It's just that people need to be a bit more realistic about what's attractive or not, and even more importantly, they need to be realistic about how attractive they are themselves.
It's not clever. The first question that popped into my mind was if the DMCA actually applied to this or not -- and I haven't verified for myself that it doesn't apply, but if not: It's typical lawyer douchebaggery and an abuse of the law, and probably subject to censure if somebody cared to take up the case.
9/11 was when a handful of sheep herders armed with box cutters
That's quite racist and seriously underestimates the enemy. For example, Mohamed Atta was well-educated and studied architecture. al-Qaeda was well-funded and headed up by a son of an extremely wealthy businessman with ties to royalty.
killed fewer people than we lose to accidental drowning each year and did property damage that is pittance next to one of the many minor hurricanes that hit the US each year
They completely wiped out internationally recognized office buildings that were part of the crown jewels of New York City -- they changed the fucking skyline. They flew a plane into the Pentagon. These were high-valued targets, not just some random Joe getting into his accident on his way home from work.
As for actual property damage, your analogy is way off. This paper estimates the World Trade Center losses at around $20 billion. For hurricanes, this paper shows a mean loss of $7 billion for a Category 3 hurricane -- not exactly minor. Categories 2 and 1 show mean losses of $2 billion and $1 billion.
Furthermore, 9/11 is not the kind of event you want to see if they can repeat or top. Hurricanes are going to happen no matter what, and they're not scheming against us trying to outdo themselves.
We ratcheting back liberties we had defended for a few hundred years in the face of much scarier opponents
You mean like the concentration camps that we rounded up American citizens of Japanese descent into? Or how about the Sedition Act of 1918?
Too recent? Surely the Founders wouldn't tread on us? How about the Alien and Sedition Acts from 1798? Thank you, John Adams.
We did this, all the while ignoring real threats that actually kill millions of Americans... like cancer, heart disease, and eating too much fucking food.
Those threats haven't been ignored. They've been getting press and funding all along.
Pearl Harbor was tragic a moment that brought us to action. 9/11 was the day we pissed ourselves and surrendered to sheep herders. Please don't try and draw parallels between the two.
They both involved large-scale attacks on American soil that shocked the nation. If we really had surrendered to al-Qaeda, we would have pulled all our troops out of the Middle East, not invaded Afghanistan or Iraq, and not have captured or killed many of their members.
Contrary to the propaganda, al-Qaeda doesn't give a crap if we have less freedom or not. What they care about is our foreign policy.
Instead of using adblockers, how about boycotting content that comes with annoying ads? Content owners are people, too, and you're not respecting their wishes when you block ads.
I don't give a shit about their wishes. The Web was around before the advertisers were, and one of the fundamental principles of the Web was that you could view the content as you wished, whether that meant not loading pictures, disabling JavaScript, or whatever. Blocking ads is no different.
If the "content owners" don't like the game, they can take their ball and play somewhere else.
The whole "hot coffee" thing seems quaint now. In Red Dead Redemption, at least on the PS3 version I played, there's actually a scene where one of the characters is shown fucking a topless woman. It's part of the main story, no mod needed. Maybe it's ok because he's doing it missionary style?
No, you don't see any actual penetration, but there wasn't any for hot coffee, either.
Well, I've been looking for an excuse to stop using slashdot.... it's the same bullshit over and over, and the few gems that do crop up have gotten so rare that trawling through the shit spewed by consumer-capitalist apologists is just too much.
The shit is coming out of your own keyboard. This is pure flamebait, and I don't like seeing it either from the left or the right. The less people like you that stick around, the better.
Slashdot still rocks for high-quality comments on tech stories. I browse at 3, mod down funny to -5, never visit Idle, and I always find worthwhile comments. Is there another site where I could do this? Sites like reddit just don't come close.
The problem with socialism in America is this: It only applies to the rich.
Except that it doesn't. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Unemployment, welfare, disability. Tax breaks for families with children. Drug programs for senior citizens.
But socialism for the poor such as free or low cost medical care, ensuring that all have adequate food, shelter, and clothing, help for the indigent, these things are frowned upon and looked upon as somehow bad or evil.
