Not the exact same argument, and you've spelt out why quite clearly. CSS mangles the CONTENTS! Aimster just mangles the FILENAME, but does not change the content of a file. They're still infringing copyright, they're just making it more difficult to spot it with an automated tool.
Let's take an example. Say I copied "Baby one more time" and tried to sell it as my own work, as a song called "Hit me baby". Maybe I've changed the name of the song, but it doesn't at all change the fact that I've infringed copyright.
To be honest, I'd be surprised if one of their kids didn't come up with the idea, it's that lame.
Erm, ".net" is the one that really _is_ supposed to have a restriction - that's supposed to be ISPs and other internet connectivity ppl only. But that got wildly usurped ages back, to the extent that ppl now don't remember it was originally for that.
The more interesting thing with this is that we ALL grew up with these machines - anyone working in software now, chances are they started programming on a C-64, Spectrum, whatever. With these machines, it was all pretty stripped down, and one person really _could_ make a difference - some of the greatest games then, like Paradroid, really were just written by one person. The limitations of the hardware meant that you had to learn about programming the sound chip, handling sprites and stuff like that, usually in assembler. But the hardware was all pretty simple then, so it wasn't too hard to figure it out. And if you knew that one person, working on their own, could do that, there was the incentive to see if you could too - you knew it was possible.
Fast-forward 20 years. The hardware is so immensely complex that no one person can figure it all out (although Tom Pabst does a good job!:-) and all applications, games and other programs are so complex, it's difficult for a newbie to get started. And there's no really successful single-person programs (AFAIK:-) so where's the incentive to try? If you know you can't do something on your own, bcos all programs (even the open-source ones) require vast project teams to do it, where's the spark to make you try?
I'm not advocating that all 16-bit processors and upwards should be ritually slaughtered!:-) The point really is that we've been lucky; our learning curve started low, with fairly simple computers, so as the technology involved in those computers has stepped up, it's been easy for us to make the jump to the next computer technology, using what we learnt b4. But today, you have to START on your Pentium, figure out Windows programming, DirectX or whatever, and that learning curve is more like a cliff-face!
I'd be interested to see how many software ppl we've still got in maybe 10 years time, when the new ppl have only ever known hugely-fast machines. Also, I'd be interested to see what the software's like. Starting on slow machines, we naturally learnt how to optimise for speed when we needed it. But if you've got some serious hardware, where's the incentive? I work on embedded stuff, which is much closer to the older machines and often needs to run fast to control the car engine or whatever - if we get ppl used to writing bloatware, it's going to be difficult to get them out of the habit.
Eyes are a great example of evolution in action, TOT. There's all sorts of types of eyes around. Worms have very simple light-sensitive cells on their body - these are your "proto-eyes". They'll let it determine orientation and relative light and shade, best guess is so that it knows how at risk it is on the surface (all fishermen know that the best time to dig for worms is at night or early in the morning, when they're near the surface). Other invertebrates (eg. hydras) have better eyes, which allow them to act as filter feeders - their "eyes" aren't much, but are sufficiently fast at seeing light and dark to determine that there's something close in front of them, so they can try and grab it.
Scale up, and up, and up. Each time an improvement occurs, it opens up a new area of specialisation. Insects (usually prey) have developed lots of low-resolution eyes for good all-round vision and threat detection, and that trades of accuracy of vision against view angle. Lizards and mammals (generally predators, or at least opportunistic omnivores) developed 2 good eyes which give better forward vision but a big blank spot behind. When lizards died out and mammals started filling their niches, some mammals became herbivores (and hence prey). They developed eyes more on the side of their heads with a wider field of view, trading off forward perception against threat detection again.
In eyes, humans (and mammals in general) are far from the peak - birds such as eagles can see vast distances with pin-point accuracy, which allows them to fly high and scan the ground from a height. If you can still see your prey from a height, then you may as well stay high whilst hunting bcos you can see more ground. So flying high for long periods makes soaring a naturally effective strategy for hunting larger ground creatures (eg. rabbits), which makes birds with wide-spread wings more effective (eg. eagles and buzzards). For hunting other birds, a swept-back wing gives greater speed and manoevrability for diving on them (eg. falcons). And so on, and so on. The basic improvement in eyes allowed a hunting strategy of staying high and diving on things; different wing shapes made them better at hunting specific types of prey.
"Skinnable" sounds a lovely idea. Then you find that it gives you no consistent way of using an application. Borrow a friend's PC, and the button which prints a page on your version may close his window, or bring up his favourite pr0n page.
"Cross-platform" sounds a lovely idea. Then you find that every program you write runs like treacle. Cross-platform at _compile_ time is reasonable; at _run_ time is just plain ridiculous except for some ultra-specialised niches (eg. Web applets). Computer scientists have gone to the "cycles are cheap" model - ESR's coding guidelines explicitly say this. Back in the real world, performance is important! A 0.1s delay for a menu to open is acceptable, a 0.5s delay is not. A search taking 10s is acceptable, a search taking a minute or so isn't.
