The damnedest thing is that pedophiles are about as peaceful a group of people as can be found...
Hmm... the child rape apologist is modded "5: Informative", whereas most people pointing out how fucked up that is are modded "-1: Troll" or "-1: Flamebait".
Either there's an organized group with mod points... or else Slashdot culture has finally drifted to the point where I'm no longer part of the community.
If it's the latter, then I blame the Apple fanboys for starting this process.
Why on earth is this modded "5, Funny", rather than "5, Insightful"?!? Actually, I would mod it "5, Agree" if I could... but "5, Insightful" means more or less the same thing.
I think that was the party that took place in New Orleans...
Ah, yes. Around 2000 or 2001, my then-employer rewarded some overtime by sending me to New Orleans for the "ATG Open"... ATG's version of Java One. ATG hired a hundred or so jazz musicians to stand around the hallways of the hotel playing music all day. They hired a few dozen more people to dress up as the company mascot (a square with a dot in the center), just to stand around the hallways for the hell of it waving to everyone. Free booze was everywhere, and at night the hotel conference rooms were turned into dance parties with half-naked women suspended from the ceilings in cages.
On the last day, they closed off Bourbon Street for a parade with all the musicians and weird "dot" mascots. That night they rented out the freaking Superdome for a jazz/rock concert, along with carnival rides and a field goal kicking contest (NOTE: Football kickers deserve respect, 25 yards is a LONG way!). On our way out, they gave each attendee hundreds of dollars worth of premium-quality swag... designer pens, football jerseys, and a weekend luggage bag that I still take to the gym today.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that the machine-or-transformation test is not at all applicable to Beauregard claims. However, BPAI rulings and District Court decisions over the past year have been all over the map on it. Some view Alappat and Beauregard doctrine as turning a "general-use" computer into a "particular" machine, satisfying that first prong. Others opinions "pierce the veil" so to speak, and consider the particularity of the machine apart from merely having software on it (e.g. Cybersource in California).
Regardless, when you invent software and install it on a general-use computer... in my opinion it's fundamentally disingenuous to say that you have a "particular machine". Even if Beauregard claims offer weaker protection than claims written in method or system form, the fact that a patent issues at all creates a chilling effect because most parties will simply consent to a licensing shakedown rather than spend the $4+ million required to litigate validity or non-infringement. Beauregard is simply terrible doctrine, and it would have been nice for everyone (even those who disagree) to get some finality on its status either way.
While Bilski lost, the Supreme Court did not throw out software or method patents. The Supreme Court actually re-opened the door just a bit after the Federal Circuit had left it cracked.
The actual majority opinion is only 16 pages long, and really doesn't say much. They more or less like the "machine or transformation" test that the Federal Circuit had come up with... wherein a method patent must tie any abstract ideas to a "particular" machine or transformation of matter, such that the abstract idea may be combined with other machines or transformations not protected by the patent. However, the Supreme Court now says that while this test may get the job done most of the time, it is not necessarily the only possible test (and they don't say what the other tests might include.
Most important for software patent watchers, the Supreme Court completely ignored In re Alappat and the impact of "Beauregard claims" on the Federal Circuit "machine or transformation" test. That older Alappat decision opened the door for patentee to write claims for software as being articles of manufacter. This "Bearegard" format is basically a sneaky trick... saying that you haven't invented software on a hard drive (which should be analyzed as a method), but rather you've invented a hard drive that has software on it (which should NOT be treated as a method). This is how most software still gets in the door, as the PTO gives it a wink and a nudge doesn't treat it as being "software" at all! This was the issue that software patentees were watching mostly closely, and Supreme Court was completely silent and left the status quo untouched.
Nice headline, but it does not reflect the total picture. This opinion is NOT a victory whatsoever for the anti-software patent crowd.
Any of you editors care to post on the Bilski decision coming down earlier this morning... so Slashdot can kick off the firestorm about software patents effectively being upheld?
Sometimes I complain that everything on Slashdot is either: (1) a misleading story about intellectual property and piracy, (2) a misleading story about the latest events with either Apple or AT&T, or (3) an absurdly misleading story about China, Microsoft, video games, the military, or medical science.
Then every few days the editors put something on the main page which doesn't fall into one of those categories. When they do, it reminds us that maybe those three categories are for the best after all.
