As much as I love the wholecolonization of America thing, it is a dead end. It will not solve the overcrowding of England, or pollution issues, and I doubt it will ever be economically feasible to get natural resources from America.
Sure, we could go to America. But what will it get you?America is an empty wilderness. There may be enough resources to run a colony. Fine, you have a thousand or so people living in a palisade, breathing foul swamp air, drinking putrid water, and eating hardscrabble. That's just a drop in the population bucket. And if that's the way you're going to live, why go all the way to America to do it? Why not just build your palisade here in England?
Just thought I'd insert a little historical perspective, here. These opinions are not new. Nor are they especially important, since colonization efforts generally aren't governed by entirely rational impulses. Look at the United States. Maryland was founded by Lord Baltimore as an experiment in utopian feudalism. Massachusetts was founded by people looking to worship Jesus however they pleased. Virginia was established by a private company whose sole interest was in turning a profit. Not one of 'em worked out as planned -- Maryland is not a feudal state and never really was; Massachusetts discovered that religious freedom and strict orthodoxy don't go well together (see: formation of Connecticut); and the Virginia Company went bust. All three of those (and arguably the other colonies as well, each in their own ways) were founded by slightly bonkers people whose grand plans went poof on contact with reality. And in all those cases there were plenty of people back home in England saying "What, are you nuts? The East Indies are the future!"
That said, I would be greatly surprised if we established a colony on Mars without first putting together a few near-Earth projects, first. Colonists setting out for America had a long history of seafaring experience to rely on to get them there, and could look forward to practicing agriculture on their arrival. We have very little experience in long-distance space journeys, and even less in domed living. Personally, I think we're much more likely to establish a moon-base first. We've already visited it a few times. It's closer, so if something goes hideously wrong help can show up in days or weeks rather than months. And it's even less hospitable than Mars, so we'll get some good experience.
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of visiting Anne McCaffrey at her home in Ireland. I stayed as her guest for ten days, and one of the things that came up in conversation was this very topic. Evidently some fellow in Canada had been posting copies of her books to the web, and she'd won a legal battle against him. But the penalty wasn't enough to deter him, and she had already learned that he was posting them again on a different web site.
This was in late March, 2000, so Napster was up and running but as yet there wasn't much in the way of non-music peer-to-peer file trading going on. I would imagine that this sort of thing has been happening more frequently with the improvement of OCR software and the development of massive, organized file-sharing programs. It's not really surprising.
I bet, though, that downloads of pirated books will NEVER come anywhere close to downloads of pirated music or video files, for a number of reasons:
You have to read books, and that requires effort. Music you just listen to, and video you stare at. Reading takes a lot longer.
The books that are most likely to be pirated (popular fiction) are already available free of charge in hardcopy at the library.
A major factor in music piracy is that the price of a CD is just too high. Books are much cheaper, especially paperbacks. You can get three paperbacks for the price of one CD -- more if you buy 'em used. The prices of books just aren't high enough to make it worth the trouble of downloading them and reading them on your screen.
For these reasons, I don't think it will ever be a large-scale problem for mainstream publishers. That's not to say it won't exist. There will be some piracy, especially of ultra-popular stuff like the Harry Potter books. The only place I see it becoming a major factor is within the scientific/technical field. It can be hard to get some of the more obscure sci/tech books, they tend to be expensive if you find them, and the people who are likely to be reading them are also likely to be tech-savvy and dedicated enough to not mind reading 'em on-screen.
For those who have not read the linked weblog entry, here are the reasons he believes it to be a GPL violation:
1) "One perfect example of this is Zebra, the advanced dynamic routing software package. By opening the firmware file directly, as well as by making queries through the makeshift ping interface mentioned earlier, we noticed that the zebra running on the WRT54G doesn't use the standard configuration file locations. This means that it must certainly be a modified binary." He also mentions that Linksys seems to have used a modified GCC to compile their software, "with a signature string of "GCC: (GNU) 3.0 20010422 (prerelease) with bcm4710a0 modifications"). That bcm4710 refers to the Broadcom chipset that this AP is actually made from."
2) Yes, the author DID email Linksys asking for the source code. You can read that message here. According to the update at the bottom of the weblog entry, he got a response shortly before midnight on 29 July, but it just said that the issue was being directed to second level support.
. . . How To Install Filtering Software To Keep The Kids From Porn.
That's a pretty good point; I'm sure there are plenty of parents who'd like to be able to do that.
If you do make a class like that, however, may I suggest expanding it just slightly? Make it something like "Safe Surfing: Protecting your Privacy in the Digital Age". I would suggest that it cover the following topics:
Online Transactions (how to recognize an insecure site, figuring out which vendors are trustworthy, what to do if your credit card number gets stolen anyway, etc)
Spam Avoidance. (Common scams like the Nigerian thing, Maintaining separate public/private email accounts, not "unsubscribing", disabling HTML email to avoid web bugs, etc)
Avoiding Annoyance. (Pop-up blocking, how to avoid installing spyware, adware, malware; how to get rid of it if you install it by accident, ad-blocking)
Porn Filters. (When and where such things are advisable, flaws in the existing programs, etc)
Advanced topics. (Encryption for private files, email encryption.)
If you make each of those one lesson, and classes meet once a week for an hour, that's quite manageable. An awful lot of people wind up installing spyware and other junk they don't need simply because they don't know not to. A course like this would go a long way towards helping a new surfer avoid the common pitfalls, and just generally improve the quality of their online experience. It'll also probably make their computers run better -- not having zillions of crappy unneccesary little programs cluttering up the memory and the taskbar.
Lastly, you could distribute a disc full of useful software as part of the class materials. Quite a few of the programs you'll discuss will be open source, and lots of the others will be shareware, so you could probably put together a nice little disc full of software discussed in the class.
one must assume that the sheer numbers involved evens out the effects of differing quality
He is where his logic is flawed, because quality and quantity are not in any way related.
I wondered about that assumption, too. But in the end, I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption. The higher the quantity, the higher the probability that a portion of the produced works will be high-quality.
