Congress is quite correct that the GPL would interfere with this congressional strategy of wealth transfer. Rather the GPL would keep public property in the public domain to be used by the public for the public. IMHO that is a far worthier goal than "increasing the government-private partnership".
All of what you say is basically correct (and shut put an end to the myth that subsidizing the rich is solely a Republican vice, when it clearly is an Equal Opportunity Vice engaged in liberally by both parties), but I have one minor nit to pick:
Rather the GPL would keep public property in the public domain to be used by the public for the public.
That should read public commons, not public domain. GPLed code is a part of the public commons, however it does remain under copyright, and is therefor not in the public domain. Otherwise, very insightful post!
With public domain, anyone can take my code and change the license and sell it to me with a restrictive license.
Yes, and that's part of the freedom. You know, freedom doesn't apply only to things you approve of. It also means freedom to do things which you don't like.
You mean, like the freedom to put a toll booth up on a public road, the freedom to park my car on the flowerbed of the local park, the freedom to put a fence up around your property (but not on it, of course) and charge you a toll to walk through the gate? Or perhaps you mean the freedom to rape your wife, or cap a bunch of random innocents with a.223 caliber round from 100 meters?
I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other with respect to using a BSD or GPL style license... though I do think that is something for each agency to decide, not Microsoft via their paid Washington lackey... uh, I mean, "representative." If the NSA feels the public good, and national security, would be well served by strengthening the security of GNU/Linux, then they should not be prohibited from doing so merely because Linus and RMS have chosen to GPL their code, any more than they should be prevented from submitting patches to Microsoft to plug the latest gaping security hole in their products (if such a feat is even possible).
However, I do think it is time, once and for all, to put a nail in the coffin of this misguided notion that freedom in general equals the "freedom" to do things that take away everyone elses freedom as a result (i.e. the "freedom" to oppress others), when it is clear to any thinking being that such is not the case. You do not have the freedom to take away my free access to my property by abusing public lands around it, why should you have the "freedom" to take away my access (or usability) of public code by embracing, extending, and destroying it?
My mom phones me weekly yapping about some new virus that has slipped into her computer.
My mom has been running Debian for almost two years, and aside from a few calls early on of the "how do I do X under Linux" type, I haven't had to field any calls at all (none within the last year. None). Indeed, I havent had to fix her computer once since I installed it nearly two years ago.
Not once.
Now that Applix has grown a little staid, I'm probably going to upgrade her to Gentoo 1.4 when it is released, with Open Office.
She works with Microsoft every day at work, and has been agitating her employer to let her use GNU/Linux instead. My mom, who, like yours, is 50+.
However, even if her employer doesn't let her switch, she has no trouble importing and exporting to Microsoft Word and Excel formats using her GNU/Linux box... in fact she loves the fact that it is quick and stable, unlike the much more expensive machine she uses at work, which is down for software repairs quite frequently.
Most especially, she likes not having to worry about the latest Klez worm or misc. virus, something that is steadilly stressing out all her friends.
My mother, who is computer competent but certainly not computer savvy, has become a stronger propoent of Linux and free software than I have. All the Microsoft-funded astroturfers keep harping about how the consumers wants this or that slick or shiny feature, when in truth all of the computer illiterate and computer competent (but not necessarilly savvy) people I've exposed to GNU/Linux haven't ever wanted to go back. Why?
Because in truth people don't care all that much about shiny feature X or slick feature Y, they care far more about stability, predictability, and the ability to simply get their work done. And that is where GNU/Linux truly excells... unlike Windows, it does not change its behavior for no apparent reason, nor does it break mysteriously simply because you've added a new piece of software.
What is interesting is how few people realize they have a viable choice, and once they do realize it, how many (of the people I know, at least, of various walks of life) end up dumping Windows like a bad habit.
Indeed - you only have to look at the fine examples of capitalistic ethics provided recently by companies such as Enron, Worldcom, Global Crossing etc to realise how unnecessary government regulation in the free market is.
You are citing real world examples. That isn't fair.
Objectivists have based their entire philosophy on Ayn Rand's fictional novels, of which The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are just two. This is in contrast to other schools of capitalist, socialist, and even communist thought, which, however flawed they may be, at least have insight enough to cite serious academic studies as the foundation of their ethos and philisophical views.
Does this mean a world view based upon a fictional work is false, or one based upon a scientific or academic study will yield better results? Not necessarilly, any more than we can know with certainty that science will yield a more accurate understanding of the universe than religion (of whatever flavor) will.
However, the vast majority of evidence is that science does yield better practical results than religious dogma, and rigorous academic studies more useful insights than works of fiction.
Having said all that, in Ayn Rand's defense (and I say this despite disagreeing with many of her assumptions and rather myopic views on a number of subjects), she was nowhere near as extreme as many of her adherents.
BTW - When I lived and worked in Germany I made two interesting observations:
1. German taxes were not significantly higher for middle and upper-middle income people there than they are in the United States, despite their having an excellent social net, including a form of socialized medicine (socialized via a strictly regulated insurance industry and policies paid for with public moneys for those who cannot afford the premiums), and
2. The healthcare I was provided there was vastly better than what I have in the United States, despite having one of the better PPOs currently available. The American system appears to be designed to subsidize high-end medical procedures, available generally only to the very wealthy or very well insured (two groups which are quickly becoming synonymous) through vastly higher costs for standard medical procedures (like getting a checkup or an allergy shot).
We in the United States pay three times as much for our less adequate healthcare than the rest of the industrialized world does for the "less effecient" socialized healthcare -- a fact which should put to rest once and for all the myth that the free market is always more effecient than a public works equivelent. In the area of healthcare, where the customer is captive by nature of the fact that without it they will suffer and possibly die, clearly the power of the customer to choose, or reject unacceptable conditions of service vs. the power of the provider to coerce or set their own conditions, is so degraded as to make a "free" marketplace in any meaningful sense impossible. This leaves corporate oligarchies and trusts vs. socialized medicine as the two real choices we face, and the experience of the entire developed world, outside of the united states, indicates that the socialized approach is vastly more effecient and effective.
Raymond described a model of collaborative software development in which a large, geographically dispersed group of programmers worked together in a seemingly chaotic way. This bazaar model was to be contrasted with the cathedral model, in which everything is done according to a detailed, preexisting plan.
[...]
The bazaar model seems to have been almost a complete failure in the world of free books, although not for want of trying. Tellingly, The Cathedral and the Bazaar was itself written cathedral-style by Raymond. He has also started a bazaar-style book project, The Art of Unix Programming[7], which appears to be languishing.
[...]
The failure of the bazaar model with free books might not seem surprising
This depends largely on where one draws the line between bizzar and cathedral, or put another way, with what granularity one considers a project or body of work. The Star Trek and Star Wars universes are examples where there is a large body of Cathedralesque work, as well as an even larger body of "fan fiction." While many stories (perhaps most) are themselves written by a single author (as, in fact, my own (soon-to-be released under a free license) novel has been), the overall, net effect of the body of work which comprises the fan fiction of the Star Trek and Star Wars universes (and undoubtably other settings as well) is in many ways more remeniscent of the Bizzar than a Cathedral approach. The Linux kernel is a bizzar-type project, yet within that kernel are modules and subsystems that are quite 'cathedralesque' in how they were managed and written.
The definition in many ways becomeds one of granularity, and while I agree with much the article writes, I think the author overlooks the bizzar aspect of the cultural commons from which all authors draw inspiration. This is readilly seen in the collections of fan fiction which abound and, were it not for the often extremely repressive aspects of copyright in limiting how and when a person can incorporate another's work in their own project (no, I'm not advocating plagerism, I'm advocating broader definitions of fair use that including giving the original creator credit for their contribution, if not exclusive use).
Canadian provinces can secede... consider, say, Prince Edward Island, with a population of 138,000 spread over 5,600 square kilometers. That's a plausible province for this scheme. 20,000 determined people really could take it over.
Here I was looking at the real feasability of moving to Canada (BC) and/or at least having a summer home there to run to if things get really ugly here in the United People's States of America, and now you go suggesting a thing like this.
There's no way in hell they'll let any of us in now... would you want a bunch of gun totin', right-wing Americans in your province messing up your nice, socialized medicine and sparkling clean streets? Neither would they, and since the right-wingers don't have any distinguishing marks, that probably rules out all of us who'd like to emigrate north.
It certainly isn't free, I'm in a ~40% tax bracket.
I'm in a 40% tax bracket in the United States, and my employer pays for my health care insurance, which isn't nearly as good as what I had in Germany when I was working as a college intern (the money my employer pays for health insurance would likely be mine as income otherwise, so it wouldn't be at all unfair to add that to my tax bracket for a more even ocmparison, in which case the United States taxes would come out vastly more expensive than most, if not all, of the industrialized world. We pay three times what the rest of the world does for comparable healthcare).
