The real problem here is the general public who doesn't know any better, and even worse - doesn't care.
Actually, I meet a lot of people who doesn't know any better, but they still feel they're being exploited.
They tend to think that the whole IT and entertainment industry sucks, but that there really is no alternative, so they just bend over and take it in. To them, it is all just magic, ref, Arthur C. Clark, it is nothing that can be understood.
They're starting to think that all of us who is working on this is a bunch of maniacs, but there's nothing they can do about it, so they get on with it.
I think that what is going to happen, is that we get a huge counter-reaction, like what happened to the environmental stuff. The problem is that people will still only see the magic, they can't see what is good, and what was bad. So, instead of constructively use technology for the good of all mankind, they are going to throw everything out. Us included. Though, we warned them.
Hehe, and citing every possible referee for the paper saying that s/he made a "fundamental contribution to the field"...:-)
Check out Robert Nemiroff's Comedy of Science-page for more of this. Nemiroff is also the man behind "Astronomy Picture of the Day" and he did a thesis on my subject long ago, so I have actually referred to him as having made a fundamental contribution to the field...:-)
This is very true. For my thesis, I wrote a perl-script to grab the BibTeX records directly from the NASA Astrophysics Data System (cut'n'paste was too hard. Had to be a script). I saw no reason to edit them, never touched them by hand. Of my references, there was just a couple of references I had to write by hand, which was not available from ADS.
Yet, I don't think it is wise to disregard this. I think it may well be a problem. But then, I didn't RTFA...:-)
Well, you've all heard that the geocentric world system was abandoned because it was required to add more and more epicycles for the model to fit observations, right? That's what many text-books say, that's what Thomas Kuhn says, and that's what Encyclopedia Britannica said up to recently.
To support the view that observations got better and better, requiring more and more circles, you'll probably find most of these sources citing a book by J.L.E. Dreyer, written in the beginning of the previous century, but it exists in a few editions published later.
But Dreyer says the opposite:
[...] One looks in vain [in Alfonso's work] for any improvement over
Ptolemy; on the contrary, the low state of astronomy in the Middle
Ages is nowhere better illustrated.
Basically, if these people had actually read Dreyer, we wouldn't have had to struggle with this myth any longer. Of course, there's a lot more to this story than this, but I don't have time to write it now...:-)
Actually, the prosecutor's case rests more or less solely on this post. Jon has posted a very interesting message to the mailing list of Electronic Frontier Norway (at my request) that quite clearly shows this is badly out of context.
Obviously, these hotspots are going to be more or less obsolete when UMTS is up and running, but I think that if they can get it up and running fast, it is a nice idea, and good for the transitional period.
Well, I'm a hunter and a pacifist. What I find weird is the idea that owning a gun actually give you personal safety and that it works as some kind of deterrence. Guns are not good for shooting at other people, guns are good for gathering food!
Basically, if you're up against a hardened criminal with a big gun, do you really think your little pistol is going to scare him off? Of course not. This guy has been around too much. He might well have shot at people before. He doesn't really care too much about his rotten, stinking life anyway. He has little to loose. You have never shot at anybody before. You have no clue as to how you would react. And you're probably not good at it anyway.
you can't deter someone if that someone thinks he is better than you and/or have less to loose
Well, that sniper, well you guys taught him all he needed to know about killing people, and you taught him that it was actually an OK thing to do with your enemies. Then, it is too late to tell him that "you're not supposed to shoot at others than we tell you to". It just isn't possible. The guys who want guns the most is the last people on earth you should give it to.
But, to end these ramblings. I don't think it is about guns per se, it is about a culture that says that shooting at people is a legitimate way to use a gun. That's where it goes wrong. I think you'd find that shooting crimes would go down if you got rid of that attitude. Guns are for gathering food. Not self-defence. No armed revolution. But that's awfully hard to do.
But then, this was an opinion, not what you were asking for.
I think we have cried quite loudly, and the media has been picking some things up. We have a long way to go, however. There is a reason why IM Sunde (prosecutor) used some time on trying to refute the "David vs. Goliath" angle. Partly because we have been quite successful, and partly because Norwegians usually find themselves in David's position, since we're a small country, so this angle is pretty strong.
