I can't believe the ignorance and ludditism I'm seeing here on slashdot. You would think this website was frequented by a congregation of the Amish, rather than self-proclaimed technophiles.
Your post is a breath of fresh air, being at least thoughtful (if perhaps not fully informed). Your point that pilot's licenses are far more difficult and rigorous than drivers licenses is a good one.
It's still a lot harder to get a license for and rental of a small aircraft than a car.
To get a driver's license in the United States, the chief requirement seems to be a pulse. To rent a car, you need a credit card in addition to the pulse.
Pilot's licenses--for good reason--are more difficult to get.
However, while "they" may call these new aircraft "flying cars," and these aircraft may even become easier to fly than current cars are to drive, I suspect one will be required to have a pilot's license to fly these aircraft just as one must have to fly any other aircraft. And well one should... if the automatics crap out for whatever reason one should be competent enough to pilot the device safely to the ground without hand-holding.
As a pilot I would love to have a flying car. Being able to get from driveway to driveway in one vehicle, rather than taking a car to the airport, flying the plane to my destination, and then renting/borrowing a car at the far end (many FBOs have courtesy cars, but many do not, and getting one is always a crapshoot), would be a tremendous boon.
Let those who want to pilot flying cars jump through the necessary hoops to become competent pilots (ideally with an instrument rating), while those who get regular drivers licenses remain restricted to the planet's surface.
All the benefits of flying vehicles, all the air safety of the current licensing system, and additional flexibility for those who do like to travel and are willing to acquire the skills to fly.
As for the post wondering what to do if one has a midair in one county and plumets to the earth in another, that one is easy. The NTSB investigates the crash irrespective of where it lands (in the US). WRT international borders, the current norms for investigative aeronautical crashes would apply.
I'm sure open-source means 'the source is freely available'
This underscores the importance of using clear terminology, and understanding the definitions of both Open Source software, and Free Software (they are not at all the same, though they do overlap in some areas).
"Open source" means that the source is released under a license that has been vetted by the Open Source organization. Such licenses are often less-than-free, imposing in some cases mutually incompatible, and to many fairly onerous, restrictions on its (re)usage and incorporation into other projects. "Open Source" implies source availablility with a modicum of freedom, but that is all.
"Freely" available (implying freedom to make use of the software) more closely implies "free software" according to the Free Software Foundations criteria, which does insure freedom, whether it is *BSD style freedom (maximizes first generation programmer freedom by eliminated protection of freedom for downstream products) or GPL style freedom (reduces first generation programmer freedom slightly with a "share-and-share-alike" provision, while insuring freedom of derivative works in perpetuity). Both are free software which is a far cry from some of the Licenses the open source folks have approved.
I have absolutely nothing against the Open Source folks. Quite the contrary, I have successfully invoked their rhetoric in the gentle nudge of executives from a proprietary mindset to a free software mindset... there's was a very useful stepping stone in that direction, but it is not the destination, and here we see one of the dangers of the "open source" definition vs. that of free software: Microsoft could release software under a license that meets the open source definition, but cripples its usefulness to the open source and free software communities in terms of being incorporated into larger projects... making the contribution very one-way: open source programmers contributing to Microsoft, while the community in turn gets nothing more than a look-see at the code, but no real, meaningful usage.
Then we get into the issue of patents. A lot of code these companies produce includes patented algorithms which would disqualify the code from even being released under a lot of Open Source licenses to begin with
That is a problem trivial to deal with. Relocate your special effects shop to Canada, Europe, or -- should those two be Finlandized by the United State's expansion of patent law to include mathematics, software, and business models and cave completely -- South America or the far east.
Software and data are easy to move around... there is no reason people couldn't telecommute to wherever the software is legal. Let the US patent system strangle the US economy, while the rest of the world enjoys its intellectual freedom and the prosperity that follows.
Why not atrocious or cruel' movies as 'harmful matter to children and adults!
Why don't we start with 'atrocious or cruel' governments, such as the Bush government Arnold supports in Washington today? It certainly has been harmful to plenty of children and adults, in this country and, even more acutely, abroad.
Even if they are not putting the warmed water back into the lake, the removal of cold water will raise the average temperature of the water (as warmer surface water has more of an impact on the overall lake) and will cause the lake to get warmer. We've done enough (I'm from Toronto) to screw up the environment around this city, we should NOT be doing this!
Yeah, the equivelent of eight extra seconds of sunlight hitting the lake will be death to the entire eco-system! Run away, run away! Burn freighters full of fuel and oil instead! (RTFA if you don't get the reference)
Get a grip. YOU have a much bigger impact on the eco-system every day you use heat, airconditioning, refridgeration, eat, sleep, shit, work or play.
The hydrocarbins the manufacture and use of the computer you typed your comments on probably have a larger impact on global warming than this entire project. The Canadian's approach is the smartest solution to this problem that anyone has come up with in a long time. Is it scalable to every city on the coast of that lake? No (8 seconds of sunlight is one thing, eight days equivelent would be another), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing it in order to reduce the consumption of power in other areas.
Nothing is a panacea, but this is a damn sound solution for Toronto, and they get to do it by being there first. Any overall solution to our energy, global warming, etc. problems will involve numerous clever solutions, and this project stands a good chance of being a part of that solution.
And as for impacting the environment: 6 billion people breathing the air impact the environment. If you truly don't want to have an impact, slit your wrists. Oops, your decaying flesh will still have an impact, so you're out of luck there too. Better get used to it, because people do have an effect, and they always will. The impact of this project is benign and minimal, compared to every other public works project out there, including the sewage system in your town you probably make use of multiple times every day.
Gore led the charge on getting the Internet funded. This seed capital was instrumental in its creation, and he rightly took credit for his significant role in its creation. He never claimed to have invented it, and claims to the contrary (originating from Declan McCullagh, the same guy who smeared the LiViD - "Linux DVD" project - and painted them out to be a bunch of DVD pirates, which got the MPAA interested and forced several developers to drop the project or face litigious reprisals) have been thoroughly debunked by a number of folks who did in fact take part in inventing the Internet, and have in fact spoken up on Al Gore's behalf.
