The Criterion Collection is released by a company (Criterion) that specializes on high quality transfers of films to DVD often with alot of extras. they started doing tis for Laser Disc and are now doing it for DVD. They are not doing anymore LDs and IIRC are stopping production of their LD becuase they feel that LD has been supersceded by DVD.
Im a big fan of DVD, i have a PC DVD ROM drive (the only 2 things win98 is good for is games and DVDs) and a Sony DVD player for my TV.
Ive never used LD, but I have to say that LDs often have commentry tracks and other special features found on DVD. In fact alot of DVDs are just copies of the LDs. On several of my DVDs (for instance on Phantasm and on Criterion's Brazil commentary tracks the director mentions doing the commentary "for this laser disc")
LDs have an analogue sound track which, depending on your A/D hardware and the type of encoding on the DVD may or may not sound better than the DVD. I have a friend hwo has both DVD & LD who swears that his LDs sound alot better than DVD.
Im constantly amazed by how good BeOS is at what it does. Of course what it does is still quite limited compared to other OSes that have been out longer. In my experience the RH and windows installs are pretty much equal these days. Alot depends on your hardware.
I prefer the RH because the windows way of doing just about anything really frustrates me. Windows is an example of how NOT to do a GUI interface. BeOS is an example of just how good a GUI can be.
BeOS has the easiest, quickest install of them all if (and its still a fairly big if) your hardware is supported.
BeOS is fun & easy to use and doesn't sacrifice power in doing so. And its fast, really really fast. Right now its weakest point as an OS is the lack of multiuser support and the attendant network security problems.
I think you're reading alittle too much into what is said in the patent. From the abstract:
determination is made that a sequence of translated instructions will generate an exception or error on the host processor [empahsis mine]
It seems to me that what they are doing here is making sure that the translation is correct, i.e. that the native instructions make sense. It does not do anything about any memory writes that might take place as a result of the execution of those native commands. Remember that the BSOD in windows comes as a result of the execution of a valid set of x86 instructions that mess up memory in a way that stops the application/system from functioning properly. What TM is talking about here would not effect that sort of thing at all (the chip logic would have no idea that writing to memlocation x would screw up the running of your app)
This implies to me that whatever mechanism TM is using to quickly translate (say) x86 -> TM instruction set can cause a set of instructions that make no sense (for instance a value is written to a register then another a value written to the same register without the first value being used at all -- that might not be a very good example but its that sort of thing )
Keep the command-line power for those who want it, but a consumer user should NEVER have to see it. Period
BeOS already does this. The GUI is very slick too. The multitasking is better than ANY other OS ive ever used (lots of threads and fine grained scheduling)
BeOS is nowhere close to linux or *nix as a server for one thing it doesn't (yet) have multiuser support, but it rocks as a desktop OS. For this reason amongst others you and many other Slashdotters might not want to actually use BeOS, but if you want to see what your goal of a "user friendly linux" might look like take a look at BeOS!
Its bad enough that these kids are forced wear IDs and its even worse that they are using the supposedly provate SSN but whats the deal with the Pepsi logo also mentioned in the article?
Not only are they subjected to this pointless knee-jerk facist "security", measure they're forced to be walking coporate billboards.
Im glad some of them are standing up aginst this foolishness, and I think they should also boycott Pepsi products.
this is part of the IMO rather disturbing "prove you're not a criminal" mentality thats increasingly prevelant in the US today (show your DL for transactions, drug tests etc etc)
In a recent thread on/. this topic was discussed in depth. One article compared the murdur rates in the US and UK with extensive documentation. The thread was in the left/right/center politics poll so I can't give you the link. However I did note down the relevant stats. The last year with complete data was 1997. In 1997 there were 142 murdurs in the UK and 18,209 in the US of which 68% were commited with guns. Adjusting for population (the US has 5 times the population of the UK) there were 2.4 murdered per million people in the UK and 67.9 per million in the US.
I would argue that the 28X higher murder rate in the US is, at least in part, due to easy access to guns (especially handguns)
It sems to me that the UK doesn't have the "same problems" as the US.
