What harm can have child if his photo is viewed on Internet after he have been abused?
The very availability of the picture compounds the child's injury. Its use for titillation reduces the victim to an object again, denying the victim basic humanity. Its distribution over the Internet makes it available to a much larger audience, so that this may happen not just a few times but potentially millions of times. Not only that, but it whets the appetite of the viewer for more child porn, thereby contributing to the ongoing exploitation of children for sex.
Or you think that children might be abused as long as their photo are not on Internet? I think publicly available photos will help to catch those who abuse children.
Child pornography pre-dates the Internet by thousands of years. It would continue even if the Internet vanished tomorrow. But the easy availability of this material inspires the creation of yet more child pornography, meaning that the practice will expand.
The photos may occasionally help track down a child pornographer. Certainly it's easier for the activity to come to the attention of the authorities if that is so.
That is, until you put it into Freenet, where it is essentially impossible to track where the material is coming from over the Net. The details in the photos may help narrow down the location, but only if the pornographer is stupid enough to let unique features show up in the distributed versions. One basement looks pretty much like any other basement.
I don't think what you're saying is what the original poster meant. His argument (badly articulated ) goes like this: no-one would go throught the trouble of making child porn if he didn't intend to get payed for it. Stealing the child porn and putting it on freenet harms the creator since he isn't getting payed. Thus, in theory, it HELPS the children by economically harming the porn making bastard.
Even if that is what he was arguing, it doesn't hold up.
Most people who make child porn don't expect to get paid for it. They make it firstly because they like it, but also because they can trade it for more child pornography from other people like them. Not only does this ensure a steady supply of child porn for them, it also acts as a way to gain status within the child pornography community. Thus, stealing it is NOT hurting its creator, even economically, and the children are still getting hurt in its creation.
It makes plenty of since to go after porn sites on the web because they SELL kiddie porn, someones earning money to abuse kids and then selling the photos and movies, this SHOULD be illegal because someone is being harmed for cash.
Quote #2:
Now, if these pictures are stolen from the site and placed on freenet and all over the P2Ps and people download and view it without payinng a dime, who is this hurting?
It's hurting the children, you fool!
Honestly, your argument seems to be that it's okay to hurt people as long as you're not making money. You are saying that it's acceptable to abduct or illegally buy children, beat them, rape them, photograph/film it, and distribute it to other sick pervs as long as you're not doing it for cash.
What is this, some kind of inverted public service? Is economic damage truly the only sort of harm you recognize? That's reprehensible! Congratulations buddy, you're the first one on my Slashdot "enemies" list.
Makes sense to me. The -on suffix has a nice ring to it, sort of techy in a Greek kind of way. Plus it's an English word in its own right with generally positive connotations, turning you on to the product.
The prefixes are just common sense, conveying to the potential buyer what the company would like you to believe about their product. Athlons are Athletic. Durons are Durable. Opterons are Optimized for Optimum performance, suggesting that it's the best of the best. The Latin optimus, from which the prefix is ultimately derived, simply means "best".
Course, they had to throw an "er" into that last one, 'cause otherwise it would have sounded like some sort of legion of boxy doom robots in a low budget SF invasion flick: Oh my God, the Optons are coming! Run . . . RUN!
But even then that extra joining syllable was carefully chosen. They could have picked an i, making the product Option. That would pick up on the Opti- prefix of optimum and optimize, but it would also make the word an English word that merely means "one possible choice", clearly not the best message to send to a potential buyer looking for the best.
-er- works much better. Not only does it call to mind the English comparative adjectival ending ("It's not only opt, it's opter!), it also rhymes with the middle syllable of their highly successful Duron line, suggesting by extension that these new chips will carry on that tradition of excellent value for the money.
Over-analysis, you say? That which we call a CPU would perform its function by any other name? Certainly the silicon would work the same; but the perception of the chip would be different, perhaps worse for AMD, and for that reason the name matters. Names are words, and words are how we define reality. You might ask me "What's a figgin?" And I would say "A figgin is a type of pasty, with chicken inside and raisins on top." Prior to that you probably had no notion what a figgin was, and I have now created in your mind the idea that it's a chicken pasty with raisins on top, and I may also have conveyed the idea to you that it is tasty and filling. And I have done it using words. This is exactly what the AMD marketing people are trying to do: they are using words to create a reality in which people believe that AMD's products are superior (Ha! there's the next one: the Superion), and buy from AMD rather than its competitors as a result.
Typical attention spans are short, moreso now than before we got so saturated with advertising, so they have to pack as much meaning into as few words as possible. Figgin is a rotten product name. It has no linguistic history; it could just as easily be a bodily organ, often removed in unpleasant ways by sadistic tyrants. Athlon, Duron, Opteron are much better: they are made from phonemes that have positive connotations to English speakers, and in several other languages as well, notably the Romance tongues.
Sensible buyers will not make purchasing decisions based solely on this, of course, but the initial impression remains and is reinforced every time you see, hear, or think the name. That counts . . . it may not be logical, but humans are not always logical. (Seldom, in fact.)
Basically, I think AMD's marketing team has done an outstanding job picking these names. Even you, oh parent poster, must have picked up on the positive connotations, even if you then realized how silly the whole thing is and mocked them for it. AMD's going to need every advantage they can get to win serious market share from Intel, but if their naming team is anything to judge by, then they've made a good start.
Your basic gas station has quite a bit of roof space for photovoltaic cells, neh?
Neh.
There are a number of problems with electrolysis. In order to generate hydrogen from water, you need 1) lots of electricity, and 2) lots of water.
Electrolysis is not efficient; you need to put more power into creating the hydrogen than you will get out of it later on. Solar panels on a filling station roof are NOT going to generate enough power to generate as much hydrogen as you'd need to meet demand. PV cells are expensive, especially the good ones that are highly efficient. Any filling station that tried this would go out of business long before the cost of the PV cells was made back. In order to generate the electricity you'd need to make enough hydrogen to stay in business, you'd need a LOT of electricity cheap. PV cells just aren't going to do that -- not with current technology, and maybe never on such a small scale. Anyway, they only work (well) when it's sunny. Not everywhere is sunny. Solar cells aren't even worth looking at in places like, say, England, where it's overcast more than half of each year.
Then, of course, you need a supply of water. My hometown is Denver, Colorado. We've been suffering from drought for the last five years. Last year was the driest year since the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. This is probably going to be drier than that. Our reservoirs are low, there has been little precipitation, and groundwater only goes so far. We've outlawed watering lawns. We've outlawed washing your car (except by hand with one bucket of water). Last year we lost a lot of our crops to the lack of water, not to mention large numbers of cattle that were prematurely slaughtered because we couldn't supply them with enough to drink. And you want us to take what we've got left and use it to power our cars? Sorry, that's not going to work. It'd make much more sense to set up large electrolysis plants next to the ocean and then ship the hydrogen elsewhere than to do it on a "cottage industry" basis with each filling station providing it's own water/electricity.
Genetic engineering != eugenics. They're two completely different ideas.
That may need a little elaboration, as the two touch on related areas.
Eugenics is a theory which holds that certain individuals are innately superior to others, and that the superior few are vastly outnumbered by the inferior many. If you accept these two premises, then it follows that the inferior many are sure to reproduce faster than the superior few, with the result that the characteristics of the superior individuals will be lost. Basically, a eugenicist sees the world in terms of a conflict between those with big brains and those with big dicks. In order to improve the species, therefore, a eugenicist will attempt to discourage the inferior from procreating, and encourage the superior.
The biggest problem with this theory is figuring out how to tell who's superior and who's inferior. The answer depends on how you ask the question, and on what your beliefs are about what would constitute a "superior" human being. The Nazis believed that a certain physical type was superior -- blond hair, blue eyes, extremely fair skin, what they called "Aryan". They conducted experiments attempting to further these characteristics; for example they would take a pair of brown-eyed twins, and inject chemicals into their eyes in an attempt to change the eye-color to blue. This particular study was carried out at Auschwitz by Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death.
If, on the other hand, you are an American eugenicist, what you do to separate the inferior and the superior is come up with the Intellectual Quotient Test and administer it to all schoolchildren. Those who do well are deemed fit, and allowed to do things like take college prep courses in high school. Those who are deemed unfit are only allowed to take classes in, say, technical arts, thereby preparing them for a lifetime working as drones in a factory. Also, you get laws passed in many states requiring the forced sterilization of any person below a certain IQ level who attempts to reproduce. You might also conduct studies such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments which were begun with the understanding that the subjects would be black because black men are naturally more lascivious than white men, and therefore more likely to have syphilis. These experiments were funded by Congress, continued for four decades, involved hideously painful procedures like spinal fluid taps, and worst of all the subjects were never told that they had syphilis. By the time they found out, it was far too late for any of them to seek treatment.
