Why should executable code be "pretty"? Nobody (except the rare reverse-engineer hacker) will ever look at it. Better to have it be correct and as efficient as possible (no matter how "ugly" that makes it).
Let's face it, the allure of this game isn't the BMX simulation, it's the real time full-physics hyper-realistic simulation of young firm bouncing breasts. Frankly, they'd probably sell better if they dropped the 'game' part and sold it as 3D Studio Max add-on.
Even if you agree with that, most people would agree that the value of a 70 year old movie is close to zero.
Yes, but the value of a movie in the public domain is negative to a movie studio. If people have a vast library of public domain movies that they can view for free, they'll be less likely to spend money on new movies. The studios benefit by keeping old movies out of circulation, as it reduces competition for their product.
The problem I see with this is that it/would/ prevent the whole flying-into-buildings thing, but wouldn't really prevent hijackings
Preventing the flying-into-buildings thing alone is a damn sight better than the current system, and I would argue that it would partially prevent "old-style" hijackings as well -- there is nothing to physically force the pilots to do what the terrorists want. Yes, the terrorists could still threaten to torture passengers or blow up the plane, but in the final equation, the pilots could always just turn off the intercom and land at the nearest airport. These days, I think even if passengers were killed, this would be considered acceptable to allowing terrorists any control over an aircraft.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen Saving Private Ryan, so I can't comment on that.... but I think a plane the size of a 747 could probably carry a few thousand extra pounds.:^)
Of course, there is another option -- one that doesn't cost anybody their civil liberties, and would actually be effective against plane hijaakers...
Simply build a thick metal wall between the pilot's cabin and the rest of the plane. Yes, you'd have to take out a few rows in first class to accomodate a separate pilot's restroom and a separate door so the pilots could get in and out, but once that was done, sneaking weapons onto a plane wouldn't do a terrorist much more good than sneaking them into, say, a shopping mall. The terrorists wouldn't be able to take control of the plane, even if the pilots wanted them to.
They're stigma-free. Mention hydrogen and the first thing many people think of is the hindenburg.
For what it's worth, I really think the above is a non-issue. The people who are technically savvy will understand the truth of the matter easily enough when it is told to them (if they don't know already), and the non-technical types will become comfortable with hydrogen in a few years, once they have seen enough people using it with no major accidents. Remember how things went with air travel -- initially people were afraid of it, but now most people don't give it a second thought.
Go with humans, who are known fallable and subjective, or machines, who are known fallable and too objective.
Unfortunately, the machines aren't objective either; they have the biases of their programmers and operators built into them. An example of this from the article was the speeder-catcher-cameras that were rigged to cite drivers who weren't actually going above the speed limit, in order to generate more revenue for the city.
The easiest way to crack encyption is to avoid cracking the encryption and attack the installation or the people using the encryption.
As long as this is true, the encryption can be considered effective. It's done it's job of preventing eavesdroppers on the line; it's not responsible for the rest of the world.
Nah, if you reply with "Fsck off and die" you're still stupid, because that lets the spammer know your email address is valid and being read by a live human... which means he is that much more likely to re-sell it to all his spammer buddies.
Hm, I'm not sure I like that system. I'd prefer if people just rank as many or as few candidates as they choose to; if most people only want to rank a single candidate, then so be it; that would be no worse than the system we have now in the US -- but for those of us who wish to rank more, we would have the choice of doing so.
The option to "vote the party lineup" sounds like a bad one, since it encourages people to use the (gerrymandered) party lists, rather than think for themselves.
So I get a citation for downloading 5 Linux ISOs...
'Punishment' is the wrong solution, and only serve to piss people off, as seen here. Packet shaping (what UCI is doing) is infinitely preferable. The p2p bandwidth hogs still get to transfer files (albeit slowly) and everybody else gets their educational material without delay. Best of all, nobody has to live in fear of the Bandwidth Police knocking down their dorm room door. I'm glad some institutions finally 'get it'...
Yeah, I know -- and I think that's a good thing. If the public can't agree on which of the top two candidates it wants, but the public does agree that the #3 candidate is a good compromise (2nd choice), then having the #3 candidate elected is the best result.
he government is, after all, representative of the people, not the few large corporations.
The politicians represent those who get them elected into office. These days, the main thing it takes to get elected is wads and wads of cash. Do the math....;^)
Re:Should stuff *ever* enter the public domain?
on
Eldred vs. Ashcroft
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· Score: 2
Quite being lazy and write your own book.
