The question is what is data and electronic correspondence? If it is to be treated like speech, then you should have the right to refuse to answer or provide information. No problem there.
The problem is that it most likely not treated like speech it is treated like an electronic version of a paper document. Electronic files are property. Now if they are property then shouldn't you be required to disclose their contents? As I see it the argument is analagous to the cops knocking on your door with a search warrant. You let them in, but when they get to your locked bedroom you refuse to let them in there. Well then the cops can kick down the door, because they have a legal right to do so. If they find that you do have the key and withheld it, they can charge you with obstruction of justice. Seems straight forward, but the cops must prove that you had the key to be able to charge you with a crime. At least in America they have to give you the benefit of the doubt. Of course if the room contains daily business records updated this morning, then proving you didn't have the key to it is damn hard. Rightfully so.
Keep in mind that most encryption programs are much more like a steel gate or bank vault than a thin bedroom door. A lot of effort is required to open them. If you have encrypted data that the authorities have a right to see and the key, then you should be required to provide it. The law will basically mean nothing in the end, though. Its kind of like lying to the cops, illegal but in many cases unprovable.
I don't know, I have to take anything Tom's Hardware says about Intel and AMD with a big ole grain of salt. Just after AMD released the K6 he predicted the K6-2 would kick the PII's ass and he was wrong. Then he predicted the K6-3 would take out Intel once and for all, and he was wrong. Finally he said that Athlon would beat out PIII. Not to be rude, but we've all known that Intel chips we're using dated technology since the introduction of the PentiumPro. Was it a surprise that it finally hurt them? Not really.
Now Tom's Hardware predicts the demise of Intel. The problem is the Intel has lots of money and momentum. They can afford to spend it on regaining the lead, if their bulk and inefficiency doesn't kill them first. I'm seeing a large restructuring in their future to be more competitive. I also see them making more flexible products in their various devisions. Then we'd have to see.
I read The Onion a lot, but I do not consider it to be material suitable for children. The parodies include articles like "Male Orgasm Caught on Film" and other high brow humor. I laughed at that article, but I wouldn't particularly want a little kid reading it. I can easily understand why someone might want it blocked. Its like the nets version of a racy episode of Seinfeld, funny but not especially suitable for children.
I didn't have trouble with win3.1 crashing a lot. It couldn't do a lot of things and may not have run the program quite right, but it usually didn't crash outright.
Is it me or does this story have some factual errors? Win2k is not replacing win98. Microsoft realized that it could make a lot more money by selling a cheap crappy desktop OS (win95/98 and descendents) and another "good stable secure server OS" (winNT/2k and descendents) for much more money.
Kind of makes me mad though. When did stability become optional in a commercial operating system?
WARNING: BLUNT REBUTTAL TO FOLLOW. APOLOGIES TO ANYONE OFFENDED.
You assert that homosexuality is something you ARE. I assert that is something you DO. You aren't born gay like your born white or asian or whatever. It is a physical action of DOing which makes you gay. The default of humanity is not neuter, people are born male and female and to successfully reproduce they need to act accordingly.
I was also generalizing. There are many kinds of gay people, straight people, drunks , substance abusers, etc... Some are worse than others. You are correct, being straight does not mean morally righteous. However most of the world's religions say homosexuality is a sin, because you're not using the equipment God gave you properly.
PS I was personifying the average fundie attitude. Trying to get you to see it from their point of view. Evidentally I failed. I don't have kids. I have gay friends. They know how I stand and I try not to preach.
Gay Conspiracy does sound stupid I will admit, but it is basically how fundies react to coordinated gay activism in their own paranoid way. They don't like people beating ideas they don't agree with into themselves or their children, but that is the fundamental purpose of activism.
The fundamental kernel of morality is not the command but where it comes from. Schools teach society or some other changeable thing. Religious individuals teach God. The first line of the ten commandment is "I am the God who brought you out of Egypt..." not "Do not....". Where morality comes from makes a huge difference when you have an interpretive moral question and it what the Xians care about most in the whole moral shebang.
Children do not question in the way you suggest, many adults do not either. A marketplace of ideas requires many tolerant people who will intellectually evaluate. Children do not do this, they most often simply absorb and believe. Teaching them to evaluate is important and necessary but simple belief is the rule of thumb especially for young children. Children need to be taught before they can learn as you suggest.
Also remember that popular and legal do not equate to right. See the current copyright debate and DeCSS articles for confirmation.