Now having said that I don't beleive UK style gun control could work in the US. The attitude of people at large is very different. The vast majority of people in the UK see no legitimate need for private handgun control. The same cannot be said for the US. Many people in the US beleive that hand gun ownership is a good thing. The majority of gun owners in the US are also responsible people who do not commit crimes. It would be very hard to convince such people that banning handguns is a good idea. Indeed in the US it probably isn't because not only are there a huge number of guns out there, in many places they aren't registered or liscenced in anyway so there would be no way implement such a ban.
You have to remember 2 things here to put his comment in context:
1. he's a head-in-the-clouds academic.
2. he's from the UK
The attitude towards gun in the UK is completely different from that in UK. Don't try and parse his comments in terms of the NRA vs Handgun Control Inc. gun ownership is a "right" debate.
In the UK the overwhelming majority of people think that handguns have no legitimate place in society.
Im not trying to comment on the relative merits of the US or UK approach to guns, Im just trying to put the guys comments in context!
Where I work they are considering switching to StarOffice because the cost of converting the entire company to Office2000 would be too high (after all they have to pay my bloated salary also;-) So this Linus guy may have a point!
I think the main advantage of this device over a Palm pilot with a city guide & maps on it is that it can have up-to-the-minute info. If you're in some place you've never been before & want to go to a movie, not only could this thing tell whenre the nearest cinema is but also tell you whats playing today at what times and what the ticket prices are. The idea of a constantly upgraded info base with user feed back is much much better than simply putting Fromers (or whatever) on a handheld
NO the web certainly is not utopia, but plenty of information is shared still. Take a look at slashdot.org fo instance;-) Seriously there is plenty of data and opinion published on the web for the benefit of researchers and other interested parties. The problem with the sharing on the web may not be so much the advertising as the sheer number of people with access.
A site that may be set up for the serious discussion of some idea or academic study can be become overwhelmed by input from crack pots, zealots with some axe to grind against the site's subject, or the just plain ill-informed.
The web still does allow people to collaborate and share information in new and innovative ways, it also does a whole bunch of other things that Mr. Berners-Lee never thought of. ISn't it great?
I certainly don't condone kiddy porn or people trying to seduce little girls, but I must say I've heard of many instances of people getting arrested for meeting people who claim to be kids on the net, but turn out to be cops, but I can't remember hearing about any actual molestation cases where the molestor met his victim over the net!
Given the media's propensity to over-hype anything net-related, its seems likely that it doesn't happen all that often. My local paper seems to have stories about pedophiles getting arrested every week, but non of them seem to be net-related.
This leads me to the conclusion that most of the "children" trolling for sex on net chat rooms are actually law enforcement officials. Shouldn't they be doing something more useful? Now if these people are actually prodcung child porn, then busting them obviously should have a high priority, but you only hear about these people possessing it, not making it. They probably got it from some FBI troll anyway. It looks to me that the cops like this because they can sit on their butts eating tax-payer doughnuts and look like they're doing something useful.
As far as i know it was 5 or 6 years ago that they first allowed people to sell end-users net access as opposed to commercial entities (defence contractors etc) being allowed to use the net to communicate with univeristies and government organizations. Before that joe-average-person on the street couldn't buy net access at all, if they had it was through their emplyer or school.
Re:Anybody notice Slashdot's time is off?
on
Linux Turns 8
·
· Score: 1
no GMT is 5 hours ahead of Eastern time. (or maybe its 4 with daylight time)
I first ran Linux about 5 years ago, when they first opened up the Net to commercial access, I got a dial-up unix account (never even heard of unix before) and found it was realy cool. I got UNIX for Dummies and was pretty impressed with the capabilities and the idea of 100 people accessing the net at the same time on one box.
I started to hear about this "linux" thing and got a slackware distro, ftp'd each dir to my dial up and then downloaded at 9600 baud to my PC. At least I had just got a second HD so I could do a HD install from the windows partition to the other drive.
The first kernel I had was 0.9.18
I figured if it was crap i'd just blow it away. Well needless to say since I was running Windows 3.1 at the time, it was the Windows partition that ended up getting blown away. But it was more than a month of frustration before I could get X to work though.