And why these features? Bcos it's a "beautiful thing" for a _coder_. No mention ANYWHERE of the user. Most users WON'T change their app skins, WON'T run the application on 3 different platforms at once. Most users just want something that works. If they have to download it, they want it to be a fairly small code size. If they have to use it all the time, they want it to work at a reasonable speed. A typical computer scientist works at a university (student/postgrad/lecturer) and runs his programs on a mainframe, or works in business and runs his programs on the latest hardware; they're likely to have a hot PC at home too. A typical home user buys a low-end PC (maybe 300 MHz) with a small amount of RAM. It's not acceptable for the computer scientist to say "Well it works fine on mine". You end up with exactly the same problems of platform-dependency in that a percentage of users just can't run it; this time though, the dependency isn't on architecture/manufacturer but on how much you can afford to spend on your PC.
This gives the odd situation of an "upper-class" program. Only those who are rich enough can run it; if you don't have the money to buy a high-spec machine, you get a definitely second-class performance out of the program. And it keeps the hardware manufacturers rubbing their hands with glee.
Mozilla was intended to be a replacement to a buggy, bloated and over-featured browser. What's emerged is a buggy, bloated and over-featured browser. Tell me again why anyone bothered?
Evidence pointing away from evolution?! There's arguments about _how_ it happens, but the only argument about _whether_ it happens is coming from the religious side, who'd rather believe 3000-year old folk myths. AFAIK, in every conflict between religion and science, religion has come off second-best after a lot of screaming and kicking of feet (and, incidentally, killing ppl).
Anyway, the only fossils we see are those which (a) die in a muddy environment, (b) that mud has to be the right kind to preserve it, (c) that muddy environment gets turned into rocks, (d) those rocks end up somewhere we can see. If the proto-turtle lived in a place with acidic soil, no fossils will exist bcos the remains will have long since dissolved, or if it lived in somewhere which is now the middle of Siberia, there may be millions of fossils but we'll never see them.
In addition, the more common the animal was, the longer its species survived, and the wider the area the species covered, the more likely we are to find it. As an example, during the Industrial Revolution in the UK, evolution favoured black moths in a sooty environment, so within a few years most moths were black, but when industry cleaned up a bit more, the moths changed back to more natural colours. No-one is EVER likely to find a fossilised black moth, since they existed for such a short time-span in such a small area.
Nope. Keyboards and flat panels are safe. Point is that monitors use a high voltage to scan the screen, which produces mucho electromagnetic signals to pick up - quite possibly from enough distance that you don't have to be in the same building. This is at a fixed frequency which is fairly easy to pick up, and there's nothing much else of the same kind of emissions level to interfere with it.
Keyboards and screens use 5V or less to (respectively) send data down the cable and to scan the screen. This is happening at fixed frequencies, but it's such a low voltage that you'd need an extraordinarily sensitive receiver placed pretty damn close to the equipment. Point is that signal strength is proportional to the SQUARE of the voltage. A 5V signal doesn't produce 20 times less EM noise than a 100V signal, it produces 400 times less!
And if you did have this extraordinariny sensitive receiver, it'd be swamped by the broad-band noise generated by the processors, RAM, etc which are also giving off the same kind of emissions. Never mind the shielding which every bit of kit has to try and prevent it giving off EM emissions.
Excuse me, did OpenSSH spring fully-formed from a random configuration of bits? Of course not. Ppl worked on it, made it, distributed it. Therefore it's a product, as in "something produced". The fact that it's free is neither here nor there; nor is the fact that bcos you haven't paid for it, you don't consider it a "product". As an example, you haven't paid for songs downloaded from Napster, but these songs are still the product of the music industry.
And why is there a requirement to know how the thing works? All the newbie user needs to know is that SSH improves security. Are you claiming that you don't deserve a secure system until you're reached a certain level of experience?!
But he says he's tried to ask the guys leading OpenSSH and they've just ignored him. If they won't pay him attention, what choice has he got? They're bloody lucky he's had the courtesy to post on a forum first, instead of just sending in the lawyers.
Same a couple of months back. I managed it in quite spectacular style - a brake lever came off and jammed the front wheel while I was doing full speed. I felt it come off, so I was prepared for exit and angled out of the toe clips just right. Over the handlebars, roll on one shoulder with my head down and back up in one piece - Jackie Chan would have been proud! Nasty graze on my shoulder and a chunk out of my helmet, but otherwise intact!
But it can't top my friend's one - I wouldn't have believed this, except I saw it happen. Cycling back home from uni, he didn't have lights on, and stupidly he was ahead of the rest of us who did have lights. A driver didn't see him and pulled out of a car park in front of him. He hit the car's front wheel square on, throwing him forward over the bonnet. But he had his toe clips on, so the bike came with him. The end result was that he did a complete forward roll over the car's bonnet, complete with bike, and LANDED ON HIS WHEELS on the other side! Unfortunately he was so shocked by the experience that he immediately fell over.:-)
Interconnection isn't so much of a problem - that's just an engineering issue, albeit a difficult one. What _is_ a problem is the energy expenditure to start and stop rotation. The only effective way of doing it is reaction jets (the same way rockets and satellites steer), and that requires a supply of gas to do it, which means a lot of resupply problems and lots more hugely expensive Shuttle launches.
