1....Also, the German government can chose to buy its software from whoever it wants.
Something which is not true of the US government, (again) for Constitutional reasons. Discrimination on the basis of religion would be taken seriously by our courts, even if the religion in question is arguably a cultish sham.
Not to mention that Microsoft software is worthless crap anyway.
Yeah, whatever.
2. I find it odd that you stress that it was a German reporter. So what? Who cares about some piece of paper? You also seem to equate the views of that reporter with that of the German people or government. Again, I find this to be very disturbing.
We're talking about German attitudes, and the fact that you (and the writer of that article) are seemingly unaware of higher principles beyond those that simply divide people into groups of "good guys" and "bad guys."
3. If state and church are spearated, why did US government documents get leaked to CoS? I would definitely call this a conspiracy that requires the force of law to be used against it.
I would also call it a conspiracy if people plan to murder millions of people.
Conspiracy to commit a crime is not considered a "natural right." Maybe it should be (Boston Tea Party, anyone?), I don't know. At any rate, neither is misapporpriation of documents. Prosecute the actual criminal(s), not the abstract group(s) they belong to.
4. Intimidation, snooping around in other people's private life, controlling people's lives are definitely actual acts that also need to be prosecuted.
So you say that people have the right to commit genocide?
If humans ever figure out how to commit genocide by using words and ideas rather than guns and ovens, perhaps I'll be willing to grant you that point.
If the Nazis don't want to grant others any rights, why should they be granted any?
That, in a nutshell, is why the USA is such an unusual place. Unlike almost anywhere else in the world, US citizens are taught to respect the rights of others to think, write, and believe things that we may find unspeakably evil or repugnant.
In short, we believe that actions, not simply words, are cause for legal enforcement. That's obviously a gross oversimplification (especially in regard to commercial issues lately) but it's still only principle on which true "freedom of speech, press, and religion" can be said to exist. Anything else -- like Germany's approach to these "freedoms" -- is an exercise in hypocrisy at the national level.
1. The Nazis want to take away other people's most basic natural rights. Just how is protecting natural rights wrong?
Freedom to contemplate ("wanting") something -- even something evil -- is a natural right. In the US, the force of law is supposed to be used only against an actual act or conspiracy, not an ideology or a religion.
In general, you cannot protect one natural right by withholding another, which is something that even our own ACLU doesn't quite understand.
2. Scientology is most definetly not banned in Germany, Scientologists are not persecuted. Yes, Scientology is criticized. What's wrong with that? Freedom of speech is a natural right.
It most certainly is regulated by the government. Tell me what role the government of Germany should be playing in this affair. This (German) reporter does a great job of illustrating how he doesn't "get" our constitutional separation of church and state, when he claims that CoS activities are only permitted in the States because of the protection of one of our political parties!
Yes, you ARE a troll and you ARE ignorant.
No, our disagreement stems from the fact that I am referring to concepts like "natural rights" that you're apparently thinking about for the first time in your life.:)
Almost all European countries recognize that everyone naturally has these rights(f.o. speech, religion, etc.). In (West) Germany this is so since 1949 with the Grundgesetz
Oh, OK, I'm a troll. I guess that explains how membership in various "undesirable" political parties (e.g. the Nazis), belief in various "undesirable" religions (e.g., Scientology), and publishing various "undesirable" books (e.g., Mein Kampf) are not considered valid "rights" in Germany.
Thanks for clearing that up. I really was thinking that the USA was the only place where ideas and words aren't supposed to be prosecuted as crimes.
Why? Because usually when a site appears to be "only" readable by Internet Explorer, the reality is that it is using W3C standards that inferior browsers like Nutscrape don't implement properly.
Like it or lump it, that's the way it is, unless you're talking about ActiveX. Even though it usually makes sense to author your content for the widest audience, no one is under any obligation to do so.
>- Can an enthusiast make one of these "impossibly cheap" devices?