The difference in performance between the 2 OSes on the same hardware was a real eye-opener and really got me thinking about software and OSes. In fact I ended up returning to school to do CS and now I make lots of $ writing software for a living (ironicly its for windows:p ) But I have linux to thank for my new career!
The last linux kernel i had was 2.0.?
I think OSS is a good idea but im not religious or political when it comes to that. I used linux initialy because 1) it worked properly and 2) it allowed me to learn about computer systems.
When I heard about BeOS it sounded really interesting and innovative, so when they released it on x86 I thought I'd give it a try. I bought a nice dual proc box from the guys who made the development machines for Be (no HW support problems that way) figuring if I didn't like it i'd just put linux on it instead. Well 1 1/2 years later that box still only has BeOS on it and I use it daily because, for me, it does what i need it to better than anything else out there!
I saw this article on the CNN website 5 or 6 hours ago and tried to take a look at the company's web site and it looked like that it couldn't standup to the CNN Effect! So I'd bet it can't stand up to both that and the/. effect at the same time! (Then again I can't get through to/. half the time anyway) I'd bet that CNN gets more hits than/. but I would think that alot less people follow links out of CNN than they do out of/.
In anycase this air scooter thing looks very interesting if it ever works out.
Another problem is all the advertizing on US cable, thy often have to re-edit to get the length right. They have a Discovery Channel on cable in the UK now, but the programs are differnet becuase the UK version has significantly less commercial time than the US, so an hour long show has alot more content than in the US.
US shows like Bay Watch that are shown outside the US often shoot extra scenes known as "Euro minutes" to add into the exported version of the show so that it will run for a full hour outside the US
Reagan did cut taxes (or rather the congress did at his urging) but he also increased spending (almost all on the Military) this where we got the infamous $90 hammers from, he just pissed money away on a huge military build up, not caring how efficiently it was spent.
The argument about his spending the Soviets under to win the cold war is nonsense, and if there were any truth to it, it was completely inadvertant on Reagan's part. He justified all this spending by scaring the public about the Soviet "Evil Empire" that was poised to take over the world if we didn't get ready to fight back.
If the Soviets were so strong & agressive a military build up wouldn't have put them under. Of course the military, who should have known better, went along with this as they got lots of shiny new toys and $500 toilet seats out of it.
It can be argued that the Soviets made us needlesly spend more, after the cold war ended it was revealed that some of the big scary rockets paraded past Lenin's tomb on May Day were fakes. In at least one case a fake long range nuclear rocket caused the US to spend billions on countering it!
Of course Reagan's fiscal policies tripled the national debt, so that even now the biggest item on the budget is interest payments on the debt. Thanks Ronnie!
At the same time Reagan was borrowing and spending he had the Education Department re-define ketchup as a vegetable so that a few $ would be saved on school lunches for poor kids. What an American Hero!
Encrypt encrypt encrypt
on
CALEA update
·
· Score: 4
All the more reason we should all routinely encrypt everything that goes over the network. What is needed is more seamless encryption tools, e.g. if all e-mails are routinely encrypted/de-crypted using public key cryptography without intervention from the user, most people would probably do so.
If internet communications are routinely strongly encrypted all this Big Brother business would become moot. To be sure there are legitimate reasons for the feds to snoop on people, but such a power will be abused (either officialy or by "rouge" agents)
Also this is fundamentaly different from tapping phone conversations in that more and more transactions now take place over the net. Net surveilance would not only include person-to-person communication, but also financial transactions, purchasing habits, reading habits etc etc.
It seems to me that the feds don't really have a compelling reason for this otherwise they would be able to come up with a better reason than the tired old Terrorists/Pedophiles/"Think of the Children" justification.
Have you actualy ever seen any terrorists --Brazil
While the gamma-ray hypothosis is interesting, it needs alot of further investigation before we should start to divide the Drake Equation by 1000. There's an awful lot we still don't know about planetary formation and this is just one explanation so we shouldn't jump to conclusions.
