I might have been living under a rock, but I never thought that the possibility of bacteria living in the atmosphere far from the ground and from most of the organisms, was a real possibility. I did a quick search and I couldn't find how high we assume that the biosphere extends at the moment, but I suspect that these bacteria are living almost isolated up there. If that is true, it opens the possibility for life in the atmosphere of Venus, and in the atmosphere of the gas giants. Some people have suggested that the latter is possible, but since this discovery they are one more step away from fiction and closer to real possibility.
However, it only shows that life can exist and survive in these conditions, floating freely in a gas, which is not exactly a surprise. And since it is possible, because of the abundance (or existance?) of life on our planet and it's tendency to spread to every environment it can adapt to, it's natural that it got there, too. But nothing more -- the condition on Venus are quite different, the chemical composition of the atmosphere is different, and the conditions for life survival don't tell us much about the conditions under life can spring into existence.
One of the articles speculated about extraterrestrial origin, I don't buy that either. It is certainly possible, but the thriving biosphere just beneath it is certainly a better and simpler explanation than a hypothetical extraterrestrial source.
One thing that isn't mention in any of the articles I skimmed through... They say we suspected that UV-resistance was impossible in any life as we know it, and there is no word on if and how different these bacteria were from the life as we know it. My suspicion would be that there would be no difference, and they would just have some interesting mechanism to protect them from UV light for which we just didn't think of. Which would still be cool, but I fear that extraterrestrial sources wouldn't be much likely. Unfortunately, again nothing groundbreaking.
However, it is still one of the most interesting discoveries I read about in the last several years. Both the UV resistance, and the fact that there is life up there were unexpected. And both would certainly have many implications, and I still think that this is huge news.
I'm not entirely sure about the meaning of "redundant" in English, but in my native language the word for redundant also means "unnecessary". While I wouldn't agree with such moderation of the grandparent post, but wouldn't an unnecessary and obvious post deserve a "redundant" moderation? If the information in the post is obvious to everyone, isn't it already redundant?
I guess it wasn't that secret after all... Anyone with access to the original pictures could discover the base, and as you mention the people at Google were given at least a huge hint that it is lying there.
I wouldn't call anything secret is a whole bunch of people with no connection to the base in question that have the information to find it. Sure, with more eyes looking something hidden might become easily uncovered, I guess that's part of the reason they requested the blurring, but once they made that hint, the millions of eyes are no longer necessary.
This means that the location wasn't hidden well enough from people that must not know where it is, Google just 'uncovered' it to the rest of us. Not a big deal.
And how is the ability to exercise a freedom which you weren't given, but should have been, is bad for you? Of couse that if an essential freedom is missing, anonymity won't give it back to you, but it will still give you the ability to exercise it.
Of course, after reading the first half of TFA, I don't see what anonymity you're talking about. It's about sharing files only with people you want. It's a cool feature, which I would find usefull, but it seems useless if you want anonymity.
From Wikipedia's article on Pain of Salvation - BE:
'Another song consists entirely of voice messages to be left on "God's answering machine". To approach this song, the band asks the subscribers of their newsletter to call a certain phone number and say what ever they would want to say to God.'
You can even listen to the result on YouTube: Vocari Dei
I think that trading one monopoly (MS) for another (Linux) is not a good thing, even if I like Linux.
Just to remind you that there is a difference between a free system and a proprietary one when we are talking about monopoly.
First, the word monopoly is connected to the market, and is tied to the vendor, not the program in question -- claiming that GNU/Linux has a monopoly would be like claiming that electricity has monopoly in the power market. It simply doesn't lead to any of the problems usually associated with monopoly in economics that I've studied or read about. It's about the _vendors_, not about the products, goods or programs.
However, if there was a monopoly of a single vendor of services for GNU/Linux (for example, Canonical), which is, given the nature of free software, impossible, it would still cause a lot less trouble than what you get from monopoly with abusive anti-competitive practices and vendor lock-in. In your hypothetical situation, you aren't replacing your broken leg with a broken arm, you are replacing it with a painful bruise.