Go ahead, try and touch any of the above programs. In particular, "Social Security" is the so-called third rail of politics. About the only program that the people can get behind hating is welfare, and that's because it has a reputation of people just sitting on their ass and collecting a check just because they can. If you told people that you were going to cut a program and stop giving food to children you'd be crucified politically.
Of course, the very first line of the Wikipedia article you link to says: "Who's on First? is a vaudeville comedy routine made most famous by Abbott and Costello."
Meaning the basic premise was around for awhile. There's more details in the History section.
Before I go fishing for a definition that, to the best of everyone's knowledge *has* no definitive definition (yet it seems that it's totally fine for the FSF and OSI and slashdot posters to tell me what it *isn't* somehow)
I can totally accept that there is no standard definition of open standard like their is for open source. That said, I think it's clear that the ideas behind open source are what people are after when they clamor for "open standards" these days. It's too bad that there isn't an unambiguous term to cover it to avoid arguments over definitions.
would you care to define "Internet-level"?
You can start with TCP/IP. Throw on top of that DNS and email. That was pretty much the foundation that allowed disparate computers platforms, operating systems, and networks to talk to each other. It was all freely implementable, no royalties required. The Web was built on top of that, and again, freely implementable with no royalties required.
Now you seem to be trying to try to claim that h.264 is somehow different to all the other patented, but open standards that people use every day yet somehow don't get all frothy about.
You ignored my GIF example. People have been complaining about Flash for years. There's a huge push now for an open, freely implementable standard in HTML 5 to replace proprietary technology. Talking about cell phones and USB isn't comparable.
Your final point is the crux of this issue, because it is a "big cause" right now.
It's always been a "big cause". People don't like being forced to pay to implement a standard.
I am going by the definitions of the major standards bodies such as IETF.
Why don't you go with the W3C instead? Or if you want to stick with the IETF, can you name a single standard they endorsed that requires patent royalties? Wasn't the Internet founded on standards that anybody could implement, for free?
What you think is "common sense" really has nothing to do with it
Unless you can point to a definitive place where "open standard" originated from, or a point in time where there was general agreement on what an "open standard" was, then common sense has to play a part. What got people talking about open standards? Were they not concerned about having to pay a single stakeholder?
H.264 is no different to GSM or USB, and you don't hear people crying about how those are not open standards.
Those aren't Internet-level standards. This is more like like the GIF fight from the 90s.
I am a strong supporter of open (free as in freedom) standards and open source, but it doesn't mean I have to agree with the way certain elements of that movement try to redefine things and muddy the waters
By who's definition? Wikipedia shows many definitions, some that allow royalties, some that don't.
Open standard =/= Open source
That's true. The nice thing about the phrase "open source" was that it was not in common use back in 1998 when a bunch of people got together and defined it for their purposes. Can you say the same for "open standard"?
When and where did the phrase come from?
For a technology site, people seem to conflate and confuse those two things so much.
I'm looking forward to your definitive reference.
In the meantime, I think it's common sense that a standard that requires royalties is in some obvious way not as "open" as one that doesn't. What is it that people didn't like about proprietary standards? Surely a big part is being forced to pay a stakeholder money.
You're a stupid apologist mediocrity-defending nigger. Eat shit and shit out that shit and then eat THAT shit and chew it slowly so you can savor the taste of your own lies. Fucker.
That's a very deep, introspective, artistic, and inspiring message you've got there. You should get a job on talk radio.
I'm getting pissed off because you can't address the specific claim, but instead keep wandering off into unrelated scenarios about different products and then spew general anti-Microsoft FUD.
My message has always been the same. The problem is that you wrongly equated it with some stupid claim about Microsoft granting a patent and then suing anyways. I then spent several messages trying to refute that same stupid equation, because you kept on making it.
You act like Mono exists in isolation and is made up of only the Community Promise bits.
Well, obviously I don't because I covered this explicitly in my first message. I said that "the general public won't be able to make the distinction between technology that is covered by the Microsoft Community Promise Agreement and the parts that is not".
Indeed, yet in every message after that, including this one, you act as if Mono is just the Community Promise stuff in isolation, and any other connections don't matter. You use really dumb car to tank analogies as an example. You say there is no danger of being sued for Mono (developed by Novell), yet Microsoft only granted very specific Community Promise rights, has gone into greater patent deals with Novell, and already rattled their saber with nebulous claims about protecting their intellectual property, trying to bully people into buying a Microsoft-royalty version of Linux (which you unbelievably summarized as Public Relations).