Given the extraordinary pictures the Hubble Space Telescope has porduced of stella formation and protoplanetary discs, I for one would love to see a next generation Space telescope with an order of magnitutde greater power put into orbit which might give us some more data to explain the planetary foramtion process.
Of course with the GOP trying to kill NASA's science research budget there's not much chance of this happening.
Why even post this? I don't usualy critisize what gets posted here, its good to see stuff I wouldn't ordinaarily see, but really whats the point of this one? Theres no chance whatsoever that some little web cam in someone's house is going to stand up to the/. effect! So basicly this post has no information and no web cams pics to view so they might as well not have posted it!
Its not like the Slashdot effect isn't in the dictionary.
/. is not an objective source for anything. The linux bias on the part of the people who run the site and moderate and post comments is overwhelming. Basicaly the attitude is "if its not linux/OSS its CRAP"
Anyone who reads/. on a regular basis knows this however, so we don't take the "News for nerds. Stuff that matters" thing seriously. Id like to see alot more about BeOS here too, but despite it probably being the most technicaly advanced desktop OS out there, its Not Linux, so few/.ers would care.
It might be useful here to point out that "Communism" is not the same as the former Eastern Bloc/Soviet totalitarian states. In several posts people are talking about dictators and freedom of information, but the repression in the former "Communist" countries has nothing to do with the idea of Communism.
Communism was an idea, a way of organizing economies, the countries refered to claimed to be attempting to implement this idea, but most didn't even claim to have met that ideal and refered to themselves as "Socialist". It also must be pointed out that many countries that profess to be capitalist also are just as repressive as the communist ones were.
Marx had a lot of economic theories about the future of the relationship between the people who do the wrok and the people who own the resources and the means of production, and postulated a better system that could be implemented once the former group had finaly cast off the chains imposed on them the latter.
Communism could be summed up by the phrase "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". It has nothing to do with freedom or the lack of freedom according to any of the definitions often used on this board (speech, beer civil)
Slashdot Mirror
The Criterion Collection is released by a company (Criterion) that specializes on high quality transfers of films to DVD often with alot of extras. they started doing tis for Laser Disc and are now doing it for DVD. They are not doing anymore LDs and IIRC are stopping production of their LD becuase they feel that LD has been supersceded by DVD.
There web site is here.
Im a big fan of DVD, i have a PC DVD ROM drive (the only 2 things win98 is good for is games and DVDs) and a Sony DVD player for my TV.
Ive never used LD, but I have to say that LDs often have commentry tracks and other special features found on DVD. In fact alot of DVDs are just copies of the LDs. On several of my DVDs (for instance on Phantasm and on Criterion's Brazil commentary tracks the director mentions doing the commentary "for this laser disc")
LDs have an analogue sound track which, depending on your A/D hardware and the type of encoding on the DVD may or may not sound better than the DVD. I have a friend hwo has both DVD & LD who swears that his LDs sound alot better than DVD.
BeOS install crushes them all
Im constantly amazed by how good BeOS is at what it does. Of course what it does is still quite limited compared to other OSes that have been out longer. In my experience the RH and windows installs are pretty much equal these days. Alot depends on your hardware.
I prefer the RH because the windows way of doing just about anything really frustrates me. Windows is an example of how NOT to do a GUI interface. BeOS is an example of just how good a GUI can be.
BeOS has the easiest, quickest install of them all if (and its still a fairly big if) your hardware is supported.
BeOS is fun & easy to use and doesn't sacrifice power in doing so. And its fast, really really fast. Right now its weakest point as an OS is the lack of multiuser support and the attendant network security problems.
