Slashback: Blender, Pictures, Servitude

Tonight, the updates and addenda continue apace, with more on the Anti-Unix Unix server, the possible future of Blender, Steve Mann's treatment at the hands of Air Canada, and an interesting consequence of Linux's popularity in Russia. Read below to enjoy.

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 The most interesting change adds one more step to the solution, suggesting that the DMCA must be repealed.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."

Comments

wehavethewayout.com down?

[Mr. Sketch]

When I click on the link, I get:
Directory Listing Denied
This Virtual Directory does not allow contents to be listed.
?!?!?!?!
I guess they must have hired some MCSEM's (Microsoft Certified System Engineer Monkeys) to set up their site.

I also tried /index.htm,html,asp and nothing worked.

Should have stuck with the leaders, I guess, instead of following Microsoft.

Cyborg?

[jhaberman]

I'm confused. Now, what the airline did to this guy sounds awful. Pretty much the worst nightmare for anyone. However, I guess I just don't understand his situation if his brain can be damaged by rebooting this system he's attached to. Truly bizzare. Is he a "cyborg" for medical reasons? Is he like that kook in the UK who sees himself as half machine?

What a strange and wonderful and horrible time we live in...

Re:Cyborg?

[SlightlyMadman]

Because he's been living with these enhancements for so long, they've become a neccesary part of him for functioning normally. He's basically handicapped without them.

As far as brain damage is concerned, maybe that has to do with the improper handling of the equipment while it was hooked up to him. It says he was bleeding from where they ripped electrodes from his skin. If they were that careless, they could easily have done something that would give him an electrical shock or something somewhere sensitive to that sort of thing.

The airlines have really gone too far. The last time I tried to board a plane, there was a man putting his hands down my pants and up my shirt TOUCHING CERTAIN SENTSITIVE AREAS OF MY BODY. I did nothing to provoke this (in fact, I had already passed through a security checkpoint a few minutes earlier where I was frisked), other than having steel toed boots that set off the metal detector.

It's one thing to increase security, but most of the things they're hassling people about really make no sense. What about Dr. Mann's gear gave any sort of indication that it could have been a bomb? I think they're just harassing people so it looks to everyone else like they're doing a good job.

Re:Cyborg?

[Grab]

But Mann's electronics have no medical purpose. Furthermore, many witnesses who've worked with Mann over the last few years say that he doesn't wear his gadgets all the time (even for serious stuff like teaching), so he's perfectly capable of operating normally without them. This is not the case for Hawking.

Grab.

I don't understand Mann's changes..?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get what changes Dr. Mann had. We've got people in the technology/medical field for whom implanting a tiny little chip into their skin is major international news yet this guy his stuff wired into his brain and eyeballs and vital organs and stuff to the extent that removing it would cause brain damage and possibly death?

Or is this all blown out of proportion and the "health risk" and "damage" we're talking about is nothing more than his "shock" at no longer looking at images with a little targeter on a pair of glasses and no longer knowing what his pulse rate is, from little patches on his chest? And what's this about a hard drive? In his brain? Recording what?! Jesus, think people - think.

And no i'm not trying to troll. His website is really sparse and I dont' see any "hey here's what I've done to myself - check it out!" page or anything.

Re:Anti-Unix site running IIS now?

[beebware]

Hmm...I can't do finger printing at the moment, but here's the results of a port scan:
www.wehavethewayout.com=130.94.214.143
Open ports: 21 (FTP Control:Microsoft FTP Service version 5.0), 25 (SMTP: Relay not authorized error), 80 (WWW: Microsoft IIS5.0/403 Access Forbidden), 110 (POP3), 389 (LDAP), 443 (HTTPS), 1433 (Microsoft SQL Server), 1755 (MS-Streaming), 1801 (Microsoft Message Queue), 2103 (Zephyr serv-hm connection), 2105 (MiniPay) AND (to round off all the nice open ports): 5900 (VNC!!!: no Terminal Services eh Microsoft?).
Talk about leaving the doors unlocked... Now if I could be bothered trying standard passwords we can see if they actually bothered closing the doors as well!
It's mainly Unisys to blame (according to the DNS records), but that is becoming a laugh a minute anyway!

the russian "translation" is very different!

[dunkelfalke]

i don't know how nataliya translated the text but sometime linus' sentences are given a different meaning. the best example is imho the last sentence.

the english one:
I don't think I have any special messages at all. I think the only "message" in my book was the tongue-in-cheek "Party on, Dude!"

and here is the russian one:
I definitely don't want to give a message to anybody. The most important thing in my book is its cool ending: "Let's rock, pal?"

this is just one of many examples.
A small info: i am a native russian speaker although i live in germany since 1993.

Re:the russian "translation" is very different!

[achurch]

The important question is whether the Russian text imparts the same meaning and nuances to a native Russian reader as the English text does to an English reader--not whether the words happen to match up. I don't know any Russian, so I can't speak for this particular case, but I do speak fluent Japanese, and I have seen far too many "translations" that rely too heavily on dictionaries and end up missing critical points because of it. (Those who have played console games, particularly in the 8/16-bit era, will probably remember the frequency of unnatural English text in those games; one good example is "it's dangerous", which is a literal--and incorrect--translation of the Japanese word used to mean "look out!".) The better translation is not the one with the most word-for-word matches, but the one that causes readers in both languages to think the same thing. And with all due respect, I think it's difficult to judge that without a fluent knowledge of both languages involved.