Well, Microsoft have done all the things listed in the summary, but I fail to see how does that make Ballmer's statement incorrect? Getting something right is still getting something right, whether you do it seldomly or your motives lie inside your pocket. And iPhone is more locked up than anything Microsoft has ever done, so his statement is not even hypocritical.
Given that they are already altering the natural motion of the pendulum with a motor, couldn't they simply attach a motor that makes the pendulum move the way that is needed to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth to construct even shorter one? It would be cheating, but... after all, all that matters is to convince the ones watching the experiment, right?:D
Why not? The more crap goes into the EULA, the better. If they try to enforce the crap inside them, they'll manifest how low these EULAs are worth, and certainly undermine their value more and more in the eyes of everyone. And I doubt these parts are enforcable.
Who says this? Music is highly subjective matter, yes. Science might not be, but a lot of people use their personal beliefs when making decisions about science, thus putting the subjective part in the decisions. Sometimes the people that come to judge science are just objective as those who would be judging music. You know, while this sucks, and science could certainly be doing better, it kinda works.
Applying this system to music might produce better results than what we currently have. Yeah, they will be far from perfect, and you already stated one of the reasons. Yeah, you are right, it might turn to be a disaster, shitty musicians with no talent getting the largest piece of the pie, while the most talented struggling and working hard to get more fans to support them. What?.. Wait... We're already there... I don't know, currently the situations sucks so much, that I would suspect that if you put measures generated by a random number generator, things would actually get better.
My opinion is this. The tax is not to compensate musicians and give be fair. It is to make the industry a bit more happy and give a solution to the "but how would the musicians get paid?" problem. I've never read anything that actually convinced me that this problem really exists, and I don't agree with the way it is stated, but such a tax gives a "solution" to it. Some money going to the wrong person, not such a big deal, it's happening all the time. That would be fine *if* it gives us more freedom to share and remix music, which in turn might slowly lead out of this rotten situation we're in.
In regard to the point of your post, this could be stated the following way: if the taxation leads to more file sharing, it would mean that while the industry would still get the money, it will lose the control. More talented artists without support from the industry would get more publicity. And people will listen more to the music they like and less to the music they get from the industry. That's already happening with or without the tax. Very slowly, though.
When you accidently delete libc, and cp is not statically linked, cp from the console is not cutting it for real, but an open mc window would be just fine.
Nokia doesn't give a shit about the Free Software bullshit (and neither does anyone else of relevance). [...] They have more important things to do than suck up to Stallman.
Someone managed to drop the anchor in the wrong place several times year ago, and now I'm confident that some big-jawed sea monster gnawed them. Nobody would be foolish enough to assume that the cables were cut intentionally, right?
So the best explanation we got so far is obviously wrong. Isn't there any other source of information about this, leaked documents, analysis based on the ship identification, pure speculations... Hell, even articles from conspiracy nuts would be better than what we already have.
The news that someone cut cables again struck me, but do we have any information about who did it and why? I'm quite more interested in this, than what it is linked.
There was a speculation about this here, our obvious options include sabotage and installation of spying equipment. But somehow I can't buy any of them.
That's interesting, but I've had a 64-bit Java plugin installed on my Gentoo for several months now, with the java-overlay and the icedtea JDK. I've not used it much, but I've accessed several sites using Java with it. They say that the plugin is missing functionality, but I've never had any problem, when I needed it.
Now, if only Gentoo guys would fix OOo broken compilation with icedtea...:)
Wine is also a solution. Ran as a different user, of course. During the last few years once I had to run a small program, which I suspected to be carrying malware. I simply created another user on my machine and ran the program with Wine as that user.
The ~/.wine of the user immediately got filled with all kind of crap, the program what it was supposed to do correctly, while obviously filling the Windows system folders with all kind of malicious files. So I simply erased this folder and I had my job done.
