If this patent is not valid in the rest of the world, can we just get on with our lives? - No they will hit us with shock and awe. You wonder why Americans are not popular every where they go?
Um, I think all the companies are being sued are American, and their products are used globally. If you don't use anything made by American companies, though, feel free to be unconcerned about this issue. Or maybe you think those American companies are noble enough to only pass litigation costs along to customers in the US market?
Waterworld: sucks 236, rules/rocks 1255
Mission to Mars: sucks 93, rules/rocks 2280
Mars Attacks: sucks 204, rules/rocks 922
Battlefield Earth: sucks 81, rules/rocks 1624
The Matrix: sucks 1294, rules/rocks 6641
Red Planet: sucks 117, rules/rocks 2847
(Note: the terms "Mission to Mars" and "Red Planet" combined with "rocks" may be yielding hits based on actual Martian lithology, not the movies.)
So there you have it, all of these movies rule more than they suck. I don't much agree with these results, but what can I say? This is hard science we're dealing with here; the TOOT does not lie!
The link
http://www.w hit ehouse.gov/library/hot_releases/November_4_2000.ht ml no longer goes to the President's statement.
Perhaps the link generated too much traffic.
Perhaps the Secret Service is now closely monitoring the threat of this "slashdot.org" which seems to be attempting a DoS attack on whitehouse.gov.;-)
Hooray! Now you can play all of those resource-limited console games on your PC, without those pesky things like user-friendliness and being able to hook it up to the TV! Yes, now you can enjoy all your favorite Dreamcast games with the joys of installing infuriating, unstable Windows drivers, solving hardware conflicts, and everyone getting to huddle around your computer desk to play 4 player games! All for about the same price as a standard Dreamcast!
I certainly hope this is a rumor, or else Sega is throwing some good money away.
This article brings to mind a pet peeve I've had -- people who advocate running only Free Software on PCs but are quite content to play with game consoles. The hypocrisy, of course, is that today's consoles ARE software platforms.
From an ethical standpoint (using RMS ethics:), playing games on Windows is no worse than using an N64, yet I freqently hear comments like "Sorry, can't play [game] because it's proprietary non open source crap," followed by "Time for some Zelda action!" as if consoles are somehow different because they aren't PC-like to end users.
Of course, there is always the argument of price with consoles vs game PCs, but that's another barrel of worms...
I thought Unix users referred to it as just "mail," as per the command, using the term "snail mail" in those strange instances when one should wish to use that paper and ink stuff. The "e" is just for people who don't already assume that mail should be electronic.
In any event, I suspect the hyphenated form will fade from use, much as spellings like "to-day" have fallen out of use.
Although, as a domain holder, my knee-jerk reaction to this is "Hey! My domains are very much my property!" I have to agree that "property" is the wrong legal protection for domain names.
The current domain name system was never intended to be a keyword based system, unfortunately this is what it has become. As a result we have domain name speculators running rampant, as evidenced by Netcraft's recent report that over 10 million web sites are inactive. If domains are treated as property, then a domain name is like real estate, and you should scoop up whatever looks potentially valuable with the hope of unloading it at a nice profit.
It is entirely feasible that for some reason or another the present domain hierarchy could be abandoned and replaced with a better system. (I personally doubt it though, since a lot of companies have dumped a lot of money into promoting their domain names by now.) Registry services need to be free to withdraw a domain or shuffle things around if necessary.
The phone number analogy, while still a crappy way to think of domains, is decidely better than treating domains as real estate.
That said... 1-800-COLLECT or whoever would be pretty pissed off if the phone company dropped the ball and accidentally let someone else use that number. The same thing goes for a big site like microsoft.com. Just because something is not semantically property doesn't mean it can't be stolen. Clearly someone needs to be culpable for giving sex.com away.
Regrettably, I think it falls to attorneys to determine a just system for handling this sort of thing, since a large part of what lawyers do is hashing out precise legal terminology. I only hope that the legal system gets good technical council.