It is Republican smear pure and simple, and has about as much basis in fact as Baby Bush's Weapons of Mass Destruction excuse for invading Iraq in a misguided effort to undue Daddy's defeat, ie none whatsoever.
If your only goal is to recover the data and then install some other OS why not just use one of the many linux live cds that support mounting fat32 and use it to back up the data? Seems a lot simpler than putzing with win95 for 10.5 hours just to grab some data.
Often that is the case (I've used Knoppix more than once to pull files off of a suspect Windows box prior to a reinstall), but in at least two cases (including the one I had in mind when I wrote the earlier post) one has to actually run the software and export the data into a vendor-neutral format before moving platforms. Annoying, because it does generally involve restoring the current windows version (or hoping to god the vendor's key will work after a reinstall with the old files... something that in one case I know of isn't true at all.
With MPAA on one side and Microsoft on the other, I just don't know who to cheer.
Mutual annihilation (nuclear weapons optional)?
If the Media Cartels and Hollywood mutually destroyed one another, we'd not only see the renaissance in software we've seen in the free software world accelerate even faster, we'd see a renaissance in cultural expression as well.
Unfortunately the two are very likely to work out a sweetheart deal that destroys both and leaves us with nothing but a cultural wasteland in both arenas.
C'mon now! IF runing Spybot S&D and Microsoft's own repair process didn't fix it, you could have just reinstalled Win98.
Total time, 2 hours MAX!
Yes, and in two minutes they can be running foot-loose and fancy free on a Knoppix or other Linux LiveCD. So what?
People's data is far more valuable than the software and hardware it runs under and resides upon, and very few people can afford to simply throw it away in order to expidite a repair.
Should these people have backed up their data and configurations? Yes.
Should they not be running Windows at all? Yes.
Should they switch immediately to Mac OS X or GNU/Linux. Absolutely.
Even if they do all of these things, the fact that they didn't backup previously (or have backups that are hopelessly out of date) means that one will probably spend a good eight or ten hours getting the system into a state where the data can be extracted, prior to booting a Knoppix or other Live CD, reformatting their hard drive, and installing Linux, or alternatively, going down the street to the nearest Apple store and leaving the pain of Microsoft Windows behind for good. Either solution is good (I have provided both to various and sundry non-techie people, all of whom, universally, have expressed extraoridinary gratitude at having been shown how to be windows free, and gone on to enthusiastically laud their new Apple|Linux box).
The pain is there. Any recovery of their data from an infected, corrupted, or 0wned windows box is likely to take many hours... after which a quick 2 minute boot of Knoppix will have them up and running again, safely and securely... but if they want those old financial records and documents, they have to go through the multi-hour recovery process first.
And this is why it will be fought against on the political front. How much you want to bet that the feds will want to require some sort of keying/user tracing mechanism in order for this "free" technology to be made publically available?
Let the feds scream like stuck pigs.
Now that the Bush administration has completely gutted our diplomatic clout to such a degree we can't even rally people against emerging nuclear threats (remember the boy who cried wolf?), no one but no one is willing to blindly go along with the United States.
Britain is the last staunch ally we have, and at this point we need them more than they need us. If Hollywood's lackeys in Washington try to push London around on this one I suspect they will be in for a very nasty surprise.
Cheney/Bush: "Ban this subversive technology or we'll have to impose tarrifs on many British goods."
UK Prime Minister: "It would be a shame if the US felt it necessary to impose trade tarrifs on the UK. That would depress our economy enough that we could no longer afford the fiscal expenditure to maintain our presence in your latest cockup, that is to say, Iraq. It might well call Afghanistan into question as well."
Cheney/Bush: ??? Who knows if they would be stupid enough to do so anyway, and lose both wars before the year is out, or if they would cave and crawl back into their backrooms for some more Haliburtan deals. Either way the US will have lost even more political and diplomatic clout (which at one time had been our greater asset, far outweighing our military strength), and the BBC's free codec will continue to be developed and deployed, unabated.
And, lest Kerry think he could pull a similiar stunt (remember, as destructive as Bush/Cheney have been on every other front, they are equaled by the Democrats on this particular topic: selling the interests of the people out to Hollywood), he would face exactly the same reaction, and results.
So, I think the BBC is reasonably safe from the depredations of Washington, whether Hollywood and Redmond like it or not.
Why CANT we do research on human enhancement? What's ethically wrong with looking for ways to make us "Better...stronger...faster...smarter" by science? It's as if there is some un-written rule somewhere that most medical researchers that say " Though shalt not ever engage in research for the purpose of enhancing humans over the norm"
Because western society is still smarting from early abuses of the concept of Eugenics (as applied to humans), and the rhetorical hijacking of such notions, by such toxic regimes as the Nazis, Khmere Rouge, Mao, and others, and we have chosen to throw the baby out with the bathwater rather than grapple with such complex and emotionally high-charged subjects in any rational public debate.
As a result, it will probably not be a western country that first engages in significant planned evolutionary enhancement (e.g. increasing people's intelligence). There are of course other factors (religious dumbing down of the masses, political dumbing down of the masses, corporate dumbing down of the masses) that are particularly pronounced in the United States, but to which even Europe, with its better educated and more critical populace, is not immune. In short, many regimes don't want smarter people, they want dumber people.
As a result, should scientists develope a way to enhance the intelligence of unborn children (as they have gender selection, and the elimination of many genetic diseases), it will probably be a country like India or China that first applies the technology and moves their people forward through a deliberate act of planned pro-evolution, leaving us behind. Those regimes don't appear to have an issue with intelligent people, chosing instead to control information flow or use other means to insure allegiance instead.
The real intersting question is that, once left behind like this for emotional, religious, or other irrational reasons, will we ever be able to reach parity again, or does that spell the end of western culture and the ascendance of another, smarter, less irrational culture instead?
