Because unlike Deutschland, Americans are supposed to be free,
not living in a police state where any petty official may demand "Zeigen Sie Ihre Papiere,
Kameraden!"
Although thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, we can now be arrested and booked for any petty infraction, no matter how trivial.
Nobody contributed to the product except Lutris employees and the original (commercial) developers.
Depends on how you define contribution. I'm sure the people who were using the Lutris binaries would consider themselves to be contributing if they were performing beta-testing. Their expectation was that the final product would be open-source. If you read the article, you will understand why: the company's website used "open source" all over the place, and the company's representatives gave presentations at public meetings with "open source" in the title...
I think the lesson here is: don't trust a company. If they say you should help out, believe them when you have the code on your hard disk, not before. Read the fine print.
However, a DRM system consistent with the framers' intent would be beneficial to everyone.
Digital media technologies have undermined the balance between natural rights and maximizing available content. Current DRM systems and supporting legislation go too far in the opposite direction, undermining the peoples' natural rights.
The balance has to be made again before I'll talk about DRM being a reasonable possibility. Rolling back copyright term would be the first step. As we both know, that will never happen, so my effort will be on ways to undermine DRM and copyright, not on trying to influence something which is inherently unfair to be less unfair.
Considering where the money for our legislators comes from and the lack of public interest in this issue, I have absolutely no hope for a good outcome of any type of DRM legislation.
Why don't you guys work on a fuel cell _system_ that produces energy from hydrocarbons? By system I mean the fuel cell itself could just run on 2H2 + O2 to 2H2O and wastefully throw away the C + O2 to CO2 route. I note a recent report of a carbon fuel cell, so with some luck and effort we could use everything.
Then we can run electric cars off gasoline etc. They'll run a lot more efficiently and produce a lot less pollution.
So any reason why the focus seems to be on pure hydrogen or at best methanol?
Most of the interesting work being done on portable fuel cells right now involves a type of fuel cell using polymer electrolyte membranes (PEM). Platinum or a mixture of platinum and a few other metals is used as the catalyst. This catalyst can catalyze the adsorption and reaction for hydrogen and oxygen gases, but not for liquids such as hydrocarbons. Also, the dissociation energy for hydrocarbons is much higher than for pure hydrogen. Methanol is a special case, but "direct methanol" fuel cells which can use methanol directly on the anode require much more catalyst and have much lower power density than hydrogen fuel cells.
There are currently projects by the major automakers to create a gasoline fuel cell car. This is really a hydrogen fuel cell with a "reformer" on the front end which converts gas to hydrogen and CO2. The reformer adds a lot of inefficiency, and the fuel cells are still very expensive.
I worked in the lab where
this product was invented (by Mahlon Wilson at Los Alamos National Lab). I drove around a remote control truck which was entirely powered by this fuel cell. The lack of commercialization is due to the high cost of the fuel cell, not because it doesn't work.
Can you show me a similar cold fusion device that I can drive my remote control truck with? When you can, I will believe.
I'm distinguishing between work that clearly has the potential to be used for purposes the creator would find reprehensible [...] and work for a benign task that someone's imagination might somehow transform into a tool for harm.
To tell you the truth, I'm not sure I can see a difference between these two categories.
Some examples of things that would fit into your category of things that "clearly has the potential to be used for purposes the creator would find reprehensible":
Butcher knife - killing someone
Computer - child pornography
Cell phones - driving while using them
If you are designing any of these things, you can be guaranteed that these things will be almost immediately used for the bad things in the list above. Yet people who design these things aren't critisized when they are used this way. Why?
Why isn't the ability to have private communications across a distance not a "benign task"? Certainly you would agree that something that allows you to have a private communication in a closed room would fit in that category.
I guess I'll agree with you that the exact same people are not running the show as 30 years ago. What I meant (and poorly articulated) was that I am not convinced the people in charge now will not start using secret manipulation of third-world countries again.
Exhibit A would have to be Iran-Contra.
Exhibit B is the Crypto-AG backdoor. Do you really think we didn't pull strings with this information?
Exhibit C is the U.S. support of the mujahedin in Afghanistan during the 1980s
Exhibits A-C are all within the last 30 years.
I'm sure there are plenty of others, but I have only been following world history for a few years. The original point that the "U.S. has a history of secret interference" seems valid to me. Consider that for the last 20 years the U.S. has been under incredibly low threat, and it makes sense that we wouldn't often be involved in these kinds of secret manipulations. Now that we feel insecure again, I expect to see these kinds of things increase again.
Thanks for the link, by the way. The Atlantic has done some great work.