Eugenics is no longer an accepted theory. It depends on an arbitrary vision of what constitutes "superiority", and led to some truly barbaric practices, both in Germany and in the United States. I do not know how well the theory was received in other countries. I am, however, truly grateful that it is no longer accepted.
Genetic engineering, on the other hand, is a technique for the modification of living creatures by altering their genetic structure. It could very easily be used for eugenics, but has other more benign purposes as well.
There are two kinds of genetic engineering. One involves the modification of an existing organism. For example, take a child afflicted with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease which causes the lungs to fill with mucus, thereby making it extremely difficult to breathe. That child might be treated by inhaling a vapor of specially created viruses that insert themselves into the affected lung cells and alter their genetic code in such a way that they stop producing the mucus. This is also known as gene therapy.
The other form of genetic engineering involves modifying an organism before it starts growing. Thus you might take a fertilized egg and modify its DNA prior to its implantation in the wall of the mother's womb. Since all cells in the body ultimately derive from that egg, your modification would change the fundamental nature of the adult organism. Genetic modifications have been carried out on plants, for example to make them resistant to a particular disease, or to increase the per-acre yield of a food crop. You yourself have probably eaten such genetically modified food. It is quite common in America; less so in Europe, where there are a great many people who protest against it.
Genetic engineering is a field which has enormous potential for good -- the elimination of genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis. If two people are aware that their child might suffer from CF, they could perform an artificial insemination of an egg which had been "fixed", or avoid the disease simply by choosing an egg that wasn't affected in the first place. On the other hand, genetic engineering also has a staggering potential for abuse. A genetic engineer could not only cure diseases, but also create entirely new ones. The new disease might be used in biological warfare. It is conceivable (though currently not possible) that genetic engineering might be able to create a contagious mutagen -- a virus that would spread throughout the population, and make a particular modification within the bodies of the victims. Imagine if the Nazis had been able to create a virus that would alter the eggs and testicles of those who contracted it. They could have ensured that the next generation would be blond and blue-eyed, against the will of the parents.
Then, of course, there is the danger that we might screw up. We know a lot about genetics now, but there's even more that's not well understood. Sequencing out a full human gene doesn't mean that we understand how all the parts interact with another. There are large portions of the genome that don't seem to do anything (introns) . . . but then again maybe they do, and we just haven't figured it out quite yet. Then there's the fact that one sequence of DNA might control or contribute to three or four different finished structures. If you alter it to give a child green eyes, you might also cause the child to be bald. (That's just an example, I have no idea if the sequences controlling hair production and eye color are at all related.)
Basically, we don't know enough at this point to engage in wholesale manipulation of human genetics. We should not outlaw it -- the genie is out of the bottle, and if we tried outlawing it, the research would merely be undertaken by unethical scientists with little or no oversight. On the other hand, we should NOT perform modifications of human beings without a clear idea of what we're doing and a damn good reason to do it. Giving your kid a particular eye color is NOT a good reason for genetic engineering. Avoiding cystic fibrosis is acceptable. Engineering for more abstract qualities -- musical talent, mathematical skill, linquistic ability -- should be avoided at all costs until we have some idea what the hell we're doing. We don't even know if those qualities are controlled by genes; in the process of trying it out we might very well screw up and make some truly horrible mistakes. Note that many autistic people are also extremely good at math.
Then there are the social issues. Genetic engineering is expensive. If we're not careful, it could become a way for the wealthy to reinforce their dominance over world affairs. It is natural to want to give your child every advantage in life that you can; but doing so can simultaneously disadvantage other people's children.
In short, genetic engineering of humans is problematic. It could provide some unparalleled benefits to the human species . . . but it is also an ethical minefield, and could easily be turned to selfish or downright evil purposes.
Another thing worth pointing out about NTFS is that Mandrake is not the first Linux distribution with NTFS resizing support. Xandros had it when they announced their first official release a few months ago. I suspect that they used the same code as Mandrake, though I don't know. Xandros's PR pages claim that they were the first with that capability.
I have no idea who to believe, and frankly I don't care who got their first; I'm just glad it's implemented. Now, if we could just get decent NTFS write support, we'd be in much better shape. Being able to read/write your Windows partition from Linux makes dual-booting much more tolerable. On at least one occasion, being able to write a FAT32 partition from Linux has saved my butt. (Windows was refusing to boot because some vital configuration files had gotten corrupted; I couldn't boot from floppy 'cause my disk drive was dead, but I was able to replace them from Linux -- disaster averted!)
Not being able to do similar things with NTFS partitions is a significant drawback which may be discouraging some people from trying Linux out on their shiny new 2K/XP machine. I hope it gets worked out in the not-too-distant future.
Yours is an interesting argument. You have put a lot of thought into it. I think there are several problems with it. At the risk of writing an overly long post, I am going to respond to a few of your points.
Regarding paragraph one, which details your experience with Congressman Goodlatte. He dismissed you and called you a thief. From this, you conclude that those elected to Congressional seats do not represent you. You say, "You see, they don't care what the actual coders think, they care what corporations and unions' leaders think." I do not think that this is a valid conclusion. You can certainly conclude that Congressman Goodlatte does not agree with you, and that he does not represent your views. But he is just one person. How do you know that all representatives do not care? Perhaps a different senator would echo your views more closely.
Also -- your account is a bit vague. Your rhetorical style seems rather combative. Might you have alienated him by showing up and aggressively presenting your views and then expecting him to agree with you automatically?
The conclusion of your fourth paragraph strikes me as an of unsupported assertion compounded by the same logical error that troubled your judgement of representatives (judging a whole class of people based on your own experiences with a small section of that class). "Invariably political people tend to be scumbags . . . [who] have no real desire or capacity as a general rule to effect positive change." How is this different from the general population? Strike the word "political" from the above sentence. It now reads "Invariably people tend to be scumbags . . . [who] have no real desire or capacity as a general rule to effect positive change." You seem to suggest that politicians (if that is what you mean by "political people") should be held to a higher standard than anyone else. And yet, they are human too. They have failings, and they have flaws.
Turning to the last bit of that sentence, you seem to forget that people constantly disagree on what constitutes "positive change" and how to effect those changes. No change is universally positive; eliminating slavery was good for the slaves, but bad for the slave-owners who depended on their labor. In that case, deciding that the interests of the slaves were more important than those of their masters would seem fairly straightforward. But even that was hotly contested for years. Consider reading the writings of Senator Calhoun, who spoke vigorously in favor of slavery. He proposed basically a whole new political ideology in order to retain an institution that was important to him and a small group of others. You will always find special-interest groups in any political body; as a result, it is essentially impossible to maintain 100% consensus. A dictatorship is the only example I can think of where this is not a problem; because the dictator always agrees with himself, and his vote is the only one that counts. Even then, he'll have people trying to influence him for their own ends.
There is lots more I could say, but this post is getting long. Before I submit, let me turn to your last paragraph. Let me just put in a couple of quotes:
The average person doesn't have the intellectual maturity and education to wield the political power that is the vote.
If our representatives were chosen at random from the bourgiouse then we'd have representatives who could actually relate to us and would see us as equals.
Let me get this straight. First you say that the average person is too dumb to be trusted with a vote. And then you say that our representatives should be selected at random from that same mass of people who are too stupid to vote in a general election, and given a vote in a legislative assembly? Are you sure about that? You'd be giving huge amounts of power to people who are, by your reasoning, incapable of wielding even the lesser power of a vote diluted by thousands of others. Perhaps you should put that one back to bake for a bit more, 'cause it ain't done yet.
Your political system evidently would be controlled by a small minority -- the "intelligent" ones who can "do the right thing" for all the countless others. You say you don't want to be lorded over by an aristocrat; but what I hear is not that you hate aristocrats . . . merely that you want to be the one doing the lording.
MS will be found guilty and given the biggest fine ever. MS appeal - and the appeal process takes forever - RealPlayer fades away (nobody notices or cares)- Bill Gates donates $100M to fight AIDS in eastern Europe and is lauded as Europe's hero, a selfless white knight whose moral integrity should never be questioned again.
Here's an alternate scenario.
MS is found guilty and given the biggest fine ever. (10% of their total global revenue is the upper limit, according to the article - so 2.8 billion dollars.) They appeal. The appeal takes forever. RealPlayer fades away, and there is much rejoicing.
Now the interesting part: the appeals run out, MS is still guilty, and with all appeals exhausted, they have to pay the huge fine. They pay it. The EU promptly uses the money to hire a bunch of crackerjack programmers to make the Linux desktop a true drop-in replacement for Windows. The code is GPL'ed.
Or, on an even wilder flight of fancy, MS in its arrogance refuses to pay the fine. The EU slaps a heavy tariff on all MS products, and diverts the revenue from that tariff to Linux desktop development. The code is GPL'ed, and the ongoing revenue stream from the tariff means that they can keep working on it till there's no good reason not to use Linux.