Because rest assured, sooner or later, some group of people are going to choose artificially enhanced intelligence for their children (if not retroactively for themselves), and they will have a significant edge over those of us who remain behind. Decrying it, wishing it weren't so, praying to God, swearing allegiance to America, etc. will do nothing to make it go away, or to help those prosper who will have certainly lost any economic edge they might once have enjoyed.
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
SCO has violated the GPL (and the IBM countersuit will get that fact into the public legal record, perminantly).
Their rights to modify and distribute Linux have therefor been terminated. If they try to distribute Linux now, they will in fact be guilty of willful copyright infringement.
SCO has locked themselves out of the Linux industry forever. Their own outdated, buggy, and next-to-useless UNIX system is their only future. Which means, in effect, they have no viable future at all. Not even frivolous litigation, as the courts are ruling.
My insterest in Doom3 and similiar games are their use for machinima (particularly if I can do it under linux and switch back and forth between it, the gimp, blender, and transcode). I do a lot of blendering, and choreographing scenes in real time, with multiple actors / sprites, has some real appeal vs. offline rendering.
Any chance you guys are planning some add-ons to specifically support machinima type activities (character/sprite editing, etc.), lighting editors, etc?
Slight Correction in the interests of accuracy
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I wish one could go back and edit old posts.:-)
I apologize for the sloppy use of language.
If I had it to do over again, I would substitute zealotry for radicalism in the post above.
There are many people with radical notions (where radical = divergence from the society's mainstream assumptions) who are not at all fanatical and would never resort to violent means to achieve those changes (Richard Stallman is an example of someone who is radical and stubborn, but not zealous or fanatical in any real sense of the word... his detractor's rhetoric notwithstanding). Women's suffurage was at one time radical, but most of those persuing it were not fanatical and virtually everyone non-violent. This in contrast to those who fanatically defended the status quo and physically attacked and even murdered women for daring to insist on the same basic civil rights afforded the men of their day.
So, to recap: the reality is that folks of all fanatical stripes, in all political, religious, social, and philosophical directions, employ similiar methods to achieve their goals, those methods correlating much more strongly to their degree of zealotry and fanaticism than their political, social, relgiious, or phisophical bent, or their degree of divergence from the political "mainstream."
Violence is both Leftist and Rightist
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How is it that the members of the most dovish American ideology when it comes to foreign policy always seem to be the ones for inciting violence against their domestic enemies?
For the same reason that the radical right are always the ones who seem to be inciting violence against their domestic enemies. Tim McVee is hardly unique in his political stance and aspirations, nor have you cited anyone on the left that equals his level of destructiveness or intent (there are such people, but CrimeThinc is hardly of that caliber. He is not advocating mass murder).
The reality is that the so-called political spectrum is more of a sphere than a line. The extreme right and far left meet and become one and the same. Consider the similiarities of Stalin and Hitler, for example. Kids blowing up toilets to protest vietnam bear a striking similiarity to skinheads defacing jewish tombstones. Republican thugs terrorizing librarians and volunteers during the Florida recount bear a striking resemblence to communists in China enforcing campus-wide political correctness vis-a-vis the One True Party(tm) system.
Radicalism is radicalism, whether dressed in a Liberal Left or Reactionary Right attire, just as religious fundamentalism is religious fundamentalism irrespective of its Christian, Jewish, or Islamic trappings.
You have simply chosen to filter your perceptions through your own political dogma, as many people on both sides of the aisle often do. However, the reality is that folks of all radical stripes, in all political, religious, social, and philosophical directions, employ similiar methods to achieve their goals, those methods correlating much more strongly to their degree of radicalism and fanaticism than their particular social, political, religious, or philosophical bent.
Why do we keep subsidizing broken businesses? The NFL isn't like the airlines or Amtrak, our country could still function normally if some of the less profitable teams folded.
Sports is the mechanism by which the powers that be keep the American people dumbed down, sedate, and easily controlled. More so than religion (although that is certainly also a potent tool in undermining a person's ability to think critically), more so than a shoddy educational system.
Sports is the true opiate of the poeple. Baseball fans who can't balance their checkbook routinely excersize college level statistical analysis on their favorite player's batting averages and team's performance. Clearly these people aren't stupid per se, or necessarilly ignorant, but their creative and intellectual capacity has been stupified and hijacked toward ends that present no competition or threat to those who rule. The message is quite clear and effective: "think as much as you like, as long as it isn't about something important."
The last thing they are ever going to do is allow a key component of the Bread and Circuses America is spoonfed to fall, regardless of how much of the rest of the economy subsidizing their existence will harm. Just as the Romans would routinely choose to ship expensive sand for the Colesium, rather than much needed food for the people, so to will our government choose to prop up Hollywood and the NFL, at any expense.
To do otherwise risks the very real possibility that the sleeping, fooled and distracted masses of America might actually arise from the couch and get involved politically, and that is something none of the current politicans want... particularly the current administration.
Gotta love the hypocrisy of/.. Apple threatens to invoke the DMCA against Real, and there's applause and cheers. Creative licenses a software patent to id, and there's mass boycotts threatened.
Oh Good Lord not yet again. How many fucking times does it take to get this through peoples think, apparently more dense than degenerate matter, skulls?
Slashdot is a community of hundreds of thousands, each with their own set of opinions.
"slashdot hypocracy" is an oxymoron, and those who keep trotting this strawman out like it has some relevance to reality (virtual or otherwise) are themselves moronic.
I have been moderated into oblivion by Apple Fankiddies for daring to be critical of their management. This is hardly "slashdot", it is merely a group of rabidly pro-Apple fanchildren... quite possibly astroturfers at that (who says Microsoft has a monopoly on sleazy tactics?).
So what? There are others, like myself, who vehemently disagree. There are those that admire RMS. There are those who loathe him. There are those who like patents, those like myself who think any government entitlement to a monopoly is dangerous and harmful, and those who fall in between and dislike software patents but somehow think that the chilling effects they have on the IT industry magically don't exist in other areas of intellectual endeavor, such as medicine or mechanics.
There are those who would like to repeal the copyright laws and have everything in the public domain, those who would like to reform copyright so as to not grant monopolies and stifle derivative works (a sort of "authorright") and those that vehemently believe copyright is a sacred property right not to be touched.