The FRC is funamentally a conservative (but not especially fundamentalist) Christian group. That such a christian group is against homosexuality should be a surprise to no one. So are many conservative Jewish and Muslim groups and for good strong religious reasons (like the old testament). What they need to do is say that they are a Christian group instead of mascarading as an objective authority on "family values" (whatever they are).
*Rant*
As for the "homosexual agenda" I have a tendency to agree with them. In theory schools do not teach morality. Today's public schools certainly do not teach "traditional" morals. That job has been relegated to the parents and churches which I suppose is fine.
The problem is that schools have to teach some morals just to be able to punish kids for being bad and keep students in line. So they teach the social relativist moral system. Stealing, hurting, and killing other people are bad, everyone says so. What about alcoholism or drug abuse and inappropriate sex? Are they bad? Well, kinda. But your really just hurting yourself, the kids rationalize, so thats ok. Hence the rise in teenage sex, drug abuse, and drinking through much of the 90s. Now far-sighted kids are wisening up and seeing that the consequences of these actions so they don't do them. Hence the climb has leveled off and is starting to go down.
Now if you want your kids to be social relativists this type of schooling is fine. But, if you want your kids to believe in something more (like anyone with deeply held religious beliefs does) schools are effectively undermining and opposing your instruction of your children. They are saying there are no real absolute morals, which is against the teaching of most religions who use God as an absolute moral reference system. This is what pisses the AFA and FRC off. If you want to teach no morals thats fine, but don't go teaching my kids relativism when I know better and want them to know better too.
Likewise if you want live what I consider a negative lifestyle (like homosexuality) thats fine, I don't like it and I'll tell you so. I have free speech just like you and I actually think I'm doing it for your own good. In the end you can go off and pay the consequences for your actions whatever they may be, sorry you didn't listen. However if you get my kids, that I love much more than you, taking up that negative lifestyle too I'm going to get really angry.
Sexual orientation doesn't affect study skills, or gender, or anything else along those lines.
Men and women do study differently because mens' brains have a weaker corpus collostum (sp?), the bridge between the hemispheres. Men have, in general, a greater ability to think objectively. Women have greater ability to think subjectively. So women empathize and work with people better than men, but men usually make better analysts.
I doubt race or sexual preference matter though.
even a simple hammer is flawed: it can miss the nail or worse, hit your finger
Thats not a flaw with the hammer, its a flaw with the operator. A hammer is not the perfect tool because you can't turn screws with it, etc. You are right though, no one tool can do everything. You either have many specialized tools that work well on specifics, or a few generalized ones that aren't very good at anything.
1) Objective decisions like colleges must make needs objective data. Interviews are not, standized testing can be. Therefore provided the tests are well constructed they are a good tool.
2) Is the SAT etc unbiased and well constructed. Many say no, but I haven't seen a good study. Most people waving this banner just complain because minorities historically do badly. Is this because the test is skewed or because the minorities don't get as good an education because their schools don't have as much money to hire enough/good teachers or have lousy learning environments. Notice this trend is true for almost all standarized testing, not just the SAT.
3) People in college take lots of standardized tests in their classes, usually given by white males. Is accepting them under a different standard than that which they will be graded upon fair?
4) Interviews can be very very bad. I had a friend who was a talented would be director. He compiled an impressive portfolio of work and tried to get into film school for three years. He was told after three years that he wasn't going to get in. Not because he wasn't talented (which he is), but because he was a white male with a traditional directing style. He wasn't cutting edge enough for them. The problem was that my friend didn't create his style from Speilberg and Lucas, he studied film history and created it form the same people they studied in college.
5) Most colleges also look at your high school transcript. If you're a kid with good grades but bad SATs they usually overlook the SATs. If you're a kid with great SATs but took remedial classes because you're lazy, it will also matter.
I was asking for people working on open source game projects. I don't expect to see companies putting out linux games first, but that shouldn't stop us, the OS community from developing some cool stuff ourselves.
How many people use linux on their desktops vs. windoze? That's why shear numbers... Sure, Carmack likes linux so he puts Quake out for it, but other than that if you had to aim at a target audience, would you go for 90% or 2%.
Note: above numbers are estimates I have no idea about the true makeup of the PC OS market.
Games for Linux is good, but I'll consider it a real victory when we get games out for linux first instead of being treated like we use MacOS or something...
Anyone have links to good open source games/development projects built primarily for linux? I would expect that there's some in the pipeline now that some of the older game engines (like quake) are being open sourced.
