Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Blender, Pictures, Servitude
Is your Blender still under warranty? Myriad writes: "NaN, the publishers of the free cross-platform 3D modeling and rendering package Blender, may not be as dead as was previously reported here on Slashdot. While Blender remains unavailable for download, some of the websites functionality has returned along with the notice "NaN is currently undergoing a re-organization of the company...and are working to restore wider operations as soon as possible." Hopefully they will manage to bring back Blender!"
"I only read Computerra for the pictures." Natalie Shahova writes: "As the translator of Just for Fun, I had to contact Linus by email in order to clarify some issues. This way we got virtually acquainted, and Linus agreed to give me an interview. Its Russian version was published in Computerra on March 26, but the original is - as you might guess - in English. As far as I know, Linus Torvalds has never given an interview to a Russian journalist before. Knowing from Just for Fun that Linus is tired of questions about Linux and open source, I chose some other subjects that interest me as a professional translator: languages, emigration, fiction, etc." A fun interview, with some amusing pictures, too (only in the Russian version). Thanks, Natalie!
Wasn't Windows NT 'More UNIX than UNIX'? thelizman writes: "C|Net is reporting that the joint Microsoft and Unisys website attacking Unix has been experiencing problems all day. Now, normally I would venture an evil laugh, but in light of yesterdays revelation here on /. about the site being FreeBSD powered, could this merely reinforce Microsoft's point? Not likely, since it was quickly switched over to IIS running on Windows 2000, and that's when the problem seems to have started."
What time is it when an elephant dances on your computer? Tom Veil writes: "Minor editorial changes have been made on the article "When Elephants Dance" (referenced earlier by Slashdot). The most interesting change adds one more step to the solution, suggesting that the DMCA must be repealed. A comment is also made as to how fair use is already protected, and thus 'there is no need for additional action in this area.'"
And thanks for flying Air Canada -- Have a nice day. steveha writes: "Linux Journal has more on cyborg Steve Mann's troubles with Air Canada. Over $100,000 in equipment damage, and possible... brain damage?!? Not good."
It doesn't seem as though his 'brain damage' was exactly what we think of. The first thing that pops into my head is ratardation and the lack of ability to think. It seems, however, that the abilities were more related to his brain being able to control his body. For example, if you damaged part of your brain you would no longer be able to see, or move your arm, or feel your pinky toe. It appears that the brain damage was more realted to his ability to interact with his devices, most specifically the vision items, then his ability to formulate thought.
Either way, AirCanada really fucked this guy over. What they did was simply wrong, and they deserve what they get, and then some. This is some fucked up shit, and though the part about the knives is fairly irrelevant, it does throw their safety procedure excuse out the window.
As you wish: (Modified for Lameness)
root:~$ nmap -O -P0 wehavethewayout.com
Starting nmap V. 2.54BETA30 ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ )
Interesting ports on www.wehavethewayout.com (130.94.214.143):
(The 1158 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: filtered or closed)
Port State Service
21/tcp open ftp
25/tcp open smtp
80/tcp open http
110/tcp open pop-3
443/tcp open https
1433/tcp open ms-sql-s
2105/tcp open eklogin
3306/tcp open mysql
5900/tcp open vnc
Remote OS guesses: FreeBSD 2.2.1 - 4.1, Windows Me or Windows 2000 RC1 through final release
Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 155 seconds
root:~$
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
But I can believe disorientation. Similar to losing hearing or some other input channel.
I recall experiments from many years ago where the people were wearing glases that flipped everything upside down. At some point the people completely adjusted.
in a similar fashion, space shuttle jockeys take about two weeks to get used to weightlessness, especially for tasks like throwing balls, etc. both throwing and catching are pretty hard wired.
Loss of an electronic input should not be any more damaging than any of these things.
Unless he is counting electronics as part of his brain.
Which I disagree with.
Now the reality check might be an issue as far dealing with non-electronic reality goes.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I went to their site and I got the following standard IIS 404 error:
The page cannot be found The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.
Please try the following:
- If you typed the page address in the Address bar, make sure that it is spelled correctly.
- Open the www.wehavethewayout.com home page, and then look for links to the information you want.
- Click the Back button to try another link.
