Beta is the current Charlie-Foxtrot the Slashdot community is dealing with, and we're nothing if not navel-gazing when it comes to change. Though usually that change isn't quite as damaging as Beta is in the current form. However, for/. to continue to be a useful source of information, the commentators should prove the necessity they are to the success of the site by actually posting useful content, along with the quite justified complaints about the new system being forced on the users.
That having been said, this is a very interesting change in direction for the microsat community. Most microsats live for a few months (at best) in Low Earth orbit. The current NASA contests are for what are essentially the first deep-space microsats, which can potentially (with the right design) perform useful science for decades or more, far away from Earth. Just how much useful propulsion can you cram into a satellite that weighs 3 pounds? With cheap, consumer-level sensors and a few government waivers, I would think quite a lot. The potential of a swarm of mini-RTG-powered microsats zooming around the Solar System towards or around various planets could yield quite a lot of useful science. Not to mention that this could be a useful demonstration for future Von-Newmann probes, simple machines created from raw materials, in an asteroid or planetary moon and spread throughout the Solar System (and beyond?), exploring, replicating, and continuing to send valuable data to Earth to inform future exploration or colonization..
Why the hell shouldn't something that *I* created, exist for my lifetime as *MY* personal property and then pass on to my heirs or go to my grave with me if I want?
You *do* have that right, so long as your creation stays *personal*. If you publish your works, then the work belongs to society, and the rights to distribution of those works (within certain limits) belongs to you. After a time those distribution rights are made public.
Now I see the benefit to society in this (of course!) but I draw the line at the point where society starts thinking that it is their imperitive to set the rules for the government of personal creations. Society should encourage philanthropy, but by demanding it or by pick pocketing it by putting up legal obsticles like this just bad karma.
Society setting the rules for government of creations is what copyright *is*! Your copyrights limit my free speech, as my copyrights limit yours. For example, I can not take a story you wrote and read it aloud to an audience. When you published your story, however, it became part of your culture, and can not be taken back. Ideas are ephermal and forever, which is why we have vastly different laws governing intellectual "property" as physical property. I can comment on your story, but only within certain limits proscribed by law (and by extension society). This is generally accepted by society as a fair limit to free speech to reward those that create. Eventually, you should have *no* say on your creation. You decided to make it part of the culture, and eventually it is the culture's decision what to do with it from there. You should feel honored to be able to contribute to culture. The public domain is unarguably very important to the advancement of the arts, and you have no right to take from it any more than the public has the right to take the temporary profit from your creations away from you. Respect the public's rights and expect the public to respect yours.
I'm an indie artist who distributes my COPYRIGHTED work for free, but things like this make me think that that society doesn't deserve any of my work any more
I'm sorry you feel that way, but you seem as greedy to keep art from the public as you accuse the public if taking away your rights. I have a feeling if you did this you would lose far more than society.
Why the hell shouldn't something that *I* created, exist for my lifetime as *MY* personal property and then pass on to my heirs or go to my grave with me if I want?
You *do* have that right, so long as your creation stays *personal*. If you publish your works, then the work belongs to society, and the rights to distribution of those works (within certain limits) belongs to you. After a time those distribution rights are made public.
Now I see the benefit to society in this (of course!) but I draw the line at the point where society starts thinking that it is their imperitive to set the rules for the government of personal creations. Society should encourage philanthropy, but by demanding it or by pick pocketing it by putting up legal obsticles like this just bad karma.
Society setting the rules for government of creations is what copyright *is*! Your copyrights limit my free speech, as my copyrights limit yours. For example, I can not take a story you wrote and read it aloud to an audience. When you published your story, however, it became part of your culture, and can not be taken back. Ideas are ephermal and forever, which is why we have vastly different laws governing intellectual "property" as physical property. I can comment on your story, but only within certain limits proscribed by law (and by extension society). This is generally accepted by society as a fair limit to free speech to reward those that create. Eventually, you should have *no* say on your creation. You decided to make it part of the culture, and eventually it is the culture's decision what to do with it from there. You should feel honored to be able to contribute to culture. The public domain is unarguably very important to the advancement of the arts, and you have no right to take from it any more than the public has the right to take the temporary profit from your creations away from you. Respect the public's rights and expect the public to respect yours.