There are libertarians, neo-conservative fascists, communists, socialsists, Republicans, Democrats, independents, and countless others who read and post to slashdot. There are athiests, muslims, christians, wiccans, buddhists, daoists, pegans, and satanists who take part in this forum.
There is no hypocracy. There are just vocal people here who disagree with each other and are not shy about saying so. Some of them support Apple no matter what, some support Microsoft no matter what, and a whole bunch who support Linux or FreeBSD. They're arguing with each other all of the time, and none of them define some "Slashdot Ueber mentality", gestalt entity, or anything else which is even capable, by the most liberal definition of the word, of being "hypocritical."
When you have the NAACP endorsing a white democrat over a black republican, what is going on here?
If the white democrat is a Bill Clinton with a reasonable history of promoting issues important to people of color, while the black republican is a Clerance Thomas with a history of hostility on those very same issues, it is perfectly reasonable for the NAACP (or any organization whose charter is to promote the rights, civil liberties, and concerns of people of color) to choose the candidate that better represents their cause regardless of the candidate's race.
Indeed, to do otherwise would not only be racist, it would be self defeating.
In other words, what is going on is rational thought, something that seems to be increasingly in short supply, particularly among the ever-more radical right.
When you have the ACLU arguing against the outlawing of child pornography, yet agreeing with Reno that gun ownership is not an individual human right, what is going on here?
Again, more rational thought. Child-porn laws create a dangerous loophole in the protection of freedom of expression. Much as I abhor child porn (and would like nothing more than to see all such people rotting away in prison until the end of their days without any possibility of parole), the situation we now find ourselves in is a fuzzy definition of what child porn is, and worse, the situation in which any recipient of SPAM that contains child pornography, or any web surfur who clicks on the wrong hyperlink, suddenly has illegal data cached on their computer and is subject to hard core jail time.
And lest you think that is far fetched, there are already people serving prison sentences because of such things. The FBI is notorious for going after people who engage in unpopular professions, such as ADULT pornographers (who wouldn't touch child porn with a 10e50 meter pole) who received bad SPAM or clicked through on a deceptive link (why child pornographers feel the need to label things "hot older women" and direct people whose interests are at the opposite end of the age spectrum to their filth is beyond me) because they could get them on a technicality of the law combined with a browser's persistent cache, not because the people had in any way engaged in any willful illegal act. Technical folks like us know enought to purge a web or email cache if anything questionable comes across our screen (and lately, SPAM is the greatest offendor. Even with beysian spam filtering, that stuff still passes through the server), but the average person is defensless against this sort of thing. Most people who've ever received SPAM, or ever clicked on a pornographic link by mistake, are probably in some trouble with the law without even realizing it, and certainly without ever having done anything wrong.
Virtually anyone who looks at porn is at risk, in that there are as many deceitful links as legitimate ones. So we see child-porn is now effectively a back door into criminalizing all porn, which is contrary to both the intent of the child-porn laws, and the express wishes of the founding fathers vis-a-vis the first amendment.
The ACLU is right, the "do it for the children" crowd are wrong. We could put all those jerks in prison without creating a class of "illegal" data simply by treating the child porn as evidence of a crime (which it is) and the traffikers as accessories to the crime. Impound the materials as evidence and you get the same net effect as the anti-child-porn laws currently seek to achieve, without the deliterious civil-rights implications, or the ever steeper slippery slope of banned speech we now find ourselves on.
As for guns, the constitution clearly states that we have the right to form malitia's. Whether or not each individual has the right to an arsenal is ambiguous in the verbiage of the constitution. I personally think the interpretation that we do have that right is more accurate than the one that says we do not, but either can be supported by the text of th
From what I have seen, such socialist stuff doesn't really go down well with corporations. They don't give away things for free, and they don't expect anything given to them for free.
What is "socialist" about a worm (white knight or otherwise)? Tresspassing a computer system has nothing whatsoever to do with economic theory, be it capitalist, socialist, communist, corporatist, or what have you.
Or are you one of these ignorant idealogues that equates socialism with "something bad" irrespective of the context or subject at hand?
Not only is water uncommon, the liquid phase is uncommon.
Water is likely very common. Hydrogen in the most common element in the universe, and Oxygen is a pretty common element as well.
The liquid phase of water appears to be fairly uncommon, in our solar system and likely everywhere.
Goodbye arm, hello tennis elbow
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Your solution allows 3-d movement using a 2-d interface -- not the same at all.
No... my solution is a hell of a lot better. "Moving in 3d" means carporal tunnel not just in your wrist, but in your elbow as well. It will make tennis elbow look like a picnic.
With a logitech trackball and scroll wheel, I can navigate three dimensions with almost no movement at all. No carporal tunnel despite spending 12+ hours/day using the thing. No mouse can compete, and certainly no 3-d doohickey that requires arm and elbow movement can.
A far better solution in software
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...can be built with two analog joysticks.
While that is far superior to the string and glue solution, an even better solution can be achieved in software.
Map the scroll wheel to the z-axis. Navigate the x-y plane with the usual mouse/trackball movements, and the z-axis with the scroll wheel. Full freedom of movement in all three dimensions with existing hardware and either existing device drivers (change the software itself, e.g. Blender) or a tiny kernel patch (change the device driver to deliver z-axis information, in preparation for holographic displays:-)).
Why do people feel compelled to offer such incredibly byzantine solutions to technical problems that have such simple, straightforward solutions staring them in the face?
Re:What a crock of...
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I don't even see that as a problem. I don't want my phone to be listed. My Vonage phone never rings unless it's someone I have given my number to!
Exactly. People pay good money to have their phone number unlisted. This isn't a bug with voip, this is a feature, and an excellent one at that.
You didn't bother to click the link, did you? LinuxMyths is a porn site, not a MS-sponsored site.
You're right. I thought I recognized the quote from Microsofts "get the (non)facts on linux" site and wrote my rebuttal without actually clicking through to the site. My bad, such as it is.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe the ignorance and ludditism I'm seeing here on slashdot. You would think this website was frequented by a congregation of the Amish, rather than self-proclaimed technophiles.
