based on what Lucas turned out for Episode I, I'm not holding my breath for this one.
What about what he "turned out" for Episodes IV, V, and VI? Or the Indiana Jones franchise? Or Willow? So with you, it's "make one movie that I don't like and you're permanently blacklisted?" Doesn't that seem kind of silly?
Lucas has an excellent track record. I still hold high hopes for the rest of the prequel trilogy.
I don't understand this at all. When a university student launches a program out into the net, and that program sneaks onto your machine and mucks with your registry and steals your CPU cycles, it's a "virus." The kid is labeled a hacker and is arrested. And now, thanks to 9/11, the kid has the additional dubious classification of a "terrorist."
However, if this EXACT SAME THING is done by a corporation, in the name of profit, it is viewed completely differently! Why? What's the difference? It's a VIRUS! Software forces itself onto your machine and changes things without your permission. That's a virus. That's illegal. Why are we tolerating it???
This article and all the Matrix comments here prove just how powerful a film "The Matrix" really is. Peruse the comments here and notice the huge amount of people spouting off their opinions about the movie, completely ignoring the fact that nobody asked.
Why would people feel such a strong urge to offer up their opinions on a movie if they really, truly felt that it was mediocre? Lots of movies I'm sure they hate just as much are mentioned every day, and these people don't succumb to the temptation to compose a huge commentary on all the borrowed cliches in "Notting Hill." And yet, one need only mention "The Matrix", and even now, 3 years later, and people come out of the woodwork, trying to show off what little they know about classical mythology and contemporary filmmaking. I guess "Intro Filmmaking 101" makes experts out of you all, eh?
I particularly love the poseurs who say they think people are being modded down just because people resent those who rip on popular things. And yet, here on Slashdot, I see far more negative comments about "The Matrix" than positive ones. This little subculture does rip on popular things. The little teeny-bopper geeks-in-waiting have only been around a little over a decade, but they already (claim to) know more about programming than Microsoft, and more about filmmaking than the Wachowskis. They see a couple 60's kung-fu movies at a friend's sleepover and think that makes them film connoisseurs.
Face it - a lot of the kids on this site have been bred to hate popular things. And they don't even consider that it's because they're not popular, so one way to feel good about themselves is to embrace a culture that preaches "popular things are bad." Linux fits that bill nicely. And thus, you have your target audience for Slashdot. Unfortunately, you then have a truly groundbreaking movie like "The Matrix", and it gets shunned by people who think the makers were going for Shakespeare.
The Wachoswkis weren't trying to re-invent the world. Read some interviews with them. All along, all they wanted was to make a cool sci-fi, kung-fu movie. They're just a couple of kids who got their dream come true and were granted a budget by a major studio. Like children in a candy store, they made the movie they wanted to make, and it worked. The editing was bang-on, the effects were groundbreaking, and it was a box-office sleeper hit. They succeeded.
But, unfortunately, in the eyes of their target demographic (Slashdotters), they had crossed over to the dark side. They were (shudder) popular.
Oh well. You can't please everybody. There are so many movies out there that are content with working on just one level. They follow the standard formula of plausible plot, one or too big-name actors, maybe a couple effects, rush it through the grinder and get it up on the screen. I really liked that the Wachowskis bothered to put in so many clever references, even if they didn't rival Freud's greatest works. It's just something fun, something new to discover each time you watch the movie. I think that's all they were going for, and I think it's sad that so many people think they are the final authority on what the film should have been, or was trying to be, when the Wachowskis have clearly articulated their vision already.
When cable TV was first pitched to the masses, it was a new medium, and ad support was weak. At the time, subscribers were told that as the ad revenue picked up, cable would eventually be free, so people signed up, paying the "temporary" subscription fee.
I don't know about you guys, but I'm still paying for my cable. 50 years later, and the ads still aren't paying for the whole model. So I'll be damned if I'm going to pay to watch advertisements.
Should I feel a moral obligation to not channel surf during commercials? Because they're giving me such a great discount (*guffaw*) on quality programming, by only charging me $49.95/month?
GameGear was one of the coolest handhelds I've ever seen. Way ahead of its time, IMHO. It was a portable, full-colour handheld gaming system with a backlit LCD. You could play the thing in full colour in a pitch dark room, out of the box. What systems, even today, can make such a claim?
It's drawbacks were lack of games, pretty pricey, and it ate batteries like Oprah goes through Twinkies.
