MisterBlister: If the album sales are a disappointment, the shit's gonna hit the fan in one way or another...It will be interesting to see what happens.
Marshall Mathers: The rapper said bluntly: "I think that shit is fucking bullshit. Whoever put my shit on the Internet, I want to meet that motherf***er and beat the shit out of him, because I picture this scrawny little dickhead going 'I got Eminem's new CD! I got Eminem's new CD! I'm going to put it on the Internet.' I think that anybody who tries to make excuses for that shit is a fucking bitch."
So the shit is going to hit the fan because some fucking bitch (or scrawny little dickhead, not sure) put Eminem's shit on the internet?
I'd love a Linux distro laid out like Solaris, with all the same things working as expected, and all the other things NOT working (also as expected!).
Imagine a Linux distro with a functioning, but lamely configured SysV init, complete with run level changes that do NOTHING. Imagine a Linux distro with a SysV package system that makes it super easy to locate what file belongs to what package - so long as you are willing to write that tool (3 lines in awk, I swear!). Imagine a Linux distro with a syslogd configured out of the box to log all critical messages to the console, instead of some out-of-the-way log file. Imagine a Linux distro which included a completely broken BSD compatibility API, and plenty of warnings not to use it throughout 10 years' worth of OS documentation. Imagine a Linux distro every bit as half-assed as the one YOU would put together yourself, but with a Big Important Company's logo stuck to the box.
Boy, this article is a gold mine of damning quotes.
Spokesman Jon Murchinson said Microsoft has been talking about how to allow open-source and proprietary software to coexist. "Our goal is to resolve difficult issues that are driving a wedge between the commercial and free software models," he said.
Those issues are all of Microsoft's making!
The company also complained that the Pentagon is funding research on making free software more secure, which in effect subsidizes Microsoft's open-source competitors, Stenbit said.
So open your source code, and we'll research and improve Microsoft's code too! Simple!
[Defense Department's chief information officer] Stenbit said that the debate is academic and that what matters is how secure a given piece of software is.
Oh well if it's all academic, I guess we can ignore what you're saying, since it has no practical value.
To that end, the Defense Department is now prohibited from purchasing any software that has not undergone security testing by the NSA. Stenbit said he is unaware of any open-source software that has been tested.
Then it's a good thing you don't have to purchase it! Bwahahahah!!!!
...because Microsoft has lots of money to sink into it and make it successful.
Just like our missile defense shield.
Keep in mind, Microsoft may make a few dumb moves occasionally...
Like forgetting to buy a few congresscritters before exercising illegal monopoly control...
...but they make a lot fewer than most companies.
Oh yeah? Got any facts to back that up? Give me a URL to some studies that back up this claim of yours.
Also, when they settle on a goal they typically acheive it (though maybe a year or two later than originally planned).
You got that right. They have managed to stall the anti-trust proceedings to the point of irrelevancy.
Gates is an entrepreneur -- you've got to respect him for that.
So is Ron Popeil and the whore on the corner by the streelight. Being an entrepreneur is nothing special and is not particularly praiseworthy. I'd rate being a public school teacher or a firefighter higher on the scale of praiseworthy careers.
The National Highway Safety Institute released a report today that strongly suggests motorists are the cause of most traffic accidents. I know, hard to believe, but there you have it.
One solution is to set up another repository for the Linux sources, using CVS or another free version control system, and arranging to load new versions into it automatically. This could use Bitkeeper to access the latest revisions, then install the new revisions into CVS. That update process could run automatically and frequently.
The FSF cannot do this, because we cannot install Bitkeeper on our machines. We have no non-free systems or applications on them now, and our principles say we must keep it that way. (emphasis added)
So Richard - which is it? Do your principles endow you with more or less freedom? You say the FSF CAN'T install Bitkeeper because it is non-free. Yet people who disagree with you use all the free software that the FSF uses, and in addition they can and do use proprietary software if they so choose.
It seems like Richard has painted himself into a corner, and has LESS freedom than someone who is not laboring under the principles he endorses. But I suppose RMS will counter that a man who is a slave to his ideals, is not really a slave at all.
I suppose my disagreement is, like Richard's beef, over just one word: can't vs. won't.
Uhhh.... Slashdot ate my paragraph! That post was supposed to look like this:
Sun Solaris will henceforth be referred to as AT&T/Solaris. Only one part - the kernel - is really Solaris. The majority of the system, which came about long before Solaris, is AT&T System V Release 4.
