one of those people who doesn't store a crap-ton of data on my computers. 95% of the data on my computers is OS and applications. All of my important or bulk data goes on a file server which is accessed over the network and hence does not need to be available within less than a milisecond.
The day someone sells a fast, reliable, low-capacity SSD (20GB is fine) for under $100 is the day I'll buy three.
It's not a right. A right is something you're allowed to have, not something you're required to buy. Health insurance (not necessarily health care) is now a requirement for every American adult. It's great for people who have been screwed over by the current healthcare system and I'm very happy for them. I'm unhappy that those of us who are in good health and know how to take care of ourselves are now unconditionally required to give our money to insurance companies for a product that we don't need or face a federal fine. It might have been an easier pill to swallow if the reform included a cheap government plan where at least the money would be funding a good cause, but that was the first thing the insurance companies got nixed. No matter how many "reforms" the final bill contains, the insurance companies just got a new captive market handed to them by the federal government. They will work at chipping away the restrictions applied to them over the next few decades but the requirement for every person in the country to buy healthcare insurance is now permanent.
My advice is coming late in the thread, but I hope the submitter gets it:
The first person I would talk to is Jason Scott of textfiles.com. He collects old BBS files and some hardware. He would be able to give you some tips on the system or put you in touch with someone who can.
And if you do manage to get the data without his help, please send it to textfiles.com anyway so the world has access to it.
If everyone subscribed to that logic, we would not have Postfix, Firefox, lighttpd, or any other number of important open source Internet software projects.
Tolkien's dialogue can't, and never could, survive a direct adaptation to the big screen. Even if it could be managed, people would still complain that the actors didn't act in the manner that they themselves had envisioned while reading the books. Perhaps more importantly, books have the luxury of taking up entire chapters to describe background, settings, and conversations; movies do not. Tolkien purists will never be satisfied with *any* adaptation of his work. Luckily for them, the source material will always be available for their enjoyment.
"3.3.13 If Your Application includes or will include any other content, You must either own all such content or have permission from the content owner t use it in Your Application."
What I meant was the ability to download and play back media like music, movies, and books. It's entirely possible that I could be wrong on this point, but to my knowledge Apple will not let a developer sell an application in the App Store that does these things even if the SDK allows it (which I don't believe it does). In the case of music and movie apps, they would be considered competition to iTunes. In the case of eBook readers, none of them allow you to save books to the iPhone itself; you have to upload (or purchase) the content on a third-party server and stay online in order to read anything.
"3.3.16 If Your Application includes any FOSS, You agree to comply with all applicable FOSS licensing terms. You also agree not to use any FOSS in the development of Your Application in such a way that would cause the non-FOSS portions of the Apple Software to be subject to any FOSS licensing terms or obligations."
You can apply a FOSS license to the code, yes, but it's not really free software because it's impossible (without jailbreaking the iPhone/iPod) to run the compiled code on the intended device unless you pay the annual developer membership fee.
The app store is a hobby programmer's greatest dream. Apple makes everything nice & easy for the hobby programmer,
Completely agree. Nice and easy. Unless you:
* don't have an extra $100/yr to spend on a membership fee * don't have a Mac * want to write apps that do a better job than Apple's built-in apps * want your apps to be able to run tasks in the background * want your apps to be able to download, save and play back locally-stored media * want to write apps that contain a plugin system or language interpreter * want to write free (as in speech) software
But other than that, yeah, a hobby programmer's dream.
Bluetooth headsets are mass-market products, which drives the price down and most are not as small as a hearing aid.
That said, I think it would be great if a company did offer a bluetooth-style hearing aid that could be sold in major stores. Everyone wears bluetooth headsets these days whereas hearing aids tend to stand out even when camouflaged with flesh-tone colored casings. A mass-market hearing aid could come with software that allows the user to tune the device to his or her needs without the help of a specialist.