... if the automatics crap out for whatever reason one should be competent enough to pilot the device safely to the ground without hand-holding.
Your post is a breath of fresh air, being at least thoughtful (if perhaps not fully informed). Your point that pilot's licenses are far more difficult and rigorous than drivers licenses is a good one.
It's still a lot harder to get a license for and rental of a small aircraft than a car.
To get a driver's license in the United States, the chief requirement seems to be a pulse. To rent a car, you need a credit card in addition to the pulse.
Pilot's licenses--for good reason--are more difficult to get.
However, while "they" may call these new aircraft "flying cars," and these aircraft may even become easier to fly than current cars are to drive, I suspect one will be required to have a pilot's license to fly these aircraft just as one must have to fly any other aircraft. And well one should
As a pilot I would love to have a flying car. Being able to get from driveway to driveway in one vehicle, rather than taking a car to the airport, flying the plane to my destination, and then renting/borrowing a car at the far end (many FBOs have courtesy cars, but many do not, and getting one is always a crapshoot), would be a tremendous boon.
Let those who want to pilot flying cars jump through the necessary hoops to become competent pilots (ideally with an instrument rating), while those who get regular drivers licenses remain restricted to the planet's surface.
All the benefits of flying vehicles, all the air safety of the current licensing system, and additional flexibility for those who do like to travel and are willing to acquire the skills to fly.
As for the post wondering what to do if one has a midair in one county and plumets to the earth in another, that one is easy. The NTSB investigates the crash irrespective of where it lands (in the US). WRT international borders, the current norms for investigative aeronautical crashes would apply.
I'm sure open-source means 'the source is freely available'
... there's was a very useful stepping stone in that direction, but it is not the destination, and here we see one of the dangers of the "open source" definition vs. that of free software: Microsoft could release software under a license that meets the open source definition, but cripples its usefulness to the open source and free software communities in terms of being incorporated into larger projects ... making the contribution very one-way: open source programmers contributing to Microsoft, while the community in turn gets nothing more than a look-see at the code, but no real, meaningful usage.
This underscores the importance of using clear terminology, and understanding the definitions of both Open Source software, and Free Software (they are not at all the same, though they do overlap in some areas).
"Open source" means that the source is released under a license that has been vetted by the Open Source organization. Such licenses are often less-than-free, imposing in some cases mutually incompatible, and to many fairly onerous, restrictions on its (re)usage and incorporation into other projects. "Open Source" implies source availablility with a modicum of freedom, but that is all.
"Freely" available (implying freedom to make use of the software) more closely implies "free software" according to the Free Software Foundations criteria, which does insure freedom, whether it is *BSD style freedom (maximizes first generation programmer freedom by eliminated protection of freedom for downstream products) or GPL style freedom (reduces first generation programmer freedom slightly with a "share-and-share-alike" provision, while insuring freedom of derivative works in perpetuity). Both are free software which is a far cry from some of the Licenses the open source folks have approved.
I have absolutely nothing against the Open Source folks. Quite the contrary, I have successfully invoked their rhetoric in the gentle nudge of executives from a proprietary mindset to a free software mindset
Then we get into the issue of patents. A lot of code these companies produce includes patented algorithms which would disqualify the code from even being released under a lot of Open Source licenses to begin with
... there is no reason people couldn't telecommute to wherever the software is legal. Let the US patent system strangle the US economy, while the rest of the world enjoys its intellectual freedom and the prosperity that follows.
That is a problem trivial to deal with. Relocate your special effects shop to Canada, Europe, or -- should those two be Finlandized by the United State's expansion of patent law to include mathematics, software, and business models and cave completely -- South America or the far east.
Software and data are easy to move around
We wiped our asses with toilet paper in 84 and 94, we do it now and we'll still be doing it in 2014.
You don't understand how to use the three sea-shells? Where have you been? Living under a rock since 2005?
Why not atrocious or cruel' movies as 'harmful matter to children and adults!
Why don't we start with 'atrocious or cruel' governments, such as the Bush government Arnold supports in Washington today? It certainly has been harmful to plenty of children and adults, in this country and, even more acutely, abroad.
Even if they are not putting the warmed water back into the lake, the removal of cold water will raise the average temperature of the water (as warmer surface water has more of an impact on the overall lake) and will cause the lake to get warmer. We've done enough (I'm from Toronto) to screw up the environment around this city, we should NOT be doing this!
Yeah, the equivelent of eight extra seconds of sunlight hitting the lake will be death to the entire eco-system! Run away, run away! Burn freighters full of fuel and oil instead! (RTFA if you don't get the reference)
Get a grip. YOU have a much bigger impact on the eco-system every day you use heat, airconditioning, refridgeration, eat, sleep, shit, work or play.
The hydrocarbins the manufacture and use of the computer you typed your comments on probably have a larger impact on global warming than this entire project. The Canadian's approach is the smartest solution to this problem that anyone has come up with in a long time. Is it scalable to every city on the coast of that lake? No (8 seconds of sunlight is one thing, eight days equivelent would be another), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing it in order to reduce the consumption of power in other areas.
Nothing is a panacea, but this is a damn sound solution for Toronto, and they get to do it by being there first. Any overall solution to our energy, global warming, etc. problems will involve numerous clever solutions, and this project stands a good chance of being a part of that solution.
And as for impacting the environment: 6 billion people breathing the air impact the environment. If you truly don't want to have an impact, slit your wrists. Oops, your decaying flesh will still have an impact, so you're out of luck there too. Better get used to it, because people do have an effect, and they always will. The impact of this project is benign and minimal, compared to every other public works project out there, including the sewage system in your town you probably make use of multiple times every day.
A lie is a lie, and you just told one.
