... of the routine deception that is the modern way of life. From GW lying about, well, everything, to the quaint concept of "marketing", to this... it seems to be totally acceptable, and it seems nobody cares. The language is debased, and even music is subverted and perverted.
... what a huge affront the very notion of the GPL is to the dominator paradigm that runs the show these days. (Excuse me for using the word paradigm, but sometimes it works.)
The whole concept of cooperation and sharing is completely off the radar of these people, and if it should happen to appear, it appears as a hideous threat to all that is sacred in their dinosaur minds.
This conflict goes back a long way, and this is just the latest manifestation.
The REALLY interesting thing to me is the collection of corporate entities that have endorsed open source. Or that there even ARE corporate entities that have endorsed/cultivated it.
... my brother is the DARPA project manager for the Segway stuff. In fact, it was his idea to explore the uses of Segway as an autonomous robot. He bought a couple dozen and spread them around to various universities, etc.
He's been doing distributed robotics and autonomous robots for years. He's also in charge of MARS, another USC robotics project. Some pretty wild stuff!
I have been using Linux since RH 5.1 - worked my way through various 6's, 7's, and 8.0. I spent a considerable amount of time learning and understanding Linux, and got pretty knowledgeable about it. I tried very hard to go all-Linux, all the time, but I couldn't and still can't do it. Here's why: apps. Yes, apps.
OK, the Office situation I consider adequately covered. Ditto Internet: email, browsing, etc. I even converted my years of Quicken data over to CBB. And I couldn't care less about games. But I still found myself needing to dual-boot, and I hate needing to dual-boot.
It's the less mainstream stuff that's still missing. On Windows, I have some excellent topographic map software, nicely integrated with my GPS unit. I have some excellent birding software, with videos and birdsongs. Great genealogical software. Great sound editing software. Etc., etc. I looked pretty hard, but was not able to find Linux equivalents.
When Windows 2000 came out, that was a turning point. So much more stable than Windows 98. I generally run Windows 2000 now, and hardly ever boot into Linux. I don't have the time or inclination to maintain 2 systems, so I'll stick with Windows 2000, because it's good enough.
Sure, if it's a commercial site with ads, you want max viewers. But the goal of offering a website isn't necessarily to get the most people to view it.
In fact, one of the best things about the web to me is the number of small, specialized sites that are basically labors of love offered by enthusiastic amateurs. No ads, no Flash, just otherwise hard to find information brought together in one place.
Another reason people have websites is simply to store their stuff somewhere - sort of an online archive that happens to be viewable by anyone who's interested.
As for "blogs" (stupid word), people act as though it's some new craze, but I suspect most personal websites since the beginning of the web have more or less been blogs. Now there's software to make it simple, so more people can do it. BFD.
"Uh, since many historical events described in the bible have already been confirmed through archaeological discoveries, I don't think the bible can ever be proven to be -complete- nonsense."
Uh, I have a tree outside my house, and last night, I flapped my arms and flew to the moon.
You can confirm that there is a tree outside my house, so the notion of my flying to the moon by flapping my arms is not -completely- nonsensical.
Why is Google perceived by MS to be a competitor? Why does MS feel compelled to own everything? Why not admit that Google is excellent, that there's already lots of competition in the search engine niche, and get on with life?
I try and try not to hate MS (I hate hating, and personally find it exhausting:-), but they regularly come up with stuff like this, and it just disgusts me. They're like evil monkeys. Just can't stop fidgeting, fidgeting, fidgeting.
"The market, with its greedy corporations and frugal consumers, will take care of the "oil problem" just fine by itself."
You are flat out wront. The market will not and can not "take care of the oil problem."
You (and other people with a religious faith in "free markets") are confusing money price with energy price. If it costs more than a barrel's worth of energy to extract a barrel of oil, the game is over, no matter if oil is a kazillion dollars a barrel.
Per capita production of oil has already peaked (probably last year or the year before). Demand is going to go way up as more of the world decides they want a "higher" standard of living.