I really like the concept of XP, and have been working hard to incorporate some of the ideals into my own work. However, XP seems more suited to small, nimble projects of less than 20 people. It doesn't seem to scale very well to larger projects, especially in an organization averse to taking risks and doing things any differently than the way they've been doing them for 20 years (doubly so in this punishing economic environment).
Last year, I actually had the opportunity to ask Kent Beck if he had any suggestions for adopting XP to large projects (200+ people across multiple geographic locations), and unfortunately, he wasn't too optimistic. He indicated that the largest projects he's tried XP on were 20 people or so.
Other issues we've had when considering adopting XP in our organization are that XP tends to assume that you will be developing for a single customer with a set of evolving - but consistent - requirements. In our reality, we have multiple customers, who want different things.
Finally, XP doesn't seem to offer any solution for testing GUIs, which make up a large part of our product.
So while I'm very excited by the promises of XP (and will likely buy this book), I think it is important to temper your enthusiasm with a healthy dose of reality, and consider that XP relies on some subtle preconditions in order to deliver on the promise of a smooth and successful development cycle.
I think from the article, it's pretty clear that Microsoft will eventually be ordered to market some form of a stripped-down Windows product. However, even though he's portrayed as the "bad guy," I think Gates has a bit of a point, with these comments:
"What Windows is loses any meaning," claimed Mr Gates. He said the proposals were "fantasies" that gave his business rivals "everything they ever dreamed of".
Sure, Microsoft needs to lose some power here, but I hope they don't swing the pendulum too far the other way. Are we really any better off if Sun or Oracle are given the power to choose the direction of Windows? I hope the decision makers stick to the principle of "What's good for the consumers," and not just "What's bad for Microsoft."
Because part of Slashdot's new finance model includes the posting of one "sponsored" story (i.e., advertisement in the form of a story) per day. This was announced along with a bunch of the other subscription news.
How can we continue to bitch on companies selling software
Not everyone feels that way - just the ones who haven't finished school yet, and are still living in an idealistic dream world while living off of their parents' teat.
(software is information)
Baloney. Software is art, not information. Software is no more information than the number 9 is information. Or 6. Or a billion of 'em strung together.
If people were smart enough, they would just download open source software, examine the code and compile it themselves. But if you are too LAZY to do that [...]
This viewpoint is much too simplistic. You can't seriously expect everybody with a computer to get that involved. Why should they? It's an appliance, a tool. Do you expect people to get intimately familiar with the firmware in their microwaves? Then why should they invest the tremendous time and effort to comprehend their computer's operating system?
Sure, you find OS source code interesting, and so do I. But not everyone does. Some people like overhauling the engine in their truck, rather than just taking it to a mechanic. Am I "lazy" because I'd rather spend some time with my wife than master my car's ignition system? No. I just have different priorities. And there's nothing wrong with that.
What news would that be? Who the heck is talking about "banning CD burners?" At first, I thought maybe I missed a major news article or something, so I did a quick Google search and came up empty handed. The closest thing I could find was a satire piece in the Purdue student newsletter.
So, praytell, please post a link to this news article wherein people are calling for a ban on CD burners, or quit exaggerating.
Games DON'T affect kids. If PacMan did, we'd all be eating pills and listening to repeditive [sic] music...
Newsflash: Kids today are eating all kinds of pills (Ritalyn, Ecstasy, multivitamins, etc.), and they do listen to repetitive music (See No Doubt's "Hey baby" for more evidence).
But other than that (and the spelling mistake), it's kind of a cute.sig.
If two competent players sit down and play a modern RTS game the winner is usually predicted by the player ever has more resources and who can get it faster.
Duh! Who should win then, if not the person who is better at building up and managing their troops? I suppose next you're going to complain that you can usually predict who's going to win a race by noting which competitor is fastest?
A fancy trick^H^H^H^H^strategy might look pretty and be fun to do (as long as your opponents leave you alone and let you pull it off), but it doesn't mean that that player deserves to win because of it. The winner should be the person who is better at micromanaging, can launch an effective attack, and defends themselves adequately. If they are strong enough that they can pull off a couple fancy tricks on top of that, then great.
Whoops, guess I should have used the "Preview" button. Corrected post follows:
but if the poles just flipped, imagine what chaos it would cause. Would we have to relabel all the maps that are made?
