Did you know that you can basically do that now, quickly and easily? Lots of feature-length radio shows are available via the iTunes Music Store. My favorite is "This American Life." It's hilarious if you can stand to listen to the host's mild speech impediment. (I'm not making fun of him or anything. My wife is a speech therapist, and she says that she can't listen to him speak because all she wants to do is run him through an hour of the "lee lee lee" exercise. Whatever the heck that means.)
With more and more car stereos, both factory and after-market, coming with a built-in iPod connector, I think this is a really good solution to that problem. Could stand improvement, sure, but not bad for a head start.
Judging from mailing lists and message boards, many of us are leaving Safari for Firefox
You do realize that 99.9% of all Mac users don't even know what a "mailing list" or a "message board" is, right? I'm just sayin', that's hardly a good way to make a judgment.
Its best feature is its range of extensions
Of thirty-five million Mac owners, how many do you think have ever even given a second's thought to an "extension" for their browser? A thousand? Ten thousand? Hint: The fraction is so invisibly small as to be meaningless in context.
I'm sure that Mozilla fills a niche among Mac users. It's just important that we keep in perspective just how vanishingly tiny that niche is.
Apple must now play catch-up.
In what? Building "dictionary look-up" and "translation" into the Web browser? Silly man. You must not be aware of Dashboard. Rather than building completely unrelated features into the Web browser, Apple took core browser technologies like the XHTML renderer and the JavaScript runtime and made them available through a desk-accessory-type paradigm. So you don't have to take things that are built on Web technologies but that clearly don't belong in the Web browser and build standalone widgets out of them instead.
Though Tiger is not out yet, I do believe it's the rest of the world, yet again, that's been leap-frogged.
First, it's typical to capitalize all the letters of an acronym, hence GNU which stands for "GNU's Not Unix"
I'm sure there are some people out there who think that's a funny, funny joke. I am not among them.
And there are multiple GNU licenses
The distinctions between them are neither self-evident nor particularly interesting. None of them are necessary. All of them exist to undermine the acceptance of property rights.
the copyright on Joyce's "Ulysses" expired and then the work re-entered copyright (at least in Ireland) not long ago.
That's an EU thing. If you're not happy with the way your legislature (or, in that case, trans-national pseudo-legislature) passes copyright laws, participate in your political system. Working to abolish the rights those laws protect is not the correct course of action.
Also, the PD does nothing to ensure that derivative works will remain free.
Nor should it. Derivative works, being new works, most certainly should be subject to the same protections of law that any other work enjoys.
Ensuring the freedom of derivative works was a goal from the outset of the GNU project
That's an exercise in double-speak that has to be seen to be believed. How you go from "denying the fundamental property rights of creators of derivative works" to "ensuring the freedom of derivative works" is something I don't think I will ever understand. I'm not one of those who jumped on the "let's invoke 1984 at every opportunity" bandwagon, but yours really is a case of Newspeak, isn't it? "Slavery is freedom," "Arbeit macht Frei" and all that.
You say the GNU Manifesto illustrates the desire to abolish "property rights over computer source code" but you cite no specifics.
You have read them, right? I presume you wouldn't be going on at this kind of length if you hadn't read them. So both you and I know exactly what's contained in the various Gnu manifestos.
The most fundamentally shocking to me is the section that's titled "The Argument Against Having Owners." A more overt anti-property sermon I haven't seen in a long, long time.
I'm to assume that the abolition of this would be harmful
Are you kidding? Seriously, I can't even tell any more. Are you making a joke? When you act like the importance of legal protections for natural property rights is anything less that self-evident, are you trying to be funny?
I believe that patent policy should be decided with an eye toward what its goal is and how it affects the population it restricts.
And so it is. That's why we--the population of creators and inventors, I mean --permit the government to seize our works and place them in the public domain after a period of years: because we understand the goal behind such seizure and agree that it's good. That goes both for patents and for copyrights.
I also think that patents affect different fields differently.
That's where you're wrong. Well, that is to say, that's where you're no longer on sound legal ground. In this country, we have an idea called, in shorthand, "equal protection." The fundamental idea is that the government does not discriminate against people when it applies the laws. The same laws apply equally to black people and to white people, to men and to women, to the guy who invents the longer-lasting light bulb and the guy who writes the next great computer algorithm.
Even trying to argue that some people should receive patent protection while others should not is a complete non-starter.
Finally, according to the Free Software Foundation, it is not an excercise of freedom to restrict the rights of others.
I don't recall granting the mind-blowingly inaptly named "Free Software Foundation" an exclusive license on defining the terms of the debate. And this is why. They either fail to understand or --in my opinion, more likely -- seek to deliberately obfu
RMS, who started the GNU project, would disagree with you.
I assume you're referring to the person who goes by the name "Richard M. Stallman" on the Internet. If so, then your statement isn't really true, is it? Read his "manifestos" some time. He might say that he disagrees with what I said --that his group's goal is the abolition of property rights over computer software source code --but if you read what he writes, you'll see that that is, in fact, his underlying agenda.
It allows middlemen to make the software proprietary
That's not true. This shows a misunderstanding of what the expression "public domain" means, a misunderstanding that the Gnu people go out of their way to perpetuate. See, once a work has been placed in the public domain --once the creator of that work has waived all rights to it --that work can never again be considered the property of any individual or group. You can't just pick something up from the public domain and claim that you own it. Neither the law nor common sense would imply that you can. But the Gnu people like to spread the idea that something like that would be possible.