Not that I think that MS would be stupid enough to refuse to pay a fine. But one can always dream, right?
Non sequitur. If you pay attention, you'll notice that this article was an address to NARAS, not a statement of their position. Just because John Snyder has expressed this opinion does not mean that NARAS agrees with him. He's only one member, after all.
For that matter, it wasn't even an address to the whole of NARAS: it was ". . . written in response to a discussion by the board of governors of the New York chapter of [NARAS] regarding the position NARAS should take with respect to a new public relations campaign proposed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) condemning those who download music from the Internet." (Quote from the intro of the article on Salon, emphasis added)
The article suggests not only a return to shorter copyright terms (14 years, renewable once) but also the implementation of strong copy protection. Speaking for myself, I find that an acceptable trade-off. I would be willing to put up with strong copy protection mechanisms in exchange for the freedom of all those thousands upon thousands of older books, movies, and songs.
Regarding the restoration of pre-1976 laws, it occurred to me recently that the Copyright Act of 1976 might be unconstitutional because it extends copyright beyond the author's death.
The constitution says in Article 1, section 8, that Congress is empowered " To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
Note that it says "to Authors and Inventors", not "to Authors, Inventors, and their Heirs and Assigns". Given this approach, it would still be legal to sell your rights to a work to a corporation while you yourself were still alive, but you could not have them transferred automatically to an heir following your own death. Furthermore, the copyright you sold -- or perhaps "licensed" would be a better term -- to a corporation would expire when you do. This would give companies a powerful motive to attend to the health of copyright-generating employees.:-)
The article provides some details -- the most vital of which were echoed by the submitter -- but doesn't give us any clear idea of how good or bad this fact is. How does the environmental impact of microchip production compare to other goods?
Fortunately, the study itself -- linked to by another poster first -- provides some more useful details.
The lower bound of fossil fuel and chemical inputs to produce and use one 2-gram microchip are estimated at 1600 g and 72 g, respectively. Secondary materials used in production total 630 times the mass of the final product, indicating that the environmental weight of semiconductors far exceeds their small size. This intensity of use is orders of magnitude larger than that for "traditional" goods. Taking an automobile as an example, estimates of life cycle production energy for one passenger car range from 63 to 119 GJ (42). This corresponds to 1500-3000 kg of fossil fuel used, thus the ratio of embodied fossil fuels in production to the weight of the final product is around two.
This is more useful than the article, but still does not give a clear idea how microchip fabrication stacks up against lower-tech items in terms of environmental impact. I mean, that automobile that he uses as an example is an non-trivial machine. More to the point, all modern cars incorporate microchips. In order to properly compare the environmental impacts of car and microchip fabrication, you'd have to factor in the environmental costs of all of their respective parts. I'll bet that a car has a much higher environmental impact once you add in all its microchips, pieces of plastic, and so on.
Furthermore, both microchips and cars have a greater environmental impact than merely that caused during their production. In both cases, you should also consider what sort of impact their use will entail. Microchips require electricity to function; that electricity has to be generated somehow, and the methods of its production have an environmental impact. Microchips also need to be disposed of once they are no longer useful, as happens all to frequently. I personally have found a good computer recycler, but lots of other pieces of equipment are thrown into landfills, where they remain indefinitely. They may also leak toxic substances as they begin to fall apart (Lead from CRTs, for instance.) Likewise cars have a HUGE environmental impact during their use -- just think how much gasoline a car can burn in a year of normal use.
But I digress. The study did not consider the entire lifetime of the chip, merely the circumstances of its production. In which case, I find it less than satisfactory. It's a good starting place, but doesn't follow through.
The production of microchips is not environmentally friendly. This is true. What we need to know now is how dirty the process is, and how great of a problem it is compared to other areas of production. Comparison with a car alone isn't too useful, especially as it doesn't figure in the environmental costs of the car's components. What would be useful would be a comparison with lots of other objects, ranging in complexity from a table knife to a bicycle to, say, the space shuttle, with the environmental costs of the components of the more complex items figured in. Then we could use that study to see what areas are worst, and where we most need to improve.
Lastly, lest I sound too harsh, the article does mention that this is only the first installment of research that has taken several years to complete. It is entirely possible that the team will put out exactly the sort of report I envision here sometime in the future. So overall, I'd have to say this is a good start, but needs a lot more analysis to be especially useful.
AOL has its serious downsides, I'll admit it. But they have also done some really good stuff. The prime example of this is Mozilla. Yes, the open-source web browser that is so justly celebrated on this site is backed by AOL. An awful lot of the main developers are AOL employees, and that fast connection that mozilla.org sits on is provided by AOL.
That makes up for one heck of a lot in the way of crappy customer service, if you ask me. Mozilla is as good as it is largely because there is an actual paid development team that works on it professionally. So don't be too quick to shout "Hurrah!" if AOL melts down.
You're just sitting there, being immobilized and spoon fed artificial ideals by observing make-believe stories and/or lives of media-friendly commercial-pimping characters in some fabulously unrealistic plot.
Television can indeed be stultifying. I think the reason that we continue to watch it nonetheless is that we have an inborn need for continuing validation of the way we think things are supposed to be. If we see that others behave in the same fashion as we do, then it reassures us that we are in tune with our culture. It helps us form a sense of ourselves as belonging to a larger social unit than just our families or immediate friends.
In the past, this sort of external validation was provided by books, and before that by oral storytelling. The fact that the characters are fictitious makes them excellent for conveying abstract ideas about what an ideal person is supposed to be like.
This sort of thing can be repressive and conservative in the extreme. Note that while most of our recent movies portray the ideal woman as sassy, smart, and independent, the ultimate fate of these heroines is the same as always: marriage and presumed domestic bliss. There is the implication that these characters are basically templates to model ourselves after. "If you follow the script, you will be fulfilled," whispers the sub-text, "And if you don't, you will be isolated and unhappy."
That said, there are counter-examples: some shows subvert the dominant ideals through parody, satire, or irony. The Simpsons is a prime example. Regrettably, however, such counter-cultural shows are comparatively few. Likewise for movies; the vast majority of 'em are essentially forms of brainwashing, especially those out of Hollywood. Independent films from smaller labels are much more likely to be aware of their own messages. Books are subject to the same sort of division.
There's no way we can stop doing this; there is no such thing as a totally unbiased text. We automatically encode our beliefs into anything we write, or sing, or act. And though this is a subjective value judgement on my part, I find that the best pieces of literature are the ones that are aware of this fact. They don't have to be progressive, or anything: simply being aware of the effects and writing a thoughtful and deliberate piece of work makes it a lot better than a simple regurgitation of dominant values.
As for wanting really big televisions, I think that's more of a status competition than anything else. If your neighbors can watch your television from across the street and not miss any details, that advertises your ability to spend large amounts of money on fancy equipment. Same as big expensive cars.
Anyway, this post is getting long and rambling, so I'll shut up now.
Very cool. I wonder if it could be ported to Linux once they've got working okay on FreeBSD. Then Linux would be able to run Mac OS X apps -- the Mac OS X versions of Photoshop and Word come to mind. One major barrier to the adoption of Linux on the desktop is the percieved lack of familiar applications, and Photoshop and Word are high on the list. Word has been pretty well taken care of by the Crossweaver WINE stuff, but Photoshop is still missing. Gimp is great and all, but most graphics professionals would rather keep using the package they're already familiar with than try to learn a whole new one, which is frankly often not as capable as Photoshop.
Stop equal Free Software with freedom, you don't really have much more freedom than with closed software, infact, in many cases you have much less.
Okay, maybe I'm dense, but how does your line of reasoning go? The only restrictions I see in the GPL are that 1) You have to make your source available under the GPL if you make a modified version and you choose to distribute that version to the public, and 2) programs that use GPL'ed code fall under the GPL.
That's it. You can use the program on as many machines as you want, give copies to your friends, all legally. You can even make modifications and keep the source to yourself, so long as you also keep the binaries to yourself. There is nothing in there to prevent you from being selfish. Heck, for most purposes you don't even have to accept the license. You can decline the GPL and still use the program all you want, you just can't legally modify it.
Compare this to Microsoft's licensing policies. Let's take a specific example: Windows 98 OEM version. That Windows disc that came with your computer can only be used legally on your computer. If you replace, say, the motherboard, it's not the same computer anymore, and you no longer have the right to use that copy of Windows 98 on any computer at all. Similarly, if you sell the computer that the disc came with and build a new one, you cannot use it on the new computer, even if you wiped the old one clean before you sold it. And there are lots of other restrictions, too -- read through a Microsoft EULA some time. If you actually take the time to understand it, you will find that there are about a zillion restrictions on how you can use the program. And of course you are not allowed to modify it, and couldn't if you wanted to, unless you are a wizardly programmer who can read binaries and reconstruct the original source code from them.