Of course, Wine is not sandboxed, the malware can access the network, which is why you disable the network for this user with iptables, also it can read all of your disk, which is not much of a problem, and write in all places there is world write permissions (such as/tmp). I don't believe the malware will try to fill/tmp, or open your soundcard, or anything like that, but for files you can run find before you go to sleep to be sure that there is no crap left in the morning.
That would be just meaningless. And well, it will would render the anti-circumvention clause completely useless. That sounds like a very good reason to do it, I'm all for it.
Yes... Apart from the seemingly unneeded TLD, am I the only one who thinks that this isn't the way that 'internet communications' should work? I would always go with communication networks having similar architecture to email, like XMPP and SIP.
These days the central point doesn't play such a big role in these services, I would like to see gazillion communication service providers, like we already have with email, ISPs running their XMPP and/or SIP services, popular sites doing the same, and you running your own.
There are already ones that do so, and they seem to be growing in number. What, should they all get a.tel TLD? And should current email providers get a.tel TLD? Should everyone email, IM or VoIP address end in.tel? In the end, will there be _anyone_ with an email or VoIP address ending in.tel?
I would say this, the guy should simply download the book and not trouble his mind with this issue at all.
The thing is, ethical issues are important _only_ when you are causing harm, and your actions actually have an effect on the market. While you might hear different opinions on whether unauthorized copying is ethical or not, in this case it is simply obvious that getting the etext for free is the right way to go. Come on, the book is out of print.
Buying the used hardcover book might be a good idea anyway, if you like owning it, but it's completely unrelated. In case like this one, I wouldn't go and order it from Amazon, but if I ever find a used copy while at some used book shop, I'll get it.
Slashdot Mirror
Or you could delete it, and it could miraculously remain on a snapshot of your home file system.
The news is indeed very interesting.
I might have been living under a rock, but I never thought that the possibility of bacteria living in the atmosphere far from the ground and from most of the organisms, was a real possibility. I did a quick search and I couldn't find how high we assume that the biosphere extends at the moment, but I suspect that these bacteria are living almost isolated up there. If that is true, it opens the possibility for life in the atmosphere of Venus, and in the atmosphere of the gas giants. Some people have suggested that the latter is possible, but since this discovery they are one more step away from fiction and closer to real possibility.
However, it only shows that life can exist and survive in these conditions, floating freely in a gas, which is not exactly a surprise. And since it is possible, because of the abundance (or existance?) of life on our planet and it's tendency to spread to every environment it can adapt to, it's natural that it got there, too. But nothing more -- the condition on Venus are quite different, the chemical composition of the atmosphere is different, and the conditions for life survival don't tell us much about the conditions under life can spring into existence.
One of the articles speculated about extraterrestrial origin, I don't buy that either. It is certainly possible, but the thriving biosphere just beneath it is certainly a better and simpler explanation than a hypothetical extraterrestrial source.
One thing that isn't mention in any of the articles I skimmed through... They say we suspected that UV-resistance was impossible in any life as we know it, and there is no word on if and how different these bacteria were from the life as we know it. My suspicion would be that there would be no difference, and they would just have some interesting mechanism to protect them from UV light for which we just didn't think of. Which would still be cool, but I fear that extraterrestrial sources wouldn't be much likely. Unfortunately, again nothing groundbreaking.
However, it is still one of the most interesting discoveries I read about in the last several years. Both the UV resistance, and the fact that there is life up there were unexpected. And both would certainly have many implications, and I still think that this is huge news.
I'm not entirely sure about the meaning of "redundant" in English, but in my native language the word for redundant also means "unnecessary". While I wouldn't agree with such moderation of the grandparent post, but wouldn't an unnecessary and obvious post deserve a "redundant" moderation? If the information in the post is obvious to everyone, isn't it already redundant?
I was once modded -5: Anti-funny, but that on another Slashdot. You should see how this story looked there, when they discovered the top antiquark.
I guess it wasn't that secret after all... Anyone with access to the original pictures could discover the base, and as you mention the people at Google were given at least a huge hint that it is lying there.
