While this is obviously a significant move for both governments, I am most impressed with the Russian space agency. It looks to me like the Russians realized that their own country wasn't going to be spending a lot of money on launching anything into space, so they decided to shop around and sell themselves. They must have done a good job of it, too, since they convinced Australia to fund them some. It's things like this that make it easy to believe Russia really was a very formidible foe during the cold war.
Perhaps the best thing to come out of Mundie's original talk and the fallout that followed it is the attention it draws to the GPL. I'm one of many people who has concerns about the GPL's ability to stand up to a strong challenge. And even if it did stand up in court, that wouldn't mean anything if everyone ignored it anyway. The EFF and company can only expend so many resources fighting GPL violaters with legal action.
Now that Mundie has made such a big deal out of the GPL, hopefully people and corporations will respect the GPL instead of ignoring it. If Microsoft takes it seriously, I should, too.
I believe so. A well known example involves the patent on waterbeds. Science fiction writer Robert A Heinlein described a water bed in one of his books. Soon afterwards a company put a patent out on water beds. The patent was challenged and later invalidated because the description and design of a water bed was available to the public and therefore not the intellectual property of anyone.
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
Not necessarily. If he releases his code under the GPL and then his company wants to use it in their code, they can't charge for the works using his code and need to release all the source code and GPL all of it, etc. There are other open source licenses that would work better for something like what you're talking about, like the BSD license.
Note that I'm not saying one license is absolutely better than another.
Why not? Because ideas tend to propogate. The common phrase for this is "Information wants to be free." Information and ideas aren't alive, they don't really want anything, it's simply a quotable simplification of the fact that information tends toward freedom. Your seeing my desk doesn't give you a desk. However, your seeing my desk does give you the idea of my desk. Once you've seen my desk or novel, nothing I do can keep you from taking that idea away from you. Trying to restrict the spread of an idea runs against the natural tendencies of ideas (or more specifically, the natural tendencies of the humans holding those ideas). Granting "ownership" of an idea is granting ownership of ideas held in other people's heads. It's granting control over what other people can do. I, for one, don't want to live in a world where most of the stuff in my head in "owned" by someone else.
This is exactly why some sort of copyright law in beneficial. Let's say that there is no copyright law. I decide to create and publish a book. By your own admission it's very difficult for someone who reads my book to forget about it or its characters. If said reader is creative it's very possible that they would come up with their own ideas based on my book. Without copyright law they're able to go ahead and publish a very similiar book, which would posibly take money away from me. They could even just copy my book verbatim and then publish it themselves. They could charge less than me for my book since the time spent copying the book is probably a lot less than the time required to write it. Copyright law gives me the exclusive right to make money off of my ideas for a certain period of time. Having the copyright wear out isn't too bad because I've had some time to make money off my ideas, making it a profitable activity. Infinite copyright is bad, but ten or twenty years is a really good idea.
Light's kinda weird. It has a small but greater-than-zero momentum (not really mass, but momentum). Momentum must be conserved, so momentum from the laser is imparted to the target, and it's this momentum that causes the damage. If the light is reflected then the momentum imparted to the target is even larger, because it needs to not only stop the light but also impart the same amount of momentum in the other direction. The amount that the momentum imparted causes the target to move or deform can be used to determine the force imparted. Since the area that the force is acting over is known, you can find the pressure. Thus, light has pressure. For more info I recommend Eri'c Treasure Trove of Physics. Try starting here.
I won't pretend to know what's going on in detail, but I've heard lots of smart people saying that the root cause is that California's power
companies have discovered that the economics of shortage are more profitable than the economics of full supply.
The best way to make a profit in any system is to skim the cream off the top. Providing service from the cream all the way down to the dregs (if I
might so mix metaphors) is not nearly so lucrative.
I don't know about you, but I'd love to be able to supply non-price-regulated electricity to california right now. And I bet every power company in the country would, too. In an economic situation like this any intelligent supplier will be making as much product as possible to keep up with demand, since they'll be able to sell as much as they can make. Or ever better, I'll make more than the demand is but I'll sell it for less than my competitors, forcing them to slice their prices also. I don't know who these smart people are, but they're wrong.
The traditional model of supply and demand never claimed that all consumers would get as much as they wanted. Or even needed.
Actually, that's pretty much what the laws of supply and demand do say. If by 'want' you mean that the consumers are willing to pay a reasonable cost such that the manufacturer can make a normal profit then more and more suppliers will keep entering the industry until prices drop to the point where it's not profitable to enter the industry.