To prove the point, though, you'd have to come up with an objective measure of "quality" -- or rather, "innovation" since that is what copyright law is supposed to encourage. I wish you luck. People have been arguing back and forth about how to assess quality in an artistic work for literally millenia, and we're no closer to a any kind of objective metric now than we were then. Like Horace said, "De gustibus non disputandem est", "There's no arguing with tastes", or more loosely translated as "There's no accounting for taste". Take "innovation", for example. We think of innovation as a Good Thing; but some cultures disagree. Roman culture was one (since it already came up). The Romans considered innovation in poetry a Bad Thing, since the point was to imitate the poets of the Golden Age. (At first this mostly meant Homer, whose poetry was greatly admired despite not being written in Latin, and later Horace and Vergil and so on.)
But to return to the subject, I'd have to say this guy has come up with a reasonably decent metric for a slippery subject, and put one hell of a lot of unpaid work into it just because he found it interesting. More power to him.
You would have preferred they spent nothing and used an operating system that steals the intellecual property from SCO, is developed by forein nationals, and comes in silly sounding flavors like Knoppix and Gentoo?:)
No; I'd prefer they use an operating system whose code is open so that they can 1) see that it contains no stolen code, and 2) check to make sure employees of Company X haven't been suborned by foreign powers into slipping in nasty subroutines that might leak sensitive information.
Coming in silly sounding flavors would just be a bonus -- to give the employees a good laugh. And of course they could always re-name it to something appropriately dignified, like G.O.O.S.E. (Government Operated Operating System Extraordinaire).
(Disclaimer: yes, I am aware the parent poster was joking -- I saw that smiley. It just seemed to me that a government security department should prefer to be able to perform its own security/legal audits on the code of the programs it uses.)
I have to agree. Not only that, the article just plain didn't make sense. I just read it beginning to end, and I still don't have any clear idea what it's supposed to be about. Is it about hardware innovation? Software innovation? Corporate adoption of 64-bit computing? Open source? Enthusiast communities? All of those things are mentioned, but there are no clear lines drawn to connect them.
It's possible that there's a thesis in there somewhere, but the author never actually says what it is. It shows no depth of thought, fails to articulate an argument, and and provides no coherent evidence for any of the points it actually makes. If I were grading this, it'd get a C minus. Maybe a D plus if I was feeling uncharitable.
As I understand them, weblog programs are designed to allow one person to post an article, and then other people to comment on it. I do not think this is well suited to what you want to do, because 1) you will have multiple people posting multiple works, 2) you will probably not want to allow comments from random strangers. Using weblogs, each student would need to have his or her own weblog, which would make it more difficult for collaborative use of the type you envision.
For these purposes, a forum would be much better; forums allow for multiple, separate discussions to take place in a centralized area. They also allow the forum administrator to lock down the forum in such a way that only members can post messages, and the administrator gets to say who can be a member. This would help keep the discussion on topic. Each student's work would go in a different thread -- say Sally M. Haverforth posts the first draft of her argumentative essay on Milton's treatment of women in a thread called "S. Haverforth -- Milton: Masochistic Misogynist?". Subsequent comments from her peers would be replies to that initial posting, keeping the whole thing neatly organized.
If you have access to an appropriately equipped server, I recommend phpBB for the job: it's easy to set up and administer, open source, free of charge, and fairly easy to use.
"all 'copyright' = greed . . . the TRUTH is that there is no LEGITIMATE use of CSS on the first place"
Copyright is not greed. Copyright is a legal mechanism designed to encourage people to create new works of art and useful inventions. Its purpose is to get people to continue creating new works, by rewarding them for ones they've already made. This is supposed to better society.
Copyright can be used in a greedy fashion. But kindly keep in mind that most open source and free software licenses, including the GPL, depend on copyright. Those works (the Linux kernel, GCC, Mozilla, libdvdcss, and thousands of others) have been given to the community by their authors without the expectation of monetary compensation. This is a non-greedy use of copyright.
CSS (and Macrovision, and region coding) is used by the movie industry to attempt to control our movie-watching behavior by dictating where and when and how we can watch movies that we have paid for. That is a legitimate use in the eyes of the industry, though I'll agree that it has been misapplied.
But those same techniques could be used in good ways; for example to protect your own privacy. Say you have a digital camera, and you make some risque films with your lover. You could then burn those to DVD and use CSS, Macrovision, and region coding to try and make sure that no-one but you and your lover are able to watch those videos. Mind, it probably wouldn't work very well -- the techniques are too well known and too easily broken. You'd be better off encoding it to DivX or Xvid and then encrypting the whole file with PGP.
Anyway, my point is that copyright and DVD technologies are neutral: it's how they are used that makes them good or bad.
It's a problem not because it might simply replace one existing species, but because it might replace that species and take down dozens of others with it, throwing an entire ecosystem into disarray. Take the brown snake, which was introduced to Guam in fruit shipments. They eat birds and birds' eggs. They are rapidly destroying all of the birds in Guam, because there are not enough natural hazards to keep them in check. Additionally, they crawl into transformers and short circuit them, frying themselves and disrupting power, which can be very serious in some circumstances. Also, they are poisonous. They're not especially aggressive, but have been known to bite both adults, children, and infants, who then require hospitalization.
That's just a problem of species being introduced into alien environments. Genetically modified creatures that escape could cause similar problems, perhaps exacerbated by their modifications. Mind you, a fish that glows at night is going to get eaten pretty quick. But we should be very careful about introducing GM creatures into the wild just because there could be unforeseen consequences that we wouldn't like.
. . . it's simply an ethical consideration about making a species that is doomed without us.
Well, that's one ethical consideration that doesn't strike me as particular pressing; we've done it before, why not again? There are plenty of species that would almost certainly die out if we did: seedless grapes, maize, several forms of wheat, possibly cows. Personally I would be more worried about species dying because we kill them than species dying because we create them.
. . . if I were in charge of a government (or other) agency, I would demand access to the source code of the work I'd commissioned.
Apropos of that, the Irish government recently commissioned an electronic voting system -- and they didn't get the source code! Following a Freedom of Information request by the author of that article, the Irish government admitted that they didn't have the code. It was discussed on Slashdot a while back. Note that this is system was used in the May 2002 general election.
So; they gave the company who developed the program a huge amount of power over their elections, yet have nothing but the company's word that it's completely fair. Not to impugn the company's honor, but in a public arena that vital, the impartiality of the system needs to be demonstrable not only to the government but also to any citizen who cares to ask. Without the source code, they can't do that. The potential for corruption is enormous.