Compare this to the GPL, where there are only those two restrictions, and they only apply to developers. And the GPL is probably the most restrictive open-source license: others, like BSD-style-licenses, or the Zlib license, place effectively no restrictions at all on your use of the program. So, please explain to me: how is it that you have less freedom with open software than with closed?
I must conclude that this AC is a troll. Dang. Oh, well, I've got karma to burn.
I agree; the Heaney translation reads very well to the modern ear. It's NOT a good translation to compare with the original; Heaney took some very large liberties. This is fine, considering he wasn't producing an academic version. So yes, the Heaney is a good buy; just don't try to use it as a learning aid if you're studying Old English.
Hmmm, I must have read a severely truncated version in high school, because I only remember three supernatural creatures in "Beowulf" -- Grendel, Grendel's mom, and the Dragon.
Not so; there are only three supernatural beings who have roles in the plot, but others are mentioned. For example, in this passage:
anon untydras ealle onwocon
eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas
swylce gigantas a wið gode wunnon
lange rage . . .
That's from the Robinson and Mitchel edition, titled "Beowulf: An Edition". In case you can't read Anglo-Saxon, here is my (prose) translation:
From thence all evil things awake: giants and elves and orcs, such giants as strove against God for many ages . . .
This is a passage describing the origin of all unholy creatures from Cain following his banishment by God. Grendel (and his mother) were descended from Cain. "Eotenas" is a synonym for "giants"; "gigantas" is probably a loan-word from Latin.
So the version you read in high school is correct, it's just that elves and orcs and giants don't figure very large in the poem. Elves are only mentioned a couple of times, and are always evil; orcs are mentioned all of once in the passage above, and the term is not clearly defined, though my glossary offers "evil spirits of the dead." Giants are mentioned several times, but only as a race that got destroyed in Noah's flood.
Stamp Tolkien's name to a manuscript, shove it in the bottom of a box, and have a dusty librarian dig it up for you. Instant next-year's-script..
Unlikely in the extreme, my friend.
Beowulf was written in Old English, also known as Anglo-Saxon. The language is extremely different from what we now speak. I've just finished reading Beowulf in the original. It was hard, and I've been studying the language for two years already. Doing a translation of Beowulf, especially one that would measure up to Tolkien's high standards, would require a lot more practice than that. You'd have to hire a professional Anglo-Saxonist. There just aren't that many of them. A few hundred, tops.
You'd have to figure out exactly which sources Tolkien would have worked from. Would he have consulted the original manuscript (MS Cotton Vitelius A. xv)? If so, would there have been a record of that consultation in the British Library, and would you have to fake such a record? If you decide he did NOT consult the original, whose edition would he have worked from? Which editions was he familiar with? Would he also have consulted reprints of late-seventeenth century transcriptions from before the manuscript was damaged in a fire?
Then, of course, the article mentions that the translation consists of two thousand hand-written pages. Not only do you need to hire a professional Anglo-Saxonist to translate the poem, you also have to hire someone who can fake Tolkien's handwriting for two thousand pages so well that it isn't an instantly recognizable forgery. Not only that, you have to obtain a large supply of vintage paper and ink, or perform expensive aging routines on modern paper to simulate an aged condition, which would be instantly detectable should anyone think to subject that paper to an age test. Which they would if there was any doubt as to the authenticity of the piece.
Then, of course, you have to figure out how to get your expensive and complicated fake into the Bodleian library. You'll probably have to bribe a librarian. An awful lot of people are now involved. One of them is sure to spill the beans unless you 1) pay them HUGE amounts of money to shut up, or 2) kill them.
All this so you can make a movie and slap Tolkien's name on it? That's one hell of a lot of work, especially since it would be really, really hard to pull off without detection. Why bother, when you could just spend all that time and effort promoting the movie?
Cynicism is fine and all, but really. Do think a little harder next time.
I agree. Seanator McCain is very conservative. He is hawkish on the Iraq issue, and conservative on social issues such as abortion. And where these social issues intersect with tech issues, he will favor a conservative social stance. (Take, for example, his sponsorship of a resolution designating October "Children's Internet Safety Month", a term of dubious nature which could easily fit any one of a number of different positions.)
I myself am very liberal, and disagree with him on many such issues.
Nonetheless, John McCain is a man that I respect very much. I believe that, unlike come of his colleagues, he does his very best to serve the people. His long and vigorous struggle for campaign finance reform provides ample evidence, as do his efforts to curb wasteful spending, even in areas traditionally favored by conservatives, like Defense. He has also shown his willingness to work with Democrats on bipartisan issues. For these reasons, I respect him one hell of a lot more than Bush, or Cheney, or Hollings, all of whom spend more time serving their corporate cronies than their constituents. McCain and Senator Russ Feingold are, to my mind, the finest statesmen currently serving in Congress.
As I say, I disagree with Senator McCain on many subjects. Given his record, however, I think he is likely to handle this appointment in a way that the tech community will approve of. I suspect that he will put up a vigorous fight against the CBDTPA, on the grounds that it's a textbook case of special interests trying to buy legislation.
One thing I'm sure of: it's going to be an interesting ride!
When will the United States finally have to act like everybody else and use ".us" for sites hosted in the country? I'm sure Microsoft and Netscape would just autocomplete that part, like they do with "http://".
It's not mandatory to use the two-letter country suffixes for non-US sites. For example, jungle.co.uk (an online retailer of computer goods and so on) is just a re-direct to jungle.com, even though they do business exclusively in the UK.
Also, the.US domain has recently been opened up to general use. It's available from a number of different registrars, for example here and here and here, to name a few.
Regarding auto-completing parts of URLs, note that the "http" protocol is universal to web sites. (Well, if you count https, but anybody using that for an entire site will have an unencrypted redirect page if they have the first clue what they're doing.) It is interesting, though, to try different browsers with just random words typed into the location bar. Internet Explorer, for example, will interpret "foobar" as a search term and direct you to a MicroSoft owned search engine where it will search for foobar. Phoenix (and most likely NS7, Beonex, and their common progenitor Mozilla) will assume that you meant http://www.foobar.com/ and send you there.
There are other consequences to irrigation as well. Take, for example, the state of the Great Plains aquifer, which underlies Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and in fact most of the middle of the country. Aquifers are a resource in a delicate balance between the amount of water withdrawn and the amount of water recharged from streams and precipitation soaking into the ground.
Currently we are withdrawing water from the Great Plains aquifer about twice as fast as it is being replenished. My geology book from last year claimed it'll be used up in another 10-15 years. If that happens, some MAJOR changes are going to result. We'll have to decrease agricultural production to about 25% of current levels -- not enough water to plant the crops as densely as we hvae been. Cattle ranching will suffer, too -- not enough water to maintain the current herds.
This process is only being exacerbated by the prolonged drought throughout the western half of the country. Remember the Hayman fire in Colorado last summer? And the literally hundreds of other fires? That's because the entire region is as dry as a bone: we haven't been getting normal precipitation levels. Colorado (which is my home state) lost about three quarters of the crops that were planted this year due to the drought. Mandatory watering restrictions were in place all summer, and have already been announced for next year.
Then, of course, there are going to be some pretty severe economic repercussions. For a state whose primary industry is agriculture, a 75% decrease in crop yields, be it because of unusual drought or a depleted aquifer, is HUGE. Food prices -- especially for energy-intensive products like beef -- will go up. People will not be happy.
It's funny, half those words sound Icelandic or German, how long does it usually take someone with those languages and English to pick start reading olde english?
Old English is more closely related to Icelandic or German than it is to modern English. Old English (Or Anglo-Saxon as it is sometimes called) is derived from the western branch of the Germanic language group. Icelandic and the other Scandinavian tongues are from the North Germanic branch, so they really do have a lot in common. This was reinforced by the Scandinavian invasions of England in the 10th and 11th centuries; once the Vikings (mostly Norwegian and Icelandic speakers) settled down in the north-eastern part of the country, their words mingled with those of the native population, which is part of the reason for the distinct regional dialects that exist in those areas to this day. Some people have also thought that the Scandinavian presence may have hastened the decline of word-endings; when your neighbor speaks Icelandic and you speak Anglo-Saxon, both of you know the stem "hors" (meaning the big four-legged animal you can ride), but both of you use different endings to indicate its grammatical function. So in order to make it easier to communicate, you both start using the part that you both already know. So instead of saying "horsu" - "the horse" you would just say "hors".
So yes. If you already know Icelandic, Old English is pretty easy to pick up. (And vice versa -- many English medievalists start by learning Old English, and then move on to Old Norse/Icelandic because it's an easy leap.)
Oh and why the inconsistency of Ond & and?
Well, on the one hand that's a typo. On the other hand, that's an extremely realistic typo, because they did spell it both ways, frequently in the same document. In fact, Old English spelling is not standardized at all. It can vary by region, by scribe, and even from sentence to sentence.