You completely dismiss the problems of technology creep, where Microsoft-proprietary technologies gain more adoption by it's relation to Community Promise software, yet it's obvious this happens in the real world and only helps Microsoft while they are trying to gain adoption of Silverlight as the next Flash.
Here's a tip: constant repetition of a statement is not the same as a well-reasoned argument.
I've been making well-reasoned arguments. I repeat the message at the end to summarize and reinforce.
Microsoft has, and always will, use their technologies to reinforce their desktop monopoly.
Bill Gates in 1991: "In the same way that DEC's strategy for the 80's was VAX -- one architecture, one operating system -- our strategy for the 90's is Windows -- one evolving architecture, a couple of implementations. Everything we do should focus on making Windows more successful."
They executed that strategy to perfection in the 90s. Do you think anything has changed? Windows is still the center of their universe.
If you believe in open standards, then you should not follow Microsoft's lead.
unexceptional sound that sells well and has great popular appeal because its mediocrity appeals to the lowest common denominator
I've not really a big Rolling Stones fan, but Paint It Black, Under My Thumb, Mother's Little Helper, and even Satisfaction are some outstanding songs off the top of my head. All of those songs are more interesting than the average love song from the time.
Most bands don't even have one great song in them.
No, if you want to make an argument that we could advance faster without patents, then you either have to look to the pre-patent era for evidence of rapid technological development, or to countries without patent law for the same. And neither evidence exists.
It does exist for software. The software field exploded before software patents applied to it. Networking, graphics, all kinds of programming languages, all kinds of operating systems, databases, all kinds of applications -- all of it was created without software patents and forms the bedrock of software today.
Now we have all this red tape and worries over patent lawsuits. Where's the patent-inspired innovation? The vast majority of software patents are rubbish. To quote more from that Bill Gates memo: "In many application categories straighforward thinking ahead allows you to come up with patentable ideas."
And that's exactly what happened. There's been a huge rush to patent the next straighforward thought.
No, the quote discusses a solution for any standstill.
It's a partial solution to a government-imposed problem.
Given a set of clauses that "or" a set of literals
You are talking about literals when the problem concerns variables. In fact, you seem to go out of your way, in a rather tortured manner, to not use the word variable, but do you really think somebody who doesn't know what a variable is will be helped by talking about literals?
I think you can assume that somebody on Slashdot digging into P = NP? knows the basics of boolean algebra. If not, I'm sure your explanation didn't make sense anyways.
You're really pissing me off. You keep moving between a specific scenario to a generalization, as if the two were equal.
That looks incredibly like you are saying that this isn't about being sued by Microsoft.
Not being sued by Microsoft for a granted patent != sued by Microsoft for non-granted patents. Can you see the difference now? Can you please stop equating the two?
So if you agree that you are not in danger of being sued for using Mono
No, I don't agree and never said that. Mono is a large project that goes well beyond the Community Promise stuff.
The danger in using some open source software is that a company might pull the plug on some other proprietary software that you are not using. That does not make sense.
I've already explained my reasoning. The danger is adopting Mono leads to greater adoption of proprietary parts, and strengthens Microsoft's hand. You act like Mono exists in isolation and is made up of only the Community Promise bits. Neither is true.
Microsoft has, and always will, use their technologies to reinforce their desktop monopoly. If you believe in open standards, then you should not follow Microsoft's lead.
Slashdot Mirror
It's just that people need to be a bit more realistic about what's attractive or not, and even more importantly, they need to be realistic about how attractive they are themselves.
Lowered Expectations
Which is why Occams' razor brings us to the Copenhagen interpretation where there is just a unique universe.
Particles (even molecules) act as probability waves? And these waves "collapse" when "measured", in some ill-defined way?
Occams' razor my ass.
A multiverse of infinite mass... come on.
The Earth revolves around the sun? Come on.
Time slowing down? Come on.
It's not clever. The first question that popped into my mind was if the DMCA actually applied to this or not -- and I haven't verified for myself that it doesn't apply, but if not: It's typical lawyer douchebaggery and an abuse of the law, and probably subject to censure if somebody cared to take up the case.