This report touches on the same issue. Putting government data in proprietary formats -- whether those data are votes, agricultural reports, or anything else -- makes the government and hence the citizenry dependent on the business who wrote the program for access to the information.
It also gives the company the ability to do whatever it wants with the data in its format, alter it, make copies of it -- anything at all. Altering the data would almost certainly be detected rapidly, and the company would be in deep kimchee. But it would be fairly easy to insert a routine that would scan a file on opening, and email an encrypted copy of the file to someone if it contained a particular key term. This wouldn't even have to be done with the knowledge of the company: all it would take would be for one of the programmers on the team to be suborned by a foreign power interested in obtaining secret data.
Open, standard formats means that any company (or individual) can write a program to access data in that format. Open code means that those programs can be rigorously audited by independent programmers, thereby ensuring that the program's security does not depend on a single individual or organization.
I look at those Irish officials, and I just have to wonder what they were thinking. They're so clueless, their mere presence could destroy evidence at a crime scene. Sheesh.
Re:Wow, this story is getting around
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Cable TV Ruins Bhutan
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· Score: 4, Informative
In general, I agree; television does indeed have social effects. However, I have to take issue with your third paragraph:
On the other hand, I would certainly be pissed off if the government decided I couldn't watch television because it might make me 'violent'. So it would be hypocritical for me to proscribe that for some other nation. And the self-proclaimed "dragon king" of this place has no more right either. Everyone hated the Taliban, who imposed a similar ban on Television, but loves the Bhutanese. Sure, the taliban were all-around evil people, and the Dragon King seems genuinely interested in national happiness, but still. People need to be free to make up their own minds about what information they want to take in.
1) There is not a ban on television. Nor is the government considering one. Did you read the article? If you had, you might have noticed that it says ". . . in its haste to introduce TV, the government failed to prepare legislation. There is no film classification board or TV watershed in force here, no regulations about media ownership. Companies such as Star TV are free to broadcast whatever they want. Only three years after the introduction of cable did the government announce that a media act would be drafted."
2) Comparing Bhutan's government with the Taliban is completely and totally bogus. The Taliban took power violently and sustained their rule through violence, including public executions of "criminals" such as women who committed adultery. Bhutan was founded as a Buddhist refuge. Under the Taliban, living conditions in Afghanistan became notably worse.
Bhutan's monarchy, by contrast, was not "self-proclaimed". It was set up under British influence in 1907, as mentioned here and here. That second source contains, among other things, this information: "Bhutan's third hereditary ruler, King Jigme Dorji Wangchuk (reigned 1953â"72), modernized Bhutanese society by abolishing slavery and the caste system, emancipating women, dividing large estates into small individual plots, and starting a secular educational system. Although Bhutan no longer has a Dharma Raja, Buddhist priests retain political influence. In 1969 the absolute monarchy gave way to a 'democratic monarchy.'"
What's more, the article we're discussing mentions that "[In] 1998 . . . King Jigme Singye Wangchuck announced he would give up his role as head of government and cede power to the national assembly. The people would be consulted about the drafting of a constitution. The process would complete Bhutan's transformation from monarchist Shangri-la into a modern democracy."
Listen, sounds like in balance they've been pretty good for the country. Given a choice between living in Bhutan today or Afghanistan-under-the-Taliban, I would take Bhutan in a heartbeat. The main fault of Bhutan's government seems to be that they're embracing foreign ways a bit too enthusiastically. Comparing them to the Taliban does them a disservice.
Dude, you're a fucking moron. Iraq deserved what they got, a despot is out of the picture, and that's that.
Let's see . . . where to begin?
Point 1: Saddam Hussein was a despot. He and his flunkies deserved what they got. Iraq also includes the civilian population, and that population has suffered at our hands: first due to years of economic sanctions, intermittent warfare (Clinton bombed them, too), then a much larger war in which indeterminate numbers of civilians were killed or wounded, and many more than that left without reliable supplies of clean water, electricity, or food.
Point 2: President Bush did not choose to make Hussein's despotism the justification for war. He and his advisors chose to make Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction in contravention of UN resolutions the justification for war. They made persistent, clear, and unambiguous claims that Hussein possessed these weapons, and that they had proof of it.
So we went to war. Roughly a hundred Americans died, thousands of enemy combatants, and indeterminate numbers of civilians, both due to direct military involvement (ie they got bombed or shot) and due to indirect secondary effects (ie getting diarrhea from drinking unclean water after Baghdad's infrastructure was destroyed -- in an environment as hot as Iraq, with no reliable clean water, it's really damn easy to shit yourself to death if you get the runs).
Now. All that is one hell of a lot of death. And the WMD's that were the justification for all this death do not seem to be there. We have found two -- count 'em -- mobile trailers that might conceivably have been used to make biological or chemical agents for use in WMD's. That's it. The weapons aren't there now, and weren't there then.
If Bush wanted to go to war because Hussein was a despot, he should have said so! But he didn't. He chose to lie to his people and the world. That lie led to thousands of deaths, destablized an entire region, and pissed off our allies. I don't know about you, but I am pretty damn angry about it. War should never, ever be fought without a clear, unambiguous and truthful reason.
. . . 80 lines could be a very large problem for IBM and Linux.
For IBM, possibly.
For Linux, I doubt it. 80 lines is not a lot. It can be replaced easily. Presumably, there is a lot more than just 80 lines, and they haven't revealed it all yet. Nevertheless, the instant the suspect code becomes public knowledge, it is certain to be ripped out of the kernel and replaced with completely new code. I suspect that the code will be replaced even if SCO loses the case -- this sort of thing is an assault on the fundamental values of the open source community, and I cannot imagine them leaving any code in place with even a shadow of illegitimacy.
There would be no point in SCO suing individual kernel developers -- they're private individuals. They don't have the kind of money SCO would be interested in getting. The only reason I can see for suing individuals would be to bolster more important suits against corporations, eg IBM, Red Hat, etc.
So, 1) there's basically no motive for SCO to sue individual kernel developers; 2) any suspect code is certain to be replaced rapidly as soon as it is revealed. At the end of the day, I suspect Linux-the-project will be rather more wary of intellectual property issues than before, but otherwise unchanged.
Re:New age fluff piece of crap:
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Biofeedback Gaming
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Yes; there's some hazy new-ageishness about their work. On the other hand, there is also some decent science there. Biofeedback, in this context, is used to measure alterations in your physical state, and that change controls what happens in the game. In essence, in order to control the game world you need to learn to control your own physical state: heartrate, sweat production, brainwave activity.