Yes. Schematics and parts are readily available.
Where?
There is a patent conflict. Thoma McEwan of Lawrence Livermore Labs copied Time Domain's ideas and patented them. Manufacturer's will face litigation expense and could end up paying royalties on both.
My understanding is that the court told McEwan to go pound sand last year. Do you have more up-to-date info?
No. Unlike the various broadband providers, Microsoft's monopoly was earned in a more-or-less open market. It's not a "natural monopoly," and it was not granted by government fiat.
I can always tell when a new apartment I go to has wireless ethernet;-(),
Then God help you if you ever come within 100 feet of a working microwave oven. At that distance, their emissions are still 10-20X as powerful as an 802.11 card at 6 feet.
I can 'see' more radiation from my neighbor's microwave oven on a 2.4 GHz spectrum analyzer than I get from the Orinoco card in the PC that sits next to the analyzer on my workbench.
Seriously... get help. Even though the supposed cause of your suffering is purely imaginary, your symptoms themselves may not be.
I have been running a GeForce 2 GTS on my main machine at home. Not sure about the GTS designation, but it's one of the later GeForce 2 cards, at least.
On this card, it was necessary to drill out the end of the plastic DVI connector insert to allow the 170T's plug to fit. I doubt this would be necessary with a retail card (mine is preliminary OEM hardware that I brought home from the office.)
The GeForce 3 in my PC here at work has a DVI connector with all its holes in the right places, so it would work with the 170T as-is.
I would suggest looking for an NVidia GeForce 2 or 3 card. I'm not familiar with DVA, though, so if it's not compatible with the DVI standard, you may be in trouble.
A good LCD monitor will exhibit almost no ghosting in games, will support either standard VGA or DVI, and will have a viewing angle well over 100 degrees.
I'm sure the OLED displays will be insanely awesome and all, but the present-day reality is that the best LCD displays are now reasonably competitive with the best CRTs. You must have been looking at some really cheap LCD monitors -- or some really old ones -- in order to get the impressions you posted.
Samsung's flat-panel product line is fairly easy to summarize, even without a formal review. I looked closely at several different models when upgrading my monitor late last year.
The Samsung 170T is godlike, especially with a DVI connection. It has a 400:1 contrast ratio, 0.26mm dot pitch, and it's bright enough to be painful to look at in dim light. The 160-degree viewing angle will remind you of a CRT. Oddly enough, it's not much more expensive than their (far inferior) 170MP and other 17" models.... which explains why most mail-order houses are usually sold out of the 170T.
I've replaced every CRT monitor in my house (three) with 170Ts, and couldn't be happier. There is only one dead pixel among the three.
Sadly, however, the other Samsung monitors are all junk, no better or worse than everything else in the slush pile at CompUSA. I imagine the 170T is blown away by the 210T, but those are even larger, more expensive, and (probably) harder to find.
The appearance of Deja/Google archives killed USENET because it has shown that there are no guarantees: only a fool would now engage in any kind of controversial discussion on USENET under their own name.
Either a fool, or a mature person who is willing to take responsibility for what he/she posts to a public newsgroup. Either way, it sounds like you're out of the game, huh?
Anyway, my point is that I'd like to moderate, and I don't understand why I can't.
Check out K5 if you haven't already. Their moderation system is much more democratic than Slashdot's, and (at least IMHO) much more effective. Unlike Slashdot's moderation system, theirs doesn't seem to have been designed to provoke confusion and deliberate abuse at every turn.
The quality of discussion at K5 is generally a little higher, since it's not such a playground for trolls. It's a different site with different purposes, but I've found myself spending a lot more time there than on/. lately, and you might, too.
Not that it belies anything you've said about equipment accessible to hobbyists, but it's interesting to note that Tek's latest TDS5000-series digital phosophor oscilloscopes are basically.... Windows PCs with oscilloscope cards.
It's hard to beat a PC-based solution if you've got a lot of customized and/or repetitive measurement tasks.
