Well, I'm the kind of person who thinks that federal funding for idealistic projects is a good thing. I'm not against welfare or funding the NEA or NASA or federal parks with federal money (though these agencies, like all others, could use a little bit of pruning). I suspect you would disagree with that, and if so I doubt we'd come to any agreement on this anyway, though I do respect your opinion. I've got my one vote!
Well, it's not as if UPS doesn't use Federal interstates and air traffic control systems and fossil fuels made cheap by the US military and buy.com doesn't use big chunks of Internet funded by the government. The main advantage is that you could lower taxes on other things (not that this would necessarily happen). Sales taxes also promote economic growth better than income taxes (at the expense of being more "unfair"; they're progressive), so maybe they could have more of one and less of the other to reach a nicer balance.
So many Libertarians on Slashdot! (you are a libertarian, right?) Sometimes they tax things just so that they can increase the big-pile-of-money-that-disappears-every-year.
I've made more than my fair share of Internet purchases, and I don't live in California, so I don't have to pay sales tax on any of it. Despite this, we really do need to tax Internet transactions.
A lot of people say "But you have to pay shipping! That makes it even!" and they'll probably say it now, so I'll dispell that right now. It's not the same thing. Suppose there were no taxes on anything. In this case, online shopping would not have this advantage. Then say a government comes along and decides they want to tax stuff. A brand new tax. Should they not tax online and mailorder retailers because they have to pay shipping? No, that would be stupid, because you'd essentially be subsidizing retailers who ship out of state and hurting brick-and-mortar stores. Shipping represents a real cost--the amount of effort and resources that go into producing and procuring whatever thingie you bought from buy.com is higher because they have to ship it. That's not true of the sales tax you pay at WalMart. That's an external cost. But I expect we'll see lots of this argument anyway.
That's not to say it's easy to have a tax or that we should have one right now. There is still some truth to the argument that it's a fledgling industry and might need protection till it gets on its feet (though this sort of protection tends to go on way longer than it's usually needed). Also, it would be pretty difficult to implement this kind of tax. It's only interstate commerce that we're concerned with, so Congress could do it, but that's a really big deal. It would take time. What rate do you charge? What counts as a taxable product? (the distinction between product and service is very fuzzy on the Internet).
There are actually alternate, fan-created AIs for Total Annihilation, by Cavedog. I think they were created because people weren't challenged enough by the skirmish AI. Unfortunately, many of them cheat. I don't know how they did this or whether Cavedog released an API or something, but it is a good example.
Yes, I'm tired of "courts" and their "laws" made by "congress" trampling on my rights. Fizgig's Coca-Cola, Fizgig's PentiumII, and Fizgig's PizzaHut businesses have all been trampled by "trademark" "laws".
Free trade is important. Laws protecting intellectual property (including trademarks) are also important.
That's not the legal hoop I'm wondering about. I'm wondering how they plan on bringing an Internet appliance to market with a name beginning with a lowercase i and followed by the capitalized name without getting in some trouble with the legal department of a certain multi-billion dollar fruit company.
Re:If ever there was a book written for slashdotte
on
Review:Cryptonomicon
·
· Score: 2
He was mean, though! Seriously, the sig was a bit old and needed replacement; that was just my excuse. If you want to see it again, by all means.
Insightful, not inciteful. Maybe both . . . nah. (My girlfriend's going to see this and rag me about it; she stalks me on Slashdot!)
If ever there was a book written for slashdotters
on
Review:Cryptonomicon
·
· Score: 2
I got the book about a week ago, and I've been pretty busy, so I'm only up to page 116, but never before have I thought, "Hey, this is written for me!" I bought Snow Crash because of "In the Beginning was the Command Line". I liked Snow Crash, but I still thought "In the Beginning" was better (completely different genres, I know). Cryptonomicon is even better! Of course, I can't make too much comment from the first ~100 pages, but it does seem very good so far. How many other books have Alan Turing as a normal character in the first 20 pages? It has all that subtle (and not-so-subtle) humor that Snow Crash had, but it has a lot more of it. I've actually laughed out loud a lot, and I really don't do that when reading books much (Dave Barry, though, can do that to me). But somehow he manages to be hilarious without being flippant. There's a scene (being really vague to avoid any spoilers, but I don't think there are any here anyway) where sailors are walking by and see their babies by local women. That was a really well-written passage that has nothing to do with sci-fi and isn't really humorous. It was just inciteful. I second that 10/10, and I haven't even finished!
I got mine today (what a coincidence!) and I can't even use the thing. Why? Because the serial adapter is huge. It hits the case of my computer and won't go in. If I try it in my laptop, I can get it in, but it pops out if I want to put the laptop down on the desk. Very impractical. I could buy an extension cord, but I'm not going to do that for this little novelty. It just seems they should have thought that part out a little more thoroughly.