When I was a kid, I was diagnosed with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). At one point, my parents signed me up for some biofeedback sessions. I would go to this office in downtown Denver, and they would put one of those electrode nets on my head -- they always used to squirt some cold goop into each electrode to ensure good conductivity between the electrode and my scalp. This was annoying, because the goop got kind of crusty when it dried out -- always had to wash my hair when I got home.
Anyway, once the net was in place they'd hook me up to a computer. The screen displayed information about the state of my brainwaves -- alphas, betas, gammas, deltas -- and my task was to attempt to control the relative levels thereof. The theory was that if I could learn to do that, I could apply the same technique elsewhere (eg in school) to sharpen my concentration.
I never noticed that it worked especially well. I suspect there are two reasons for this: 1) I didn't stick with it for very long; and 2) the information about my brainwaves was displayed as colored graphs -- line graphs, bar graphs, and I seem to recall a pie chart, too. Staring at a line graph scrolling past on a computer screen for an hour is really damn boring. The objective was to heighten my concentration skills. Presenting me with a boring-ass chart was probably not the best way to do that.
If I did well in a session, they would let me use their computer to play Commander Keen for a while before my parents came to pick me up. I was much more interested in playing Commander Keen than in those stupid charts.
For that reason, I think this game may be a huge advance over the stuff they had me do. Having an external objective to focus on (ie manipulating the game environment) is much more interesting than trying to make colored lines stay low. If the price isn't too high, I may just buy a copy of the game and the USB controller and give it a shot.
He wants to program cool stuff that interests him. He couldn't care less about linux vendors, desktop wars, or 90% of the shit that "the linux community" is concerned about.
That's correct, and it has been one of his great strengths. This lawsuit, however, is part of that remaining 10%. If SCO were to actually win a favorable judgement at trial, it could very easily diminish Linus' ability to "program cool stuff that interests him". The issue is therefore directly relevant to his own interests -- especially if SCO goes ahead an sues him personally, whatever the charge.
For this reason, I will be surprised if Linus doesn't make some sort of statement before much longer.
First, let us draw a careful line between Bill Gates' charity and Microsoft's. Bill Gates, and his wife Melinda, have indeed, given away quite a lot of money. What's more, Bill has pledged to give away 95% of his wealth, focusing mainly on combatting disease. (Get yourself a Salon Day Pass before clicking that link.) We're talking 43 billion dollars, here. That's some major moola, and it is coming from Bill's private coffers, not that of his company.
On the other hand, we have Microsoft's charity. Microsft is not giving away money. It's giving away copies of its software. Those copies cost it very, very little to produce -- just a few bucks per unit, most of which is actually to print the box and manual. The CD containing the software itself is less than dollar in the volumes they produce them.
So they actually are paying very little to produce this, but in their press releases they can claim to be giving away the amount it would total if all those copies of the software were purchased at full retail price. Major PR coup. What's more, it makes sure that their OS is the one the company is using, not Linux or Mac or BSD or anything else.
End result -- MS comes out looking like a saint, it helps maintain their market dominance, and it costs them next to nothing in actual money. It's a positively brilliant move.
If you're trying to reverse-engineer someone else's code, shame on you; go find honest work.
Shame on you Davak, you should go find honest code...
If you read carefully, you'll note that the "honest work" sentence is NOT Davak's. It is still indented as part of the blockquote, and therefore is the final section of the passage he was quoting from that C++ FAQ. The last sentence that is actually Davak's is his comment about wishing to post as an anonymous coward, presumably to avoid situations like this one. Since AC posting wasn't working for him, it might have been a good idea to italicize the quoted passage to set it off clearly from the rest of the post. Oh well, too late now.
Re:Star Trek has been completed!
on
Mastering Light
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· Score: 1
Besides which, note that the article says:
The team is now collaborating with researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to demonstrate the effect. Initially they will generate shock waves by shooting bullets at photonic crystals. This would destroy the crystal, but not before the light has had time to shift. Eventually, sound waves should do the job just as well, they say. "Its really practical, and potentially even easier to do than with actual shock waves," says Reed.
This explains why hand-phasers make that annoying high-pitched whine! There are light sources contained in the handle of the weapon whose outputs are modified by passing through a photonic crystal. The sound is generating the shock waves necessary to the operation of the crystal.
Mind, it still doesn't explain why you can hear those sounds even when the camera is hovering in space and recording a battle taking place in vacuum . . . but hey, that'll come.:-)
correct. we're just another ape. there's a difference - unless, maybe, you've got a tail...?
Interestingly enough, some humans are born with tails. About 1 in every 1000 babies is born with a tail. Usually, these appendages are removed shortly after birth. When Bert Covert was teaching my Intro to Biological Anthropology class a few years ago, he mentioned this, and a girl in the front row raised her hand and announced that she had had one when she was born. Professor Covert perked right up and scooted over, but she wouldn't let him look at the scar.
She did consent to let him count her teeth, though, after which he disappointedly announced that she had the usual number.
Sophostry. Illegal activities, beit murder, fraud, libel, slander, or anything deemed so for the protection of the public is not a "right."
We were talking about establishing limits on personal liberty. The laws you refer to are those limits. Their existence proves my point: that society cannot function properly in the absence of some form of restraing on personal liberty.
On a lighter note, I quote Reverend Lovejoy: "If the government approves of it, it must be moral!"
Thanks for an amusing conversation. Go ahead and reply if you want; for my part I'm going to drop it here.
Personal liberty and the right to vehemently question one's leadership shouldn't be questioned . ..
Sooo . . . I should be allowed to ask about anything as long as I don't ask whether I should be allowed to ask? Phzzt . . . whoops, hold on a sec, my hippocampus is overheating.
Seriously though. I think what you're trying to say is that people should never be punished for asking questions. That I can agree with.
I think you're also trying to say that personal liberty is a value so fundamental that it would be foolish even to ask whether it might be a good idea to limit it in some cases. And that I do not agree with; there are plenty of cases where individual liberty is at odds with the interests of other individuals or those of society. As the old saw goes, "Your right to swing your arm ends at my nose." In the absence of any restraint on personal liberty, you have chaos; suppose I choose to exercise my personal liberty by murdering random strangers on the street? If you try to stop me, you are abrogating my liberty.