Gore led the charge on getting the Internet funded. This seed capital was instrumental in its creation, and he rightly took credit for his significant role in its creation. He never claimed to have invented it, and claims to the contrary (originating from Declan McCullagh, the same guy who smeared the LiViD - "Linux DVD" project - and painted them out to be a bunch of DVD pirates, which got the MPAA interested and forced several developers to drop the project or face litigious reprisals) have been thoroughly debunked by a number of folks who did in fact take part in inventing the Internet, and have in fact spoken up on Al Gore's behalf.
It is Republican smear pure and simple, and has about as much basis in fact as Baby Bush's Weapons of Mass Destruction excuse for invading Iraq in a misguided effort to undue Daddy's defeat, ie none whatsoever.
If your only goal is to recover the data and then install some other OS why not just use one of the many linux live cds that support mounting fat32 and use it to back up the data? Seems a lot simpler than putzing with win95 for 10.5 hours just to grab some data.
... something that in one case I know of isn't true at all.
Often that is the case (I've used Knoppix more than once to pull files off of a suspect Windows box prior to a reinstall), but in at least two cases (including the one I had in mind when I wrote the earlier post) one has to actually run the software and export the data into a vendor-neutral format before moving platforms. Annoying, because it does generally involve restoring the current windows version (or hoping to god the vendor's key will work after a reinstall with the old files
With MPAA on one side and Microsoft on the other, I just don't know who to cheer.
Mutual annihilation (nuclear weapons optional)?
If the Media Cartels and Hollywood mutually destroyed one another, we'd not only see the renaissance in software we've seen in the free software world accelerate even faster, we'd see a renaissance in cultural expression as well.
Unfortunately the two are very likely to work out a sweetheart deal that destroys both and leaves us with nothing but a cultural wasteland in both arenas.
C'mon now! IF runing Spybot S&D and Microsoft's own repair process didn't fix it, you could have just reinstalled Win98.
... after which a quick 2 minute boot of Knoppix will have them up and running again, safely and securely ... but if they want those old financial records and documents, they have to go through the multi-hour recovery process first.
Total time, 2 hours MAX!
Yes, and in two minutes they can be running foot-loose and fancy free on a Knoppix or other Linux LiveCD. So what?
People's data is far more valuable than the software and hardware it runs under and resides upon, and very few people can afford to simply throw it away in order to expidite a repair.
Should these people have backed up their data and configurations? Yes.
Should they not be running Windows at all? Yes.
Should they switch immediately to Mac OS X or GNU/Linux. Absolutely.
Even if they do all of these things, the fact that they didn't backup previously (or have backups that are hopelessly out of date) means that one will probably spend a good eight or ten hours getting the system into a state where the data can be extracted, prior to booting a Knoppix or other Live CD, reformatting their hard drive, and installing Linux, or alternatively, going down the street to the nearest Apple store and leaving the pain of Microsoft Windows behind for good. Either solution is good (I have provided both to various and sundry non-techie people, all of whom, universally, have expressed extraoridinary gratitude at having been shown how to be windows free, and gone on to enthusiastically laud their new Apple|Linux box).
The pain is there. Any recovery of their data from an infected, corrupted, or 0wned windows box is likely to take many hours
And this is why it will be fought against on the political front. How much you want to bet that the feds will want to require some sort of keying/user tracing mechanism in order for this "free" technology to be made publically available?
Let the feds scream like stuck pigs.
Now that the Bush administration has completely gutted our diplomatic clout to such a degree we can't even rally people against emerging nuclear threats (remember the boy who cried wolf?), no one but no one is willing to blindly go along with the United States.
Britain is the last staunch ally we have, and at this point we need them more than they need us. If Hollywood's lackeys in Washington try to push London around on this one I suspect they will be in for a very nasty surprise.
Cheney/Bush: "Ban this subversive technology or we'll have to impose tarrifs on many British goods."
UK Prime Minister: "It would be a shame if the US felt it necessary to impose trade tarrifs on the UK. That would depress our economy enough that we could no longer afford the fiscal expenditure to maintain our presence in your latest cockup, that is to say, Iraq. It might well call Afghanistan into question as well."
Cheney/Bush: ??? Who knows if they would be stupid enough to do so anyway, and lose both wars before the year is out, or if they would cave and crawl back into their backrooms for some more Haliburtan deals. Either way the US will have lost even more political and diplomatic clout (which at one time had been our greater asset, far outweighing our military strength), and the BBC's free codec will continue to be developed and deployed, unabated.
And, lest Kerry think he could pull a similiar stunt (remember, as destructive as Bush/Cheney have been on every other front, they are equaled by the Democrats on this particular topic: selling the interests of the people out to Hollywood), he would face exactly the same reaction, and results.
So, I think the BBC is reasonably safe from the depredations of Washington, whether Hollywood and Redmond like it or not.
Why CANT we do research on human enhancement? What's ethically wrong with looking for ways to make us "Better...stronger...faster...smarter" by science? It's as if there is some un-written rule somewhere that most medical researchers that say " Though shalt not ever engage in research for the purpose of enhancing humans over the norm"
Because western society is still smarting from early abuses of the concept of Eugenics (as applied to humans), and the rhetorical hijacking of such notions, by such toxic regimes as the Nazis, Khmere Rouge, Mao, and others, and we have chosen to throw the baby out with the bathwater rather than grapple with such complex and emotionally high-charged subjects in any rational public debate.
As a result, it will probably not be a western country that first engages in significant planned evolutionary enhancement (e.g. increasing people's intelligence). There are of course other factors (religious dumbing down of the masses, political dumbing down of the masses, corporate dumbing down of the masses) that are particularly pronounced in the United States, but to which even Europe, with its better educated and more critical populace, is not immune. In short, many regimes don't want smarter people, they want dumber people.
As a result, should scientists develope a way to enhance the intelligence of unborn children (as they have gender selection, and the elimination of many genetic diseases), it will probably be a country like India or China that first applies the technology and moves their people forward through a deliberate act of planned pro-evolution, leaving us behind. Those regimes don't appear to have an issue with intelligent people, chosing instead to control information flow or use other means to insure allegiance instead.
The real intersting question is that, once left behind like this for emotional, religious, or other irrational reasons, will we ever be able to reach parity again, or does that spell the end of western culture and the ascendance of another, smarter, less irrational culture instead?