Aeronautical maps are re-issued every 4-5 years anyway, because of this natural drift. Pick up any aviation chart and look for the curving lines called "deviation lines." These are used by pilots to convert from magnetic heading to true heading. Since the poles move, the lines also move, and the charts are re-printed periodically. This isn't a big deal, since other things change over time too, as new airports are added, and airspace is re-classified.
Incidentally, if the poles flipped, older planes wouldn't have any trouble navigating. All planes have at least a basic instrument navigation system to direct them to fixed radio beacons. Even most older planes are fitted with relatively modern (<10 years old) instrument navigation systems (IFR).
A relatively more significant issue to worry about are the runways themselves. The numbers on the ends of runways are the first two digits of the magnetic heading corresponding to the runway direction. If the poles flipped, these numbers would all have to be updated.
The "chaos" that we'd have to worry about would actually be in relation to the radiation shielding provided by the Earth's magnetic field. If the poles were to switch, it's not the kind of thing that happens instantaneously. It could take years, even decades for the switch to complete, and in the interim, we would be vulnerable to harsh radiation from the Sun. Aside from the obvious effects to our health, this could disrupt power grids and disable magnetic storage media. THAT is what you should be worried about.
but if the poles just flipped, imagine what chaos it would cause. Would we have to relabel all the maps that are made?
Aeronautical maps are re-issued every 4-5 years anyway, because of this natural drift. Pick up any aviation chart and look for the curving lines called "deviation lines." These are used by pilots to convert from magnetic heading to true heading. Since the poles move, the lines also move, and the charts are re-printed periodically. This isn't a big deal, since other things change over time too, as new airports are added, and airspace is re-classified.
Incidentally, if the poles flipped, older planes wouldn't have any trouble navigating. All planes have at least a basic instrument navigation system to direct them to fixed radio beacons. Even most older planes are fitted with relatively modern (The real issue I'd worry about are the runways themselves. The numbers on the ends of runways are the first two digits of the magnetic heading corresponding to the runway direction. If the poles flipped, these numbers would all have to be updated.
The "chaos" that we'd have to worry about would actually be in relation to the radiation shielding provided by the Earth's magnetic field. If the poles were to switch, it's not the kind of thing that happens instantaneously. It could take years, even decades for the switch to complete, and in the interim, we would be vulnerable to harsh radiation from the Sun. Aside from the obvious effects to our health, this could disrupt power grids and disable magnetic storage media. THAT is what you should be worried about.
Someone paid a lot of money to license those marks from LucasArts, and I don't think they did it without conducting at least a little market research. That means that at least a few people out there believe people will buy this. And why not?
Why not believe it, that is. Take a look around you. Plenty of companies are having a great deal of success convincing people to pay them to advertise for them. People pay top dollar for t-shirts with some other guy's name on the front (Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, etc.). Why would people do that? The way I see it, if they want me to be a billboard for their brand, they should be paying me
Personally, I refuse to wear clothes in public with logos on them. You will never catch me walking around the mall with a big Nike "swoosh" on the front of my shirt. Nor will you catch me in a band playing a "Star Wars" guitar, unless I have a check in my pocket from Mr. Lucas.
Nevertheless, lots of people out there, in their quest for conformity-friendly-individuality, will pay money for something just a little different. And companies are making lots of money off of them. A fool and their money, so to speak.
Understand that the people reading this don't exactly make up an accurate cross-section of consumer society. Of course, we would never buy these things, but we would never gush over the virtues of Windows XP, either, and Microsoft is having plenty of success without us.
So laugh and joke if you will, but in the end, the scariest part about all of this is that these guys will probably actually make a profit on these things. And that truly saddens me.
Getting rid of this is now going to be seriously difficult. Repealing the DMCA [...] will equal the US pulling out of a ratified international agreement.
Hey, it's not unheard of. They did it with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and they snubbed their nose at Kyoto. Why not this, too?
This is merely semantics, not a hard-and-fast legal technicality on which you can assert a lawsuit. By this flimsy logic, we cannot distribute GPL'd software packages as.tgz files either, unless we happen to have some sort of IDE which lets us work within the.tgz, without ever having to unzip it. We would only be allowed to distribute our code as a directory full of.cpp files.
Clearly, there's some wiggle room, and I think that's what their lawyer is relying on.
You did say they still plan on releasing the resulting, obfuscated code under the GPL, right? So, under the terms of the GPL, there is no violation. The GPL says you can change the code all you want (including obfuscation), as long as you release the resulting work under the same license.