Establishing a good balance between personal liberty and the interests of others is an ongoing process, and questioning the premises on which the current balance is based is vital maintenance.
This Korean proposal is a perfect example. The government says "We should do this," and people say "Why?" and then you have a debate which hopefully ends up in a course of action acceptable to the interested parties. It's when that process is derailed that bad things start happening: when the government says "It's going to be this way" and pays no attention to the citizenry, the chances that the resulting legislation will be narrow, self-serving crap rise dramatically.
For that reason, we should always be allowed to question every facet of our political systems, without exception.
I've been using Firebird (neé Phoenix) as my default browser since 0.2, in both Windows and Linux. I love it. It's great. Hurrah for the developers.
That said, I've had one major peeve ever since I first tried it: the preferences control is a joke. While this new version (I've just tried it out) is better in some respects, they've got a loooong way to go.
Some specific points:
Setting the home page should have a button labelled "Choose file . .." I know I can go File->Open then re-open the preferences and click "Use Current". But that's a pain in the ass.
The "Set default browser" option (Windows-specific) is imprecise. Clicking it associates Firebird with loads of file types, including bitmap files (.bmp). Bring back the old-style Mozilla pref where you click a check-box next to each file type you wanted associated. Hide it behind an "advanced" button if you must.
Moz is capable of disabling animated.gifs, which makes browsing a lot nicer. Unfortunately, there's no control of that in the preferences.
Which brings me to the "about:config" screen. It shows you a list of all the prefs you can control, including things like gif animation. In principle this is a great idea -- the ultimate "advanced" tab that allows power-users to tweak to their heart's content.
In practice, it's horrible. It just prints out a list of every preference there is, in alphabetical order. There are over five hundred of them. You have to wade through hundreds of lines to find the one you want. What's more, there's no indication what they do beyond the names of the prefs. Some of the time that makes it clear -- but lots of the time it doesn't. For example, "browser.related.enabled". That's set to "true" by default. I wonder what it controls?
Then, once you've found what you want -- in my case "image.animation_mode" to control gif animations -- you have to figure out what value to set it to. Altering values in about:config is basically identical to altering values with the registry editor in Windows, and we all know how easily that can screw something up. If a value is boolean, that's fairly easy to figure out. In the case of "image.animation_mode", however, you have to guess what string the developer picked to signify the behaviors. At least right-clicking an option lets you reset it to default if you screw up.
Basically, about:config needs some major work. For one thing, there are about a zillion options in there that no longer apply to Firebird -- editor.* and mail.* for example. Those should be removed. The ones that are left should be put in expandable trees by their first word so you don't have to wade through dozens of options you're not interested in -- eg browser.* would have (+) next to it and expand to show all options beginning with "browser.". There should also be something explaining what all these options do and what their values are. Ideally that'd be a little ? next to each option that would pop up a box explaining the term, but a monolithic document somewhere on the web would work just as well.
Anyway, I've groused long enough. It's a great browser, I just think it should be easier to control all those options. Splitting it into a "basic" and "advanced" config panels is a fine idea, but it needs a lot more work!
Slashdot Mirror
Just thought I'd insert a little historical perspective, here. These opinions are not new. Nor are they especially important, since colonization efforts generally aren't governed by entirely rational impulses. Look at the United States. Maryland was founded by Lord Baltimore as an experiment in utopian feudalism. Massachusetts was founded by people looking to worship Jesus however they pleased. Virginia was established by a private company whose sole interest was in turning a profit. Not one of 'em worked out as planned -- Maryland is not a feudal state and never really was; Massachusetts discovered that religious freedom and strict orthodoxy don't go well together (see: formation of Connecticut); and the Virginia Company went bust. All three of those (and arguably the other colonies as well, each in their own ways) were founded by slightly bonkers people whose grand plans went poof on contact with reality. And in all those cases there were plenty of people back home in England saying "What, are you nuts? The East Indies are the future!"
That said, I would be greatly surprised if we established a colony on Mars without first putting together a few near-Earth projects, first. Colonists setting out for America had a long history of seafaring experience to rely on to get them there, and could look forward to practicing agriculture on their arrival. We have very little experience in long-distance space journeys, and even less in domed living. Personally, I think we're much more likely to establish a moon-base first. We've already visited it a few times. It's closer, so if something goes hideously wrong help can show up in days or weeks rather than months. And it's even less hospitable than Mars, so we'll get some good experience.
This was in late March, 2000, so Napster was up and running but as yet there wasn't much in the way of non-music peer-to-peer file trading going on. I would imagine that this sort of thing has been happening more frequently with the improvement of OCR software and the development of massive, organized file-sharing programs. It's not really surprising.
I bet, though, that downloads of pirated books will NEVER come anywhere close to downloads of pirated music or video files, for a number of reasons:
- You have to read books, and that requires effort. Music you just listen to, and video you stare at. Reading takes a lot longer.
- The books that are most likely to be pirated (popular fiction) are already available free of charge in hardcopy at the library.
- A major factor in music piracy is that the price of a CD is just too high. Books are much cheaper, especially paperbacks. You can get three paperbacks for the price of one CD -- more if you buy 'em used. The prices of books just aren't high enough to make it worth the trouble of downloading them and reading them on your screen.
For these reasons, I don't think it will ever be a large-scale problem for mainstream publishers. That's not to say it won't exist. There will be some piracy, especially of ultra-popular stuff like the Harry Potter books. The only place I see it becoming a major factor is within the scientific/technical field. It can be hard to get some of the more obscure sci/tech books, they tend to be expensive if you find them, and the people who are likely to be reading them are also likely to be tech-savvy and dedicated enough to not mind reading 'em on-screen.For those who have not read the linked weblog entry, here are the reasons he believes it to be a GPL violation:
1) "One perfect example of this is Zebra, the advanced dynamic routing software package. By opening the firmware file directly, as well as by making queries through the makeshift ping interface mentioned earlier, we noticed that the zebra running on the WRT54G doesn't use the standard configuration file locations. This means that it must certainly be a modified binary." He also mentions that Linksys seems to have used a modified GCC to compile their software, "with a signature string of "GCC: (GNU) 3.0 20010422 (prerelease) with bcm4710a0 modifications"). That bcm4710 refers to the Broadcom chipset that this AP is actually made from."