During the past week, one thing I've thought about a bit is that I really wouldn't be able to tell an
Islamic person from a Pakistani.
Well, first off, most Pakistani are Muslims.
I recommend watching or listening to the BBC instead of our own (I am American) corporate-beholden news carriers. I started doing this a few weeks ago, and the difference in quality and perspective is incredible. The
BBC website is a pain to navigate when you first start, but give it some time to get used to it. You can get streaming audio and video of most of their shows and news, and their web-based news is also very good.
I haven't used mathtype, so I can't comment on its quality. Even assuming it blows away TeX, how much does Microsoft + Office + endnote + mathtype cost? Last time I was in an office store, Office was $400, and Windows was $250. So if you don't mind paying as much for your software as I paid for my computer, go for it.
Try lyx if you want a really good (thesis quality) WYSIWYG editor. You should still know LaTeX before you go putting your thesis in it, but it is incredible. The mathematics ability of lyx and LaTeX put Word to shame.
Once the judges are appointed, their job is to interpret the established laws, based entirely on the evidence presented in court.
Then what's all this stuff about "friend of the court" briefs at the Supreme Court? Is there anything similar with lower courts?
Also, when someone is found guilty in a criminal court, can't the judge take into account almost anything during the sentencing phase? Is civil court different in this regard?
If anything, it indicates your perception that inanimate creations of an individual or group are not
that person or group's personal property, should not be considered personal property, and if
anything should belong to the whole of society...in other words, that you are a communist.
I'm going to assume that you meant "immaterial" instead of "inanimate", since that makes more sense. In other words, anyone who thinks intellectual property is not identical to physical property is a communist? That seems to be your view based on the rest of your post. I suppose you know it is not viewed by either the founders (USA), or most of the court decisions since then? If they had your opinion, there would not be the phrase "limited times" in the Constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and
Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
Is there an analogous time limit for physical property?
When consumers lack the freedoms that define Free Recipe, they can't tell if the chicken was cooked correctly, can't check for inappropriate ingredients, can't monitor quality control, can't monitor fat content
Why is demanding the freedom to always know what you are eating so absurd? In fact:
the majority of people prefer to know if their food is genetically engineered
many vegetarians would like to know if there are animal products in the foods they eat
many people are allergic to certain foods
many people don't eat certain ingredients for religious reasons
Your argument is doubly poor, because the FDA already requires food producers to divulge most of their recipe. The concession the FDA has made to food producers is that they can keep secret the "essential" parts of flavorings.
Don't use 6.2, use 7.1 if you go with Redhat. If you do go with 6.2, don't use NFS without upgrading, there's a remote root exploit. I found out the hard way.
Hasn't this already happened to Martin Luther King, Jr? Several parts of his graduate work were plagerized... It wasn't found out by automated means, but it was just as much plagarism.
> I just wish there was a spam filter that you can
> use that would return unknown user like an
> account died, so the spam programs would
> automatically remove the user.
There is:
Spam Bouncer
It is a procmail filter and it works VERY well.
What is the deal with so many of the stories on Slashdot being linked to New York Times when there are other sites out there that don't require registration? I know I'm not the only one who just skips it if it is from them...
Junkbuster allows you to set up a list of "allowed" cookies sites whose cookies can get through. I wish it had an option to pass through when it blocks a link I want, instead of having to edit the configuration or disabling proxy in the browser to see the link.
I see you referenced a web site in your message. There is a handy new invention called a hyperlink that you can use with your reference. It involves a short piece of HTML code. Email me if you need help learning how to use it.
You people have a lot of strange ideas about what fuel cells are.
1. Fuel cell catalysts are NOT toxic. They use platinum or platinum/ruthenium. These are expensive, but not toxic. If fact, nothing in a fuel cell is toxic except the fuel (if using methanol). Components include carbon (graphite), teflon, membrane (similar to teflon), and water.
2. No practical low-temperature (less than 100 C) fuel cell runs on anything other than hydrogen or methanol. In fact, a methanol fuel cell is really a hydrogen fuel cell with the conversion from methanol to hydrogen occurring at the anode catalyst. That is the reason its performance is so much lower than a hydrogen fuel cell. All other fuels must first be converted to hydrogen. This conversion introduces inefficiencies and often poisons the fuel cell.