Neat! It's MikeO! I discovered DigitalDJ yesterday . Very nice stuff, especially since I don't know anything about SQL. Could use the ability to delete songs from the database, though:) Oh well, what do I expect from a 0.4 version piece of software.
Ok, I'm sure Crow (I'm assuming you're Stephen Crowely [sp?], unless I've been confused for a long time) has adequately explained this, but I'll chime in. People keep complaining about the WARP specs not being there. It doesn't really matter yet anyway. Besides, this is a bunch of people who asked for specs and got some of them. Matrox is willing to work with them. Likewise, NVidia has released source but no specs. Both have made great contributions but haven't gone all the way. Neither seems like that much of a publicity stunt, just another way of keeping/getting customers. Also, some people seem to think that support for the G[24]00 cards comes at the expense of support for the NVidia cards, but that isn't so. They share a lot of source, from what I can tell, and not all the developments the G200 development people are making are specific to Matrox products. GLX has a bit of a ways to go, and they're making it go. I've been on the G200 dev. mailing list for all but the first week it existed. It's been very interesting. I've learned a lot. I was very shocked when I noticed that first message from John Carmack! I've since moved to digest form (I'm not contributing anything anyway!), but I still get it, and it's still interesting. Everything is progressing along fine, and there really isn't any bad news at all, except for the impatient. And for the license-complainers talking about microcode and the WARP engine, someone on the g200 list has repeatedly pointed out that the Linux kernel contains microcode, and that is quite GPL'd.
It doesn't look like it says they can't decrypt things. It just says they can't force you to file a key with the government or a government agency (outlawing key escrow). Maybe I missed the part about not decrypting.
It also makes it a crime to use encryption to hide criminal activities. Seems akin to mail fraud. Watch out for encrypting those MP3s, though! That's an extra 5 years in jail.
And it says that using encryption is not by itself "probably cause" for decrypting. Good! You know they'd use that if that clause weren't in there.
I don't know about votes (I've only been following bills in the early stages), but http://thomas.loc.gov seems to have everything else you ask for (and maybe even the votes; I don't know)
I have to agree. If I see one more UFO special or "Cars of Tomorrow"-type show on Discovery or TLC I think my head is going to explode! I like a lot of the stuff they have, but even there a lot of it caters to the lowest common denominator. There's plenty of stuff that PBS shows that they would never show.
I don't think so, at least not this way. For you to do something like that with OpenGL you would have to have a lot of memory. You would of course have to have just as much memory for the actual screen display (1024x768x24bits or whatever) plus each window would have to be a tecture (a very finely detailed one at that). So each window would have to be in memory twice. Then there's all that other stuff, like Z-buffer, that I think takes up memory but I don't know anything about. I recall reading something a year ago or so explaining how we were orders of magnitude of memory away from having working 3d desktops. Of course, we probably do have orders of magnitude more memory now. That SGI thing, on the other hand, doesn't look like a conventional window manager, so who knows how they implement that.
I'm sure the post on Linuxtoday (where I first read it) was more hits to this guy's online column than he had ever seen before. I'm sure he also got more feedback than he had ever gotten before. Then Slashdot was probably another order of magnitude more hits for his column. Combine this with the fact that this was probably the most error-ridden piece he's ever written before, and it's not surprising that he was treated this way. I'm not saying it's right. In fact, shame on you guys (you know who you are)! But if he had written something sexist and inaccurate that somehow got into the hands of several tens of thousands of feminists, what's he expect? Say something that's an opinion that people disagree with, you'll get some flack. Say something wrong and you'll get a lot. That */. = bad news for him. He wrote an incorrect story and it was viewed by lots of people who disagree with him. Surely he realizes that a lot of us read it, dismissed it, and went on with our lives and that the people who flamed him are not in the majority (or I'm sure mail.andover.net or whatever would have died a quick death)
I know this is an old thread and you probably won't read this, but I just noticed. That message was old even when I posted last time. Update is that they're working with two non-Matrox (you didn't mean NVidia, did you?) community developers and that nothing has been said yet officially. The two guys seem to be leaning towards microcode (everyone seems to be ignoring that email)
"Would we allow a car to be driven with features which would evade and outrun police cars?" Well... yes, we would, unless high performance sports cars were banned while I wasn't looking.
Don't forget radar detectors! Why are those things legal?
Slashdot Mirror
There is simply no good reason that Internet commerce should be taxed any differently than any other commerce.
Um, that's the point. It's not taxed like any other form of commerce.