Incidentally, stuff isn't left lying loose, it's all fairly well restrained (mostly with Velcro). If you left anything lying loose, there's too much chance of it getting somewhere it shouldn't - say, a floating spanner banging into a crucial button at the wrong time!
Why d'you need gravity anyway? There's those vibrating pad things that claim to stimulate your muscles, which the gullible use thinking that they're a substitute for exercise. Kit up with those, and you're in business.
It's only completely zero at the very centre - the further away you get, the more gravity you've got. This rather limits how many zero-G experiments you can do, and zero-G experiments are the reason for having SS-Alpha.
There's a good example recently of naked greed. Some journalist in the UK saw the tech stocks going up, heard about online stocks and thought he couldn't lose. He didn't know shit about computers, didn't own a computer, had never done anything like that in his life. But he still thought he could pick the winners. He remortgaged his house and stuff, and blew the entire stack in under a year - now he's likely to be out on his ass bcos he got greedy.
Emissions -- thank God I can pump out all the shite I want, and not let it bother me. "No snowflake in an avalanche believes it is responsible."
Incidentally, has anyone thought that this might actually be a _good_ idea? Say, anyone who's had friends/relatives run down by drunk and/or speeding drivers? Or who's been held up for hours in a traffic jam caused by an accident in fog? A system which reduces the speed limit for bad conditions, AND which increases the limit in perfect conditions - sounds good to me.
Depends on what you think sci-fi is. If you think that descriptions of cool gadgets are more important than the story, then sure, a lot of sci-fi isn't.
But if you reckon that the sci-fi/fantasy aspect is there to present a different world in which things happen differently, and the actions and reactions of the characters in this environment, then Frankenstein fits perfectly. Taking Asimov's robots as an example, the actions of each robot's personality in following the Laws is the important element, not the fact of the robot's construction.
So it all hinges on your definition of sci-fi. Which really comes down to "sci-fi is what sci-fi writers write" - and good luck getting a better definition!:-)
Why bother pandering to paranoids who think the NYT is out to steal their souls (or even worse, their bandwidth). If you're that bothered, get a Hotmail account, or Bigfoot, or any other freeby mailbox.
You never get something for nothing. In this case, you get free news (instead of having to pay however much each day) in exchange for your user demographics and an email address - that's the deal, take it or leave it. If you want to leave it, then don't bitch that you can't get free news.
By the mention of the gun, you've established that you're talking about the police in the US.
That may be the case over there. Over here in the UK, we don't have that kind of problem, or at least not to the same extent. Sure, there's been problems with racism and stuff like that, and still are. But these guys are (hopefully) in the minority - all I can say is that in the few times I've had contact with the police, I've been treated well.
And I'm not sure what the problem is - this is completely an issue where if you're innocent you've got nothing to worry about, and if you're guilty then you'll be found. I can't see a problem with finding a guilty person. The main crime that DNA evidence would be used for is rape, and currently many rapes are either not reported or do not lead to a conviction. I'd rather have a country-wide database (including myself) and know that a rapist WILL be caught - maybe the increased conviction rate would stop ppl doing it, or at least make them think twice. It's the same way that drink-driving has been cut down - if you're stopped then you're automatically breathalysed, and if you've been drinking then you WILL be found out, so ppl don't drink and drive any more.
And it's not like DNA evidence can be planted. It's the other way round from planting stuff on the suspect - here you'd actually have to plant the guy's DNA at the scene during the first couple of hours when they're collecting evident, and that just isn't possible.
A modem requires 2 things. First off, you have to send and receive stuff down a phone line - that's the physical layer stuff. Then you have to decode what you've received using the protocol layer (V.90, etc), or encode what you're going to send out. Only after that do you get to the "PC software" bit where you just call it COM1 and forget about the details.
A true modem does the physical layer stuff AND the protocol layer stuff. Your PC can just throw stuff at the modem and not worry about how the modem's going to send it. This makes life very easy for the PC - it doesn't have to do any processing to send stuff, so it can devote all its resources to displaying web pages, playing Q3 Arena, running video decoders, etc.
A Winmodem only does the physical layer stuff, and that's the problem. See, the protocol layer is where the sophistication is - phone lines aren't naturally good at sending stuff much above 19K2, so there's all sorts of tricks used to try to make sure that your data gets there intact, and that you're receiving what the guy at the other end actually sent you. Winmodems shift all this processing onto the PC, instead of doing it in the modem card itself, and that drains a fair chunk of processing resources away from what you're actually wanting to do - Q3, etc.
And there's the problem that someone's got to sit down and write the driver software for the PC to do this protocol layer stuff. The problems here are that (a) it's a very complex piece of code; (b) it requires the driver to access physical locations in the PC's interface memory, which isn't good from the hardware abstraction side; and (c) it requires the author of the software to know EXACTLY how the Winmodem hardware works so that he/she can interface to it correctly, and Winmodem manufacturers aren't telling. There's drivers already written for Windows, but Linux drivers would have to be written by some volunteer, and the 3 BIG problems above will stop anyone (except a total hero, or a total loony:-) from writing the code.
