1) While the space race might have been in your opinion a grotesque display of materialism it was not BS. Real people made real things happen, territory was forged, trails were blazed, adventures happened. Those missions had real scientific value, nobody knew if a human could survive in weightlessness, nobody knew what was _really_ out there (espically shown with mega-probes like the Voyager series). And need I mention again the massive amounts of technology that had to be developed to make this work. Do you think that that effort was just thrown away? We see the spinoffs of space, and nuclear, programs every day in new materials, computer tech, medical tech, etc.
2) I think the "Hilton in Space" is just a wild rumor, but I would _love_ to see it built, just for the coolness factor. Of course it would be paid with private, not public, funds.
If you are talking about the space station, let me mention that we have much research to do in long term space habitation, and that a manned station out of the gravity well is an important way point for any other intra-solar exploration. Parts for space ships can be manufactured and/or assembled at the station. A Moon base would be better because we could mine the surface for raw materials as well.
3) If you think that all the worlds problems can be solved just by throwing money at them, then you are a fool. Dumping money on social programs tends to encourage wasteful spending and people looking out only for their own self interest and greed. Need I remind you that the US spends more per student for public schooling than any other country in the world. And our "graduates" of this glorified day-care are not proportionally better off for it.
1) Who says that this is automatically bad. The Internet, GPS and others are old DoD projects. While I'll admit they often go bad, it is not predestined.
2) Yeah, we have fucked the Earth up something royal, but that alone shouldn't stop us from trying again to do better. And if you are waiting for a clean Earth, no poverty, Utopia, basically, you are in for a loooonnnnnggg wait because these things will probably never happen (hopes to be proved wrong).
3) We are going to have to deal with Mars sometime, we can't stay here on Earth forever. We are not going to be the "bubble people" who live in their own isolated environment, we couldn't maintain that forever. So sometime bacteria is going to be leaked, maybe even in a terraforming effort, so this is really a non-issue. We should do our best but shit happens, as any septic surgery patient will tell you.
Heck, it was estimated at $50B so having 1B people invest $50 would do the trick. You can afford to wait on Q3A for one month, can't you, that would be about the right amount.
I would think that it could be cheaper, considering the advances in technology. One could probably design a Moon mission at the same level as the Apollo missions with off-the-shelf parts. We have faster computers, better materials, and cheaper mass production of same.
To follow your logic to its ultimate conclusion all humans should never move, breathe and should probably all commit mass suicide to keep from sullying the environment.
/flamebait
As this is not going to happen we must wise up quick, or we are all going to be living in a big smoking pile of shit. I have read Red Mars and found it very sad and depressing, most of all because it is probably true. The Corporate mass consiousness will probably want to exploit, exploit, exploit and damn the long term costs. I also found a glimmer of hope in some of the wild eyed idealists like Arkady and John. We should move carefully but we should move!
PS: Also, I would like it if people just moved underground where there is much less environment to damage. We could build a self contained society and leave the surface for arable farmland and wilderness. That would make the world a _much_ better, and more beautiful, place to live.
Moderate this man up, and the origional poster down. This is a _public petition_ folks. Not only is all your information in cleartext right on their website, it is in really ugly colors too. And don't bother to make up fake information, that defeats the purpose of the petition, and just makes everyone look silly.
The "faster, cheaper, more" school of space exploration would be greatly enhanced by a shot of Vodka. No, really. What I mean is that we should support, maybe even purchase, the Russian space program. It would get us great facilities (Well, fixer-uppers, life has not been kind to the Russians lately), annother launch site and mostly great engineers who are used to designing great experiments on shoestring budgets.
While I'm a great fan of spinoffs (see previous post), NASA has spent too much time reinventing the wheel for every probe they make (and dumping resources down the black hole that is the Space Shuttle). This would be a real challenge to innovate and Russian involvement would really improve the price/performance ratio.
Realistically the Russian government cannot afford the meager space program they have now. They have more pressing matters. If I was the Russian President _I_ would cut them off, and probably reassign them to a think tank tasked to keep the country from completely falling into chaos.
> I'm not against space travel and colonization. I'm just trying to be realistic, and the truth is there's no real reason to go to Mars right now, and it's not really possible to do it right with current technology.
Of course, if we support a Mars program, the appropriate technology will be developed. Or did you think they would just stick an extra tank in the back of the Shuttle and send it on its way?
And don't forget the spinoffs. Robert A. Heinlein did a wonderful speech on the importance of space program spinoffs. For any space program massive amounts of new technology must be created to solve even the most mundane issues, this tech does not go to waste. From simple things like Tang, and Space Ice Cream to advanced medical monitoring and telemetry equipment, everyone benefits from all the neat stuff space explorers develop in their quest to conquer the universe.