'm an indie artist who distributes my COPYRIGHTED work for free, but things like this make me think that that society doesn't deserve any of my work any more
I'm sorry you feel that way, but you seem as greedy to keep art from the public as you accuse the public if taking away your rights. I have a feeling if you did this you would lose out far more than society.
Mexico City has a polulation of that dwarfs most US states. London, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Rome, Cairo... these, like NY and LA, are major cities.
Detriot and Atlanta are not major cities, regardless of where Ted Turner and Ford Motor Company choose to be located. They are small cities, made up of only a few million people, and of little note to anybody who doesn't live in either Michigan or Georgia.
Detriot: 5.8 million
Atlanta: 4.5 million
Rome: 3.3 million
(according to citypopulation.de)
Are you saying Rome is not a major city now? Or for that matter Berlin (4.2 million), Sydney (4.1 million), Amsterdam (2.1 million), are these now "of little note to anybody"?
Actually there is valuable science in *not* getting a result after several thousand CPU-years of crunching on the data from Aricebo. It allows us to fill in or at least narrow down some numbers in the Drake equation. The fact that we haven't found anything from all of this effort so far is telling in an of itself. The main conclusion being that civlizations like ours are most likely quite rare, or short lived, at least in our block of the universe. If the results are bogus, even with a negative, we lost out on potentially valuable data. If the bogus results can not be filtered out, the entire effort would be contaminated, and the data would be useless.
According to the radio, the Am. Airlines plane was *departing* JFK, and had only been in the air for two minutes before crashing. With reports of the engine exploding, it sounds like a bomb or engine failure as opposed to a hijacking.
Actually, Neal Stephenson made a good point in _In the Beginning Was the Command Line_ that Linux wouldn't be possible without contributions from three individuals: Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman and Bill Gates. The IBM-compatible P.C., because of their open archetecture (and BIOS opened by Compaq) allowed many manufacturers to create machines that ran the same software. In most cases this was MS-DOS software. This allowed homogeneous commodity hardware that anyone could afford. This probably fueled free software, and specifically Linux, more than anything. The fact that developers all around the world were running basically the same hardware, no matter what the manufacturer, allowed Linux to be available to many developers, especially in it's early days. If MS-DOS hadn't existed, it would have taken longer for this commodity hardware to spring up. While M$ didn't invent open source (which they never claimed to do), they certainly helped establish the platform where it would flouish.
It seems from the article that the case Warner Home Video is presenting is that a DVD is computer software with a movie hidden somwhere inside, which is totally bogus.
What I think is interesting is that Warner is arguing (in different cases) that DVD's are software, and (in the DeCSS case with the MPAA) that software is not covered by first ammendment free expression. Does this mean that to make a few extra bucks from Australian video rental shops, they would be willing to have the Government censor their films since according to the MPAA, software does not have first ammendment protection?
I think that Dreamcast owners will be familiar with the concept of the iPod as a portable, interactive data storage unit similar to the Dreamcast's VMU, only far more advanced. The VMU would allow you to manage data stored on the card, as well as run small applets such as games. Apple seems to be concentrating on MP3's at the moment, but you can expect other applets to be following soon.
Pe^H^HLocke writes what he wants to write, as do I. We agree on the points being made and go off to write our essays. This time he wrote a whole freaking book that I have to respond to (as soon as I read it, too busy cleaning up tortured squirrels at the moment). Locke isn't *that* important. It's not like he's going to be Hegemon or anything.
If games would affect kids then by think of all the "pacman" playing there where in the 80's.
That would mean that we would by now have a bunch of teenagers running around in dark rooms, listening to monotonous music and eating pills..
Simply because laser radiation is detected, doesn't necessarily mean that an intelligent entity sent it. This article from the Goddard Space Flight Center describes natural laser radiation from the atmosphere of Mars (basically a sun-pumped CO2 laser). Similar findings have been observed in comets.
It's amazing how much technology has come from IBM in the past couple of years. Just from memory:
Now:
Copper chip technology
The Microdrive
Ultra High-res LCD screens
Many advancements in HDD tech.
Linux on a watch.:)
Soon:
*Usable* wearable computers
MRAM
????