The reason the manufacturers do this is simply cost - you need something to do the processing for the protocol layer, which means an extra chip or several on the card, which makes the card cost more. By buying a Winmodem, you're trading off modem cost (maybe £25 for a card instead of £35, I don't know what that is in USD) against performance.
Granted, there's nothing will repay what's been done to the victim. So what do you do - execute the offender? There's also ppl who never recover from having their purse snatched or having their house broken into, but there's not much you can do about it short of counselling for the victim.
As for the eroding privacy laws, we've got a case of that over in the UK. A newspaper released the names of some alleged sex offenders who'd served their sentences. A couple of days later, an innocent man had to go into hiding (he'd been threatened, attacked and had ppl smashing up his house and his car) bcos he happened to have the same name as one of these guys. You can't tell me this is right. Vigilante violence is NEVER, EVER a solution, unless you happen to believe that a person's human rights don't mean shit and you're prepared to stomp all over ethics, morals and laws. If your moral code says that it's OK to drag someone out of their house and beat them up bcos you THINK they MAY be a sex offender - well, you're a pretty sick individual yourself. And eroding ex-offenders' privacy is entirely vigilante-ism - it's just a threat to throw them to the wolves, and that makes you as guilty for supporting it as the thugs who actually do the beating-up.
Would you care to quantify the "spiritually malnourished" line? Or "no innate sense of human worth"? This doesn't help your argument - ppl tend to be turned off when they see daft statements like that.
I happen to agree with you that the parents (or adoptive parents or whatever) are the best ppl to look after their kids; this is a full-time job, at least until the kids go to school, so one member of the family needs to stay at home. Whether it's the mum or the dad, doesn't matter.
The case for childcare comes with single-parent families. I don't have too much sympathy for women (especially young girls with low/no income) getting pregnant after one-night stands and deciding to keep it - children do cost money, and if you can't afford to look after a child properly (ie. at least provide basic food, clothing and a home of some description) then you shouldn't be having one. But ppl whose partner dies or leaves them - they need to work to provide for the child, and then you do need some form of daycare.
Destruction is only "mutual" if you know who's done it and can respond. In the 60s, only two nations could wage nuclear war. Now we're getting close to double figures, maybe even past it (some places aren't saying). ICBMs can be tracked so you can respond, but the terrorist situation is a different matter. If it comes to that, a sub-launched nuke could have come from several sources too.
And suppose the bomb is a terrorist one. If Osama bin Laden explodes one in New York, who do you hit? He's a Saudi national, but he doesn't live there and the government there doesn't want him. Afghanistan? they claim he's not there, and in any case we wouldn't know where to target. Libya? they funded him and his organisation for a while, but they're getting back in touch with reality and distancing themselves from terrorism. Iraq? probably funded him, but it's doubtful he's there. Or suppose a Pakistani terrorist exploded a nuke in the US, and claimed responsibility. Would you nuke the whole of Pakistan, even though their government says it was a terrorist act and promises to find those responsible? Or even worse, what if the terrorist was an American?
Following on from this, is MAD justifiable? Suppose someone does bomb a city - does this then justify us levelling their entire country? Bear in mind that those responsible will be the military and government, or a terrorist group - either way they're only going to be a small minority and they're going to be prepared for the results. The guys who'll suffer will be the millions of normal folks who just happen to have been born in that town/city/country. Maybe the guys responsible for it are evil and must be wiped out, but if we respond in the same way, then that's just as bad. Our society is quite clear on this. If a drunk driver kills a family, for example, then the drunk driver goes to jail. We do NOT do "eye for an eye" and kill the driver's family in cold blood as revenge!
John's article complained about the errors. Unfortunately most of his examples were of ppl who'd actually done stuff, and were now finding the consequences of it. Such as...
Forgot to cancel a comic subscription? Well how the !$%* is the comic company supposed to know you moved? Telepathy?
Hit a deer? Well if you live somewhere with lots of deer, drive slower. And one of those two deer-hits was your own fault.
The article was pretty valid - credit agencies are under-regulated. A similar situation exists in the UK - my sister got stiffed by the Halifax bank. It just needs a bit more regulation to sort it out, so you need to talk to your local elected representative and see what you can get swung for you.
Hang on, aren't Fraunhofer the guys who originally came up with the MP3 format? So they're the guys that everyone (NullSoft, MS, Sony, etc) pays for licensing to produce an MP3 player? So they're the ones making a nice amount of money off the current MP3?
So can anyone guess how likely it is that Fraunhofer are trying to stop ppl using MP3 format? Back in the real world, it's a response to Ogg Vorbis etc - if you want to stay in front you have to keep producing new and innovative products. They've done it once with MP3 (radically better than anything else at the time), and they're trying to do the same again with MP3Pro. Where's the issue with this?
Incidentally, YOU won't be paying money for it directly. Nullsoft etc will pay to produce compatible players, but that's it.
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Not the exact same argument, and you've spelt out why quite clearly. CSS mangles the CONTENTS! Aimster just mangles the FILENAME, but does not change the content of a file. They're still infringing copyright, they're just making it more difficult to spot it with an automated tool.
Let's take an example. Say I copied "Baby one more time" and tried to sell it as my own work, as a song called "Hit me baby". Maybe I've changed the name of the song, but it doesn't at all change the fact that I've infringed copyright.
