However, note this: 200 years to go 10 light years is 5% of the speed of light, or roughly 54 million kilometers per hour. Current spacecraft travel around one thousandth of this, or in the neighborhood of 50 thousand kilometers per hour. With current technology, the trip would take more like 250,000 years, which is quite a while even in the great scheme of things.
Ah, but what about relativity? There's no limit (beyond acceleration * amount of fuel you can carry) to how "fast" you can go, really... I remember reading in Analog (way back when) that it would take less than a lifetime of "subjective" time to reach the center of this galaxy at 1 gee acceleration; we need lighter fuel and better drives, but not exponentially better ones.
Not for credit: If in the ?illions of years you're taking, earth-time, we build a 2 gee ship and chase you down, are you younger, older, or the same age as you would have been if you'd waited and gone with the second crew? Or does it depend?
CoSource is IMHO a very cool attempt at an implementation of that idea; I noticed while double-checking the URL that Apache's gained a feature thanks to their efforts. I especially like that a common response to a pending project is to point out that some arcane software package nobody's (read: I haven't) ever heard of will do it for you, and/or it's easy if you use the XYZ library/technique (usually with a URL). People almost get pissed off when they get offered money for something that's trivial.
OTOH, from the very limited amount of attention I've given it, it doesn't seem like that many people are getting paid -- there are a lot of semi-cool-sounding projects with $10 committed to them, and a lot of projects that have stagnated once half the amount needed was raised. If this impression is accurate, then it's a terrible shame.
Maybe they're hedging their bets in case they HAVE to take Windows back to being a shell, which is all most of their market cares about anyway ("What's a.. kur-nul?"). I'll believe it when I see it, but nothing would make me happier than to see M$ admit that the problem of OS design is simply beyond them. Betchya they could write a spiffy GUI for Linux.
Pipe-dreams aside, I really wonder why M$ does so poorly at a (semi-) solved problem when they have an essentially infinite amount of money and (AFAIK) talent. Maybe Gates', "They're users, they won't care" attitude spreads through the intranet there. Or maybe there really is a god.
Or maybe Gates hacks on the release code every now and then, and the last guy who changed his code was never heard from again.
M$ is a corporation, by definition removed from questions of morality. It is a machine designed to make money, legally or illegally, and it has done extremely well, in part because it is willing to cheat. If it were a guy who lived next door or a Lovecraftian deity, ideas like "He's an asshole" would have some meaning, but it is a machine. M$, like every other company in America, has a responsibility to its stockholders to act like a money-grubbing tyrant if it is within its power. If it were legal/possible for them to build a device which would beam money directly from your wallet into their treasury, they would. I would, too. That's business. The government's job is to stop them overstepping their bounds; the reason the government has to do this is that, like every other corporation and a lot of human beings, they'll do it if given the chance. They're greedy. They're supposed to be. In all the manifestos you've seen pointing out M$'s flagrant violations of human decency, how many have spent more than a paragraph flaming the goverment for not stopping them? M$ is not human and has no decency, by design.
Getting angry at M$ as a whole, or even at Gates, seems like missing the mark to me. Even if the DoJ dissolved M$ tomorrow, all that would happen is that a lot of semi-competent people would lose their jobs and all the people responsible for the evil would retire to the Caribbean and spend the rest of their lives getting fat and humping the native women. Everybody would start using Macs. M$ or a company like it is here to stay, for the rest of our lives, because 95% of computer users like the start menu, and every time one of them wanders into the Linux community, one of us calls him a cretin because he can't configure his dial-up connection. He doesn't know that M$ is evil and wouldn't care if he did, and we shouldn't care that he has a crappy operating system. All he wants is email and internet porn, and Windows makes him happy. I see no problem with that.
The Linux community should pick its holy wars with care; by fighting to replace Windows as the OS of choice for the average AOL user, we're inviting a certain amount of noise and confusion into our lives. Do you really want Linus to be bombarded with emails saying, "I can't get my homepage to come up in StarOffice?" Let M$ sell overpriced, brittle software to the naive and undercut any attempt at competition; it'll happen whether you like it or not, and it's what they're good at. Even Jim Clark teamed up with M$ when he realized Healtheon's only other option was to compete. M$ can't screw Linux, though; the strategy outlined in the Halloween documents assumes that the only reason OSS can produce good server software is that the protocols are simple enough for all those Linux-minded feebs to understand, and it's the most credible strategy I've seen.
... none of which means I don't chortle with glee as I see the DoJ look at M$ with increasing disbelief and disdain. I just think M$'s way of looking at the PC world is here to stay, just as open source is. We're about due now for M$ to go the way of IBM and DEC; they'll still be around, but they'll be harmless and we'll all have someone new to hate.
Re:I suspect this is scientifically invalid
on
Author Unknown
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· Score: 2
Foster claims in the book that he successfully identified three consecutive anonymous peer-reviewers of his Shakespeare writings... pages 65-69 of the hardcover (section "Primary Culprit") include a long rundown of his methods for fingering Klein as the author of Primary Colors; judge for yourself.
IMHO, he grinds his axes too loudly to be bullshitting. The first hundred pages or so have more iterations of "X said I was a fraud; here's why X was wrong; yeah, suck it, X" than I've ever heard from a supposed psychic.