Nowhere does it say that that code has to be non-obfuscated. Nor do I think it should. Do we really want to try and formalize that gray area between "obfuscation" and just plain "sloppy code?"
Not all of the code released under the GPL is what we would consider "good code." By that, I mean people release all sorts of toy projects and junk code under the GPL, for learning purposes. They use bad variable names and inefficient algorithms, but when do we start to consider code "obfuscated?" And more importantly, do we want to leave it to a lawyer to make that decision for us?
I say if you're really concerned about it, then leave the company. Otherwise, just write it off as mean-spirited. There's no law against being mean.:(
First off, let me say that I don't begrudge the Slashdot folk for trying to make a living. Anyone who posts comments to the effect of "Slashdot is evil!" is an ignorant hypocrite. Things cost money, and there's nothing evil about trying to make a fair living. Slashdot provides a valuable service - valuable enough to keep all you guys coming back.
That said, let me also add that I think this is yet another example of one of the major flaws of Free software - its utter inability to be self-sufficient and sustainable. Ironically, as Free software (and content, in Slashdot's case) grows more and more popular, it becomes less and less able to remain viable under the "Free" model.
People will give away their time, as long as they get to control how much, and on what. That's why small projects like Apache succeed, and why toy projects like Mozilla are still kicking around (but not really making any mainstream noise). But, when a project's popularity demands a person's full attention, they're suddenly faced with a decision: abandon the project, or try to make money from it.
I value Slashdot. Do I value it enough to pay for it? Frankly, yes. However, I won't be forking over any cash until they offer more payment options (I don't/won't use PayPal). $5 a month is peanuts. I spend more than that on far more frivilous things. But that $5 will go a long way towards keeping Rob employed. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to request that none of my subscription dollars go toward keeping Jon Katz around. In fact, I'd pay money for him to be FIRED. He's never once posted a single commentary or editorial that has actually made me think. He just states the obvious, exaggerates it, and makes it sound like it'll spell the end of the world. But I digress.
Presumably, most of you reading this have a job, or will have a job someday. This is Rob's job. We've seen that the "free content" model doesn't work (and a few of us even got burned pretty badly in the dot-bomb fallout on the stock market). This is evolution. This is reality. Suck it up, or take your ball and go home, continuing to live in your fantasy world that there are a wealth of people out there lining up to donate their time to entertain you for free.
The poor would go the 'natural' way and subbsequently become a lower class physically than families who can afford such procedures.
But this is already happening. Those who can afford hair transplants, liposuction, and facelifts get an aesthetic advantage over those who can't. And look around - the world hasn't exactly fallen apart because of it.
By your logic, we should eliminate all university fees, and have enrolment done via some sort of "lottery," to ensure that rich parents' kids don't get an advantage over those who can't afford school, or couldn't afford a private tutor through high school to help them score higher on the SATs.
Yes, but the problem is that by that point, you're tapping an analog signal. We already know the MPAA doesn't care much about that - people have been copying VHS for decades. An analog signal will never be as pure as the digital one, and the black market for movies and music right now is only interested in digital specimens.
Slashdot Mirror
based on what Lucas turned out for Episode I, I'm not holding my breath for this one.
What about what he "turned out" for Episodes IV, V, and VI? Or the Indiana Jones franchise? Or Willow? So with you, it's "make one movie that I don't like and you're permanently blacklisted?" Doesn't that seem kind of silly?
Lucas has an excellent track record. I still hold high hopes for the rest of the prequel trilogy.
Try actually reading the warnings at the beginning of your home videos. They merely say you're not allowed to charge money to people to watch them.
I don't understand this at all. When a university student launches a program out into the net, and that program sneaks onto your machine and mucks with your registry and steals your CPU cycles, it's a "virus." The kid is labeled a hacker and is arrested. And now, thanks to 9/11, the kid has the additional dubious classification of a "terrorist."
However, if this EXACT SAME THING is done by a corporation, in the name of profit, it is viewed completely differently! Why? What's the difference? It's a VIRUS! Software forces itself onto your machine and changes things without your permission. That's a virus. That's illegal. Why are we tolerating it???
