I had the good fortune to see Spamalot two weeks ago, and it's brilliant. Doesn't exactly hew to the movie, which is fine; most of the best-known skits are intact (often with minor changes in timing or dialogue), although there have been several major changes in terms of plot structure (in other words, the musical actually has a plot structure). Of the three "big-name" leads, Tim Curry, Hank Azaria, and David Hyde-Pierce, Curry comes off the best (he's Arthur all the way through), Hank Azaria is great in a variety of roles (Tim the Enchanter, the French Taunter, Lancelot), and David Hyde-Pierce is pretty good (although his Sir Robin is best when he's most similar to Niles Crane).
Actually, the biggest surprise is Sara Ramirez as the Lady of the Lake. She's a fantastic singer and a great comedic actress. Those of you who've seen it know what I mean. Here's hoping she goes on to great things.
Bah, what am I analyzing it for? It's hysterically funny. Beg, borrow, and steal, and go see it. And if you're going to see it, just remember... A101. (Shh, if you've seen it, don't spoil it!)
You know, I took you seriously until I read the first sentence of your post. The guys who run the New York Times are dumber than dirt?
I bet they'd make an order of magnitude more money that way than they ever would off selling subscriptions to the archives...
Yeah, I'm sure their accountants haven't done any research at all into what will make them more money. They surely should take the advice of some random joe on Slashdot, who I'm sure owns at least two or three national newspapers, and knows what he's talkin' about.
One of these people who's time is worthless. For the rest of us, spending $50 for 1 year's access is a better deal than spending an hours time going to the library for an article.
If you make $50 an hour, then yeah, it's worth it to spend the $50 for online access instead of spending an hour going to the library. Guess what? Most people make less than $50 an hour.
For most people, I suspect that it's not. I think we'll be seeing a lot of people copy-pasting the entire content of an article to their blogs in order to preserve it for purposes of personal use, review, criticism, and discussion. And then we'll see a slew of copyright lawsuits to try to quash these exercises of fair use.
If there's lawsuits, it means the blog is public, in which case there's no way in hell posting an entire copy of a copyrighted news article is "fair use," and the copyright holders are well within their rights to quash these copies via lawsuits. If you think copyright law should be thrown out, that's one thing; but then you wouldn't be talking about fair use, which is part of copyright law.
Lucas didn't write the screenplay for Empire; Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett did. So even if your comment was valid (which it isn't; see other replies), it still wouldn't be accurate to place the blame on Lucas.
I'd say it's fairly important for those religious people to realize thou is the familiar form, since that would change the tone of the ten commandments significantly.
I hate to break this to you, but the Ten Commandments weren't written in English originally.
In fact the only books I recall that centered around pre-episode 4 content was the Han Solo trilogy that is a pretty good set of books that tells Han Solo's back story from about age 17 to right about the time he walks into the cantina in episode 4.
There was also the Lando Calrissian trilogy:
- Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu
- Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon
- Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka
It's been a long damn time since I read them, but they were written around the same time (slightly after, I think) as the three Han Solo novels.
Wrong. People fundamentally go to the movies (and experience all entertainment media) in order to see great stories. Other things can act as a subtitute (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has great acting and writing and a lousy story), but great stories are what people are, at their core, seeking.
There's a great deal of literature on the subject; go read it.
Wow. From your description, it sounds like we should simply execute everyone who's ever sent to prison, because "It's all nice to be Mr. Compasion until you realize that the reality is that anything you give them is abused. Over and over." Why would that stop after prison? Clearly all convicts should simply be put to death. Department of CORRECTIONS? Ha!
Felons don't believe in your right to property/life/free express, etc. why should you agree to theirs?
Once they get released, presumably they've received their punishment and served their time. Learned their lesson, so to speak. At least, that's the theory behind our justice system. Why should their rights be further fettered once they're released?
In practice, it's because our prison system does basically nothing to discourage ex-cons from becoming repeat offenders. There's a massive correlation between crime and lack of education/opportunity. The cost to educate convicts is far lower than the cost to society from the additional crimes they'll go on to commit when they get out and see that they have basically nothing going for them. But of course, it would (for some inexplicable reason) be wrong to try and prevent further crime by educating convicts. The only way to prevent crime is more law enforcement!
Once again, we see a real advancement predicted by a science fiction author.
Don't forget that they've also predicted thousands of inventions that have not yet been invented, or are actually impossible by the laws of physics. (There's also inventions that are possible, but aren't practical or particularly useful in light of other inventions.)
Uh, you should maybe read the rest of the sentence, where I explain that if she can acquire a GPLed copy from Joe, then she wouldn't be fucked, unless your license with her specifies that she cannot ever distribute ANY version and continue using hers, but then I also said that that probably wouldn't be legal. She's probably not fucked, in reality, and that's why I had that big long parenthetical after the "Jane Doe is completely fucked" sentence.:)
Okay, imagine that the sun rises at 4am. You get up at 7 to be at work at 9. In the evening, the sun goes down at 6pm and you go to bed at 11. That means you've got the lights on for 5 hours in the evening.