I think you're reading alittle too much into what is said in the patent. From the abstract:
determination is made that a sequence of translated instructions will generate an exception or error on the host processor [empahsis mine]
It seems to me that what they are doing here is making sure that the translation is correct, i.e. that the native instructions make sense. It does not do anything about any memory writes that might take place as a result of the execution of those native commands. Remember that the BSOD in windows comes as a result of the execution of a valid set of x86 instructions that mess up memory in a way that stops the application/system from functioning properly. What TM is talking about here would not effect that sort of thing at all (the chip logic would have no idea that writing to memlocation x would screw up the running of your app)
This implies to me that whatever mechanism TM is using to quickly translate (say) x86 -> TM instruction set can cause a set of instructions that make no sense (for instance a value is written to a register then another a value written to the same register without the first value being used at all -- that might not be a very good example but its that sort of thing )
My passport says im a British Citizen, they got rid of the 'British Subject' bit sometime in the 80s
Also loving being British
Keep the command-line power for those who want it, but a consumer user should NEVER have to see it. Period
BeOS already does this. The GUI is very slick too. The multitasking is better than ANY other OS ive ever used (lots of threads and fine grained scheduling)
BeOS is nowhere close to linux or *nix as a server for one thing it doesn't (yet) have multiuser support, but it rocks as a desktop OS.
For this reason amongst others you and many other Slashdotters might not want to actually use BeOS, but if you want to see what your goal of a "user friendly linux" might look like take a look at BeOS!
Its bad enough that these kids are forced wear IDs and its even worse that they are using the supposedly provate SSN but whats the deal with the Pepsi logo also mentioned in the article?
Not only are they subjected to this pointless knee-jerk facist "security", measure they're forced to be walking coporate billboards.
Im glad some of them are standing up aginst this foolishness, and I think they should also boycott Pepsi products.
this is part of the IMO rather disturbing "prove you're not a criminal" mentality thats increasingly prevelant in the US today (show your DL for transactions, drug tests etc etc)
In a recent thread on /. this topic was discussed in depth. One article compared the murdur rates in the US and UK with extensive documentation. The thread was in the left/right/center politics poll so I can't give you the link. However I did note down the relevant stats. The last year with complete data was 1997. In 1997 there were 142 murdurs in the UK and 18,209 in the US of which 68% were commited with guns. Adjusting for population (the US has 5 times the population of the UK) there were 2.4 murdered per million people in the UK and 67.9 per million in the US.
I would argue that the 28X higher murder rate in the US is, at least in part, due to easy access to guns (especially handguns)
It sems to me that the UK doesn't have the "same problems" as the US.
Now having said that I don't beleive UK style gun control could work in the US. The attitude of people at large is very different. The vast majority of people in the UK see no legitimate need for private handgun control. The same cannot be said for the US. Many people in the US beleive that hand gun ownership is a good thing.
The majority of gun owners in the US are also responsible people who do not commit crimes. It would be very hard to convince such people that banning handguns is a good idea. Indeed in the US it probably isn't because not only are there a huge number of guns out there, in many places they aren't registered or liscenced in anyway so there would be no way implement such a ban.
You have to remember 2 things here to put his comment in context:
1. he's a head-in-the-clouds academic.
2. he's from the UK
The attitude towards gun in the UK is completely different from that in UK. Don't try and parse his comments in terms of the NRA vs Handgun Control Inc. gun ownership is a "right" debate.
In the UK the overwhelming majority of people think that handguns have no legitimate place in society.
Im not trying to comment on the relative merits of the US or UK approach to guns, Im just trying to put the guys comments in context!
Where I work they are considering switching to StarOffice because the cost of converting the entire company to Office2000 would be too high (after all they have to pay my bloated salary also ;-) So this Linus guy may have a point!
1. They still (at 12:20 Eastern) have not regained contact.
2. As has allready been pointed out the Mars Global Surveyor can also act as a relay.
3. the lander has a low gain attenna on it that it can use to communicate with Earth directly if needed.
I think the main advantage of this device over a Palm pilot with a city guide & maps on it is that it can have up-to-the-minute info. If you're in some place you've never been before & want to go to a movie, not only could this thing tell whenre the nearest cinema is but also tell you whats playing today at what times and what the ticket prices are. The idea of a constantly upgraded info base with user feed back is much much better than simply putting Fromers (or whatever) on a handheld
NO the web certainly is not utopia, but plenty of information is shared still. Take a look at slashdot.org fo instance ;-) Seriously there is plenty of data and opinion published on the web for the benefit of researchers and other interested parties. The problem with the sharing on the web may not be so much the advertising as the sheer number of people with access.