I wouldn't call anything secret is a whole bunch of people with no connection to the base in question that have the information to find it. Sure, with more eyes looking something hidden might become easily uncovered, I guess that's part of the reason they requested the blurring, but once they made that hint, the millions of eyes are no longer necessary.
This means that the location wasn't hidden well enough from people that must not know where it is, Google just 'uncovered' it to the rest of us. Not a big deal.
And how is the ability to exercise a freedom which you weren't given, but should have been, is bad for you? Of couse that if an essential freedom is missing, anonymity won't give it back to you, but it will still give you the ability to exercise it.
Of course, after reading the first half of TFA, I don't see what anonymity you're talking about. It's about sharing files only with people you want. It's a cool feature, which I would find usefull, but it seems useless if you want anonymity.
This has already been done.
From Wikipedia's article on Pain of Salvation - BE:
'Another song consists entirely of voice messages to be left on "God's answering machine". To approach this song, the band asks the subscribers of their newsletter to call a certain phone number and say what ever they would want to say to God.'
You can even listen to the result on YouTube: Vocari Dei
I think that trading one monopoly (MS) for another (Linux) is not a good thing, even if I like Linux.
Just to remind you that there is a difference between a free system and a proprietary one when we are talking about monopoly.
First, the word monopoly is connected to the market, and is tied to the vendor, not the program in question -- claiming that GNU/Linux has a monopoly would be like claiming that electricity has monopoly in the power market. It simply doesn't lead to any of the problems usually associated with monopoly in economics that I've studied or read about. It's about the _vendors_, not about the products, goods or programs.
However, if there was a monopoly of a single vendor of services for GNU/Linux (for example, Canonical), which is, given the nature of free software, impossible, it would still cause a lot less trouble than what you get from monopoly with abusive anti-competitive practices and vendor lock-in. In your hypothetical situation, you aren't replacing your broken leg with a broken arm, you are replacing it with a painful bruise.
Well, Microsoft have done all the things listed in the summary, but I fail to see how does that make Ballmer's statement incorrect? Getting something right is still getting something right, whether you do it seldomly or your motives lie inside your pocket. And iPhone is more locked up than anything Microsoft has ever done, so his statement is not even hypocritical.
Well, your plan's got fifty percent chance to fuck up when the court observes your defence.
Given that they are already altering the natural motion of the pendulum with a motor, couldn't they simply attach a motor that makes the pendulum move the way that is needed to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth to construct even shorter one? It would be cheating, but... after all, all that matters is to convince the ones watching the experiment, right? :D
Why not? The more crap goes into the EULA, the better. If they try to enforce the crap inside them, they'll manifest how low these EULAs are worth, and certainly undermine their value more and more in the eyes of everyone. And I doubt these parts are enforcable.
That's exactly what it's all about. When you seed from the cloud, the torrents run better.
Who says this? Music is highly subjective matter, yes. Science might not be, but a lot of people use their personal beliefs when making decisions about science, thus putting the subjective part in the decisions. Sometimes the people that come to judge science are just objective as those who would be judging music. You know, while this sucks, and science could certainly be doing better, it kinda works.
Applying this system to music might produce better results than what we currently have. Yeah, they will be far from perfect, and you already stated one of the reasons. Yeah, you are right, it might turn to be a disaster, shitty musicians with no talent getting the largest piece of the pie, while the most talented struggling and working hard to get more fans to support them. What?.. Wait... We're already there... I don't know, currently the situations sucks so much, that I would suspect that if you put measures generated by a random number generator, things would actually get better.
My opinion is this. The tax is not to compensate musicians and give be fair. It is to make the industry a bit more happy and give a solution to the "but how would the musicians get paid?" problem. I've never read anything that actually convinced me that this problem really exists, and I don't agree with the way it is stated, but such a tax gives a "solution" to it. Some money going to the wrong person, not such a big deal, it's happening all the time. That would be fine *if* it gives us more freedom to share and remix music, which in turn might slowly lead out of this rotten situation we're in.