Here is a word-by-word gloss of the original quotation:
Sume: One particular (Mod. En. "some")
dæge: day
hit: it
gelamp: happened
æt: that
an: a certain (Mod. En. "One")
nunnan: nun
of: of
æm: that (Accusative singular definite article)
ilcan: same (Mod. En. "ilk")
mynstre: monastery (Mod. En. "Minster")
geforon: went (Mod. En. "fare", eg "she fared")
in on: into
hire: their
wyrt-tun: Wort town (read: garden)
Ond: And
ær: there
heo: she
gesawon: saw
an: a certain (Mod. En. "One")
leahtric,: lettuce
and: and
hit: it
gelyste: wanted (Mod. En. "lusted" but carries no sexual connotations in this case)
æs.: of-that (genitive definite article, relates to "hit" in this sentence.)
As you can see from the gloss, I didn't change the word order very much. The biggest alteration is the conflation of æs and hit in the second sentence. If you're interested, the most commonly used grammar of Old English is Bright's Old English Grammar and Reader. Try to get the 1973 revision by Cassidy and Ringler. You seem to be pretty familiar with grammar from other languages, so it ought not to be too hard for you to grok. People with no grammatical background are likely to find it hard to follow without guidance. Another commonly cited one is A Guide To Old English by Mitchell and Robinson, which is still in print and much more recent.
Hope this helps, feel free to email me and ask about this in more detail.
Slashdot Mirror
The very availability of the picture compounds the child's injury. Its use for titillation reduces the victim to an object again, denying the victim basic humanity. Its distribution over the Internet makes it available to a much larger audience, so that this may happen not just a few times but potentially millions of times. Not only that, but it whets the appetite of the viewer for more child porn, thereby contributing to the ongoing exploitation of children for sex.
Child pornography pre-dates the Internet by thousands of years. It would continue even if the Internet vanished tomorrow. But the easy availability of this material inspires the creation of yet more child pornography, meaning that the practice will expand.
The photos may occasionally help track down a child pornographer. Certainly it's easier for the activity to come to the attention of the authorities if that is so.
That is, until you put it into Freenet, where it is essentially impossible to track where the material is coming from over the Net. The details in the photos may help narrow down the location, but only if the pornographer is stupid enough to let unique features show up in the distributed versions. One basement looks pretty much like any other basement.
Even if that is what he was arguing, it doesn't hold up.
Most people who make child porn don't expect to get paid for it. They make it firstly because they like it, but also because they can trade it for more child pornography from other people like them. Not only does this ensure a steady supply of child porn for them, it also acts as a way to gain status within the child pornography community. Thus, stealing it is NOT hurting its creator, even economically, and the children are still getting hurt in its creation.
Quote #2:
It's hurting the children, you fool!
Honestly, your argument seems to be that it's okay to hurt people as long as you're not making money. You are saying that it's acceptable to abduct or illegally buy children, beat them, rape them, photograph/film it, and distribute it to other sick pervs as long as you're not doing it for cash.
What is this, some kind of inverted public service? Is economic damage truly the only sort of harm you recognize? That's reprehensible! Congratulations buddy, you're the first one on my Slashdot "enemies" list.
Makes sense to me. The -on suffix has a nice ring to it, sort of techy in a Greek kind of way. Plus it's an English word in its own right with generally positive connotations, turning you on to the product.
The prefixes are just common sense, conveying to the potential buyer what the company would like you to believe about their product. Athlons are Athletic. Durons are Durable. Opterons are Optimized for Optimum performance, suggesting that it's the best of the best. The Latin optimus, from which the prefix is ultimately derived, simply means "best".
Course, they had to throw an "er" into that last one, 'cause otherwise it would have sounded like some sort of legion of boxy doom robots in a low budget SF invasion flick: Oh my God, the Optons are coming! Run . . . RUN!
But even then that extra joining syllable was carefully chosen. They could have picked an i, making the product Option. That would pick up on the Opti- prefix of optimum and optimize, but it would also make the word an English word that merely means "one possible choice", clearly not the best message to send to a potential buyer looking for the best.
-er- works much better. Not only does it call to mind the English comparative adjectival ending ("It's not only opt, it's opter!), it also rhymes with the middle syllable of their highly successful Duron line, suggesting by extension that these new chips will carry on that tradition of excellent value for the money.
Over-analysis, you say? That which we call a CPU would perform its function by any other name? Certainly the silicon would work the same; but the perception of the chip would be different, perhaps worse for AMD, and for that reason the name matters. Names are words, and words are how we define reality. You might ask me "What's a figgin?" And I would say "A figgin is a type of pasty, with chicken inside and raisins on top." Prior to that you probably had no notion what a figgin was, and I have now created in your mind the idea that it's a chicken pasty with raisins on top, and I may also have conveyed the idea to you that it is tasty and filling. And I have done it using words. This is exactly what the AMD marketing people are trying to do: they are using words to create a reality in which people believe that AMD's products are superior (Ha! there's the next one: the Superion), and buy from AMD rather than its competitors as a result.
Typical attention spans are short, moreso now than before we got so saturated with advertising, so they have to pack as much meaning into as few words as possible. Figgin is a rotten product name. It has no linguistic history; it could just as easily be a bodily organ, often removed in unpleasant ways by sadistic tyrants. Athlon, Duron, Opteron are much better: they are made from phonemes that have positive connotations to English speakers, and in several other languages as well, notably the Romance tongues.
Sensible buyers will not make purchasing decisions based solely on this, of course, but the initial impression remains and is reinforced every time you see, hear, or think the name. That counts . . . it may not be logical, but humans are not always logical. (Seldom, in fact.)
Basically, I think AMD's marketing team has done an outstanding job picking these names. Even you, oh parent poster, must have picked up on the positive connotations, even if you then realized how silly the whole thing is and mocked them for it. AMD's going to need every advantage they can get to win serious market share from Intel, but if their naming team is anything to judge by, then they've made a good start.
Too late.
Neh.
There are a number of problems with electrolysis. In order to generate hydrogen from water, you need 1) lots of electricity, and 2) lots of water.
Electrolysis is not efficient; you need to put more power into creating the hydrogen than you will get out of it later on. Solar panels on a filling station roof are NOT going to generate enough power to generate as much hydrogen as you'd need to meet demand. PV cells are expensive, especially the good ones that are highly efficient. Any filling station that tried this would go out of business long before the cost of the PV cells was made back. In order to generate the electricity you'd need to make enough hydrogen to stay in business, you'd need a LOT of electricity cheap. PV cells just aren't going to do that -- not with current technology, and maybe never on such a small scale. Anyway, they only work (well) when it's sunny. Not everywhere is sunny. Solar cells aren't even worth looking at in places like, say, England, where it's overcast more than half of each year.
Then, of course, you need a supply of water. My hometown is Denver, Colorado. We've been suffering from drought for the last five years. Last year was the driest year since the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. This is probably going to be drier than that. Our reservoirs are low, there has been little precipitation, and groundwater only goes so far. We've outlawed watering lawns. We've outlawed washing your car (except by hand with one bucket of water). Last year we lost a lot of our crops to the lack of water, not to mention large numbers of cattle that were prematurely slaughtered because we couldn't supply them with enough to drink. And you want us to take what we've got left and use it to power our cars? Sorry, that's not going to work. It'd make much more sense to set up large electrolysis plants next to the ocean and then ship the hydrogen elsewhere than to do it on a "cottage industry" basis with each filling station providing it's own water/electricity.
That may need a little elaboration, as the two touch on related areas.
Eugenics is a theory which holds that certain individuals are innately superior to others, and that the superior few are vastly outnumbered by the inferior many. If you accept these two premises, then it follows that the inferior many are sure to reproduce faster than the superior few, with the result that the characteristics of the superior individuals will be lost. Basically, a eugenicist sees the world in terms of a conflict between those with big brains and those with big dicks. In order to improve the species, therefore, a eugenicist will attempt to discourage the inferior from procreating, and encourage the superior.
The biggest problem with this theory is figuring out how to tell who's superior and who's inferior. The answer depends on how you ask the question, and on what your beliefs are about what would constitute a "superior" human being. The Nazis believed that a certain physical type was superior -- blond hair, blue eyes, extremely fair skin, what they called "Aryan". They conducted experiments attempting to further these characteristics; for example they would take a pair of brown-eyed twins, and inject chemicals into their eyes in an attempt to change the eye-color to blue. This particular study was carried out at Auschwitz by Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death.