If you look at tax rates based upon what you earn, Germany (and likely Canada, though I haven't compared the numbers myself for Canada yet) has about the same tax rate as the United States for anyone earning wages in the middle to upper-middle income brackets. Yes, if you make $500,000 or $1,000,000 / year you'll pay much higher taxes in Germany (and probably Canada) than you do in the US, but how many people does that affect, and just how impoverished are the lifestyles of those so affected. Not as impoverished as the upper middle income bracket folks, who pay roughly the same in both countries, but get a hell of a lot more for their tax dollar in Germany than they do the United States. Woopty-fucking-do if Joe Corporate Exec can't afford a second yacht this year... that is an asinine reason to perpetuate the existing, severely broken system which is clearly designed to serve the few and priveleged, subsidized by higher costs for the rest of us.
What is amazing to me is how utterly myopic we Americans are when it comes to socialized medicine. The insurance and pharmaceutical companies tell us how poorly socialized medicine works, citing one or two anectdotes (for which there are a dozen anectdotes making exactly the opposite point), but no hard evidence that socialized medicine a la Europe (including Germany's highly regulated medical insurance industry, the system Hilary Clinton wanted to emulate), and we as a people buy it hook, line, and sinker merely because anything having the dirty word "socialism" in it must be worse than the current 40% uninsured population we have now.
Not all that goes to health care, of course, but a good chunk does. Do I dislike the taxes? Yes. Would I want to lower taxes and go to a for-profit US-style system? Not on your life.
Amen. The irony is, I doubt your taxes are all that much higher than ours, if at all. We get to pay taxes to prop up Worldcom, line the pockets of Baby Bush and his cronies, and invade small middle-eastern countries at the behest of our oil moghuls instead. And we're told we should be 'proud' to be Americans. Feh.
What really get me is this sniper. Hes killed almost a dozen, maybe more by tonight because i dont follow it every day.
Yeah, and about 40 people murded with guns every day in the united states. His shootings aren't even a blip in the statistic.
And jesus christ if they are going to be that safe they better not get NEAR a car.
A-Fucking-Men.
We could have a 9/11 event once each year and still be 17 times more likely to die in a car accident than by an act of terror. But of course we aren't have a 9/11-style attack each year.
These people are hateful, and they can scare us. Hatred, determination, and ruthlessness are appropriate in finding and exterminating such vermin,. so long as it is done within the law and within the consitution. Fear is neither reasonable or appropraite, as these people really can't do us any signficant materia harm (though we certainly can and are hurting outselves by behaving so irrationally). Fear is what is allowing our government to abridge the constitution in such an irresponsible manner with hardly a voice raised in protest, and what allows a congress to capitulate with hardly a debate in giving the president unilateral power to wage war, with no formal declaration, no accountability to the UN, nothing.
Fear. It isn't just the great mind killer, it is the great Democracy Killer, starting right here at home.
I doubt that "the desktop user" is really the audience that the author has in mind.
That is, of course, unless rendering massive feature-film CG effects has become a cool thing to do at home.
That is the crux of the matter. It will only be a year or two before home computers are powerful enough for people to render home-made movies with CG effects to rival that of the latest Hollywood blockbusters.
With GNU/Linux, Blender, Liquid, Aqsis, Wings 3D, Film Gimp, Cinelerra, and other free software packages it will soon be possible for individuals to create feature length movies of blockbuster quality (though likely with much better story lines than much of the tripe eminating from Hollywood), and to distribute those movies on-line either as DVD iso images or xvid (mpeg4) avi files for world consumption.
A popular audio-video culture, where hobbiests create and share movies with one another the way free software enthusiasts do software today.
Suddenly Jack Velenti's rabid approach in trying to make it impossible to distribute content, any content (even your own) via the internet starts to make a lot more sense, doesn't it. They've grown used to the money and power that comes from controlling the media we see and hear, and nothing galls or freightens them more than the thought that we might have the freedom to ignore them and go somewhere else for our entertainment. This is why the RIAA seeks to destroy P2P, and it is why Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti want to turn every home PC into a governance police device (Microsoft's willingness to accomodate this has to do with their desire to displace the RIAA and MPAA as the gatekeepers of modern culture, such as it is, but that is a tangent for another day).
How about Art of Illusion [...] It's written in Java so it performs nicely under Windows, Linux and the Mac. That plus Wings3D [...] gives you a complete Open Source animation package.
I use blender and love it, but you (or someone else) had pointed out Wings3d before as a better modeler that could be used in conjunction with blender, and I had lost the link (and slashdot's search function is next to useless for digging up worthwhile information in older threads).
Thanks for reposting that info, and may I suggest Wings3D should list their project on freshmeat (it wasn't there, and I couldn't recall the project name. I'm sure it is buried on google somewhere, but after wading through several google pages having searched on 'free 3d modeller linux' I gave up). I have added links to the packages you mention on my website (under the Free Tools sidebar) to help out, but getting that project listed on freshmeat would go a much longer way toward getting the word out.
Thanks for the post, you saved me a long search I'd decided to put off, and deserve every +1 mod point you got.
Moonlight 3D is a ray tracer and Blender is a scan line renderer. Blender will likely never have/be a raytracer natively (although export scripts to a few ray tracers exist). These are two *very* different approaches to rendering so by no means would I say that Blender and Moonlight are cut from the same cloth.
Best of luck to the Moonlight 3d team! Its a spiffy little app with a nice interface and plenty of potential!
As a Blender fan (who has purchased books from NaN in the past and donated some money toward freeing the source) I can only agree.
My hope is that any and all of the free 3d modelling and rendering projects will get together on the data side, either using standards (e.g. renderman format) or agreeing on a common format to use as a lingua franca. Ideally one should be able to do portions of their project in Blender, portions in povray, portions in Moonlight 3D, and so on. If history is any guide, each of these projects will have its strengths and weaknesses, and allowing them all to interact (at least at the data level) smoothly would be a huge boon to all of the projects in question.
Of course, having them all be able to provide 'expert components' for their areas of strength to some kind of a meta (or ueber) 3d authoring suite is probably too much to ask at this stage, but not too much to dream of and perhaps work toward down the road.
"...it turns out that it wasn't just Microsoft that filed the lawsuit - Sony and Nintendo both joined in. The end result is that the modchips are gone."
That must be plenty embarrasing to all the people that cried "MS is enforcing law in China!!!" when this whole BS started.
By "MS is enforcing law in China" I assume you are either (a) disingenuously putting words in people's mouths no amount of perusing the old comments can corroborate, or (b) you were characterizing (for whatever reason) comments accusing MS of defining the law in China, export US law to China, etc.
All of which may be true, to one degree or another. No one should feel at all emberrassed to have made such accusations, which appear on may fronts to be demonstrably true. Now, if someone said "Microsoft is the only company defining law in China/exporting US law to China" then they should be quite emberrassed. After all, it is clear, at the very least, that the member corporations of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have been doing likewise, and others may well be engaged in similiar behavior. Yes, even other software companies *cough* Adobe *cough* or, in this case, a trust of gaming companies.
The fact the Microsoft has been shown to be part of a trust, a consortium, or if you prefer, a cabal of corporations engaging in the same ill-mannered and obscene behavior shouldn't make anyone feel emberrassed for having pointed out the fact... indeed it merely confirms their behavior. The fact that others behave equally despicably doesn't make Microsoft any less despicable.
Donate $50.00 and become a member
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Blender Is GPL
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· Score: 2
For those not able to access the site, the source is up. However, there isn't any compiled versions up
Binaries and all kinds of documenation (pdf format) have been available for member downloads for some time. If you cannot compile the source yourself (rock on Gentoo!), you can always donate $50 and become a member. There will be ongoing costs to making the code available, managing it, and providing varous other blender resources, so a donation would not be a waste of money.
Or, alternatively, you could wait until someone else compiles it and makes a binary available for download, or use a free platform like Linux, which doesn't seem to have too much trouble compiling the sources.
Taiwan is 50 years after the death of the author, Australia is 50 years after the death of the author. What part of "Don't think originally, and adopt everyone else's laws" doesn't the U.S. understand? I guess it only works with European laws...
Feh. Any law that expires a patent based on the authors death is stupid and flawed. You should be able to tell whether or not a book is in the public domain simply by looking at its copyright date.
8 years, 10 years, 14 years, 50 years, whatever, it should be from the time of the initial copyright, not some other event (like a human death) that cannot be determined by looking at the work itself.
Oh, and for good measure, copyright should only bestow tax incentives, not monopoly rights of any kind. Acknowledgement (no plagerism permitted) should be decoupled from copyright, and have no expiration (after all, George Lucas didn't suddenly stop being the creator of Star Wars simply because his copyright expired in 4078 when congress forgot to extend copyrights again in their fall session, due to being distracted in passing their legislation funding the War on Unauthorized Thought).
Um, you can't go around copyrighting other peoples' stuff... the Bible is copyright (c) God,
Actually, the Bible is (c) a lot of crazy antisocial misfits and (c) some more moderate, less antisocial misfits, although to incorporate them all, including (c) a very social, prince gone bad and done turned revolutionary (Moses) you'd have to extend copyright terms to 6000 years or so.