I'm not the biggest BP fan right now... but this is probably the only intelligent comment in the whole thread thus far. If they HADN'T set up some sort of highly prominent web page with information on what they're doing, people would have criticized that too.
I think that the second half of this post says that that the oil leak is bad, or could cause the end of the world, or something. However, it's such a gusher of spastic sentence fragments that I can't quite be certain.
Someone should drop a containment dome over this guy's keyboard until he's learned to organize his thoughts.
Back before this website's buyout, editors used to post reasonable things... and commenters would fly off in random crazy directions without having RTFA.
Today, the editors fly off in random crazy directions without having RTFA... and half of the comments are reasonable things posted to correct the misinformation.
In this story, the data collection in question is widely publicized to Kindle owners. And it is disabled by default... users must opt-in, not opt-out. There is nothing more to see here, move along.
Please people, don't feed the trolls... by "trolls", I mean "today's Slashdot editorial staff". When you see some post about digital rights armageddon or corporate bad behavior, fight the impulse to fire off a knee-jerk comment in response. RTFA instead, or simply wait 15 minutes... and other people will RTFA and post comments explaining why the editor is a misleading troll. There are plenty of things to talk about and focus on in the digital rights area, but Slashdot takes advantage of people's passion with inflammatory fluff... and it hurts the credibility of digital rights in the big picture.
Discussion of female grooming habits is one thing, but there are too many comments here from dudes about their own "manscaping". If Slashdot is going to have an "Informative" tag which mods posts up... then there should also be a "Too Much Informative" tag which mods posts down.
Can anyone confirm whether the controversy over Mac-ifying the window buttons applies to the Xubuntu flavor (or Kubuntu for that matter)? I recently made the switch full-time after discovering that XFCE supports everything I care about in Gnome (and then some) while carrying a much lighter footprint. I don't really care what they do to Gnome, I'm just interested in whether those design choices are spilling over into the other flavors as well.
I think we are ultimately applying very different criteria. I use one of the 100+ "nobody" devices that you just linked to, and for me Ogg provides the best balance between audio quality and file size. That's my criteria.
In your criteria, you seem far more focused on avoiding "exclusion". Oh my gosh, what if I'm locked out of the most popular and trendy (and overpriced) devices? What if people don't want to download the pirate torrents that I go through the hassle of creating and publishing? What if I'm in a minority?!? Oh noes!!!
Cool. If anybody reading this is highly concerned about fitting in, then:
Buy an iPod or iPhone
Use MP3 for your own rips
Just leech torrents rather than create them
Ignore all the 20 paragraphs this guy wrote about FLAC (it is a good archival format, but it's silly to carry around on a portable device)
Presto, now you are just like most everyone else!
Anyway... if you want a lossless archival format, FLAC is the best choice. If you have a device with weak format support, or if creating torrents is a big deal to you, then MP3 is the best choice. But if you have a device that supports Ogg, and you don't really give a crap about sharing your own rips, then this format happens to provide the best ratio of quality to file size. Pick your criteria accordingly.
The Rockbox firmware has relatively simplistic failings. For example, look at the screenshots on Wikipedia or their site. The text is so small that it's relatively difficult to read.
Yes, the default Rockbox skin sucks. Hence the "with a sensible choice of skin" qualifier that you overlooked.
My man, you really need to get over the love affair with the sound of your own voice! This behemoth of a post could have been expressed in a single paragraph, and it would have been more effective. You're basically saying that:
Using Ogg limits your choice of hardware
It limits the number of people you can share with.
My response to these two points is:
The only significant hardware vendor that refuses to support Ogg is Apple. Even that's not necessarily true if you're a fan of the Rockbox firmware. Either way, all the Apple guys probably stopped reading this thread two or three levels back.
You keep citing to statistics on file-sharing sites, for the formats that leeches would prefer to have provided to them for free. Number one, I frankly don't understand the motivation behind catering to those who would look a gift horse in the mouth. However, if you want to share a CD with the torrent community, or your girlfriend, or whoever, then fine... rip to MP3. I don't see what any of that has to do with the format that you choose to rip for your own personal purposes.