If, on the other hand, you are an American eugenicist, what you do to separate the inferior and the superior is come up with the Intellectual Quotient Test and administer it to all schoolchildren. Those who do well are deemed fit, and allowed to do things like take college prep courses in high school. Those who are deemed unfit are only allowed to take classes in, say, technical arts, thereby preparing them for a lifetime working as drones in a factory. Also, you get laws passed in many states requiring the forced sterilization of any person below a certain IQ level who attempts to reproduce. You might also conduct studies such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments which were begun with the understanding that the subjects would be black because black men are naturally more lascivious than white men, and therefore more likely to have syphilis. These experiments were funded by Congress, continued for four decades, involved hideously painful procedures like spinal fluid taps, and worst of all the subjects were never told that they had syphilis. By the time they found out, it was far too late for any of them to seek treatment.
Eugenics is no longer an accepted theory. It depends on an arbitrary vision of what constitutes "superiority", and led to some truly barbaric practices, both in Germany and in the United States. I do not know how well the theory was received in other countries. I am, however, truly grateful that it is no longer accepted.
Genetic engineering, on the other hand, is a technique for the modification of living creatures by altering their genetic structure. It could very easily be used for eugenics, but has other more benign purposes as well.
There are two kinds of genetic engineering. One involves the modification of an existing organism. For example, take a child afflicted with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease which causes the lungs to fill with mucus, thereby making it extremely difficult to breathe. That child might be treated by inhaling a vapor of specially created viruses that insert themselves into the affected lung cells and alter their genetic code in such a way that they stop producing the mucus. This is also known as gene therapy.
The other form of genetic engineering involves modifying an organism before it starts growing. Thus you might take a fertilized egg and modify its DNA prior to its implantation in the wall of the mother's womb. Since all cells in the body ultimately derive from that egg, your modification would change the fundamental nature of the adult organism. Genetic modifications have been carried out on plants, for example to make them resistant to a particular disease, or to increase the per-acre yield of a food crop. You yourself have probably eaten such genetically modified food. It is quite common in America; less so in Europe, where there are a great many people who protest against it.
Genetic engineering is a field which has enormous potential for good -- the elimination of genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis. If two people are aware that their child might suffer from CF, they could perform an artificial insemination of an egg which had been "fixed", or avoid the disease simply by choosing an egg that wasn't affected in the first place. On the other hand, genetic engineering also has a staggering potential for abuse. A genetic engineer could not only cure diseases, but also create entirely new ones. The new disease might be used in biological warfare. It is conceivable (though currently not possible) that genetic engineering might be able to create a contagious mutagen -- a virus that would spread throughout the population, and make a particular modification within the bodies of the victims. Imagine if the Nazis had been able to create a virus that would alter the eggs and testicles of those who contracted it. They could have ensured that the next generation would be blond and blue-eyed, against the will of the parents.
Then, of course, there is the danger that we might screw up. We know a lot about genetics now, but there's even more that's not well understood. Sequencing out a full human gene doesn't mean that we understand how all the parts interact with another. There are large portions of the genome that don't seem to do anything (introns) . . . but then again maybe they do, and we just haven't figured it out quite yet. Then there's the fact that one sequence of DNA might control or contribute to three or four different finished structures. If you alter it to give a child green eyes, you might also cause the child to be bald. (That's just an example, I have no idea if the sequences controlling hair production and eye color are at all related.)
Basically, we don't know enough at this point to engage in wholesale manipulation of human genetics. We should not outlaw it -- the genie is out of the bottle, and if we tried outlawing it, the research would merely be undertaken by unethical scientists with little or no oversight. On the other hand, we should NOT perform modifications of human beings without a clear idea of what we're doing and a damn good reason to do it. Giving your kid a particular eye color is NOT a good reason for genetic engineering. Avoiding cystic fibrosis is acceptable. Engineering for more abstract qualities -- musical talent, mathematical skill, linquistic ability -- should be avoided at all costs until we have some idea what the hell we're doing. We don't even know if those qualities are controlled by genes; in the process of trying it out we might very well screw up and make some truly horrible mistakes. Note that many autistic people are also extremely good at math.
Then there are the social issues. Genetic engineering is expensive. If we're not careful, it could become a way for the wealthy to reinforce their dominance over world affairs. It is natural to want to give your child every advantage in life that you can; but doing so can simultaneously disadvantage other people's children.
In short, genetic engineering of humans is problematic. It could provide some unparalleled benefits to the human species . . . but it is also an ethical minefield, and could easily be turned to selfish or downright evil purposes.
Another thing worth pointing out about NTFS is that Mandrake is not the first Linux distribution with NTFS resizing support. Xandros had it when they announced their first official release a few months ago. I suspect that they used the same code as Mandrake, though I don't know. Xandros's PR pages claim that they were the first with that capability.
I have no idea who to believe, and frankly I don't care who got their first; I'm just glad it's implemented. Now, if we could just get decent NTFS write support, we'd be in much better shape. Being able to read/write your Windows partition from Linux makes dual-booting much more tolerable. On at least one occasion, being able to write a FAT32 partition from Linux has saved my butt. (Windows was refusing to boot because some vital configuration files had gotten corrupted; I couldn't boot from floppy 'cause my disk drive was dead, but I was able to replace them from Linux -- disaster averted!)
Not being able to do similar things with NTFS partitions is a significant drawback which may be discouraging some people from trying Linux out on their shiny new 2K/XP machine. I hope it gets worked out in the not-too-distant future.
Regarding paragraph one, which details your experience with Congressman Goodlatte. He dismissed you and called you a thief. From this, you conclude that those elected to Congressional seats do not represent you. You say, "You see, they don't care what the actual coders think, they care what corporations and unions' leaders think." I do not think that this is a valid conclusion. You can certainly conclude that Congressman Goodlatte does not agree with you, and that he does not represent your views. But he is just one person. How do you know that all representatives do not care? Perhaps a different senator would echo your views more closely.
Also -- your account is a bit vague. Your rhetorical style seems rather combative. Might you have alienated him by showing up and aggressively presenting your views and then expecting him to agree with you automatically?
The conclusion of your fourth paragraph strikes me as an of unsupported assertion compounded by the same logical error that troubled your judgement of representatives (judging a whole class of people based on your own experiences with a small section of that class). "Invariably political people tend to be scumbags . . . [who] have no real desire or capacity as a general rule to effect positive change." How is this different from the general population? Strike the word "political" from the above sentence. It now reads "Invariably people tend to be scumbags . . . [who] have no real desire or capacity as a general rule to effect positive change." You seem to suggest that politicians (if that is what you mean by "political people") should be held to a higher standard than anyone else. And yet, they are human too. They have failings, and they have flaws.
Turning to the last bit of that sentence, you seem to forget that people constantly disagree on what constitutes "positive change" and how to effect those changes. No change is universally positive; eliminating slavery was good for the slaves, but bad for the slave-owners who depended on their labor. In that case, deciding that the interests of the slaves were more important than those of their masters would seem fairly straightforward. But even that was hotly contested for years. Consider reading the writings of Senator Calhoun, who spoke vigorously in favor of slavery. He proposed basically a whole new political ideology in order to retain an institution that was important to him and a small group of others. You will always find special-interest groups in any political body; as a result, it is essentially impossible to maintain 100% consensus. A dictatorship is the only example I can think of where this is not a problem; because the dictator always agrees with himself, and his vote is the only one that counts. Even then, he'll have people trying to influence him for their own ends.
There is lots more I could say, but this post is getting long. Before I submit, let me turn to your last paragraph. Let me just put in a couple of quotes:
Let me get this straight. First you say that the average person is too dumb to be trusted with a vote. And then you say that our representatives should be selected at random from that same mass of people who are too stupid to vote in a general election, and given a vote in a legislative assembly? Are you sure about that? You'd be giving huge amounts of power to people who are, by your reasoning, incapable of wielding even the lesser power of a vote diluted by thousands of others. Perhaps you should put that one back to bake for a bit more, 'cause it ain't done yet.
Your political system evidently would be controlled by a small minority -- the "intelligent" ones who can "do the right thing" for all the countless others. You say you don't want to be lorded over by an aristocrat; but what I hear is not that you hate aristocrats . . . merely that you want to be the one doing the lording.
Here's an alternate scenario.
MS is found guilty and given the biggest fine ever. (10% of their total global revenue is the upper limit, according to the article - so 2.8 billion dollars.) They appeal. The appeal takes forever. RealPlayer fades away, and there is much rejoicing.
Now the interesting part: the appeals run out, MS is still guilty, and with all appeals exhausted, they have to pay the huge fine. They pay it. The EU promptly uses the money to hire a bunch of crackerjack programmers to make the Linux desktop a true drop-in replacement for Windows. The code is GPL'ed.
Or, on an even wilder flight of fancy, MS in its arrogance refuses to pay the fine. The EU slaps a heavy tariff on all MS products, and diverts the revenue from that tariff to Linux desktop development. The code is GPL'ed, and the ongoing revenue stream from the tariff means that they can keep working on it till there's no good reason not to use Linux.