To be honest, I'd be surprised if one of their kids didn't come up with the idea, it's that lame.
Grab.
Erm, ".net" is the one that really _is_ supposed to have a restriction - that's supposed to be ISPs and other internet connectivity ppl only. But that got wildly usurped ages back, to the extent that ppl now don't remember it was originally for that.
Grab.
The more interesting thing with this is that we ALL grew up with these machines - anyone working in software now, chances are they started programming on a C-64, Spectrum, whatever. With these machines, it was all pretty stripped down, and one person really _could_ make a difference - some of the greatest games then, like Paradroid, really were just written by one person. The limitations of the hardware meant that you had to learn about programming the sound chip, handling sprites and stuff like that, usually in assembler. But the hardware was all pretty simple then, so it wasn't too hard to figure it out. And if you knew that one person, working on their own, could do that, there was the incentive to see if you could too - you knew it was possible.
:-) and all applications, games and other programs are so complex, it's difficult for a newbie to get started. And there's no really successful single-person programs (AFAIK :-) so where's the incentive to try? If you know you can't do something on your own, bcos all programs (even the open-source ones) require vast project teams to do it, where's the spark to make you try?
:-) The point really is that we've been lucky; our learning curve started low, with fairly simple computers, so as the technology involved in those computers has stepped up, it's been easy for us to make the jump to the next computer technology, using what we learnt b4. But today, you have to START on your Pentium, figure out Windows programming, DirectX or whatever, and that learning curve is more like a cliff-face!
Fast-forward 20 years. The hardware is so immensely complex that no one person can figure it all out (although Tom Pabst does a good job!
I'm not advocating that all 16-bit processors and upwards should be ritually slaughtered!
I'd be interested to see how many software ppl we've still got in maybe 10 years time, when the new ppl have only ever known hugely-fast machines. Also, I'd be interested to see what the software's like. Starting on slow machines, we naturally learnt how to optimise for speed when we needed it. But if you've got some serious hardware, where's the incentive? I work on embedded stuff, which is much closer to the older machines and often needs to run fast to control the car engine or whatever - if we get ppl used to writing bloatware, it's going to be difficult to get them out of the habit.
Grab.
Eyes are a great example of evolution in action, TOT. There's all sorts of types of eyes around. Worms have very simple light-sensitive cells on their body - these are your "proto-eyes". They'll let it determine orientation and relative light and shade, best guess is so that it knows how at risk it is on the surface (all fishermen know that the best time to dig for worms is at night or early in the morning, when they're near the surface). Other invertebrates (eg. hydras) have better eyes, which allow them to act as filter feeders - their "eyes" aren't much, but are sufficiently fast at seeing light and dark to determine that there's something close in front of them, so they can try and grab it.
Scale up, and up, and up. Each time an improvement occurs, it opens up a new area of specialisation. Insects (usually prey) have developed lots of low-resolution eyes for good all-round vision and threat detection, and that trades of accuracy of vision against view angle. Lizards and mammals (generally predators, or at least opportunistic omnivores) developed 2 good eyes which give better forward vision but a big blank spot behind. When lizards died out and mammals started filling their niches, some mammals became herbivores (and hence prey). They developed eyes more on the side of their heads with a wider field of view, trading off forward perception against threat detection again.
In eyes, humans (and mammals in general) are far from the peak - birds such as eagles can see vast distances with pin-point accuracy, which allows them to fly high and scan the ground from a height. If you can still see your prey from a height, then you may as well stay high whilst hunting bcos you can see more ground. So flying high for long periods makes soaring a naturally effective strategy for hunting larger ground creatures (eg. rabbits), which makes birds with wide-spread wings more effective (eg. eagles and buzzards). For hunting other birds, a swept-back wing gives greater speed and manoevrability for diving on them (eg. falcons). And so on, and so on. The basic improvement in eyes allowed a hunting strategy of staying high and diving on things; different wing shapes made them better at hunting specific types of prey.
Grab.
Bloatware city.
"Skinnable" sounds a lovely idea. Then you find that it gives you no consistent way of using an application. Borrow a friend's PC, and the button which prints a page on your version may close his window, or bring up his favourite pr0n page.
"Cross-platform" sounds a lovely idea. Then you find that every program you write runs like treacle. Cross-platform at _compile_ time is reasonable; at _run_ time is just plain ridiculous except for some ultra-specialised niches (eg. Web applets). Computer scientists have gone to the "cycles are cheap" model - ESR's coding guidelines explicitly say this. Back in the real world, performance is important! A 0.1s delay for a menu to open is acceptable, a 0.5s delay is not. A search taking 10s is acceptable, a search taking a minute or so isn't.
And why these features? Bcos it's a "beautiful thing" for a _coder_. No mention ANYWHERE of the user. Most users WON'T change their app skins, WON'T run the application on 3 different platforms at once. Most users just want something that works. If they have to download it, they want it to be a fairly small code size. If they have to use it all the time, they want it to work at a reasonable speed. A typical computer scientist works at a university (student/postgrad/lecturer) and runs his programs on a mainframe, or works in business and runs his programs on the latest hardware; they're likely to have a hot PC at home too. A typical home user buys a low-end PC (maybe 300 MHz) with a small amount of RAM. It's not acceptable for the computer scientist to say "Well it works fine on mine". You end up with exactly the same problems of platform-dependency in that a percentage of users just can't run it; this time though, the dependency isn't on architecture/manufacturer but on how much you can afford to spend on your PC.