Malda, I'm presuming that your opinion of Gore only stood prior to the selection of Sen. Lieberman as Gore's running mate. The announcement that this self styled "moral crusader" (read: pro-censorship) is running on the Democratic ticket has left me in a position where I will be completely able to vote for either Bush or Gore.
You put/home on its own partition, right? Use tar to back up/etc and maybe/var,/usr/local,/opt,/root (and/home if you were unfortunate enough to put/home on the / partition). Then toast your / partition and install Debian off the full cd set (or from a fast net connection). Debian includes more packages than any other distro so most stuff you use will be there. You can just use your old/home as is, maybe removing some dotfiles if you'd rather use Debian's application defaults. The other stuff I listed for backup is mostly "just in case," so if you don't remember how you had your system configured, you can pull it off backup and check. The beauty of this is that all of your important files are located under/home, since you know better than to do routine work as superuser and put files outside your home directories. (Right?) And should you want to revert to your old distro for some odd reason, the above backup and reinstall plan works just as elegantly for putting that back on instead too.
Regarding stuff that isn't in Debian...
First off, a number of packages that peeve Debian (such as KDE) are available from third-party sources. The best thing about apt is that you can insert the location of these files into your sources list, and voila, they will be transparently handled as Debian packages.
Secondly, Debian includes the alien utility which allows you to just use RPM packages. So if you still have those RPMs of the packages you want on your hard drive, or for that matter have them on your Red Hat CD, you can just let alien install them. (Although I recommend against this approach if possible, RPMs routinely ignore the filesystem standard and files end up in weird places.)
Also, I've seen cd distributors that make unnofficial Debian CDs with KDE or what not on them.
(Note: I'm planning to do much the same thing within a month to clean up some cruft from running unstable versions of Debian. If anyone sees any flaws in the above backup system, please correct me.)
Sorry if I'm in the dark on this, but why would you have to worry about bacteriological infetcion by handling a dubbed disc? I'm presuming this is a joke about the bad quality of dubbed anime, in which case, what the heck is "Macekbacter?"
Civil disobedience is a morally acceptable method of protesting an immoral law. However, an important aspect of civil disobedience is that you perform the action with the full intention of taking responsibility and receiving the legal penalty for your crime.
In this case, there is a trial going on, and Mr. Bove is seeking aquittal, i.e. seeking to eschew his responsibility. He wants to be able to break the law and get away with it. This is not civil disobedience, this is mere criminality, regardless of the motivation.
It's a pity the crowds rallying for Bove at his trial couldn't be bothered to come out and peaceably protest McDonald's restaurants by picketing or, as with the case in Britain, handing out leaflets. But no, their intention is to use the power of mob rule to override the rule of law.
I am pretty pissed off about gasoline prices in this part of the US right now, and with the pollutive internal combustion engine in general. Does this mean I should be permitted to go to the gas station, turn on all the pumps and spill their gas all over, without repercussion? Or maybe go to the auto dealerships and take a sledgehammer to the vehicles? No, of course not, I would just be a vandal.
Also, please don't go comparing popular vandals with the leaders of the American revolution, unless it is actually your intent to disparage the Founding Fathers as mere criminals and traitors to the Crown.
I think I've finally figured it out — John Katz is secretly just a troll, relishing the controversies created by his "who needs support when you can write provocative assertions" articles. He seems to be following the guidlines of the Slashdot Troll HOWTO. (Which I can't seem to find anymore.)
Mozilla M17 is not out yet! M16 was only released in mid-late June. The current nightly builds do identify themselves as M17 is you look in about:, but this is because nightlies identify themselves as the next impending milestone. But it's not an actual Milestone release yet.
Secondly, all the fancy PNG features mentioned in this article were working quite nicely as of M16.
