There are many reasons so many folks who work the web are opposed to these bills. Beyond the fears of enshrining government sponsored censorship (ala China) which could easily kill your access to non-American news media (especially important in a crisis) and stifling innovation (by creating a precarious legal climate for startups), existing businesses models that allow users to link to content (youtube, twitter, flickr, imgur, you name it) could be put off the internet in one fell swoop at the whim of another industry. But theres another way to look at this issue – the economics of it don’t make any sense. All signs point to this as being a massive lobbying effort by the publishers and movie industry to break the web once and for all and theres a great article by Julian Sanchez (of the Cato Institute) on Ars Technia discussing the economics of piracy which goes into great detail exploring the claims of the RIAA and the movie industry for the supposed harms of piracy.
Just discovered these guys tonight, but so far every video I’ve seen has been absolutey brilliant. As an acoustic guy, I’m probably a bit biased since they do a lot of that – but really, this is special.
These are just my notes on how to install Atari’s official Dungeons and Dragons game Temple of Elemental Evil (ToEE) using wine in Ubuntu 11.10. This old game has been on my shelf since 2004 and with the kids’ recent interest in D&D I thought it was a good time to see if it would install on their machine (which runs Ubuntu). ToEE is based on the 1985 module for Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) of the same name (module T1-4) for which I have fond memories. So does Daniel Rivera who has done an excellent job of converting the old module’s maps into digital format for display on-screen (just in case this story has the side effect of making you want to play this module for real!). The Atari game’s mechanics are strictly based on D&D (3rd edition rules) and it offers just about the closest thing you can get to playing D&D in a single player video game, though I have to admit its a very bad substitute for the real thing.
I originally posted this to the G+ app on the tablet, but have rewritten large parts of it here.
I was reading an article linked below on the tablet when I clicked a little “sharing” icon in my browser which passed the link to another application (G+). According to a recent ruling, you won’t be able to buy an HTC android device that can do that after April, 2012 (unless HTC figures out another way to do it) because Apple says they patented the technique in 1996. Apple was making Newtons and Power PCs running MacOS in 1996. The patent diagram even includes a floppy drive!. How ludicrous is it to try to apply a technique developed for an operating system long since abandoned (in favor of a open source unix OS) to shut down the use of a “similar” technique in an open source unix OS (android) developed 15 years later? Ironic because you have one company (Apple) which has built its last 10 years of success on top of an open source OS (OSX from BSD Unix) and is claiming another company can’t use some little piece of open source code because its similar to something they got rid of because it sucked?
I have boxes of audio cassettes that I can no longer play because all of my cassette players are broken. A lot of these old cassette tapes were just recordings of LPs (those were big black discs that look like oversized CDs, kids) which I’ve since replaced with wonderfully re-mastered digital versions. If that was all these cassettes contained I wouldn’t mind just tossing the lot of them, but many of the tapes hold the product of years of home recordings. Playing guitar and composing songs is a long time hobby of mine and you’re not going to find my stuff on Amazon or in the iTunes store (well, actually you will find a podcast there). I can’t just download new mp3s of my old stuff since it only exists on these tapes.
Ubuntu 11.10 no longer allows you to create desktop launchers (icons) - perhaps this will be resolved in v12, but for now here's a couple work arounds. […]
The father of the GNU compiler was once asked how he felt about C++ and answered that it was lousy. Ambiguous language, inherits all of C anyway but isn't compatible with it and usually for gratuitous reasons. […]
He is not the Tea Party’s founder (there isn’t one), or its culturally resonant figure (that’s Sarah Palin), but something more like its brain, its Marx or Madison. He has become its intellectual godfather—and its actual father, in the case of its brightest rising star, his son Rand Paul, Kentucky’s GOP Senate nominee […]