Why would people feel such a strong urge to offer up their opinions on a movie if they really, truly felt that it was mediocre? Lots of movies I'm sure they hate just as much are mentioned every day, and these people don't succumb to the temptation to compose a huge commentary on all the borrowed cliches in "Notting Hill." And yet, one need only mention "The Matrix", and even now, 3 years later, and people come out of the woodwork, trying to show off what little they know about classical mythology and contemporary filmmaking. I guess "Intro Filmmaking 101" makes experts out of you all, eh?
I particularly love the poseurs who say they think people are being modded down just because people resent those who rip on popular things. And yet, here on Slashdot, I see far more negative comments about "The Matrix" than positive ones. This little subculture does rip on popular things. The little teeny-bopper geeks-in-waiting have only been around a little over a decade, but they already (claim to) know more about programming than Microsoft, and more about filmmaking than the Wachowskis. They see a couple 60's kung-fu movies at a friend's sleepover and think that makes them film connoisseurs.
Face it - a lot of the kids on this site have been bred to hate popular things. And they don't even consider that it's because they're not popular, so one way to feel good about themselves is to embrace a culture that preaches "popular things are bad." Linux fits that bill nicely. And thus, you have your target audience for Slashdot. Unfortunately, you then have a truly groundbreaking movie like "The Matrix", and it gets shunned by people who think the makers were going for Shakespeare.
The Wachoswkis weren't trying to re-invent the world. Read some interviews with them. All along, all they wanted was to make a cool sci-fi, kung-fu movie. They're just a couple of kids who got their dream come true and were granted a budget by a major studio. Like children in a candy store, they made the movie they wanted to make, and it worked. The editing was bang-on, the effects were groundbreaking, and it was a box-office sleeper hit. They succeeded.
But, unfortunately, in the eyes of their target demographic (Slashdotters), they had crossed over to the dark side. They were (shudder) popular.
Oh well. You can't please everybody. There are so many movies out there that are content with working on just one level. They follow the standard formula of plausible plot, one or too big-name actors, maybe a couple effects, rush it through the grinder and get it up on the screen. I really liked that the Wachowskis bothered to put in so many clever references, even if they didn't rival Freud's greatest works. It's just something fun, something new to discover each time you watch the movie. I think that's all they were going for, and I think it's sad that so many people think they are the final authority on what the film should have been, or was trying to be, when the Wachowskis have clearly articulated their vision already.
I don't know about you guys, but I'm still paying for my cable. 50 years later, and the ads still aren't paying for the whole model. So I'll be damned if I'm going to pay to watch advertisements.
Should I feel a moral obligation to not channel surf during commercials? Because they're giving me such a great discount (*guffaw*) on quality programming, by only charging me $49.95/month?
Oh really? TIME magazine is free (as in beer) now?
GameGear was one of the coolest handhelds I've ever seen. Way ahead of its time, IMHO. It was a portable, full-colour handheld gaming system with a backlit LCD. You could play the thing in full colour in a pitch dark room, out of the box. What systems, even today, can make such a claim?
It's drawbacks were lack of games, pretty pricey, and it ate batteries like Oprah goes through Twinkies.
Last year, I actually had the opportunity to ask Kent Beck if he had any suggestions for adopting XP to large projects (200+ people across multiple geographic locations), and unfortunately, he wasn't too optimistic. He indicated that the largest projects he's tried XP on were 20 people or so.
Other issues we've had when considering adopting XP in our organization are that XP tends to assume that you will be developing for a single customer with a set of evolving - but consistent - requirements. In our reality, we have multiple customers, who want different things.
Finally, XP doesn't seem to offer any solution for testing GUIs, which make up a large part of our product.
So while I'm very excited by the promises of XP (and will likely buy this book), I think it is important to temper your enthusiasm with a healthy dose of reality, and consider that XP relies on some subtle preconditions in order to deliver on the promise of a smooth and successful development cycle.
"What Windows is loses any meaning," claimed Mr Gates. He said the proposals were "fantasies" that gave his business rivals "everything they ever dreamed of".
Sure, Microsoft needs to lose some power here, but I hope they don't swing the pendulum too far the other way. Are we really any better off if Sun or Oracle are given the power to choose the direction of Windows? I hope the decision makers stick to the principle of "What's good for the consumers," and not just "What's bad for Microsoft."
Because part of Slashdot's new finance model includes the posting of one "sponsored" story (i.e., advertisement in the form of a story) per day. This was announced along with a bunch of the other subscription news.
Not everyone feels that way - just the ones who haven't finished school yet, and are still living in an idealistic dream world while living off of their parents' teat.