It's incredible what a company can produce when they decide that research should be a priority. Either that, or an alien spacecraft crashed into an IBM campus.:)
This new one, the Asimo is FAR more impressive than the P3. The main improvement (other than the more natural walking ability, of course) is that they have dramatically reduced the weight. According to their website the P2 weighs 210kg (~462lbs) and the P3 weighs 130kg (~286 lbs). The Asimo drops that down to *43*kg (~95 lbs). With a dextrous, humanoid robot that weighs less than an average adult human, you can bet that NASA is going to look at this kind of thing for work on the ISS.
(1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
This is still the part that chafes me most; it completely wipes previously legal fair use copying. This would make even dubbing to a tape illegal.
So you go out and buy your new secure digital music CD player and you can't even legally make a copy to play in your car's tape deck.
Well, by their logic since there are "commercially avaliable alternatives" (e.g. taking your SDMI deck out to your car, buying a $100 inverter to run off your car battery, and wiring it to your stereo system) it is simply a matter of convenience. They dismissed all questions of freedom to use that which you own as being matters of convenience (e.g. Buy a Windows box or a dedicated player you dang long-haired hippie! Just because it's inconvenient (expensive/unstable/unusable/etc) doesn't mean you have a right to use what you just bought!)
I think that this mouse might find some use outside of gaming. For instance, people that are hearing impaired might find this very useful to get non-visual feedback from their computer. Also, this could be used in a quiet office environment for various types of system alerts/incoming e-mails/etc. Though for most people, including myself it's kinda useless.
Actually this would be the perfect test of the DMCA. The posting of the actual document is obviously in violation of Microsoft's copyright, however the links to it and the instructions for bypassing the EULA would certainly provide a good legal test of the DMCA. Rob, take down the actual document where it is posted on Slashdot, but leave the other posts. We need to choose our battles, DMCA is one I think we can win. Posting copyrighted material (like the specification) is not.
Unfortunately, the C-64 BASIC interpreter (which was essentially the OS) *was* published by Micro$oft. That it fit into 16k of ROM makes evident the sad state of M$ software now.
Slashdot Mirror
An ICE running on bio-ethanol/diesel or hydrogen would be emission-neutral.
Beta is the current Charlie-Foxtrot the Slashdot community is dealing with, and we're nothing if not navel-gazing when it comes to change. Though usually that change isn't quite as damaging as Beta is in the current form. However, for /. to continue to be a useful source of information, the commentators should prove the necessity they are to the success of the site by actually posting useful content, along with the quite justified complaints about the new system being forced on the users.
That having been said, this is a very interesting change in direction for the microsat community. Most microsats live for a few months (at best) in Low Earth orbit. The current NASA contests are for what are essentially the first deep-space microsats, which can potentially (with the right design) perform useful science for decades or more, far away from Earth. Just how much useful propulsion can you cram into a satellite that weighs 3 pounds? With cheap, consumer-level sensors and a few government waivers, I would think quite a lot. The potential of a swarm of mini-RTG-powered microsats zooming around the Solar System towards or around various planets could yield quite a lot of useful science. Not to mention that this could be a useful demonstration for future Von-Newmann probes, simple machines created from raw materials, in an asteroid or planetary moon and spread throughout the Solar System (and beyond?), exploring, replicating, and continuing to send valuable data to Earth to inform future exploration or colonization..
Why the hell shouldn't something that *I* created, exist for my lifetime as *MY* personal property and then pass on to my heirs or go to my grave with me if I want?
You *do* have that right, so long as your creation stays *personal*. If you publish your works, then the work belongs to society, and the rights to distribution of those works (within certain limits) belongs to you. After a time those distribution rights are made public.
Now I see the benefit to society in this (of course!) but I draw the line at the point where society starts thinking that it is their imperitive to set the rules for the government of personal creations. Society should encourage philanthropy, but by demanding it or by pick pocketing it by putting up legal obsticles like this just bad karma.
Society setting the rules for government of creations is what copyright *is*! Your copyrights limit my free speech, as my copyrights limit yours. For example, I can not take a story you wrote and read it aloud to an audience. When you published your story, however, it became part of your culture, and can not be taken back. Ideas are ephermal and forever, which is why we have vastly different laws governing intellectual "property" as physical property. I can comment on your story, but only within certain limits proscribed by law (and by extension society). This is generally accepted by society as a fair limit to free speech to reward those that create. Eventually, you should have *no* say on your creation. You decided to make it part of the culture, and eventually it is the culture's decision what to do with it from there. You should feel honored to be able to contribute to culture. The public domain is unarguably very important to the advancement of the arts, and you have no right to take from it any more than the public has the right to take the temporary profit from your creations away from you. Respect the public's rights and expect the public to respect yours.