Just consider: the AT&T Project starts developing an operating system, and years later Scott McNealy adds one important piece. The AT&T Project says, "Please give our project equal mention," but Scott says, "Don't give them a share of the credit; call the whole thing after my name alone!" Now envision the mindset of a person who can look at these events and accuse the AT&T Project of egotism. It takes strong prejudice to misjudge so drastically.
You may now return to your regular scheduled flame war.
I'm guessing I shoulda previewed.... and escaped the ampersands.
Sun Solaris will henceforth be referred to as AT call the whole thing after my name alone!" Now envision the mindset of a person who can look at these events and accuse the AT&T Project of egotism. It takes strong prejudice to misjudge so drastically.
Thank you very much. You may now continue with your regularly scheduled flame war.
In my experience, the people who most enjoy The Sims are the ones who cannot get a handle on their real life affairs. So they exert control in the virtual world.
but after careful, deliberate thought something occurred to me: we don't know with absolute certainty that a fetus is not a living being.
We don't know anything with absolute certainty. But that has never stopped us from acting on imperfect information. Indeed, it is not possible to do otherwise.
what do the scientists say? they seem to be just as divided on this subject as the rest of the population. and this is the heart of the matter: we cannot say with absolute certainty when a fetus is a living being.
But we can say with a great deal more certainty that the woman in the doctor's office is.
the last was rhetorical, of course. if i made you stop and think for a second, i've done my job. if you jerk your knee and retreat into the same old tired arguments, i've failed.
You failed to begin with. You have come up with nothing new. Your arguments are as tired and old as any.
While I can see that scheme happening with servers being hosted by different companies simply by using a common protocol of some sort, I would think that this would be very difficult to implement when you're talking about many vendors and many hosting facilities.
Nonsense. Just put a Instant Message client into the game. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, just make existing IM services available in the game.
Why does everyone keep assuming that if you just pile enough money in front of a corporation you will automaticly own them?
Because if you do, you will.
No one can force the company to sell to MSFT.
It's not the company's (EA's) call. It's their shareholders' call. If MS is unsuccessful at negotiating a price, they can still buy shares on the open market until they have enough votes to get their way. Given enough money, there it no way to prevent a hostile takeover. You can make it expensive, sometimes, but you can't stop it if deep pockets are determined to own you.
MAPS RBL was assembled from user contributions. It would be nothing without the data submitted by thousands of users over the course of several years. I contributed reports to it.
When they got a fat enough database, they changed their tune and wanted to charge me to use the data we researched and gave to them, thinking we were benefitting the whole community. How wrong we were. That was the first death-wheeze as far as I am concerned. This story is just the latest labored breath by what will soon be the corpse of MAPS. And good riddance. They won't be missed.
First, are you a New Yorker? If you're not, you don't quite know just what it was like to be on the island that day.
Just because the same accident of proximity did not befall the other guy, does not mean his opinion about what happened there and elsewhere in that day is "less worthy" than yours. "Being there" didn't give you a trump card. But this is hardly surprising, since New Yorkers had the same attitude about "being in New York" before 9/11. I think there's enough distance now to stop overlooking that little conceit, and call them on it just like we always have.
I am so used to my TiVo that even when I am in the car listening to the radio, if I hear a part of a news story, or something else that catches my ear, my first thought is to rewind. Only then do I realize that my car radio has no TiVo-like functionality.
But wouldn't it be cool if it did? Does XM Radio offer this, by chance? It should be rather easy to do with some modest components. Audio takes up far less storage bandwidth than audio+video. A TiVo device for radio ought to be able to buffer 30 minutes of a dozen preset stations, simultaneously, so that you had a pre-recorded buffer no matter which of your presets you switched to at any given moment.
My whole point throughout this thread is that the DMCA is not interested in legal uses of software.
My whole point is that your point is wrong. The DMCA is very interested in whether a "circumvention device" was created primarily to circumvent access controls. The reason AGFA's demands are baseless is because they have no basis in the DMCA itself, never mind 1st Amendment precedent.
The embed program was not created to circumvent access controls to a protected work.
It is not distributed with that intent in mind, the author has never encouraged anyone to use it that way, and the author has never used it that way himself.