Not that I think that MS would be stupid enough to refuse to pay a fine. But one can always dream, right?
Non sequitur. If you pay attention, you'll notice that this article was an address to NARAS, not a statement of their position. Just because John Snyder has expressed this opinion does not mean that NARAS agrees with him. He's only one member, after all.
For that matter, it wasn't even an address to the whole of NARAS: it was ". . . written in response to a discussion by the board of governors of the New York chapter of [NARAS] regarding the position NARAS should take with respect to a new public relations campaign proposed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) condemning those who download music from the Internet." (Quote from the intro of the article on Salon, emphasis added)
The article suggests not only a return to shorter copyright terms (14 years, renewable once) but also the implementation of strong copy protection. Speaking for myself, I find that an acceptable trade-off. I would be willing to put up with strong copy protection mechanisms in exchange for the freedom of all those thousands upon thousands of older books, movies, and songs.
:-)
Regarding the restoration of pre-1976 laws, it occurred to me recently that the Copyright Act of 1976 might be unconstitutional because it extends copyright beyond the author's death.
The constitution says in Article 1, section 8, that Congress is empowered " To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
Note that it says "to Authors and Inventors", not "to Authors, Inventors, and their Heirs and Assigns". Given this approach, it would still be legal to sell your rights to a work to a corporation while you yourself were still alive, but you could not have them transferred automatically to an heir following your own death. Furthermore, the copyright you sold -- or perhaps "licensed" would be a better term -- to a corporation would expire when you do. This would give companies a powerful motive to attend to the health of copyright-generating employees.
The article provides some details -- the most vital of which were echoed by the submitter -- but doesn't give us any clear idea of how good or bad this fact is. How does the environmental impact of microchip production compare to other goods?
Fortunately, the study itself -- linked to by another poster first -- provides some more useful details.
This is more useful than the article, but still does not give a clear idea how microchip fabrication stacks up against lower-tech items in terms of environmental impact. I mean, that automobile that he uses as an example is an non-trivial machine. More to the point, all modern cars incorporate microchips. In order to properly compare the environmental impacts of car and microchip fabrication, you'd have to factor in the environmental costs of all of their respective parts. I'll bet that a car has a much higher environmental impact once you add in all its microchips, pieces of plastic, and so on.Furthermore, both microchips and cars have a greater environmental impact than merely that caused during their production. In both cases, you should also consider what sort of impact their use will entail. Microchips require electricity to function; that electricity has to be generated somehow, and the methods of its production have an environmental impact. Microchips also need to be disposed of once they are no longer useful, as happens all to frequently. I personally have found a good computer recycler, but lots of other pieces of equipment are thrown into landfills, where they remain indefinitely. They may also leak toxic substances as they begin to fall apart (Lead from CRTs, for instance.) Likewise cars have a HUGE environmental impact during their use -- just think how much gasoline a car can burn in a year of normal use.
But I digress. The study did not consider the entire lifetime of the chip, merely the circumstances of its production. In which case, I find it less than satisfactory. It's a good starting place, but doesn't follow through.
The production of microchips is not environmentally friendly. This is true. What we need to know now is how dirty the process is, and how great of a problem it is compared to other areas of production. Comparison with a car alone isn't too useful, especially as it doesn't figure in the environmental costs of the car's components. What would be useful would be a comparison with lots of other objects, ranging in complexity from a table knife to a bicycle to, say, the space shuttle, with the environmental costs of the components of the more complex items figured in. Then we could use that study to see what areas are worst, and where we most need to improve.
Lastly, lest I sound too harsh, the article does mention that this is only the first installment of research that has taken several years to complete. It is entirely possible that the team will put out exactly the sort of report I envision here sometime in the future. So overall, I'd have to say this is a good start, but needs a lot more analysis to be especially useful.
AOL has its serious downsides, I'll admit it. But they have also done some really good stuff. The prime example of this is Mozilla. Yes, the open-source web browser that is so justly celebrated on this site is backed by AOL. An awful lot of the main developers are AOL employees, and that fast connection that mozilla.org sits on is provided by AOL.
That makes up for one heck of a lot in the way of crappy customer service, if you ask me. Mozilla is as good as it is largely because there is an actual paid development team that works on it professionally. So don't be too quick to shout "Hurrah!" if AOL melts down.
Television can indeed be stultifying. I think the reason that we continue to watch it nonetheless is that we have an inborn need for continuing validation of the way we think things are supposed to be. If we see that others behave in the same fashion as we do, then it reassures us that we are in tune with our culture. It helps us form a sense of ourselves as belonging to a larger social unit than just our families or immediate friends.
In the past, this sort of external validation was provided by books, and before that by oral storytelling. The fact that the characters are fictitious makes them excellent for conveying abstract ideas about what an ideal person is supposed to be like.
This sort of thing can be repressive and conservative in the extreme. Note that while most of our recent movies portray the ideal woman as sassy, smart, and independent, the ultimate fate of these heroines is the same as always: marriage and presumed domestic bliss. There is the implication that these characters are basically templates to model ourselves after. "If you follow the script, you will be fulfilled," whispers the sub-text, "And if you don't, you will be isolated and unhappy."
That said, there are counter-examples: some shows subvert the dominant ideals through parody, satire, or irony. The Simpsons is a prime example. Regrettably, however, such counter-cultural shows are comparatively few. Likewise for movies; the vast majority of 'em are essentially forms of brainwashing, especially those out of Hollywood. Independent films from smaller labels are much more likely to be aware of their own messages. Books are subject to the same sort of division.
There's no way we can stop doing this; there is no such thing as a totally unbiased text. We automatically encode our beliefs into anything we write, or sing, or act. And though this is a subjective value judgement on my part, I find that the best pieces of literature are the ones that are aware of this fact. They don't have to be progressive, or anything: simply being aware of the effects and writing a thoughtful and deliberate piece of work makes it a lot better than a simple regurgitation of dominant values.
As for wanting really big televisions, I think that's more of a status competition than anything else. If your neighbors can watch your television from across the street and not miss any details, that advertises your ability to spend large amounts of money on fancy equipment. Same as big expensive cars.
Anyway, this post is getting long and rambling, so I'll shut up now.
Very cool. I wonder if it could be ported to Linux once they've got working okay on FreeBSD. Then Linux would be able to run Mac OS X apps -- the Mac OS X versions of Photoshop and Word come to mind. One major barrier to the adoption of Linux on the desktop is the percieved lack of familiar applications, and Photoshop and Word are high on the list. Word has been pretty well taken care of by the Crossweaver WINE stuff, but Photoshop is still missing. Gimp is great and all, but most graphics professionals would rather keep using the package they're already familiar with than try to learn a whole new one, which is frankly often not as capable as Photoshop.
In the sixth slide, it says that the GPL is 'Known in the OSS community as a "viral" license.'
Totally regardless of whether or not the GPL is viral, isn't this the description that Microsoft came up with?
I'm confused. Who first described the GPL as viral? MS? RMS? Somebody else?
Okay, maybe I'm dense, but how does your line of reasoning go? The only restrictions I see in the GPL are that 1) You have to make your source available under the GPL if you make a modified version and you choose to distribute that version to the public, and 2) programs that use GPL'ed code fall under the GPL.
That's it. You can use the program on as many machines as you want, give copies to your friends, all legally. You can even make modifications and keep the source to yourself, so long as you also keep the binaries to yourself. There is nothing in there to prevent you from being selfish. Heck, for most purposes you don't even have to accept the license. You can decline the GPL and still use the program all you want, you just can't legally modify it.
Compare this to Microsoft's licensing policies. Let's take a specific example: Windows 98 OEM version. That Windows disc that came with your computer can only be used legally on your computer. If you replace, say, the motherboard, it's not the same computer anymore, and you no longer have the right to use that copy of Windows 98 on any computer at all. Similarly, if you sell the computer that the disc came with and build a new one, you cannot use it on the new computer, even if you wiped the old one clean before you sold it. And there are lots of other restrictions, too -- read through a Microsoft EULA some time. If you actually take the time to understand it, you will find that there are about a zillion restrictions on how you can use the program. And of course you are not allowed to modify it, and couldn't if you wanted to, unless you are a wizardly programmer who can read binaries and reconstruct the original source code from them.
Compare this to the GPL, where there are only those two restrictions, and they only apply to developers. And the GPL is probably the most restrictive open-source license: others, like BSD-style-licenses, or the Zlib license, place effectively no restrictions at all on your use of the program. So, please explain to me: how is it that you have less freedom with open software than with closed?
I must conclude that this AC is a troll. Dang. Oh, well, I've got karma to burn.
I agree; the Heaney translation reads very well to the modern ear. It's NOT a good translation to compare with the original; Heaney took some very large liberties. This is fine, considering he wasn't producing an academic version. So yes, the Heaney is a good buy; just don't try to use it as a learning aid if you're studying Old English.