The single scariest freakiest thing I can think of is from Battle Angel Alita, and is pertinent to this discussion.
The evil scientist "villian" reveals that all citizens of the high tech utopia he comes from have their brains removed and replaced with an almost identical brain chip with all their memories, etc. It makes them more predictable and easier to control, but effectively robs them of any true free will (almost identical remember). The freaky thing is that these people don't know it.
Imagine waking up one day and being shown that you have no free will, that every thought in your head was put there years ago. You are effectively a robot. My God that scares the hell out of me and its possible under the technology this article is talking about. Its been years since I read the book and it still freaks me out.
What is stopping a government with this articles abilities from quickly and systematically reprogramming its people in this way without anyone catching on?
Notice their TOU allows them to monitor your IP, email address, any personal information they get about you, etc. in order to check whether you are actually in Canada. They are also allowed to bring about legal action if they so choose.
Its practically impossible for them to track you down, but you should still be aware that they can legally do so and you have let them.
iCrave can legally show any unaltered live public broadcast to anyone in Canada over the internet. It's perfectly legal under Canadian law and is not copyright infringement.
Question, how do they pay for this? If its only ads on their website then they're fine, everything is still legal. What if they send the TV signal with some ads on the side, in addition to the normal TV signal but not obstructing it in any way, like an additional window? Haven't they altered the broadcast? Yes and what they are doing is illegal even under Canadian law.
I do not know if this is the case and since I live in Delaware, I would rather not lie to find out. Any Canadians out there know whether they are doing this?
I'm betting a lot of networks start airing RealMedia versions of their programs after this is all over, though. Think of the cheap source of revenue.
I don't care about flamers. Moderation works well enough that I can simply ignore them. What concerns me is that unless you start a thread in (approximately) the first hour of an article your voice and ideas will not be heard because they drowned out. Unless, of course, you post to high moderated threads that started early and ride up on their coat-tails. Its almost impossible for a great post to end up where it deserves if it starts late.
I usually read/. a few times a day, but not often enough to get into the forum early. Considering the number of articles/day, it works out to one article I can actually post on with a chance of being heard. Usually I don't post, its not worth the effort.
The problem with/. that I see is that it tends to exclude the casual infrequent users and benefits people with lots of time on their hands. (Notice the number of college students posting and think about their relative representation in the slashdot community as a whole.)
Would the StN ratio really improve or would a lot of people who posted well-meaning but low-content material end up with the trolls? Your system would require a lot of active moderation and more moderation points because the majority of posts would have to moderated up to differentiate them from flame.
This may have been said already,but the regulon that preys on information is self interest. There is power in information. If you know something your competitor doesn't then you can exploit that to your advantage. This works in business, war, and any other number of fields. This is the reason behind patent and IP law, I spent the money to acquire this information, therefore I should have the right to its sole use for a given period of time.
Slashdot has this neohippie view of information, that information should be free even though somebody has to spend money to create it. I think this is probably the case because many members of slashdot aren't that somebody. If they are then its usually in a computer field where information and experiments are pretty cheap by physical world standards.
In short, knowledge is power and so will always be protected by someone in order to further their self interest.
There are several reasons for this kind of thing happens and they usually stem from 2 causes:
Government
The government is sloooow to act, usually undermanned, and may have no clue what its talking about.
No big news here. The government won't act until it thinks it can make its case, or has no other choice. It doesn't have enough contacts to hear about things quickly and act swiftly. Lets face it our government was designed 200 years ago and it shows, especially during enforcement.
Why was the agent from Buffalo? Because in order to get the closest seven agents they probably had to pull in everyone in the 1.5 hour driving radius (if not a larger area). While the FBI may have enough staff many of the other enforcement branches are woefully undermanned to do their jobs and so they need help from state cops, etc.
Most feds are computer/technology illiterate. How much did the Secret Service know about the internet when it was given internet jurisdiction? Answer: Most of them couldn't tell a computer from a microwave oven. Should they know more? Yes, but frankly how well would you do if you had to become a cop tomorrow and start investigating murders? Probably not any better than they do when its the other way around.
The real problem that the government will never admit its wrong. You will have to go through a extended legal battle to get your equipment back even if they never file charges. This is wrong and it should be corrected. However it also stems from the overwork/ignorance of the enforcement agencies as mentioned above.
Business
It is a business's job to know what laws pertain to their products. It is homework that any good business should do.