2) Yes, the author DID email Linksys asking for the source code. You can read that message here. According to the update at the bottom of the weblog entry, he got a response shortly before midnight on 29 July, but it just said that the issue was being directed to second level support.
If you do make a class like that, however, may I suggest expanding it just slightly? Make it something like "Safe Surfing: Protecting your Privacy in the Digital Age". I would suggest that it cover the following topics:
If you make each of those one lesson, and classes meet once a week for an hour, that's quite manageable. An awful lot of people wind up installing spyware and other junk they don't need simply because they don't know not to. A course like this would go a long way towards helping a new surfer avoid the common pitfalls, and just generally improve the quality of their online experience. It'll also probably make their computers run better -- not having zillions of crappy unneccesary little programs cluttering up the memory and the taskbar.
Lastly, you could distribute a disc full of useful software as part of the class materials. Quite a few of the programs you'll discuss will be open source, and lots of the others will be shareware, so you could probably put together a nice little disc full of software discussed in the class.
To prove the point, though, you'd have to come up with an objective measure of "quality" -- or rather, "innovation" since that is what copyright law is supposed to encourage. I wish you luck. People have been arguing back and forth about how to assess quality in an artistic work for literally millenia, and we're no closer to a any kind of objective metric now than we were then. Like Horace said, "De gustibus non disputandem est", "There's no arguing with tastes", or more loosely translated as "There's no accounting for taste". Take "innovation", for example. We think of innovation as a Good Thing; but some cultures disagree. Roman culture was one (since it already came up). The Romans considered innovation in poetry a Bad Thing, since the point was to imitate the poets of the Golden Age. (At first this mostly meant Homer, whose poetry was greatly admired despite not being written in Latin, and later Horace and Vergil and so on.)
But to return to the subject, I'd have to say this guy has come up with a reasonably decent metric for a slippery subject, and put one hell of a lot of unpaid work into it just because he found it interesting. More power to him.
Coming in silly sounding flavors would just be a bonus -- to give the employees a good laugh. And of course they could always re-name it to something appropriately dignified, like G.O.O.S.E. (Government Operated Operating System Extraordinaire).
(Disclaimer: yes, I am aware the parent poster was joking -- I saw that smiley. It just seemed to me that a government security department should prefer to be able to perform its own security/legal audits on the code of the programs it uses.)
I have to agree. Not only that, the article just plain didn't make sense. I just read it beginning to end, and I still don't have any clear idea what it's supposed to be about. Is it about hardware innovation? Software innovation? Corporate adoption of 64-bit computing? Open source? Enthusiast communities? All of those things are mentioned, but there are no clear lines drawn to connect them.
It's possible that there's a thesis in there somewhere, but the author never actually says what it is. It shows no depth of thought, fails to articulate an argument, and and provides no coherent evidence for any of the points it actually makes. If I were grading this, it'd get a C minus. Maybe a D plus if I was feeling uncharitable.
As I understand them, weblog programs are designed to allow one person to post an article, and then other people to comment on it. I do not think this is well suited to what you want to do, because 1) you will have multiple people posting multiple works, 2) you will probably not want to allow comments from random strangers. Using weblogs, each student would need to have his or her own weblog, which would make it more difficult for collaborative use of the type you envision.
For these purposes, a forum would be much better; forums allow for multiple, separate discussions to take place in a centralized area. They also allow the forum administrator to lock down the forum in such a way that only members can post messages, and the administrator gets to say who can be a member. This would help keep the discussion on topic. Each student's work would go in a different thread -- say Sally M. Haverforth posts the first draft of her argumentative essay on Milton's treatment of women in a thread called "S. Haverforth -- Milton: Masochistic Misogynist?". Subsequent comments from her peers would be replies to that initial posting, keeping the whole thing neatly organized.
If you have access to an appropriately equipped server, I recommend phpBB for the job: it's easy to set up and administer, open source, free of charge, and fairly easy to use.
Copyright can be used in a greedy fashion. But kindly keep in mind that most open source and free software licenses, including the GPL, depend on copyright. Those works (the Linux kernel, GCC, Mozilla, libdvdcss, and thousands of others) have been given to the community by their authors without the expectation of monetary compensation. This is a non-greedy use of copyright.
CSS (and Macrovision, and region coding) is used by the movie industry to attempt to control our movie-watching behavior by dictating where and when and how we can watch movies that we have paid for. That is a legitimate use in the eyes of the industry, though I'll agree that it has been misapplied.
But those same techniques could be used in good ways; for example to protect your own privacy. Say you have a digital camera, and you make some risque films with your lover. You could then burn those to DVD and use CSS, Macrovision, and region coding to try and make sure that no-one but you and your lover are able to watch those videos. Mind, it probably wouldn't work very well -- the techniques are too well known and too easily broken. You'd be better off encoding it to DivX or Xvid and then encrypting the whole file with PGP.
Anyway, my point is that copyright and DVD technologies are neutral: it's how they are used that makes them good or bad.
That is seriously bizarre.
But at least it's running Linux!
That's just a problem of species being introduced into alien environments. Genetically modified creatures that escape could cause similar problems, perhaps exacerbated by their modifications. Mind you, a fish that glows at night is going to get eaten pretty quick. But we should be very careful about introducing GM creatures into the wild just because there could be unforeseen consequences that we wouldn't like.
Well, that's one ethical consideration that doesn't strike me as particular pressing; we've done it before, why not again? There are plenty of species that would almost certainly die out if we did: seedless grapes, maize, several forms of wheat, possibly cows. Personally I would be more worried about species dying because we kill them than species dying because we create them.
So; they gave the company who developed the program a huge amount of power over their elections, yet have nothing but the company's word that it's completely fair. Not to impugn the company's honor, but in a public arena that vital, the impartiality of the system needs to be demonstrable not only to the government but also to any citizen who cares to ask. Without the source code, they can't do that. The potential for corruption is enormous.
This report touches on the same issue. Putting government data in proprietary formats -- whether those data are votes, agricultural reports, or anything else -- makes the government and hence the citizenry dependent on the business who wrote the program for access to the information.