Every book is in some way derivative of previous works. Without the public domain, it becomes legally impossible to "write your own book".
So if they extended it to 1000 years, it would still be constitutional?
Sadly, yes.
I think the Supreme Court will agree that the writers of the Constitution meant "limited" in the human sense, not the mathematical sense.
Re:Only 7 ammendments left in the Bill of Rights
on
That Link Is Illegal
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· Score: 2
Why can't we get a win-win choice for once?!? Feingold v. John McCain, or Feingold v. Colin Powell? I'd be proud to have any of those men leading hte U.S.
Politicians with principles won't sell out to the moneyed interests, and people who won't sell out don't get the campaign funds they need to convince people to vote for them. Until meaningful campaign finance reform is enacted, we shouldn't expect anything except sell-outs, or millionares, or combinations of the two.
I don't give a damn if the government knows that my dad went to a meeting about eggs. So what? They're never going to use that information against me.
(Insert quote about those who forget history being condemned to repeat it here)
It's not a question of eggs, it's a question of whether you trust the government to spy on any and all aspects of your life, and not eventually abuse the information it acquires. History strongly suggests that anything that can be abused, will be.
So saying "I prefer free software" is tantamount to saying "I reject the best software and choose instead to search for good software among the worst stuff out there."
You're assuming there is a single, universal definition of "best". Some people find having access to the source code (and therefore, full control over the apps they run) is a feature that outweighs the bells and whistles that competing closed source software offers.
Re:Sounds interesting...
on
Skydriving
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· Score: 2
Seriously though why spend $15k to drop a car out of a plane when you can do the next best thing, throw wireless webcams off of tall buildings!
That does sound like fun.... got any links to videos produced that way?
I think you would want some sort of tail assembly (to stabilize the camera on its way down) and of course the camera would need to be battery-powered... but in the end you would have a nice 3D zoom video along with your small camera shards...
If I had a few spare 100 millions of dollars lying around, I would. That's what galls me: Robertson has the freaking money and contacts. He could do it -- if he had the guts to see it through
The difference between you and Mr. Robertson is that Mr. Robertson has already thrown a bunch of money, time, and engineers at the Windows-compatibility problem, and you are only guessing. Given that, I would imagine that he has a better estimate of how difficult the task is than you do.
Filtering your own e-mail has absolutely no effect on the spammer, you were not going to respond anyway.
You're missing the point. I could care less what the spammer does. The benefit is that with a good filter, I don't have to look at spam. Currently I spend maybe 15 minutes a day recognizing and deleting spam emails, and occasionally screw it up and delete something important by mistake. If a filter program can reduce that load, it's useful to me even if it doesn't stop the spammer from spamming.
And in any case, in a year or two, when such intelligent filters are a standard feature on AOL and Outlook and etc, the spammer's "hit rates" will likely drop dramatically, at which point they will have less incentive to spam.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should executable code be "pretty"? Nobody (except the rare reverse-engineer hacker) will ever look at it. Better to have it be correct and as efficient as possible (no matter how "ugly" that makes it).
Hmph. REAL geeks remember to balance their parentheses.
How can anyone stop them from forking GPL'd code? Part of the GPL is the right to fork.
Let's face it, the allure of this game isn't the BMX simulation, it's the real time full-physics hyper-realistic simulation of young firm bouncing breasts. Frankly, they'd probably sell better if they dropped the 'game' part and sold it as 3D Studio Max add-on.
Yes, but the value of a movie in the public domain is negative to a movie studio. If people have a vast library of public domain movies that they can view for free, they'll be less likely to spend money on new movies. The studios benefit by keeping old movies out of circulation, as it reduces competition for their product.
catch me riding on it, thats for sure.
Consider that the alternative is riding into space on an exploding bomb. Maybe you'd be happiest just staying on the ground.
Sure, it all sounds like it will work, but have they thought about how they plan to deal with the Vermicious Knids?
Preventing the flying-into-buildings thing alone is a damn sight better than the current system, and I would argue that it would partially prevent "old-style" hijackings as well -- there is nothing to physically force the pilots to do what the terrorists want. Yes, the terrorists could still threaten to torture passengers or blow up the plane, but in the final equation, the pilots could always just turn off the intercom and land at the nearest airport. These days, I think even if passengers were killed, this would be considered acceptable to allowing terrorists any control over an aircraft.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen Saving Private Ryan, so I can't comment on that.... but I think a plane the size of a 747 could probably carry a few thousand extra pounds.