It's also worth noting that it simply isn't possible to express some concepts in some languages, because the culture/society the language is used in simply doesn't have the concept in the first place. For example, Japanese has numerous words for expressing interpersonal relationships (such as nearly a dozen first-person singular pronouns, each with a different connotation); while you can approximate the meaning of those in English by playing games with sentence structure and the like, you can't get exactly the same nuance because English simply doesn't use the same concept set as Japanese does. So there will always be some inaccuracies in any translation, especially with colloquialisms like "party on, dude!"; the object is to keep them as few and as small as possible--again. in terms of the effect on the reader.

Of course, translating a Russian translation back into English is going to result in even more inaccuracies, like converting an MP3 file to Ogg Vorbis and then back to MP3 again; just because the final result sounds bad doesn't necessarily mean that the original or intermediate result are also bad.

Re:not quite

[JAVAC THE GREAT]

And the more important question: why is ls 285K?

He was wearing some pretty odd gear.

[Christopher Thomas]

Why should this guy have to go through any trouble at all? He wasn't wearing anything that could be construed as a bomb or a weapon of any kind.

Unless he's changed it very recently, his gear looks like a fanny pack filled with gutted computer parts, with misc. cables going out to various peripherals, many with visible PCBs and so forth.

He may have cleaned it up a bit, but take this and add a reasonable-sized battery, and you have a rig that looks a lot like your "ACME Personal Bomb" from any action movie from the past decade or two.

Add to this the fact that Prof. Mann is a bit on the eccentric side and that he would very likely have gotten pushy with the guards when they challenged him (trust me on this one), and what you have is a recipe for a really bad day (and a really golden publicity opportunity, which was probably the plan).

Re:Dr. Mann, what's up with that?

[_Shad0w_]

He's been doing this for 20 years, it's his lifes research, he's a professor now, he's been interestesd in this field since he was a student.

The electrodes as far as I can tell are implanted under the skin, which means to remove them you would have to break them out of the skin, they're not designed to be removed except under clinical conditions I suspect...security gaurds randomly grabbing things is hardly clinical.

Personaly anyone who believe in their research enough to get this involved with it deserves one hell of a lot of respect, this is the very definition of putting your money where your mouth is.

If your body constantly uses something then it begins to expect it to be there, if you suddenly rip it all out you will seriously disorientate the body and it will not thankyou for it...think of it akin to someone who looses their sight or hearing during adulthood - it's seriously disorientating to them because it's always been there and they don't know how to function without it.

The whole fiasco sounds like someone on a powertrip to me...which went to far but by then they couldn't back down.

Re:Brain Damage

[jheinen]

"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."

Just so. There have been a number of experiments that have shown the human body is remarkably adept at adjusting to changes in primary sensory input. The flipped vision thing you metioned is just one of them. Subjects wearing glasses with prisms that flip everything upside down eventually begin to see everything as normal. Take them off and the recovery period is even quicker. Same with auditory senses. Expose people to a constant background noise and people eventually filter it out until, for them, it's no longer there.

I am highly skeptical of Dr. Mann's claims in this case. Certainly he may have been a little disoriented without his gear, but it shouldn't be anything that he wouldn't recover from in a few hours at most. As for the "implants," I think that's pure bull. My understanding was he had some electrodes taped to his skin and he suffered some skin damage when the tape was removed. Certainly nothing like the image of invasive torture the original article conjures up. Of course the airlines shouldn't have forcibly removed anything from his person (and were probably committing assault in doing so), but nothing was ripped out of his body.

Also, if he wears this stuff constantly, I have to ask why the latest picture from his continuously updated "eyecam" is dated August 14, 2001?

He may be suffering from depression at the thought of having his equipment damaged (I can only imagine the state I'd be in if someone broke into my house and trashed all of my computers), and may even be having symptoms of withdrawl, assuming his attachment to his equipment was something like an addiction. However that's a pathological condition that could be argued is not very healthy in the first place.

I also have to question the quoted figure of >$100,000 in damage. I simply can't believe he was wearing half a million dollars worth of equipment. In fact I strongly doubt you would have to pay more than a few grand to put together an identical system. If you look through his site, all the documentation seems to indicate that his sytems are made out of easily available off the shelf components. I see nothing referencing any piece of exotic or outrageously expensive equipment.

Finally, let's not forget that Dr. Mann is the same guy who came up with the "shooting Back" project wherein people take cameras into places that have video surveillance and "shoot back" by filming the filmers. Principles notwithstanding, this is designed from the outset to elicit confrontational situations.

So ultimately I'd have to chalk this up as a fine publicity stunt that perhaps went a little too far.

wehavethewayout.com anon FTP open...

[shaka]

Both the DOS box (www.wehavethewayout.com) and the FreeBSD box (198.63.57.204) have anonymous FTP open. Both of them contains a file in the root directory, called 10k.html.
Both of these files are filled with the string "10k" repeated hundreds of times, ended with a </BODY> tag - the size is exactly 10000 bytes.
Did they put them there just to make /. readers wonder why, or what the heck is this!?