No, the only thing you can do that's even remotely similar to that is to take a work that's in the public domain, use it as the basis of a new work, one that's sufficiently different as to justify calling it a new work, and then claim ownership of the new, derived work.
But in that case, the original work remains in the public domain. It's still there. Nobody has "made the software proprietary."
Rather, what somebody has done is to exercise his freedom to create new works based on the work of others. And naturally those new works are property like anything else, so their creators have rights over them.
The Gnu people would like to establish a system whereby those natural property rights do not exist. The first step in the process is to get people to reject the idea of property rights, to weaken traditions surrounding them. It's a clever plan. And, unfortunately, there are a few people out there who have fallen for it.
It's depressingly evident that you count yourself among those people.
RMS isn't just thinking about the freedom of the users of the program, but the freedom of the users of derivative works as well.
But that's just the thing, don't you see? That's got nothing to do with freedom. It's got to do with entitlement, and with the implicit rejection of property rights. Calling that "freedom" is a malicious misnomer.
in some countries, computer programming is regulated by patent law as well
As well it should be. Computer programs are inventions just as surely as the cotton gin or the transmission or the floppy drive.
Compared to the default of copyright (which is to say "no" to virtually everything it regulates), the GPL is quite permissive.
Then why is it necessary? Since a work that's placed in the public domain by its creator can never be removed from the public domain, ever, what possible purpose can the Gnu license -- that's what you mean by "GPL," right? --serve, if not to truncate the property rights of those creators who would wish to use existing works as the basis for new works?
It seems self-evident to me that if the stated purpose of the Gnu organization is its actual purpose, then the Gnu license is utterly unnecessary. Yet, they keep the Gnu license around... which means that they must have some purpose in mind other than the one that they tout. By reading the words of the various members of the group, you can decide for yourself what their agenda is. I think I've got a pretty good idea.
The question is who's freedom is being increased...
The GNU project's goal isn't innovation or being there first, it's software freedom.
Well, that's kind of tangential to the point here, but I don't really think that sort of comment should be allowed to pass unchallenged. That's absolutely not the goal of the Gnu project. The Gnu project's goal is the abolition of property rights over computer software source code. Freedom has nothing to do with it. In fact, the Gnu advocates require -- or try to require, anyway --people to release software only under a restrictive license that prohibits whole classes of reuse, rather than simply contributing it to the public domain. Freedom? Heck, no.
But that's not the topic here.
comparing GNOME (which is part of the GNU project) and a proprietor's work is bound to lead to confusion and misunderstanding
Yes, that's certainly true. The confusion is, "Why does this software seem like it came straight out of the mid-1980s?" And the misunderstanding is, "This software sucks."
Well, wait. No. That last part isn't a misunderstanding at all. It is, in fact, an understanding. The misunderstanding is, "This software is better than Windows in a few very narrow and specific ways, and it's cheaper. Therefore this software is good." That's the misunderstanding. The truth of the matter is that simply being better than something bad doesn't equate to being good.
I really do wish that Apple had forked Gecko instead of KHTML.
If I remember correctly, that wouldn't have been possible even if it had been a good idea. Gecko is only available under a restrictive, Gnu-style license. KHTML, on the other hand, is free. If I remember that correctly.
But apart from that, there were other important considerations. Like the fact that KHTML was something like one-sixth the size of Gecko, was easier to extend and maintain, and was just plain better written in the opinion of the folks who made the decision.
a clearly equal if not superior peer product exists in Firefox
Um. No. Have you ever actually compared Safari and Firefox? I don't mean the angel-counting of comparing this rendering blah blah to that rendering whozit. I'm talking about actually comparing them, as programs, in terms of user experience.
Firefox might be a great Windows program, and a mind-blowingly fantastic Unix program. But as a Mac program, it just plain sucks.
Are you at all entertained when you watch a science fiction movie from the 50's?
You mean like Forbidden Planet (1956) or When Worlds Collide (1951) or Donovan's Brain (1956) or The Time Machine (1960)? Why, yes. Yes, I am.
Because those movies told entertaining stories, and told them well.
When a writer tries to sell you on the notion of a jetplane flying in space, and aliens who walk around with exposed brains sticking out of the top of their head, don't you think it loses something?
Nope. It loses something when the characters are poorly drawn or the plot isn't interesting or there's no emotional engagement with the story that's being told.
See, I think your problem is that you're thinking about science fiction. You should instead be thinking about science fiction. You'll be happier in the long run.
all your answers are evasive to the real point of the problem
You're absolutely right. I should have spent more time on the fact that "Ricardo" is an illiterate mouthbreather who hasn't got the first idea of what he's talking about. I definitely should have been more clear about that. My apologies.
do you real know what you are talking about?
Yes, I "real know."
do you real use a computer for work?
Yes, a two-year-old Power Mac G4.
they sure can do better on...office suite
Um. I'm gonna go real slow here, because apparently your meds started to kick in while you were writing your comment: Apple has released a new product. The new product is called iWork. iWork consists of a word processor and a presentation program. The word processor is called Pages. The presentation program is called Keynote. These are good programs. Apple made them, and they are good. Apple has, in other words, "done better."
