"The only thing this kind of sociopathic requirement causes is hit-and-run troll posts."
Not so. This isn't about spreading the message. If you've ever seen the comment threads on some of the sites they call "hostile", you'll notice that commenters who try to push a creationist message don't just get ignored, they get hit back hard with a combination of mockery, direct insults, and point by point refutations in extreme detail. This is reliable.
This is not about preaching, this is about setting up an Us vs. Them attitude in the students, to make it easier to accept the irrational. After all, the other side is evil, they wouldn't have been so mean to them if they weren't, they must be wrong...
Most of the catastrophes so horrible that they are unpreventable also give very little warning. Rogue black holes or gamma ray bursts are the two that spring immediately to mind here, but there might be others that we have no idea how to prepare for because the hazard is coming from something incredibly dangerous that we haven't invented yet.
Since this is slashdot, perhaps the best analogy here would be offsite backups: you don't only make them when you can see a disaster coming.
Are you trying to evaluate the success of an idea based on what the general public think about it?
If you really want to make that comparison though, this is the equivalent of admitting that the old policy of throwing spent fuel rods out of the back of vans and leaving them lying around in the streets might not have been such a great idea, and perhaps we ought to be picking a few up and putting them in some of those fancy new deep storage warehouses where children can't play with them.
It pains me to have to say this, but I think the people who propose dumping liquid co2 under pressure into old oil wells have the right idea. We don't have the capacity at the moment to deal with the massive amounts of co2 that these machine trees would crank out, not to do anything useful with it, and biofuel plants would take a hell of a lot of time to set up.
Burying the gas has the downside of risking a massive poisonous cloud of doom if there's ever a leak, but at least once the leak disperses you're no worse off than you were before, the gas is just back in the atmosphere and you have to collect it all again. The upside of the idea is that in a century or so once we have the tech to do something truly useful and sensible with our massive stock of co2, it's all in one place and can be recovered easily.
Draining it from the air, which we only just have the technological capability to do on a large scale, then shoving it under the sea into a place where we'd have no hope of cleaning it up if something went wrong, is not a good move. None of the possible options are good moves. Storage is the least bad move.
I have tried to play plenty of.mkv files, and have yet to see a single one that was encoded correctly. I don't care if the container is technically excellent, if the software people are using to make the damn things is not going to let them make working files I'm not going to want the files, I'm not going to want the format.
Collisions among the scrap rapidly scatter it out to make a mess of all the useful orbits, and it starts breaking stuff that we'd prefer to be unbroken.
A lot of the effects that Planck is looking for are extremely subtle, weak signals. I'm not sure how signal and noise compare in this case, but if they're comparable we will have to hope that heliopause effects are predictable enough to be cancelled out. One of the major objectives of Planck is to look for remnant signals resulting from gravity waves shortly after the inflation phase, and this could be not just weak but a localised signal, so small scale features of the heliopause may matter in this case.
Would have been nice to find this out before ESA launched their shiny new Planck telescope to study the CMBR.
Perhaps Planck2, or whatever the next model is called, will have to travel outside the solar system to get a clear view. If so, we'll be waiting for a very long time for results from it.
This has happened to me. I've got an old laptop from my brother that one of the local repair shops wrote off as being unfixable because it looked as though it had a bios error. I got hold of it and took it to a second shop who, after taking it to bits and poking about, told me that it was hung because something had been spilled on the keyboard and it was jamming on a key combo that locked up the boot sequence. Imagine the word "something" being said complete with emphasis, raised eyebrow and knowing look. I didn't want to ask, just mumbled something about it being my brother's machine and whatever it was must have been his fault.
All in all, I'm glad the keyboard got replaced before I touched it again.
There is and probably always will be some form of ownership of information. It's right that there should be. The problem arises when people have wildly unrealistic ideas about what the consequences of ownership are.
If they weren't information they wouldn't be so easy to copy and piracy wouldn't be an issue. In software and film there is no one single definitive original from which all the copies are derived, they aren't like a painting that later becomes scanned and digitised. This is increasingly true of professionally recorded music too, single performance leading to single recording just doesn't happen.
All of these things are created as information, the creators shouldn't be surprised when they are ended up sold as information too.