Of course, the Catholic Church would probably own the copyrights on much of the new testament (and portions of the old) which bear little resemblence to the original gospels and torah, assuming of course there is no estate of the aforementioned Crazy Antisocial Misfits to sue the church for copyright violation in their own right.
And whether Moses was a raving, hallucinating lunatic driven mad by too much sun and too much sand (and lamenting his lost life of privelege), or whether he was in fact spoken to by a superior being (divine or otherwise), the fact is that the books of Genesis et. al. are his writings paraphrasing the alleged words of said being, and not the being itself. Therefor the copyright would belong to Moses as the authoring reporter of the event, not God as merely a participant.
In other words, God wouldn't enter the copyright equation regardless, even if he did have the bad taste to exist.
Affordable flight exists, if you aren't greedy
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The Coming Air Age
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· Score: 3, Insightful
As a pilot I can tell you, affordable flight already exists. Expensive, yes, but no more expensive than a nice car. IF, of course, you are willing to shop, buy used, and don't require 'sexiness' in your aircraft.
A two seater Cessna 150 or 152 in good condition goes for about $20k, and will generally do 95-100 knots TAS and burns about 7 gallons per hour.
A Beech Sundowner (my personal choice) will hold 3 adults plus fuel, has a range of six hours (more than most people's bladders), does about 105-110 knots, goes for around $40,000 and burns 8-9 gallons / hour.
Annuals typically run $1,000-$2,000, fuel typically costs $2.50/gallon. Insurance is typically $800/year or so (post 9/11), less if you get your instrument rating.
1. The FAA also mandates inspections by FAA certified aircraft mechanics each year at the maximum or after so many hours of flight.
Part 91 (personal aircraft) only requires an annual. Commercial air carriers must submit to more rigorous inspections, such as 100 hour inspections, etc.
If you miss an inspection the aircraft is forbidden to fly as it is not airworthy.
In Germany, if your car misses its biannual inspection, it is illegal to drive.
The inspections can take some time and any defects found must be corrected before the craft can fly.
Some defects which affect air worthiness must be fixed. Others, which may be a good idea for safety but are not required to insure air worthiness you can either fix or put off. A wise pilot chooses to fix such things, but there are those who do not. Part of getting an annual done is discussing and working out with your mechanic what should be fixed now, and what makes more sense to put off.
A Piper Navajo inspection costs upwards of $2,500 and the aircraft may be out of service for some time.
As for time, annuals typically don't last more than a week or two, unless something is seriously wrong or a part is backordered.
Which is what happened to a colleague of mine... whose mechanic has had his car for over a month. I've never been without my airplane for a month.
2. Detailed logs must be kept of each flight, each repair, and each add-on. If the logs are not correct, spanning the whole life of the aircraft, it is not airworthy.
Not true. First, you are confusing pilot logs (logs of each flight, kept by and for the pilot in their own log book) with aircraft logs, of which there are two: airframe logs and engine logs.
Second, the only thing that has to be certified is that the aircraft is currently airworthy, i.e. a certified aircraft mechanic has performed an annual within the last twelve months and signed off that the aircraft is airworthy. If logs are missing that is irrelevant, so long as the log showing the most recent annual is intact. Missing logs will decrease the value of the plane, they will not affect its air worthiness unless you've had the bad luck to lose the log book containing the most recent annual.
3. The manufacturer and FAA provide notices of problems that sometimes require inspections, repairs, and replacement. The repairs must be complied with. You are not allowed to fly around with defects.
If you are part 91, most ADs are to be complied with at the next annual. Commercial aircraft have more stringent requirements, of course. If an AD does require immediate inspection and repair (it happens, but is rare), that is akin to an automobile recall.
4. Avionics are expensive to purchase, install, and maintain. The last time I checked three or four years ago a collision avoidance system cost $25,000. This would tend to put the price of the aircraft out of reach of most folks.
Avionics are vastly overpriced. But most private planes do not have collision avoidance systems, moving map GPSes (Garmin 540 goes for about $14k installed). Most have the basic radio stack and navigational instruments, which are included in the prices I mentioned before. But yes, if you are feeling greedy for the latest fancy equipment it will cost you dearly, as will the latest, faster aircraft. So don't be greedy, fly an older, reliable, less sexy aircraft instead.
All in all, I think that the typical person is not well suited to this degree of complexity, care, and expense and it won't happen any time soon.
Agreed. However, the Germans don't just let anyone drive. A drivers license typically requires about $2,000 for the training and a fairly rigorous exam. Not as rigorous as a pilot exam and checkride by any stretch, but far more rigorous than the silly tests we in America take.
However, if everyone were given rigorous flying lessons in high school (as we are drivers ed) and the prerequisites to becoming a private or instrument rated pilot remained as they are (fairly rigorous), I think the majority of people could become very competent pilots. Not every idiot, as we have with cars, but perhaps as many as 70-80%.
Of course, the skies would be vastly more crowded, and that would present its own set of problems. Those issues are being addressed (smart autopilots, vastly better navigation and guidance equipment, etc.), but alas, that will be expensive.
However, if someone wishes to become a competent pilot and fly today, in America at least it can be done on a budget, if you are careful and willing to forego the latest, sexiest toys in favor of used hand-me-downs.
Lift and drag are proportional to 1/2*density of fluid*surface area*Velocity squared. (L, D ~ 1/2*rho*S*V^2)
Thanks, the days when I had that memorized are long behind me.
The effect is much more pronounced in water because of density, not viscosity.
Oops, I did say viscosity didn't I. Someday I'll actually start proofreading my posts. I meant despite water's viscosity the improvement in lift would be more than enough.
I'm certain the entire post I replied to was tongue-in-cheeck, based on the "water transport will never amount to anything" quip at the end, but the equation you provided underscores how well gliders in water would function... and we haven't even considered the energy provided by hydro-thermal activity (the oceans have thermals just like the atmosphere does, of course).
Energy = work = force times distance. And, in the case of moving through a fluid, force is proportional to the square of the area times the viscosity. Let's say that the square of the area of the glider is 1 unit. And let's say the viscosity of air is 1 and that of water is 2. Then the energy to push the glider through water is twice as high as it would be in air.
Of course, the lift generated is at least proportionally impoved as well (I don't have the equations at hand, so a little handwaiving will have to suffice until someone corrects it with hard facts). A lifting surface generates no lift in a vacuum, thus the need for reaction mass in space. As air thickens, a lifting surface generates more lift, so much so that my plane flies noticably better in the winter than the summer, simply because colder air is generally more dense than warmer air at the same barametric pressure and altitude. This effect should even be more pronounced in even more viscouse, denser fluids, such as water.
Any aerospace engineers or physics students have the equations handy?
This is exactly why water transport is a dead end that has rarely worked in the past.
This was when I finally figured out you were having some fun at our expense.;-) Nicely done.
(To those who don't get it: more than 90% of all goods are transported by water. It is the most effecient means of moving stuff around we humans have yet devised).
Might as well be honest, and say, "I believe laws to be meaningless and unimportant; breaking them to suit my whims and is ethically--and financially!--sound."
Some laws are meaningless and unimportant. Laws like those banning couples living together "in sin," laws against various sexual acts between consenting adults, laws against spitting on the sidewalk, or mowing the lawn on Sunday.
Others are quite meaningful. Laws against driving a white van around the greater DC area and sniping individuals while they pump gas or wait for a school bus, for example.
Most fall somewhere in between, and people make reasonable value judgements. Some you may agree with, others you may not, but one thing is certain, even a law worshipping person such as you portray yourself can hardly make it through a single day in the United States without breaking some law or regulation, in some fashion, somewhere along the way. Jaywalking? Speed Limits? Parking too close to the corner, to a fire hidrant? Sneezing in public?
It should be no surprise that so many people's value judgements place a low premium on copyright law, given that it flies in the face of most people's instincts as to right and wrong ("but it isn't wrong to share, is it? According to the cartels, it is now).
Given the plethora of absurd, often outright unjust laws we have to contend with, no one should be the least surprised that a growing segment of the population is finding a growing portion of those laws, particularly those which create and maintain the legal fiction that is "intellectual property", absurd and of no real value.
Nor should anyone be stupid enough to assume that, because some people consider some laws of no value, that automatically, or even frequently, implies that they ascribe no value to all laws. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Read the story before posting please. One cannot install those buggers in their squad cars. It has to do with how images are projected from the viewing apparatus screen).
I did read it. I just reread it again. It is still not entirely clear whether it is a timing issue (which is easy to clean up digitally, interference pattern or no), or a strobe-like device to confuse luminescence detection of the camera itself (which was my assumption the first time I read the article). A strobe like device, of low intensity (but enough to confuse the camera's light setting) would actually strike me as more viable, though I suppose one could induce luminescnence variations in the film with less irritation to the viewing audience.
In retrospect my strobe interpretation (or, more likely, misunderstanding) seems unlikely, so you are probably right, this device won't be deployed all that widely. Now of course I've just planted the idea for something that might be more portable...