I was going to go with: "because they're so freaking tiny." For some reason, submitter is assuming that its somehow easy to cram all of the necessary technology into a package the size of your Shift key and still have room for a battery. Add to it the fact that this isn't a mass-market product and also that it's technically a medical device so the price is easily tripled after the development and manufacturing costs are figured in.
Clam down there, Marx. This game you refer to is called "life," and no, it isn't fair. It won't ever be. Better to accept that fact now and press on than to sit around crying about it.
No matter how much of a "fucked up mess" you think America is, the fact remains that the standard of living for the poorest of our poor is still vastly better than almost anywhere on the planet. Even if you have nothing but the clothes on your back, you can at least walk into a homeless shelter and get free food and a place to sleep.
There's no law of nature which says you deserve anything, but I find it encouraging that there are places in this world where you are allowed to make progress and better your social and financial standing whether it be by hard work, smart investing, or a combination of both. You want to see real suffering? Go to countries where trade and business is restricted, governments are practically set up to support corruption, and large groups of people are routinely persecuted and murdered en masse because of their background and/or religion.
It took the western world centuries to figure out that they stood more to gain by treating their neighbors as customers rather than enemies to be killed or controlled. World peace, if it can be achieved, will not be brought about by good will and wishful thinking, but by money.
Not being sarcastic, just curious: how exactly does having a cell phone help you with school work? 15 years ago, a computer was mainly useful for typing up reports and doing the occasional spreadsheet. The web was around, but it really wasn't *that* useful for school unless you were able to access some non-public collection of academic journals. It seems to me that the number of distractions that a smart phone offers vastly outweighs the number of academic advantages.
That said, I don't believe that not having a cell phone today is any kind of handicap for most people. If your business or work requires you to be available at all times, that's one thing. But most of us are not that "important." We just want to feel like it and are willing to pay in excess of $1000 per year for the privilege. And of course to play Tetris in the elevator.
I've yet to get a satisfactory answer as to exactly what would happen if - say - a water line breaks and floods all the electrical (including the dual redundant UPS systems) in the data center.
Simple: the power equipment gets an unscheduled watering and your servers go down.
If you want to minimize the impact that a disaster can wreak on your servers in a datacenter, then you need to have your entire setup running and synchronously replicated in another datacenter.
First off, do not change your SSH port. It won't do a whole lot for you, and it will be more hassle than it works.
I don't see why moving the SSH port is a bad idea. It's trivial and no ssh bot or script that I've heard of will even look for SSH on other ports. Adapting to it is as simple as adding a -p argument to your ssh command. I used to admin a machine that would see at least 5 brute-force runs on SSH per day. Changed the port and there were zero after that. The people who write brute-force SSH attacks (either in bot of script form) are looking for the low-hanging fruit. They don't even bother broadening their scope to systems with even a modicum of hardening because there are so many insecure-by-default machines on the net to choose from.
So I had this long diatribe all written and ready to post. It was about how it's terrible that web applications really suck to develop because there are a minimum of 5 different technologies that you have to know just to get off the ground and that every "innovation" has been a kludge on top of other kludges meant to twist a static content delivery platform into an interactive applications platform. But I scrapped it since that's a dead horse and I'm just some random jerk anyway.
Then I actually RTFA and decided I'd rather respond to Knuth's quoted sentiment:
"The problem is that coding isn't fun if all you can do is call things out of a library, if you can't write the library yourself. If the job of coding is just to be finding the right combination of parameters, that does fairly obvious things, then who'd want to go into that as a career?" (page 581)
Well, I wouldn't want to go into it as a career, but programming is a hobby of mine. I like to make applications, but I have neither the patience nor time to design even a trivial application that doesn't blatantly steal 90% of its code from other (open source) sources. The only way I know how to program is basically what Knuth said: I paste other people's frameworks, libraries, classes, and functions together into an application of my own. I don't want to spend months refining logic and algorithms. Although I do take the time to research The Right Way to do something, I don't particularly care if my code is elegant, I just want it to work and then get to the business of actually using the application.