Nobody has a right to be paid for work. If somebody has spent an amazing amount of time and effort producing something useless and trivial, I have a right not to buy it. Following on from that, I don't then have any right to claim the useless item having not paid for it, but that is a seperate issue.
There should be a mechanism by which it is possible to make money from information, but don't confuse the issue by calling it a right.
I consider piracy to be by far the lesser of two evils. There's no sensible way that it can be stopped, so society should learn to live with it. I don't think it will be a very difficult transition, even if it has to be taken to an extreme where the only cash a film maker can get hold of for their art is government grants. Only films and software are the tricky cases, almost all other forms of information already follow a model like this, such as scientific research, or are easy enough to produce that people would continue to make them even without payment, such as music or images.
There have been one or two ideas coming out of string theory that give similar possibilities, stuff like adjusting the size of dimensions in order to change the properties of space. All but one share the same problem, of having to propogate an effect ahead of you at faster than lightspeed locally.
The exception was an idea coming out of the concept that there might be something acting a bit like an extra extended space dimension that was only accessable to gravity. If that were true you could curl the bubble that the ship was in around in this extra dimension and partially ahead of itself, using conventional mass outside of the space being affected to give the effect of repulsive gravity. I don't think anybody takes that hypothesis seriously anymore though.
Positive mass can form black holes as it is self-attracting. If you tried to do the same with negative mass, which has repulsive gravity, it would have an infinite force of repulsion on itself. Not a stable structure.
My reasoning is: I don't believe FTL can exist as it could lead to paradoxes, and as negative mass could be used to create FTL it follows that I don't believe it can exist either.
It should be mentioned that this is not changed by what I said above about warp drives, because that is not the only way that negative mass could be used to create paradoxes. A more practical method would be to use it to stabilise wormholes for example, which could then be used for either FTL or time travel.
This isn't anything new, it's an old idea being analysed more rigorously with quantum mechanics.
The problem is that in order to have a region of spacetime moving in relation to the outside universe, space has to expand behind it and contract in front, which demands negative and positive gravity in those regions. You need a large negative mass held in place in front of you, and a large positive mass behind. (We'll leave aside the problem that nobody has demonstrated the existence of negative mass, I personally don't believe it could exist precisely because it would enable FTL, but that's seperate to this point.) What you have to achieve is to have the centre of gravitation of the two masses at the centre of the edges of distortion. It means inevitably that half of the negative mass you are using has to stick out of the bubble ahead of you into normal unwarped space, and so that in order to keep generating the field ahead of you, it has to travel faster than light in its local frame. That is strictly not allowed.
This is the closest they've got to getting their act together since the end of Apollo. Giving up all heavy lift capability was a mistake, and leaving to rot all the infrastructure that could support it was worse. Maybe for the next generation of spaceships they can do everything right, but for this time round it will be a major achievement if they ever manage to get the Ares V to fly at all.
I have for a long time considered the market for images online to be where the markets for all other media is heading.
It would seem thoroughly ridiculous for a copyright owner of a photograph to complain that somebody is viewing it without permission, but there usually is some form of licensing if somebody is using that image in a commercial product. In this way, a handful of very talented producers can make some money, a few other less famous artists can make money on commissioned images, but for the most part pictures are copied freely because everybody recognises that most of them are valued so low that it isn't worth the bother.
This isn't about ease of copying a file, it is about ease of producing it. The cost to produce pictures dropped at about the same rate that the cost of copying them did, and so with few exceptions, nobody complains about image piracy. For sanity to return to the world, the same has to happen for music and film. The technology needs to exist to allow anybody with a bit of free time, moderate talent, and an idea to make whatever media they want, with no money being needed.
Music has been heading in this direction for a long time, and as a result there are large numbers of artists out there who don't really care what happens to their work as they just made it for fun.
Once you find that you're not paying for the recording studio building, or the disk manufacturing hardware, or even the bandwidth, you are instead paying for the talent, it's not long before you realise that there are a lot of talented people out there and not all of them are going to want to charge you money to see what they've created.
Slashdot Mirror
"The only thing this kind of sociopathic requirement causes is hit-and-run troll posts." Not so. This isn't about spreading the message. If you've ever seen the comment threads on some of the sites they call "hostile", you'll notice that commenters who try to push a creationist message don't just get ignored, they get hit back hard with a combination of mockery, direct insults, and point by point refutations in extreme detail. This is reliable.