I've read LotR a few times over the past 10 years or so, and every time except the most recent rereading I just skipped over all the poems and 'elven things'. The most recent time I read all the poems, making sure I understood what each was about and what was happening in each the whole time. It made an enormous difference. I felt much more immersed in the world and into the story than I had before. So the next time you read the books, take the effort to read the poems, songs, etc. It's worth the extra work.
I thought it would be good to point out that the movie pretty much gets its genetics right. The movie had a couple of things that you just had to accept as something that got invented in a hollywood future, like the 'blank humans' and the whole 'read your mind through your retina' thing, but those were just there to address limits of cloning (specifically that your memory doesn't get copied and that the clone, when created, it just one cell and needs to grow up just like you and me). When it talked about what was needed to clone someone or how they actually went about doing it, I was convinced that they had someone who knew what he was talking about working on the script.
For this, the filmmakers should be aplauded. It isn't often that a movie takes the time to get real science down correctly. If you don't think this is important to making a movie good then you haven't seen Mission to Mars
My friends and I played role-playing games in high school, we liked to mess with the computers. A wild Saturday night was some Pepsi, pizza, and a game of Starfleet Battles.
We also played varsity football, basketball, and track. We were in the weight room three days a week.
I was in a similiar position in high school. My best friend and I both liked role playing, reading sci-fi, and playing computer games. For the most part we never really went and hung out with the 'cool' people on friday and saturday nights. We both also played three vartisty sports.
Unfortunately, there were only two of us. That meant that all the people I played football, lacrosse, or wrestled with thought I was a nerd/geek/whatever, and therefore was different and an outcast. Likewise, all the people I was in AP classes with considered me a jock, again making me somewhat of an outcast (The jocks were a lot more antagonistic about it, though.).
The net result? I didn't manage to find a great number of close friends with either the jock or the nerds. It's not that I had a really bad time, but it was annoying. (I suppose that if I had realized that the jocks I was spending a bunch of my time hanging out with really were jerks sometime before senior year, I could have had more fun. OTOH, I usually managed to find enough people to role-play with.).
I remember reading an interesting article a few years about West Point (the U.S. Military Academy). As you might suspect, West Point is very big on conformity and fitting in. The idea is that in order for an army to perform well everyone needs to do what they are supposed to do all the time, or 'fit in'. Quite often, cadets at West Point who don't fit in will be harassed constantly by upperclassmen until they drop out (never mind that all the underclassmen are harassed by upperclassmen in order to make them more like everyone else. This creates a viscious cycle of every senior class feeling responsible for harassing the freshman so that they all share the same West Point experience).
The problem with this system is that the best generals and strategists think unconventionally, coming up with new ideas instead of following the same traditional strategies. The types of people who think like this are the same people who never fit in in high school and college. They are nonconformists who don't just go along with what everyone else does just because everyone else is doing it. So what the people running West Point were finding was that the system that was in place was designed to basiaclly make their best leaders quit.
Something like this may have been posted previously and I missed it. If so, I'm sorry.
This is not a question, but a request. I request that all of the candidates respond in clear, normal speech. The intended audience for your answers is not the lowest common denominator, it does not consist of people who plan on making mostly uninformed decisions based primarily on emotion or party affiliation. The readers of Slashdot are intelligent, educated people instead who prefer to make choices based off of factual information. Please don't answer the questions in a vague manner, or dodge the question to talk about something unrelated, because that's the best way for you to lose our votes. If some of the question topics are not familiar to you, please take the time to educate yourself and form an educated opinion and address the specific issues brought up in each question. Some of these questions may seem highly technical, but the technological nature of our society dictates that many important issues are highly technical ones. Most of us here have little faith in politicians, and would love to see one of you answer our questions directly and completely. We want to be good citizens and make an informed choice when we vote in the upcoming presidential election, now all we need is politicians who give us specific information for us to know.
Hopefully in 100 years any encryption method used will have been broken and almost useless. They could re-encrypt stuff, but hopefully someone will still have a copy that is old enough the the encryption is breakable (probably 5-10 years old, if not even newer, assuming technology keeps trending in the direction is has been so far).
Mailing yourself something doesn't work as a poor man's copyright since the post office doesn't guarantee anything about the postmarked envelope except that the envelope itself was legally mailed by the date it is postmarked. The enveloped could be marked or unmarked, sealed or unsealed. It is completely possible for you to mail yourself an unsealed envelope and keep for three years before putting information in it an sealing it. Same goes for writing on the envelope.
