Slashdot Mirror

QuantumG writes "The first episode of the new science fiction drama Pioneer One has debuted and it looks like a hit. The pilot was shot for just $6,000, raised through the micro-funding platform Kickstarter, and the production is being supported through donations on the show's website. Donations can be made on a sliding scale with 'bonus' rewards for each level, such as an MP3 of the opening theme and deleted scenes. The show is being distributed through file-sharing systems such as BitTorrent and LimeWire thanks to VODO, the group that also helped produce it. Is this the future of television?"

QuantumG writes "The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded a $100,000 grant to the University of Queensland, Australia to develop a vaccine against dengue fever, a disease spread by mosquitoes. Unlike other vaccines, the 'altruistic vaccine' doesn't specifically protect the individual being bitten, but instead protects the community by stopping the transmission of the pathogen from one susceptible individual to another. The hope is to do this by effectively making their blood poisonous to mosquitoes, either killing them or at least preventing them from feeding on other individuals. Professor Paul Young explained how his work fell outside current scientific traditions and might lead to significant advances in global health — he said he could envision the vaccine being used around the world within 10 years, and it would be designed to be cheap and easy to implement."

QuantumG writes "Greg Zsidisin appeared on The Space Show today to ask Where Are The Space Advocates?. For the first time in decades Space is once again a political issue with all four major presidential candidates having something to say about space policy and yet nothing is being heard from space advocates. As we enter a new "Space Nexus" like we did after Apollo, now is a critical time to let your representatives know how you feel about space exploration, and yet no-one has anything to say." The show itself is a podcast if you want to give it a listen. Personally I'm hoping that this election puts space exploration back in the public consciousness- Apollo inspired a generation to learn math and science. I want my kid to be inspired by something bigger than that. And as some readers have noted- there are 3 candidates left (and really only two) so the submitter is probably high.

QuantumG writes "In a recent article on The Space Review, Greg Zsidisin reveals that Barack Obama plans to delay Project Constellation for at least five years, using the redirected funds to nationalize early-education for children under five years old to prepare them for the rigors of kindergarten and beyond, if he is elected president. It is feared that if this happens the Vision for Space Exploration will flounder and that may be the end of human spaceflight altogether."

QuantumG writes "An essay on the Space Review site is reporting that a just-completed study indicates the average citizen has no idea how much funding NASA gets. Respondents generally estimated NASA's allocation of the national budget to be approximately 24% (it's actually closer to 0.58%) and the Department of Defense budget to be approximately 33% (it's actually closer to 21%). In other words, respondents believed NASA's budget approaches that of the Department of Defense, which receives almost 38 times more money. Once informed of the actual allocations, they were almost uniformly surprised. One of the more vocal participants exclaimed, 'No wonder we haven't gone anywhere!'"

QuantumG writes: "I've written a summary of the lecture at Stanford by Jeffery B. Lotspiech / IBM. John Gilmore (EFF) was there and other than hounding Lotspiech with ethical questions, gave me a free T-shirt." We can't argue with that. Stanford has the video online, in a format so proprietary and restricted that the current version of the player has no concept of "saving" a video download to your computer. There's some sort of lesson there, I think. But the video is good, well worth watching.

QuantumG writes: "I've written a summary of the lecture at Stanford by Jeffery B. Lotspiech / IBM. John Gilmore (EFF) was there and other than hounding Lotspiech with ethical questions, gave me a free T-shirt." We can't argue with that. Stanford has the video online, in a format so proprietary and restricted that the current version of the player has no concept of "saving" a video download to your computer. There's some sort of lesson there, I think. But the video is good, well worth watching.

QuantumG asks: "I recently got into an argument with an open source project leader over wether or not releasing precompiled binaries is a good thing or not. He was adament that if potential programmers had to download the pre-alpha source code they would be more likely to take up an active part in programming than if they could just grab a binary. I thought it was important to make it as easy as possible to show the current state of the project to new recruits so they could see what has been done, what needs to be done and what could use work. I feel the same way about screenshots. What does Slashdot think?" Binaries are definitely important. Remember, programmers aren't the only ones who would like to look at your code and see what you are doing, and it's not right to expect them to compile code that may not be easy to compile. Of course, there is a (debatable) point in the software lifecycle where the software is deemed "mature" enough for binaries. What do you all think about this issue?

QuantumG asks: "What happens when someone writes a program and releases it under the GPL and then someone discovers that the program contains useful portions of code that really should be in a separate library that should be under the LGPL. One cannot simply pick up GPL'd code, make it into a library and release it LGPL. That would violate the GPL, right?" Would it? Hit the link below for more.

"Here is an e-mail I fired off to the leader of MaPlay 1.2+ for Win32, an MP3 player for Windows asking his opinion.

Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 17:53:27 +1000 (GMT+1000)
From: Trent Waddington 
To: ctsay@pasteur.eecs.berkeley.edu
Subject: MAPlay & Licenses

Hello.  I have been looking at MaPlay 1.2+ for Win32 and have been
very impressed with it.  I have taken the base code and added a simple
API to it (and removed playlists and such) and recompiled it as a
DLL. Now the question becomes one of LGPL vs GPL.. If I use the DLL in
a program to play MP3 files, am I then required to release the source
of that program under the GPL?  Obviously if I wrote a trivial WinAmp
like MP3 player frontend and used the DLL as the backend I would
personally expect that to be released GPL.  However, let's suppose
that I write a game and instead of using a bunch of enormous WAV
files, I MP3 compress them and use the MaPlay DLL to play them.  This
to me sounds like a case for LGPL, but the DLL is a "derived work" of
a GPL'd program and, as such, cannot be released under anything less
liberating than it.. is LGPL *less* liberated than GPL or *more*?
I don't think using MaPlay code to play MP3 files instead of WAV files
justifies that an entire game's source tree must be GPL'd.  Obviously
it should be for Open Source reasons but is the enforcement of GPL
valid?

I would personally be interested in knowing how the programmers of
MaPlay would feel if the MaPlay source was (hypothetically) used in a
game that was closed source.  Assuming there was something in the
about box / ending credits saying that the game used the MaPlay source
and that the source (to the player code) was available at the MaPlay
web site. Would you feel ripped off?"

Can anyone unravel the LGPL and GPL issues inherent here to help him out?