If you're a construction company or civil engineer, you better do a complete geological/ecologocial survey of the site beforehand or the EPA will have every right to shut you down when you're half finished to save the habitat of Obscure Delaware Tree Rat. It is their job to do so and your fault because you didn't do your homework. Never assume anything if you can help it.
Likewise if your equipment has a possible use in surruptitious surveillance you damn well better know it and act accordingly. If its in a gray area, then get clarification from the government. If you play your cards right you will become a government asset and they will protect you. If you do not inform them, you are inviting this sort of thing due to their ignorance.
This does not mean that the government can't be just plain wrong, like in the case of Steve Jackson Games. But don't stick it with all the blame when a business may very well have an equal share.
Biotech and Biowarfare Equipment
on
Living Terrors
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· Score: 2
The real problem with this is that most of the equipment that can be used to create biological and chemical agents has very real and very moral uses. Whats more the developing world often needs this equipment more than the developed world because they have agriculturally based economies which require the various vats and mixers to make fertilizers.
This is not to categorize the entire developing world as terrorists, but this is an example of how basic equipment necessary for fundamental manufacturing in most nations can be used for a more nefarious purpose.
I have never read good user documentation for linux. Most linux documentation that I have seen is the equivalent of this:
Q: "How do I make my car go?"
Equivalent Linux A: "You use the fuel pump to draw fuel from the tank in the rear of the car into the fuel injection manifold.... blah blah blah."
This answer is technically correct and packed full of detail, however a better answer for a mainstream user is:
Good A: "Press the gas pedal."
Most users are users (duh), not programmers. They have neither the desire to program, nor are they likely to be good at it if they actually tried. They don't care how the code works, just that it does. Until linux programmers learn to write code (and documentation) for users not themselves, linux will not become mainstream.
I'm also wondering how long it will be until nontechnical newbies trying linux start really knocking it. This won't happen because the OS is bad, but because the average Linux user is really starting to turn into an @$$#*!= elitist technosnob who is unwilling to come off his (or her) high horse to help someone who has no desire to write code, understand the workings of an OS, or even become a programmer in any way shape or form.
In other words, stop making newbies edit intimidating.conf files to get their stuff to work in the first place. Write a nice graphical routine that allows the newbie to change the most common options by checkboxes. This will change the.conf file. Nothing is sacrificed because everything is still run from the text.conf file but the newbie gets to be less intimidated.
Ok, I'm not saying this guy is right, because I don't know his shit from shinola. I'm not a physicist. I'm a mechanical engineer.
I do know:
1) Most journalists can't get specific scientific details right in their stories to save their lives. It stems from the fact that most of them can't do the scientific work and that's why they're journalists. They also think win98 is great and stable and believe Mindcraft benchmarks are unbiased.
2) You can mathmatically prove the whole universe is particle based, but it isn't. There's a wave/particle duality that means you have throw a bunch of particle theory out. Why? Not because particle theory shouldn't exist, but because it doesn't experimentally and wave theory does. I also know there is no real way to predict whether the electron will be a particle or a wave in a given experiment, except by the results. i.e. "Thats definitely a wave."
3) I have already seen people post theory's which they say are "the definitive way something works" and then in the same paragraph tell how how it doesn't capture some theoretical details we already know. (the schrodinger's equation post) This is crap, if an equation is THE way something works it should cover all the bases within experimental error. Anything else is an approximation, no matter how good.
4) Scientists like to think they know everything. Every once it a while people have to turn them on their ear. Newton did it to a bunch of ancient greeks, Einstein did it to Newton, and quantum theory did it to Einstein. (remember "god does not play dice with the universe") Big deal, happens all the time. These are theories not facts. The Big Bang is not a fact. I can assure you, you were not there to observe it.
5) I have heard no one tell how his theory violates overserved fact. It assaults one of the pillars of modern physics, but big deal. Pillars of physics are there to be assaulted. Somebody would have done it sooner or later.
6) Something unexplained is happening with Mill's process. It may not be what he says is happening. In fact it probably isn't. But the fact that the scientific community is sticking their heads in the sand says something is wrong to me. Scientists should be inherently curious about unexplained phenomenon not inherently sceptical. This stinks of the same thinking that had the church condemn Galileo, except now physicists are playing the part of the church.
Unfortuneately I'm probably posting this to late to get it noticed...
Slashdot Mirror
The question is what is data and electronic correspondence? If it is to be treated like speech, then you should have the right to refuse to answer or provide information. No problem there.