In all seriousness, I'm not saying I buy the RIAA's argument that they "own" the songs they have legal title to at the moment. The argument over Napster, though, should proceed (IMHO) along the lines of what is legally, morally, and ethically valid; we shouldn't be able to bypass those concerns by saying, "But it's for your own good!", even if it is.
I don't particularly buy that it is for the RIAA's own good, either. As with DVD/DeCSS, "piracy" is not at all the issue; what is at stake is the collective monopoly on distribution held by the RIAA. If an effective network for distribution of MP3s is allowed to develop, these guys are toast in the long run, and I think they know that (which is why they're ignoring the short-term benefits.) Personally, I'm looking forward to it.
... Jon Katz comes home to find his neighbor cutting down a tree in his yard and muttering incoherently about "free landscaping." Katz approaches the neighbor and asks what he is doing.
"Here!" says his neighbor, and thrusts a thick sheaf of statistics at him. "The American Demographic Society says that 81% of passing drivers believe your lawn to look better without this tree!"
"Wha?" says Jon Katz.
"And here! I've got a completely different landscaping model which, according to my calculations, can increase the beauty of your lawn by fifty percent or more! Think of all the new friends you'll have!"
Jon Katz chases the guy away with a stick. His neighbor, while running, shouts, "Short-sighted dunderhead!" and "Closed-minded corporate goon!"
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Ah, but what about relativity? There's no limit (beyond acceleration * amount of fuel you can carry) to how "fast" you can go, really... I remember reading in Analog (way back when) that it would take less than a lifetime of "subjective" time to reach the center of this galaxy at 1 gee acceleration; we need lighter fuel and better drives, but not exponentially better ones.
Not for credit: If in the ?illions of years you're taking, earth-time, we build a 2 gee ship and chase you down, are you younger, older, or the same age as you would have been if you'd waited and gone with the second crew? Or does it depend?
OTOH, from the very limited amount of attention I've given it, it doesn't seem like that many people are getting paid -- there are a lot of semi-cool-sounding projects with $10 committed to them, and a lot of projects that have stagnated once half the amount needed was raised. If this impression is accurate, then it's a terrible shame.
Pipe-dreams aside, I really wonder why M$ does so poorly at a (semi-) solved problem when they have an essentially infinite amount of money and (AFAIK) talent. Maybe Gates', "They're users, they won't care" attitude spreads through the intranet there. Or maybe there really is a god.
Or maybe Gates hacks on the release code every now and then, and the last guy who changed his code was never heard from again.
Getting angry at M$ as a whole, or even at Gates, seems like missing the mark to me. Even if the DoJ dissolved M$ tomorrow, all that would happen is that a lot of semi-competent people would lose their jobs and all the people responsible for the evil would retire to the Caribbean and spend the rest of their lives getting fat and humping the native women. Everybody would start using Macs. M$ or a company like it is here to stay, for the rest of our lives, because 95% of computer users like the start menu, and every time one of them wanders into the Linux community, one of us calls him a cretin because he can't configure his dial-up connection. He doesn't know that M$ is evil and wouldn't care if he did, and we shouldn't care that he has a crappy operating system. All he wants is email and internet porn, and Windows makes him happy. I see no problem with that.
The Linux community should pick its holy wars with care; by fighting to replace Windows as the OS of choice for the average AOL user, we're inviting a certain amount of noise and confusion into our lives. Do you really want Linus to be bombarded with emails saying, "I can't get my homepage to come up in StarOffice?" Let M$ sell overpriced, brittle software to the naive and undercut any attempt at competition; it'll happen whether you like it or not, and it's what they're good at. Even Jim Clark teamed up with M$ when he realized Healtheon's only other option was to compete. M$ can't screw Linux, though; the strategy outlined in the Halloween documents assumes that the only reason OSS can produce good server software is that the protocols are simple enough for all those Linux-minded feebs to understand, and it's the most credible strategy I've seen.
IMHO, he grinds his axes too loudly to be bullshitting. The first hundred pages or so have more iterations of "X said I was a fraud; here's why X was wrong; yeah, suck it, X" than I've ever heard from a supposed psychic.
In all seriousness, I'm not saying I buy the RIAA's argument that they "own" the songs they have legal title to at the moment. The argument over Napster, though, should proceed (IMHO) along the lines of what is legally, morally, and ethically valid; we shouldn't be able to bypass those concerns by saying, "But it's for your own good!", even if it is.
I don't particularly buy that it is for the RIAA's own good, either. As with DVD/DeCSS, "piracy" is not at all the issue; what is at stake is the collective monopoly on distribution held by the RIAA. If an effective network for distribution of MP3s is allowed to develop, these guys are toast in the long run, and I think they know that (which is why they're ignoring the short-term benefits.) Personally, I'm looking forward to it.
"Here!" says his neighbor, and thrusts a thick sheaf of statistics at him. "The American Demographic Society says that 81% of passing drivers believe your lawn to look better without this tree!"
"Wha?" says Jon Katz.
"And here! I've got a completely different landscaping model which, according to my calculations, can increase the beauty of your lawn by fifty percent or more! Think of all the new friends you'll have!"
Jon Katz chases the guy away with a stick. His neighbor, while running, shouts, "Short-sighted dunderhead!" and "Closed-minded corporate goon!"