Reading it a third time, it finally hits me over the head that they're playing with timings (perhaps even frame rates), which have to be one of the easier things to clean up digitally. What, exactly, do they hope to accomplish with this. "Oh, there's a slow, or fast, horizontal line moving up and down my camera's recording, oh no!". That'll take one easy filter in post-production to clean up, then its on to the divx conversion and some anonymous remailer site to post the result to the web. Perhaps my most erroneous assumption was that they had something that would actually work, rather than just more of the same snakeoil the gullible folks in Hollywood seem so eager to spend their money on. Oops.
Um.............did you read this? It's not portable.
Yet.
Yes, I did read it. But as we all know, technology is hardly static, even with the built-in slowdown of innovation inherent in the patent system.
It will become portable, at some point. How long until only government issue, hardenend cameras can operate in many places, while consumer cameras become useless for anything other than taking pictures at home (assuming you don't live too close to a theater, or a restaurant playing copyrighted music, or a police station)? Cringley's looking for predictions... maybe this time next year?
Re:Our Parents are the evil fucks, not us
on
Generation Wrecked
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· Score: 2
You're still missing the point. Let me see if I can state it clearly and succinctly: You're an adult. That means no one is ever going to take responsibility for your actions
(actually, I think you're missing the point, but be that as it may...)
No, of course not. Our leadership won't even take responsibility for its direct and flagrant actions... those that seek to condition us are unlikely ever to admit the fact, regardless of how apparent it becomes, much less take responsibility for their behavior and its impact on us and our society.
You can blithely say "tough, every adult is responsible for what they do no matter what" and feel good about condemning others who stumble and fall, in no small part because of the conditioning, propoganda, and what have you they've been subjected to, but while doing so may make you feel good and reinforce a comfortable world view, it ignores a key component of the underlying problem that, unless it is addressed and dealt with, will continue to cause disruption and difficulty indefinitely.
Or, you can begin to recognize and acknowledge the problem, and perhaps begin looking for more fundamental, and effective solutions. One would almost certainly be to repeal the myth that a corporation is equivelent to a human being, endowed with the same rights and priveleges, and another might be to repeal the myth that corporate "speech" (advertising) is entitled to anything remotely resembling the constitutional protections of freedom of speech that indivuduals are. Then of course there is the absurd notion that corporate dollars equal freedom of speech, for which we have the supreme court to thank and a result of which every election since that decision has been flagrantly and obviuously purchased by corporate America, but I digress.
And you don't have to be manipulated! Don't like being brainwashed by the TV? Turn it off! Don't like the slanting of the issues by the news media? Hey, the web is here and it offers all the viewpoints you could possibly want.
We are inundated with deliberate adds designed to condition us through many more conduits than television and the news media. To do what you suggest would require the classic biblical solution, namely pluck out thine eye if it should offend thee, which is hardly a workable solution given (a) that most of us need to see in order to function, work, and feed ourselves and our families and (b) you'd have to do the same thing to your ears, and even then some of the crap will likely get through.
It is far better we begin to address the crux of the problem, which is the impunity with which corporations, governments, and other groups can use indoctrination and conditioning techniques via our media and brainwash the public, with little restraint and no accountability for the direct and measurable consiquences of that behavior, and that will only happen if we begin to recognize their culpability in much of what they induce, and stop sweeping it under the rug in the name of an easy, but inaccurate meme, namely that no one other than themselves is ever responsible for their actions when that is clearly often not the case at all.
It's illegal. This company figured a way to stop it.
Yeah, its innovations like this that make the world safe for... what, exactly? More mindless Hollywood tripe that is selling like crazy already, despite the avialability of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter in divx format?
I wonder how many Rodney King's are going to be caught being victimized on tape now, once the LAPD installs those buggers in their squad cars. Or how many bank and convinience store robberies are going to go unmonitored, once Joe Thug can go out and buy (or steal) a cheap video camera jamming device.
Not that you can ever put Pandora's box back together again (to mix my metaphores), but spending the kind of money on this sort of research the way the entertainment industry is doing is anything but a positive contribution to the net human condition.
Not that cartel thugs like that will ever know or feel shame, as their past actions and words already attest.
I wonder why this hasn't happened earlier - I think someone evil is finally going to notice that Usenet is 95% warez/moviez, and go after the big companies that run Usenet servers. This will probably happen after someone makes a tool that allows for easy use of Usenet, ie, a "download, unpar, unrar" tool, that keeps track of binary groups.
I think the battle you speak of will heat up, and the future for free thought may be a very bleak one indeed.
On a completely different note, it would not surprise me at all, in light of congresses latest whorish display of its ability to move in contortions suggestive of a complete lack of backbone in granting president Baby Bush with a blank check for mayhem and idiocy, we didn't find ourselves embroiled in a war by this time next year that is far bigger, and far uglier, than we ever intended.
It would only surprise me a little if by this time next year we have been reduced to fighting this war with sticks and stones, however, a few more years of this sort of leadership and I wouldn't be surprised at all.
My prediction on next years technical innovation: The C.L.U.B. Mark I and the S.T.I.C.K./2003 as the state of the art in human weaponry, deployed far and wide and stockpiled in every home.
Re:Our Parents are the evil fucks, not us
on
Generation Wrecked
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· Score: 2
But my point stands-- by your argument you aren't even responsible for your argument, it is just what you were told to say.
You assume simplistic absolutes where none exist (hence my initial harsh tone). To the degree that I've been conditioned by an external force to make such an argument, I am not responsible for the argument I am making. In this case, I suspect that percentage is quite small (though perhaps social psychologists might assing it a higher value).
This quickly becomes an excersize in sophistry, but consider that parents are considered more than a little responsible for how their children turn out, and rightly so. Much of the early conditioning process that contributes to a person's later decisions is performed by the parent.
And a disturbing, and apparently growing, portion is done by advertisers, who employ sophisticated conditioning (some would call it 'brainwashing') techniques in doing so, knowingly and quite deliberately. They are not absolved in their contribution to a situation's outcome, and must logically share blame for the decisions they've manipulated, perhaps even induced, with their victims, indeed, they must share responsibility in direct proportion to the degree with which they have shaped or coerced those decisions.
And I don't accept it. you are, and always will be, responsible for all your actiosn, just as I am.
Completely responsible.
Really? And when you donate money to a worthy cause (say, feeding orphans whose parents were killed during an invasion of their country by the Soviets) only to discover ten years later that that money has been diverted to finance, say, the hijacking of some planes that leads to the murder of thousands of people and a new, possibly world, war, are you still absolutely responsible for the decision to support terrorists?
Of course not.
You are only responsible to the degree you made the decision knowingly, with your full faculties and full knowledge of what you were doing, of your own free will, which, in the very real world example I cite, is virtually none at all.
One is rarely "absolutely" responsible for anything, though we are usually very responsible (say, 99% to pull a number out of my ass) for most of what we do, most of the time. At least most of us (I think even you'd agree that an ignorant, or retarded, child is often not responsible for much of what they do, often being unable to even realize they've made a decision, much less understand its ramifications).
To the degree we are deceived or, worse, actively conditioned (a procedure that, by definition, is designed to remove free will from its target) to respond in a particular way we only, at most, share responsibility with those who so deceive or manipulate us.
And in those cases where the deceit, or conditioning, is completely successful we are only as responsible as our initial, knowing acceptance of said deceit or conditioning, which quite often is very little, or even not at all.
I am an American tax payer. I choose consciously to pay my taxes, rather than to go to jail. I know intellectually that my government decieves me and does wicked, evil things with some portion of the money I pay in taxes, and that what I think I know of our policies often bears little resemblence to what is really happening.
To what degree am I responsible for financing the wickedness of my government. To some degree, as I've admitted to an intellectual understanding that "all is not right" in Washington and that terrible things occur, but certainly not absolutely, as I am (1) being coerced by threat of jail (or worse) and (2) I can doubt all I like, but proof of much of what is suspected is lacking.
See, it isn't so simple at all. Certainly not absolute, as you repeatedly insist. Indeed, assigning blame with any degree of accuracy for a particular act is usually quite complex.
The best you can do is say "most people are mostly responsible for most of what they do most of the time."
I think the mistake you are making is assuming that, because I recognize a distribution of guilt among multiple parties that I am fully absolving one party completely (the perpetrator of an act, in this case spiralling into uncontrolled debt) and assigning all guilt to another party. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Indeed, if you think about it, the more ones actions deviate from what society, their parents, colleagues, friends, etc. are pressuring them to do, the more responsible they are for their actions. Things like murder, or revolutionizing a society and bucking a social trend, tend to be actions for which the actor is very, perhaps close to 100% responsible for. Or put another way, Martin Luthar King Jr. and his despicable assassin were much more responsible for their famous actions than, say, Jane Fashion Victim is for her "choice" of wardrobe.
Indeed, there is a whole science dedicated to this stuff, which neither of us are really qualified to debate, so I will return to limiting myself to my original premise: absolute guilt is a rare, perhaps even nonexistent, thing, while shared guilt is probably the most common thing there is, and with respect to the current state of affairs a good portion of that guilt lies with the baby boomer generation, a measure at least equal to that of the generation x-ers, if not greater.