(software is information)
Baloney. Software is art, not information. Software is no more information than the number 9 is information. Or 6. Or a billion of 'em strung together.
Kid, you really need a wake-up call.
This viewpoint is much too simplistic. You can't seriously expect everybody with a computer to get that involved. Why should they? It's an appliance, a tool. Do you expect people to get intimately familiar with the firmware in their microwaves? Then why should they invest the tremendous time and effort to comprehend their computer's operating system?
Sure, you find OS source code interesting, and so do I. But not everyone does. Some people like overhauling the engine in their truck, rather than just taking it to a mechanic. Am I "lazy" because I'd rather spend some time with my wife than master my car's ignition system? No. I just have different priorities. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Are you sure about that? Have you seen the source code?
What news would that be? Who the heck is talking about "banning CD burners?" At first, I thought maybe I missed a major news article or something, so I did a quick Google search and came up empty handed. The closest thing I could find was a satire piece in the Purdue student newsletter.
So, praytell, please post a link to this news article wherein people are calling for a ban on CD burners, or quit exaggerating.
Games DON'T affect kids. If PacMan did, we'd all be eating pills and listening to repeditive [sic] music...
Newsflash: Kids today are eating all kinds of pills (Ritalyn, Ecstasy, multivitamins, etc.), and they do listen to repetitive music (See No Doubt's "Hey baby" for more evidence).
But other than that (and the spelling mistake), it's kind of a cute .sig.
Duh! Who should win then, if not the person who is better at building up and managing their troops? I suppose next you're going to complain that you can usually predict who's going to win a race by noting which competitor is fastest?
A fancy trick^H^H^H^H^strategy might look pretty and be fun to do (as long as your opponents leave you alone and let you pull it off), but it doesn't mean that that player deserves to win because of it. The winner should be the person who is better at micromanaging, can launch an effective attack, and defends themselves adequately. If they are strong enough that they can pull off a couple fancy tricks on top of that, then great.
Whoops, guess I should have used the "Preview" button. Corrected post follows:
but if the poles just flipped, imagine what chaos it would cause. Would we have to relabel all the maps that are made?
Aeronautical maps are re-issued every 4-5 years anyway, because of this natural drift. Pick up any aviation chart and look for the curving lines called "deviation lines." These are used by pilots to convert from magnetic heading to true heading. Since the poles move, the lines also move, and the charts are re-printed periodically. This isn't a big deal, since other things change over time too, as new airports are added, and airspace is re-classified.
Incidentally, if the poles flipped, older planes wouldn't have any trouble navigating. All planes have at least a basic instrument navigation system to direct them to fixed radio beacons. Even most older planes are fitted with relatively modern (<10 years old) instrument navigation systems (IFR).
A relatively more significant issue to worry about are the runways themselves. The numbers on the ends of runways are the first two digits of the magnetic heading corresponding to the runway direction. If the poles flipped, these numbers would all have to be updated.
The "chaos" that we'd have to worry about would actually be in relation to the radiation shielding provided by the Earth's magnetic field. If the poles were to switch, it's not the kind of thing that happens instantaneously. It could take years, even decades for the switch to complete, and in the interim, we would be vulnerable to harsh radiation from the Sun. Aside from the obvious effects to our health, this could disrupt power grids and disable magnetic storage media. THAT is what you should be worried about.
but if the poles just flipped, imagine what chaos it would cause. Would we have to relabel all the maps that are made?
Aeronautical maps are re-issued every 4-5 years anyway, because of this natural drift. Pick up any aviation chart and look for the curving lines called "deviation lines." These are used by pilots to convert from magnetic heading to true heading. Since the poles move, the lines also move, and the charts are re-printed periodically. This isn't a big deal, since other things change over time too, as new airports are added, and airspace is re-classified.
Incidentally, if the poles flipped, older planes wouldn't have any trouble navigating. All planes have at least a basic instrument navigation system to direct them to fixed radio beacons. Even most older planes are fitted with relatively modern (The real issue I'd worry about are the runways themselves. The numbers on the ends of runways are the first two digits of the magnetic heading corresponding to the runway direction. If the poles flipped, these numbers would all have to be updated.
The "chaos" that we'd have to worry about would actually be in relation to the radiation shielding provided by the Earth's magnetic field. If the poles were to switch, it's not the kind of thing that happens instantaneously. It could take years, even decades for the switch to complete, and in the interim, we would be vulnerable to harsh radiation from the Sun. Aside from the obvious effects to our health, this could disrupt power grids and disable magnetic storage media. THAT is what you should be worried about.