In regard to the point of your post, this could be stated the following way: if the taxation leads to more file sharing, it would mean that while the industry would still get the money, it will lose the control. More talented artists without support from the industry would get more publicity. And people will listen more to the music they like and less to the music they get from the industry. That's already happening with or without the tax. Very slowly, though.
When you accidently delete libc, and cp is not statically linked, cp from the console is not cutting it for real, but an open mc window would be just fine.
Hey, you confused the shows, Blacky. I think we should chop your head off.
Nokia doesn't give a shit about the Free Software bullshit (and neither does anyone else of relevance). [...] They have more important things to do than suck up to Stallman.
Apart from being a corporate patron of the FSF, perhaps?
Who would see any use in killing a slashdotter?
The fact that it doesn't load UI and doesn't play music doesn't mean they aren't working perfectly fine. Apparently, they just gained sentience.
Someone managed to drop the anchor in the wrong place several times year ago, and now I'm confident that some big-jawed sea monster gnawed them. Nobody would be foolish enough to assume that the cables were cut intentionally, right?
So the best explanation we got so far is obviously wrong. Isn't there any other source of information about this, leaked documents, analysis based on the ship identification, pure speculations... Hell, even articles from conspiracy nuts would be better than what we already have.
The news that someone cut cables again struck me, but do we have any information about who did it and why? I'm quite more interested in this, than what it is linked.
There was a speculation about this here, our obvious options include sabotage and installation of spying equipment. But somehow I can't buy any of them.
So, whose ships were these?
That's interesting, but I've had a 64-bit Java plugin installed on my Gentoo for several months now, with the java-overlay and the icedtea JDK. I've not used it much, but I've accessed several sites using Java with it. They say that the plugin is missing functionality, but I've never had any problem, when I needed it.
Now, if only Gentoo guys would fix OOo broken compilation with icedtea... :)
Wine is also a solution. Ran as a different user, of course. During the last few years once I had to run a small program, which I suspected to be carrying malware. I simply created another user on my machine and ran the program with Wine as that user.
The ~/.wine of the user immediately got filled with all kind of crap, the program what it was supposed to do correctly, while obviously filling the Windows system folders with all kind of malicious files. So I simply erased this folder and I had my job done.
Of course, Wine is not sandboxed, the malware can access the network, which is why you disable the network for this user with iptables, also it can read all of your disk, which is not much of a problem, and write in all places there is world write permissions (such as /tmp). I don't believe the malware will try to fill /tmp, or open your soundcard, or anything like that, but for files you can run find before you go to sleep to be sure that there is no crap left in the morning.
That would be just meaningless. And well, it will would render the anti-circumvention clause completely useless. That sounds like a very good reason to do it, I'm all for it.
Yes... Apart from the seemingly unneeded TLD, am I the only one who thinks that this isn't the way that 'internet communications' should work? I would always go with communication networks having similar architecture to email, like XMPP and SIP.
These days the central point doesn't play such a big role in these services, I would like to see gazillion communication service providers, like we already have with email, ISPs running their XMPP and/or SIP services, popular sites doing the same, and you running your own.
There are already ones that do so, and they seem to be growing in number. What, should they all get a .tel TLD? And should current email providers get a .tel TLD? Should everyone email, IM or VoIP address end in .tel? In the end, will there be _anyone_ with an email or VoIP address ending in .tel?
Unethical? Really?
I would say this, the guy should simply download the book and not trouble his mind with this issue at all.
The thing is, ethical issues are important _only_ when you are causing harm, and your actions actually have an effect on the market. While you might hear different opinions on whether unauthorized copying is ethical or not, in this case it is simply obvious that getting the etext for free is the right way to go. Come on, the book is out of print.
Buying the used hardcover book might be a good idea anyway, if you like owning it, but it's completely unrelated. In case like this one, I wouldn't go and order it from Amazon, but if I ever find a used copy while at some used book shop, I'll get it.