This is not about preaching, this is about setting up an Us vs. Them attitude in the students, to make it easier to accept the irrational. After all, the other side is evil, they wouldn't have been so mean to them if they weren't, they must be wrong...
Does it count as being invented here if over 90% of the work done on it was before the company was bought and became part of "here"?
So I can say "half times less" when I mean double?
A system will use one times its own power use. One times less power use means using zero power. Five times less power use means using negative power.
Clearly nuclear powered with an overall electrical output enough to supply four other units.
CentOS has 0.64 of a user? and 0.36 of a user seperate?
Are we talking unreasonably sharp install media here?
Most of the catastrophes so horrible that they are unpreventable also give very little warning. Rogue black holes or gamma ray bursts are the two that spring immediately to mind here, but there might be others that we have no idea how to prepare for because the hazard is coming from something incredibly dangerous that we haven't invented yet.
Since this is slashdot, perhaps the best analogy here would be offsite backups: you don't only make them when you can see a disaster coming.
Are you trying to evaluate the success of an idea based on what the general public think about it?
If you really want to make that comparison though, this is the equivalent of admitting that the old policy of throwing spent fuel rods out of the back of vans and leaving them lying around in the streets might not have been such a great idea, and perhaps we ought to be picking a few up and putting them in some of those fancy new deep storage warehouses where children can't play with them.
It pains me to have to say this, but I think the people who propose dumping liquid co2 under pressure into old oil wells have the right idea. We don't have the capacity at the moment to deal with the massive amounts of co2 that these machine trees would crank out, not to do anything useful with it, and biofuel plants would take a hell of a lot of time to set up. Burying the gas has the downside of risking a massive poisonous cloud of doom if there's ever a leak, but at least once the leak disperses you're no worse off than you were before, the gas is just back in the atmosphere and you have to collect it all again. The upside of the idea is that in a century or so once we have the tech to do something truly useful and sensible with our massive stock of co2, it's all in one place and can be recovered easily. Draining it from the air, which we only just have the technological capability to do on a large scale, then shoving it under the sea into a place where we'd have no hope of cleaning it up if something went wrong, is not a good move. None of the possible options are good moves. Storage is the least bad move.
VLC doesn't have the feature that I want most of all - low processor use. VLC can't play video smoothly on a 1GHz processor.
I have tried to play plenty of .mkv files, and have yet to see a single one that was encoded correctly. I don't care if the container is technically excellent, if the software people are using to make the damn things is not going to let them make working files I'm not going to want the files, I'm not going to want the format.
Collisions among the scrap rapidly scatter it out to make a mess of all the useful orbits, and it starts breaking stuff that we'd prefer to be unbroken.
A lot of the effects that Planck is looking for are extremely subtle, weak signals. I'm not sure how signal and noise compare in this case, but if they're comparable we will have to hope that heliopause effects are predictable enough to be cancelled out. One of the major objectives of Planck is to look for remnant signals resulting from gravity waves shortly after the inflation phase, and this could be not just weak but a localised signal, so small scale features of the heliopause may matter in this case.
Would have been nice to find this out before ESA launched their shiny new Planck telescope to study the CMBR.
Perhaps Planck2, or whatever the next model is called, will have to travel outside the solar system to get a clear view. If so, we'll be waiting for a very long time for results from it.
This has happened to me. I've got an old laptop from my brother that one of the local repair shops wrote off as being unfixable because it looked as though it had a bios error. I got hold of it and took it to a second shop who, after taking it to bits and poking about, told me that it was hung because something had been spilled on the keyboard and it was jamming on a key combo that locked up the boot sequence. Imagine the word "something" being said complete with emphasis, raised eyebrow and knowing look. I didn't want to ask, just mumbled something about it being my brother's machine and whatever it was must have been his fault.
All in all, I'm glad the keyboard got replaced before I touched it again.
but only on hardware that implements Halt and Catch Fire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire
There is and probably always will be some form of ownership of information. It's right that there should be. The problem arises when people have wildly unrealistic ideas about what the consequences of ownership are.