9/11 was when a handful of sheep herders armed with box cutters
That's quite racist and seriously underestimates the enemy. For example, Mohamed Atta was well-educated and studied architecture. al-Qaeda was well-funded and headed up by a son of an extremely wealthy businessman with ties to royalty.
killed fewer people than we lose to accidental drowning each year and did property damage that is pittance next to one of the many minor hurricanes that hit the US each year
They completely wiped out internationally recognized office buildings that were part of the crown jewels of New York City -- they changed the fucking skyline. They flew a plane into the Pentagon. These were high-valued targets, not just some random Joe getting into his accident on his way home from work.
As for actual property damage, your analogy is way off. This paper estimates the World Trade Center losses at around $20 billion. For hurricanes, this paper shows a mean loss of $7 billion for a Category 3 hurricane -- not exactly minor. Categories 2 and 1 show mean losses of $2 billion and $1 billion.
Furthermore, 9/11 is not the kind of event you want to see if they can repeat or top. Hurricanes are going to happen no matter what, and they're not scheming against us trying to outdo themselves.
We ratcheting back liberties we had defended for a few hundred years in the face of much scarier opponents
You mean like the concentration camps that we rounded up American citizens of Japanese descent into? Or how about the Sedition Act of 1918?
Too recent? Surely the Founders wouldn't tread on us? How about the Alien and Sedition Acts from 1798? Thank you, John Adams.
We did this, all the while ignoring real threats that actually kill millions of Americans... like cancer, heart disease, and eating too much fucking food.
Those threats haven't been ignored. They've been getting press and funding all along.
Pearl Harbor was tragic a moment that brought us to action. 9/11 was the day we pissed ourselves and surrendered to sheep herders. Please don't try and draw parallels between the two.
They both involved large-scale attacks on American soil that shocked the nation. If we really had surrendered to al-Qaeda, we would have pulled all our troops out of the Middle East, not invaded Afghanistan or Iraq, and not have captured or killed many of their members.
Contrary to the propaganda, al-Qaeda doesn't give a crap if we have less freedom or not. What they care about is our foreign policy.
also, unlike Beijing, the Egypt protests are country-wide.
Tiananmen was the flashpoint and main protest, but the protests had spread country-wide in 1989, too.
And I'm a physician and I have medical training.
That may be so, but your use of terminology was terrible. Abusing terminology in this manner only leads to confusion.
Instead of using adblockers, how about boycotting content that comes with annoying ads? Content owners are people, too, and you're not respecting their wishes when you block ads.
I don't give a shit about their wishes. The Web was around before the advertisers were, and one of the fundamental principles of the Web was that you could view the content as you wished, whether that meant not loading pictures, disabling JavaScript, or whatever. Blocking ads is no different.
If the "content owners" don't like the game, they can take their ball and play somewhere else.
The whole "hot coffee" thing seems quaint now. In Red Dead Redemption, at least on the PS3 version I played, there's actually a scene where one of the characters is shown fucking a topless woman. It's part of the main story, no mod needed. Maybe it's ok because he's doing it missionary style?
No, you don't see any actual penetration, but there wasn't any for hot coffee, either.
Well, I've been looking for an excuse to stop using slashdot.... it's the same bullshit over and over, and the few gems that do crop up have gotten so rare that trawling through the shit spewed by consumer-capitalist apologists is just too much.
The shit is coming out of your own keyboard. This is pure flamebait, and I don't like seeing it either from the left or the right. The less people like you that stick around, the better.
Slashdot still rocks for high-quality comments on tech stories. I browse at 3, mod down funny to -5, never visit Idle, and I always find worthwhile comments. Is there another site where I could do this? Sites like reddit just don't come close.
The second link says "University of California Scientists won't be boycotting Nature".
Of course this isn't a popular thought here on Slashdot but hey, who needs karma anyway?
Apparently you do, because your karma whine got the +5, as it usually does on Slashdot.
The problem with socialism in America is this: It only applies to the rich.
Except that it doesn't. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Unemployment, welfare, disability. Tax breaks for families with children. Drug programs for senior citizens.