What worries me is not that it's going to cost a lot to drive around. I worry about what we're going to eat: The food you eat is just as much a manufactured item as the computer you type on - fertilizers, pesticides, water pumping, farm machinery, transportation, etc. There is no substitute for petroleum in our food system, which is not agriculture in the sustainable sense - it's manufacturing.
And all the prime farmland near the cities has been paved over and developed.
People, and there are lots of them, who think that the market will or can take care of this approaching issue are very sadly mistaken.
Dune was one of the most intriguing SF books I've ever read. If only, if only FH would have left it there. OK, maybe one more sequel, but jeezus! Can you say "potboiler"?
It really came across as "let's see how much $$$ we can milk out of this franchise". And his son carried on the tradition.
"Physicists far better than I think things like space colonies and even travel to other stars are possible."
Of course they're possible. But not trivially so, and not next week. Does anyone remember Gerard K. O'Neill's space colony wet dreams in the 70's? He claimed that we could build these enormous self-contained colonies (we're talking 100's or 1000's of people), using mass-drivers to shoot lunar material into L-space, where it would be smelted into usable metals for building the damn things. All using technology that was "well understood". Why, we could do it in 10 years! (It's always 10 years).
It was total bullshit! Of the 100's of technological links in his chain, 99.99% were at best nacent technologies, especially in space.
Can we do it "some day"? Sure. But we don't even know how to produce food in space, much less build mass drivers and use native lunar/asteroidal material for any kind of useful construction. Of course, any experiments to learn how to do so on the ISS are caustically derided by the self-appointed experts on/. as a waste of time.
Well doods and babes, it's gonna take some time, so be patient.
Yes, Tailhook (and I see you're already modded up to 5, which gives me hope for/.
I instantly took that "maybe what we're up against..." quote and put it in my quote file for use the next time a "all we gotta do is privatize space and we'll all go to Mars next week" post comes up.
1) As you so nicely put it, The Universe has no compelling reason to cater to whims and dreams of mortals.
I'd add...
2) Nowhere is it written that The Universe in all Its glory should be completely comprehended by talking monkeys.
"Right click on the file/directory, choose properties, go to the Security tab. It's as simple as that. "
Running Windows 2000 Professional. When I right click on a directory or file, and pick properties, I see no Security tab. Just General, Web Sharing, and Sharing.
Look, I knew my use of the word "intuition" would get all the pollyannas of Slashdot going, and semi-intentionally used it. My intuition is based on decades of watching hyper-optimistic technological projections go down the toilet. Remember "space colonies"? That was another crock. Just because you can mouth the word "nanotube" doesn't mean we can make a tens-of-kilometers 2m diameter cable of the stuff next week, and that when we do, it will behave anything like what we think it will.
The fact of the matter is, you may believe these pie-in-the-sky feasibility and cost estimates, but they are a crock of shit - marketing. I say again: remember what all the wonderful studies said about the shuttle...
In theory, sure, there are ways you might go about making a space elevator. The technologies to do so, however, do not currently exist, and that's a fact. Maybe someday they will. But there's this troublesome entity called "the real world".
I am NOT saying it IS impossible, forever. It's just not the walk in the park that so many of you make it out to be. It's the "we could do it right now for only $6 billion" that's patently absurd.
"The USA needs a Shuttle replacement, pronto. We need cheap access to space."
It would be nice, I suppose.
"We need the national challenge, excitement, unity, and pride that the Moon missions gave us."
Just because? Might there be other projects that might be more unifying and challenging? It's like geeks talking about terraforming Mars when we haven't even demonstrated that we can avoid fucking up Terra... we don't know enough! Will we ever? Maybe some day.
Look, we're all impatient to get into space. I hope that humans will visit Mars in my lifetime. Will it benefit "the economy" to do so? Net, I doubt it, and I don't care. You know and I know that that's not the point.
But I've noticed that every time space exploration/travel comes up on/. that everyone is just really weirdly hostile to anything like a reality check. Asimov/Clarke/Heinlein/et al. notwithstanding, Space is difficult, and will take some time.