Well, I'm the kind of person who thinks that federal funding for idealistic projects is a good thing. I'm not against welfare or funding the NEA or NASA or federal parks with federal money (though these agencies, like all others, could use a little bit of pruning). I suspect you would disagree with that, and if so I doubt we'd come to any agreement on this anyway, though I do respect your opinion. I've got my one vote!
Well, it's not as if UPS doesn't use Federal interstates and air traffic control systems and fossil fuels made cheap by the US military and buy.com doesn't use big chunks of Internet funded by the government. The main advantage is that you could lower taxes on other things (not that this would necessarily happen). Sales taxes also promote economic growth better than income taxes (at the expense of being more "unfair"; they're progressive), so maybe they could have more of one and less of the other to reach a nicer balance.
So many Libertarians on Slashdot! (you are a libertarian, right?) Sometimes they tax things just so that they can increase the big-pile-of-money-that-disappears-every-year.
I've made more than my fair share of Internet purchases, and I don't live in California, so I don't have to pay sales tax on any of it. Despite this, we really do need to tax Internet transactions.
A lot of people say "But you have to pay shipping! That makes it even!" and they'll probably say it now, so I'll dispell that right now. It's not the same thing. Suppose there were no taxes on anything. In this case, online shopping would not have this advantage. Then say a government comes along and decides they want to tax stuff. A brand new tax. Should they not tax online and mailorder retailers because they have to pay shipping? No, that would be stupid, because you'd essentially be subsidizing retailers who ship out of state and hurting brick-and-mortar stores. Shipping represents a real cost--the amount of effort and resources that go into producing and procuring whatever thingie you bought from buy.com is higher because they have to ship it. That's not true of the sales tax you pay at WalMart. That's an external cost. But I expect we'll see lots of this argument anyway.
That's not to say it's easy to have a tax or that we should have one right now. There is still some truth to the argument that it's a fledgling industry and might need protection till it gets on its feet (though this sort of protection tends to go on way longer than it's usually needed). Also, it would be pretty difficult to implement this kind of tax. It's only interstate commerce that we're concerned with, so Congress could do it, but that's a really big deal. It would take time. What rate do you charge? What counts as a taxable product? (the distinction between product and service is very fuzzy on the Internet).
Ok, just my musings. Feel free to shoot me down.
Oh, I didn't think you were anti-American. Sorry if I led you to believe that.
There are actually alternate, fan-created AIs for Total Annihilation, by Cavedog. I think they were created because people weren't challenged enough by the skirmish AI. Unfortunately, many of them cheat. I don't know how they did this or whether Cavedog released an API or something, but it is a good example.
Yes, I'm tired of "courts" and their "laws" made by "congress" trampling on my rights. Fizgig's Coca-Cola, Fizgig's PentiumII, and Fizgig's PizzaHut businesses have all been trampled by "trademark" "laws".
Free trade is important. Laws protecting intellectual property (including trademarks) are also important.
That's not the legal hoop I'm wondering about. I'm wondering how they plan on bringing an Internet appliance to market with a name beginning with a lowercase i and followed by the capitalized name without getting in some trouble with the legal department of a certain multi-billion dollar fruit company.
He was mean, though! Seriously, the sig was a bit old and needed replacement; that was just my excuse. If you want to see it again, by all means.
Insightful, not inciteful. Maybe both . . . nah. (My girlfriend's going to see this and rag me about it; she stalks me on Slashdot!)
I got the book about a week ago, and I've been pretty busy, so I'm only up to page 116, but never before have I thought, "Hey, this is written for me!" I bought Snow Crash because of "In the Beginning was the Command Line". I liked Snow Crash, but I still thought "In the Beginning" was better (completely different genres, I know). Cryptonomicon is even better! Of course, I can't make too much comment from the first ~100 pages, but it does seem very good so far. How many other books have Alan Turing as a normal character in the first 20 pages? It has all that subtle (and not-so-subtle) humor that Snow Crash had, but it has a lot more of it. I've actually laughed out loud a lot, and I really don't do that when reading books much (Dave Barry, though, can do that to me). But somehow he manages to be hilarious without being flippant. There's a scene (being really vague to avoid any spoilers, but I don't think there are any here anyway) where sailors are walking by and see their babies by local women. That was a really well-written passage that has nothing to do with sci-fi and isn't really humorous. It was just inciteful. I second that 10/10, and I haven't even finished!
Are you implying that you've already finished that giant?!
I got mine today (what a coincidence!) and I can't even use the thing. Why? Because the serial adapter is huge. It hits the case of my computer and won't go in. If I try it in my laptop, I can get it in, but it pops out if I want to put the laptop down on the desk. Very impractical. I could buy an extension cord, but I'm not going to do that for this little novelty. It just seems they should have thought that part out a little more thoroughly.