Kay?
i love when you say ppl dont need ftp, and the native one is enough, came on.
I guess it would be too much to ask that your comments either contain an idea or intelligible writing, huh? I'm not greedy. I'd be happy with either one or the other.
do you real tryed to upload files at least once?
Yes, I "real tryed" just a couple of weeks ago, in fact. Somebody asked me to upload some digital pictures to his FTP server because he was too baffled by the concept of trying to download them from my iDisk. So I downloaded Transmit and did what I needed to do. (Thanks, Panic, for offering a free trial.)
are macos users so naive or inacessible that they dont pull stuff from ftp servers?
Um. I think you've kind of got that backwards. The Internet has moved on. Most stuff isn't stored on FTP servers any more. To access the occasional stuff that is, the Finder handles connecting to and downloading files from FTP servers. If you need to upload, Transmit is the program of choice.
came on give me a break!
Okay, I will "came on" and give you a break. You got it.
Of course they're inaccurate and out of date. The number given totaled the US contribution at $350 million. Private contributions to the ARC alone have exceeded half a billion dollars.
That's not necessary. If you pick up a phone on a disconnected line with no dial tone, and dial "911," you'll get an operator. That's a key part of the 911 system.
Do not try this to see if it works. In most places, there's a fairly steep fine for making a non-emergency call to 911.
Because, from a Mac user's point of view, Open Office is just terrible, terrible software. It isn't even a Mac application. It has to run under X11, a windowing environment that isn't installed by default and that most Mac users will never need or want. It doesn't support Mac givens like drag-and-drop or advanced typography. Hell, it doesn't even support cut and paste!
Put a computer user down in front of Open Office on the Mac, and the response is going to be "This sucks." Apple, understandably, doesn't want anybody to have a reason to say "This sucks" while sitting in front of a Macintosh.
why apple dont you push mozilla more upfront
See the above answer, minus the part about X11. Mozilla (Camaro, Firebird, whatever the hell they're calling themselves this week) just sucks compared to Safari.
why apple dont you push a native and complete workable FTP client more upfront with UTF-8 character set support!!!
What, you mean like Transmit from Panic Software?
If you consider that there are about 35 million Mac users out there, the fraction of them who ever need to use an FTP client is vanishingly small. If all you need to do is download files, the Finder takes care of that for you: FTP URLs are handed off to the Finder. For the one-in-a-thousand who need to upload, Panic has your number.
safari miserably fails to complay with w3c standards
Um? That's...what's the word I'm looking for here? Wrong.
fail to run properly javascript
Again with the wrong.
fail to run properly flash apllications
No, also not true.
I think the problem here might be related to the fact that you haven't got the foggiest idea what you're talking about. I think that might be a part of it.
Gnome is a serious competitor to Windows, yes. That's because, frankly, both of them suck.
I don't mean that in the "I don't like them" sense. I mean it in the sense that both of them are built on 20th-century ideas that seem so bafflingly dated today.
Spend some time using a Mac, learn about the new ideas that went into the Mac OS, and see if you still think Gnome is even on the same planet.
(You know, when the Mac was first introduced, Apple had a "test-drive a Mac" program. They should reinstate it. It wouldn't take much. Right now, you can buy anything you want at the Apple store and return it within 10 days for a 10% restocking fee. Just waive the fee on Macs. If you buy a Mac mini or a Power Mac G5, you can return it within 10 days for a full refund. That might be a good idea.)
Well, it's not really "new-from-scratch." In fact, a huge amount of Pages code was reused from Keynote.
I think it's worth pointing out that Keynote is not a new application at all. It was in heavy use at Apple internally for several years before it was productized and released to the public. It was so well received, for a 1.0 product, that Apple started working on a document-authoring application using some of the same basic ideas.
Obviously there's a good explanation (which conveniently ignores modern physics).
Why yes, as a matter of fact, there is. Ron Moore, who created the show and wrote that episode, explains it on his blog.
Why 33 minutes?
The truth is, there's no real answer. It's just a random number that felt right when I came up with the idea that our people were under continuous, relentless attack since the end of the pilot. I wanted it to be a short interval, just long enough for them to grab a bite to eat, jump in the shower and maybe try to catch a catnap before dragging themselves back to their duty stations and begin the whole tedious, terrifying ordeal all over again.
A deeper truth is, I was never interested in coming up with an explanation for Why? Never. I mean, I suppose I could've come up with a sufficiently important-sounding bit of technobabble that would've made sense (you see, the Cylon double-talk sensors tracking the Olympic Carrier's nonsense drive signature needed 15 minutes to relay the made-up data wave through the pretend continuum, then the Cylon navigational hyper silly system needed another 10 minutes to recalculate the flux capacitor, etc.) but what would that have really added to the drama? How does explaining that 33 minute interval help our understanding of Laura's terrible moment of decision, or bring us to any greater knowledge of Dualla's search for her missing family and friends, or yield insight into Baltar's morally shattered psyche?
It doesn't, of course. The answer, however artfully it may (or may not) have been crafted can only subtract from the experience we have in watching the episode. Not knowing the how's or why's of the Cylon attack puts us in the same seat as the characters we're watching. They're in the dark, and we're in the dark. The relentless attack is unfathomable in its origin and unstoppable in its execution. It's mortality coming at you on a loop. If you only had 33 minutes before the next time you could die, what would you do? And what about the time after that? And the time after that? At a certain point, you stop caring about why it's happening, all you know is that it is happening, and it's happening to you.