This gives the odd situation of an "upper-class" program. Only those who are rich enough can run it; if you don't have the money to buy a high-spec machine, you get a definitely second-class performance out of the program. And it keeps the hardware manufacturers rubbing their hands with glee.
Mozilla was intended to be a replacement to a buggy, bloated and over-featured browser. What's emerged is a buggy, bloated and over-featured browser. Tell me again why anyone bothered?
Grab.
Too easy, man. Troll city...
Evidence pointing away from evolution?! There's arguments about _how_ it happens, but the only argument about _whether_ it happens is coming from the religious side, who'd rather believe 3000-year old folk myths. AFAIK, in every conflict between religion and science, religion has come off second-best after a lot of screaming and kicking of feet (and, incidentally, killing ppl).
Anyway, the only fossils we see are those which (a) die in a muddy environment, (b) that mud has to be the right kind to preserve it, (c) that muddy environment gets turned into rocks, (d) those rocks end up somewhere we can see. If the proto-turtle lived in a place with acidic soil, no fossils will exist bcos the remains will have long since dissolved, or if it lived in somewhere which is now the middle of Siberia, there may be millions of fossils but we'll never see them.
In addition, the more common the animal was, the longer its species survived, and the wider the area the species covered, the more likely we are to find it. As an example, during the Industrial Revolution in the UK, evolution favoured black moths in a sooty environment, so within a few years most moths were black, but when industry cleaned up a bit more, the moths changed back to more natural colours. No-one is EVER likely to find a fossilised black moth, since they existed for such a short time-span in such a small area.
Grab.
Nope. Keyboards and flat panels are safe. Point is that monitors use a high voltage to scan the screen, which produces mucho electromagnetic signals to pick up - quite possibly from enough distance that you don't have to be in the same building. This is at a fixed frequency which is fairly easy to pick up, and there's nothing much else of the same kind of emissions level to interfere with it.
Keyboards and screens use 5V or less to (respectively) send data down the cable and to scan the screen. This is happening at fixed frequencies, but it's such a low voltage that you'd need an extraordinarily sensitive receiver placed pretty damn close to the equipment. Point is that signal strength is proportional to the SQUARE of the voltage. A 5V signal doesn't produce 20 times less EM noise than a 100V signal, it produces 400 times less!
And if you did have this extraordinariny sensitive receiver, it'd be swamped by the broad-band noise generated by the processors, RAM, etc which are also giving off the same kind of emissions. Never mind the shielding which every bit of kit has to try and prevent it giving off EM emissions.
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> The OpenSSH 'product'?
Excuse me, did OpenSSH spring fully-formed from a random configuration of bits? Of course not. Ppl worked on it, made it, distributed it. Therefore it's a product, as in "something produced". The fact that it's free is neither here nor there; nor is the fact that bcos you haven't paid for it, you don't consider it a "product". As an example, you haven't paid for songs downloaded from Napster, but these songs are still the product of the music industry.
And why is there a requirement to know how the thing works? All the newbie user needs to know is that SSH improves security. Are you claiming that you don't deserve a secure system until you're reached a certain level of experience?!
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But he says he's tried to ask the guys leading OpenSSH and they've just ignored him. If they won't pay him attention, what choice has he got? They're bloody lucky he's had the courtesy to post on a forum first, instead of just sending in the lawyers.
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Same a couple of months back. I managed it in quite spectacular style - a brake lever came off and jammed the front wheel while I was doing full speed. I felt it come off, so I was prepared for exit and angled out of the toe clips just right. Over the handlebars, roll on one shoulder with my head down and back up in one piece - Jackie Chan would have been proud! Nasty graze on my shoulder and a chunk out of my helmet, but otherwise intact!
:-)
But it can't top my friend's one - I wouldn't have believed this, except I saw it happen. Cycling back home from uni, he didn't have lights on, and stupidly he was ahead of the rest of us who did have lights. A driver didn't see him and pulled out of a car park in front of him. He hit the car's front wheel square on, throwing him forward over the bonnet. But he had his toe clips on, so the bike came with him. The end result was that he did a complete forward roll over the car's bonnet, complete with bike, and LANDED ON HIS WHEELS on the other side! Unfortunately he was so shocked by the experience that he immediately fell over.
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Interconnection isn't so much of a problem - that's just an engineering issue, albeit a difficult one. What _is_ a problem is the energy expenditure to start and stop rotation. The only effective way of doing it is reaction jets (the same way rockets and satellites steer), and that requires a supply of gas to do it, which means a lot of resupply problems and lots more hugely expensive Shuttle launches.
Incidentally, stuff isn't left lying loose, it's all fairly well restrained (mostly with Velcro). If you left anything lying loose, there's too much chance of it getting somewhere it shouldn't - say, a floating spanner banging into a crucial button at the wrong time!