And what's wrong with that, anyway? Isn't the point of modern programming paradigms to reuse whatever existing components you can, to save yourself time and headaches from re-inventing the wheel? If I need AES-256, there's no way in hell I'm writing it myself when there are dozens of existing implementations out there for nearly every language by people who are much smarter than me, and which are packaged up into nice little bundles that I can wget into my source tree and use right away. How is that anything but a good thing?
I've been loudly clammoring for Canonical to ditch the brown for the better part of a decade.
Ubuntu has been out for just over 5 years, calling that "the better part of a decade" is really stretching it.
For all but the past couple of years, Ubuntu has looked "better" (my opinion) by default than most other Linux distros and that's no mean feat. I'm with you that the brown motif has largely been a negative point, but Ubuntu's priorities hasn't been the color scheme, it's been ease of use, something that Linux lacked most.
That said, this new theme is nearly as bad. Great, getting rid of the brown for.... PURPLE?!?!
Purple and Orange look god damned atrocious.
From the preview screenshots, the purple was entirely from the wallpaper and orange from certain user interface highlights. The main color for the widgets and interface seems to be beige. I think it looks quite nice, although I can see where they're going to draw a lot of criticism for copying OS X.
Why not just take a cue from Linux Mint? They actually have a very decent and PLEASING default look that is even original and different compared to Win and OSX.
Mint is beautiful, but not suitable for a wide audience. It's too rich, too dark, and reminds me of something an overclocker or gamer would install. Most of us just want to use the computer and get on with our day. Ubuntu could certainly take cues from Mint, but most of it is just eye-candy. A good UI should be subtle, not flashy or distracting.
In fact, other than Open Office, most of the Ubuntu default apps are right crap.
There are often more powerful tools for a job, but Ubuntu is trying to pick the best ones for their user base. All of the applications you mentioned are good, but they don't integrate as nicely into the Gnome desktop as nicely the default Ubuntu ones.
It wouldn't be hard to make 2010 the year of Linux on the desktop. All the tools are here now.
Sadly, all the distros I've seen are still too bulky, too ugly, and have all the worst default apps. Ubuntu is definitely a good example of that.
Nothing stopping you from rolling your own if it's that important to you. That's the beauty of open source.
Or you could participate in any of the many ways that Canonical helps the community participate in the direction and development of Ubuntu.
It works on the Mac because the application menu is up at the top of the screen for everything. If the application menu was within the application window, users who didn't have precise control of the mouse would constantly be hitting the Close button when they meant to hit File. On Windows/Linux, users are trained to go to the left of the window for the menu and the right for the window controls. I bet this will trip up a lot of users who use the default decorations for Lynx.
Netflix is heavily pimping the Roku set-top media player, which apparently runs Linux under the hood. It doesn't look like anyone's made much progress in reverse engineering the NetFlix application, but it's proof that there is already a Netflix player for Linux which has no Silverlight dependency.
1) You made your post by clicking the Reply link a highly-ranked earlier post despite your post having nothing to do with the parent. If I had mod points, I would mod you Off-Topic.
2) No one is denying or disparaging your grandfather, his sacrifice, or the war in general. The court ruling had zip, zero, zilch to do with the Korean War. It had everything to do with copyright, however, and in this case I think I agree with the court. A Post Office employee can't walk into a museum, take a picture of a copyrighted painting, and then sell it on a stamp without paying royalties to the artist. Neither can they do the same to a sculpture. To pass the "transformative" test, the photo would have to be a lot more than just $original_sculpture + $snow.
Slashdot Mirror
The Wii appeals to a broader audience than just gadget freaks who buy all the latest HDMI-3D-HD-everything. The little white box has a huge market share, especially among people who don't play "typical" video games. That's why it's a smart move for Netflix, it brings them much a wider audience for not very much effort.
I just don't see what's wrong with not wanting health insurance. I'm healthy, I take care of myself, and I live an extremely low-risk lifestyle. I get sick maybe once every few years. I've never broken a bone, ever. I have health insurance through my job, but I feel that I should have the option of saying, "no, I'll take the risk of having a huge hospital bill on the extremely rare chance that I contract a sudden illness or break something." It's not a free country when you're legally forced to purchase and own something you don't need.