Of course, there is another option -- one that doesn't cost anybody their civil liberties, and would actually be effective against plane hijaakers...
Simply build a thick metal wall between the pilot's cabin and the rest of the plane. Yes, you'd have to take out a few rows in first class to accomodate a separate pilot's restroom and a separate door so the pilots could get in and out, but once that was done, sneaking weapons onto a plane wouldn't do a terrorist much more good than sneaking them into, say, a shopping mall. The terrorists wouldn't be able to take control of the plane, even if the pilots wanted them to.
For what it's worth, I really think the above is a non-issue. The people who are technically savvy will understand the truth of the matter easily enough when it is told to them (if they don't know already), and the non-technical types will become comfortable with hydrogen in a few years, once they have seen enough people using it with no major accidents. Remember how things went with air travel -- initially people were afraid of it, but now most people don't give it a second thought.
Unfortunately, the machines aren't objective either; they have the biases of their programmers and operators built into them. An example of this from the article was the speeder-catcher-cameras that were rigged to cite drivers who weren't actually going above the speed limit, in order to generate more revenue for the city.
As long as this is true, the encryption can be considered effective. It's done it's job of preventing eavesdroppers on the line; it's not responsible for the rest of the world.
Nah, if you reply with "Fsck off and die" you're still stupid, because that lets the spammer know your email address is valid and being read by a live human... which means he is that much more likely to re-sell it to all his spammer buddies.
The option to "vote the party lineup" sounds like a bad one, since it encourages people to use the (gerrymandered) party lists, rather than think for themselves.
'Punishment' is the wrong solution, and only serve to piss people off, as seen here. Packet shaping (what UCI is doing) is infinitely preferable. The p2p bandwidth hogs still get to transfer files (albeit slowly) and everybody else gets their educational material without delay. Best of all, nobody has to live in fear of the Bandwidth Police knocking down their dorm room door. I'm glad some institutions finally 'get it'...
Yeah, I know -- and I think that's a good thing. If the public can't agree on which of the top two candidates it wants, but the public does agree that the #3 candidate is a good compromise (2nd choice), then having the #3 candidate elected is the best result.
The politicians represent those who get them elected into office. These days, the main thing it takes to get elected is wads and wads of cash. Do the math....
Every book is in some way derivative of previous works. Without the public domain, it becomes legally impossible to "write your own book".
Sadly, yes.
I think the Supreme Court will agree that the writers of the Constitution meant "limited" in the human sense, not the mathematical sense.
Politicians with principles won't sell out to the moneyed interests, and people who won't sell out don't get the campaign funds they need to convince people to vote for them. Until meaningful campaign finance reform is enacted, we shouldn't expect anything except sell-outs, or millionares, or combinations of the two.
(Insert quote about those who forget history being condemned to repeat it here)
It's not a question of eggs, it's a question of whether you trust the government to spy on any and all aspects of your life, and not eventually abuse the information it acquires. History strongly suggests that anything that can be abused, will be.
You're assuming there is a single, universal definition of "best". Some people find having access to the source code (and therefore, full control over the apps they run) is a feature that outweighs the bells and whistles that competing closed source software offers.
That does sound like fun.... got any links to videos produced that way?
I think you would want some sort of tail assembly (to stabilize the camera on its way down) and of course the camera would need to be battery-powered... but in the end you would have a nice 3D zoom video along with your small camera shards...
The difference between you and Mr. Robertson is that Mr. Robertson has already thrown a bunch of money, time, and engineers at the Windows-compatibility problem, and you are only guessing. Given that, I would imagine that he has a better estimate of how difficult the task is than you do.
You're missing the point. I could care less what the spammer does. The benefit is that with a good filter, I don't have to look at spam. Currently I spend maybe 15 minutes a day recognizing and deleting spam emails, and occasionally screw it up and delete something important by mistake. If a filter program can reduce that load, it's useful to me even if it doesn't stop the spammer from spamming.
And in any case, in a year or two, when such intelligent filters are a standard feature on AOL and Outlook and etc, the spammer's "hit rates" will likely drop dramatically, at which point they will have less incentive to spam.