Re:NASA *is* funding this already
on
The Space Elevator
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"If the space elevator is feasible right now for only US$6 billion (less than half of NASA's annual budget), why aren't we building one ASAP and preparing to retire the shuttles?"
Because it's NOT feasible right now, for only $6 billion or any amount.
And yeah, and the space shuttle was gonna put stuff into orbit for $10/lb. and launch every week. What a crock.
I must confess that intuitively, it sounds impossible to me. A 40,000 km string! Can you just imagine the harmonics on this thing when the jetstream plucks it (or whatever). Hello! Atmosphere! Weather! Not the beautiful calm vacuum of space.
And the geosynchronous terminus at the other end... a geosynchronous orbit doesn't maintain a precise spot over the earth. It wanders here and there in response to a number of influences. Not much, but if one end is supposed to be tied to the ground... The whole concept just seems off the wall to me. Fun! A cool idea! But off the wall.
It sure is tough to get off this damn planet, ain't it?
"Suddenly there's a fresh new thing, blogs (which i never got anyways... how is posting stuff to a website different than what we were doing before blogs were big? but that's its own post)."
Oh Happy Day! I'm not alone! "Blogs" (what a disgusting word - sounds like what someone does if they drink too much) are nothing but fucking websites. What's new about "blogging"?
I don't get it either.
What a crock of shit. Can't anyone live an unmediated life anymore? Are we all going to end up as corporate whores?
Sure there are reasons for putting people in space - everything can't be done by robots, and believe it or not, even low earth orbit stuff is exploration of a sort. Even that pork-fed Space Station is more than just a boondoggle - we still have lots to learn about simply living in space. Sure, it's not a glamorous trip to Mars, but we're not ready for that yet, Zubrin notwithstanding.
Why does the shuttle have to be so big? To lift freight: big satellites. That surely doesn't require people. Separate the jobs, and make the human-transport part smaller and safer.
Part of the shuttle's problem is that it was forced into being a "one size fits all" solution. We basically made the shuttle our only human transport to space and our only big-payload transport to space. Those aren't necessarily compatible missions, especially if you throw in "and it has to have wings and land on a runway".
And why take wings into space? As someone has pointed out, the shuttle is only marginally "reusable" anyway. If you're going to be spending all that time, money, and manpower on shuttle turnaround, why not just use a "capsule"? Why do you have to land the thing on a runway? With modern design, materials, and electronics I'm sure an extremely safe, comfy (that leaves out the Soyuz:-), and cost-effective capsule could be developed.
And it seems to me that even a "capsule" could be made reusable, if it were designed with a replacable ablative shield in mind...
Whatever - back to the drawing board.
One more comment: NASA no doubt has its problems, and in this day and age people think that the way to sound smart and cool is to diss everybody and everything. But it's easy to forget that space travel is damn hard. Really damn hard.
"A tactit commenly employed is to group products by the model name"
Yes indeed, quite annoying. Even more annoying to me is when you go to a site for information about a product, click on the "products" link, and are made to choose between "home", "small business", and "enterprise". I just want to see the products and their specs! Don't worry about why! Just tell me what you've got, and I'll make my own goddam decisions!
Slashdot Mirror
... of the routine deception that is the modern way of life. From GW lying about, well, everything, to the quaint concept of "marketing", to this... it seems to be totally acceptable, and it seems nobody cares. The language is debased, and even music is subverted and perverted.
Bah!
... what a huge affront the very notion of the GPL is to the dominator paradigm that runs the show these days. (Excuse me for using the word paradigm, but sometimes it works.)
The whole concept of cooperation and sharing is completely off the radar of these people, and if it should happen to appear, it appears as a hideous threat to all that is sacred in their dinosaur minds.
This conflict goes back a long way, and this is just the latest manifestation.
The REALLY interesting thing to me is the collection of corporate entities that have endorsed open source. Or that there even ARE corporate entities that have endorsed/cultivated it.
I fear there will be no resolution soon...
- Steve
"...based on information from the Symantec's DeepSight Threat Management System,"
Did anyone else read that as "DeepShit Threat Management" ?