Universal health care will be a boon to many who are less fortunate than me in terms of their genetic and situational (i.e. hit by a bus) health. But a great many more will see this as an opportunity to be even less responsible with their health than they already are.
I'm not saying there's not a lot of good in the bill. But I am saying there is a lot of bad. Chief among them the fact that the health insurance industry just the whole country's money handed to them for comparatively minor concessions. As I said in my post, I would have ultimately been fine with it if I knew my new healthcare "tax" was going towards subsidizing a low-income insurance plan run by a government agency or non-profit. Instead, a non-trivial cut is going straight into the pockets of insurance executives.
From TFA:
This has always been the argument against SSDs, and it's always been wrong. Pundits are under the impression that it should be possible to get speed, capacity, and affordability all in one go. To use a car analogy, they're asking for a 12-cylinder sports car that gets 40mpg and costs under $30k.
For as long as there have been SSDs, consumers have been waiting for lower-capacity versions that were affordable. It's not that hard to do: just take your "low-end" 160GB version, leave a few chips off the PCB, and voila. The manufacturers so far have been hitting the overclocker and enthusiast crowd who will pay any amount of money for the latest and greatest and the companies are just now realizing that hey, average Joes might buy these things too if we can meet a reasonable price point.
I've personally been waiting for an affordable SSD for my laptop and desktop machines but so far the options have been:
1) A mini-PCIe thing that barely holds an OS and doesn't perform any better than a mechanical disk
2) A fast 2.5" SATA SSD with about 4x more space than I need and costs 2x more than I'm willing to pay
I'm one of those people who doesn't store a crap-ton of data on my computers. 95% of the data on my computers is OS and applications. All of my important or bulk data goes on a file server which is accessed over the network and hence does not need to be available within less than a milisecond.
The day someone sells a fast, reliable, low-capacity SSD (20GB is fine) for under $100 is the day I'll buy three.
It's not a right. A right is something you're allowed to have, not something you're required to buy. Health insurance (not necessarily health care) is now a requirement for every American adult. It's great for people who have been screwed over by the current healthcare system and I'm very happy for them. I'm unhappy that those of us who are in good health and know how to take care of ourselves are now unconditionally required to give our money to insurance companies for a product that we don't need or face a federal fine. It might have been an easier pill to swallow if the reform included a cheap government plan where at least the money would be funding a good cause, but that was the first thing the insurance companies got nixed. No matter how many "reforms" the final bill contains, the insurance companies just got a new captive market handed to them by the federal government. They will work at chipping away the restrictions applied to them over the next few decades but the requirement for every person in the country to buy healthcare insurance is now permanent.
America just got fleeced.
My advice is coming late in the thread, but I hope the submitter gets it:
The first person I would talk to is Jason Scott of textfiles.com. He collects old BBS files and some hardware. He would be able to give you some tips on the system or put you in touch with someone who can.
And if you do manage to get the data without his help, please send it to textfiles.com anyway so the world has access to it.
If everyone subscribed to that logic, we would not have Postfix, Firefox, lighttpd, or any other number of important open source Internet software projects.
Tolkien's dialogue can't, and never could, survive a direct adaptation to the big screen. Even if it could be managed, people would still complain that the actors didn't act in the manner that they themselves had envisioned while reading the books. Perhaps more importantly, books have the luxury of taking up entire chapters to describe background, settings, and conversations; movies do not. Tolkien purists will never be satisfied with *any* adaptation of his work. Luckily for them, the source material will always be available for their enjoyment.
Yeah, won't someone please think of the poor spammers?
What I meant was the ability to download and play back media like music, movies, and books. It's entirely possible that I could be wrong on this point, but to my knowledge Apple will not let a developer sell an application in the App Store that does these things even if the SDK allows it (which I don't believe it does). In the case of music and movie apps, they would be considered competition to iTunes. In the case of eBook readers, none of them allow you to save books to the iPhone itself; you have to upload (or purchase) the content on a third-party server and stay online in order to read anything.