However, he is not being charged with DMCA or anything like that. Not even IPR-law. He is being charged with a law that says it is illegal to read other people's letters. In this case, there's nothing wrong with the law. The law is good. It is this moronic prosecutor, who after digging to several years couldn't come up with anything better. The mere thought that it should be illegal to read your own letters is absurd, and I hope this is going to be thrown out of court.
According to the police investigation, he had a box which booted into FreeBSD, Windows and Linux, so it is definately not all true.
I think it is quite correct what he said, that he only wanted to watch the movies on whatever equipment he chose. But he has definately grown up to see the bigger picture now.
Any kind of DRM involved? Are they using open standards?
Honestly, I would pay $10 a month to get access to a large selection of high-quality Oggs, but if they try to feed me with crippled files, forget it. They have to do their best and not treat me as a potential criminal.
Because I'm not. I never used Napster or the like, because I feel they were only trying to rip people off too. Most of my MP3s are legal, and I am buying music, though the only CD player I have is on my PC.
I'm in Norway, and I'm pretty happy with the service I get from Easynet. I have my own box in their fridge, it's an old PC. I do what I want with it. I managed to close myself out of it after having uploaded a kernel to it which was for my workstation and hadn't the correct network card driver compiled in, but that is the only time I've called support...
I'm paying NOK 1500 a month, that's about $200. Very few ISPs around here just host customers boxes around here, and even fewer allow people to play with it as they please. I'm just aware of one other than this, and they're more expensive. The bill is actually shared between a non-profit I work for, and my father...
The bandwidth to it is excellent. It is actually sitting on the top of the national backbone. That's not going to last, unfortunately, it was just because they are rebuilding their server room. The bottleneck there is probably the hard drive and not the network anyway...:-)
It's just a operational formula. You've gotta start somewhere, you know!
I tried to dig up the paper, but these guys are really publishing a lot of stuff. this may have something to do with it. The author's homepage is here, you can look through a list of some of his papers.
I'm a bit surprised that they refer to the Hipparcos catalogue as the most comprehensive star catalogue, when the Tycho 2 catalogue is far bigger.
Sure, the astrometry (positions) in Hipparcos are better than in Tycho 2, and Hipparcos contains more information about the stars than Tycho 2 (e.g. variability), but still. I would in fact think that Tycho 2 would be better for SETI than Hipparcos, but they may have their reasons.
Hehe, I discussed languages with a girl yesterday who were about to start studying literature, and she thought studying dialects was geeky. Actually, I think that often, geeks have a fairly broad horizon compared to many other knowledgeable people.
Yeah, and that goes for another of Axis' products too, the Bluetooth access point. I would really like one of those for home use, but they are far too expensive right now. Also, I think I could settle for a simpler device.
Right now, for my own home, which isn't too big, I think something like the MSI transcieving module would be more like it. But I'd rather get something good from Axis which has excellent Linux support, than from MSI who doesn't support Linux explicitly at all.
I've dumped their sales department an e-mail about this now and then, but never got a response.
It can, if the person happens to be somewhere he is under US jurisdiction. Which pretty much means that a lot of people can't travel to the US before you get more sane legislation.
The current S-Bahns can be sped up to 160km/h (from a current 80-120, generally), which would take the travel time down to 16 minutes versus the expected 10 for the Transrapid.
Yeah, I think it should be rather obvious that maglev trains are not suited for distances as short as this. It is weird that they would even plan to use it for city-to-airport connections. This is not going to be useful for distances shorter than a few hundred kilometers, but given that these trains can go from city-centre to city-centre, they can shorten the time it takes to travel between cities considerably. Therefore, I would expect maglev trains to eventually be competitive on distances between 400 and 1500 kilometers. But it seems to take longer than I would have guessed 15 years ago.
To make things worse, the video schedule displays along the lines run Windows and crash at least once a week. Luckily, the trains don't.
Which reminds me of a trip I had with one of the newest trains here in Norway. I happened to be seated beside an american who worked in the telecom industry, and he said that before I entered the train, the train had stopped for a few minutes, and they said on the speaker "we are standing still while the onboard computers are restarted". We both went: "Uh-oh, I hope they're not running Windows on those control systems"...