Slashdot Mirror
Congress is quite correct that the GPL would interfere with this congressional strategy of wealth transfer. Rather the GPL would keep public property in the public domain to be used by the public for the public. IMHO that is a far worthier goal than "increasing the government-private partnership".
All of what you say is basically correct (and shut put an end to the myth that subsidizing the rich is solely a Republican vice, when it clearly is an Equal Opportunity Vice engaged in liberally by both parties), but I have one minor nit to pick:
Rather the GPL would keep public property in the public domain to be used by the public for the public.
That should read public commons, not public domain. GPLed code is a part of the public commons, however it does remain under copyright, and is therefor not in the public domain. Otherwise, very insightful post!
With public domain, anyone can take my code and change the license and sell it to me with a restrictive license.
.223 caliber round from 100 meters?
... though I do think that is something for each agency to decide, not Microsoft via their paid Washington lackey ... uh, I mean, "representative." If the NSA feels the public good, and national security, would be well served by strengthening the security of GNU/Linux, then they should not be prohibited from doing so merely because Linus and RMS have chosen to GPL their code, any more than they should be prevented from submitting patches to Microsoft to plug the latest gaping security hole in their products (if such a feat is even possible).
Yes, and that's part of the freedom. You know, freedom doesn't apply only to things you approve of. It also means freedom to do things which you don't like.
You mean, like the freedom to put a toll booth up on a public road, the freedom to park my car on the flowerbed of the local park, the freedom to put a fence up around your property (but not on it, of course) and charge you a toll to walk through the gate? Or perhaps you mean the freedom to rape your wife, or cap a bunch of random innocents with a
I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other with respect to using a BSD or GPL style license
However, I do think it is time, once and for all, to put a nail in the coffin of this misguided notion that freedom in general equals the "freedom" to do things that take away everyone elses freedom as a result (i.e. the "freedom" to oppress others), when it is clear to any thinking being that such is not the case. You do not have the freedom to take away my free access to my property by abusing public lands around it, why should you have the "freedom" to take away my access (or usability) of public code by embracing, extending, and destroying it?
My mom phones me weekly yapping about some new virus that has slipped into her computer.
... in fact she loves the fact that it is quick and stable, unlike the much more expensive machine she uses at work, which is down for software repairs quite frequently.
... unlike Windows, it does not change its behavior for no apparent reason, nor does it break mysteriously simply because you've added a new piece of software.
My mom has been running Debian for almost two years, and aside from a few calls early on of the "how do I do X under Linux" type, I haven't had to field any calls at all (none within the last year. None). Indeed, I havent had to fix her computer once since I installed it nearly two years ago.
Not once.
Now that Applix has grown a little staid, I'm probably going to upgrade her to Gentoo 1.4 when it is released, with Open Office.
She works with Microsoft every day at work, and has been agitating her employer to let her use GNU/Linux instead. My mom, who, like yours, is 50+.
However, even if her employer doesn't let her switch, she has no trouble importing and exporting to Microsoft Word and Excel formats using her GNU/Linux box
Most especially, she likes not having to worry about the latest Klez worm or misc. virus, something that is steadilly stressing out all her friends.
My mother, who is computer competent but certainly not computer savvy, has become a stronger propoent of Linux and free software than I have. All the Microsoft-funded astroturfers keep harping about how the consumers wants this or that slick or shiny feature, when in truth all of the computer illiterate and computer competent (but not necessarilly savvy) people I've exposed to GNU/Linux haven't ever wanted to go back. Why?
Because in truth people don't care all that much about shiny feature X or slick feature Y, they care far more about stability, predictability, and the ability to simply get their work done. And that is where GNU/Linux truly excells
What is interesting is how few people realize they have a viable choice, and once they do realize it, how many (of the people I know, at least, of various walks of life) end up dumping Windows like a bad habit.
Indeed - you only have to look at the fine examples of capitalistic ethics provided recently by companies such as Enron, Worldcom, Global Crossing etc to realise how unnecessary government regulation in the free market is.
You are citing real world examples. That isn't fair.
Objectivists have based their entire philosophy on Ayn Rand's fictional novels, of which The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are just two. This is in contrast to other schools of capitalist, socialist, and even communist thought, which, however flawed they may be, at least have insight enough to cite serious academic studies as the foundation of their ethos and philisophical views.
Does this mean a world view based upon a fictional work is false, or one based upon a scientific or academic study will yield better results? Not necessarilly, any more than we can know with certainty that science will yield a more accurate understanding of the universe than religion (of whatever flavor) will.
However, the vast majority of evidence is that science does yield better practical results than religious dogma, and rigorous academic studies more useful insights than works of fiction.
Having said all that, in Ayn Rand's defense (and I say this despite disagreeing with many of her assumptions and rather myopic views on a number of subjects), she was nowhere near as extreme as many of her adherents.
BTW - When I lived and worked in Germany I made two interesting observations:
1. German taxes were not significantly higher for middle and upper-middle income people there than they are in the United States, despite their having an excellent social net, including a form of socialized medicine (socialized via a strictly regulated insurance industry and policies paid for with public moneys for those who cannot afford the premiums), and
2. The healthcare I was provided there was vastly better than what I have in the United States, despite having one of the better PPOs currently available. The American system appears to be designed to subsidize high-end medical procedures, available generally only to the very wealthy or very well insured (two groups which are quickly becoming synonymous) through vastly higher costs for standard medical procedures (like getting a checkup or an allergy shot).
We in the United States pay three times as much for our less adequate healthcare than the rest of the industrialized world does for the "less effecient" socialized healthcare -- a fact which should put to rest once and for all the myth that the free market is always more effecient than a public works equivelent. In the area of healthcare, where the customer is captive by nature of the fact that without it they will suffer and possibly die, clearly the power of the customer to choose, or reject unacceptable conditions of service vs. the power of the provider to coerce or set their own conditions, is so degraded as to make a "free" marketplace in any meaningful sense impossible. This leaves corporate oligarchies and trusts vs. socialized medicine as the two real choices we face, and the experience of the entire developed world, outside of the united states, indicates that the socialized approach is vastly more effecient and effective.
Raymond described a model of collaborative software development in which a large, geographically dispersed group of programmers worked together in a seemingly chaotic way. This bazaar model was to be contrasted with the cathedral model, in which everything is done according to a detailed, preexisting plan.
[...]
The bazaar model seems to have been almost a complete failure in the world of free books, although not for want of trying. Tellingly, The Cathedral and the Bazaar was itself written cathedral-style by Raymond. He has also started a bazaar-style book project, The Art of Unix Programming[7], which appears to be languishing.
[...]
The failure of the bazaar model with free books might not seem surprising
This depends largely on where one draws the line between bizzar and cathedral, or put another way, with what granularity one considers a project or body of work. The Star Trek and Star Wars universes are examples where there is a large body of Cathedralesque work, as well as an even larger body of "fan fiction." While many stories (perhaps most) are themselves written by a single author (as, in fact, my own (soon-to-be released under a free license) novel has been), the overall, net effect of the body of work which comprises the fan fiction of the Star Trek and Star Wars universes (and undoubtably other settings as well) is in many ways more remeniscent of the Bizzar than a Cathedral approach. The Linux kernel is a bizzar-type project, yet within that kernel are modules and subsystems that are quite 'cathedralesque' in how they were managed and written.
The definition in many ways becomeds one of granularity, and while I agree with much the article writes, I think the author overlooks the bizzar aspect of the cultural commons from which all authors draw inspiration. This is readilly seen in the collections of fan fiction which abound and, were it not for the often extremely repressive aspects of copyright in limiting how and when a person can incorporate another's work in their own project (no, I'm not advocating plagerism, I'm advocating broader definitions of fair use that including giving the original creator credit for their contribution, if not exclusive use).
Canadian provinces can secede ... consider, say, Prince Edward Island, with a population of 138,000 spread over 5,600 square kilometers. That's a plausible province for this scheme. 20,000 determined people really could take it over.
... would you want a bunch of gun totin', right-wing Americans in your province messing up your nice, socialized medicine and sparkling clean streets? Neither would they, and since the right-wingers don't have any distinguishing marks, that probably rules out all of us who'd like to emigrate north.
...
Here I was looking at the real feasability of moving to Canada (BC) and/or at least having a summer home there to run to if things get really ugly here in the United People's States of America, and now you go suggesting a thing like this.
There's no way in hell they'll let any of us in now
Nice going
[/humor]
It certainly isn't free, I'm in a ~40% tax bracket.
... that is an asinine reason to perpetuate the existing, severely broken system which is clearly designed to serve the few and priveleged, subsidized by higher costs for the rest of us.
I'm in a 40% tax bracket in the United States, and my employer pays for my health care insurance, which isn't nearly as good as what I had in Germany when I was working as a college intern (the money my employer pays for health insurance would likely be mine as income otherwise, so it wouldn't be at all unfair to add that to my tax bracket for a more even ocmparison, in which case the United States taxes would come out vastly more expensive than most, if not all, of the industrialized world. We pay three times what the rest of the world does for comparable healthcare).