While you can at least hear SS signals on a conventional receiver (they sound like more- or less-random noise), there are technologies coming down the pike that are completely undetectable without a time-correlated receiver.
See, for example, Time Domain's technology. Ultra-wideband radio is fundamentally different from both DSSS/FHSS and conventional modulation technologies, and it may very well prove to be the Right Way to send and receive wireless signals in the long run.
If time-domain radio turns out to be the natural direction of evolution for wireless systems, we don't have a chance in hell of listening in on ET's phone conversations.:(
This is my biggest problem with SETI -- the assumptions they are making about the nature of an advanced civilization's communications traffic are almost all entirely unwarranted. I don't think we're going to find anything interesting by staring at frequency-domain FFT displays all day.
Re:On the nature of power
on
Freedom or Power?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Similarly, the ONLY action GNU wants to take away from you is your ability to take freedom away from other people. I think that's perfectly spelled out in the GPL. People don't have the right to take freedom from other people.
It'll be interesting to hear your explanation of how I can "take freedom from other people" by writing my own software and offering it under license terms of my own choosing.
If you honestly believe what you wrote, you're not talking about power, or even ideology. You're talking about religion.
The authors state something that we might have suspected from essays from Kuhn and Stallman before, but now is a little more clear, if still ambiguous: "However, one so-called freedom that we do not advocate is the "freedom to choose any license you want for software you write". We reject this because it is really a form of power, not a freedom."
And forcing me to choose a license that meets the FSF's approval is an attempt to assert what?
Could it be...?
Power?
I'm impressed. That single-sentence excerpt, by itself, says more about its author than Mao's entire Little Red Book did.
Yes, you can fix your own radios. You'd be allowed to write your own software. But would you be allowed to write it commercially?
Not a problem. An un-degreed SE would be "allowed" to write commercial software, just as an undegreed EE would be "allowed" to design commercial hardware. (Ever hear of a fellow named Wozniak? Or Dell, for that matter)
Professional engineering licensing/accreditation issues tend to be relevant when government or military contracts are at stake. For instance, no municipality is going to accept a bridge-design proposal from some random dude calling himself a "civil engineer." Likewise, you're not going to work for JPL or NASA unless you can show the necessary professional credentials to indicate competency with metric and English units, for example.
It's true that a few talented engineers have been held back by a lack of degrees and licenses. After WWII, Wernher von Braun had to send off for a mail-order doctorate degree before Congress would take him seriously. But for the most part, this action on IEEE's part isn't something that should scare anyone, IMHO. The IEEE is a rather toothless organization, and no commercial interests are going to let them threaten the supply of talent, accredited or otherwise.
In the surplus-electronics business, it's almost an industry axiom. UPS Blue (2-day air) is fine, and FedEx 3-day Express Saver service is a good compromise between cost and delivery time. UPS Ground, however, guarantees that your equipment will receive the most abusive possible treatment at the hands of heavily-unionized goons who have zero accountability to management.
In fact, you're lucky if your shipment doesn't magically vanish from the distribution hub.
I usually use FedEx when it absolutely, positively, has to get there in one piece. That being said, I have not been hearing good things about the new FedEx Ground (formerly RPS) service. Apparently the integration with FedEx has not gone particularly well, and they're not providing reliable service with low breakage risk.
Before using any carrier or service, it's a good idea to search Google Groups to see what the various collectibles groups are bitching about lately. And always, always pack your gear to survive a 3-foot fall into a concrete floor. If you catch yourself flinching at the thought of such an impact, you didn't pack well enough.
Slashdot Mirror
1. ...Also, the German government can chose to buy its software from whoever it wants.
Something which is not true of the US government, (again) for Constitutional reasons. Discrimination on the basis of religion would be taken seriously by our courts, even if the religion in question is arguably a cultish sham.
Not to mention that Microsoft software is worthless crap anyway.
Yeah, whatever.