Why d'you need gravity anyway? There's those vibrating pad things that claim to stimulate your muscles, which the gullible use thinking that they're a substitute for exercise. Kit up with those, and you're in business.
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It's only completely zero at the very centre - the further away you get, the more gravity you've got. This rather limits how many zero-G experiments you can do, and zero-G experiments are the reason for having SS-Alpha.
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There's a good example recently of naked greed. Some journalist in the UK saw the tech stocks going up, heard about online stocks and thought he couldn't lose. He didn't know shit about computers, didn't own a computer, had never done anything like that in his life. But he still thought he could pick the winners. He remortgaged his house and stuff, and blew the entire stack in under a year - now he's likely to be out on his ass bcos he got greedy.
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Rarely, but it does happen. Examples below:-
1) Bladerunner. Nuff said.
2) Legend of Sleepy Hollow is nothing like the Washington Irving (?) story, but is still an impressive film.
3) Various Bond films already cited - Connery's films mostly worked, the others mostly didn't.
4) Tim Burton's Batman films are a bit of an advance on the comic strips (the other Batman films are better dropped in a big hole and lost).
5) The Crow was a good film made from a bit of a mess of a comic book - the book would be best described as "concept art" for the film.
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Emissions -- thank God I can pump out all the shite I want, and not let it bother me. "No snowflake in an avalanche believes it is responsible."
Incidentally, has anyone thought that this might actually be a _good_ idea? Say, anyone who's had friends/relatives run down by drunk and/or speeding drivers? Or who's been held up for hours in a traffic jam caused by an accident in fog? A system which reduces the speed limit for bad conditions, AND which increases the limit in perfect conditions - sounds good to me.
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Depends on what you think sci-fi is. If you think that descriptions of cool gadgets are more important than the story, then sure, a lot of sci-fi isn't.
:-)
But if you reckon that the sci-fi/fantasy aspect is there to present a different world in which things happen differently, and the actions and reactions of the characters in this environment, then Frankenstein fits perfectly. Taking Asimov's robots as an example, the actions of each robot's personality in following the Laws is the important element, not the fact of the robot's construction.
So it all hinges on your definition of sci-fi. Which really comes down to "sci-fi is what sci-fi writers write" - and good luck getting a better definition!
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Why bother pandering to paranoids who think the NYT is out to steal their souls (or even worse, their bandwidth). If you're that bothered, get a Hotmail account, or Bigfoot, or any other freeby mailbox.
You never get something for nothing. In this case, you get free news (instead of having to pay however much each day) in exchange for your user demographics and an email address - that's the deal, take it or leave it. If you want to leave it, then don't bitch that you can't get free news.
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Who's read Stephen King's Dark Tower books? Anyone thinking Blaine the Mono?
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By the mention of the gun, you've established that you're talking about the police in the US.
That may be the case over there. Over here in the UK, we don't have that kind of problem, or at least not to the same extent. Sure, there's been problems with racism and stuff like that, and still are. But these guys are (hopefully) in the minority - all I can say is that in the few times I've had contact with the police, I've been treated well.
And I'm not sure what the problem is - this is completely an issue where if you're innocent you've got nothing to worry about, and if you're guilty then you'll be found. I can't see a problem with finding a guilty person. The main crime that DNA evidence would be used for is rape, and currently many rapes are either not reported or do not lead to a conviction. I'd rather have a country-wide database (including myself) and know that a rapist WILL be caught - maybe the increased conviction rate would stop ppl doing it, or at least make them think twice. It's the same way that drink-driving has been cut down - if you're stopped then you're automatically breathalysed, and if you've been drinking then you WILL be found out, so ppl don't drink and drive any more.
And it's not like DNA evidence can be planted. It's the other way round from planting stuff on the suspect - here you'd actually have to plant the guy's DNA at the scene during the first couple of hours when they're collecting evident, and that just isn't possible.
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A modem requires 2 things. First off, you have to send and receive stuff down a phone line - that's the physical layer stuff. Then you have to decode what you've received using the protocol layer (V.90, etc), or encode what you're going to send out. Only after that do you get to the "PC software" bit where you just call it COM1 and forget about the details.
:-) from writing the code.
A true modem does the physical layer stuff AND the protocol layer stuff. Your PC can just throw stuff at the modem and not worry about how the modem's going to send it. This makes life very easy for the PC - it doesn't have to do any processing to send stuff, so it can devote all its resources to displaying web pages, playing Q3 Arena, running video decoders, etc.
A Winmodem only does the physical layer stuff, and that's the problem. See, the protocol layer is where the sophistication is - phone lines aren't naturally good at sending stuff much above 19K2, so there's all sorts of tricks used to try to make sure that your data gets there intact, and that you're receiving what the guy at the other end actually sent you. Winmodems shift all this processing onto the PC, instead of doing it in the modem card itself, and that drains a fair chunk of processing resources away from what you're actually wanting to do - Q3, etc.