Because rest assured, sooner or later, some group of people are going to choose artificially enhanced intelligence for their children (if not retroactively for themselves), and they will have a significant edge over those of us who remain behind. Decrying it, wishing it weren't so, praying to God, swearing allegiance to America, etc. will do nothing to make it go away, or to help those prosper who will have certainly lost any economic edge they might once have enjoyed.
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
[source]
SCO has violated the GPL (and the IBM countersuit will get that fact into the public legal record, perminantly).
Their rights to modify and distribute Linux have therefor been terminated. If they try to distribute Linux now, they will in fact be guilty of willful copyright infringement.
SCO has locked themselves out of the Linux industry forever. Their own outdated, buggy, and next-to-useless UNIX system is their only future. Which means, in effect, they have no viable future at all. Not even frivolous litigation, as the courts are ruling.
IANAL, etc.
My insterest in Doom3 and similiar games are their use for machinima (particularly if I can do it under linux and switch back and forth between it, the gimp, blender, and transcode). I do a lot of blendering, and choreographing scenes in real time, with multiple actors / sprites, has some real appeal vs. offline rendering.
Any chance you guys are planning some add-ons to specifically support machinima type activities (character/sprite editing, etc.), lighting editors, etc?
I wish one could go back and edit old posts. :-)
... his detractor's rhetoric notwithstanding). Women's suffurage was at one time radical, but most of those persuing it were not fanatical and virtually everyone non-violent. This in contrast to those who fanatically defended the status quo and physically attacked and even murdered women for daring to insist on the same basic civil rights afforded the men of their day.
I apologize for the sloppy use of language.
If I had it to do over again, I would substitute zealotry for radicalism in the post above.
There are many people with radical notions (where radical = divergence from the society's mainstream assumptions) who are not at all fanatical and would never resort to violent means to achieve those changes (Richard Stallman is an example of someone who is radical and stubborn, but not zealous or fanatical in any real sense of the word
So, to recap: the reality is that folks of all fanatical stripes, in all political, religious, social, and philosophical directions, employ similiar methods to achieve their goals, those methods correlating much more strongly to their degree of zealotry and fanaticism than their political, social, relgiious, or phisophical bent, or their degree of divergence from the political "mainstream."
How is it that the members of the most dovish American ideology when it comes to foreign policy always seem to be the ones for inciting violence against their domestic enemies?
For the same reason that the radical right are always the ones who seem to be inciting violence against their domestic enemies. Tim McVee is hardly unique in his political stance and aspirations, nor have you cited anyone on the left that equals his level of destructiveness or intent (there are such people, but CrimeThinc is hardly of that caliber. He is not advocating mass murder).
The reality is that the so-called political spectrum is more of a sphere than a line. The extreme right and far left meet and become one and the same. Consider the similiarities of Stalin and Hitler, for example. Kids blowing up toilets to protest vietnam bear a striking similiarity to skinheads defacing jewish tombstones. Republican thugs terrorizing librarians and volunteers during the Florida recount bear a striking resemblence to communists in China enforcing campus-wide political correctness vis-a-vis the One True Party(tm) system.
Radicalism is radicalism, whether dressed in a Liberal Left or Reactionary Right attire, just as religious fundamentalism is religious fundamentalism irrespective of its Christian, Jewish, or Islamic trappings.
You have simply chosen to filter your perceptions through your own political dogma, as many people on both sides of the aisle often do. However, the reality is that folks of all radical stripes, in all political, religious, social, and philosophical directions, employ similiar methods to achieve their goals, those methods correlating much more strongly to their degree of radicalism and fanaticism than their particular social, political, religious, or philosophical bent.
Why do we keep subsidizing broken businesses? The NFL isn't like the airlines or Amtrak, our country could still function normally if some of the less profitable teams folded.
... particularly the current administration.
Sports is the mechanism by which the powers that be keep the American people dumbed down, sedate, and easily controlled. More so than religion (although that is certainly also a potent tool in undermining a person's ability to think critically), more so than a shoddy educational system.
Sports is the true opiate of the poeple. Baseball fans who can't balance their checkbook routinely excersize college level statistical analysis on their favorite player's batting averages and team's performance. Clearly these people aren't stupid per se, or necessarilly ignorant, but their creative and intellectual capacity has been stupified and hijacked toward ends that present no competition or threat to those who rule. The message is quite clear and effective: "think as much as you like, as long as it isn't about something important."
The last thing they are ever going to do is allow a key component of the Bread and Circuses America is spoonfed to fall, regardless of how much of the rest of the economy subsidizing their existence will harm. Just as the Romans would routinely choose to ship expensive sand for the Colesium, rather than much needed food for the people, so to will our government choose to prop up Hollywood and the NFL, at any expense.
To do otherwise risks the very real possibility that the sleeping, fooled and distracted masses of America might actually arise from the couch and get involved politically, and that is something none of the current politicans want
Gotta love the hypocrisy of /.. Apple threatens to invoke the DMCA against Real, and there's applause and cheers. Creative licenses a software patent to id, and there's mass boycotts threatened.
... quite possibly astroturfers at that (who says Microsoft has a monopoly on sleazy tactics?).
Oh Good Lord not yet again. How many fucking times does it take to get this through peoples think, apparently more dense than degenerate matter, skulls?
Slashdot is a community of hundreds of thousands, each with their own set of opinions.
"slashdot hypocracy" is an oxymoron, and those who keep trotting this strawman out like it has some relevance to reality (virtual or otherwise) are themselves moronic.
I have been moderated into oblivion by Apple Fankiddies for daring to be critical of their management. This is hardly "slashdot", it is merely a group of rabidly pro-Apple fanchildren
So what? There are others, like myself, who vehemently disagree. There are those that admire RMS. There are those who loathe him. There are those who like patents, those like myself who think any government entitlement to a monopoly is dangerous and harmful, and those who fall in between and dislike software patents but somehow think that the chilling effects they have on the IT industry magically don't exist in other areas of intellectual endeavor, such as medicine or mechanics.