On Manhattan Scientific These are the guys who are funding Bob Hockaday, who is working on "micro" fuel cells on his own in Los Alamos (he's not working at Los Alamos National Lab). I expect he does have some patents on the way he is trying to build a fuel cell. A word of caution, though: there were huge press releases and enormous hype when he was first funded (January 1998, 2 years ago). When he gave a technical talk at Los Alamos, the performance he had so far was really awful. He said they expected it would increase very soon, and that there would be a prototype in a year. They have built a prototype, but it doesn't meet their original goal, which I thought was to make a drop-in replacement for the current batteries. They are now talking about a belt-clip device which will recharge the regular batteries. The question is: is this going to be any lighter or cheaper than clipping on a lead-acid or lithium battery to your belt instead? If it is, it will be a good product. From the web page mentioned above: Q. Is it commercially viable ? A. Not yet. We believe it will be soon.
Also, they mention that without a large corporation making a deal with them to produce their device, it won't get produced.
Slashdot Mirror
Although thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, we can now be arrested and booked for any petty infraction, no matter how trivial.
Depends on how you define contribution. I'm sure the people who were using the Lutris binaries would consider themselves to be contributing if they were performing beta-testing. Their expectation was that the final product would be open-source. If you read the article, you will understand why: the company's website used "open source" all over the place, and the company's representatives gave presentations at public meetings with "open source" in the title...
I think the lesson here is: don't trust a company. If they say you should help out, believe them when you have the code on your hard disk, not before. Read the fine print.
The balance has to be made again before I'll talk about DRM being a reasonable possibility. Rolling back copyright term would be the first step. As we both know, that will never happen, so my effort will be on ways to undermine DRM and copyright, not on trying to influence something which is inherently unfair to be less unfair.
Considering where the money for our legislators comes from and the lack of public interest in this issue, I have absolutely no hope for a good outcome of any type of DRM legislation.
That's true, but I can give you a rational explanation of why that is true: the huge difficulty of containing matter at a zillion degrees.
Is there a similar reason that cold-fusion devices can't be demonstrated at small scale?
Then we can run electric cars off gasoline etc. They'll run a lot more efficiently and produce a lot less pollution.
So any reason why the focus seems to be on pure hydrogen or at best methanol?
Most of the interesting work being done on portable fuel cells right now involves a type of fuel cell using polymer electrolyte membranes (PEM). Platinum or a mixture of platinum and a few other metals is used as the catalyst. This catalyst can catalyze the adsorption and reaction for hydrogen and oxygen gases, but not for liquids such as hydrocarbons. Also, the dissociation energy for hydrocarbons is much higher than for pure hydrogen. Methanol is a special case, but "direct methanol" fuel cells which can use methanol directly on the anode require much more catalyst and have much lower power density than hydrogen fuel cells.
There are currently projects by the major automakers to create a gasoline fuel cell car. This is really a hydrogen fuel cell with a "reformer" on the front end which converts gas to hydrogen and CO2. The reformer adds a lot of inefficiency, and the fuel cells are still very expensive.
I worked in the lab where this product was invented (by Mahlon Wilson at Los Alamos National Lab). I drove around a remote control truck which was entirely powered by this fuel cell. The lack of commercialization is due to the high cost of the fuel cell, not because it doesn't work.
Can you show me a similar cold fusion device that I can drive my remote control truck with? When you can, I will believe.
Depends on how you define "producing".
http://www.lanl.gov/worldview/news/releases/archiv e/98-037.shtml
To tell you the truth, I'm not sure I can see a difference between these two categories.
Some examples of things that would fit into your category of things that "clearly has the potential to be used for purposes the creator would find reprehensible":
If you are designing any of these things, you can be guaranteed that these things will be almost immediately used for the bad things in the list above. Yet people who design these things aren't critisized when they are used this way. Why?
Why isn't the ability to have private communications across a distance not a "benign task"? Certainly you would agree that something that allows you to have a private communication in a closed room would fit in that category.
Exhibit A would have to be Iran-Contra.
Exhibit B is the Crypto-AG backdoor. Do you really think we didn't pull strings with this information?
Exhibit C is the U.S. support of the mujahedin in Afghanistan during the 1980s
Exhibits A-C are all within the last 30 years. I'm sure there are plenty of others, but I have only been following world history for a few years. The original point that the "U.S. has a history of secret interference" seems valid to me. Consider that for the last 20 years the U.S. has been under incredibly low threat, and it makes sense that we wouldn't often be involved in these kinds of secret manipulations. Now that we feel insecure again, I expect to see these kinds of things increase again. Thanks for the link, by the way. The Atlantic has done some great work.
Well, first off, most Pakistani are Muslims.
I recommend watching or listening to the BBC instead of our own (I am American) corporate-beholden news carriers. I started doing this a few weeks ago, and the difference in quality and perspective is incredible. The BBC website is a pain to navigate when you first start, but give it some time to get used to it. You can get streaming audio and video of most of their shows and news, and their web-based news is also very good.