I actually read it as "DeepThroat Shit Management System.
... my brother is the DARPA project manager for the Segway stuff. In fact, it was his idea to explore the uses of Segway as an autonomous robot. He bought a couple dozen and spread them around to various universities, etc.
He's been doing distributed robotics and autonomous robots for years. He's also in charge of MARS, another USC robotics project. Some pretty wild stuff!
I have been using Linux since RH 5.1 - worked my way through various 6's, 7's, and 8.0. I spent a considerable amount of time learning and understanding Linux, and got pretty knowledgeable about it. I tried very hard to go all-Linux, all the time, but I couldn't and still can't do it. Here's why: apps. Yes, apps.
OK, the Office situation I consider adequately covered. Ditto Internet: email, browsing, etc. I even converted my years of Quicken data over to CBB. And I couldn't care less about games. But I still found myself needing to dual-boot, and I hate needing to dual-boot.
It's the less mainstream stuff that's still missing. On Windows, I have some excellent topographic map software, nicely integrated with my GPS unit. I have some excellent birding software, with videos and birdsongs. Great genealogical software. Great sound editing software. Etc., etc. I looked pretty hard, but was not able to find Linux equivalents.
When Windows 2000 came out, that was a turning point. So much more stable than Windows 98. I generally run Windows 2000 now, and hardly ever boot into Linux. I don't have the time or inclination to maintain 2 systems, so I'll stick with Windows 2000, because it's good enough.
"Summer Phish concerts mean hippies in armpit hair revealing clothing. *shudder*"
:-)
Ohmigod! A living, embodied human! Quick, download them to silicon!
What are you, some geeked out transhuman that armpit hair makes you shudder?
What the hell do you care about music anyway... have you ever danced? Or had sex? Thought not.
You are a mammal, my friend. Get over it. Better yet, embrace it!
"Since tedious jams' primary life purpose are the facilitation of Woodstock-style druggie babe gyrations"
I hope you're not implying that this is a problem...
"I love the music but stopped going to Phish shows years ago because the crowds got too big/disgusting."
Exactly why I stopped going to Dead shows in the 80's.
"Now I can go on tour again from the comfort of my own home."
Not quite the same, don't you think?
Sure, if it's a commercial site with ads, you want max viewers. But the goal of offering a website isn't necessarily to get the most people to view it.
In fact, one of the best things about the web to me is the number of small, specialized sites that are basically labors of love offered by enthusiastic amateurs. No ads, no Flash, just otherwise hard to find information brought together in one place.
Another reason people have websites is simply to store their stuff somewhere - sort of an online archive that happens to be viewable by anyone who's interested.
As for "blogs" (stupid word), people act as though it's some new craze, but I suspect most personal websites since the beginning of the web have more or less been blogs. Now there's software to make it simple, so more people can do it. BFD.
- Steve
"Uh, since many historical events described in the bible have already been confirmed through archaeological discoveries, I don't think the bible can ever be proven to be -complete- nonsense."
Uh, I have a tree outside my house, and last night, I flapped my arms and flew to the moon.
You can confirm that there is a tree outside my house, so the notion of my flying to the moon by flapping my arms is not -completely- nonsensical.
Ah, confused philosopher!
I believe you meant to say:
"I'm pink, therefore I'm spam".
isorox,
after reading your analysis of the situation, I'm REALLY exhausted! (lol)
Why is Google perceived by MS to be a competitor? Why does MS feel compelled to own everything? Why not admit that Google is excellent, that there's already lots of competition in the search engine niche, and get on with life?
:-), but they regularly come up with stuff like this, and it just disgusts me. They're like evil monkeys. Just can't stop fidgeting, fidgeting, fidgeting.
I try and try not to hate MS (I hate hating, and personally find it exhausting
"The market, with its greedy corporations and frugal consumers, will take care of the "oil problem" just fine by itself."
You are flat out wront. The market will not and can not "take care of the oil problem."
You (and other people with a religious faith in "free markets") are confusing money price with energy price. If it costs more than a barrel's worth of energy to extract a barrel of oil, the game is over, no matter if oil is a kazillion dollars a barrel.