It also gives the company the ability to do whatever it wants with the data in its format, alter it, make copies of it -- anything at all. Altering the data would almost certainly be detected rapidly, and the company would be in deep kimchee. But it would be fairly easy to insert a routine that would scan a file on opening, and email an encrypted copy of the file to someone if it contained a particular key term. This wouldn't even have to be done with the knowledge of the company: all it would take would be for one of the programmers on the team to be suborned by a foreign power interested in obtaining secret data.
Open, standard formats means that any company (or individual) can write a program to access data in that format. Open code means that those programs can be rigorously audited by independent programmers, thereby ensuring that the program's security does not depend on a single individual or organization.
I look at those Irish officials, and I just have to wonder what they were thinking. They're so clueless, their mere presence could destroy evidence at a crime scene. Sheesh.
1) There is not a ban on television. Nor is the government considering one. Did you read the article? If you had, you might have noticed that it says ". . . in its haste to introduce TV, the government failed to prepare legislation. There is no film classification board or TV watershed in force here, no regulations about media ownership. Companies such as Star TV are free to broadcast whatever they want. Only three years after the introduction of cable did the government announce that a media act would be drafted."
2) Comparing Bhutan's government with the Taliban is completely and totally bogus. The Taliban took power violently and sustained their rule through violence, including public executions of "criminals" such as women who committed adultery. Bhutan was founded as a Buddhist refuge. Under the Taliban, living conditions in Afghanistan became notably worse.
Bhutan's monarchy, by contrast, was not "self-proclaimed". It was set up under British influence in 1907, as mentioned here and here. That second source contains, among other things, this information: "Bhutan's third hereditary ruler, King Jigme Dorji Wangchuk (reigned 1953â"72), modernized Bhutanese society by abolishing slavery and the caste system, emancipating women, dividing large estates into small individual plots, and starting a secular educational system. Although Bhutan no longer has a Dharma Raja, Buddhist priests retain political influence. In 1969 the absolute monarchy gave way to a 'democratic monarchy.'"
What's more, the article we're discussing mentions that "[In] 1998 . . . King Jigme Singye Wangchuck announced he would give up his role as head of government and cede power to the national assembly. The people would be consulted about the drafting of a constitution. The process would complete Bhutan's transformation from monarchist Shangri-la into a modern democracy."
Listen, sounds like in balance they've been pretty good for the country. Given a choice between living in Bhutan today or Afghanistan-under-the-Taliban, I would take Bhutan in a heartbeat. The main fault of Bhutan's government seems to be that they're embracing foreign ways a bit too enthusiastically. Comparing them to the Taliban does them a disservice.
Kindly think twice before posting.
Let's see . . . where to begin?
Point 1: Saddam Hussein was a despot. He and his flunkies deserved what they got. Iraq also includes the civilian population, and that population has suffered at our hands: first due to years of economic sanctions, intermittent warfare (Clinton bombed them, too), then a much larger war in which indeterminate numbers of civilians were killed or wounded, and many more than that left without reliable supplies of clean water, electricity, or food.
Point 2: President Bush did not choose to make Hussein's despotism the justification for war. He and his advisors chose to make Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction in contravention of UN resolutions the justification for war. They made persistent, clear, and unambiguous claims that Hussein possessed these weapons, and that they had proof of it.
So we went to war. Roughly a hundred Americans died, thousands of enemy combatants, and indeterminate numbers of civilians, both due to direct military involvement (ie they got bombed or shot) and due to indirect secondary effects (ie getting diarrhea from drinking unclean water after Baghdad's infrastructure was destroyed -- in an environment as hot as Iraq, with no reliable clean water, it's really damn easy to shit yourself to death if you get the runs).
Now. All that is one hell of a lot of death. And the WMD's that were the justification for all this death do not seem to be there. We have found two -- count 'em -- mobile trailers that might conceivably have been used to make biological or chemical agents for use in WMD's. That's it. The weapons aren't there now, and weren't there then.
If Bush wanted to go to war because Hussein was a despot, he should have said so! But he didn't. He chose to lie to his people and the world. That lie led to thousands of deaths, destablized an entire region, and pissed off our allies. I don't know about you, but I am pretty damn angry about it. War should never, ever be fought without a clear, unambiguous and truthful reason.
Is that so much to ask?
For IBM, possibly.
For Linux, I doubt it. 80 lines is not a lot. It can be replaced easily. Presumably, there is a lot more than just 80 lines, and they haven't revealed it all yet. Nevertheless, the instant the suspect code becomes public knowledge, it is certain to be ripped out of the kernel and replaced with completely new code. I suspect that the code will be replaced even if SCO loses the case -- this sort of thing is an assault on the fundamental values of the open source community, and I cannot imagine them leaving any code in place with even a shadow of illegitimacy.
There would be no point in SCO suing individual kernel developers -- they're private individuals. They don't have the kind of money SCO would be interested in getting. The only reason I can see for suing individuals would be to bolster more important suits against corporations, eg IBM, Red Hat, etc.
So, 1) there's basically no motive for SCO to sue individual kernel developers; 2) any suspect code is certain to be replaced rapidly as soon as it is revealed. At the end of the day, I suspect Linux-the-project will be rather more wary of intellectual property issues than before, but otherwise unchanged.
Yes; there's some hazy new-ageishness about their work. On the other hand, there is also some decent science there. Biofeedback, in this context, is used to measure alterations in your physical state, and that change controls what happens in the game. In essence, in order to control the game world you need to learn to control your own physical state: heartrate, sweat production, brainwave activity.
When I was a kid, I was diagnosed with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). At one point, my parents signed me up for some biofeedback sessions. I would go to this office in downtown Denver, and they would put one of those electrode nets on my head -- they always used to squirt some cold goop into each electrode to ensure good conductivity between the electrode and my scalp. This was annoying, because the goop got kind of crusty when it dried out -- always had to wash my hair when I got home.
Anyway, once the net was in place they'd hook me up to a computer. The screen displayed information about the state of my brainwaves -- alphas, betas, gammas, deltas -- and my task was to attempt to control the relative levels thereof. The theory was that if I could learn to do that, I could apply the same technique elsewhere (eg in school) to sharpen my concentration.
I never noticed that it worked especially well. I suspect there are two reasons for this: 1) I didn't stick with it for very long; and 2) the information about my brainwaves was displayed as colored graphs -- line graphs, bar graphs, and I seem to recall a pie chart, too. Staring at a line graph scrolling past on a computer screen for an hour is really damn boring. The objective was to heighten my concentration skills. Presenting me with a boring-ass chart was probably not the best way to do that.