This artical is a lumbering horror out of Dr. Frankensteins nightmares. While it does hit on many topics, providing a wide breadth of information, it is basically a cut & paste job from the Slashdot without much effort put into fact checking and coherency. Supporting paragraphs from parts of arguments are left dangling without the rest of the argument. The prose is terrible, with it jumping from one writing style to the next on a paragraph by paragraph basis. Some important information was not fleshed out completely (Info on Script Kiddies is not well written and incomplete) while many precious words were wasted on trivialities (The Hacker/Cracker White-Hat/Black-Hat stuff is not THAT important. A single paragraph could explain it eloquently.)
Ultimately the article is functional, one would be more clued by reading it than say watching TV, "Y2K: The Movie" anyone? I noticed that it is loacated under the/sample directory, hopefully this is a draft and hasn't actually gone into print. With a little touchup, and fact checking, this could be a _really_ good article for the Jane's readership. I see much potential here.
Oh, and claim your quotes that were purchased by Jane's, it's payday!
Most of this was hashed out in the origional thread. And remember folks, the posts on the origional thread were intended for the paid use by Jane's. This, for that thread only, superceded the standard "Comments are owned by the Poster" clause.
If they used any of your work, please point it out to them and receive your check, or remain anonymous, your choice.
Actually this could be made to work, if the network cable could be sufficiently hidden, ie. painted brown and run behind some furnature. It would also be possible to have a IR transmitter inside the lamp bulb, and have a network interface that connects to the power cord of the lamp, broadcasting over the short distance of the power cable.
Annother trick would be to plug a small computer (Heck a NetWinder would work) into a data jack. Then you could have all your nifty cracking and intrusion tools right on the local network, bye bye firewall! This would be great if the jack was hidden behind furnature, or in some other unused area where it wouldn't be noticed. IIRC some NetWinders even have IR ports--see paragraph 1.
Is anyone here fed up enough to just move away? This stuff makes me really sick, I have always dreamed of starting fresh. Maybe the/. community could pull together and buy a small Pacific island (preferrably one near underwater telecom cabling). We could set up our own Country with strong privacy laws, a secure data repository, etc., etc.
I just need to win the lottery, or inherit from a heretofore unknown rich uncle to be able to afford this.
I suppose that depends on your definition of "Operating System". RedHat could be considered "integrated" if they include Mozilla with their distro, but only if you consider the entire CD, including Apache, Samba, MySQL, Gnome/KDE, X, etc as part of the OS. More likely you consider the OS as the kernel and the barest minimum of utilities (basicly/bin:/sbin) than no.
Really they (RH & MS) are completely dissimilar organizations with differing morals. RH would do well to include a standards compliant, open source, free (as in speach as well as beer) browser into their desktop environment. We have waited too long for browser tech to catch up with the HTML standard (incl. DOM/CSS/XML/ECMAScript/Java). Now we can build websites with all the power and be sure that the client will be able to use them. Lets not start over and go back to the dark ages when even a table wouldn't render properly and people actually used Frames(!).
>thing I am pretty sure of is that this would be the end of the Corel Linux distro.
Not necessarily, they could leverage the market for people who want RedHat/Gnome and/or Debian/KDE. No matter what kind of Linux distro you are looking for they make money off it. It would be a good insurance policy. If any one of those components becomes unpopular they could shift development to annother, already completed component.
Somehow I don't think that MS has any influence on S/390 development. That computer might as well exist in a different solar system from MS. I can't see how marketing will have much effect, while Linux is everybodys favorite child now OS/390 is very well respected in the S/390 market. S/390s are used heavily in the finantial industry because they DON'T GO DOWN (Billy C. wouldn't like them). While having Linux run in a VM is VERY usefull (running Apache, Samba(!), Domino, firewall, etc with any database or backend software running on the same hardware), running Linux on the bare hardware is just a hobby toy now. That will change as Linux/390 stabilizes and IBM can offer solutions with a consistant environment from desktop PCs to Mainframes. All in all--Neato!
Maybe, if RHAT makes a RedHat branded Mozilla broswer, this will show, once and for all, that Mozilla != Netscape. Mozilla is not even the same codebase as the Navigator series of browsers. Maybe RH will invest in some integration of the Mozilla HTML/XML libraries into Gnome (via a wrapper or some such). Fun fun fun!
Unfortunately the documentation was not included in the latest version, it was in fact in all the previous demo versions. Look for the part about the MOTD server getting the GL_RENDERER string. This is not some Illuminati/BlackHelicopter/AlienGray/CIA/FBI/NSA/M icrosoft conspiricy folks.
