I don't think this is strictly true. The gas giant itself would not give off much heat - what does come into play is the constant stretching and compressing of a natural satellite by the massive tidal forces involved in orbiting such a monster. This process, in turn, can generate the heat in the satellite to kick off all kinds of interesting stuff....
Well, technically, neither the sun nor the earth orbit each other. They both orbit their mutual centre of gravity. Seeing as this imaginary point in space is actually located inside the sun (as it is so much more massive than the earth), then it would seem more appropriate to say the earth approximately orbits the sun.
I can't blame the US for assuming the.com etc. TLD's. It a bit like England and postage stamps - from what I'm aware, England is the only country that doesn't put the name of the country on the stamp itself - but they invented them as we know it, so why did they need to originally? This is the same as the US and the most commonly known TLD's. The US came up with the whole idea in the first place....
Here's a couple: 1. Have you ever considered releasing a work only on the interenet, ala Mr. King? 2. Do you see h2g2.com competing with everything2.com? Ever think of hooking up? They seem to trying to accomplish the same goal. 3. "Mostly Harmless" seemed to have an air of "Let's just get this over with and kill off all the characters." Was one of the goals of the book to make another sequel impossible, or at least not expected? 4. Which character in the HHGTTG books would you associate with most? Or do you think that each exhibits characteristics that we all have from time to time? (e.g. The hedonistic Zaphod, the helpless Dent.) 5. Do you like science fiction in general, or do you just find it a convenient medium in which wierd and zany things can happen to your characters? 6. Having imagined an all-pervasive source of information years before anyone else, what do you think is the future of the internet? Were you surprised when life imitated art in this way? 7. Is the story about you lying in a field (drunk I believe), while hitch-hiking true? 8. Do you have a work currently in progress? If so, what is it about?
It's a pity that they don't put the same amount of effort into analysing and correcting social problems as they do computer program design. In this instance, what WAVE are doing (or what they're being paid to do - they might try to draw that fine distinction) is a HACK of the highest order. Imagine you have a program, and every now and then it throws out terrible, dangerous data (kids killing kids). You know the problem is somewhere in the low-level code (the homes or environment in this case), but you're just not willing to make the effort to dig down and face the difficult issue of sorting it out. What to do instead? Just try to catch the problem immediately before it shows itself, in your high-level code. You reason that you have so much data to spare that even if you catch a few false-positives (kids just being harmlessly different because they are different), the app will still work. I know I wouldn't get away with basic design mistakes like this at my job. Why can these people (the civil servants in charge of the mess I guess) make fundamental mistakes and get away with it? What are they going to do if more and different types of social problems show up? Keep hacking at the top of the system to try to catch them? When are they going to finally realise that there is something gone wrong at the fundamental level, and spend the time and resources sorting it out there?
But I think that the main cause of digital copyright problems is the fact that digital media can be copied so easily. So easily, in fact, as to make it impossible to deal with the information itself on a bit level - you have to go one level higher. In this case, if I give you the ftp address of a piece of code that could bring down the net (let say!), then I am, for all intents and purposes, giving you the code itself... As another example, lets say that your personal details were stored in a file on a unix box, and someone came along and gave me a symbolic link to that file. You could say that as it wasn't the file itself then he didn't do anything wrong. But I'd argue that he did, and giving me the link was as good as giving me the file...
I still think that if you want to use the gun analogy, then it is not correct to merely say you just telling people where the gun store is. Because most of the digital media opyright problems stem from the fact (I believe) that digital forms of information can be copied effortlessly, then giving someone a link to information on the net has the same effect as _giving them the information itself_.
I don't think this is necessarily a free-speech case. I think a link is more than 'telling someone where it can be found'. It's like handing it to them on a platter. If I was to tell you that you can buy a gun in a gun store, then obviously I have committed no crime. But if I was to leave a loaded gun on the sidewalk outside a school, then a case could be made that I am at least partly responsible for the consequences of someone picking up and using that gun. There are no perfect analogies for what goes on with information on the net, and I think that a lot of the ambiguities are caused by people trying fit the sqaure peg if internet information into the round hole of media we're more used to.