If I did well in a session, they would let me use their computer to play Commander Keen for a while before my parents came to pick me up. I was much more interested in playing Commander Keen than in those stupid charts.
For that reason, I think this game may be a huge advance over the stuff they had me do. Having an external objective to focus on (ie manipulating the game environment) is much more interesting than trying to make colored lines stay low. If the price isn't too high, I may just buy a copy of the game and the USB controller and give it a shot.
That's correct, and it has been one of his great strengths. This lawsuit, however, is part of that remaining 10%. If SCO were to actually win a favorable judgement at trial, it could very easily diminish Linus' ability to "program cool stuff that interests him". The issue is therefore directly relevant to his own interests -- especially if SCO goes ahead an sues him personally, whatever the charge.
For this reason, I will be surprised if Linus doesn't make some sort of statement before much longer.
There are a number of things at work here.
First, let us draw a careful line between Bill Gates' charity and Microsoft's. Bill Gates, and his wife Melinda, have indeed, given away quite a lot of money. What's more, Bill has pledged to give away 95% of his wealth, focusing mainly on combatting disease. (Get yourself a Salon Day Pass before clicking that link.) We're talking 43 billion dollars, here. That's some major moola, and it is coming from Bill's private coffers, not that of his company.
On the other hand, we have Microsoft's charity. Microsft is not giving away money. It's giving away copies of its software. Those copies cost it very, very little to produce -- just a few bucks per unit, most of which is actually to print the box and manual. The CD containing the software itself is less than dollar in the volumes they produce them.
So they actually are paying very little to produce this, but in their press releases they can claim to be giving away the amount it would total if all those copies of the software were purchased at full retail price. Major PR coup. What's more, it makes sure that their OS is the one the company is using, not Linux or Mac or BSD or anything else.
End result -- MS comes out looking like a saint, it helps maintain their market dominance, and it costs them next to nothing in actual money. It's a positively brilliant move.
This explains why hand-phasers make that annoying high-pitched whine! There are light sources contained in the handle of the weapon whose outputs are modified by passing through a photonic crystal. The sound is generating the shock waves necessary to the operation of the crystal.
Mind, it still doesn't explain why you can hear those sounds even when the camera is hovering in space and recording a battle taking place in vacuum . . . but hey, that'll come.
Interestingly enough, some humans are born with tails. About 1 in every 1000 babies is born with a tail. Usually, these appendages are removed shortly after birth. When Bert Covert was teaching my Intro to Biological Anthropology class a few years ago, he mentioned this, and a girl in the front row raised her hand and announced that she had had one when she was born. Professor Covert perked right up and scooted over, but she wouldn't let him look at the scar.
She did consent to let him count her teeth, though, after which he disappointedly announced that she had the usual number.
We were talking about establishing limits on personal liberty. The laws you refer to are those limits. Their existence proves my point: that society cannot function properly in the absence of some form of restraing on personal liberty.
On a lighter note, I quote Reverend Lovejoy: "If the government approves of it, it must be moral!"
Thanks for an amusing conversation. Go ahead and reply if you want; for my part I'm going to drop it here.
Sooo . . . I should be allowed to ask about anything as long as I don't ask whether I should be allowed to ask? Phzzt . . . whoops, hold on a sec, my hippocampus is overheating.
Seriously though. I think what you're trying to say is that people should never be punished for asking questions. That I can agree with.
I think you're also trying to say that personal liberty is a value so fundamental that it would be foolish even to ask whether it might be a good idea to limit it in some cases. And that I do not agree with; there are plenty of cases where individual liberty is at odds with the interests of other individuals or those of society. As the old saw goes, "Your right to swing your arm ends at my nose." In the absence of any restraint on personal liberty, you have chaos; suppose I choose to exercise my personal liberty by murdering random strangers on the street? If you try to stop me, you are abrogating my liberty.
Establishing a good balance between personal liberty and the interests of others is an ongoing process, and questioning the premises on which the current balance is based is vital maintenance.
This Korean proposal is a perfect example. The government says "We should do this," and people say "Why?" and then you have a debate which hopefully ends up in a course of action acceptable to the interested parties. It's when that process is derailed that bad things start happening: when the government says "It's going to be this way" and pays no attention to the citizenry, the chances that the resulting legislation will be narrow, self-serving crap rise dramatically.
For that reason, we should always be allowed to question every facet of our political systems, without exception.
That said, I've had one major peeve ever since I first tried it: the preferences control is a joke. While this new version (I've just tried it out) is better in some respects, they've got a loooong way to go.
Some specific points:
Which brings me to the "about:config" screen. It shows you a list of all the prefs you can control, including things like gif animation. In principle this is a great idea -- the ultimate "advanced" tab that allows power-users to tweak to their heart's content.
In practice, it's horrible. It just prints out a list of every preference there is, in alphabetical order. There are over five hundred of them. You have to wade through hundreds of lines to find the one you want. What's more, there's no indication what they do beyond the names of the prefs. Some of the time that makes it clear -- but lots of the time it doesn't. For example, "browser.related.enabled". That's set to "true" by default. I wonder what it controls?
Then, once you've found what you want -- in my case "image.animation_mode" to control gif animations -- you have to figure out what value to set it to. Altering values in about:config is basically identical to altering values with the registry editor in Windows, and we all know how easily that can screw something up. If a value is boolean, that's fairly easy to figure out. In the case of "image.animation_mode", however, you have to guess what string the developer picked to signify the behaviors. At least right-clicking an option lets you reset it to default if you screw up.
Basically, about:config needs some major work. For one thing, there are about a zillion options in there that no longer apply to Firebird -- editor.* and mail.* for example. Those should be removed. The ones that are left should be put in expandable trees by their first word so you don't have to wade through dozens of options you're not interested in -- eg browser.* would have (+) next to it and expand to show all options beginning with "browser.". There should also be something explaining what all these options do and what their values are. Ideally that'd be a little ? next to each option that would pop up a box explaining the term, but a monolithic document somewhere on the web would work just as well.
Anyway, I've groused long enough. It's a great browser, I just think it should be easier to control all those options. Splitting it into a "basic" and "advanced" config panels is a fine idea, but it needs a lot more work!
Or "grave robbing" depending on whether or not the stiff got a decent burial.