Napolean: Never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetance.
It seems to me that the cure for this non-problem would be to send the current version information, in the release client, and let the client figure out if it needs updating.
Sending the GL_RENDERER is probably a good idea for the test, the only reason that this is an issue is that some people don't RTFM.
This is nothing like MS or Real, there is nothing "secret" going on. It is not sending your P3 ID, your email address, or any other identifying charactaristics (except for IP but there isn't any way to get around that). What it is doing is described in the docs that come with your beta test package, including how to turn it off. I hate having to repeat this so many times but people are jumping the gun and going crazy without reading up on the facts. This drama has really gotten out of han. I though Slashdot was supposed to be the largest collection of smart people around, guess not.
Repeat after me "It's in the README, it's in the README." Feel better now. Christ, so much melodrama over so little (It's only the GL_RENDERER and it's in the docs).
>FALSE. An http User-Agent is sent because I told my machine to contact that server. When I launch a game, I am not, in my mind, commanding my system to contact a server unless and until I tell my system to join a network game.
Of course Q3A is a network only game, your argument is invalid--you will ALWAYS be connecting to a server.
Really though this is not as dramatic a thing as it is beeing made out to be. The only error on Carmacks part is forgetting to include the README with the latest test of Q3A. As a "Beta Tester" you should have read the applicable docs, in preparation of making bug reports to ID. The README plainly states that the GL_RENDERER string will be sent to the MOTD server, it even describes how to turn this off!
John is not hiding anything, he is not burying anything, this is just ignorance on the part of the Slashdot crowd. One only has to look at another person wrong to get the "Privacy Advocates" a hopping and a jumping. It seems 80% of the posters don't know what the heck they are talking about.
I think it is a mistake to believe "It can never happen in a Free Nation (TM) like this one!" Look at the recent hubub in Australia, with the government drafting draconian Internet legislation. Look at tech like Echelon, or data mining. This stuff is already happening under our noses.
Hey, just don't tell the weather guys. Some bright fools in actually started a program to use the Nexrad to detect flocks of birds (for birdstrike prevention). What a load of crap, between the height of the scanning beam and noise it is completely worthless (except that someone gets Kudos and an award/promotion points)
Slashdot Mirror
This must be a joke, right?
1) While the space race might have been in your opinion a grotesque display of materialism it was not BS. Real people made real things happen, territory was forged, trails were blazed, adventures happened. Those missions had real scientific value, nobody knew if a human could survive in weightlessness, nobody knew what was _really_ out there (espically shown with mega-probes like the Voyager series). And need I mention again the massive amounts of technology that had to be developed to make this work. Do you think that that effort was just thrown away? We see the spinoffs of space, and nuclear, programs every day in new materials, computer tech, medical tech, etc.
2) I think the "Hilton in Space" is just a wild rumor, but I would _love_ to see it built, just for the coolness factor. Of course it would be paid with private, not public, funds.
If you are talking about the space station, let me mention that we have much research to do in long term space habitation, and that a manned station out of the gravity well is an important way point for any other intra-solar exploration. Parts for space ships can be manufactured and/or assembled at the station. A Moon base would be better because we could mine the surface for raw materials as well.
3) If you think that all the worlds problems can be solved just by throwing money at them, then you are a fool. Dumping money on social programs tends to encourage wasteful spending and people looking out only for their own self interest and greed. Need I remind you that the US spends more per student for public schooling than any other country in the world. And our "graduates" of this glorified day-care are not proportionally better off for it.
1) Who says that this is automatically bad. The Internet, GPS and others are old DoD projects. While I'll admit they often go bad, it is not predestined.
2) Yeah, we have fucked the Earth up something royal, but that alone shouldn't stop us from trying again to do better. And if you are waiting for a clean Earth, no poverty, Utopia, basically, you are in for a loooonnnnnggg wait because these things will probably never happen (hopes to be proved wrong).
3) We are going to have to deal with Mars sometime, we can't stay here on Earth forever. We are not going to be the "bubble people" who live in their own isolated environment, we couldn't maintain that forever. So sometime bacteria is going to be leaked, maybe even in a terraforming effort, so this is really a non-issue. We should do our best but shit happens, as any septic surgery patient will tell you.
Heck, it was estimated at $50B so having 1B people invest $50 would do the trick. You can afford to wait on Q3A for one month, can't you, that would be about the right amount.
I would think that it could be cheaper, considering the advances in technology. One could probably design a Moon mission at the same level as the Apollo missions with off-the-shelf parts. We have faster computers, better materials, and cheaper mass production of same.