A site that may be set up for the serious discussion of some idea or academic study can be become overwhelmed by input from crack pots, zealots with some axe to grind against the site's subject, or the just plain ill-informed.
The web still does allow people to collaborate and share information in new and innovative ways, it also does a whole bunch of other things that Mr. Berners-Lee never thought of. ISn't it great?
I certainly don't condone kiddy porn or people trying to seduce little girls, but I must say I've heard of many instances of people getting arrested for meeting people who claim to be kids on the net, but turn out to be cops, but I can't remember hearing about any actual molestation cases where the molestor met his victim over the net!
Given the media's propensity to over-hype anything net-related, its seems likely that it doesn't happen all that often. My local paper seems to have stories about pedophiles getting arrested every week, but non of them seem to be net-related.
This leads me to the conclusion that most of the "children" trolling for sex on net chat rooms are actually law enforcement officials. Shouldn't they be doing something more useful? Now if these people are actually prodcung child porn, then busting them obviously should have a high priority, but you only hear about these people possessing it, not making it. They probably got it from some FBI troll anyway. It looks to me that the cops like this because they can sit on their butts eating tax-payer doughnuts and look like they're doing something useful.
As far as i know it was 5 or 6 years ago that they first allowed people to sell end-users net access as opposed to commercial entities (defence contractors etc) being allowed to use the net to communicate with univeristies and government organizations. Before that joe-average-person on the street couldn't buy net access at all, if they had it was through their emplyer or school.
no GMT is 5 hours ahead of Eastern time. (or maybe its 4 with daylight time)
I first ran Linux about 5 years ago, when they first opened up the Net to commercial access, I got a dial-up unix account (never even heard of unix before) and found it was realy cool. I got UNIX for Dummies and was pretty impressed with the capabilities and the idea of 100 people accessing the net at the same time on one box.
:p ) But I have linux to thank for my new career!
I started to hear about this "linux" thing and got a slackware distro, ftp'd each dir to my dial up and then downloaded at 9600 baud to my PC. At least I had just got a second HD so I could do a HD install from the windows partition to the other drive.
The first kernel I had was 0.9.18
I figured if it was crap i'd just blow it away. Well needless to say since I was running Windows 3.1 at the time, it was the Windows partition that ended up getting blown away. But it was more than a month of frustration before I could get X to work though.
The difference in performance between the 2 OSes on the same hardware was a real eye-opener and really got me thinking about software and OSes. In fact I ended up returning to school to do CS and now I make lots of $ writing software for a living (ironicly its for windows
The last linux kernel i had was 2.0.?
I think OSS is a good idea but im not religious or political when it comes to that. I used linux initialy because 1) it worked properly and 2) it allowed me to learn about computer systems.
When I heard about BeOS it sounded really interesting and innovative, so when they released it on x86 I thought I'd give it a try. I bought a nice dual proc box from the guys who made the development machines for Be (no HW support problems that way) figuring if I didn't like it i'd just put linux on it instead. Well 1 1/2 years later that box still only has BeOS on it and I use it daily because, for me, it does what i need it to better than anything else out there!
I saw this article on the CNN website 5 or 6 hours ago and tried to take a look at the company's web site and it looked like that it couldn't standup to the CNN Effect! So I'd bet it can't stand up to both that and the /. effect at the same time! (Then again I can't get through to /. half the time anyway) I'd bet that CNN gets more hits than /. but I would think that alot less people follow links out of CNN than they do out of /.
In anycase this air scooter thing looks very interesting if it ever works out.
Another problem is all the advertizing on US cable, thy often have to re-edit to get the length right. They have a Discovery Channel on cable in the UK now, but the programs are differnet becuase the UK version has significantly less commercial time than the US, so an hour long show has alot more content than in the US.
US shows like Bay Watch that are shown outside the US often shoot extra scenes known as "Euro minutes" to add into the exported version of the show so that it will run for a full hour outside the US
Reagan did cut taxes (or rather the congress did at his urging) but he also increased spending (almost all on the Military) this where we got the infamous $90 hammers from, he just pissed money away on a huge military build up, not caring how efficiently it was spent.