The FCC has repeatedly said Internet companies are not common carriers because they provide "enhanced" services rather than basic communication services, the appeals court said.
What if I started up an ISP that only connected people to the internet? No email address, no mail servers, no shell accounts, nothing. Just a dialup connection. I would keep no more logs that I would need to operate and that I would be legally required to as a common carrier. Would the FCC the contend that I'm not a common cariar because I'm providing some sort of "enhanced" service? It seems to me that the FCC needs to reasses their description of ISP's. Unless C|Net chnged the meanign of the FCC's statement to make it more interesting for the article, of course.
Mr. Spey
"When you stumble, you may regain your balance
by jumping beyond the thing that tripped you."
- Frank Herbert
"[I]f one appliance in a home network has an Internet connection, or flash memory, or an MP3 music archive - whatever - all other appliances can access that resource automatically. Not only is this cool, but it can dramatically lower the cost of entry for home networks"
Isn't being cool reason enough to try it out? This is almost enough to get a second box running in my shoebox apartment so that I can set up a lan and try this out. It's not so much that it can share the resources, but that there's no work involved.
Sometimes the best law of all is no law at all. Not all the world's
ills are susceptible to legislative correction.
- Pierre S. du Pont
All history shows that every man who has authority is led to abuse it;
he does not stop until he comes up against limitations...Things must be
so arranged that one authority checks another.
- Montesquieu
Human Beings are perhaps never more frightening than
when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.
- Laurens van der Post
Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but
man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
- Reinhold Niebuhr
"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment
by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
- Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
Just for the record, White Wolf didn't completely invent Mage themselves. Mage was originally called Ars Magica, which was written by someone named Jonathan Tweet (and possibly others) and is owned now by Atlas Games. Ars Magica took place hundreds of years ago, when the Order of Reason was going head-to-head with traditional mages who wanted to keep magic around. White Wolf bought the rights to the game system, which it turned into Mage. However both the general premise of traditional mages against the Order of Reason and the magic system itself, which is what really differentiates Mage / Ars Magica from other magic-using rpg's, were not invented by White Wolf.
Slashdot Mirror
While this is obviously a significant move for both governments, I am most impressed with the Russian space agency. It looks to me like the Russians realized that their own country wasn't going to be spending a lot of money on launching anything into space, so they decided to shop around and sell themselves. They must have done a good job of it, too, since they convinced Australia to fund them some. It's things like this that make it easy to believe Russia really was a very formidible foe during the cold war.
Mr. Spey
Perhaps the best thing to come out of Mundie's original talk and the fallout that followed it is the attention it draws to the GPL. I'm one of many people who has concerns about the GPL's ability to stand up to a strong challenge. And even if it did stand up in court, that wouldn't mean anything if everyone ignored it anyway. The EFF and company can only expend so many resources fighting GPL violaters with legal action.
Now that Mundie has made such a big deal out of the GPL, hopefully people and corporations will respect the GPL instead of ignoring it. If Microsoft takes it seriously, I should, too.
Mr. Spey
Can you claim fiction as prior art?
I believe so. A well known example involves the patent on waterbeds. Science fiction writer Robert A Heinlein described a water bed in one of his books. Soon afterwards a company put a patent out on water beds. The patent was challenged and later invalidated because the description and design of a water bed was available to the public and therefore not the intellectual property of anyone.
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
Not necessarily. If he releases his code under the GPL and then his company wants to use it in their code, they can't charge for the works using his code and need to release all the source code and GPL all of it, etc. There are other open source licenses that would work better for something like what you're talking about, like the BSD license.
Note that I'm not saying one license is absolutely better than another.
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
Why not? Because ideas tend to propogate. The common phrase for this is "Information wants to be free." Information and ideas aren't alive, they don't really want anything, it's simply a quotable simplification of the fact that information tends toward freedom. Your seeing my desk doesn't give you a desk. However, your seeing my desk does give you the idea of my desk. Once you've seen my desk or novel, nothing I do can keep you from taking that idea away from you. Trying to restrict the spread of an idea runs against the natural tendencies of ideas (or more specifically, the natural tendencies of the humans holding those ideas). Granting "ownership" of an idea is granting ownership of ideas held in other people's heads. It's granting control over what other people can do. I, for one, don't want to live in a world where most of the stuff in my head in "owned" by someone else.