If you look at tax rates based upon what you earn, Germany (and likely Canada, though I haven't compared the numbers myself for Canada yet) has about the same tax rate as the United States for anyone earning wages in the middle to upper-middle income brackets. Yes, if you make $500,000 or $1,000,000 / year you'll pay much higher taxes in Germany (and probably Canada) than you do in the US, but how many people does that affect, and just how impoverished are the lifestyles of those so affected. Not as impoverished as the upper middle income bracket folks, who pay roughly the same in both countries, but get a hell of a lot more for their tax dollar in Germany than they do the United States. Woopty-fucking-do if Joe Corporate Exec can't afford a second yacht this year
What is amazing to me is how utterly myopic we Americans are when it comes to socialized medicine. The insurance and pharmaceutical companies tell us how poorly socialized medicine works, citing one or two anectdotes (for which there are a dozen anectdotes making exactly the opposite point), but no hard evidence that socialized medicine a la Europe (including Germany's highly regulated medical insurance industry, the system Hilary Clinton wanted to emulate), and we as a people buy it hook, line, and sinker merely because anything having the dirty word "socialism" in it must be worse than the current 40% uninsured population we have now.
Not all that goes to health care, of course, but a good chunk does. Do I dislike the taxes? Yes. Would I want to lower taxes and go to a for-profit US-style system? Not on your life.
Amen. The irony is, I doubt your taxes are all that much higher than ours, if at all. We get to pay taxes to prop up Worldcom, line the pockets of Baby Bush and his cronies, and invade small middle-eastern countries at the behest of our oil moghuls instead. And we're told we should be 'proud' to be Americans. Feh.
What really get me is this sniper. Hes killed almost a dozen, maybe more by tonight because i dont follow it every day.
Yeah, and about 40 people murded with guns every day in the united states. His shootings aren't even a blip in the statistic.
And jesus christ if they are going to be that safe they better not get NEAR a car.
A-Fucking-Men.
We could have a 9/11 event once each year and still be 17 times more likely to die in a car accident than by an act of terror. But of course we aren't have a 9/11-style attack each year.
These people are hateful, and they can scare us. Hatred, determination, and ruthlessness are appropriate in finding and exterminating such vermin,. so long as it is done within the law and within the consitution. Fear is neither reasonable or appropraite, as these people really can't do us any signficant materia harm (though we certainly can and are hurting outselves by behaving so irrationally). Fear is what is allowing our government to abridge the constitution in such an irresponsible manner with hardly a voice raised in protest, and what allows a congress to capitulate with hardly a debate in giving the president unilateral power to wage war, with no formal declaration, no accountability to the UN, nothing.
Fear. It isn't just the great mind killer, it is the great Democracy Killer, starting right here at home.
I doubt that "the desktop user" is really the audience that the author has in mind.
That is, of course, unless rendering massive feature-film CG effects has become a cool thing to do at home.
That is the crux of the matter. It will only be a year or two before home computers are powerful enough for people to render home-made movies with CG effects to rival that of the latest Hollywood blockbusters.
With GNU/Linux, Blender, Liquid, Aqsis, Wings 3D, Film Gimp, Cinelerra, and other free software packages it will soon be possible for individuals to create feature length movies of blockbuster quality (though likely with much better story lines than much of the tripe eminating from Hollywood), and to distribute those movies on-line either as DVD iso images or xvid (mpeg4) avi files for world consumption.
A popular audio-video culture, where hobbiests create and share movies with one another the way free software enthusiasts do software today.
Suddenly Jack Velenti's rabid approach in trying to make it impossible to distribute content, any content (even your own) via the internet starts to make a lot more sense, doesn't it. They've grown used to the money and power that comes from controlling the media we see and hear, and nothing galls or freightens them more than the thought that we might have the freedom to ignore them and go somewhere else for our entertainment. This is why the RIAA seeks to destroy P2P, and it is why Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti want to turn every home PC into a governance police device (Microsoft's willingness to accomodate this has to do with their desire to displace the RIAA and MPAA as the gatekeepers of modern culture, such as it is, but that is a tangent for another day).
How about Art of Illusion [...] It's written in Java so it performs nicely under Windows, Linux and the Mac. That plus Wings3D [...] gives you a complete Open Source animation package.
I use blender and love it, but you (or someone else) had pointed out Wings3d before as a better modeler that could be used in conjunction with blender, and I had lost the link (and slashdot's search function is next to useless for digging up worthwhile information in older threads).
Thanks for reposting that info, and may I suggest Wings3D should list their project on freshmeat (it wasn't there, and I couldn't recall the project name. I'm sure it is buried on google somewhere, but after wading through several google pages having searched on 'free 3d modeller linux' I gave up). I have added links to the packages you mention on my website (under the Free Tools sidebar) to help out, but getting that project listed on freshmeat would go a much longer way toward getting the word out.
Thanks for the post, you saved me a long search I'd decided to put off, and deserve every +1 mod point you got.
Moonlight 3D is a ray tracer and Blender is a scan line renderer. Blender will likely never have/be a raytracer natively (although export scripts to a few ray tracers exist). These are two *very* different approaches to rendering so by no means would I say that Blender and Moonlight are cut from the same cloth.
Best of luck to the Moonlight 3d team! Its a spiffy little app with a nice interface and plenty of potential!
As a Blender fan (who has purchased books from NaN in the past and donated some money toward freeing the source) I can only agree.
My hope is that any and all of the free 3d modelling and rendering projects will get together on the data side, either using standards (e.g. renderman format) or agreeing on a common format to use as a lingua franca. Ideally one should be able to do portions of their project in Blender, portions in povray, portions in Moonlight 3D, and so on. If history is any guide, each of these projects will have its strengths and weaknesses, and allowing them all to interact (at least at the data level) smoothly would be a huge boon to all of the projects in question.
Of course, having them all be able to provide 'expert components' for their areas of strength to some kind of a meta (or ueber) 3d authoring suite is probably too much to ask at this stage, but not too much to dream of and perhaps work toward down the road.
"...it turns out that it wasn't just Microsoft that filed the lawsuit - Sony and Nintendo both joined in. The end result is that the modchips are gone."
... indeed it merely confirms their behavior. The fact that others behave equally despicably doesn't make Microsoft any less despicable.
That must be plenty embarrasing to all the people that cried "MS is enforcing law in China!!!" when this whole BS started.
By "MS is enforcing law in China" I assume you are either (a) disingenuously putting words in people's mouths no amount of perusing the old comments can corroborate, or (b) you were characterizing (for whatever reason) comments accusing MS of defining the law in China, export US law to China, etc.
All of which may be true, to one degree or another. No one should feel at all emberrassed to have made such accusations, which appear on may fronts to be demonstrably true. Now, if someone said "Microsoft is the only company defining law in China/exporting US law to China" then they should be quite emberrassed. After all, it is clear, at the very least, that the member corporations of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have been doing likewise, and others may well be engaged in similiar behavior. Yes, even other software companies *cough* Adobe *cough* or, in this case, a trust of gaming companies.
The fact the Microsoft has been shown to be part of a trust, a consortium, or if you prefer, a cabal of corporations engaging in the same ill-mannered and obscene behavior shouldn't make anyone feel emberrassed for having pointed out the fact
For those not able to access the site, the source is up. However, there isn't any compiled versions up
Binaries and all kinds of documenation (pdf format) have been available for member downloads for some time. If you cannot compile the source yourself (rock on Gentoo!), you can always donate $50 and become a member. There will be ongoing costs to making the code available, managing it, and providing varous other blender resources, so a donation would not be a waste of money.
Or, alternatively, you could wait until someone else compiles it and makes a binary available for download, or use a free platform like Linux, which doesn't seem to have too much trouble compiling the sources.
So? Harmonize already...
Agreed.
Taiwan is 50 years after the death of the author, Australia is 50 years after the death of the author. What part of "Don't think originally, and adopt everyone else's laws" doesn't the U.S. understand? I guess it only works with European laws...
Feh. Any law that expires a patent based on the authors death is stupid and flawed. You should be able to tell whether or not a book is in the public domain simply by looking at its copyright date.
8 years, 10 years, 14 years, 50 years, whatever, it should be from the time of the initial copyright, not some other event (like a human death) that cannot be determined by looking at the work itself.
Oh, and for good measure, copyright should only bestow tax incentives, not monopoly rights of any kind. Acknowledgement (no plagerism permitted) should be decoupled from copyright, and have no expiration (after all, George Lucas didn't suddenly stop being the creator of Star Wars simply because his copyright expired in 4078 when congress forgot to extend copyrights again in their fall session, due to being distracted in passing their legislation funding the War on Unauthorized Thought).
Um, you can't go around copyrighting other peoples' stuff... the Bible is copyright (c) God,
Actually, the Bible is (c) a lot of crazy antisocial misfits and (c) some more moderate, less antisocial misfits, although to incorporate them all, including (c) a very social, prince gone bad and done turned revolutionary (Moses) you'd have to extend copyright terms to 6000 years or so.