Slashdot Mirror
and the planet itself gives off heat
I don't think this is strictly true. The gas giant itself would not give off much heat - what does come into play is the constant stretching and compressing of a natural satellite by the massive tidal forces involved in orbiting such a monster. This process, in turn, can generate the heat in the satellite to kick off all kinds of interesting stuff....
Well, technically, neither the sun nor the earth orbit each other. They both orbit their mutual centre of gravity. Seeing as this imaginary point in space is actually located inside the sun (as it is so much more massive than the earth), then it would seem more appropriate to say the earth approximately orbits the sun.
I can't blame the US for assuming the .com etc. TLD's. It a bit like England and postage stamps - from what I'm aware, England is the only country that doesn't put the name of the country on the stamp itself - but they invented them as we know it, so why did they need to originally?
This is the same as the US and the most commonly known TLD's. The US came up with the whole idea in the first place....
Here's a couple:
1. Have you ever considered releasing a work only on the interenet, ala Mr. King?
2. Do you see h2g2.com competing with everything2.com? Ever think of hooking up? They seem to trying to accomplish the same goal.
3. "Mostly Harmless" seemed to have an air of "Let's just get this over with and kill off all the characters." Was one of the goals of the book to make another sequel impossible, or at least not expected?
4. Which character in the HHGTTG books would you associate with most? Or do you think that each exhibits characteristics that we all have from time to time? (e.g. The hedonistic Zaphod, the helpless Dent.)
5. Do you like science fiction in general, or do you just find it a convenient medium in which wierd and zany things can happen to your characters?
6. Having imagined an all-pervasive source of information years before anyone else, what do you think is the future of the internet? Were you surprised when life imitated art in this way?
7. Is the story about you lying in a field (drunk I believe), while hitch-hiking true?
8. Do you have a work currently in progress? If so, what is it about?
Thanks for the reads...
It's a pity that they don't put the same amount of effort into analysing and correcting social problems as they do computer program design. In this instance, what WAVE are doing (or what they're being paid to do - they might try to draw that fine distinction) is a HACK of the highest order.
Imagine you have a program, and every now and then it throws out terrible, dangerous data (kids killing kids). You know the problem is somewhere in the low-level code (the homes or environment in this case), but you're just not willing to make the effort to dig down and face the difficult issue of sorting it out. What to do instead? Just try to catch the problem immediately before it shows itself, in your high-level code. You reason that you have so much data to spare that even if you catch a few false-positives (kids just being harmlessly different because they are different), the app will still work.
I know I wouldn't get away with basic design mistakes like this at my job. Why can these people (the civil servants in charge of the mess I guess) make fundamental mistakes and get away with it?
What are they going to do if more and different types of social problems show up? Keep hacking at the top of the system to try to catch them? When are they going to finally realise that there is something gone wrong at the fundamental level, and spend the time and resources sorting it out there?
But I think that the main cause of digital copyright problems is the fact that digital media can be copied so easily. So easily, in fact, as to make it impossible to deal with the information itself on a bit level - you have to go one level higher. In this case, if I give you the ftp address of a piece of code that could bring down the net (let say!), then I am, for all intents and purposes, giving you the code itself... As another example, lets say that your personal details were stored in a file on a unix box, and someone came along and gave me a symbolic link to that file. You could say that as it wasn't the file itself then he didn't do anything wrong. But I'd argue that he did, and giving me the link was as good as giving me the file...
I still think that if you want to use the gun analogy, then it is not correct to merely say you just telling people where the gun store is. Because most of the digital media opyright problems stem from the fact (I believe) that digital forms of information can be copied effortlessly, then giving someone a link to information on the net has the same effect as _giving them the information itself_.
I don't think this is necessarily a free-speech case. I think a link is more than 'telling someone where it can be found'. It's like handing it to them on a platter. If I was to tell you that you can buy a gun in a gun store, then obviously I have committed no crime. But if I was to leave a loaded gun on the sidewalk outside a school, then a case could be made that I am at least partly responsible for the consequences of someone picking up and using that gun. There are no perfect analogies for what goes on with information on the net, and I think that a lot of the ambiguities are caused by people trying fit the sqaure peg if internet information into the round hole of media we're more used to.