I'm an indie artist who distributes my COPYRIGHTED work for free, but things like this make me think that that society doesn't deserve any of my work any more
I'm sorry you feel that way, but you seem as greedy to keep art from the public as you accuse the public if taking away your rights. I have a feeling if you did this you would lose far more than society.
- Demosthenes
Why the hell shouldn't something that *I* created, exist for my lifetime as *MY* personal property and then pass on to my heirs or go to my grave with me if I want?
You *do* have that right, so long as your creation stays *personal*. If you publish your works, then the work belongs to society, and the rights to distribution of those works (within certain limits) belongs to you. After a time those distribution rights are made public.
Now I see the benefit to society in this (of course!) but I draw the line at the point where society starts thinking that it is their imperitive to set the rules for the government of personal creations. Society should encourage philanthropy, but by demanding it or by pick pocketing it by putting up legal obsticles like this just bad karma.
Society setting the rules for government of creations is what copyright *is*! Your copyrights limit my free speech, as my copyrights limit yours. For example, I can not take a story you wrote and read it aloud to an audience. When you published your story, however, it became part of your culture, and can not be taken back. Ideas are ephermal and forever, which is why we have vastly different laws governing intellectual "property" as physical property. I can comment on your story, but only within certain limits proscribed by law (and by extension society). This is generally accepted by society as a fair limit to free speech to reward those that create. Eventually, you should have *no* say on your creation. You decided to make it part of the culture, and eventually it is the culture's decision what to do with it from there. You should feel honored to be able to contribute to culture. The public domain is unarguably very important to the advancement of the arts, and you have no right to take from it any more than the public has the right to take the temporary profit from your creations away from you. Respect the public's rights and expect the public to respect yours.
'm an indie artist who distributes my COPYRIGHTED work for free, but things like this make me think that that society doesn't deserve any of my work any more
I'm sorry you feel that way, but you seem as greedy to keep art from the public as you accuse the public if taking away your rights. I have a feeling if you did this you would lose out far more than society.
- Demosthenes
Mexico City has a polulation of that dwarfs most US states. London, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Rome, Cairo... these, like NY and LA, are major cities.
Detriot and Atlanta are not major cities, regardless of where Ted Turner and Ford Motor Company choose to be located. They are small cities, made up of only a few million people, and of little note to anybody who doesn't live in either Michigan or Georgia.
Detriot: 5.8 million
Atlanta: 4.5 million
Rome: 3.3 million
(according to citypopulation.de)
Are you saying Rome is not a major city now? Or for that matter Berlin (4.2 million), Sydney (4.1 million), Amsterdam (2.1 million), are these now "of little note to anybody"?
Actually there is valuable science in *not* getting a result after several thousand CPU-years of crunching on the data from Aricebo. It allows us to fill in or at least narrow down some numbers in the Drake equation. The fact that we haven't found anything from all of this effort so far is telling in an of itself. The main conclusion being that civlizations like ours are most likely quite rare, or short lived, at least in our block of the universe. If the results are bogus, even with a negative, we lost out on potentially valuable data. If the bogus results can not be filtered out, the entire effort would be contaminated, and the data would be useless.
According to the radio, the Am. Airlines plane was *departing* JFK, and had only been in the air for two minutes before crashing. With reports of the engine exploding, it sounds like a bomb or engine failure as opposed to a hijacking.
- Demosthenes
Actually, Neal Stephenson made a good point in _In the Beginning Was the Command Line_ that Linux wouldn't be possible without contributions from three individuals: Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman and Bill Gates. The IBM-compatible P.C., because of their open archetecture (and BIOS opened by Compaq) allowed many manufacturers to create machines that ran the same software. In most cases this was MS-DOS software. This allowed homogeneous commodity hardware that anyone could afford. This probably fueled free software, and specifically Linux, more than anything. The fact that developers all around the world were running basically the same hardware, no matter what the manufacturer, allowed Linux to be available to many developers, especially in it's early days. If MS-DOS hadn't existed, it would have taken longer for this commodity hardware to spring up. While M$ didn't invent open source (which they never claimed to do), they certainly helped establish the platform where it would flouish.