You can apply a FOSS license to the code, yes, but it's not really free software because it's impossible (without jailbreaking the iPhone/iPod) to run the compiled code on the intended device unless you pay the annual developer membership fee.
Nice to see people still use DEBUG.EXE in the future!
Completely agree. Nice and easy. Unless you:
* don't have an extra $100/yr to spend on a membership fee
* don't have a Mac
* want to write apps that do a better job than Apple's built-in apps
* want your apps to be able to run tasks in the background
* want your apps to be able to download, save and play back locally-stored media
* want to write apps that contain a plugin system or language interpreter
* want to write free (as in speech) software
But other than that, yeah, a hobby programmer's dream.
Bluetooth headsets are mass-market products, which drives the price down and most are not as small as a hearing aid.
That said, I think it would be great if a company did offer a bluetooth-style hearing aid that could be sold in major stores. Everyone wears bluetooth headsets these days whereas hearing aids tend to stand out even when camouflaged with flesh-tone colored casings. A mass-market hearing aid could come with software that allows the user to tune the device to his or her needs without the help of a specialist.
I was going to go with: "because they're so freaking tiny." For some reason, submitter is assuming that its somehow easy to cram all of the necessary technology into a package the size of your Shift key and still have room for a battery. Add to it the fact that this isn't a mass-market product and also that it's technically a medical device so the price is easily tripled after the development and manufacturing costs are figured in.
Clam down there, Marx. This game you refer to is called "life," and no, it isn't fair. It won't ever be. Better to accept that fact now and press on than to sit around crying about it.
No matter how much of a "fucked up mess" you think America is, the fact remains that the standard of living for the poorest of our poor is still vastly better than almost anywhere on the planet. Even if you have nothing but the clothes on your back, you can at least walk into a homeless shelter and get free food and a place to sleep.
There's no law of nature which says you deserve anything, but I find it encouraging that there are places in this world where you are allowed to make progress and better your social and financial standing whether it be by hard work, smart investing, or a combination of both. You want to see real suffering? Go to countries where trade and business is restricted, governments are practically set up to support corruption, and large groups of people are routinely persecuted and murdered en masse because of their background and/or religion.
It took the western world centuries to figure out that they stood more to gain by treating their neighbors as customers rather than enemies to be killed or controlled. World peace, if it can be achieved, will not be brought about by good will and wishful thinking, but by money.
I posit that anyone who loses vast sums of money due to short-sighted investments or business plans shall hereby be referred to as bwnt.
Not being sarcastic, just curious: how exactly does having a cell phone help you with school work? 15 years ago, a computer was mainly useful for typing up reports and doing the occasional spreadsheet. The web was around, but it really wasn't *that* useful for school unless you were able to access some non-public collection of academic journals. It seems to me that the number of distractions that a smart phone offers vastly outweighs the number of academic advantages.
That said, I don't believe that not having a cell phone today is any kind of handicap for most people. If your business or work requires you to be available at all times, that's one thing. But most of us are not that "important." We just want to feel like it and are willing to pay in excess of $1000 per year for the privilege. And of course to play Tetris in the elevator.
Simple: the power equipment gets an unscheduled watering and your servers go down.
If you want to minimize the impact that a disaster can wreak on your servers in a datacenter, then you need to have your entire setup running and synchronously replicated in another datacenter.
I don't see why moving the SSH port is a bad idea. It's trivial and no ssh bot or script that I've heard of will even look for SSH on other ports. Adapting to it is as simple as adding a -p argument to your ssh command. I used to admin a machine that would see at least 5 brute-force runs on SSH per day. Changed the port and there were zero after that. The people who write brute-force SSH attacks (either in bot of script form) are looking for the low-hanging fruit. They don't even bother broadening their scope to systems with even a modicum of hardening because there are so many insecure-by-default machines on the net to choose from.