Per capita production of oil has already peaked (probably last year or the year before). Demand is going to go way up as more of the world decides they want a "higher" standard of living.
What worries me is not that it's going to cost a lot to drive around. I worry about what we're going to eat: The food you eat is just as much a manufactured item as the computer you type on - fertilizers, pesticides, water pumping, farm machinery, transportation, etc. There is no substitute for petroleum in our food system, which is not agriculture in the sustainable sense - it's manufacturing.
And all the prime farmland near the cities has been paved over and developed.
People, and there are lots of them, who think that the market will or can take care of this approaching issue are very sadly mistaken.
"Why not put a few small wind turbines on the car roof to power the car.
;o)"
Then the faster you go the more power you get to drive the car
Hey, quiet down there! I've got a patent application in on this one, and I don't want anyone else to jump my claim before it's approved!
Regarding serialization...
Just one word...
Dune.
Dune was one of the most intriguing SF books I've ever read. If only, if only FH would have left it there. OK, maybe one more sequel, but jeezus! Can you say "potboiler"?
It really came across as "let's see how much $$$ we can milk out of this franchise". And his son carried on the tradition.
Ack!
"Physicists far better than I think things like space colonies and even travel to other stars are possible."
/. as a waste of time.
Of course they're possible. But not trivially so, and not next week. Does anyone remember Gerard K. O'Neill's space colony wet dreams in the 70's? He claimed that we could build these enormous self-contained colonies (we're talking 100's or 1000's of people), using mass-drivers to shoot lunar material into L-space, where it would be smelted into usable metals for building the damn things. All using technology that was "well understood". Why, we could do it in 10 years! (It's always 10 years).
It was total bullshit! Of the 100's of technological links in his chain, 99.99% were at best nacent technologies, especially in space.
Can we do it "some day"? Sure. But we don't even know how to produce food in space, much less build mass drivers and use native lunar/asteroidal material for any kind of useful construction. Of course, any experiments to learn how to do so on the ISS are caustically derided by the self-appointed experts on
Well doods and babes, it's gonna take some time, so be patient.
Yes, Tailhook (and I see you're already modded up to 5, which gives me hope for /.
;-)
I instantly took that "maybe what we're up against..." quote and put it in my quote file for use the next time a "all we gotta do is privatize space and we'll all go to Mars next week" post comes up.
1) As you so nicely put it, The Universe has no compelling reason to cater to whims and dreams of mortals.
I'd add...
2) Nowhere is it written that The Universe in all Its glory should be completely comprehended by talking monkeys.
That said, it's fun to try
"Right click on the file/directory, choose properties, go to the Security tab. It's as simple as that. "
Running Windows 2000 Professional. When I right click on a directory or file, and pick properties, I see no Security tab. Just General, Web Sharing, and Sharing.
Look, I knew my use of the word "intuition" would get all the pollyannas of Slashdot going, and semi-intentionally used it. My intuition is based on decades of watching hyper-optimistic technological projections go down the toilet. Remember "space colonies"? That was another crock. Just because you can mouth the word "nanotube" doesn't mean we can make a tens-of-kilometers 2m diameter cable of the stuff next week, and that when we do, it will behave anything like what we think it will.
/. that everyone is just really weirdly hostile to anything like a reality check. Asimov/Clarke/Heinlein/et al. notwithstanding, Space is difficult, and will take some time.
The fact of the matter is, you may believe these pie-in-the-sky feasibility and cost estimates, but they are a crock of shit - marketing. I say again: remember what all the wonderful studies said about the shuttle...
In theory, sure, there are ways you might go about making a space elevator. The technologies to do so, however, do not currently exist, and that's a fact. Maybe someday they will. But there's this troublesome entity called "the real world".
I am NOT saying it IS impossible, forever. It's just not the walk in the park that so many of you make it out to be. It's the "we could do it right now for only $6 billion" that's patently absurd.
"The USA needs a Shuttle replacement, pronto. We need cheap access to space."