The vast majority of people I see with DAPs use an Apple product. Unless you use the third party Rockbox firmware, which substantially reduces the UI quality
Wow... you are definitely not "someone I could have a beer with"! Rockbox is dramatically superior to native firmware in terms of feature set and intuitiveness, and with a sensible choice of skin it can be more aesthetically pleasing as well.
The rest of your novella of a post is really arguing apples and oranges though. You could have boiled that down to two sentences: "(1) FLAC is a great lossless format for archival purposes, because it's popular and cool, (2) Ogg is poor lossy format for portable device use, because it's unpopular and nerdy." Assuming that #2 is a valid point (which it is not), there's little to no connection between these two threads of discussion.
You may not need absolute-100%-CD-quality, but you're still more demanding than the majority of users
You have a decent (i.e. non-Apple) media player that supports a variety of formats, and Ogg happens to be one of them
You don't see the point of wasting space with a FLAC that's half the size of a ripped WAV, when you could just use an Ogg file that's less than ten-percent the size of a ripped WAV
[shrug]... That's my reasoning for using Ogg, anyway.
As far as Whedon goes, he's one of these guys that studios often bring in to write/rewrite scripts just to test the waters on early projects. His name generates some buzz, and the studio may or may not get an interesting script out of him.... Hiring Joss Whedon may be a good way to get some geek buzz, but it doesn't indicate in any way that the studio is serious about actually making this movie.
Bingo. After five or ten years of "development" for Wonder Woman with Joss at the helm, I'm a bit surprised to see so many people freak out at any of his comic film announcements. Somebody ping me when actors are actually cast... I'm still waiting to hear whether Charisma Carpenter or Summer Glau will star in the LAST vaporware.
We know that Apple protects their branding to a ridiculous degree... essentially arguing that any name with an "i" in front it threatens their intellectual property. So I wonder if Amazon will have anything to say about this new product? If I saw a news story about the "Kin Two", and the headline didn't qualify it as a Microsoft thing, my first assumption would be that it's a new version of Amazon's ebook reader.
Slashdot seems idle today...
on
The Neo-Geo Song
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
You know, it's a shame that Slashdot doesn't have a designated area just for stuff like this. That could help keep non-stories off the main page, and make the site better overall. Oh well.
One is using an official public channel while Kevin Trudeau was having people spam the judge through a private email account.
No, the article did not say that it was private email account. Presumably, this was his taxpayer-funded public email address. I pulled up his profile page on the District Court's website... and while it doesn't list his email address (at least not anymore!), it does still provide contact information such as the direct telephone line to his chambers.
At a high level, we assume that it's immoral or unjust to lobby a judge, in hopes that pressure will overcome his or her sense of justice and public policy. Meanwhile, we find it (more or less) totally acceptable to lobby a legislator, in hopes that pressure will overcome his or her sense of justice and public policy. Assuming that the channels in both case are public and valid, what's the fundamental difference?
Just to play devil's advocate to some of the comments thus far... I wonder how people would differentiate this from political lobbying. This guy had a court case pending before the judge, and asked his followers to write the judge in hopes that it will sway the judge's impartial decision-making. Large special interest organizations ask their followers to write Congressmen, in hopes that it will sway the legislator's impartial decision-making.
What's the difference between lobbying a government's judicial branch, as opposed to lobbying the legislative branch? I'm not necessarily saying that there ISN'T an enormous difference between these two things... I'm just curious what kind of answers I'd get by posing the question.
The most interesting thing to me about Gnome these days is that it's memory footprint is still ridiculously fatter than Xfce's, even though Xfce has caught up with Gnome's basic features.
My "family computer" has been running default Ubuntu with Gnome, and my non-technical wife has been happy with it. However, it's starting to show its age, and with each major software update it gets a little slower and slower. So for the hell of it last month I thought I'd experiment with Xfce and see if I could postpone the next computer purchase until the holiday season.
I might postpone a lot further out than that! Thanks to Canonical's packaging of Xfce, it looked pretty much the same as Gnome right out of the box. After 5 minutes of tweaking the panel icons and theme settings, it was almost indistinguishable from my machine's previous setup. My wife didn't notice at all until three weeks later when she went to copy some files from a USB drive, and noticed that the file manager was Thunar rather than Nautilus. She turned out to be happier with Thunar though, because it doesn't randomly freeze up during drag-and-drop operations.