So I had this long diatribe all written and ready to post. It was about how it's terrible that web applications really suck to develop because there are a minimum of 5 different technologies that you have to know just to get off the ground and that every "innovation" has been a kludge on top of other kludges meant to twist a static content delivery platform into an interactive applications platform. But I scrapped it since that's a dead horse and I'm just some random jerk anyway.
Then I actually RTFA and decided I'd rather respond to Knuth's quoted sentiment:
Well, I wouldn't want to go into it as a career, but programming is a hobby of mine. I like to make applications, but I have neither the patience nor time to design even a trivial application that doesn't blatantly steal 90% of its code from other (open source) sources. The only way I know how to program is basically what Knuth said: I paste other people's frameworks, libraries, classes, and functions together into an application of my own. I don't want to spend months refining logic and algorithms. Although I do take the time to research The Right Way to do something, I don't particularly care if my code is elegant, I just want it to work and then get to the business of actually using the application.
And what's wrong with that, anyway? Isn't the point of modern programming paradigms to reuse whatever existing components you can, to save yourself time and headaches from re-inventing the wheel? If I need AES-256, there's no way in hell I'm writing it myself when there are dozens of existing implementations out there for nearly every language by people who are much smarter than me, and which are packaged up into nice little bundles that I can wget into my source tree and use right away. How is that anything but a good thing?
Ubuntu has been out for just over 5 years, calling that "the better part of a decade" is really stretching it.
For all but the past couple of years, Ubuntu has looked "better" (my opinion) by default than most other Linux distros and that's no mean feat. I'm with you that the brown motif has largely been a negative point, but Ubuntu's priorities hasn't been the color scheme, it's been ease of use, something that Linux lacked most.
From the preview screenshots, the purple was entirely from the wallpaper and orange from certain user interface highlights. The main color for the widgets and interface seems to be beige. I think it looks quite nice, although I can see where they're going to draw a lot of criticism for copying OS X.
Mint is beautiful, but not suitable for a wide audience. It's too rich, too dark, and reminds me of something an overclocker or gamer would install. Most of us just want to use the computer and get on with our day. Ubuntu could certainly take cues from Mint, but most of it is just eye-candy. A good UI should be subtle, not flashy or distracting.
There are often more powerful tools for a job, but Ubuntu is trying to pick the best ones for their user base. All of the applications you mentioned are good, but they don't integrate as nicely into the Gnome desktop as nicely the default Ubuntu ones.
Nothing stopping you from rolling your own if it's that important to you. That's the beauty of open source.
Or you could participate in any of the many ways that Canonical helps the community participate in the direction and development of Ubuntu.
It works on the Mac because the application menu is up at the top of the screen for everything. If the application menu was within the application window, users who didn't have precise control of the mouse would constantly be hitting the Close button when they meant to hit File. On Windows/Linux, users are trained to go to the left of the window for the menu and the right for the window controls. I bet this will trip up a lot of users who use the default decorations for Lynx.
Until you've had to design a good-looking, full-featured, production-ready website for IE6, you can never truly understand.
does not compute
Netflix is heavily pimping the Roku set-top media player, which apparently runs Linux under the hood. It doesn't look like anyone's made much progress in reverse engineering the NetFlix application, but it's proof that there is already a Netflix player for Linux which has no Silverlight dependency.
Well, Anonymous Coward, you did two things wrong.
1) You made your post by clicking the Reply link a highly-ranked earlier post despite your post having nothing to do with the parent. If I had mod points, I would mod you Off-Topic.
2) No one is denying or disparaging your grandfather, his sacrifice, or the war in general. The court ruling had zip, zero, zilch to do with the Korean War. It had everything to do with copyright, however, and in this case I think I agree with the court. A Post Office employee can't walk into a museum, take a picture of a copyrighted painting, and then sell it on a stamp without paying royalties to the artist. Neither can they do the same to a sculpture. To pass the "transformative" test, the photo would have to be a lot more than just $original_sculpture + $snow.