The embed bit was not designed to control access to the font that contains it. The fonts can be accessed/copied/read/displayed regardless of the state of the embed bit.
The embed bit is not the subject of any "application of information, or a process or a treatment" under the authority of the owner "to gain access to the work". Therefore manipulating the embed bit cannot be considered circumvention under the DMCA.
`(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--
`(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
`(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
`(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
`(3) As used in this subsection--
`(A) to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
`(B) a technological measure `effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
Perhaps you should take some lessons in wit. After all, you seem to be stuck on the bottom rung: sarcasm.
However, I don't think it's a good idea to team up with AOL.
Oh no, getting access to 23 million+ naive consumers who have at least $20 disposable income per month is usually the death knell for any fledgling business. Yessirree.
As far as I can tell, this program is specifically designed to circumvent licencing controls built into the font format, since the legal owner of the font could just make their own embeddable versions in their 'font creation' software. No?
No. You obviously did not read anything but the paragraph posted to Slashdot, or you failed to remember what you had read by the time you came here to post your comments. The author of embed created it to modify his own set of fonts that he had authored. Unknown to him at the time, the font authoring software set the don't-embed bit by default. He only discovered this later, after he had created many fonts. He didn't want to load the font authoring software, then load each font in turn, and uncheck a box on a properties dialog before saving them again. He'd have to do this laborious process for each of dozens of fonts he had authored himself. It was much easier to write a simple utility to make the change to a batch of fonts at one time.
Furthermore, the embed bit has absolutely nothing to do with licensing any font, or with controlling the copying of any font. This was also made clear in the stories the Slashdot article pointed out.
If you had remembered any of the other information you read about this story (giving you the benefit of the doubt), you'd have avoided the mistake of assuming it had no substantial non-infringing use. It is entirely non-infringing, and no one had even thought of using it for infringing purposes until AGFA came along.
They tell me short term memory improves markedly in the first few months after a chronic cannibis smoker quits his habit. Maybe you should give that some thought, it will help avoid the "Memento" effect you seem to be suffering from.
Slashdot Mirror
MisterBlister:
If the album sales are a disappointment, the shit's gonna hit the fan in one way or another...It will be interesting to see what happens.
Marshall Mathers:
The rapper said bluntly: "I think that shit is fucking bullshit. Whoever put my shit on the Internet, I want to meet that motherf***er and beat the shit out of him, because I picture this scrawny little dickhead going 'I got Eminem's new CD! I got Eminem's new CD! I'm going to put it on the Internet.' I think that anybody who tries to make excuses for that shit is a fucking bitch."
So the shit is going to hit the fan because some fucking bitch (or scrawny little dickhead, not sure) put Eminem's shit on the internet?
And we are supposed to care... because why?
I'd love a Linux distro laid out like Solaris, with all the same things working as expected, and all the other things NOT working (also as expected!).
Imagine a Linux distro with a functioning, but lamely configured SysV init, complete with run level changes that do NOTHING. Imagine a Linux distro with a SysV package system that makes it super easy to locate what file belongs to what package - so long as you are willing to write that tool (3 lines in awk, I swear!). Imagine a Linux distro with a syslogd configured out of the box to log all critical messages to the console, instead of some out-of-the-way log file. Imagine a Linux distro which included a completely broken BSD compatibility API, and plenty of warnings not to use it throughout 10 years' worth of OS documentation. Imagine a Linux distro every bit as half-assed as the one YOU would put together yourself, but with a Big Important Company's logo stuck to the box.
Sign me up!
Boy, this article is a gold mine of damning quotes.
Spokesman Jon Murchinson said Microsoft has been talking about how to allow open-source and proprietary software to coexist. "Our goal is to resolve difficult issues that are driving a wedge between the commercial and free software models," he said.
Those issues are all of Microsoft's making!
The company also complained that the Pentagon is funding research on making free software more secure, which in effect subsidizes Microsoft's open-source competitors, Stenbit said.
So open your source code, and we'll research and improve Microsoft's code too! Simple!
[Defense Department's chief information officer] Stenbit said that the debate is academic and that what matters is how secure a given piece of software is.
Oh well if it's all academic, I guess we can ignore what you're saying, since it has no practical value.
To that end, the Defense Department is now prohibited from purchasing any software that has not undergone security testing by the NSA. Stenbit said he is unaware of any open-source software that has been tested.
Then it's a good thing you don't have to purchase it! Bwahahahah!!!!