I would think that _any_ petition would at a minimum have to ask for your proper name and snail mail address, with email addy being a plus.
flamebait
To follow your logic to its ultimate conclusion all humans should never move, breathe and should probably all commit mass suicide to keep from sullying the environment.
/flamebait
As this is not going to happen we must wise up quick, or we are all going to be living in a big smoking pile of shit. I have read Red Mars and found it very sad and depressing, most of all because it is probably true. The Corporate mass consiousness will probably want to exploit, exploit, exploit and damn the long term costs. I also found a glimmer of hope in some of the wild eyed idealists like Arkady and John. We should move carefully but we should move!
PS: Also, I would like it if people just moved underground where there is much less environment to damage. We could build a self contained society and leave the surface for arable farmland and wilderness. That would make the world a _much_ better, and more beautiful, place to live.
Moderate this man up, and the origional poster down. This is a _public petition_ folks. Not only is all your information in cleartext right on their website, it is in really ugly colors too. And don't bother to make up fake information, that defeats the purpose of the petition, and just makes everyone look silly.
The "faster, cheaper, more" school of space exploration would be greatly enhanced by a shot of Vodka. No, really. What I mean is that we should support, maybe even purchase, the Russian space program. It would get us great facilities (Well, fixer-uppers, life has not been kind to the Russians lately), annother launch site and mostly great engineers who are used to designing great experiments on shoestring budgets.
While I'm a great fan of spinoffs (see previous post), NASA has spent too much time reinventing the wheel for every probe they make (and dumping resources down the black hole that is the Space Shuttle). This would be a real challenge to innovate and Russian involvement would really improve the price/performance ratio.
Realistically the Russian government cannot afford the meager space program they have now. They have more pressing matters. If I was the Russian President _I_ would cut them off, and probably reassign them to a think tank tasked to keep the country from completely falling into chaos.
> I'm not against space travel and colonization. I'm just trying to be realistic, and the truth is there's no real reason to go to Mars right now, and it's not really possible to do it right with current technology.
Of course, if we support a Mars program, the appropriate technology will be developed. Or did you think they would just stick an extra tank in the back of the Shuttle and send it on its way?
And don't forget the spinoffs. Robert A. Heinlein did a wonderful speech on the importance of space program spinoffs. For any space program massive amounts of new technology must be created to solve even the most mundane issues, this tech does not go to waste. From simple things like Tang, and Space Ice Cream to advanced medical monitoring and telemetry equipment, everyone benefits from all the neat stuff space explorers develop in their quest to conquer the universe.
This artical is a lumbering horror out of Dr. Frankensteins nightmares. While it does hit on many topics, providing a wide breadth of information, it is basically a cut & paste job from the Slashdot without much effort put into fact checking and coherency. Supporting paragraphs from parts of arguments are left dangling without the rest of the argument. The prose is terrible, with it jumping from one writing style to the next on a paragraph by paragraph basis. Some important information was not fleshed out completely (Info on Script Kiddies is not well written and incomplete) while many precious words were wasted on trivialities (The Hacker/Cracker White-Hat/Black-Hat stuff is not THAT important. A single paragraph could explain it eloquently.)
/sample directory, hopefully this is a draft and hasn't actually gone into print. With a little touchup, and fact checking, this could be a _really_ good article for the Jane's readership. I see much potential here.
Ultimately the article is functional, one would be more clued by reading it than say watching TV, "Y2K: The Movie" anyone? I noticed that it is loacated under the
Oh, and claim your quotes that were purchased by Jane's, it's payday!
Most of this was hashed out in the origional thread. And remember folks, the posts on the origional thread were intended for the paid use by Jane's. This, for that thread only, superceded the standard "Comments are owned by the Poster" clause.
If they used any of your work, please point it out to them and receive your check, or remain anonymous, your choice.
Actually this could be made to work, if the network cable could be sufficiently hidden, ie. painted brown and run behind some furnature. It would also be possible to have a IR transmitter inside the lamp bulb, and have a network interface that connects to the power cord of the lamp, broadcasting over the short distance of the power cable.
Annother trick would be to plug a small computer (Heck a NetWinder would work) into a data jack. Then you could have all your nifty cracking and intrusion tools right on the local network, bye bye firewall! This would be great if the jack was hidden behind furnature, or in some other unused area where it wouldn't be noticed. IIRC some NetWinders even have IR ports--see paragraph 1.
Is anyone here fed up enough to just move away? This stuff makes me really sick, I have always dreamed of starting fresh. Maybe the /. community could pull together and buy a small Pacific island (preferrably one near underwater telecom cabling). We could set up our own Country with strong privacy laws, a secure data repository, etc., etc.