Not so; there are only three supernatural beings who have roles in the plot, but others are mentioned. For example, in this passage:
That's from the Robinson and Mitchel edition, titled "Beowulf: An Edition". In case you can't read Anglo-Saxon, here is my (prose) translation:
This is a passage describing the origin of all unholy creatures from Cain following his banishment by God. Grendel (and his mother) were descended from Cain. "Eotenas" is a synonym for "giants"; "gigantas" is probably a loan-word from Latin.
So the version you read in high school is correct, it's just that elves and orcs and giants don't figure very large in the poem. Elves are only mentioned a couple of times, and are always evil; orcs are mentioned all of once in the passage above, and the term is not clearly defined, though my glossary offers "evil spirits of the dead." Giants are mentioned several times, but only as a race that got destroyed in Noah's flood.
Unlikely in the extreme, my friend.
Beowulf was written in Old English, also known as Anglo-Saxon. The language is extremely different from what we now speak. I've just finished reading Beowulf in the original. It was hard, and I've been studying the language for two years already. Doing a translation of Beowulf, especially one that would measure up to Tolkien's high standards, would require a lot more practice than that. You'd have to hire a professional Anglo-Saxonist. There just aren't that many of them. A few hundred, tops.
You'd have to figure out exactly which sources Tolkien would have worked from. Would he have consulted the original manuscript (MS Cotton Vitelius A. xv)? If so, would there have been a record of that consultation in the British Library, and would you have to fake such a record? If you decide he did NOT consult the original, whose edition would he have worked from? Which editions was he familiar with? Would he also have consulted reprints of late-seventeenth century transcriptions from before the manuscript was damaged in a fire?
Then, of course, the article mentions that the translation consists of two thousand hand-written pages. Not only do you need to hire a professional Anglo-Saxonist to translate the poem, you also have to hire someone who can fake Tolkien's handwriting for two thousand pages so well that it isn't an instantly recognizable forgery. Not only that, you have to obtain a large supply of vintage paper and ink, or perform expensive aging routines on modern paper to simulate an aged condition, which would be instantly detectable should anyone think to subject that paper to an age test. Which they would if there was any doubt as to the authenticity of the piece.
Then, of course, you have to figure out how to get your expensive and complicated fake into the Bodleian library. You'll probably have to bribe a librarian. An awful lot of people are now involved. One of them is sure to spill the beans unless you 1) pay them HUGE amounts of money to shut up, or 2) kill them.
All this so you can make a movie and slap Tolkien's name on it? That's one hell of a lot of work, especially since it would be really, really hard to pull off without detection. Why bother, when you could just spend all that time and effort promoting the movie?
Cynicism is fine and all, but really. Do think a little harder next time.
I agree. Seanator McCain is very conservative. He is hawkish on the Iraq issue, and conservative on social issues such as abortion. And where these social issues intersect with tech issues, he will favor a conservative social stance. (Take, for example, his sponsorship of a resolution designating October "Children's Internet Safety Month", a term of dubious nature which could easily fit any one of a number of different positions.)
I myself am very liberal, and disagree with him on many such issues.
Nonetheless, John McCain is a man that I respect very much. I believe that, unlike come of his colleagues, he does his very best to serve the people. His long and vigorous struggle for campaign finance reform provides ample evidence, as do his efforts to curb wasteful spending, even in areas traditionally favored by conservatives, like Defense. He has also shown his willingness to work with Democrats on bipartisan issues. For these reasons, I respect him one hell of a lot more than Bush, or Cheney, or Hollings, all of whom spend more time serving their corporate cronies than their constituents. McCain and Senator Russ Feingold are, to my mind, the finest statesmen currently serving in Congress.
As I say, I disagree with Senator McCain on many subjects. Given his record, however, I think he is likely to handle this appointment in a way that the tech community will approve of. I suspect that he will put up a vigorous fight against the CBDTPA, on the grounds that it's a textbook case of special interests trying to buy legislation.
One thing I'm sure of: it's going to be an interesting ride!
It's not mandatory to use the two-letter country suffixes for non-US sites. For example, jungle.co.uk (an online retailer of computer goods and so on) is just a re-direct to jungle.com, even though they do business exclusively in the UK.
Also, the .US domain has recently been opened up to general use. It's available from a number of different registrars, for example here and here and here, to name a few.
Regarding auto-completing parts of URLs, note that the "http" protocol is universal to web sites. (Well, if you count https, but anybody using that for an entire site will have an unencrypted redirect page if they have the first clue what they're doing.) It is interesting, though, to try different browsers with just random words typed into the location bar. Internet Explorer, for example, will interpret "foobar" as a search term and direct you to a MicroSoft owned search engine where it will search for foobar. Phoenix (and most likely NS7, Beonex, and their common progenitor Mozilla) will assume that you meant http://www.foobar.com/ and send you there.
There are other consequences to irrigation as well. Take, for example, the state of the Great Plains aquifer, which underlies Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and in fact most of the middle of the country. Aquifers are a resource in a delicate balance between the amount of water withdrawn and the amount of water recharged from streams and precipitation soaking into the ground.
:-(
Currently we are withdrawing water from the Great Plains aquifer about twice as fast as it is being replenished. My geology book from last year claimed it'll be used up in another 10-15 years. If that happens, some MAJOR changes are going to result. We'll have to decrease agricultural production to about 25% of current levels -- not enough water to plant the crops as densely as we hvae been. Cattle ranching will suffer, too -- not enough water to maintain the current herds.
This process is only being exacerbated by the prolonged drought throughout the western half of the country. Remember the Hayman fire in Colorado last summer? And the literally hundreds of other fires? That's because the entire region is as dry as a bone: we haven't been getting normal precipitation levels. Colorado (which is my home state) lost about three quarters of the crops that were planted this year due to the drought. Mandatory watering restrictions were in place all summer, and have already been announced for next year.
Then, of course, there are going to be some pretty severe economic repercussions. For a state whose primary industry is agriculture, a 75% decrease in crop yields, be it because of unusual drought or a depleted aquifer, is HUGE. Food prices -- especially for energy-intensive products like beef -- will go up. People will not be happy.
It's a mess.
Old English is more closely related to Icelandic or German than it is to modern English. Old English (Or Anglo-Saxon as it is sometimes called) is derived from the western branch of the Germanic language group. Icelandic and the other Scandinavian tongues are from the North Germanic branch, so they really do have a lot in common. This was reinforced by the Scandinavian invasions of England in the 10th and 11th centuries; once the Vikings (mostly Norwegian and Icelandic speakers) settled down in the north-eastern part of the country, their words mingled with those of the native population, which is part of the reason for the distinct regional dialects that exist in those areas to this day. Some people have also thought that the Scandinavian presence may have hastened the decline of word-endings; when your neighbor speaks Icelandic and you speak Anglo-Saxon, both of you know the stem "hors" (meaning the big four-legged animal you can ride), but both of you use different endings to indicate its grammatical function. So in order to make it easier to communicate, you both start using the part that you both already know. So instead of saying "horsu" - "the horse" you would just say "hors".
So yes. If you already know Icelandic, Old English is pretty easy to pick up. (And vice versa -- many English medievalists start by learning Old English, and then move on to Old Norse/Icelandic because it's an easy leap.)
Well, on the one hand that's a typo. On the other hand, that's an extremely realistic typo, because they did spell it both ways, frequently in the same document. In fact, Old English spelling is not standardized at all. It can vary by region, by scribe, and even from sentence to sentence.Here is a word-by-word gloss of the original quotation:
Sume: One particular (Mod. En. "some")
dæge: day
hit: it
gelamp: happened
æt: that
an: a certain (Mod. En. "One")
nunnan: nun
of: of
æm: that (Accusative singular definite article)
ilcan: same (Mod. En. "ilk")
mynstre: monastery (Mod. En. "Minster")
geforon: went (Mod. En. "fare", eg "she fared")
in on: into
hire: their
wyrt-tun: Wort town (read: garden)
Ond: And
ær: there
heo: she
gesawon: saw
an: a certain (Mod. En. "One")
leahtric,: lettuce
and: and
hit: it
gelyste: wanted (Mod. En. "lusted" but carries no sexual connotations in this case)
æs.: of-that (genitive definite article, relates to "hit" in this sentence.)
As you can see from the gloss, I didn't change the word order very much. The biggest alteration is the conflation of æs and hit in the second sentence. If you're interested, the most commonly used grammar of Old English is Bright's Old English Grammar and Reader. Try to get the 1973 revision by Cassidy and Ringler. You seem to be pretty familiar with grammar from other languages, so it ought not to be too hard for you to grok. People with no grammatical background are likely to find it hard to follow without guidance. Another commonly cited one is A Guide To Old English by Mitchell and Robinson, which is still in print and much more recent.
Hope this helps, feel free to email me and ask about this in more detail.