This is exactly why some sort of copyright law in beneficial. Let's say that there is no copyright law. I decide to create and publish a book. By your own admission it's very difficult for someone who reads my book to forget about it or its characters. If said reader is creative it's very possible that they would come up with their own ideas based on my book. Without copyright law they're able to go ahead and publish a very similiar book, which would posibly take money away from me. They could even just copy my book verbatim and then publish it themselves. They could charge less than me for my book since the time spent copying the book is probably a lot less than the time required to write it. Copyright law gives me the exclusive right to make money off of my ideas for a certain period of time. Having the copyright wear out isn't too bad because I've had some time to make money off my ideas, making it a profitable activity. Infinite copyright is bad, but ten or twenty years is a really good idea.
Mr. Spey
Cover you butt. Bernard is watching.
Light's kinda weird. It has a small but greater-than-zero momentum (not really mass, but momentum). Momentum must be conserved, so momentum from the laser is imparted to the target, and it's this momentum that causes the damage. If the light is reflected then the momentum imparted to the target is even larger, because it needs to not only stop the light but also impart the same amount of momentum in the other direction. The amount that the momentum imparted causes the target to move or deform can be used to determine the force imparted. Since the area that the force is acting over is known, you can find the pressure. Thus, light has pressure. For more info I recommend Eri'c Treasure Trove of Physics. Try starting here.
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
I won't pretend to know what's going on in detail, but I've heard lots of smart people saying that the root cause is that California's power companies have discovered that the economics of shortage are more profitable than the economics of full supply.
The best way to make a profit in any system is to skim the cream off the top. Providing service from the cream all the way down to the dregs (if I might so mix metaphors) is not nearly so lucrative.
I don't know about you, but I'd love to be able to supply non-price-regulated electricity to california right now. And I bet every power company in the country would, too. In an economic situation like this any intelligent supplier will be making as much product as possible to keep up with demand, since they'll be able to sell as much as they can make. Or ever better, I'll make more than the demand is but I'll sell it for less than my competitors, forcing them to slice their prices also. I don't know who these smart people are, but they're wrong.
The traditional model of supply and demand never claimed that all consumers would get as much as they wanted. Or even needed.
Actually, that's pretty much what the laws of supply and demand do say. If by 'want' you mean that the consumers are willing to pay a reasonable cost such that the manufacturer can make a normal profit then more and more suppliers will keep entering the industry until prices drop to the point where it's not profitable to enter the industry.
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
I've read LotR a few times over the past 10 years or so, and every time except the most recent rereading I just skipped over all the poems and 'elven things'. The most recent time I read all the poems, making sure I understood what each was about and what was happening in each the whole time. It made an enormous difference. I felt much more immersed in the world and into the story than I had before. So the next time you read the books, take the effort to read the poems, songs, etc. It's worth the extra work.
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
I thought it would be good to point out that the movie pretty much gets its genetics right. The movie had a couple of things that you just had to accept as something that got invented in a hollywood future, like the 'blank humans' and the whole 'read your mind through your retina' thing, but those were just there to address limits of cloning (specifically that your memory doesn't get copied and that the clone, when created, it just one cell and needs to grow up just like you and me). When it talked about what was needed to clone someone or how they actually went about doing it, I was convinced that they had someone who knew what he was talking about working on the script.
For this, the filmmakers should be aplauded. It isn't often that a movie takes the time to get real science down correctly. If you don't think this is important to making a movie good then you haven't seen Mission to Mars
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
My friends and I played role-playing games in high school, we liked to mess with the computers. A wild Saturday night was some Pepsi, pizza, and a game of Starfleet Battles.
We also played varsity football, basketball, and track. We were in the weight room three days a week.
I was in a similiar position in high school. My best friend and I both liked role playing, reading sci-fi, and playing computer games. For the most part we never really went and hung out with the 'cool' people on friday and saturday nights. We both also played three vartisty sports.
Unfortunately, there were only two of us. That meant that all the people I played football, lacrosse, or wrestled with thought I was a nerd/geek/whatever, and therefore was different and an outcast. Likewise, all the people I was in AP classes with considered me a jock, again making me somewhat of an outcast (The jocks were a lot more antagonistic about it, though.).
The net result? I didn't manage to find a great number of close friends with either the jock or the nerds. It's not that I had a really bad time, but it was annoying. (I suppose that if I had realized that the jocks I was spending a bunch of my time hanging out with really were jerks sometime before senior year, I could have had more fun. OTOH, I usually managed to find enough people to role-play with.).
Whatever. Just thought I'd share.
Mr. Spey
"Cover your butt. Bernard is watching."