2. I find it odd that you stress that it was a German reporter. So what? Who cares about some piece of paper? You also seem to equate the views of that reporter with that of the German people or government. Again, I find this to be very disturbing.
We're talking about German attitudes, and the fact that you (and the writer of that article) are seemingly unaware of higher principles beyond those that simply divide people into groups of "good guys" and "bad guys."
3. If state and church are spearated, why did US government documents get leaked to CoS? I would definitely call this a conspiracy that requires the force of law to be used against it.
I would also call it a conspiracy if people plan to murder millions of people.
Conspiracy to commit a crime is not considered a "natural right." Maybe it should be (Boston Tea Party, anyone?), I don't know. At any rate, neither is misapporpriation of documents. Prosecute the actual criminal(s), not the abstract group(s) they belong to.
4. Intimidation, snooping around in other people's private life, controlling people's lives are definitely actual acts that also need to be prosecuted.
True enough. So prosecute them, already!
So you say that people have the right to commit genocide?
If humans ever figure out how to commit genocide by using words and ideas rather than guns and ovens, perhaps I'll be willing to grant you that point.
If the Nazis don't want to grant others any rights, why should they be granted any?
That, in a nutshell, is why the USA is such an unusual place. Unlike almost anywhere else in the world, US citizens are taught to respect the rights of others to think, write, and believe things that we may find unspeakably evil or repugnant.
In short, we believe that actions, not simply words, are cause for legal enforcement. That's obviously a gross oversimplification (especially in regard to commercial issues lately) but it's still only principle on which true "freedom of speech, press, and religion" can be said to exist. Anything else -- like Germany's approach to these "freedoms" -- is an exercise in hypocrisy at the national level.
1. The Nazis want to take away other people's most basic natural rights. Just how is protecting natural rights wrong?
:)
Freedom to contemplate ("wanting") something -- even something evil -- is a natural right. In the US, the force of law is supposed to be used only against an actual act or conspiracy, not an ideology or a religion.
In general, you cannot protect one natural right by withholding another, which is something that even our own ACLU doesn't quite understand.
2. Scientology is most definetly not banned in Germany, Scientologists are not persecuted. Yes, Scientology is criticized. What's wrong with that? Freedom of speech is a natural right.
It most certainly is regulated by the government. Tell me what role the government of Germany should be playing in this affair. This (German) reporter does a great job of illustrating how he doesn't "get" our constitutional separation of church and state, when he claims that CoS activities are only permitted in the States because of the protection of one of our political parties!
Yes, you ARE a troll and you ARE ignorant.
No, our disagreement stems from the fact that I am referring to concepts like "natural rights" that you're apparently thinking about for the first time in your life.
Almost all European countries recognize that everyone naturally has these rights(f.o. speech, religion, etc.). In (West) Germany this is so since 1949 with the Grundgesetz
Oh, OK, I'm a troll. I guess that explains how membership in various "undesirable" political parties (e.g. the Nazis), belief in various "undesirable" religions (e.g., Scientology), and publishing various "undesirable" books (e.g., Mein Kampf) are not considered valid "rights" in Germany.
Thanks for clearing that up. I really was thinking that the USA was the only place where ideas and words aren't supposed to be prosecuted as crimes.
Why? Because usually when a site appears to be "only" readable by Internet Explorer, the reality is that it is using W3C standards that inferior browsers like Nutscrape don't implement properly.
Like it or lump it, that's the way it is, unless you're talking about ActiveX. Even though it usually makes sense to author your content for the widest audience, no one is under any obligation to do so.
>- Can an enthusiast make one of these "impossibly cheap" devices?
Yes. Schematics and parts are readily available.
Where?
There is a patent conflict. Thoma McEwan of Lawrence Livermore Labs copied Time Domain's ideas and patented them. Manufacturer's will face litigation expense and could end up paying royalties on both.
My understanding is that the court told McEwan to go pound sand last year. Do you have more up-to-date info?