HTTP 404 - File not foundInternet Information Services
Even from the IIS site, I *can* download
I can't figure out why you'd want to have
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.linu x64.com
Imagine you wear special, expensive, contact lens. You wear them all day, every day, for a long time. Then an airline security guard decides the contact lens might be the next thing in terms of smuggled terrorist weapons (after all, given a bomb hidden in shoes, and plastic explosives, well, better safe than sorry). So security rips the contact lenses out of your eyes (scratching your corneas in doing so), and ruins your lens with their grubby fingers in the process of examining them.
Suddenly, you're back to pre-contact lens vision, with some "damage" (not dramatic in the overall scale of things, but still painful) to your eyes.
Now imagine you can't get easily get new contact lenses, or even replacement glasses, because they're specially-made.
Stripped of the cyborgness, this is the sort of experience we're talking about. It's clear it's not a pleasant one.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
See the previous article re. Prof. Mann for testimony from myself and other students who have worked with him.
As far as any of us have been able to tell, he has absolutely no medical requirement for any of his equipment, or any actual physical or psychological dependence on his equipment. He has been observed working fine without it on several occasions.
This is a publicity stunt, plain and simple. Prof. Mann has an agenda to push and is pushing it as hard as he can.
Of course it's presented to Linus as this "special message" which he ovbiously takes as "messages" in his book. But then the russian translation of his response, can once again be taken (especially in view of the question) simply as "I don't want to say anything to anyone at all" which I found rather odd when I read it.
I am curious though, why you translated "Saegraem, paren'?" as "Let's rock, pal?" It's an idiom that literally means "Shall we play, you man?" (for lack of a better word), but I'd say that it has the same general meaning as "Party on, dude"
But then again, I haven't lived in a russian speaking country for some time, either; and yeah the translation is not exactly stellar.
sic transit gloria mundi
I can understand how removal of Mann's equipment would cause him something of a form of "brain damage". What we all tend to forget is how long Mann has been doing this sort of thing - his first rig (IIRC) was a TV attached to an Apple IIe back in the 80's!!!
His latest rigs are much more compact - others here have noted the research done using special glasses that flipped the image - in those researches the volunteers got used to it, but when they were taken away, they were "disoriented" again (if I have it right, the brain starts to reinterpret everything normally, but take away the special glasses, and the user sees things wrong, until the brain readjusts - someone posted that some of the volunteers NEVER readjusted, which is scary).
Furthermore, you have to realise that Mann's devices were a form of brain/memory augmentation - he literally had a system where he could look at locations/faces and "tag" them with reminders, so that he didn't have to remember names/places/items - he could just look at them again, and if he had tagged them before, the tag would appear - in true augmented reality "magic". Anything from names to reminders about events ("milk on sale", etc).
So, without the system, one could effectively say he had lost a portion of his memory (and he has been doing this so long, almost two decades now, that one could say his augmentation is normal for him - he seems to be truely a walking experiment). While I am sure some of his antics are publicity stunt type material, I don't really think this was the case here. It would be more akin to someone who had chopped their arm off intentionally to use a "bionic" replacement (custom designed, of course), but had it taken away because it could be a "bomb"...
As far as the comment about Mann's system being "wires and pc boards" and looking like it could be a bomb - the last version I remember Mann working on (and supposedly had a prototype of) was contained in the "lining" of a large suit sport coat, with the boards spread out among the coat's inner surface, maybe a bit of kit in a fanny pack (batteries likely), and a very small vision/camera system (can't remember the company that was developing it, but it looked like an ordinary set of glasses, with a very small prism mounted on one lens, with the projection system mounted on the earpiece of the frame projecting in from the side) - the whole thing was mostly "invisible". I suppose the camera and such made for a slightly more visible system, but I don't think (if this was the system he was wearing at the time) that it would be a "shocking" looking system. Of course, I could be wrong, and he might have been testing out something more recent...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
So they're migrating all their mainframe customers to Win2k running on their very expensive up-to-32-way Wintel 'mainframe' (caugh).
me: So there are no plans for Linux then?
them: No. We don't think it scales and besides Unix is proprietary.
me: www.osdl.org has it on a 16cpu (4x4) NUMA and it appears to scale just fine.
them: We don't know. Nearly everyone we talk to asks us what our Linux plan is and we just tell them "senior management has decided we'll run Windows."
So I finished with the FreeBSD server stuff and they went 'oh yeah, we got some internal mail on that stuff'.
Unisys is just being their normal closed, proprietary self. They make zillions doing this by being kissy-face with governments all over. I hope this round bites them squarely since Windows does not make an enterprise O/S no matter how much wishful thinking is done on Bill's or Unisys's part.
-- Multics