The problem is that it most likely not treated like speech it is treated like an electronic version of a paper document. Electronic files are property. Now if they are property then shouldn't you be required to disclose their contents? As I see it the argument is analagous to the cops knocking on your door with a search warrant. You let them in, but when they get to your locked bedroom you refuse to let them in there. Well then the cops can kick down the door, because they have a legal right to do so. If they find that you do have the key and withheld it, they can charge you with obstruction of justice. Seems straight forward, but the cops must prove that you had the key to be able to charge you with a crime. At least in America they have to give you the benefit of the doubt. Of course if the room contains daily business records updated this morning, then proving you didn't have the key to it is damn hard. Rightfully so.
Keep in mind that most encryption programs are much more like a steel gate or bank vault than a thin bedroom door. A lot of effort is required to open them. If you have encrypted data that the authorities have a right to see and the key, then you should be required to provide it. The law will basically mean nothing in the end, though. Its kind of like lying to the cops, illegal but in many cases unprovable.
I don't know, I have to take anything Tom's Hardware says about Intel and AMD with a big ole grain of salt. Just after AMD released the K6 he predicted the K6-2 would kick the PII's ass and he was wrong. Then he predicted the K6-3 would take out Intel once and for all, and he was wrong. Finally he said that Athlon would beat out PIII. Not to be rude, but we've all known that Intel chips we're using dated technology since the introduction of the PentiumPro. Was it a surprise that it finally hurt them? Not really.
Now Tom's Hardware predicts the demise of Intel. The problem is the Intel has lots of money and momentum. They can afford to spend it on regaining the lead, if their bulk and inefficiency doesn't kill them first. I'm seeing a large restructuring in their future to be more competitive. I also see them making more flexible products in their various devisions. Then we'd have to see.
I read The Onion a lot, but I do not consider it to be material suitable for children. The parodies include articles like "Male Orgasm Caught on Film" and other high brow humor. I laughed at that article, but I wouldn't particularly want a little kid reading it. I can easily understand why someone might want it blocked. Its like the nets version of a racy episode of Seinfeld, funny but not especially suitable for children.
I didn't have trouble with win3.1 crashing a lot. It couldn't do a lot of things and may not have run the program quite right, but it usually didn't crash outright.
Someone please troll this guy before he manages to buy a house off all the business slashdot is going to give his site.
Self serving bastard...
Is it me or does this story have some factual errors? Win2k is not replacing win98. Microsoft realized that it could make a lot more money by selling a cheap crappy desktop OS (win95/98 and descendents) and another "good stable secure server OS" (winNT/2k and descendents) for much more money.
Kind of makes me mad though. When did stability become optional in a commercial operating system?
Wow, you mean post-merger /. will be pro Linux and anti-M$ and almost ignore BSD... So how will it change exactly?
WARNING: BLUNT REBUTTAL TO FOLLOW. APOLOGIES TO ANYONE OFFENDED.
You assert that homosexuality is something you ARE. I assert that is something you DO. You aren't born gay like your born white or asian or whatever. It is a physical action of DOing which makes you gay. The default of humanity is not neuter, people are born male and female and to successfully reproduce they need to act accordingly.
I was also generalizing. There are many kinds of gay people, straight people, drunks , substance abusers, etc... Some are worse than others. You are correct, being straight does not mean morally righteous. However most of the world's religions say homosexuality is a sin, because you're not using the equipment God gave you properly.
PS I was personifying the average fundie attitude. Trying to get you to see it from their point of view. Evidentally I failed. I don't have kids. I have gay friends. They know how I stand and I try not to preach.
Gay Conspiracy does sound stupid I will admit, but it is basically how fundies react to coordinated gay activism in their own paranoid way. They don't like people beating ideas they don't agree with into themselves or their children, but that is the fundamental purpose of activism.
The fundamental kernel of morality is not the command but where it comes from. Schools teach society or some other changeable thing. Religious individuals teach God. The first line of the ten commandment is "I am the God who brought you out of Egypt..." not "Do not ....". Where morality comes from makes a huge difference when you have an interpretive moral question and it what the Xians care about most in the whole moral shebang.
Children do not question in the way you suggest, many adults do not either. A marketplace of ideas requires many tolerant people who will intellectually evaluate. Children do not do this, they most often simply absorb and believe. Teaching them to evaluate is important and necessary but simple belief is the rule of thumb especially for young children. Children need to be taught before they can learn as you suggest.