As a long-time geek and pencil & paper roleplayer, I wish to state publicly for the record that this is, by far, the silliest thing Jon Katz has ever written.
(Wow, there's like this wacky thing called cyberpunk, and it's a not-so-subtle take on where our society is heading. Boy, wait'll I break the news of this strange new genre, apparently invented by FASA Games, to all the Slashdot readers!)
Disclaimer: Those attempting to state opinions on Judge Penfield's ruling without actually having read said document may look like morons.
I'm seeing quite a few people bringing up their usual knee-jerk responses that they've been using for this thing for the last year or so; which is odd since the good judge has acknowleged most of these opinions in his statement.
Seriously, it's written in a minimum of legalspeak, and isn't too long. I think he does a very good job of explaining his decision in a way that most people can understand.
Oh yeah, you're correct. Rolling Stone provides Yahoo!'s music news. I remember this because I found myself a little distraught that the article offered a bunch of related links to rollingstone.com, although no links to, say, the actual Offspring site. Gotta love news parterships.
Installing a Windows game is as easy as double-clicking the setup icon;
Bet your pardon? While I know this is true of some games, a great deal of Windows games are quite a chore to get working properly. This can involve digging around for compatible (sometimes beta) sound and video drivers, making sure you've got the correct version of DirectX installed, making sure you don't have weird interfering programs running in the background, configuring various 3D graphics parameters either from within the game or from an external app, and downloading subsequent patches that inevitably follow due to the proprietary, buggy development environment that Win32 is loved for.
It's not as bad as the days of MS-DOS games, but I know quite well that these kinds of problems are very frustrating for non-technical users. (Guess who gets asked to fix them!) It's a far cry from the plug and go simpicity of consoles.
This sort of ties in with my belief that Linux isn't actually harder to use than Windows, it's merely unfamiliar to those accustomed to Windows.
The Offspring have succeeded in making Napster look like pricks where all of Metallica's rhetoric couldn't. From a Yahoo! news story the other day (before the lawsuit):
"[The money] will go in their pockets," a source close to the band said. "It isn't about making money. In typical Offspring fashion, they think it's funny to fuck with people. They think Napster's cool and want to see how cool they [really] are."
Generally, filing these kinds of lawsuits makes the plaintiff look like an asshole. Sure, they may be in the right, but it's just not a very "rock 'n' roll" thing to do. People who have been supporting Napster because it lets you give the finger to the record companies now get to see that Napster is just another player in the corporate system.
I'm currently an @Home subscriber, and lately I've been paying attention to their routing patterns. Simply put, @Home does some wacky things as far as routing. I try to reach servers on the east coast, and get routed through L.A. and San Francisco first. Yet, I try to reach servers on the west coast, and I'll frequently get routed through Chicago and MAE-East first. To reach another local ISP, I go through Dallas then Chicago first.
My suspicion is that they are choosing these routes over more efficient, low-latency ones because of high-bandwidth peering agreements. i.e. At exchanges, packets will ignore more direct routes in favor of links which can provide greater throughput. (This is unsurprising considering the purposes for which they advertise their service, such as streaming/multimedia content, although it strikes me as flaunting convention a bit.)
Not directly related to the article at hand, but I believe it provides some useful background...
Gosh, everyone is so focused on what a dangerous thing this could be. But let's think about the positive applications of this. For instance, let's say you are a crime lord, and you're looking to expand. Now, dice.com isn't exactly going to be able to handle your particular staffing needs. Well now you can just plug into CrimeNet and get yourself a listing of hundreds of potential employees!
Geez, I knew Apple charged too much for their computers, but if people are going to these lengths, apparently things have really gotten out of hand!;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Good work, Captain Obvious!
If this patent is not valid in the rest of the world, can we just get on with our lives? - No they will hit us with shock and awe. You wonder why Americans are not popular every where they go?