For years now, Gnome's "niche" has been with those who want something more feature-rich than Fluxbox, yet simpler and more lightweight than KDE. However, Gnome's basic functionality has been pretty stagnant for a long time, and lighter-weight desktop environments are catching up with the core expected feature set. Right now, I don't know of any compelling reason to run Gnome other than wanting to use a lot of Compiz visual effects, and Xfce is almost caught up with that too.
Slashdot Mirror
The damnedest thing is that pedophiles are about as peaceful a group of people as can be found...
Hmm... the child rape apologist is modded "5: Informative", whereas most people pointing out how fucked up that is are modded "-1: Troll" or "-1: Flamebait".
Either there's an organized group with mod points... or else Slashdot culture has finally drifted to the point where I'm no longer part of the community.
If it's the latter, then I blame the Apple fanboys for starting this process.
Why on earth is this modded "5, Funny", rather than "5, Insightful"?!? Actually, I would mod it "5, Agree" if I could... but "5, Insightful" means more or less the same thing.
I think that was the party that took place in New Orleans...
Ah, yes. Around 2000 or 2001, my then-employer rewarded some overtime by sending me to New Orleans for the "ATG Open"... ATG's version of Java One. ATG hired a hundred or so jazz musicians to stand around the hallways of the hotel playing music all day. They hired a few dozen more people to dress up as the company mascot (a square with a dot in the center), just to stand around the hallways for the hell of it waving to everyone. Free booze was everywhere, and at night the hotel conference rooms were turned into dance parties with half-naked women suspended from the ceilings in cages.
On the last day, they closed off Bourbon Street for a parade with all the musicians and weird "dot" mascots. That night they rented out the freaking Superdome for a jazz/rock concert, along with carnival rides and a field goal kicking contest (NOTE: Football kickers deserve respect, 25 yards is a LONG way!). On our way out, they gave each attendee hundreds of dollars worth of premium-quality swag... designer pens, football jerseys, and a weekend luggage bag that I still take to the gym today.
I miss the dot-com years.
"The reason is simple: Starting flamewars and attracting eyeballs is how it makes money, and Slashdot is above all owned by a business."
Make this happen...
Yuk-yuk... I kid, folks! (except not really)
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that the machine-or-transformation test is not at all applicable to Beauregard claims. However, BPAI rulings and District Court decisions over the past year have been all over the map on it. Some view Alappat and Beauregard doctrine as turning a "general-use" computer into a "particular" machine, satisfying that first prong. Others opinions "pierce the veil" so to speak, and consider the particularity of the machine apart from merely having software on it (e.g. Cybersource in California).
Regardless, when you invent software and install it on a general-use computer... in my opinion it's fundamentally disingenuous to say that you have a "particular machine". Even if Beauregard claims offer weaker protection than claims written in method or system form, the fact that a patent issues at all creates a chilling effect because most parties will simply consent to a licensing shakedown rather than spend the $4+ million required to litigate validity or non-infringement. Beauregard is simply terrible doctrine, and it would have been nice for everyone (even those who disagree) to get some finality on its status either way.
While Bilski lost, the Supreme Court did not throw out software or method patents. The Supreme Court actually re-opened the door just a bit after the Federal Circuit had left it cracked.
The actual majority opinion is only 16 pages long, and really doesn't say much. They more or less like the "machine or transformation" test that the Federal Circuit had come up with... wherein a method patent must tie any abstract ideas to a "particular" machine or transformation of matter, such that the abstract idea may be combined with other machines or transformations not protected by the patent. However, the Supreme Court now says that while this test may get the job done most of the time, it is not necessarily the only possible test (and they don't say what the other tests might include.
Most important for software patent watchers, the Supreme Court completely ignored In re Alappat and the impact of "Beauregard claims" on the Federal Circuit "machine or transformation" test. That older Alappat decision opened the door for patentee to write claims for software as being articles of manufacter. This "Bearegard" format is basically a sneaky trick... saying that you haven't invented software on a hard drive (which should be analyzed as a method), but rather you've invented a hard drive that has software on it (which should NOT be treated as a method). This is how most software still gets in the door, as the PTO gives it a wink and a nudge doesn't treat it as being "software" at all! This was the issue that software patentees were watching mostly closely, and Supreme Court was completely silent and left the status quo untouched.