And there's the problem that someone's got to sit down and write the driver software for the PC to do this protocol layer stuff. The problems here are that (a) it's a very complex piece of code; (b) it requires the driver to access physical locations in the PC's interface memory, which isn't good from the hardware abstraction side; and (c) it requires the author of the software to know EXACTLY how the Winmodem hardware works so that he/she can interface to it correctly, and Winmodem manufacturers aren't telling. There's drivers already written for Windows, but Linux drivers would have to be written by some volunteer, and the 3 BIG problems above will stop anyone (except a total hero, or a total loony
The reason the manufacturers do this is simply cost - you need something to do the processing for the protocol layer, which means an extra chip or several on the card, which makes the card cost more. By buying a Winmodem, you're trading off modem cost (maybe £25 for a card instead of £35, I don't know what that is in USD) against performance.
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Granted, there's nothing will repay what's been done to the victim. So what do you do - execute the offender? There's also ppl who never recover from having their purse snatched or having their house broken into, but there's not much you can do about it short of counselling for the victim.
As for the eroding privacy laws, we've got a case of that over in the UK. A newspaper released the names of some alleged sex offenders who'd served their sentences. A couple of days later, an innocent man had to go into hiding (he'd been threatened, attacked and had ppl smashing up his house and his car) bcos he happened to have the same name as one of these guys. You can't tell me this is right. Vigilante violence is NEVER, EVER a solution, unless you happen to believe that a person's human rights don't mean shit and you're prepared to stomp all over ethics, morals and laws. If your moral code says that it's OK to drag someone out of their house and beat them up bcos you THINK they MAY be a sex offender - well, you're a pretty sick individual yourself. And eroding ex-offenders' privacy is entirely vigilante-ism - it's just a threat to throw them to the wolves, and that makes you as guilty for supporting it as the thugs who actually do the beating-up.
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Would you care to quantify the "spiritually malnourished" line? Or "no innate sense of human worth"? This doesn't help your argument - ppl tend to be turned off when they see daft statements like that.
I happen to agree with you that the parents (or adoptive parents or whatever) are the best ppl to look after their kids; this is a full-time job, at least until the kids go to school, so one member of the family needs to stay at home. Whether it's the mum or the dad, doesn't matter.
The case for childcare comes with single-parent families. I don't have too much sympathy for women (especially young girls with low/no income) getting pregnant after one-night stands and deciding to keep it - children do cost money, and if you can't afford to look after a child properly (ie. at least provide basic food, clothing and a home of some description) then you shouldn't be having one. But ppl whose partner dies or leaves them - they need to work to provide for the child, and then you do need some form of daycare.
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Destruction is only "mutual" if you know who's done it and can respond. In the 60s, only two nations could wage nuclear war. Now we're getting close to double figures, maybe even past it (some places aren't saying). ICBMs can be tracked so you can respond, but the terrorist situation is a different matter. If it comes to that, a sub-launched nuke could have come from several sources too.
And suppose the bomb is a terrorist one. If Osama bin Laden explodes one in New York, who do you hit? He's a Saudi national, but he doesn't live there and the government there doesn't want him. Afghanistan? they claim he's not there, and in any case we wouldn't know where to target. Libya? they funded him and his organisation for a while, but they're getting back in touch with reality and distancing themselves from terrorism. Iraq? probably funded him, but it's doubtful he's there. Or suppose a Pakistani terrorist exploded a nuke in the US, and claimed responsibility. Would you nuke the whole of Pakistan, even though their government says it was a terrorist act and promises to find those responsible? Or even worse, what if the terrorist was an American?
Following on from this, is MAD justifiable? Suppose someone does bomb a city - does this then justify us levelling their entire country? Bear in mind that those responsible will be the military and government, or a terrorist group - either way they're only going to be a small minority and they're going to be prepared for the results. The guys who'll suffer will be the millions of normal folks who just happen to have been born in that town/city/country. Maybe the guys responsible for it are evil and must be wiped out, but if we respond in the same way, then that's just as bad. Our society is quite clear on this. If a drunk driver kills a family, for example, then the drunk driver goes to jail. We do NOT do "eye for an eye" and kill the driver's family in cold blood as revenge!
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John's article complained about the errors. Unfortunately most of his examples were of ppl who'd actually done stuff, and were now finding the consequences of it. Such as...
Forgot to cancel a comic subscription? Well how the !$%* is the comic company supposed to know you moved? Telepathy?
Hit a deer? Well if you live somewhere with lots of deer, drive slower. And one of those two deer-hits was your own fault.
The article was pretty valid - credit agencies are under-regulated. A similar situation exists in the UK - my sister got stiffed by the Halifax bank. It just needs a bit more regulation to sort it out, so you need to talk to your local elected representative and see what you can get swung for you.
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Hang on, aren't Fraunhofer the guys who originally came up with the MP3 format? So they're the guys that everyone (NullSoft, MS, Sony, etc) pays for licensing to produce an MP3 player? So they're the ones making a nice amount of money off the current MP3?
So can anyone guess how likely it is that Fraunhofer are trying to stop ppl using MP3 format? Back in the real world, it's a response to Ogg Vorbis etc - if you want to stay in front you have to keep producing new and innovative products. They've done it once with MP3 (radically better than anything else at the time), and they're trying to do the same again with MP3Pro. Where's the issue with this?
Incidentally, YOU won't be paying money for it directly. Nullsoft etc will pay to produce compatible players, but that's it.
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