Um, I think all the companies are being sued are American, and their products are used globally. If you don't use anything made by American companies, though, feel free to be unconcerned about this issue. Or maybe you think those American companies are noble enough to only pass litigation costs along to customers in the US market?
I don't understand why this is funny. Are you not familiar with hieroglyphics?
We can definitively end all debate on this subject by using the Tool of Objective Truth, a.k.a. the Sucks-Rules-O-Meter.
Waterworld: sucks 236, rules/rocks 1255
Mission to Mars: sucks 93, rules/rocks 2280
Mars Attacks: sucks 204, rules/rocks 922
Battlefield Earth: sucks 81, rules/rocks 1624
The Matrix: sucks 1294, rules/rocks 6641
Red Planet: sucks 117, rules/rocks 2847
(Note: the terms "Mission to Mars" and "Red Planet" combined with "rocks" may be yielding hits based on actual Martian lithology, not the movies.)
So there you have it, all of these movies rule more than they suck. I don't much agree with these results, but what can I say? This is hard science we're dealing with here; the TOOT does not lie!
The linkt ml
;-)
http://www.w hit ehouse.gov/library/hot_releases/November_4_2000.h
no longer goes to the President's statement.
Perhaps the link generated too much traffic.
Perhaps the Secret Service is now closely monitoring the threat of this "slashdot.org" which seems to be attempting a DoS attack on whitehouse.gov.
Hooray! Now you can play all of those resource-limited console games on your PC, without those pesky things like user-friendliness and being able to hook it up to the TV! Yes, now you can enjoy all your favorite Dreamcast games with the joys of installing infuriating, unstable Windows drivers, solving hardware conflicts, and everyone getting to huddle around your computer desk to play 4 player games! All for about the same price as a standard Dreamcast!
I certainly hope this is a rumor, or else Sega is throwing some good money away.
This article brings to mind a pet peeve I've had -- people who advocate running only Free Software on PCs but are quite content to play with game consoles. The hypocrisy, of course, is that today's consoles ARE software platforms.
:), playing games on Windows is no worse than using an N64, yet I freqently hear comments like "Sorry, can't play [game] because it's proprietary non open source crap," followed by "Time for some Zelda action!" as if consoles are somehow different because they aren't PC-like to end users.
From an ethical standpoint (using RMS ethics
Of course, there is always the argument of price with consoles vs game PCs, but that's another barrel of worms...
I thought Unix users referred to it as just "mail," as per the command, using the term "snail mail" in those strange instances when one should wish to use that paper and ink stuff. The "e" is just for people who don't already assume that mail should be electronic.
In any event, I suspect the hyphenated form will fade from use, much as spellings like "to-day" have fallen out of use.
Hooray! I only submitted this story LAST YEAR...
slightly over a year ago actually.
Although, as a domain holder, my knee-jerk reaction to this is "Hey! My domains are very much my property!" I have to agree that "property" is the wrong legal protection for domain names.
The current domain name system was never intended to be a keyword based system, unfortunately this is what it has become. As a result we have domain name speculators running rampant, as evidenced by Netcraft's recent report that over 10 million web sites are inactive. If domains are treated as property, then a domain name is like real estate, and you should scoop up whatever looks potentially valuable with the hope of unloading it at a nice profit.
It is entirely feasible that for some reason or another the present domain hierarchy could be abandoned and replaced with a better system. (I personally doubt it though, since a lot of companies have dumped a lot of money into promoting their domain names by now.) Registry services need to be free to withdraw a domain or shuffle things around if necessary.
The phone number analogy, while still a crappy way to think of domains, is decidely better than treating domains as real estate.
That said... 1-800-COLLECT or whoever would be pretty pissed off if the phone company dropped the ball and accidentally let someone else use that number. The same thing goes for a big site like microsoft.com. Just because something is not semantically property doesn't mean it can't be stolen. Clearly someone needs to be culpable for giving sex.com away.
