Comment Re:Good. (Score 1) 306
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Charles Jarvis, 1820
'Since Star Wars takes place in a fantasy world, the characters need to be identifiable so that the audience can connect to them,' says Star Wars creator George Lucas.
Dear Mr. Lucas,
Please tell this to whomever wrote and directed episodes 1, 2, 3. A lack of identifiable characters the audience can connect with was one of the biggest problems. Please refer that guy to Plinkett's reviews and this guy, who point this out, quite clearly.
In fact, you might consider firing that "director/writer" guy you've got, and finding talents like you did when you hired Lawrence Kasdan, Leigh Brackett and Irvin Kershner to write and direct Empire Strikes Back. Their story still holds up many years after the special effects have become dated. Lawrence Kasdan is still alive. Maybe he knows some good people. Maybe they could do a re-imagining of 1, 2, 3 that would actually be watchable.
a judge will just rule the damages you're asking for aren't reasonable and reduce them.
This.
The reason proprietary copyright cases get money is because they claim lost sales (damages).
It's hard to claim lost money when you're giving GPL'd code away.
Tokyo is being evacuated also.
I live in Tokyo. No one is being evacuated. No one has ever been evacuated from here as far as I know, even during the crisis. The blog post you linked, as well as the Al Jazeera broadcast within it, talks about a citizens' group who is trying to tell the government that we need to evacuate.
During the crisis, many other countries "suggested" that their nationals fly back. And some countries had their embassies fly their people out, free of charge. If that's the "evacuation of Tokyo" you're talking about, it's a bit disingenuous.
Anyone could tell that the official reports were downplaying the severity because all of the real hard numbers we got went against what they were saying.
Actually, anyone can measure the background radiation in their area with fairly cheap devices. And many independent people post their findings on aggregated maps. I watched a number of these fairly carefully for a while after the crisis. To put it into perspective, Rome has much higher background radiation than Tokyo, because the granite buildings give off a slight amount.
The news broadcast talked about average people testing the dirt. It's fairly easy. I'd imagine the actual results are similar to the background radiation, but there are no specifics in your linked article about where and how they got their numbers. The soil near the plant is bad, no doubt. But I'd like you to cite a more reliable source for the Tokyo numbers.
There's radiation everywhere in the world. It's the amount and type you have to look at. The "small amount" that can cause illness or cancer that they mention on the Al Jazeera piece is actually one particle. You are being bombarded with multiple particles of radiation every second that you're out on a sunny day or flying in an airplane. Yet one particle, at any time, may hit a part of DNA and screw up the cell's ability to inhibit cancer.
The Al Jazeera segment also shows a borderline abusive mother who won't allow her child to go outside because of her fear. Yet she claims she can't move away from Tokyo (the most expensive place to live in Japan) for financial reasons. And the size of the rooms shown in the news segment suggest a fairly expensive house/apartment in Tokyo. She's probably using the idea of losing her or her husbands job as the excuse. It's cognitive dissonance. If she wanted to, she could easily find a low paying job anywhere outside of Tokyo, live in a slightly smaller place, and live fairly well (because the cost of living would be so much less).
The mother looks like a borderline case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Children like her child are the true casualties, but not in the way your blog posting suggests.
If it looks like there is a free lunch, think again. You're losing something worth more than cash up front.
Which is an argument I've heard against GNU/Linux or F/OSS in general by people who are ignorant of it. It all depends on the situation.
Libreoffice-- well it's different (not necessarily better- it does some new things OO doesn't- OO does some new things LO doesn't.)
This is wrong as far as I know. Libreoffice is the latest OpenOffice with Go-OO fixes and some plug-ins merged in. Go-OO was made during a time when developers were getting frustrated that OO development was stagnating and they weren't being allowed to include improvements and fixes. So they made them available elsewhere, at go-oo.org
LO will continue to fork, but for now, it's OO with bug fixes and improvements. They even used the same version number, 3.3, because "The Document Foundation and most of the software's developers saw LibreOffice as being a direct continuation of OpenOffice.org"
So I'm curious what you mean when you say OO does something LO doesn't, as I can't think of anything. LO is currently the same product (plus a few fixes/addons).
Do you suffer painful elimination? -- Don Knuth, "Structured Programming with Gotos"