There are those who would like to repeal the copyright laws and have everything in the public domain, those who would like to reform copyright so as to not grant monopolies and stifle derivative works (a sort of "authorright") and those that vehemently believe copyright is a sacred property right not to be touched.
There are libertarians, neo-conservative fascists, communists, socialsists, Republicans, Democrats, independents, and countless others who read and post to slashdot. There are athiests, muslims, christians, wiccans, buddhists, daoists, pegans, and satanists who take part in this forum.
There is no hypocracy. There are just vocal people here who disagree with each other and are not shy about saying so. Some of them support Apple no matter what, some support Microsoft no matter what, and a whole bunch who support Linux or FreeBSD. They're arguing with each other all of the time, and none of them define some "Slashdot Ueber mentality", gestalt entity, or anything else which is even capable, by the most liberal definition of the word, of being "hypocritical."
When you have the NAACP endorsing a white democrat over a black republican, what is going on here?
If the white democrat is a Bill Clinton with a reasonable history of promoting issues important to people of color, while the black republican is a Clerance Thomas with a history of hostility on those very same issues, it is perfectly reasonable for the NAACP (or any organization whose charter is to promote the rights, civil liberties, and concerns of people of color) to choose the candidate that better represents their cause regardless of the candidate's race.
Indeed, to do otherwise would not only be racist, it would be self defeating.
In other words, what is going on is rational thought, something that seems to be increasingly in short supply, particularly among the ever-more radical right.
When you have the ACLU arguing against the outlawing of child pornography, yet agreeing with Reno that gun ownership is not an individual human right, what is going on here?
Again, more rational thought. Child-porn laws create a dangerous loophole in the protection of freedom of expression. Much as I abhor child porn (and would like nothing more than to see all such people rotting away in prison until the end of their days without any possibility of parole), the situation we now find ourselves in is a fuzzy definition of what child porn is, and worse, the situation in which any recipient of SPAM that contains child pornography, or any web surfur who clicks on the wrong hyperlink, suddenly has illegal data cached on their computer and is subject to hard core jail time.
And lest you think that is far fetched, there are already people serving prison sentences because of such things. The FBI is notorious for going after people who engage in unpopular professions, such as ADULT pornographers (who wouldn't touch child porn with a 10e50 meter pole) who received bad SPAM or clicked through on a deceptive link (why child pornographers feel the need to label things "hot older women" and direct people whose interests are at the opposite end of the age spectrum to their filth is beyond me) because they could get them on a technicality of the law combined with a browser's persistent cache, not because the people had in any way engaged in any willful illegal act. Technical folks like us know enought to purge a web or email cache if anything questionable comes across our screen (and lately, SPAM is the greatest offendor. Even with beysian spam filtering, that stuff still passes through the server), but the average person is defensless against this sort of thing. Most people who've ever received SPAM, or ever clicked on a pornographic link by mistake, are probably in some trouble with the law without even realizing it, and certainly without ever having done anything wrong.
Virtually anyone who looks at porn is at risk, in that there are as many deceitful links as legitimate ones. So we see child-porn is now effectively a back door into criminalizing all porn, which is contrary to both the intent of the child-porn laws, and the express wishes of the founding fathers vis-a-vis the first amendment.
The ACLU is right, the "do it for the children" crowd are wrong. We could put all those jerks in prison without creating a class of "illegal" data simply by treating the child porn as evidence of a crime (which it is) and the traffikers as accessories to the crime. Impound the materials as evidence and you get the same net effect as the anti-child-porn laws currently seek to achieve, without the deliterious civil-rights implications, or the ever steeper slippery slope of banned speech we now find ourselves on.
As for guns, the constitution clearly states that we have the right to form malitia's. Whether or not each individual has the right to an arsenal is ambiguous in the verbiage of the constitution. I personally think the interpretation that we do have that right is more accurate than the one that says we do not, but either can be supported by the text of th
From what I have seen, such socialist stuff doesn't really go down well with corporations. They don't give away things for free, and they don't expect anything given to them for free.
What is "socialist" about a worm (white knight or otherwise)? Tresspassing a computer system has nothing whatsoever to do with economic theory, be it capitalist, socialist, communist, corporatist, or what have you.
Or are you one of these ignorant idealogues that equates socialism with "something bad" irrespective of the context or subject at hand?
Not only is water uncommon, the liquid phase is uncommon.
Water is likely very common. Hydrogen in the most common element in the universe, and Oxygen is a pretty common element as well.
The liquid phase of water appears to be fairly uncommon, in our solar system and likely everywhere.
Your solution allows 3-d movement using a 2-d interface -- not the same at all.
... my solution is a hell of a lot better. "Moving in 3d" means carporal tunnel not just in your wrist, but in your elbow as well. It will make tennis elbow look like a picnic.
No
With a logitech trackball and scroll wheel, I can navigate three dimensions with almost no movement at all. No carporal tunnel despite spending 12+ hours/day using the thing. No mouse can compete, and certainly no 3-d doohickey that requires arm and elbow movement can.
While that is far superior to the string and glue solution, an even better solution can be achieved in software.
Map the scroll wheel to the z-axis. Navigate the x-y plane with the usual mouse/trackball movements, and the z-axis with the scroll wheel. Full freedom of movement in all three dimensions with existing hardware and either existing device drivers (change the software itself, e.g. Blender) or a tiny kernel patch (change the device driver to deliver z-axis information, in preparation for holographic displays
Why do people feel compelled to offer such incredibly byzantine solutions to technical problems that have such simple, straightforward solutions staring them in the face?
I don't even see that as a problem. I don't want my phone to be listed. My Vonage phone never rings unless it's someone I have given my number to!
Exactly. People pay good money to have their phone number unlisted. This isn't a bug with voip, this is a feature, and an excellent one at that.
You didn't bother to click the link, did you? LinuxMyths is a porn site, not a MS-sponsored site.
:-)
You're right. I thought I recognized the quote from Microsofts "get the (non)facts on linux" site and wrote my rebuttal without actually clicking through to the site. My bad, such as it is.