Also remember that popular and legal do not equate to right. See the current copyright debate and DeCSS articles for confirmation.
The FRC is funamentally a conservative (but not especially fundamentalist) Christian group. That such a christian group is against homosexuality should be a surprise to no one. So are many conservative Jewish and Muslim groups and for good strong religious reasons (like the old testament). What they need to do is say that they are a Christian group instead of mascarading as an objective authority on "family values" (whatever they are).
*Rant*As for the "homosexual agenda" I have a tendency to agree with them. In theory schools do not teach morality. Today's public schools certainly do not teach "traditional" morals. That job has been relegated to the parents and churches which I suppose is fine.
The problem is that schools have to teach some morals just to be able to punish kids for being bad and keep students in line. So they teach the social relativist moral system. Stealing, hurting, and killing other people are bad, everyone says so. What about alcoholism or drug abuse and inappropriate sex? Are they bad? Well, kinda. But your really just hurting yourself, the kids rationalize, so thats ok. Hence the rise in teenage sex, drug abuse, and drinking through much of the 90s. Now far-sighted kids are wisening up and seeing that the consequences of these actions so they don't do them. Hence the climb has leveled off and is starting to go down.
Now if you want your kids to be social relativists this type of schooling is fine. But, if you want your kids to believe in something more (like anyone with deeply held religious beliefs does) schools are effectively undermining and opposing your instruction of your children. They are saying there are no real absolute morals, which is against the teaching of most religions who use God as an absolute moral reference system. This is what pisses the AFA and FRC off. If you want to teach no morals thats fine, but don't go teaching my kids relativism when I know better and want them to know better too.
Likewise if you want live what I consider a negative lifestyle (like homosexuality) thats fine, I don't like it and I'll tell you so. I have free speech just like you and I actually think I'm doing it for your own good. In the end you can go off and pay the consequences for your actions whatever they may be, sorry you didn't listen. However if you get my kids, that I love much more than you, taking up that negative lifestyle too I'm going to get really angry.
*end rant*A few nits to pick..
Sexual orientation doesn't affect study skills, or gender, or anything else along those lines.
Men and women do study differently because mens' brains have a weaker corpus collostum (sp?), the bridge between the hemispheres. Men have, in general, a greater ability to think objectively. Women have greater ability to think subjectively. So women empathize and work with people better than men, but men usually make better analysts.
I doubt race or sexual preference matter though.
even a simple hammer is flawed: it can miss the nail or worse, hit your finger
Thats not a flaw with the hammer, its a flaw with the operator. A hammer is not the perfect tool because you can't turn screws with it, etc. You are right though, no one tool can do everything. You either have many specialized tools that work well on specifics, or a few generalized ones that aren't very good at anything.
Problems with your argument are numerous:
1) Objective decisions like colleges must make needs objective data. Interviews are not, standized testing can be. Therefore provided the tests are well constructed they are a good tool.
2) Is the SAT etc unbiased and well constructed. Many say no, but I haven't seen a good study. Most people waving this banner just complain because minorities historically do badly. Is this because the test is skewed or because the minorities don't get as good an education because their schools don't have as much money to hire enough/good teachers or have lousy learning environments. Notice this trend is true for almost all standarized testing, not just the SAT.
3) People in college take lots of standardized tests in their classes, usually given by white males. Is accepting them under a different standard than that which they will be graded upon fair?
4) Interviews can be very very bad. I had a friend who was a talented would be director. He compiled an impressive portfolio of work and tried to get into film school for three years. He was told after three years that he wasn't going to get in. Not because he wasn't talented (which he is), but because he was a white male with a traditional directing style. He wasn't cutting edge enough for them. The problem was that my friend didn't create his style from Speilberg and Lucas, he studied film history and created it form the same people they studied in college.
5) Most colleges also look at your high school transcript. If you're a kid with good grades but bad SATs they usually overlook the SATs. If you're a kid with great SATs but took remedial classes because you're lazy, it will also matter.
I was asking for people working on open source game projects. I don't expect to see companies putting out linux games first, but that shouldn't stop us, the OS community from developing some cool stuff ourselves.
How many people use linux on their desktops vs. windoze? That's why shear numbers... Sure, Carmack likes linux so he puts Quake out for it, but other than that if you had to aim at a target audience, would you go for 90% or 2%.
Note: above numbers are estimates I have no idea about the true makeup of the PC OS market.