Someone paid a lot of money to license those marks from LucasArts, and I don't think they did it without conducting at least a little market research. That means that at least a few people out there believe people will buy this. And why not?
Why not believe it, that is. Take a look around you. Plenty of companies are having a great deal of success convincing people to pay them to advertise for them. People pay top dollar for t-shirts with some other guy's name on the front (Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, etc.). Why would people do that? The way I see it, if they want me to be a billboard for their brand, they should be paying me
Personally, I refuse to wear clothes in public with logos on them. You will never catch me walking around the mall with a big Nike "swoosh" on the front of my shirt. Nor will you catch me in a band playing a "Star Wars" guitar, unless I have a check in my pocket from Mr. Lucas.
Nevertheless, lots of people out there, in their quest for conformity-friendly-individuality, will pay money for something just a little different. And companies are making lots of money off of them. A fool and their money, so to speak.
Understand that the people reading this don't exactly make up an accurate cross-section of consumer society. Of course, we would never buy these things, but we would never gush over the virtues of Windows XP, either, and Microsoft is having plenty of success without us.
So laugh and joke if you will, but in the end, the scariest part about all of this is that these guys will probably actually make a profit on these things. And that truly saddens me.
Hey, it's not unheard of. They did it with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and they snubbed their nose at Kyoto. Why not this, too?
This is merely semantics, not a hard-and-fast legal technicality on which you can assert a lawsuit. By this flimsy logic, we cannot distribute GPL'd software packages as
Clearly, there's some wiggle room, and I think that's what their lawyer is relying on.
Nowhere does it say that that code has to be non-obfuscated. Nor do I think it should. Do we really want to try and formalize that gray area between "obfuscation" and just plain "sloppy code?"
Not all of the code released under the GPL is what we would consider "good code." By that, I mean people release all sorts of toy projects and junk code under the GPL, for learning purposes. They use bad variable names and inefficient algorithms, but when do we start to consider code "obfuscated?" And more importantly, do we want to leave it to a lawyer to make that decision for us?
I say if you're really concerned about it, then leave the company. Otherwise, just write it off as mean-spirited. There's no law against being mean. :(
That said, let me also add that I think this is yet another example of one of the major flaws of Free software - its utter inability to be self-sufficient and sustainable. Ironically, as Free software (and content, in Slashdot's case) grows more and more popular, it becomes less and less able to remain viable under the "Free" model.
People will give away their time, as long as they get to control how much, and on what. That's why small projects like Apache succeed, and why toy projects like Mozilla are still kicking around (but not really making any mainstream noise). But, when a project's popularity demands a person's full attention, they're suddenly faced with a decision: abandon the project, or try to make money from it.
I value Slashdot. Do I value it enough to pay for it? Frankly, yes. However, I won't be forking over any cash until they offer more payment options (I don't/won't use PayPal). $5 a month is peanuts. I spend more than that on far more frivilous things. But that $5 will go a long way towards keeping Rob employed. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to request that none of my subscription dollars go toward keeping Jon Katz around. In fact, I'd pay money for him to be FIRED. He's never once posted a single commentary or editorial that has actually made me think. He just states the obvious, exaggerates it, and makes it sound like it'll spell the end of the world. But I digress.
Presumably, most of you reading this have a job, or will have a job someday. This is Rob's job. We've seen that the "free content" model doesn't work (and a few of us even got burned pretty badly in the dot-bomb fallout on the stock market). This is evolution. This is reality. Suck it up, or take your ball and go home, continuing to live in your fantasy world that there are a wealth of people out there lining up to donate their time to entertain you for free.
than families who can afford such procedures.
But this is already happening. Those who can afford hair transplants, liposuction, and facelifts get an aesthetic advantage over those who can't. And look around - the world hasn't exactly fallen apart because of it.
By your logic, we should eliminate all university fees, and have enrolment done via some sort of "lottery," to ensure that rich parents' kids don't get an advantage over those who can't afford school, or couldn't afford a private tutor through high school to help them score higher on the SATs.
Yes, but the problem is that by that point, you're tapping an analog signal. We already know the MPAA doesn't care much about that - people have been copying VHS for decades. An analog signal will never be as pure as the digital one, and the black market for movies and music right now is only interested in digital specimens.