Sure, many cool things you can do. But keep in mind that the field-of-view of major optical telescopes is very small, about the size of the ball of your pen when held at an arm-length's distance. So, large parts of the sky is never imaged with this kind of telescopes. You have surveys, but they don't go as "deep", you don't see any galaxies for example. Other objects are monitored extensively, there are terrabytes of data for some objects.
Yeah, there are really nice applications you can develop on the basis on all these data, but someone's gotta do it, and I doubt scientists will do it, there are too many challenging projects to work on. However, extending KStars is a good idea!:-)
I remember using a 386 20MHz running X and Netscape and lots of stuff back in 1995, when I worked for the student union. It wasn't fast but we could work on it. Eventually, we whined about it and got a new box.
I can't exactly point out what makes good sci-fi, but I can point out one thing that makes bad:
Our hero lands some n years in the future, and the first thing he does is walk into a shop for second-hand-gear, finds something from his own (our) time, and let that play a significant role in the story.
That typical for bad sci-fi: The authors really didn't have so much understanding for the science of it that they could make bold predictions, and they weren't able to make fiction based on those predictions, because they didn't have the imagination to see what the science could imply.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I meet a lot of people who doesn't know any better, but they still feel they're being exploited.
They tend to think that the whole IT and entertainment industry sucks, but that there really is no alternative, so they just bend over and take it in. To them, it is all just magic, ref, Arthur C. Clark, it is nothing that can be understood.
They're starting to think that all of us who is working on this is a bunch of maniacs, but there's nothing they can do about it, so they get on with it.
I think that what is going to happen, is that we get a huge counter-reaction, like what happened to the environmental stuff. The problem is that people will still only see the magic, they can't see what is good, and what was bad. So, instead of constructively use technology for the good of all mankind, they are going to throw everything out. Us included. Though, we warned them.
Check out Robert Nemiroff's Comedy of Science-page for more of this. Nemiroff is also the man behind "Astronomy Picture of the Day" and he did a thesis on my subject long ago, so I have actually referred to him as having made a fundamental contribution to the field... :-)
Yet, I don't think it is wise to disregard this. I think it may well be a problem. But then, I didn't RTFA... :-)
To support the view that observations got better and better, requiring more and more circles, you'll probably find most of these sources citing a book by J.L.E. Dreyer, written in the beginning of the previous century, but it exists in a few editions published later.
But Dreyer says the opposite:
Basically, if these people had actually read Dreyer, we wouldn't have had to struggle with this myth any longer. Of course, there's a lot more to this story than this, but I don't have time to write it now... :-)
However, I agree, the Aftenpoften server can take this hit easily, this post should be modded "Redundant" now that that fact is evident.
Uhm, they are playing Calvin Ball in court, actually, I would say that is news...
Actually, the prosecutor's case rests more or less solely on this post. Jon has posted a very interesting message to the mailing list of Electronic Frontier Norway (at my request) that quite clearly shows this is badly out of context.
I'm just wondering, how does Savannah fit in all this?
Yeah, but you know, it only works to illustrate Tim's points. I mean, who would get his books from a /. AC, anyway...?
Obviously, these hotspots are going to be more or less obsolete when UMTS is up and running, but I think that if they can get it up and running fast, it is a nice idea, and good for the transitional period.
Basically, if you're up against a hardened criminal with a big gun, do you really think your little pistol is going to scare him off? Of course not. This guy has been around too much. He might well have shot at people before. He doesn't really care too much about his rotten, stinking life anyway. He has little to loose. You have never shot at anybody before. You have no clue as to how you would react. And you're probably not good at it anyway.
you can't deter someone if that someone thinks he is better than you and/or have less to loose
Well, that sniper, well you guys taught him all he needed to know about killing people, and you taught him that it was actually an OK thing to do with your enemies. Then, it is too late to tell him that "you're not supposed to shoot at others than we tell you to". It just isn't possible. The guys who want guns the most is the last people on earth you should give it to.
But, to end these ramblings. I don't think it is about guns per se, it is about a culture that says that shooting at people is a legitimate way to use a gun. That's where it goes wrong. I think you'd find that shooting crimes would go down if you got rid of that attitude. Guns are for gathering food. Not self-defence. No armed revolution. But that's awfully hard to do.