Of course, the Catholic Church would probably own the copyrights on much of the new testament (and portions of the old) which bear little resemblence to the original gospels and torah, assuming of course there is no estate of the aforementioned Crazy Antisocial Misfits to sue the church for copyright violation in their own right.
And whether Moses was a raving, hallucinating lunatic driven mad by too much sun and too much sand (and lamenting his lost life of privelege), or whether he was in fact spoken to by a superior being (divine or otherwise), the fact is that the books of Genesis et. al. are his writings paraphrasing the alleged words of said being, and not the being itself. Therefor the copyright would belong to Moses as the authoring reporter of the event, not God as merely a participant.
In other words, God wouldn't enter the copyright equation regardless, even if he did have the bad taste to exist.
As a pilot I can tell you, affordable flight already exists. Expensive, yes, but no more expensive than a nice car. IF, of course, you are willing to shop, buy used, and don't require 'sexiness' in your aircraft.
... whose mechanic has had his car for over a month. I've never been without my airplane for a month.
A two seater Cessna 150 or 152 in good condition goes for about $20k, and will generally do 95-100 knots TAS and burns about 7 gallons per hour.
A Beech Sundowner (my personal choice) will hold 3 adults plus fuel, has a range of six hours (more than most people's bladders), does about 105-110 knots, goes for around $40,000 and burns 8-9 gallons / hour.
Annuals typically run $1,000-$2,000, fuel typically costs $2.50/gallon. Insurance is typically $800/year or so (post 9/11), less if you get your instrument rating.
1. The FAA also mandates inspections by FAA certified aircraft mechanics each year at the maximum or after so many hours of flight.
Part 91 (personal aircraft) only requires an annual. Commercial air carriers must submit to more rigorous inspections, such as 100 hour inspections, etc.
If you miss an inspection the aircraft is forbidden to fly as it is not airworthy.
In Germany, if your car misses its biannual inspection, it is illegal to drive.
The inspections can take some time and any defects found must be corrected before the craft can fly.
Some defects which affect air worthiness must be fixed. Others, which may be a good idea for safety but are not required to insure air worthiness you can either fix or put off. A wise pilot chooses to fix such things, but there are those who do not. Part of getting an annual done is discussing and working out with your mechanic what should be fixed now, and what makes more sense to put off.
A Piper Navajo inspection costs upwards of $2,500 and the aircraft may be out of service for some time.
As for time, annuals typically don't last more than a week or two, unless something is seriously wrong or a part is backordered.
Which is what happened to a colleague of mine
2. Detailed logs must be kept of each flight, each repair, and each add-on. If the logs are not correct, spanning the whole life of the aircraft, it is not airworthy.
Not true. First, you are confusing pilot logs (logs of each flight, kept by and for the pilot in their own log book) with aircraft logs, of which there are two: airframe logs and engine logs.
Second, the only thing that has to be certified is that the aircraft is currently airworthy, i.e. a certified aircraft mechanic has performed an annual within the last twelve months and signed off that the aircraft is airworthy. If logs are missing that is irrelevant, so long as the log showing the most recent annual is intact. Missing logs will decrease the value of the plane, they will not affect its air worthiness unless you've had the bad luck to lose the log book containing the most recent annual.
3. The manufacturer and FAA provide notices of problems that sometimes require inspections, repairs, and replacement. The repairs must be complied with. You are not allowed to fly around with defects.
If you are part 91, most ADs are to be complied with at the next annual. Commercial aircraft have more stringent requirements, of course. If an AD does require immediate inspection and repair (it happens, but is rare), that is akin to an automobile recall.
4. Avionics are expensive to purchase, install, and maintain. The last time I checked three or four years ago a collision avoidance system cost $25,000. This would tend to put the price of the aircraft out of reach of most folks.
Avionics are vastly overpriced. But most private planes do not have collision avoidance systems, moving map GPSes (Garmin 540 goes for about $14k installed). Most have the basic radio stack and navigational instruments, which are included in the prices I mentioned before. But yes, if you are feeling greedy for the latest fancy equipment it will cost you dearly, as will the latest, faster aircraft. So don't be greedy, fly an older, reliable, less sexy aircraft instead.
All in all, I think that the typical person is not well suited to this degree of complexity, care, and expense and it won't happen any time soon.
Agreed. However, the Germans don't just let anyone drive. A drivers license typically requires about $2,000 for the training and a fairly rigorous exam. Not as rigorous as a pilot exam and checkride by any stretch, but far more rigorous than the silly tests we in America take.
However, if everyone were given rigorous flying lessons in high school (as we are drivers ed) and the prerequisites to becoming a private or instrument rated pilot remained as they are (fairly rigorous), I think the majority of people could become very competent pilots. Not every idiot, as we have with cars, but perhaps as many as 70-80%.
Of course, the skies would be vastly more crowded, and that would present its own set of problems. Those issues are being addressed (smart autopilots, vastly better navigation and guidance equipment, etc.), but alas, that will be expensive.
However, if someone wishes to become a competent pilot and fly today, in America at least it can be done on a budget, if you are careful and willing to forego the latest, sexiest toys in favor of used hand-me-downs.
Lift and drag are proportional to 1/2*density of fluid*surface area*Velocity squared. (L, D ~ 1/2*rho*S*V^2)
... and we haven't even considered the energy provided by hydro-thermal activity (the oceans have thermals just like the atmosphere does, of course).
Thanks, the days when I had that memorized are long behind me.
The effect is much more pronounced in water because of density, not viscosity.
Oops, I did say viscosity didn't I. Someday I'll actually start proofreading my posts. I meant despite water's viscosity the improvement in lift would be more than enough.
I'm certain the entire post I replied to was tongue-in-cheeck, based on the "water transport will never amount to anything" quip at the end, but the equation you provided underscores how well gliders in water would function
thanks again for the equation.
Great joke! Thanks, I needed a chuckle.
;-) Nicely done.
Energy = work = force times distance. And, in the case of moving through a fluid, force is proportional to the square of the area times the viscosity. Let's say that the square of the area of the glider is 1 unit. And let's say the viscosity of air is 1 and that of water is 2. Then the energy to push the glider through water is twice as high as it would be in air.
Of course, the lift generated is at least proportionally impoved as well (I don't have the equations at hand, so a little handwaiving will have to suffice until someone corrects it with hard facts). A lifting surface generates no lift in a vacuum, thus the need for reaction mass in space. As air thickens, a lifting surface generates more lift, so much so that my plane flies noticably better in the winter than the summer, simply because colder air is generally more dense than warmer air at the same barametric pressure and altitude. This effect should even be more pronounced in even more viscouse, denser fluids, such as water.
Any aerospace engineers or physics students have the equations handy?
This is exactly why water transport is a dead end that has rarely worked in the past.
This was when I finally figured out you were having some fun at our expense.
(To those who don't get it: more than 90% of all goods are transported by water. It is the most effecient means of moving stuff around we humans have yet devised).
Might as well be honest, and say, "I believe laws to be meaningless and unimportant; breaking them to suit my whims and is ethically--and financially!--sound."
Some laws are meaningless and unimportant. Laws like those banning couples living together "in sin," laws against various sexual acts between consenting adults, laws against spitting on the sidewalk, or mowing the lawn on Sunday.
Others are quite meaningful. Laws against driving a white van around the greater DC area and sniping individuals while they pump gas or wait for a school bus, for example.
Most fall somewhere in between, and people make reasonable value judgements. Some you may agree with, others you may not, but one thing is certain, even a law worshipping person such as you portray yourself can hardly make it through a single day in the United States without breaking some law or regulation, in some fashion, somewhere along the way. Jaywalking? Speed Limits? Parking too close to the corner, to a fire hidrant? Sneezing in public?
It should be no surprise that so many people's value judgements place a low premium on copyright law, given that it flies in the face of most people's instincts as to right and wrong ("but it isn't wrong to share, is it? According to the cartels, it is now).
Given the plethora of absurd, often outright unjust laws we have to contend with, no one should be the least surprised that a growing segment of the population is finding a growing portion of those laws, particularly those which create and maintain the legal fiction that is "intellectual property", absurd and of no real value.
Nor should anyone be stupid enough to assume that, because some people consider some laws of no value, that automatically, or even frequently, implies that they ascribe no value to all laws. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Read the story before posting please. One cannot install those buggers in their squad cars. It has to do with how images are projected from the viewing apparatus screen).
...
I did read it. I just reread it again. It is still not entirely clear whether it is a timing issue (which is easy to clean up digitally, interference pattern or no), or a strobe-like device to confuse luminescence detection of the camera itself (which was my assumption the first time I read the article). A strobe like device, of low intensity (but enough to confuse the camera's light setting) would actually strike me as more viable, though I suppose one could induce luminescnence variations in the film with less irritation to the viewing audience.