> with the governments of other countries.
Most of which happened 30 years ago. We have a history of wearing powdered wigs, too.
The difference being, many of the same people running the show today are the same ones running the show 30 years ago.
Not too many people in government now who wore powdered wigs when they were younger.
I haven't used mathtype, so I can't comment on its quality. Even assuming it blows away TeX, how much does Microsoft + Office + endnote + mathtype cost? Last time I was in an office store, Office was $400, and Windows was $250. So if you don't mind paying as much for your software as I paid for my computer, go for it.
It's kinda hard to forget if you know that only $1.50 or so of the $15 you just spent on an album actually goes to the band.
Try lyx if you want a really good (thesis quality) WYSIWYG editor. You should still know LaTeX before you go putting your thesis in it, but it is incredible. The mathematics ability of lyx and LaTeX put Word to shame.
Then what's all this stuff about "friend of the court" briefs at the Supreme Court? Is there anything similar with lower courts?
Also, when someone is found guilty in a criminal court, can't the judge take into account almost anything during the sentencing phase? Is civil court different in this regard?
I'm going to assume that you meant "immaterial" instead of "inanimate", since that makes more sense. In other words, anyone who thinks intellectual property is not identical to physical property is a communist? That seems to be your view based on the rest of your post. I suppose you know it is not viewed by either the founders (USA), or most of the court decisions since then? If they had your opinion, there would not be the phrase "limited times" in the Constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
Is there an analogous time limit for physical property?
Why is demanding the freedom to always know what you are eating so absurd? In fact:
Your argument is doubly poor, because the FDA already requires food producers to divulge most of their recipe. The concession the FDA has made to food producers is that they can keep secret the "essential" parts of flavorings.
Don't use 6.2, use 7.1 if you go with Redhat. If you do go with 6.2, don't use NFS without upgrading, there's a remote root exploit. I found out the hard way.
Hasn't this already happened to Martin Luther King, Jr? Several parts of his graduate work were plagerized... It wasn't found out by automated means, but it was just as much plagarism.
> I just wish there was a spam filter that you can
> use that would return unknown user like an
> account died, so the spam programs would
> automatically remove the user.
There is: Spam Bouncer
It is a procmail filter and it works VERY well.
What is the deal with so many of the stories on Slashdot being linked to New York Times when there are other sites out there that don't require registration? I know I'm not the only one who just skips it if it is from them...
Junkbuster allows you to set up a list of "allowed" cookies sites whose cookies can get through. I wish it had an option to pass through when it blocks a link I want, instead of having to edit the configuration or disabling proxy in the browser to see the link.
I see you referenced a web site in your message. There is a handy new invention called a hyperlink that you can use with your reference. It involves a short piece of HTML code. Email me if you need help learning how to use it.
You people have a lot of strange ideas about what fuel cells are.
1. Fuel cell catalysts are NOT toxic. They use platinum or platinum/ruthenium. These are expensive, but not toxic. If fact, nothing in a fuel cell is toxic except the fuel (if using methanol). Components include carbon (graphite), teflon, membrane (similar to teflon), and water.
2. No practical low-temperature (less than 100 C) fuel cell runs on anything other than hydrogen or methanol. In fact, a methanol fuel cell is really a hydrogen fuel cell with the conversion from methanol to hydrogen occurring at the anode catalyst. That is the reason its performance is so much lower than a hydrogen fuel cell. All other fuels must first be converted to hydrogen. This conversion introduces inefficiencies and often poisons the fuel cell.
On Manhattan Scientific
These are the guys who are funding Bob Hockaday, who is working on "micro" fuel cells on his own in Los Alamos (he's not working at Los Alamos National Lab). I expect he does have some patents on the way he is trying to build a fuel cell.
A word of caution, though: there were huge press releases and enormous hype when he was first funded (January 1998, 2 years ago). When he gave a technical talk at Los Alamos, the performance he had so far was really awful. He said they expected it would increase very soon, and that there would be a prototype in a year. They have built a prototype, but it doesn't meet their original goal, which I thought was to make a drop-in replacement for the current batteries. They are now talking about a belt-clip device which will recharge the regular batteries. The question is: is this going to be any lighter or cheaper than clipping on a lead-acid or lithium battery to your belt instead? If it is, it will be a good product.
From the web page mentioned above:
Q. Is it commercially viable ?
A. Not yet. We believe it will be soon.
Also, they mention that without a large corporation making a deal with them to produce their device, it won't get produced.