I remember reading an interesting article a few years about West Point (the U.S. Military Academy). As you might suspect, West Point is very big on conformity and fitting in. The idea is that in order for an army to perform well everyone needs to do what they are supposed to do all the time, or 'fit in'. Quite often, cadets at West Point who don't fit in will be harassed constantly by upperclassmen until they drop out (never mind that all the underclassmen are harassed by upperclassmen in order to make them more like everyone else. This creates a viscious cycle of every senior class feeling responsible for harassing the freshman so that they all share the same West Point experience).
The problem with this system is that the best generals and strategists think unconventionally, coming up with new ideas instead of following the same traditional strategies. The types of people who think like this are the same people who never fit in in high school and college. They are nonconformists who don't just go along with what everyone else does just because everyone else is doing it. So what the people running West Point were finding was that the system that was in place was designed to basiaclly make their best leaders quit.
Something like this may have been posted previously and I missed it. If so, I'm sorry.
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
This is not a question, but a request. I request that all of the candidates respond in clear, normal speech. The intended audience for your answers is not the lowest common denominator, it does not consist of people who plan on making mostly uninformed decisions based primarily on emotion or party affiliation. The readers of Slashdot are intelligent, educated people instead who prefer to make choices based off of factual information. Please don't answer the questions in a vague manner, or dodge the question to talk about something unrelated, because that's the best way for you to lose our votes. If some of the question topics are not familiar to you, please take the time to educate yourself and form an educated opinion and address the specific issues brought up in each question. Some of these questions may seem highly technical, but the technological nature of our society dictates that many important issues are highly technical ones. Most of us here have little faith in politicians, and would love to see one of you answer our questions directly and completely. We want to be good citizens and make an informed choice when we vote in the upcoming presidential election, now all we need is politicians who give us specific information for us to know.
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching
Hopefully in 100 years any encryption method used will have been broken and almost useless. They could re-encrypt stuff, but hopefully someone will still have a copy that is old enough the the encryption is breakable (probably 5-10 years old, if not even newer, assuming technology keeps trending in the direction is has been so far).
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
Mailing yourself something doesn't work as a poor man's copyright since the post office doesn't guarantee anything about the postmarked envelope except that the envelope itself was legally mailed by the date it is postmarked. The enveloped could be marked or unmarked, sealed or unsealed. It is completely possible for you to mail yourself an unsealed envelope and keep for three years before putting information in it an sealing it. Same goes for writing on the envelope.
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt, Bernard is watching.
The FCC has repeatedly said Internet companies are not common carriers because they provide "enhanced" services rather than basic communication services, the appeals court said.
What if I started up an ISP that only connected people to the internet? No email address, no mail servers, no shell accounts, nothing. Just a dialup connection. I would keep no more logs that I would need to operate and that I would be legally required to as a common carrier. Would the FCC the contend that I'm not a common cariar because I'm providing some sort of "enhanced" service? It seems to me that the FCC needs to reasses their description of ISP's. Unless C|Net chnged the meanign of the FCC's statement to make it more interesting for the article, of course.
Mr. Spey
"When you stumble, you may regain your balance
by jumping beyond the thing that tripped you."
- Frank Herbert
From the QNX developer FAQ:
"[I]f one appliance in a home network has an Internet connection, or flash memory, or an MP3 music archive - whatever - all other appliances can access that resource automatically. Not only is this cool, but it can dramatically lower the cost of entry for home networks"
Isn't being cool reason enough to try it out? This is almost enough to get a second box running in my shoebox apartment so that I can set up a lan and try this out. It's not so much that it can share the resources, but that there's no work involved.
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
Sometimes the best law of all is no law at all. Not all the world's ills are susceptible to legislative correction.
- Pierre S. du Pont
All history shows that every man who has authority is led to abuse it; he does not stop until he comes up against limitations...Things must be so arranged that one authority checks another.
- Montesquieu
Human Beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.
- Laurens van der Post
Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
- Reinhold Niebuhr
"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
- Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
Just for the record, White Wolf didn't completely invent Mage themselves. Mage was originally called Ars Magica, which was written by someone named Jonathan Tweet (and possibly others) and is owned now by Atlas Games. Ars Magica took place hundreds of years ago, when the Order of Reason was going head-to-head with traditional mages who wanted to keep magic around. White Wolf bought the rights to the game system, which it turned into Mage. However both the general premise of traditional mages against the Order of Reason and the magic system itself, which is what really differentiates Mage / Ars Magica from other magic-using rpg's, were not invented by White Wolf.