In retrospect my strobe interpretation (or, more likely, misunderstanding) seems unlikely, so you are probably right, this device won't be deployed all that widely. Now of course I've just planted the idea for something that might be more portable
Reading it a third time, it finally hits me over the head that they're playing with timings (perhaps even frame rates), which have to be one of the easier things to clean up digitally. What, exactly, do they hope to accomplish with this. "Oh, there's a slow, or fast, horizontal line moving up and down my camera's recording, oh no!". That'll take one easy filter in post-production to clean up, then its on to the divx conversion and some anonymous remailer site to post the result to the web. Perhaps my most erroneous assumption was that they had something that would actually work, rather than just more of the same snakeoil the gullible folks in Hollywood seem so eager to spend their money on. Oops.
Um.............did you read this? It's not portable.
... maybe this time next year?
Yet.
Yes, I did read it. But as we all know, technology is hardly static, even with the built-in slowdown of innovation inherent in the patent system.
It will become portable, at some point. How long until only government issue, hardenend cameras can operate in many places, while consumer cameras become useless for anything other than taking pictures at home (assuming you don't live too close to a theater, or a restaurant playing copyrighted music, or a police station)? Cringley's looking for predictions
You're still missing the point. Let me see if I can state it clearly and succinctly: You're an adult. That means no one is ever going to take responsibility for your actions
... those that seek to condition us are unlikely ever to admit the fact, regardless of how apparent it becomes, much less take responsibility for their behavior and its impact on us and our society.
(actually, I think you're missing the point, but be that as it may...)
No, of course not. Our leadership won't even take responsibility for its direct and flagrant actions
You can blithely say "tough, every adult is responsible for what they do no matter what" and feel good about condemning others who stumble and fall, in no small part because of the conditioning, propoganda, and what have you they've been subjected to, but while doing so may make you feel good and reinforce a comfortable world view, it ignores a key component of the underlying problem that, unless it is addressed and dealt with, will continue to cause disruption and difficulty indefinitely.
Or, you can begin to recognize and acknowledge the problem, and perhaps begin looking for more fundamental, and effective solutions. One would almost certainly be to repeal the myth that a corporation is equivelent to a human being, endowed with the same rights and priveleges, and another might be to repeal the myth that corporate "speech" (advertising) is entitled to anything remotely resembling the constitutional protections of freedom of speech that indivuduals are. Then of course there is the absurd notion that corporate dollars equal freedom of speech, for which we have the supreme court to thank and a result of which every election since that decision has been flagrantly and obviuously purchased by corporate America, but I digress.
And you don't have to be manipulated! Don't like being brainwashed by the TV? Turn it off! Don't like the slanting of the issues by the news media? Hey, the web is here and it offers all the viewpoints you could possibly want.
We are inundated with deliberate adds designed to condition us through many more conduits than television and the news media. To do what you suggest would require the classic biblical solution, namely pluck out thine eye if it should offend thee, which is hardly a workable solution given (a) that most of us need to see in order to function, work, and feed ourselves and our families and (b) you'd have to do the same thing to your ears, and even then some of the crap will likely get through.
It is far better we begin to address the crux of the problem, which is the impunity with which corporations, governments, and other groups can use indoctrination and conditioning techniques via our media and brainwash the public, with little restraint and no accountability for the direct and measurable consiquences of that behavior, and that will only happen if we begin to recognize their culpability in much of what they induce, and stop sweeping it under the rug in the name of an easy, but inaccurate meme, namely that no one other than themselves is ever responsible for their actions when that is clearly often not the case at all.
It's illegal. This company figured a way to stop it.
... what, exactly? More mindless Hollywood tripe that is selling like crazy already, despite the avialability of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter in divx format?
Yeah, its innovations like this that make the world safe for
I wonder how many Rodney King's are going to be caught being victimized on tape now, once the LAPD installs those buggers in their squad cars. Or how many bank and convinience store robberies are going to go unmonitored, once Joe Thug can go out and buy (or steal) a cheap video camera jamming device.
Not that you can ever put Pandora's box back together again (to mix my metaphores), but spending the kind of money on this sort of research the way the entertainment industry is doing is anything but a positive contribution to the net human condition.
Not that cartel thugs like that will ever know or feel shame, as their past actions and words already attest.
I wonder why this hasn't happened earlier - I think someone evil is finally going to notice that Usenet is 95% warez/moviez, and go after the big companies that run Usenet servers. This will probably happen after someone makes a tool that allows for easy use of Usenet, ie, a "download, unpar, unrar" tool, that keeps track of binary groups.
You mean, like pan?
I think the battle you speak of will heat up, and the future for free thought may be a very bleak one indeed.
On a completely different note, it would not surprise me at all, in light of congresses latest whorish display of its ability to move in contortions suggestive of a complete lack of backbone in granting president Baby Bush with a blank check for mayhem and idiocy, we didn't find ourselves embroiled in a war by this time next year that is far bigger, and far uglier, than we ever intended.
It would only surprise me a little if by this time next year we have been reduced to fighting this war with sticks and stones, however, a few more years of this sort of leadership and I wouldn't be surprised at all.
My prediction on next years technical innovation: The C.L.U.B. Mark I and the S.T.I.C.K./2003 as the state of the art in human weaponry, deployed far and wide and stockpiled in every home.
But my point stands-- by your argument you aren't even responsible for your argument, it is just what you were told to say.
You assume simplistic absolutes where none exist (hence my initial harsh tone). To the degree that I've been conditioned by an external force to make such an argument, I am not responsible for the argument I am making. In this case, I suspect that percentage is quite small (though perhaps social psychologists might assing it a higher value).
This quickly becomes an excersize in sophistry, but consider that parents are considered more than a little responsible for how their children turn out, and rightly so. Much of the early conditioning process that contributes to a person's later decisions is performed by the parent.
And a disturbing, and apparently growing, portion is done by advertisers, who employ sophisticated conditioning (some would call it 'brainwashing') techniques in doing so, knowingly and quite deliberately. They are not absolved in their contribution to a situation's outcome, and must logically share blame for the decisions they've manipulated, perhaps even induced, with their victims, indeed, they must share responsibility in direct proportion to the degree with which they have shaped or coerced those decisions.
And I don't accept it. you are, and always will be, responsible for all your actiosn, just as I am.
Completely responsible.
Really? And when you donate money to a worthy cause (say, feeding orphans whose parents were killed during an invasion of their country by the Soviets) only to discover ten years later that that money has been diverted to finance, say, the hijacking of some planes that leads to the murder of thousands of people and a new, possibly world, war, are you still absolutely responsible for the decision to support terrorists?
Of course not.
You are only responsible to the degree you made the decision knowingly, with your full faculties and full knowledge of what you were doing, of your own free will, which, in the very real world example I cite, is virtually none at all.
One is rarely "absolutely" responsible for anything, though we are usually very responsible (say, 99% to pull a number out of my ass) for most of what we do, most of the time. At least most of us (I think even you'd agree that an ignorant, or retarded, child is often not responsible for much of what they do, often being unable to even realize they've made a decision, much less understand its ramifications).
To the degree we are deceived or, worse, actively conditioned (a procedure that, by definition, is designed to remove free will from its target) to respond in a particular way we only, at most, share responsibility with those who so deceive or manipulate us.
And in those cases where the deceit, or conditioning, is completely successful we are only as responsible as our initial, knowing acceptance of said deceit or conditioning, which quite often is very little, or even not at all.
I am an American tax payer. I choose consciously to pay my taxes, rather than to go to jail. I know intellectually that my government decieves me and does wicked, evil things with some portion of the money I pay in taxes, and that what I think I know of our policies often bears little resemblence to what is really happening.
To what degree am I responsible for financing the wickedness of my government. To some degree, as I've admitted to an intellectual understanding that "all is not right" in Washington and that terrible things occur, but certainly not absolutely, as I am (1) being coerced by threat of jail (or worse) and (2) I can doubt all I like, but proof of much of what is suspected is lacking.
See, it isn't so simple at all. Certainly not absolute, as you repeatedly insist. Indeed, assigning blame with any degree of accuracy for a particular act is usually quite complex.
The best you can do is say "most people are mostly responsible for most of what they do most of the time."
I think the mistake you are making is assuming that, because I recognize a distribution of guilt among multiple parties that I am fully absolving one party completely (the perpetrator of an act, in this case spiralling into uncontrolled debt) and assigning all guilt to another party. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Indeed, if you think about it, the more ones actions deviate from what society, their parents, colleagues, friends, etc. are pressuring them to do, the more responsible they are for their actions. Things like murder, or revolutionizing a society and bucking a social trend, tend to be actions for which the actor is very, perhaps close to 100% responsible for. Or put another way, Martin Luthar King Jr. and his despicable assassin were much more responsible for their famous actions than, say, Jane Fashion Victim is for her "choice" of wardrobe.
Indeed, there is a whole science dedicated to this stuff, which neither of us are really qualified to debate, so I will return to limiting myself to my original premise: absolute guilt is a rare, perhaps even nonexistent, thing, while shared guilt is probably the most common thing there is, and with respect to the current state of affairs a good portion of that guilt lies with the baby boomer generation, a measure at least equal to that of the generation x-ers, if not greater.