Now instead, imagine that we change the clocks so that when the sun rises, it's 5am instead. You still get up at 7 to be at work by 9. In the evening, the sun goes down at 7pm and you go to bed at 11. That means you've got the lights on for 4 hours in the evening.
Ideally you'd set the clocks so that the time you get up coincides with sunrise; in this example, the clocks would be set so that sunrise was at 7am, when you got up; sunset would be at 9pm, so you'd only have the lights on for 2 hours before going to bed. Since people tend to go to work immediately after getting up in the morning, you want X to coincide with Y, where X is the time people will get up (imposed by the artificial constraints of the working world) and Y is sunrise.
That's the theory, anyway. There are obviously a lot of practical issues that complicate matters, such as 1) not everyone gets up or goes to bed at the same time; 2) since DST was first implemented, we now have a lot more electrical devices that are not time-dependent (we only use lights when it's dark, but we use computers, TVs, etc. even when it's light); 3) you can't adjust the time by too much or too often people get confused/freaked out/pissed off, so DST is suboptimal (for maximum "efficiency", time would change by a minute or two a day, to keep pace with sunrise; but that would be a nightmare to implement).
Right, just like Michael Jackson can't single-handedly withdraw his license agreement with Sony. If you license something to someone else, you have to abide by the license you've agreed to!
I don't have any idea what Michael Jackson's agreement with Sony is, so I'm not going to speculate on whether it's relevant to the GPL. But the GPL covers only copying, modifying, and distributing; not using. If I issue you a copy of a GPL'ed piece of software that I wrote, and later I want to decide to deny you the ability to use that software, I cannot legally do that if the license I licensed it to you under did not specify that I could do that. The GPL does not specify this, therefore if you give someone a GPL'ed copy of your software, you cannot later rescind their possession of it. (As far as is my understanding of the GPL and copyright law. If you counterargue this point, you need to specify the laws and/or GPL clauses that indicate that you can do this.)
Every contract is a give and take. IP owners should look at the benefit and costs of various licensing options before they make a licensing decision.
A copyright license is not a contract. Contract law has very little to do with copyright law, and vice versa.
In either case, the GPL does not preclude alternative GPL-incompatible licensing schemes for your own intellectual property.
Yes, I've said multiple times that this is the case. The point is that if you issue a GPL'ed copy of a piece of software, you cannot later rescind the issuee's right to possess, modify, copy, or distribute that copy. You can later reissue the software under a proprietary license, but that has absolutely no effect on the people you gave GPL'ed copies to! The whole point of the GPL is that the author of the software can't arbitrarily decide to control what's done with the software after it leaves his hands.
For instance, you can license your IP under the GPL, and then at a later (or earlier!) date merge your same IP into another product and sell it as a completely closed source, patent-laden, trademarked, trade-secreted product. And then you can assign copyright for that product to Bill Gates himself, who will then exclusively own that product - and no one can demand the source for it, as it won't be licensed under the GPL!
Let's say in 2005, you license your program (IP? That term has no legal standing) under the GPL to Joe Shmoe. He never does anything with it, just sits on it for five years. In 2008, you license your program under the most restrictive possible copyright license to Jane Doe. Jane can't do anything with it except run it on her private computer.
Then in 2010, Joe Shmoe decides to modify the copy you gave him, and distribute that copy as GPL. He has every legal right to do this and there is nothing you can do to stop him. Jane Doe is completely fucked, though (although if she receives a GPL copy from Joe Shmoe, she might be able to modify/redistribute THAT copy; I doubt that your closed license you gave to her could legally specify that she can't use OTHER copies licensed under other mechanisms, but I could be wrong on that point).
The GPL is very flexible - and those who don't understand IP licensing simply cannot understand the flexibility of the GPL.
I seem to understand the GPL a tad better than you do.
There is no reason you would need to expose the INSIDE of the structure you live in to the OUTSIDE of the suit. Design the suit so that getting into the suit is the same as leaving the dust-free area. That means sort of 'docking' it. That way you are only exposed to the inside of the suit, never the outside.
This sounds like it would be a lot more expensive (and less reliable) than a simple decontamination chamber that can admit suits of any shape or size, not to mention other things you might want to bring into the habitat (cargo, tool boxes, whatever).
Heh, yeah. You can release a separate version (even if it's the same identical code/binaries) under a closed license (or any other license). Functionally that does you little good as far as "protecting" your code, since the GPL version is already out there and you cannot legally prevent whoever has a copy of it from redistributing it. But yes, you *can* close the barn door after the horse has left.;)
This is incorrect. Of course you can make your GPL'd code proprietary if you decide to retain copyright ownership of your IP. You may and can release your code as GPL, and later release it as closed-source, proprietary work.
Yes, but you can't cause a version already released under the GPL to become retroactively proprietary. That's probably what the poster meant.
You mean like the resolved identity of an incoming high-atmosphere, high-velocity object?
Perhaps you could rephrase that into English, and then explain what that has to do with my entire claim, not just an out-of-context part of the sentence.
For some reason we accept that software should be just thrown together rather than properly designed and proved.