I just need to win the lottery, or inherit from a heretofore unknown rich uncle to be able to afford this.
Any takers, other ideas?
I suppose that depends on your definition of "Operating System". RedHat could be considered "integrated" if they include Mozilla with their distro, but only if you consider the entire CD, including Apache, Samba, MySQL, Gnome/KDE, X, etc as part of the OS. More likely you consider the OS as the kernel and the barest minimum of utilities (basicly /bin:/sbin) than no.
Really they (RH & MS) are completely dissimilar organizations with differing morals. RH would do well to include a standards compliant, open source, free (as in speach as well as beer) browser into their desktop environment. We have waited too long for browser tech to catch up with the HTML standard (incl. DOM/CSS/XML/ECMAScript/Java). Now we can build websites with all the power and be sure that the client will be able to use them. Lets not start over and go back to the dark ages when even a table wouldn't render properly and people actually used Frames(!).
>thing I am pretty sure of is that this would be the end of the Corel Linux distro.
Not necessarily, they could leverage the market for people who want RedHat/Gnome and/or Debian/KDE. No matter what kind of Linux distro you are looking for they make money off it. It would be a good insurance policy. If any one of those components becomes unpopular they could shift development to annother, already completed component.
Somehow I don't think that MS has any influence on S/390 development. That computer might as well exist in a different solar system from MS. I can't see how marketing will have much effect, while Linux is everybodys favorite child now OS/390 is very well respected in the S/390 market. S/390s are used heavily in the finantial industry because they DON'T GO DOWN (Billy C. wouldn't like them). While having Linux run in a VM is VERY usefull (running Apache, Samba(!), Domino, firewall, etc with any database or backend software running on the same hardware), running Linux on the bare hardware is just a hobby toy now. That will change as Linux/390 stabilizes and IBM can offer solutions with a consistant environment from desktop PCs to Mainframes. All in all--Neato!
Maybe, if RHAT makes a RedHat branded Mozilla broswer, this will show, once and for all, that Mozilla != Netscape. Mozilla is not even the same codebase as the Navigator series of browsers. Maybe RH will invest in some integration of the Mozilla HTML/XML libraries into Gnome (via a wrapper or some such). Fun fun fun!
Unfortunately the documentation was not included in the latest version, it was in fact in all the previous demo versions. Look for the part about the MOTD server getting the GL_RENDERER string. This is not some Illuminati/BlackHelicopter/AlienGray/CIA/FBI/NSA/M icrosoft conspiricy folks.
Napolean: Never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetance.
It seems to me that the cure for this non-problem would be to send the current version information, in the release client, and let the client figure out if it needs updating.
Sending the GL_RENDERER is probably a good idea for the test, the only reason that this is an issue is that some people don't RTFM.
This is nothing like MS or Real, there is nothing "secret" going on. It is not sending your P3 ID, your email address, or any other identifying charactaristics (except for IP but there isn't any way to get around that). What it is doing is described in the docs that come with your beta test package, including how to turn it off. I hate having to repeat this so many times but people are jumping the gun and going crazy without reading up on the facts. This drama has really gotten out of han. I though Slashdot was supposed to be the largest collection of smart people around, guess not.
Repeat after me "It's in the README, it's in the README." Feel better now. Christ, so much melodrama over so little (It's only the GL_RENDERER and it's in the docs).
>FALSE. An http User-Agent is sent because I told my machine to contact that server. When I launch a
game, I am not, in my mind, commanding my system to contact a server unless and until I tell my system to join a network game.
Of course Q3A is a network only game, your argument is invalid--you will ALWAYS be connecting to a server.
Really though this is not as dramatic a thing as it is beeing made out to be. The only error on Carmacks part is forgetting to include the README with the latest test of Q3A. As a "Beta Tester" you should have read the applicable docs, in preparation of making bug reports to ID. The README plainly states that the GL_RENDERER string will be sent to the MOTD server, it even describes how to turn this off!
John is not hiding anything, he is not burying anything, this is just ignorance on the part of the Slashdot crowd. One only has to look at another person wrong to get the "Privacy Advocates" a hopping and a jumping. It seems 80% of the posters don't know what the heck they are talking about.
I think it is a mistake to believe "It can never happen in a Free Nation (TM) like this one!" Look at the recent hubub in Australia, with the government drafting draconian Internet legislation. Look at tech like Echelon, or data mining. This stuff is already happening under our noses.
Hey, just don't tell the weather guys. Some bright fools in actually started a program to use the Nexrad to detect flocks of birds (for birdstrike prevention). What a load of crap, between the height of the scanning beam and noise it is completely worthless (except that someone gets Kudos and an award/promotion points)