Regrettably, I think it falls to attorneys to determine a just system for handling this sort of thing, since a large part of what lawyers do is hashing out precise legal terminology. I only hope that the legal system gets good technical council.
Tell your Windows friends that the MIT non-free freeware Win32 version has already been updated to fix this.
http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp.html
Tell your Linux friends that they should be using GPG anyway.
Malda, I'm presuming that your opinion of Gore only stood prior to the selection of Sen. Lieberman as Gore's running mate. The announcement that this self styled "moral crusader" (read: pro-censorship) is running on the Democratic ticket has left me in a position where I will be completely able to vote for either Bush or Gore.
Time to shop for third-party candidates...
Alright then...
/home on its own partition, right? Use tar to back up /etc and maybe /var, /usr/local, /opt, /root (and /home if you were unfortunate enough to put /home on the / partition). Then toast your / partition and install Debian off the full cd set (or from a fast net connection). Debian includes more packages than any other distro so most stuff you use will be there. You can just use your old /home as is, maybe removing some dotfiles if you'd rather use Debian's application defaults. The other stuff I listed for backup is mostly "just in case," so if you don't remember how you had your system configured, you can pull it off backup and check. The beauty of this is that all of your important files are located under /home, since you know better than to do routine work as superuser and put files outside your home directories. (Right?) And should you want to revert to your old distro for some odd reason, the above backup and reinstall plan works just as elegantly for putting that back on instead too.
You put
Regarding stuff that isn't in Debian...
First off, a number of packages that peeve Debian (such as KDE) are available from third-party sources. The best thing about apt is that you can insert the location of these files into your sources list, and voila, they will be transparently handled as Debian packages.
Secondly, Debian includes the alien utility which allows you to just use RPM packages. So if you still have those RPMs of the packages you want on your hard drive, or for that matter have them on your Red Hat CD, you can just let alien install them. (Although I recommend against this approach if possible, RPMs routinely ignore the filesystem standard and files end up in weird places.)
Also, I've seen cd distributors that make unnofficial Debian CDs with KDE or what not on them.
(Note: I'm planning to do much the same thing within a month to clean up some cruft from running unstable versions of Debian. If anyone sees any flaws in the above backup system, please correct me.)
Sorry if I'm in the dark on this, but why would you have to worry about bacteriological infetcion by handling a dubbed disc? I'm presuming this is a joke about the bad quality of dubbed anime, in which case, what the heck is "Macekbacter?"
g0 4~4rcHy! Fsck d4 sys+3m! Uh, yeah...
Civil disobedience is a morally acceptable method of protesting an immoral law. However, an important aspect of civil disobedience is that you perform the action with the full intention of taking responsibility and receiving the legal penalty for your crime.
In this case, there is a trial going on, and Mr. Bove is seeking aquittal, i.e. seeking to eschew his responsibility. He wants to be able to break the law and get away with it. This is not civil disobedience, this is mere criminality, regardless of the motivation.
It's a pity the crowds rallying for Bove at his trial couldn't be bothered to come out and peaceably protest McDonald's restaurants by picketing or, as with the case in Britain, handing out leaflets. But no, their intention is to use the power of mob rule to override the rule of law.
I am pretty pissed off about gasoline prices in this part of the US right now, and with the pollutive internal combustion engine in general. Does this mean I should be permitted to go to the gas station, turn on all the pumps and spill their gas all over, without repercussion? Or maybe go to the auto dealerships and take a sledgehammer to the vehicles? No, of course not, I would just be a vandal.
Also, please don't go comparing popular vandals with the leaders of the American revolution, unless it is actually your intent to disparage the Founding Fathers as mere criminals and traitors to the Crown.
I think I've finally figured it out — John Katz is secretly just a troll, relishing the controversies created by his "who needs support when you can write provocative assertions" articles. He seems to be following the guidlines of the Slashdot Troll HOWTO. (Which I can't seem to find anymore.)
Well, at least IMAP works properly in M16 now.