It would be nice, I suppose.
"We need the national challenge, excitement, unity, and pride that the Moon missions gave us."
Just because? Might there be other projects that might be more unifying and challenging? It's like geeks talking about terraforming Mars when we haven't even demonstrated that we can avoid fucking up Terra... we don't know enough! Will we ever? Maybe some day.
Look, we're all impatient to get into space. I hope that humans will visit Mars in my lifetime. Will it benefit "the economy" to do so? Net, I doubt it, and I don't care. You know and I know that that's not the point.
But I've noticed that every time space exploration/travel comes up on
"If the space elevator is feasible right now for only US$6 billion (less than half of NASA's annual budget), why aren't we building one ASAP and preparing to retire the shuttles?"
Because it's NOT feasible right now, for only $6 billion or any amount.
And yeah, and the space shuttle was gonna put stuff into orbit for $10/lb. and launch every week. What a crock.
I must confess that intuitively, it sounds impossible to me. A 40,000 km string! Can you just imagine the harmonics on this thing when the jetstream plucks it (or whatever). Hello! Atmosphere! Weather! Not the beautiful calm vacuum of space.
And the geosynchronous terminus at the other end... a geosynchronous orbit doesn't maintain a precise spot over the earth. It wanders here and there in response to a number of influences. Not much, but if one end is supposed to be tied to the ground... The whole concept just seems off the wall to me. Fun! A cool idea! But off the wall.
It sure is tough to get off this damn planet, ain't it?
"Suddenly there's a fresh new thing, blogs (which i never got anyways... how is posting stuff to a website different than what we were doing before blogs were big? but that's its own post)."
Oh Happy Day! I'm not alone! "Blogs" (what a disgusting word - sounds like what someone does if they drink too much) are nothing but fucking websites. What's new about "blogging"?
I don't get it either.
What a crock of shit. Can't anyone live an unmediated life anymore? Are we all going to end up as corporate whores?
Sure there are reasons for putting people in space - everything can't be done by robots, and believe it or not, even low earth orbit stuff is exploration of a sort. Even that pork-fed Space Station is more than just a boondoggle - we still have lots to learn about simply living in space. Sure, it's not a glamorous trip to Mars, but we're not ready for that yet, Zubrin notwithstanding.
:-), and cost-effective capsule could be developed.
Why does the shuttle have to be so big? To lift freight: big satellites. That surely doesn't require people. Separate the jobs, and make the human-transport part smaller and safer.
Part of the shuttle's problem is that it was forced into being a "one size fits all" solution. We basically made the shuttle our only human transport to space and our only big-payload transport to space. Those aren't necessarily compatible missions, especially if you throw in "and it has to have wings and land on a runway".
And why take wings into space? As someone has pointed out, the shuttle is only marginally "reusable" anyway. If you're going to be spending all that time, money, and manpower on shuttle turnaround, why not just use a "capsule"? Why do you have to land the thing on a runway? With modern design, materials, and electronics I'm sure an extremely safe, comfy (that leaves out the Soyuz
And it seems to me that even a "capsule" could be made reusable, if it were designed with a replacable ablative shield in mind...
Whatever - back to the drawing board.
One more comment: NASA no doubt has its problems, and in this day and age people think that the way to sound smart and cool is to diss everybody and everything. But it's easy to forget that space travel is damn hard. Really damn hard.
- Steve
kin_korn_karn seems to be quite the asshole.
Art is no good unless it's recorded? Music is no good unless it's recorded? What utter, unremitting bullshit.
k_k_k has a very constipated sense of art.
How is a live musical performance that doesn't get recorded "the ultimate in cultural self-destruction"?
A culture had better be alive. Not just archives.
"A tactit commenly employed is to group products by the model name"
Yes indeed, quite annoying. Even more annoying to me is when you go to a site for information about a product, click on the "products" link, and are made to choose between "home", "small business", and "enterprise". I just want to see the products and their specs! Don't worry about why! Just tell me what you've got, and I'll make my own goddam decisions!
Sheesh.
- S