Do you feel the same way about Microsoft?
No. Unlike the various broadband providers, Microsoft's monopoly was earned in a more-or-less open market. It's not a "natural monopoly," and it was not granted by government fiat.
I can always tell when a new apartment I go to has wireless ethernet ;-(),
Then God help you if you ever come within 100 feet of a working microwave oven. At that distance, their emissions are still 10-20X as powerful as an 802.11 card at 6 feet.
I can 'see' more radiation from my neighbor's microwave oven on a 2.4 GHz spectrum analyzer than I get from the Orinoco card in the PC that sits next to the analyzer on my workbench.
Seriously... get help. Even though the supposed cause of your suffering is purely imaginary, your symptoms themselves may not be.
I have been running a GeForce 2 GTS on my main machine at home. Not sure about the GTS designation, but it's one of the later GeForce 2 cards, at least.
On this card, it was necessary to drill out the end of the plastic DVI connector insert to allow the 170T's plug to fit. I doubt this would be necessary with a retail card (mine is preliminary OEM hardware that I brought home from the office.)
The GeForce 3 in my PC here at work has a DVI connector with all its holes in the right places, so it would work with the 170T as-is.
I would suggest looking for an NVidia GeForce 2 or 3 card. I'm not familiar with DVA, though, so if it's not compatible with the DVI standard, you may be in trouble.
I should have qualified my sweeping generalization by saying that I was looking only at 17" monitors, not 15" or 21" ones.
A good LCD monitor will exhibit almost no ghosting in games, will support either standard VGA or DVI, and will have a viewing angle well over 100 degrees.
I'm sure the OLED displays will be insanely awesome and all, but the present-day reality is that the best LCD displays are now reasonably competitive with the best CRTs. You must have been looking at some really cheap LCD monitors -- or some really old ones -- in order to get the impressions you posted.
Samsung's flat-panel product line is fairly easy to summarize, even without a formal review. I looked closely at several different models when upgrading my monitor late last year.
The Samsung 170T is godlike, especially with a DVI connection. It has a 400:1 contrast ratio, 0.26mm dot pitch, and it's bright enough to be painful to look at in dim light. The 160-degree viewing angle will remind you of a CRT. Oddly enough, it's not much more expensive than their (far inferior) 170MP and other 17" models.... which explains why most mail-order houses are usually sold out of the 170T.
I've replaced every CRT monitor in my house (three) with 170Ts, and couldn't be happier. There is only one dead pixel among the three.
Sadly, however, the other Samsung monitors are all junk, no better or worse than everything else in the slush pile at CompUSA. I imagine the 170T is blown away by the 210T, but those are even larger, more expensive, and (probably) harder to find.
The appearance of Deja/Google archives killed USENET because it has shown that there are no guarantees: only a fool would now engage in any kind of controversial discussion on USENET under their own name.
Either a fool, or a mature person who is willing to take responsibility for what he/she posts to a public newsgroup. Either way, it sounds like you're out of the game, huh?
Anyway, my point is that I'd like to moderate, and I don't understand why I can't.
/. lately, and you might, too.
Check out K5 if you haven't already. Their moderation system is much more democratic than Slashdot's, and (at least IMHO) much more effective. Unlike Slashdot's moderation system, theirs doesn't seem to have been designed to provoke confusion and deliberate abuse at every turn.
The quality of discussion at K5 is generally a little higher, since it's not such a playground for trolls. It's a different site with different purposes, but I've found myself spending a lot more time there than on
Good point. Tek doesn't have the same engineering constraints that face a user who just wants to "upgrade" his PC with a scope card.
Take a look at the specs on those TDS5000-series scopes, and get back to me on those points you were trying to make. :)
Not that it belies anything you've said about equipment accessible to hobbyists, but it's interesting to note that Tek's latest TDS5000-series digital phosophor oscilloscopes are basically.... Windows PCs with oscilloscope cards.