- Demosthenes
What I think is interesting is that Warner is arguing (in different cases) that DVD's are software, and (in the DeCSS case with the MPAA) that software is not covered by first ammendment free expression. Does this mean that to make a few extra bucks from Australian video rental shops, they would be willing to have the Government censor their films since according to the MPAA, software does not have first ammendment protection?
- Demosthenes
I think that Dreamcast owners will be familiar with the concept of the iPod as a portable, interactive data storage unit similar to the Dreamcast's VMU, only far more advanced. The VMU would allow you to manage data stored on the card, as well as run small applets such as games. Apple seems to be concentrating on MP3's at the moment, but you can expect other applets to be following soon.
- Demosthenes
Pe^H^HLocke writes what he wants to write, as do I. We agree on the points being made and go off to write our essays. This time he wrote a whole freaking book that I have to respond to (as soon as I read it, too busy cleaning up tortured squirrels at the moment). Locke isn't *that* important. It's not like he's going to be Hegemon or anything.
Sorry I haven't read the book.
- Demosthenes
If games would affect kids then by think of all the "pacman" playing there where in the 80's.
That would mean that we would by now have a bunch of teenagers running around in dark rooms, listening to monotonous music and eating pills..
And this would be different from a rave, how?
Comcast is making a bid to buy AT&T's cable modem unit for over 44 billion
I guess those people that were being charged $500 for their cable units weren't getting such a bad deal.
Simply because laser radiation is detected, doesn't necessarily mean that an intelligent entity sent it. This article from the Goddard Space Flight Center describes natural laser radiation from the atmosphere of Mars (basically a sun-pumped CO2 laser). Similar findings have been observed in comets.
- Demosthenes
It's amazing how much technology has come from IBM in the past couple of years. Just from memory: :)
:)
Now:
Copper chip technology
The Microdrive
Ultra High-res LCD screens
Many advancements in HDD tech.
Linux on a watch.
Soon:
*Usable* wearable computers
MRAM
????
It's incredible what a company can produce when they decide that research should be a priority. Either that, or an alien spacecraft crashed into an IBM campus.
Demosthenes
This new one, the Asimo is FAR more impressive than the P3. The main improvement (other than the more natural walking ability, of course) is that they have dramatically reduced the weight. According to their website the P2 weighs 210kg (~462lbs) and the P3 weighs 130kg (~286 lbs). The Asimo drops that down to *43*kg (~95 lbs). With a dextrous, humanoid robot that weighs less than an average adult human, you can bet that NASA is going to look at this kind of thing for work on the ISS.
(1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
This is still the part that chafes me most; it completely wipes previously legal fair use copying. This would make even dubbing to a tape illegal.
So you go out and buy your new secure digital music CD player and you can't even legally make a copy to play in your car's tape deck.
Well, by their logic since there are "commercially avaliable alternatives" (e.g. taking your SDMI deck out to your car, buying a $100 inverter to run off your car battery, and wiring it to your stereo system) it is simply a matter of convenience. They dismissed all questions of freedom to use that which you own as being matters of convenience (e.g. Buy a Windows box or a dedicated player you dang long-haired hippie! Just because it's inconvenient (expensive/unstable/unusable/etc) doesn't mean you have a right to use what you just bought!)
I think that this mouse might find some use outside of gaming. For instance, people that are hearing impaired might find this very useful to get non-visual feedback from their computer. Also, this could be used in a quiet office environment for various types of system alerts/incoming e-mails/etc. Though for most people, including myself it's kinda useless.
Actually this would be the perfect test of the DMCA. The posting of the actual document is obviously in violation of Microsoft's copyright, however the links to it and the instructions for bypassing the EULA would certainly provide a good legal test of the DMCA. Rob, take down the actual document where it is posted on Slashdot, but leave the other posts. We need to choose our battles, DMCA is one I think we can win. Posting copyrighted material (like the specification) is not.
Unfortunately, the C-64 BASIC interpreter (which was essentially the OS) *was* published by Micro$oft. That it fit into 16k of ROM makes evident the sad state of M$ software now.