Nice headline, but it does not reflect the total picture. This opinion is NOT a victory whatsoever for the anti-software patent crowd.
Any of you editors care to post on the Bilski decision coming down earlier this morning... so Slashdot can kick off the firestorm about software patents effectively being upheld?
Sometimes I complain that everything on Slashdot is either: (1) a misleading story about intellectual property and piracy, (2) a misleading story about the latest events with either Apple or AT&T, or (3) an absurdly misleading story about China, Microsoft, video games, the military, or medical science.
Then every few days the editors put something on the main page which doesn't fall into one of those categories. When they do, it reminds us that maybe those three categories are for the best after all.
I'm not the biggest BP fan right now... but this is probably the only intelligent comment in the whole thread thus far. If they HADN'T set up some sort of highly prominent web page with information on what they're doing, people would have criticized that too.
I think that the second half of this post says that that the oil leak is bad, or could cause the end of the world, or something. However, it's such a gusher of spastic sentence fragments that I can't quite be certain.
Someone should drop a containment dome over this guy's keyboard until he's learned to organize his thoughts.
Back before this website's buyout, editors used to post reasonable things... and commenters would fly off in random crazy directions without having RTFA.
Today, the editors fly off in random crazy directions without having RTFA... and half of the comments are reasonable things posted to correct the misinformation.
In this story, the data collection in question is widely publicized to Kindle owners. And it is disabled by default... users must opt-in, not opt-out. There is nothing more to see here, move along.
Please people, don't feed the trolls... by "trolls", I mean "today's Slashdot editorial staff". When you see some post about digital rights armageddon or corporate bad behavior, fight the impulse to fire off a knee-jerk comment in response. RTFA instead, or simply wait 15 minutes... and other people will RTFA and post comments explaining why the editor is a misleading troll. There are plenty of things to talk about and focus on in the digital rights area, but Slashdot takes advantage of people's passion with inflammatory fluff... and it hurts the credibility of digital rights in the big picture.
Discussion of female grooming habits is one thing, but there are too many comments here from dudes about their own "manscaping". If Slashdot is going to have an "Informative" tag which mods posts up... then there should also be a "Too Much Informative" tag which mods posts down.
Can anyone confirm whether the controversy over Mac-ifying the window buttons applies to the Xubuntu flavor (or Kubuntu for that matter)? I recently made the switch full-time after discovering that XFCE supports everything I care about in Gnome (and then some) while carrying a much lighter footprint. I don't really care what they do to Gnome, I'm just interested in whether those design choices are spilling over into the other flavors as well.
I think we are ultimately applying very different criteria. I use one of the 100+ "nobody" devices that you just linked to, and for me Ogg provides the best balance between audio quality and file size. That's my criteria.
In your criteria, you seem far more focused on avoiding "exclusion". Oh my gosh, what if I'm locked out of the most popular and trendy (and overpriced) devices? What if people don't want to download the pirate torrents that I go through the hassle of creating and publishing? What if I'm in a minority?!? Oh noes!!!
Cool. If anybody reading this is highly concerned about fitting in, then:
(it is a good archival format, but it's silly to carry around on a portable device)
Presto, now you are just like most everyone else!
Anyway... if you want a lossless archival format, FLAC is the best choice. If you have a device with weak format support, or if creating torrents is a big deal to you, then MP3 is the best choice. But if you have a device that supports Ogg, and you don't really give a crap about sharing your own rips, then this format happens to provide the best ratio of quality to file size. Pick your criteria accordingly.
The Rockbox firmware has relatively simplistic failings. For example, look at the screenshots on Wikipedia or their site. The text is so small that it's relatively difficult to read.
Yes, the default Rockbox skin sucks. Hence the "with a sensible choice of skin" qualifier that you overlooked.
My man, you really need to get over the love affair with the sound of your own voice! This behemoth of a post could have been expressed in a single paragraph, and it would have been more effective. You're basically saying that:
My response to these two points is:
The vast majority of people I see with DAPs use an Apple product. Unless you use the third party Rockbox firmware, which substantially reduces the UI quality
Wow... you are definitely not "someone I could have a beer with"! Rockbox is dramatically superior to native firmware in terms of feature set and intuitiveness, and with a sensible choice of skin it can be more aesthetically pleasing as well.