But then, this was an opinion, not what you were asking for.
However, he is not being charged with DMCA or anything like that. Not even IPR-law. He is being charged with a law that says it is illegal to read other people's letters. In this case, there's nothing wrong with the law. The law is good. It is this moronic prosecutor, who after digging to several years couldn't come up with anything better. The mere thought that it should be illegal to read your own letters is absurd, and I hope this is going to be thrown out of court.
I think it is quite correct what he said, that he only wanted to watch the movies on whatever equipment he chose. But he has definately grown up to see the bigger picture now.
However, what kind of files are there?
Any kind of DRM involved? Are they using open standards?
Honestly, I would pay $10 a month to get access to a large selection of high-quality Oggs, but if they try to feed me with crippled files, forget it. They have to do their best and not treat me as a potential criminal.
Because I'm not. I never used Napster or the like, because I feel they were only trying to rip people off too. Most of my MP3s are legal, and I am buying music, though the only CD player I have is on my PC.
I'm paying NOK 1500 a month, that's about $200. Very few ISPs around here just host customers boxes around here, and even fewer allow people to play with it as they please. I'm just aware of one other than this, and they're more expensive. The bill is actually shared between a non-profit I work for, and my father...
The bandwidth to it is excellent. It is actually sitting on the top of the national backbone. That's not going to last, unfortunately, it was just because they are rebuilding their server room. The bottleneck there is probably the hard drive and not the network anyway... :-)
Well, at least the answer has been modded up. Those essays are all over fsf site. Go there and you'll find.
I tried to dig up the paper, but these guys are really publishing a lot of stuff. this may have something to do with it. The author's homepage is here, you can look through a list of some of his papers.
Sure, the astrometry (positions) in Hipparcos are better than in Tycho 2, and Hipparcos contains more information about the stars than Tycho 2 (e.g. variability), but still. I would in fact think that Tycho 2 would be better for SETI than Hipparcos, but they may have their reasons.
Hehe, I discussed languages with a girl yesterday who were about to start studying literature, and she thought studying dialects was geeky. Actually, I think that often, geeks have a fairly broad horizon compared to many other knowledgeable people.
Right now, for my own home, which isn't too big, I think something like the MSI transcieving module would be more like it. But I'd rather get something good from Axis which has excellent Linux support, than from MSI who doesn't support Linux explicitly at all.
I've dumped their sales department an e-mail about this now and then, but never got a response.
It can, if the person happens to be somewhere he is under US jurisdiction. Which pretty much means that a lot of people can't travel to the US before you get more sane legislation.
Yeah, I think it should be rather obvious that maglev trains are not suited for distances as short as this. It is weird that they would even plan to use it for city-to-airport connections. This is not going to be useful for distances shorter than a few hundred kilometers, but given that these trains can go from city-centre to city-centre, they can shorten the time it takes to travel between cities considerably. Therefore, I would expect maglev trains to eventually be competitive on distances between 400 and 1500 kilometers. But it seems to take longer than I would have guessed 15 years ago.
Which reminds me of a trip I had with one of the newest trains here in Norway. I happened to be seated beside an american who worked in the telecom industry, and he said that before I entered the train, the train had stopped for a few minutes, and they said on the speaker "we are standing still while the onboard computers are restarted". We both went: "Uh-oh, I hope they're not running Windows on those control systems"...
Yeah, there are really nice applications you can develop on the basis on all these data, but someone's gotta do it, and I doubt scientists will do it, there are too many challenging projects to work on. However, extending KStars is a good idea! :-)
I remember using a 386 20MHz running X and Netscape and lots of stuff back in 1995, when I worked for the student union. It wasn't fast but we could work on it. Eventually, we whined about it and got a new box.
Our hero lands some n years in the future, and the first thing he does is walk into a shop for second-hand-gear, finds something from his own (our) time, and let that play a significant role in the story.
That typical for bad sci-fi: The authors really didn't have so much understanding for the science of it that they could make bold predictions, and they weren't able to make fiction based on those predictions, because they didn't have the imagination to see what the science could imply.