:-)
If you want to see LDAP support fleshed out in Mozilla, go submit a bug and/or vote for it in Bugzilla. Or, better yet, implement it yourself.
Mozilla M17 is not out yet! M16 was only released in mid-late June. The current nightly builds do identify themselves as M17 is you look in about:, but this is because nightlies identify themselves as the next impending milestone. But it's not an actual Milestone release yet.
Secondly, all the fancy PNG features mentioned in this article were working quite nicely as of M16.
As a long-time geek and pencil & paper roleplayer, I wish to state publicly for the record that this is, by far, the silliest thing Jon Katz has ever written.
(Wow, there's like this wacky thing called cyberpunk, and it's a not-so-subtle take on where our society is heading. Boy, wait'll I break the news of this strange new genre, apparently invented by FASA Games, to all the Slashdot readers!)
Disclaimer: Those attempting to state opinions on Judge Penfield's ruling without actually having read said document may look like morons.
I'm seeing quite a few people bringing up their usual knee-jerk responses that they've been using for this thing for the last year or so; which is odd since the good judge has acknowleged most of these opinions in his statement.
Seriously, it's written in a minimum of legalspeak, and isn't too long. I think he does a very good job of explaining his decision in a way that most people can understand.
Oh yeah, you're correct. Rolling Stone provides Yahoo!'s music news. I remember this because I found myself a little distraught that the article offered a bunch of related links to rollingstone.com, although no links to, say, the actual Offspring site. Gotta love news parterships.
Bet your pardon? While I know this is true of some games, a great deal of Windows games are quite a chore to get working properly. This can involve digging around for compatible (sometimes beta) sound and video drivers, making sure you've got the correct version of DirectX installed, making sure you don't have weird interfering programs running in the background, configuring various 3D graphics parameters either from within the game or from an external app, and downloading subsequent patches that inevitably follow due to the proprietary, buggy development environment that Win32 is loved for.
It's not as bad as the days of MS-DOS games, but I know quite well that these kinds of problems are very frustrating for non-technical users. (Guess who gets asked to fix them!) It's a far cry from the plug and go simpicity of consoles.
This sort of ties in with my belief that Linux isn't actually harder to use than Windows, it's merely unfamiliar to those accustomed to Windows.
The Offspring have succeeded in making Napster look like pricks where all of Metallica's rhetoric couldn't. From a Yahoo! news story the other day (before the lawsuit):
Generally, filing these kinds of lawsuits makes the plaintiff look like an asshole. Sure, they may be in the right, but it's just not a very "rock 'n' roll" thing to do. People who have been supporting Napster because it lets you give the finger to the record companies now get to see that Napster is just another player in the corporate system.
I'm currently an @Home subscriber, and lately I've been paying attention to their routing patterns. Simply put, @Home does some wacky things as far as routing. I try to reach servers on the east coast, and get routed through L.A. and San Francisco first. Yet, I try to reach servers on the west coast, and I'll frequently get routed through Chicago and MAE-East first. To reach another local ISP, I go through Dallas then Chicago first.
My suspicion is that they are choosing these routes over more efficient, low-latency ones because of high-bandwidth peering agreements. i.e. At exchanges, packets will ignore more direct routes in favor of links which can provide greater throughput. (This is unsurprising considering the purposes for which they advertise their service, such as streaming/multimedia content, although it strikes me as flaunting convention a bit.)
Not directly related to the article at hand, but I believe it provides some useful background...
Gosh, everyone is so focused on what a dangerous thing this could be. But let's think about the positive applications of this. For instance, let's say you are a crime lord, and you're looking to expand. Now, dice.com isn't exactly going to be able to handle your particular staffing needs. Well now you can just plug into CrimeNet and get yourself a listing of hundreds of potential employees!
Geez, I knew Apple charged too much for their computers, but if people are going to these lengths, apparently things have really gotten out of hand! ;-)