Games for Linux is good, but I'll consider it a real victory when we get games out for linux first instead of being treated like we use MacOS or something...
Anyone have links to good open source games/development projects built primarily for linux? I would expect that there's some in the pipeline now that some of the older game engines (like quake) are being open sourced.
The single scariest freakiest thing I can think of is from Battle Angel Alita, and is pertinent to this discussion.
The evil scientist "villian" reveals that all citizens of the high tech utopia he comes from have their brains removed and replaced with an almost identical brain chip with all their memories, etc. It makes them more predictable and easier to control, but effectively robs them of any true free will (almost identical remember). The freaky thing is that these people don't know it.
Imagine waking up one day and being shown that you have no free will, that every thought in your head was put there years ago. You are effectively a robot. My God that scares the hell out of me and its possible under the technology this article is talking about. Its been years since I read the book and it still freaks me out.
What is stopping a government with this articles abilities from quickly and systematically reprogramming its people in this way without anyone catching on?
Notice their TOU allows them to monitor your IP, email address, any personal information they get about you, etc. in order to check whether you are actually in Canada. They are also allowed to bring about legal action if they so choose.
Its practically impossible for them to track you down, but you should still be aware that they can legally do so and you have let them.
iCrave can legally show any unaltered live public broadcast to anyone in Canada over the internet. It's perfectly legal under Canadian law and is not copyright infringement.
Question, how do they pay for this? If its only ads on their website then they're fine, everything is still legal. What if they send the TV signal with some ads on the side, in addition to the normal TV signal but not obstructing it in any way, like an additional window? Haven't they altered the broadcast? Yes and what they are doing is illegal even under Canadian law.
I do not know if this is the case and since I live in Delaware, I would rather not lie to find out. Any Canadians out there know whether they are doing this?
I'm betting a lot of networks start airing RealMedia versions of their programs after this is all over, though. Think of the cheap source of revenue.
I don't care about flamers. Moderation works well enough that I can simply ignore them. What concerns me is that unless you start a thread in (approximately) the first hour of an article your voice and ideas will not be heard because they drowned out. Unless, of course, you post to high moderated threads that started early and ride up on their coat-tails. Its almost impossible for a great post to end up where it deserves if it starts late.
I usually read /. a few times a day, but not often enough to get into the forum early. Considering the number of articles/day, it works out to one article I can actually post on with a chance of being heard. Usually I don't post, its not worth the effort.
The problem with /. that I see is that it tends to exclude the casual infrequent users and benefits people with lots of time on their hands. (Notice the number of college students posting and think about their relative representation in the slashdot community as a whole.)
Would the StN ratio really improve or would a lot of people who posted well-meaning but low-content material end up with the trolls? Your system would require a lot of active moderation and more moderation points because the majority of posts would have to moderated up to differentiate them from flame.
This may have been said already,but the regulon that preys on information is self interest. There is power in information. If you know something your competitor doesn't then you can exploit that to your advantage. This works in business, war, and any other number of fields. This is the reason behind patent and IP law, I spent the money to acquire this information, therefore I should have the right to its sole use for a given period of time.
Slashdot has this neohippie view of information, that information should be free even though somebody has to spend money to create it. I think this is probably the case because many members of slashdot aren't that somebody. If they are then its usually in a computer field where information and experiments are pretty cheap by physical world standards.
In short, knowledge is power and so will always be protected by someone in order to further their self interest.
There are several reasons for this kind of thing happens and they usually stem from 2 causes:
Government
The government is sloooow to act, usually undermanned, and may have no clue what its talking about.
No big news here. The government won't act until it thinks it can make its case, or has no other choice. It doesn't have enough contacts to hear about things quickly and act swiftly. Lets face it our government was designed 200 years ago and it shows, especially during enforcement.
Why was the agent from Buffalo? Because in order to get the closest seven agents they probably had to pull in everyone in the 1.5 hour driving radius (if not a larger area). While the FBI may have enough staff many of the other enforcement branches are woefully undermanned to do their jobs and so they need help from state cops, etc.
Most feds are computer/technology illiterate. How much did the Secret Service know about the internet when it was given internet jurisdiction? Answer: Most of them couldn't tell a computer from a microwave oven. Should they know more? Yes, but frankly how well would you do if you had to become a cop tomorrow and start investigating murders? Probably not any better than they do when its the other way around.
The real problem that the government will never admit its wrong. You will have to go through a extended legal battle to get your equipment back even if they never file charges. This is wrong and it should be corrected. However it also stems from the overwork/ignorance of the enforcement agencies as mentioned above.