But socialism for the poor such as free or low cost medical care, ensuring that all have adequate food, shelter, and clothing, help for the indigent, these things are frowned upon and looked upon as somehow bad or evil.
Go ahead, try and touch any of the above programs. In particular, "Social Security" is the so-called third rail of politics. About the only program that the people can get behind hating is welfare, and that's because it has a reputation of people just sitting on their ass and collecting a check just because they can. If you told people that you were going to cut a program and stop giving food to children you'd be crucified politically.
At the very least, one would expect the submitter to have read the article, which doesn't seem to be the case.
The submitter is theodp, and it's easy to spot his submissions because they are screechy rants filled with ton of links.
It was first performed by Abbott and Costello
Of course, the very first line of the Wikipedia article you link to says: "Who's on First? is a vaudeville comedy routine made most famous by Abbott and Costello."
Meaning the basic premise was around for awhile. There's more details in the History section.
touch screens are easier to clean than the mouse or the keyboard too!!
Too much information.
Before I go fishing for a definition that, to the best of everyone's knowledge *has* no definitive definition (yet it seems that it's totally fine for the FSF and OSI and slashdot posters to tell me what it *isn't* somehow)
I can totally accept that there is no standard definition of open standard like their is for open source. That said, I think it's clear that the ideas behind open source are what people are after when they clamor for "open standards" these days. It's too bad that there isn't an unambiguous term to cover it to avoid arguments over definitions.
would you care to define "Internet-level"?
You can start with TCP/IP. Throw on top of that DNS and email. That was pretty much the foundation that allowed disparate computers platforms, operating systems, and networks to talk to each other. It was all freely implementable, no royalties required. The Web was built on top of that, and again, freely implementable with no royalties required.
Now you seem to be trying to try to claim that h.264 is somehow different to all the other patented, but open standards that people use every day yet somehow don't get all frothy about.
You ignored my GIF example. People have been complaining about Flash for years. There's a huge push now for an open, freely implementable standard in HTML 5 to replace proprietary technology. Talking about cell phones and USB isn't comparable.
Your final point is the crux of this issue, because it is a "big cause" right now.
It's always been a "big cause". People don't like being forced to pay to implement a standard.
I am going by the definitions of the major standards bodies such as IETF.
Why don't you go with the W3C instead? Or if you want to stick with the IETF, can you name a single standard they endorsed that requires patent royalties? Wasn't the Internet founded on standards that anybody could implement, for free?
What you think is "common sense" really has nothing to do with it
Unless you can point to a definitive place where "open standard" originated from, or a point in time where there was general agreement on what an "open standard" was, then common sense has to play a part. What got people talking about open standards? Were they not concerned about having to pay a single stakeholder?
H.264 is no different to GSM or USB, and you don't hear people crying about how those are not open standards.
Those aren't Internet-level standards. This is more like like the GIF fight from the 90s.
I am a strong supporter of open (free as in freedom) standards and open source, but it doesn't mean I have to agree with the way certain elements of that movement try to redefine things and muddy the waters
The waters were muddy to begin with.
It *is* an open standard.
By who's definition? Wikipedia shows many definitions, some that allow royalties, some that don't.
Open standard =/= Open source
That's true. The nice thing about the phrase "open source" was that it was not in common use back in 1998 when a bunch of people got together and defined it for their purposes. Can you say the same for "open standard"?
When and where did the phrase come from?
For a technology site, people seem to conflate and confuse those two things so much.
I'm looking forward to your definitive reference.
In the meantime, I think it's common sense that a standard that requires royalties is in some obvious way not as "open" as one that doesn't. What is it that people didn't like about proprietary standards? Surely a big part is being forced to pay a stakeholder money.
You're a stupid apologist mediocrity-defending nigger. Eat shit and shit out that shit and then eat THAT shit and chew it slowly so you can savor the taste of your own lies. Fucker.
That's a very deep, introspective, artistic, and inspiring message you've got there. You should get a job on talk radio.
I'm getting pissed off because you can't address the specific claim, but instead keep wandering off into unrelated scenarios about different products and then spew general anti-Microsoft FUD.
My message has always been the same. The problem is that you wrongly equated it with some stupid claim about Microsoft granting a patent and then suing anyways. I then spent several messages trying to refute that same stupid equation, because you kept on making it.