So the mystery of 33 will be permanent on this show. No explanation, not even the attempt. Let it just be a number that seemed like an eternity for five long days on the battlestar Galactica.
So yeah. There's a good explanation. And it does ignore modern physics. Because, you know, it's got nothing to do with physics. It's got to do with storytelling, something that's far more relevant to science fiction than the number of light-seconds in a hyper-light jump.
Any ship that large would HAVE to implement a network.
The U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, with a displacement of 60,000 tons and a compliment of 4,582 officers and men, was launched in 1960. It's still in service today.
There are computers aboard, of course, but there weren't when she did her first tour. And even today, there's no ubiquitous, ship-wide computer network. You know how the captain of the Kitty Hawk gets the ship to stop? He gives an order to a guy who gives an order to a guy who picks up a phone. Downstairs, another guy answers the phone, hears the order, and turns a valve.
Your average small office has a more sophisticated computer network than you'd find aboard an aircraft carrier.
The idea of a space-borne aircraft carrier without a computer network is not only plausible, it's a direct reflection of the aircraft carriers currently sailing the seven seas today, at the dawn of the 21st century.
I expect some time travel at some point.
Ron Moore is on record as having said, more than once, that there will never be time travel or aliens in "Battlestar Galactica."
A battlestar, capable of holding 10,000 people or more, and not a single computer on it?
"No, there are many computers on this ship. But they're not networked....Many good men and women lost their lives aboard this ship because someone wanted a faster computer to make life easier. I'm sorry that I'm inconveniencing you or the teachers, but I will not allow a networked computerized system to be placed on this ship while I'm in command."
It's from the series pilot. You might try watching it sometime. It's good.
This entire remake has stupid written all over it.
I agree that something has "stupid" written all over it, but I don't really think it's the TV show.
Congratulations. You've just hit on the core premise of the entire show.
"The cylons were created by man. They rebelled. They evolved. They look and feel human. Some are programmed to think they are human. There are many copies.
Firefly was a FOX joint. The Sci-Fi channel wasn't involved.
Farscape was quality television for the first couple of seasons, but then it got incredibly bad. The writers started screwing with the ensemble cast, throwing in poorly-drawn characters (what was the deal with that old woman?) and what I called the "Aussie redhead of the week." It was definitely time for Farscape to come to an end.
Galactica was a 'light' series, and that's why it was entertaining.
Yes, it was so "entertaining" that it pulled in dismal ratings, was cancelled after a single season and was replaced with a re-tooled show that was so abysmally bad that it got the ax after just a half-dozen episodes or so.
Why should the Galactica of today be any different?
Two reasons.
First: The original "Battlestar Galactica" was really bad. Sure, it had its high points, but even the high points were pretty lame. I mean, come on. In the first hour of the pilot, the cylons annihilated nearly the entire human race. In the second hour, the refugees were partying it up on the casino planet. What the hell?
So the first reason that a new "Galactica" should be different is that the original "Galactica" was just plain bad.
The second reason is that TV can be more than just mindless fun. It can be emotionally engaging, it can be thought provoking, it can make us reexamine our circumstances from a different point of view. Really good TV can make you laugh, cry and think, all in the span of an hour. It's certainly true that most new TV shows don't aspire to that level of art, but when one comes along that does, why should we shoot it down?
we don't want another dark series, we don't want more political issues or moral dillemas. We want space adventurers and space opera.
The reviews (ubiquitous and glowing) and the overnights (unprecedented) seem to prove you at least a little bit wrong.
I just want entertaining television
Then watch "Battlestar Galactica." While opinions may differ and tastes may vary, for my money it's the best thing on TV right now.
Well, not really, not if you consider that a bullet that doesn't hit anything just keeps going. It's not like they're creating vast fields of bullets that pose a hazard to future shipping or anything.
But the important point about space munitions is kinetic energy. It's one thing for a spaceship to hit an object that's moving at solar-orbit speeds. But it's something entirely different to slam into something that's moving at a notable fraction of the speed of light. (That's just a for-instance. I have no idea if the munitions fired by the Vipers and the Galactica are supposed to have that much KE or not.)
One aspect of the Miniseries that I also noticed was the Americanification of the series.
Ron Moore is on record saying that the core idea behind the show is, "What if this happened to us?" The whole "they're a different culture" idea was very calmly and deliberately throw out the window before the first word of the first draft of the pilot was ever put on paper.
So it's not like the writers are just being lazy. They're making a creative choice to tell a story about people that are like us but different in some superficial ways.
The cousel of the twelve is totally gone
No, the "Quorum of the Twelve" is just shattered. Imagine the US Congress after a massive nuclear war. In the late-season episode "Colonial Day," the process of rebuilding the "Quorum of the Twelve" and re-establishing the civilian government is shown.
Adama simply can't take control of the government except by brute force
That's absolutely right. I really liked the way Moore chose to break out the military and civilian organizations and create the character of Laura Roslin. The constant push-and-pull between the military command authority and the civilian government is both interesting and realistic... not to mention particularly topical today. But the best part about it is that Roslin and Adama aren't just constantly battling each other. Sometimes they disagree while sometimes they're on exactly the same page. It's a very complex relationship, and I think a very interesting one.