I think you need to get out and date more. I thought your next sentence was going to express a desire to drive to Redmond and suck Bill's dick.
They are quite capable of losing millions of dollars, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars a year for the next five or ten years, or more.
Remind me not to hire you to write my IPO prospectus.
...because Microsoft has lots of money to sink into it and make it successful.
...but they make a lot fewer than most companies.
Just like our missile defense shield.
Keep in mind, Microsoft may make a few dumb moves occasionally...
Like forgetting to buy a few congresscritters before exercising illegal monopoly control...
Oh yeah? Got any facts to back that up? Give me a URL to some studies that back up this claim of yours.
Also, when they settle on a goal they typically acheive it (though maybe a year or two later than originally planned).
You got that right. They have managed to stall the anti-trust proceedings to the point of irrelevancy.
Gates is an entrepreneur -- you've got to respect him for that.
So is Ron Popeil and the whore on the corner by the streelight. Being an entrepreneur is nothing special and is not particularly praiseworthy. I'd rate being a public school teacher or a firefighter higher on the scale of praiseworthy careers.
The National Highway Safety Institute released a report today that strongly suggests motorists are the cause of most traffic accidents. I know, hard to believe, but there you have it.
One solution is to set up another repository for the Linux sources, using CVS or another free version control system, and arranging to load new versions into it automatically. This could use Bitkeeper to access the latest revisions, then install the new revisions into CVS. That update process could run automatically and frequently.
The FSF cannot do this, because we cannot install Bitkeeper on our machines. We have no non-free systems or applications on them now, and our principles say we must keep it that way. (emphasis added)
So Richard - which is it? Do your principles endow you with more or less freedom? You say the FSF CAN'T install Bitkeeper because it is non-free. Yet people who disagree with you use all the free software that the FSF uses, and in addition they can and do use proprietary software if they so choose.
It seems like Richard has painted himself into a corner, and has LESS freedom than someone who is not laboring under the principles he endorses. But I suppose RMS will counter that a man who is a slave to his ideals, is not really a slave at all.
I suppose my disagreement is, like Richard's beef, over just one word: can't vs. won't.
I'm guessing I shoulda previewed.... and escaped the ampersands.
Sun Solaris will henceforth be referred to as AT call the whole thing after my name alone!" Now envision the mindset of a person who can look at these events and accuse the AT&T Project of egotism. It takes strong prejudice to misjudge so drastically.
Thank you very much. You may now continue with your regularly scheduled flame war.
BTW, watch out for nihilism. It sneaks up on you once you've become truly cynical.
No, it doesn't. Never has, never will. Things never change.
True cynicism knows no bounds.
You're only into "pretend" cynicism. True cynicism doesn't give a shit.
In my experience, the people who most enjoy The Sims are the ones who cannot get a handle on their real life affairs. So they exert control in the virtual world.
That's my take, FWIW.
It only takes a few reasonably well organized sociopaths to ruin freedom.
That's what Ashcroft would like you to believe. But don't, because it isn't true.
but after careful, deliberate thought something occurred to me: we don't know with absolute certainty that a fetus is not a living being.
We don't know anything with absolute certainty. But that has never stopped us from acting on imperfect information. Indeed, it is not possible to do otherwise.
what do the scientists say? they seem to be just as divided on this subject as the rest of the population. and this is the heart of the matter: we cannot say with absolute certainty when a fetus is a living being.
But we can say with a great deal more certainty that the woman in the doctor's office is.
the last was rhetorical, of course. if i made you stop and think for a second, i've done my job. if you jerk your knee and retreat into the same old tired arguments, i've failed.
You failed to begin with. You have come up with nothing new. Your arguments are as tired and old as any.
While I can see that scheme happening with servers being hosted by different companies simply by using a common protocol of some sort, I would think that this would be very difficult to implement when you're talking about many vendors and many hosting facilities.
Nonsense. Just put a Instant Message client into the game. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, just make existing IM services available in the game.
Why does everyone keep assuming that if you just pile enough money in front of a corporation you will automaticly own them?
Because if you do, you will.
No one can force the company to sell to MSFT.
It's not the company's (EA's) call. It's their shareholders' call. If MS is unsuccessful at negotiating a price, they can still buy shares on the open market until they have enough votes to get their way. Given enough money, there it no way to prevent a hostile takeover. You can make it expensive, sometimes, but you can't stop it if deep pockets are determined to own you.