If they weren't information they wouldn't be so easy to copy and piracy wouldn't be an issue. In software and film there is no one single definitive original from which all the copies are derived, they aren't like a painting that later becomes scanned and digitised. This is increasingly true of professionally recorded music too, single performance leading to single recording just doesn't happen.
All of these things are created as information, the creators shouldn't be surprised when they are ended up sold as information too.
Nobody has a right to be paid for work. If somebody has spent an amazing amount of time and effort producing something useless and trivial, I have a right not to buy it. Following on from that, I don't then have any right to claim the useless item having not paid for it, but that is a seperate issue.
There should be a mechanism by which it is possible to make money from information, but don't confuse the issue by calling it a right.
I consider piracy to be by far the lesser of two evils. There's no sensible way that it can be stopped, so society should learn to live with it. I don't think it will be a very difficult transition, even if it has to be taken to an extreme where the only cash a film maker can get hold of for their art is government grants. Only films and software are the tricky cases, almost all other forms of information already follow a model like this, such as scientific research, or are easy enough to produce that people would continue to make them even without payment, such as music or images.
There have been one or two ideas coming out of string theory that give similar possibilities, stuff like adjusting the size of dimensions in order to change the properties of space. All but one share the same problem, of having to propogate an effect ahead of you at faster than lightspeed locally.
The exception was an idea coming out of the concept that there might be something acting a bit like an extra extended space dimension that was only accessable to gravity. If that were true you could curl the bubble that the ship was in around in this extra dimension and partially ahead of itself, using conventional mass outside of the space being affected to give the effect of repulsive gravity. I don't think anybody takes that hypothesis seriously anymore though.
Positive mass can form black holes as it is self-attracting. If you tried to do the same with negative mass, which has repulsive gravity, it would have an infinite force of repulsion on itself. Not a stable structure.
My reasoning is: I don't believe FTL can exist as it could lead to paradoxes, and as negative mass could be used to create FTL it follows that I don't believe it can exist either.
It should be mentioned that this is not changed by what I said above about warp drives, because that is not the only way that negative mass could be used to create paradoxes. A more practical method would be to use it to stabilise wormholes for example, which could then be used for either FTL or time travel.
This isn't anything new, it's an old idea being analysed more rigorously with quantum mechanics.
The problem is that in order to have a region of spacetime moving in relation to the outside universe, space has to expand behind it and contract in front, which demands negative and positive gravity in those regions. You need a large negative mass held in place in front of you, and a large positive mass behind. (We'll leave aside the problem that nobody has demonstrated the existence of negative mass, I personally don't believe it could exist precisely because it would enable FTL, but that's seperate to this point.) What you have to achieve is to have the centre of gravitation of the two masses at the centre of the edges of distortion. It means inevitably that half of the negative mass you are using has to stick out of the bubble ahead of you into normal unwarped space, and so that in order to keep generating the field ahead of you, it has to travel faster than light in its local frame. That is strictly not allowed.
This is the closest they've got to getting their act together since the end of Apollo. Giving up all heavy lift capability was a mistake, and leaving to rot all the infrastructure that could support it was worse. Maybe for the next generation of spaceships they can do everything right, but for this time round it will be a major achievement if they ever manage to get the Ares V to fly at all.
I have for a long time considered the market for images online to be where the markets for all other media is heading. It would seem thoroughly ridiculous for a copyright owner of a photograph to complain that somebody is viewing it without permission, but there usually is some form of licensing if somebody is using that image in a commercial product. In this way, a handful of very talented producers can make some money, a few other less famous artists can make money on commissioned images, but for the most part pictures are copied freely because everybody recognises that most of them are valued so low that it isn't worth the bother. This isn't about ease of copying a file, it is about ease of producing it. The cost to produce pictures dropped at about the same rate that the cost of copying them did, and so with few exceptions, nobody complains about image piracy. For sanity to return to the world, the same has to happen for music and film. The technology needs to exist to allow anybody with a bit of free time, moderate talent, and an idea to make whatever media they want, with no money being needed. Music has been heading in this direction for a long time, and as a result there are large numbers of artists out there who don't really care what happens to their work as they just made it for fun. Once you find that you're not paying for the recording studio building, or the disk manufacturing hardware, or even the bandwidth, you are instead paying for the talent, it's not long before you realise that there are a lot of talented people out there and not all of them are going to want to charge you money to see what they've created.