There was that --"We're in the middle of a war and you're taking orders from a schoolteacher?" --but there was also the scene where Doral takes Apollo upstairs to see the President, with the idea that Apollo will get Roslin to sit down and shut up.
Apollo walks in on Roslin as she's calmly and thoughtfully running the show. She's got it under control, as much as is possible under the circumstances.
After a few minutes of this, Doral looks at Apollo expectantly, and Apollo just sort of half-smiles and says, "The lady's in charge."
In other words, "She's doing the job as well as or better than anybody else could. Let's move on to the next thing."
Slashdot Mirror
Did you know that you can basically do that now, quickly and easily? Lots of feature-length radio shows are available via the iTunes Music Store. My favorite is "This American Life." It's hilarious if you can stand to listen to the host's mild speech impediment. (I'm not making fun of him or anything. My wife is a speech therapist, and she says that she can't listen to him speak because all she wants to do is run him through an hour of the "lee lee lee" exercise. Whatever the heck that means.)
With more and more car stereos, both factory and after-market, coming with a built-in iPod connector, I think this is a really good solution to that problem. Could stand improvement, sure, but not bad for a head start.
My girlfriend didn't want to carry around something that looked like an angry PDA
Hee hee. Thanks for writing that. You made me laugh on a Monday morning, which is no small feat.
Judging from mailing lists and message boards, many of us are leaving Safari for Firefox
You do realize that 99.9% of all Mac users don't even know what a "mailing list" or a "message board" is, right? I'm just sayin', that's hardly a good way to make a judgment.
Its best feature is its range of extensions
Of thirty-five million Mac owners, how many do you think have ever even given a second's thought to an "extension" for their browser? A thousand? Ten thousand? Hint: The fraction is so invisibly small as to be meaningless in context.
I'm sure that Mozilla fills a niche among Mac users. It's just important that we keep in perspective just how vanishingly tiny that niche is.
Apple must now play catch-up.
In what? Building "dictionary look-up" and "translation" into the Web browser? Silly man. You must not be aware of Dashboard. Rather than building completely unrelated features into the Web browser, Apple took core browser technologies like the XHTML renderer and the JavaScript runtime and made them available through a desk-accessory-type paradigm. So you don't have to take things that are built on Web technologies but that clearly don't belong in the Web browser and build standalone widgets out of them instead.
Though Tiger is not out yet, I do believe it's the rest of the world, yet again, that's been leap-frogged.
First, it's typical to capitalize all the letters of an acronym, hence GNU which stands for "GNU's Not Unix"
I'm sure there are some people out there who think that's a funny, funny joke. I am not among them.
And there are multiple GNU licenses
The distinctions between them are neither self-evident nor particularly interesting. None of them are necessary. All of them exist to undermine the acceptance of property rights.
the copyright on Joyce's "Ulysses" expired and then the work re-entered copyright (at least in Ireland) not long ago.
That's an EU thing. If you're not happy with the way your legislature (or, in that case, trans-national pseudo-legislature) passes copyright laws, participate in your political system. Working to abolish the rights those laws protect is not the correct course of action.
Also, the PD does nothing to ensure that derivative works will remain free.
Nor should it. Derivative works, being new works, most certainly should be subject to the same protections of law that any other work enjoys.
Ensuring the freedom of derivative works was a goal from the outset of the GNU project
That's an exercise in double-speak that has to be seen to be believed. How you go from "denying the fundamental property rights of creators of derivative works" to "ensuring the freedom of derivative works" is something I don't think I will ever understand. I'm not one of those who jumped on the "let's invoke 1984 at every opportunity" bandwagon, but yours really is a case of Newspeak, isn't it? "Slavery is freedom," "Arbeit macht Frei" and all that.
You say the GNU Manifesto illustrates the desire to abolish "property rights over computer source code" but you cite no specifics.
You have read them, right? I presume you wouldn't be going on at this kind of length if you hadn't read them. So both you and I know exactly what's contained in the various Gnu manifestos.
The most fundamentally shocking to me is the section that's titled "The Argument Against Having Owners." A more overt anti-property sermon I haven't seen in a long, long time.
I'm to assume that the abolition of this would be harmful
Are you kidding? Seriously, I can't even tell any more. Are you making a joke? When you act like the importance of legal protections for natural property rights is anything less that self-evident, are you trying to be funny?
I believe that patent policy should be decided with an eye toward what its goal is and how it affects the population it restricts.
And so it is. That's why we--the population of creators and inventors, I mean --permit the government to seize our works and place them in the public domain after a period of years: because we understand the goal behind such seizure and agree that it's good. That goes both for patents and for copyrights.
I also think that patents affect different fields differently.
That's where you're wrong. Well, that is to say, that's where you're no longer on sound legal ground. In this country, we have an idea called, in shorthand, "equal protection." The fundamental idea is that the government does not discriminate against people when it applies the laws. The same laws apply equally to black people and to white people, to men and to women, to the guy who invents the longer-lasting light bulb and the guy who writes the next great computer algorithm.
Even trying to argue that some people should receive patent protection while others should not is a complete non-starter.
Finally, according to the Free Software Foundation, it is not an excercise of freedom to restrict the rights of others.