You act like Mono exists in isolation and is made up of only the Community Promise bits.
Well, obviously I don't because I covered this explicitly in my first message. I said that "the general public won't be able to make the distinction between technology that is covered by the Microsoft Community Promise Agreement and the parts that is not".
Indeed, yet in every message after that, including this one, you act as if Mono is just the Community Promise stuff in isolation, and any other connections don't matter. You use really dumb car to tank analogies as an example. You say there is no danger of being sued for Mono (developed by Novell), yet Microsoft only granted very specific Community Promise rights, has gone into greater patent deals with Novell, and already rattled their saber with nebulous claims about protecting their intellectual property, trying to bully people into buying a Microsoft-royalty version of Linux (which you unbelievably summarized as Public Relations).
You completely dismiss the problems of technology creep, where Microsoft-proprietary technologies gain more adoption by it's relation to Community Promise software, yet it's obvious this happens in the real world and only helps Microsoft while they are trying to gain adoption of Silverlight as the next Flash.
Here's a tip: constant repetition of a statement is not the same as a well-reasoned argument.
I've been making well-reasoned arguments. I repeat the message at the end to summarize and reinforce.
Microsoft has, and always will, use their technologies to reinforce their desktop monopoly.
Bill Gates in 1991: "In the same way that DEC's strategy for the 80's was VAX -- one architecture, one operating system -- our strategy for the 90's is Windows -- one evolving architecture, a couple of implementations. Everything we do should focus on making Windows more successful."
They executed that strategy to perfection in the 90s. Do you think anything has changed? Windows is still the center of their universe.
If you believe in open standards, then you should not follow Microsoft's lead.
unexceptional sound that sells well and has great popular appeal because its mediocrity appeals to the lowest common denominator
I've not really a big Rolling Stones fan, but Paint It Black, Under My Thumb, Mother's Little Helper, and even Satisfaction are some outstanding songs off the top of my head. All of those songs are more interesting than the average love song from the time.
Most bands don't even have one great song in them.
No, if you want to make an argument that we could advance faster without patents, then you either have to look to the pre-patent era for evidence of rapid technological development, or to countries without patent law for the same. And neither evidence exists.
It does exist for software. The software field exploded before software patents applied to it. Networking, graphics, all kinds of programming languages, all kinds of operating systems, databases, all kinds of applications -- all of it was created without software patents and forms the bedrock of software today.
Now we have all this red tape and worries over patent lawsuits. Where's the patent-inspired innovation? The vast majority of software patents are rubbish. To quote more from that Bill Gates memo: "In many application categories straighforward thinking ahead allows you to come up with patentable ideas."
And that's exactly what happened. There's been a huge rush to patent the next straighforward thought.
No, the quote discusses a solution for any standstill.
It's a partial solution to a government-imposed problem.
Given a set of clauses that "or" a set of literals
You are talking about literals when the problem concerns variables. In fact, you seem to go out of your way, in a rather tortured manner, to not use the word variable, but do you really think somebody who doesn't know what a variable is will be helped by talking about literals?
I think you can assume that somebody on Slashdot digging into P = NP? knows the basics of boolean algebra. If not, I'm sure your explanation didn't make sense anyways.
What exactly is wrong with my statement?
You're really pissing me off. You keep moving between a specific scenario to a generalization, as if the two were equal.
That looks incredibly like you are saying that this isn't about being sued by Microsoft.
Not being sued by Microsoft for a granted patent != sued by Microsoft for non-granted patents. Can you see the difference now? Can you please stop equating the two?
So if you agree that you are not in danger of being sued for using Mono
No, I don't agree and never said that. Mono is a large project that goes well beyond the Community Promise stuff.
The danger in using some open source software is that a company might pull the plug on some other proprietary software that you are not using. That does not make sense.
I've already explained my reasoning. The danger is adopting Mono leads to greater adoption of proprietary parts, and strengthens Microsoft's hand. You act like Mono exists in isolation and is made up of only the Community Promise bits. Neither is true.
Microsoft has, and always will, use their technologies to reinforce their desktop monopoly. If you believe in open standards, then you should not follow Microsoft's lead.
Sales != income.