Neat! It's MikeO! I discovered DigitalDJ yesterday . Very nice stuff, especially since I don't know anything about SQL. Could use the ability to delete songs from the database, though :) Oh well, what do I expect from a 0.4 version piece of software.
Ok, I'm sure Crow (I'm assuming you're Stephen Crowely [sp?], unless I've been confused for a long time) has adequately explained this, but I'll chime in. People keep complaining about the WARP specs not being there. It doesn't really matter yet anyway. Besides, this is a bunch of people who asked for specs and got some of them. Matrox is willing to work with them. Likewise, NVidia has released source but no specs. Both have made great contributions but haven't gone all the way. Neither seems like that much of a publicity stunt, just another way of keeping/getting customers. Also, some people seem to think that support for the G[24]00 cards comes at the expense of support for the NVidia cards, but that isn't so. They share a lot of source, from what I can tell, and not all the developments the G200 development people are making are specific to Matrox products. GLX has a bit of a ways to go, and they're making it go. I've been on the G200 dev. mailing list for all but the first week it existed. It's been very interesting. I've learned a lot. I was very shocked when I noticed that first message from John Carmack! I've since moved to digest form (I'm not contributing anything anyway!), but I still get it, and it's still interesting. Everything is progressing along fine, and there really isn't any bad news at all, except for the impatient. And for the license-complainers talking about microcode and the WARP engine, someone on the g200 list has repeatedly pointed out that the Linux kernel contains microcode, and that is quite GPL'd.
It doesn't look like it says they can't decrypt things. It just says they can't force you to file a key with the government or a government agency (outlawing key escrow). Maybe I missed the part about not decrypting.
It also makes it a crime to use encryption to hide criminal activities. Seems akin to mail fraud. Watch out for encrypting those MP3s, though! That's an extra 5 years in jail.
And it says that using encryption is not by itself "probably cause" for decrypting. Good! You know they'd use that if that clause weren't in there.
How coincidental! 256 cosponsors! And that should be plenty to get the thing passed (assuming they show up to vote, not a given)
I don't know about votes (I've only been following bills in the early stages), but http://thomas.loc.gov seems to have everything else you ask for (and maybe even the votes; I don't know)
Perhaps he was referring to Starr, not ABC. He was forced to pay for it.
I have to agree. If I see one more UFO special or "Cars of Tomorrow"-type show on Discovery or TLC I think my head is going to explode! I like a lot of the stuff they have, but even there a lot of it caters to the lowest common denominator. There's plenty of stuff that PBS shows that they would never show.
I don't think so, at least not this way. For you to do something like that with OpenGL you would have to have a lot of memory. You would of course have to have just as much memory for the actual screen display (1024x768x24bits or whatever) plus each window would have to be a tecture (a very finely detailed one at that). So each window would have to be in memory twice. Then there's all that other stuff, like Z-buffer, that I think takes up memory but I don't know anything about. I recall reading something a year ago or so explaining how we were orders of magnitude of memory away from having working 3d desktops. Of course, we probably do have orders of magnitude more memory now. That SGI thing, on the other hand, doesn't look like a conventional window manager, so who knows how they implement that.
Hmmm, that feminist sentence makes no sense. s/[feminist setence]/[something really, really clever]/
I'm sure the post on Linuxtoday (where I first read it) was more hits to this guy's online column than he had ever seen before. I'm sure he also got more feedback than he had ever gotten before. Then Slashdot was probably another order of magnitude more hits for his column. Combine this with the fact that this was probably the most error-ridden piece he's ever written before, and it's not surprising that he was treated this way. I'm not saying it's right. In fact, shame on you guys (you know who you are)! But if he had written something sexist and inaccurate that somehow got into the hands of several tens of thousands of feminists, what's he expect? Say something that's an opinion that people disagree with, you'll get some flack. Say something wrong and you'll get a lot. That * /. = bad news for him. He wrote an incorrect story and it was viewed by lots of people who disagree with him. Surely he realizes that a lot of us read it, dismissed it, and went on with our lives and that the people who flamed him are not in the majority (or I'm sure mail.andover.net or whatever would have died a quick death)
I know this is an old thread and you probably won't read this, but I just noticed. That message was old even when I posted last time. Update is that they're working with two non-Matrox (you didn't mean NVidia, did you?) community developers and that nothing has been said yet officially. The two guys seem to be leaning towards microcode (everyone seems to be ignoring that email)
"Would we allow a car to be driven with features which would evade and outrun police cars?" Well... yes, we would, unless high performance sports cars were banned while I wasn't looking.
Don't forget radar detectors! Why are those things legal?