I don't recall granting the mind-blowingly inaptly named "Free Software Foundation" an exclusive license on defining the terms of the debate. And this is why. They either fail to understand or --in my opinion, more likely -- seek to deliberately obfu
RMS, who started the GNU project, would disagree with you.
... which means that they must have some purpose in mind other than the one that they tout. By reading the words of the various members of the group, you can decide for yourself what their agenda is. I think I've got a pretty good idea.
...
I assume you're referring to the person who goes by the name "Richard M. Stallman" on the Internet. If so, then your statement isn't really true, is it? Read his "manifestos" some time. He might say that he disagrees with what I said --that his group's goal is the abolition of property rights over computer software source code --but if you read what he writes, you'll see that that is, in fact, his underlying agenda.
It allows middlemen to make the software proprietary
That's not true. This shows a misunderstanding of what the expression "public domain" means, a misunderstanding that the Gnu people go out of their way to perpetuate. See, once a work has been placed in the public domain --once the creator of that work has waived all rights to it --that work can never again be considered the property of any individual or group. You can't just pick something up from the public domain and claim that you own it. Neither the law nor common sense would imply that you can. But the Gnu people like to spread the idea that something like that would be possible.
No, the only thing you can do that's even remotely similar to that is to take a work that's in the public domain, use it as the basis of a new work, one that's sufficiently different as to justify calling it a new work, and then claim ownership of the new, derived work.
But in that case, the original work remains in the public domain. It's still there. Nobody has "made the software proprietary."
Rather, what somebody has done is to exercise his freedom to create new works based on the work of others. And naturally those new works are property like anything else, so their creators have rights over them.
The Gnu people would like to establish a system whereby those natural property rights do not exist. The first step in the process is to get people to reject the idea of property rights, to weaken traditions surrounding them. It's a clever plan. And, unfortunately, there are a few people out there who have fallen for it.
It's depressingly evident that you count yourself among those people.
RMS isn't just thinking about the freedom of the users of the program, but the freedom of the users of derivative works as well.
But that's just the thing, don't you see? That's got nothing to do with freedom. It's got to do with entitlement, and with the implicit rejection of property rights. Calling that "freedom" is a malicious misnomer.
in some countries, computer programming is regulated by patent law as well
As well it should be. Computer programs are inventions just as surely as the cotton gin or the transmission or the floppy drive.
Compared to the default of copyright (which is to say "no" to virtually everything it regulates), the GPL is quite permissive.
Then why is it necessary? Since a work that's placed in the public domain by its creator can never be removed from the public domain, ever, what possible purpose can the Gnu license -- that's what you mean by "GPL," right? --serve, if not to truncate the property rights of those creators who would wish to use existing works as the basis for new works?
It seems self-evident to me that if the stated purpose of the Gnu organization is its actual purpose, then the Gnu license is utterly unnecessary. Yet, they keep the Gnu license around
The question is who's freedom is being increased
Because some are more equal than others, right?
The GNU project's goal isn't innovation or being there first, it's software freedom.
Well, that's kind of tangential to the point here, but I don't really think that sort of comment should be allowed to pass unchallenged. That's absolutely not the goal of the Gnu project. The Gnu project's goal is the abolition of property rights over computer software source code. Freedom has nothing to do with it. In fact, the Gnu advocates require -- or try to require, anyway --people to release software only under a restrictive license that prohibits whole classes of reuse, rather than simply contributing it to the public domain. Freedom? Heck, no.
But that's not the topic here.
comparing GNOME (which is part of the GNU project) and a proprietor's work is bound to lead to confusion and misunderstanding
Yes, that's certainly true. The confusion is, "Why does this software seem like it came straight out of the mid-1980s?" And the misunderstanding is, "This software sucks."
Well, wait. No. That last part isn't a misunderstanding at all. It is, in fact, an understanding. The misunderstanding is, "This software is better than Windows in a few very narrow and specific ways, and it's cheaper. Therefore this software is good." That's the misunderstanding. The truth of the matter is that simply being better than something bad doesn't equate to being good.
The FTP support is TERRIBLE in OS X
Gopher support is even worse. Where's the outrage?
I really do wish that Apple had forked Gecko instead of KHTML.
If I remember correctly, that wouldn't have been possible even if it had been a good idea. Gecko is only available under a restrictive, Gnu-style license. KHTML, on the other hand, is free. If I remember that correctly.
But apart from that, there were other important considerations. Like the fact that KHTML was something like one-sixth the size of Gecko, was easier to extend and maintain, and was just plain better written in the opinion of the folks who made the decision.
a clearly equal if not superior peer product exists in Firefox
Um. No. Have you ever actually compared Safari and Firefox? I don't mean the angel-counting of comparing this rendering blah blah to that rendering whozit. I'm talking about actually comparing them, as programs, in terms of user experience.
Firefox might be a great Windows program, and a mind-blowingly fantastic Unix program. But as a Mac program, it just plain sucks.
Are you at all entertained when you watch a science fiction movie from the 50's?
You mean like Forbidden Planet (1956) or When Worlds Collide (1951) or Donovan's Brain (1956) or The Time Machine (1960)? Why, yes. Yes, I am.
Because those movies told entertaining stories, and told them well.
When a writer tries to sell you on the notion of a jetplane flying in space, and aliens who walk around with exposed brains sticking out of the top of their head, don't you think it loses something?
Nope. It loses something when the characters are poorly drawn or the plot isn't interesting or there's no emotional engagement with the story that's being told.