It's hard to beat a PC-based solution if you've got a lot of customized and/or repetitive measurement tasks.
It gets worse.
:(
While you can at least hear SS signals on a conventional receiver (they sound like more- or less-random noise), there are technologies coming down the pike that are completely undetectable without a time-correlated receiver.
See, for example, Time Domain's technology. Ultra-wideband radio is fundamentally different from both DSSS/FHSS and conventional modulation technologies, and it may very well prove to be the Right Way to send and receive wireless signals in the long run.
If time-domain radio turns out to be the natural direction of evolution for wireless systems, we don't have a chance in hell of listening in on ET's phone conversations.
This is my biggest problem with SETI -- the assumptions they are making about the nature of an advanced civilization's communications traffic are almost all entirely unwarranted. I don't think we're going to find anything interesting by staring at frequency-domain FFT displays all day.
Similarly, the ONLY action GNU wants to take away from you is your ability to take freedom away from other people. I think that's perfectly spelled out in the GPL. People don't have the right to take freedom from other people.
It'll be interesting to hear your explanation of how I can "take freedom from other people" by writing my own software and offering it under license terms of my own choosing.
If you honestly believe what you wrote, you're not talking about power, or even ideology. You're talking about religion.
The authors state something that we might have suspected from essays from Kuhn and Stallman before, but now is a little more clear, if still ambiguous: "However, one so-called freedom that we do not advocate is the "freedom to choose any license you want for software you write". We reject this because it is really a form of power, not a freedom."
And forcing me to choose a license that meets the FSF's approval is an attempt to assert what?
Could it be...?
Power?
I'm impressed. That single-sentence excerpt, by itself, says more about its author than Mao's entire Little Red Book did.
Yes, you can fix your own radios. You'd be allowed to write your own software. But would you be allowed to write it commercially?
Not a problem. An un-degreed SE would be "allowed" to write commercial software, just as an undegreed EE would be "allowed" to design commercial hardware. (Ever hear of a fellow named Wozniak? Or Dell, for that matter)
Professional engineering licensing/accreditation issues tend to be relevant when government or military contracts are at stake. For instance, no municipality is going to accept a bridge-design proposal from some random dude calling himself a "civil engineer." Likewise, you're not going to work for JPL or NASA unless you can show the necessary professional credentials to indicate competency with metric and English units, for example.
It's true that a few talented engineers have been held back by a lack of degrees and licenses. After WWII, Wernher von Braun had to send off for a mail-order doctorate degree before Congress would take him seriously. But for the most part, this action on IEEE's part isn't something that should scare anyone, IMHO. The IEEE is a rather toothless organization, and no commercial interests are going to let them threaten the supply of talent, accredited or otherwise.
That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard, and a blatant stereotype.
OK, quick. Name a stereotype that's not at least partially grounded in reality.
In the surplus-electronics business, it's almost an industry axiom. UPS Blue (2-day air) is fine, and FedEx 3-day Express Saver service is a good compromise between cost and delivery time. UPS Ground, however, guarantees that your equipment will receive the most abusive possible treatment at the hands of heavily-unionized goons who have zero accountability to management.
In fact, you're lucky if your shipment doesn't magically vanish from the distribution hub.
I usually use FedEx when it absolutely, positively, has to get there in one piece. That being said, I have not been hearing good things about the new FedEx Ground (formerly RPS) service. Apparently the integration with FedEx has not gone particularly well, and they're not providing reliable service with low breakage risk.
Before using any carrier or service, it's a good idea to search Google Groups to see what the various collectibles groups are bitching about lately. And always, always pack your gear to survive a 3-foot fall into a concrete floor. If you catch yourself flinching at the thought of such an impact, you didn't pack well enough.
No, we haven't been programmed to be happy little consumers, have we?
Beats the shit out of the alternative programming choices out there.
Cool. It looks like parents are letting their kids watch Fight Club before they know how to read.