The simplest reason is that for all but a tiny, TINY fraction of software projects, the worst thing that a catastrophic failure can cause is data loss. Whereas with bridges, failure can mean that people die. Therefore, quite understandably, bridges are held to a much higher standard than software. Besides, life-critical software projects ARE held to a much higher standard than e-commerce websites or consumer word processing software.
Also add in that bridge-building as a discipline is thousands of years old; software engineering is a few decades old. And that bridges typically serve a single, simple purpose, whereas software depends on the complex interaction of thousands of elements that are not well-understood.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.geocities.com/rcwoolley/
I had the good fortune to see Spamalot two weeks ago, and it's brilliant. Doesn't exactly hew to the movie, which is fine; most of the best-known skits are intact (often with minor changes in timing or dialogue), although there have been several major changes in terms of plot structure (in other words, the musical actually has a plot structure). Of the three "big-name" leads, Tim Curry, Hank Azaria, and David Hyde-Pierce, Curry comes off the best (he's Arthur all the way through), Hank Azaria is great in a variety of roles (Tim the Enchanter, the French Taunter, Lancelot), and David Hyde-Pierce is pretty good (although his Sir Robin is best when he's most similar to Niles Crane).
Actually, the biggest surprise is Sara Ramirez as the Lady of the Lake. She's a fantastic singer and a great comedic actress. Those of you who've seen it know what I mean. Here's hoping she goes on to great things.
Bah, what am I analyzing it for? It's hysterically funny. Beg, borrow, and steal, and go see it. And if you're going to see it, just remember... A101. (Shh, if you've seen it, don't spoil it!)
Lucas didn't write the screenplay for Empire; Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett did. So even if your comment was valid (which it isn't; see other replies), it still wouldn't be accurate to place the blame on Lucas.
- Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu
- Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon
- Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka
It's been a long damn time since I read them, but they were written around the same time (slightly after, I think) as the three Han Solo novels.
Wrong. People fundamentally go to the movies (and experience all entertainment media) in order to see great stories. Other things can act as a subtitute (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has great acting and writing and a lousy story), but great stories are what people are, at their core, seeking.
There's a great deal of literature on the subject; go read it.
Wow. From your description, it sounds like we should simply execute everyone who's ever sent to prison, because "It's all nice to be Mr. Compasion until you realize that the reality is that anything you give them is abused. Over and over." Why would that stop after prison? Clearly all convicts should simply be put to death. Department of CORRECTIONS? Ha!
In practice, it's because our prison system does basically nothing to discourage ex-cons from becoming repeat offenders. There's a massive correlation between crime and lack of education/opportunity. The cost to educate convicts is far lower than the cost to society from the additional crimes they'll go on to commit when they get out and see that they have basically nothing going for them. But of course, it would (for some inexplicable reason) be wrong to try and prevent further crime by educating convicts. The only way to prevent crime is more law enforcement!
Okay, imagine that the sun rises at 4am. You get up at 7 to be at work at 9. In the evening, the sun goes down at 6pm and you go to bed at 11. That means you've got the lights on for 5 hours in the evening.
Now instead, imagine that we change the clocks so that when the sun rises, it's 5am instead. You still get up at 7 to be at work by 9. In the evening, the sun goes down at 7pm and you go to bed at 11. That means you've got the lights on for 4 hours in the evening.
Ideally you'd set the clocks so that the time you get up coincides with sunrise; in this example, the clocks would be set so that sunrise was at 7am, when you got up; sunset would be at 9pm, so you'd only have the lights on for 2 hours before going to bed. Since people tend to go to work immediately after getting up in the morning, you want X to coincide with Y, where X is the time people will get up (imposed by the artificial constraints of the working world) and Y is sunrise.
That's the theory, anyway. There are obviously a lot of practical issues that complicate matters, such as 1) not everyone gets up or goes to bed at the same time; 2) since DST was first implemented, we now have a lot more electrical devices that are not time-dependent (we only use lights when it's dark, but we use computers, TVs, etc. even when it's light); 3) you can't adjust the time by too much or too often people get confused/freaked out/pissed off, so DST is suboptimal (for maximum "efficiency", time would change by a minute or two a day, to keep pace with sunrise; but that would be a nightmare to implement).
Then in 2010, Joe Shmoe decides to modify the copy you gave him, and distribute that copy as GPL. He has every legal right to do this and there is nothing you can do to stop him. Jane Doe is completely fucked, though (although if she receives a GPL copy from Joe Shmoe, she might be able to modify/redistribute THAT copy; I doubt that your closed license you gave to her could legally specify that she can't use OTHER copies licensed under other mechanisms, but I could be wrong on that point).
I seem to understand the GPL a tad better than you do.Heh, yeah. You can release a separate version (even if it's the same identical code/binaries) under a closed license (or any other license). Functionally that does you little good as far as "protecting" your code, since the GPL version is already out there and you cannot legally prevent whoever has a copy of it from redistributing it. But yes, you *can* close the barn door after the horse has left. ;)
Well, these guys must sure be happy.
Also add in that bridge-building as a discipline is thousands of years old; software engineering is a few decades old. And that bridges typically serve a single, simple purpose, whereas software depends on the complex interaction of thousands of elements that are not well-understood.