See, I think your problem is that you're thinking about science fiction. You should instead be thinking about science fiction. You'll be happier in the long run.
all your answers are evasive to the real point of the problem
...office suite
You're absolutely right. I should have spent more time on the fact that "Ricardo" is an illiterate mouthbreather who hasn't got the first idea of what he's talking about. I definitely should have been more clear about that. My apologies.
do you real know what you are talking about?
Yes, I "real know."
do you real use a computer for work?
Yes, a two-year-old Power Mac G4.
they sure can do better on
Um. I'm gonna go real slow here, because apparently your meds started to kick in while you were writing your comment: Apple has released a new product. The new product is called iWork. iWork consists of a word processor and a presentation program. The word processor is called Pages. The presentation program is called Keynote. These are good programs. Apple made them, and they are good. Apple has, in other words, "done better."
Kay?
i love when you say ppl dont need ftp, and the native one is enough, came on.
I guess it would be too much to ask that your comments either contain an idea or intelligible writing, huh? I'm not greedy. I'd be happy with either one or the other.
do you real tryed to upload files at least once?
Yes, I "real tryed" just a couple of weeks ago, in fact. Somebody asked me to upload some digital pictures to his FTP server because he was too baffled by the concept of trying to download them from my iDisk. So I downloaded Transmit and did what I needed to do. (Thanks, Panic, for offering a free trial.)
are macos users so naive or inacessible that they dont pull stuff from ftp servers?
Um. I think you've kind of got that backwards. The Internet has moved on. Most stuff isn't stored on FTP servers any more. To access the occasional stuff that is, the Finder handles connecting to and downloading files from FTP servers. If you need to upload, Transmit is the program of choice.
came on give me a break!
Okay, I will "came on" and give you a break. You got it.
Of course they're inaccurate and out of date. The number given totaled the US contribution at $350 million. Private contributions to the ARC alone have exceeded half a billion dollars.
That's not necessary. If you pick up a phone on a disconnected line with no dial tone, and dial "911," you'll get an operator. That's a key part of the 911 system.
Do not try this to see if it works. In most places, there's a fairly steep fine for making a non-emergency call to 911.
Apple is also highly unlikely (at this stage) to stick its oar into the OOO pond.
"Brian, there's a message in my Alphabits! It says 'Ooooooo.'"
"Peter, those are Cheerios."
why apple dont you push openoffice more upfront
...what's the word I'm looking for here? Wrong.
Because, from a Mac user's point of view, Open Office is just terrible, terrible software. It isn't even a Mac application. It has to run under X11, a windowing environment that isn't installed by default and that most Mac users will never need or want. It doesn't support Mac givens like drag-and-drop or advanced typography. Hell, it doesn't even support cut and paste!
Put a computer user down in front of Open Office on the Mac, and the response is going to be "This sucks." Apple, understandably, doesn't want anybody to have a reason to say "This sucks" while sitting in front of a Macintosh.
why apple dont you push mozilla more upfront
See the above answer, minus the part about X11. Mozilla (Camaro, Firebird, whatever the hell they're calling themselves this week) just sucks compared to Safari.
why apple dont you push a native and complete workable FTP client more upfront with UTF-8 character set support!!!
What, you mean like Transmit from Panic Software?
If you consider that there are about 35 million Mac users out there, the fraction of them who ever need to use an FTP client is vanishingly small. If all you need to do is download files, the Finder takes care of that for you: FTP URLs are handed off to the Finder. For the one-in-a-thousand who need to upload, Panic has your number.
safari miserably fails to complay with w3c standards
Um? That's
fail to run properly javascript
Again with the wrong.
fail to run properly flash apllications
No, also not true.
I think the problem here might be related to the fact that you haven't got the foggiest idea what you're talking about. I think that might be a part of it.
Gnome is a serious competitor to Windows, yes. That's because, frankly, both of them suck.
I don't mean that in the "I don't like them" sense. I mean it in the sense that both of them are built on 20th-century ideas that seem so bafflingly dated today.
Spend some time using a Mac, learn about the new ideas that went into the Mac OS, and see if you still think Gnome is even on the same planet.
(You know, when the Mac was first introduced, Apple had a "test-drive a Mac" program. They should reinstate it. It wouldn't take much. Right now, you can buy anything you want at the Apple store and return it within 10 days for a 10% restocking fee. Just waive the fee on Macs. If you buy a Mac mini or a Power Mac G5, you can return it within 10 days for a full refund. That might be a good idea.)
Well, it's not really "new-from-scratch." In fact, a huge amount of Pages code was reused from Keynote.
I think it's worth pointing out that Keynote is not a new application at all. It was in heavy use at Apple internally for several years before it was productized and released to the public. It was so well received, for a 1.0 product, that Apple started working on a document-authoring application using some of the same basic ideas.
Why yes, as a matter of fact, there is. Ron Moore, who created the show and wrote that episode, explains it on his blog.
So yeah. There's a good explanation. And it does ignore modern physics. Because, you know, it's got nothing to do with physics. It's got to do with storytelling, something that's far more relevant to science fiction than the number of light-seconds in a hyper-light jump.
Any ship that large would HAVE to implement a network.
The U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, with a displacement of 60,000 tons and a compliment of 4,582 officers and men, was launched in 1960. It's still in service today.