The rest of your novella of a post is really arguing apples and oranges though. You could have boiled that down to two sentences: "(1) FLAC is a great lossless format for archival purposes, because it's popular and cool, (2) Ogg is poor lossy format for portable device use, because it's unpopular and nerdy." Assuming that #2 is a valid point (which it is not), there's little to no connection between these two threads of discussion.
So, why use OggVorbis over FLAC?
Because:
You have a decent (i.e. non-Apple) media player that supports a variety of formats, and Ogg happens to be one of them
[shrug]... That's my reasoning for using Ogg, anyway.
As far as Whedon goes, he's one of these guys that studios often bring in to write/rewrite scripts just to test the waters on early projects. His name generates some buzz, and the studio may or may not get an interesting script out of him. ... Hiring Joss Whedon may be a good way to get some geek buzz, but it doesn't indicate in any way that the studio is serious about actually making this movie.
Bingo. After five or ten years of "development" for Wonder Woman with Joss at the helm, I'm a bit surprised to see so many people freak out at any of his comic film announcements. Somebody ping me when actors are actually cast... I'm still waiting to hear whether Charisma Carpenter or Summer Glau will star in the LAST vaporware.
We know that Apple protects their branding to a ridiculous degree... essentially arguing that any name with an "i" in front it threatens their intellectual property. So I wonder if Amazon will have anything to say about this new product? If I saw a news story about the "Kin Two", and the headline didn't qualify it as a Microsoft thing, my first assumption would be that it's a new version of Amazon's ebook reader.
You know, it's a shame that Slashdot doesn't have a designated area just for stuff like this. That could help keep non-stories off the main page, and make the site better overall. Oh well.
One is using an official public channel while Kevin Trudeau was having people spam the judge through a private email account.
No, the article did not say that it was private email account. Presumably, this was his taxpayer-funded public email address. I pulled up his profile page on the District Court's website... and while it doesn't list his email address (at least not anymore!), it does still provide contact information such as the direct telephone line to his chambers.
At a high level, we assume that it's immoral or unjust to lobby a judge, in hopes that pressure will overcome his or her sense of justice and public policy. Meanwhile, we find it (more or less) totally acceptable to lobby a legislator, in hopes that pressure will overcome his or her sense of justice and public policy. Assuming that the channels in both case are public and valid, what's the fundamental difference?
Just to play devil's advocate to some of the comments thus far... I wonder how people would differentiate this from political lobbying. This guy had a court case pending before the judge, and asked his followers to write the judge in hopes that it will sway the judge's impartial decision-making. Large special interest organizations ask their followers to write Congressmen, in hopes that it will sway the legislator's impartial decision-making.
What's the difference between lobbying a government's judicial branch, as opposed to lobbying the legislative branch? I'm not necessarily saying that there ISN'T an enormous difference between these two things... I'm just curious what kind of answers I'd get by posing the question.
The most interesting thing to me about Gnome these days is that it's memory footprint is still ridiculously fatter than Xfce's, even though Xfce has caught up with Gnome's basic features.
My "family computer" has been running default Ubuntu with Gnome, and my non-technical wife has been happy with it. However, it's starting to show its age, and with each major software update it gets a little slower and slower. So for the hell of it last month I thought I'd experiment with Xfce and see if I could postpone the next computer purchase until the holiday season.
I might postpone a lot further out than that! Thanks to Canonical's packaging of Xfce, it looked pretty much the same as Gnome right out of the box. After 5 minutes of tweaking the panel icons and theme settings, it was almost indistinguishable from my machine's previous setup. My wife didn't notice at all until three weeks later when she went to copy some files from a USB drive, and noticed that the file manager was Thunar rather than Nautilus. She turned out to be happier with Thunar though, because it doesn't randomly freeze up during drag-and-drop operations.
For years now, Gnome's "niche" has been with those who want something more feature-rich than Fluxbox, yet simpler and more lightweight than KDE. However, Gnome's basic functionality has been pretty stagnant for a long time, and lighter-weight desktop environments are catching up with the core expected feature set. Right now, I don't know of any compelling reason to run Gnome other than wanting to use a lot of Compiz visual effects, and Xfce is almost caught up with that too.