The argument about his spending the Soviets under to win the cold war is nonsense, and if there were any truth to it, it was completely inadvertant on Reagan's part. He justified all this spending by scaring the public about the Soviet "Evil Empire" that was poised to take over the world if we didn't get ready to fight back.
If the Soviets were so strong & agressive a military build up wouldn't have put them under. Of course the military, who should have known better, went along with this as they got lots of shiny new toys and $500 toilet seats out of it.
It can be argued that the Soviets made us needlesly spend more, after the cold war ended it was revealed that some of the big scary rockets paraded past Lenin's tomb on May Day were fakes. In at least one case a fake long range nuclear rocket caused the US to spend billions on countering it!
Of course Reagan's fiscal policies tripled the national debt, so that even now the biggest item on the budget is interest payments on the debt. Thanks Ronnie!
At the same time Reagan was borrowing and spending he had the Education Department re-define ketchup as a vegetable so that a few $ would be saved on school lunches for poor kids.
What an American Hero!
All the more reason we should all routinely encrypt everything that goes over the network. What is needed is more seamless encryption tools, e.g. if all e-mails are routinely encrypted/de-crypted using public key cryptography without intervention from the user, most people would probably do so.
If internet communications are routinely strongly encrypted all this Big Brother business would become moot. To be sure there are legitimate reasons for the feds to snoop on people, but such a power will be abused (either officialy or by "rouge" agents)
Also this is fundamentaly different from tapping phone conversations in that more and more transactions now take place over the net. Net surveilance would not only include person-to-person communication, but also financial transactions, purchasing habits, reading habits etc etc.
It seems to me that the feds don't really have a compelling reason for this otherwise they would be able to come up with a better reason than the tired old Terrorists/Pedophiles/"Think of the Children" justification.
Have you actualy ever seen any terrorists --Brazil
While the gamma-ray hypothosis is interesting, it needs alot of further investigation before we should start to divide the Drake Equation by 1000. There's an awful lot we still don't know about planetary formation and this is just one explanation so we shouldn't jump to conclusions.
Given the extraordinary pictures the Hubble Space Telescope has porduced of stella formation and protoplanetary discs, I for one would love to see a next generation Space telescope with an order of magnitutde greater power put into orbit which might give us some more data to explain the planetary foramtion process.
Of course with the GOP trying to kill NASA's science research budget there's not much chance of this happening.
Why even post this? I don't usualy critisize what gets posted here, its good to see stuff I wouldn't ordinaarily see, but really whats the point of this one? Theres no chance whatsoever that some little web cam in someone's house is going to stand up to the /. effect! So basicly this post has no information and no web cams pics to view so they might as well not have posted it!
Its not like the Slashdot effect isn't in the dictionary.
/. is not an objective source for anything. The linux bias on the part of the people who run the site and moderate and post comments is overwhelming. Basicaly the attitude is "if its not linux/OSS its CRAP"
/. on a regular basis knows this however, so we don't take the "News for nerds. Stuff that matters" thing seriously. Id like to see alot more about BeOS here too, but despite it probably being the most technicaly advanced desktop OS out there, its Not Linux, so few /.ers would care.
Anyone who reads
It might be useful here to point out that "Communism" is not the same as the former Eastern Bloc/Soviet totalitarian states. In several posts people are talking about dictators and freedom of information, but the repression in the former "Communist" countries has nothing to do with the idea of Communism.
Communism was an idea, a way of organizing economies, the countries refered to claimed to be attempting to implement this idea, but most didn't even claim to have met that ideal and refered to themselves as "Socialist". It also must be pointed out that many countries that profess to be capitalist also are just as repressive as the communist ones were.
Marx had a lot of economic theories about the future of the relationship between the people who do the wrok and the people who own the resources and the means of production, and postulated a better system that could be implemented once the former group had finaly cast off the chains imposed on them the latter.
Communism could be summed up by the phrase "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". It has nothing to do with freedom or the lack of freedom according to any of the definitions often used on this board (speech, beer civil)