There are computers aboard, of course, but there weren't when she did her first tour. And even today, there's no ubiquitous, ship-wide computer network. You know how the captain of the Kitty Hawk gets the ship to stop? He gives an order to a guy who gives an order to a guy who picks up a phone. Downstairs, another guy answers the phone, hears the order, and turns a valve.
Your average small office has a more sophisticated computer network than you'd find aboard an aircraft carrier.
The idea of a space-borne aircraft carrier without a computer network is not only plausible, it's a direct reflection of the aircraft carriers currently sailing the seven seas today, at the dawn of the 21st century.
I expect some time travel at some point.
Ron Moore is on record as having said, more than once, that there will never be time travel or aliens in "Battlestar Galactica."
A battlestar, capable of holding 10,000 people or more, and not a single computer on it?
...Many good men and women lost their lives aboard this ship because someone wanted a faster computer to make life easier. I'm sorry that I'm inconveniencing you or the teachers, but I will not allow a networked computerized system to be placed on this ship while I'm in command."
"No, there are many computers on this ship. But they're not networked.
It's from the series pilot. You might try watching it sometime. It's good.
This entire remake has stupid written all over it.
I agree that something has "stupid" written all over it, but I don't really think it's the TV show.
To what end?
Congratulations. You've just hit on the core premise of the entire show.
"The cylons were created by man. They rebelled. They evolved. They look and feel human. Some are programmed to think they are human. There are many copies.
"And they have a plan."
Firefly was a FOX joint. The Sci-Fi channel wasn't involved.
Farscape was quality television for the first couple of seasons, but then it got incredibly bad. The writers started screwing with the ensemble cast, throwing in poorly-drawn characters (what was the deal with that old woman?) and what I called the "Aussie redhead of the week." It was definitely time for Farscape to come to an end.
Galactica was a 'light' series, and that's why it was entertaining.
Yes, it was so "entertaining" that it pulled in dismal ratings, was cancelled after a single season and was replaced with a re-tooled show that was so abysmally bad that it got the ax after just a half-dozen episodes or so.
Why should the Galactica of today be any different?
Two reasons.
First: The original "Battlestar Galactica" was really bad. Sure, it had its high points, but even the high points were pretty lame. I mean, come on. In the first hour of the pilot, the cylons annihilated nearly the entire human race. In the second hour, the refugees were partying it up on the casino planet. What the hell?
So the first reason that a new "Galactica" should be different is that the original "Galactica" was just plain bad.
The second reason is that TV can be more than just mindless fun. It can be emotionally engaging, it can be thought provoking, it can make us reexamine our circumstances from a different point of view. Really good TV can make you laugh, cry and think, all in the span of an hour. It's certainly true that most new TV shows don't aspire to that level of art, but when one comes along that does, why should we shoot it down?
we don't want another dark series, we don't want more political issues or moral dillemas. We want space adventurers and space opera.
The reviews (ubiquitous and glowing) and the overnights (unprecedented) seem to prove you at least a little bit wrong.
I just want entertaining television
Then watch "Battlestar Galactica." While opinions may differ and tastes may vary, for my money it's the best thing on TV right now.
Face it, bullets in space just add debris
... not to mention particularly topical today. But the best part about it is that Roslin and Adama aren't just constantly battling each other. Sometimes they disagree while sometimes they're on exactly the same page. It's a very complex relationship, and I think a very interesting one.
Well, not really, not if you consider that a bullet that doesn't hit anything just keeps going. It's not like they're creating vast fields of bullets that pose a hazard to future shipping or anything.
But the important point about space munitions is kinetic energy. It's one thing for a spaceship to hit an object that's moving at solar-orbit speeds. But it's something entirely different to slam into something that's moving at a notable fraction of the speed of light. (That's just a for-instance. I have no idea if the munitions fired by the Vipers and the Galactica are supposed to have that much KE or not.)
One aspect of the Miniseries that I also noticed was the Americanification of the series.
Ron Moore is on record saying that the core idea behind the show is, "What if this happened to us?" The whole "they're a different culture" idea was very calmly and deliberately throw out the window before the first word of the first draft of the pilot was ever put on paper.
So it's not like the writers are just being lazy. They're making a creative choice to tell a story about people that are like us but different in some superficial ways.
The cousel of the twelve is totally gone
No, the "Quorum of the Twelve" is just shattered. Imagine the US Congress after a massive nuclear war. In the late-season episode "Colonial Day," the process of rebuilding the "Quorum of the Twelve" and re-establishing the civilian government is shown.
Adama simply can't take control of the government except by brute force
That's absolutely right. I really liked the way Moore chose to break out the military and civilian organizations and create the character of Laura Roslin. The constant push-and-pull between the military command authority and the civilian government is both interesting and realistic
There was that --"We're in the middle of a war and you're taking orders from a schoolteacher?" --but there was also the scene where Doral takes Apollo upstairs to see the President, with the idea that Apollo will get Roslin to sit down and shut up.
Apollo walks in on Roslin as she's calmly and thoughtfully running the show. She's got it under control, as much as is possible under the circumstances.
After a few minutes of this, Doral looks at Apollo expectantly, and Apollo just sort of half-smiles and says, "The lady's in charge."
In other words, "She's doing the job as well as or better than anybody else could. Let's move on to the next thing."
A blogger has a better idea.