If we keep the violent games from the kids, they'll be in for quite a shock when we draft them to go kill whoever is the Goldstein^WTerrorist-du-Jour.
"What, you mean you want me to shoot that swarthy guy for real? Won't that hurt him?"
MAPS RBL was assembled from user contributions. It would be nothing without the data submitted by thousands of users over the course of several years. I contributed reports to it.
When they got a fat enough database, they changed their tune and wanted to charge me to use the data we researched and gave to them, thinking we were benefitting the whole community. How wrong we were. That was the first death-wheeze as far as I am concerned. This story is just the latest labored breath by what will soon be the corpse of MAPS. And good riddance. They won't be missed.
First, are you a New Yorker? If you're not, you don't quite know just what it was like to be on the island that day.
Just because the same accident of proximity did not befall the other guy, does not mean his opinion about what happened there and elsewhere in that day is "less worthy" than yours. "Being there" didn't give you a trump card. But this is hardly surprising, since New Yorkers had the same attitude about "being in New York" before 9/11. I think there's enough distance now to stop overlooking that little conceit, and call them on it just like we always have.
And I thought *I* was cycnical...
You ain't seen nothin' yet.
Dude, this guy makes most of Slashdot look like drooling idiots.
I am so used to my TiVo that even when I am in the car listening to the radio, if I hear a part of a news story, or something else that catches my ear, my first thought is to rewind. Only then do I realize that my car radio has no TiVo-like functionality.
But wouldn't it be cool if it did? Does XM Radio offer this, by chance? It should be rather easy to do with some modest components. Audio takes up far less storage bandwidth than audio+video. A TiVo device for radio ought to be able to buffer 30 minutes of a dozen preset stations, simultaneously, so that you had a pre-recorded buffer no matter which of your presets you switched to at any given moment.
So for those who are losers in real life and can't role play well enough to be liked online ...
That sounds like two mutually exclusive classes of people.
My whole point is that your point is wrong. The DMCA is very interested in whether a "circumvention device" was created primarily to circumvent access controls. The reason AGFA's demands are baseless is because they have no basis in the DMCA itself, never mind 1st Amendment precedent.
- The embed program was not created to circumvent access controls to a protected work.
- It is not distributed with that intent in mind, the author has never encouraged anyone to use it that way, and the author has never used it that way himself.
- The embed bit was not designed to control access to the font that contains it. The fonts can be accessed/copied/read/displayed regardless of the state of the embed bit.
- The embed bit is not the subject of any "application of information, or a process or a treatment" under the authority of the owner "to gain access to the work". Therefore manipulating the embed bit cannot be considered circumvention under the DMCA.
Perhaps you should take some lessons in wit. After all, you seem to be stuck on the bottom rung: sarcasm.That was an ad hominem attack, not sarcasm.
However, I don't think it's a good idea to team up with AOL.
Oh no, getting access to 23 million+ naive consumers who have at least $20 disposable income per month is usually the death knell for any fledgling business. Yessirree.
As far as I can tell, this program is specifically designed to circumvent licencing controls built into the font format, since the legal owner of the font could just make their own embeddable versions in their 'font creation' software. No?
No. You obviously did not read anything but the paragraph posted to Slashdot, or you failed to remember what you had read by the time you came here to post your comments. The author of embed created it to modify his own set of fonts that he had authored. Unknown to him at the time, the font authoring software set the don't-embed bit by default. He only discovered this later, after he had created many fonts. He didn't want to load the font authoring software, then load each font in turn, and uncheck a box on a properties dialog before saving them again. He'd have to do this laborious process for each of dozens of fonts he had authored himself. It was much easier to write a simple utility to make the change to a batch of fonts at one time.
Furthermore, the embed bit has absolutely nothing to do with licensing any font, or with controlling the copying of any font. This was also made clear in the stories the Slashdot article pointed out.
If you had remembered any of the other information you read about this story (giving you the benefit of the doubt), you'd have avoided the mistake of assuming it had no substantial non-infringing use. It is entirely non-infringing, and no one had even thought of using it for infringing purposes until AGFA came along.
They tell me short term memory improves markedly in the first few months after a chronic cannibis smoker quits his habit. Maybe you should give that some thought, it will help avoid the "Memento" effect you seem to be suffering from.