Business
It is a business's job to know what laws pertain to their products. It is homework that any good business should do.
If you're a construction company or civil engineer, you better do a complete geological/ecologocial survey of the site beforehand or the EPA will have every right to shut you down when you're half finished to save the habitat of Obscure Delaware Tree Rat. It is their job to do so and your fault because you didn't do your homework. Never assume anything if you can help it.
Likewise if your equipment has a possible use in surruptitious surveillance you damn well better know it and act accordingly. If its in a gray area, then get clarification from the government. If you play your cards right you will become a government asset and they will protect you. If you do not inform them, you are inviting this sort of thing due to their ignorance.
This does not mean that the government can't be just plain wrong, like in the case of Steve Jackson Games. But don't stick it with all the blame when a business may very well have an equal share.
The real problem with this is that most of the equipment that can be used to create biological and chemical agents has very real and very moral uses. Whats more the developing world often needs this equipment more than the developed world because they have agriculturally based economies which require the various vats and mixers to make fertilizers.
This is not to categorize the entire developing world as terrorists, but this is an example of how basic equipment necessary for fundamental manufacturing in most nations can be used for a more nefarious purpose.
I have never read good user documentation for linux. Most linux documentation that I have seen is the equivalent of this:
Q: "How do I make my car go?"
Equivalent Linux A: "You use the fuel pump to draw fuel from the tank in the rear of the car into the fuel injection manifold.... blah blah blah."
This answer is technically correct and packed full of detail, however a better answer for a mainstream user is:
Good A: "Press the gas pedal."
Most users are users (duh), not programmers. They have neither the desire to program, nor are they likely to be good at it if they actually tried. They don't care how the code works, just that it does. Until linux programmers learn to write code (and documentation) for users not themselves, linux will not become mainstream.
I'm also wondering how long it will be until nontechnical newbies trying linux start really knocking it. This won't happen because the OS is bad, but because the average Linux user is really starting to turn into an @$$#*!= elitist technosnob who is unwilling to come off his (or her) high horse to help someone who has no desire to write code, understand the workings of an OS, or even become a programmer in any way shape or form.
In other words, stop making newbies edit intimidating .conf files to get their stuff to work in the first place. Write a nice graphical routine that allows the newbie to change the most common options by checkboxes. This will change the .conf file. Nothing is sacrificed because everything is still run from the text .conf file but the newbie gets to be less intimidated.
Ok, I'm not saying this guy is right, because I don't know his shit from shinola. I'm not a physicist. I'm a mechanical engineer.
I do know:
1) Most journalists can't get specific scientific details right in their stories to save their lives. It stems from the fact that most of them can't do the scientific work and that's why they're journalists. They also think win98 is great and stable and believe Mindcraft benchmarks are unbiased.
2) You can mathmatically prove the whole universe is particle based, but it isn't. There's a wave/particle duality that means you have throw a bunch of particle theory out. Why? Not because particle theory shouldn't exist, but because it doesn't experimentally and wave theory does. I also know there is no real way to predict whether the electron will be a particle or a wave in a given experiment, except by the results. i.e. "Thats definitely a wave."
3) I have already seen people post theory's which they say are "the definitive way something works" and then in the same paragraph tell how how it doesn't capture some theoretical details we already know. (the schrodinger's equation post) This is crap, if an equation is THE way something works it should cover all the bases within experimental error. Anything else is an approximation, no matter how good.
4) Scientists like to think they know everything. Every once it a while people have to turn them on their ear. Newton did it to a bunch of ancient greeks, Einstein did it to Newton, and quantum theory did it to Einstein. (remember "god does not play dice with the universe") Big deal, happens all the time. These are theories not facts. The Big Bang is not a fact. I can assure you, you were not there to observe it.
5) I have heard no one tell how his theory violates overserved fact. It assaults one of the pillars of modern physics, but big deal. Pillars of physics are there to be assaulted. Somebody would have done it sooner or later.
6) Something unexplained is happening with Mill's process. It may not be what he says is happening. In fact it probably isn't. But the fact that the scientific community is sticking their heads in the sand says something is wrong to me. Scientists should be inherently curious about unexplained phenomenon not inherently sceptical. This stinks of the same thinking that had the church condemn Galileo, except now physicists are playing the part of the church.
Unfortuneately I'm probably posting this to late to get it noticed...