> Bruce Willis had to throw himself into the chamber and heroically sacrifice his life in order to correct the problem manually. After fixing the radiation leak, he managed to crawl into and activate an experimental cryogenic chamber stored in the same room, before expiring from the overdose of radiation. The probability of him being revived for a sequel is high.
I thought that was a Star Trek episode.
No, wait - an Andromeda episode.
Or maybe an SG-1 episode.
Or was it an Angel episode? Or maybe Buffy.
It's so hard to keep your heros straight, when they all do the same thing.
> You know, we really get tired of MOST of the dupes here and as we have discussed before, sometimes dupes are a good thing because we don't get all the stories because we're not connected all the time.
It's also nice at Christmas time, because the needy can sift through the old comments and find stuff to post under the new story to boost their karma.
> Can someone please explain to me any way in which this is not a big rip-off of the American taxpayer?
Someone mentioned the Kaufmann site. There is a link to a PDF called "Open Collaboration Principles" there, and though the wording is obtuse in several places, it sounds like it's actually a good deal. For example, the "be made available free of charge for commercial and academic use" is expanded to "be made available free of charge for commercial and academic use by any member of the public free of charge for use in open source software", and standards, etc.
I.e., they're just committing to release this stuff as FOSS.
There's some more verbiage about patents, which I think says that if the group contributing the code also owns relevant patents, the code can be used free of patent restrictions.
> As I understand the situation (IANAL), one of the most important tests for "fair-use" of protected IP is whether profit is involved -- if you make a profit on someone else's IP, you can't claim fair-use.
That's not correct. Otherwise bootlegging would be perfectly legal, so long as you gave it away instead of selling it. And conversely, you wouldn't be able to sell a newspaper that quoted someone's book, even if proper attribution was given.
Beyond that, there's a sort of war on the fair use doctrine going on in the USA anyway, as part of the general shift in IP law that the *AA has been pursuing.
> A billion dollars has nine zeros not twelve so he is actually contributing 2% of his wealth.
I did indeed write too many zeros, but I think my calculation was correct. (If I had used the numbers I typed I would have been off by a factor of 1000 rather than a factor of 10.)
> I'm an astrophysicist, currently not working in academia. This is the sort of thing we dream of - the opportunity to pitch our ideas to someone who is interested in and understands the value of science.
> I once had a high tech compnay tell me they "didn't have much call for physics", I didn't have the heart to tell them it was physics than made their computers work and not magic.
> How about just not doing anything wrong in the first place and putting some belife in the judicial system, im not sure about you yanks, but i know that i generally trust the judicial system over here in the good ol' UK.
Yeah, the worst they'll do if you're innocent is chase you through the subways and shoot you six times in the head.
> Coat Hangers in the ceiling does nothing, nor does the tinfoil/aluminum foil hat.
Sure they do. After spending a few hours watching you putting up the hangers and making the hat, they'll write you off as a kook and spend their time spying on someone else.
> My choice would have been the millions of Iraqi's who despite death threats from terrorists voted three times this year - for a provisional government, a new constitution, and a parliament. But the story wasn't particularly well covered, so I can understand how the editors of Time could have missed it.
Or to Murtha, for pointing out the emperor's nudity.
> I see all this crap bashing time for hitler being man of the year. well he was man of the year before world war 2 and he did some real good things for germany, he more or less brought them out of massive debt after world war 1.
He got MotY in 1938, after his government had been introducing racist laws for five years.
Also, though not known in 1938, his policies ultimately brought a ruin on his country that couldn't have been imagined even in the gloomiest days of the interwar period.
> and he was a brilliant strategist, he just went a little off in the late 1930s and wanted to take over the world.
I'm not aware that he ever did anything that would qualify him as "good strategist", let alone "brilliant strategist". His country's military fortunes waned pretty much in proportion to how much he involved himself in the military decision-making process.
By the time of the Battle of Stalingrad he was sitting in Germany looking at maps and issuing orders for the placement of individual anti-tank guns, while the whole southern half of the front line was being routed.
> If you feed a million people hungry people now and DO NOT address the underlying conditions that contributed to the hunger in the first place then you will just have several miilion hungry people in a generation. You have to address the root causes of hunger, not merely treat the symptom which is the hunger itself. The underlying problems are not transporting excess food, they are local political, economic, religious, and cultural. These are very hard to change. This problem is far more complex than you suggest. If it were as easy to fix as you suggest it would have been fixed long ago.
"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist." - Dom Hélder Câmara
> For every illegal practice Bill's company has been accused of, there are at least a few practices that have helped bring computers and the internet to the masses.
I'm not convinced that he has made all that much difference. Cheap computers and the internet are simply technologies whose time has come, and if one individual hadn't been there to help things along some other would have. (Heck, in is 1995 "Road Ahead" book Bill still didn't realize that the internet revolution was already underway.)
Probably the most important single event in hurrying computers to the masses was breaking Intel's patent on the x86 architecture.
(So much for the argument that patents promote progress in the technical arts.)
> Let us not forget that Bill Gates went to India in 2002 and gave $100 million to fight AIDS, which received great press.
Also, $100,000,000 / $51,000,000,000,000 = 0.2% of his net worth.
Suppose you're far better off than most people, to the point of having $100,000 socked away in the bank, and you decide to be equally generous. Should you expect kudos for your $200 donation?
What about all the people working their way through college, who still find a way to dro $5 or $10 in their church's collection plate every week?
> Although they did give a large amount back, what percentage is this to what was taken in? There are a lot of people that don't make a lot of money and give a large percentage to charities. The total amount given is really not a measure of one's thoughtfulness, the percentage is really where it counts.
I don't know what his lifetime's effort has been, but I know that he has previously been in the news - and on Slashdot - for a contribution that represented about the same fraction of his wealth as what a college student spends on tips for the pizza delivery boy over the course of a year.
It's great that some of his money is going to a good cause, but shameful that the media is portraying him as a saint for it. And that he makes sure the media knows about it.
> Percentage of income doesn't really tell us anything. He could give away 99% of his salary, and still have more money than he could ever need. Not many of us could say live off that small a pproportion of our income. Even giving 5% would hurt the income of a lot of families.
Yeah, the actual measure should be how much of your disposable income you give away. Of course, the definition of disposable income is a bit tricky.
> the Seattle-based foundation has an endowment of approximately $28.8 billion. (Thats from: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/AboutUs/ ) 28.8 billion. Buh-ill-eee-on. LARGE number. And even quite a healthy percentage of Gate's own personal fortune. He's worth about sixty billion right now.
The link doesn't actually say how much of that came from Bill himself. Nor how much of a tax break he got for whatever he did contribute.
I have a problem with the notion that a prick can get filthy rich by screwing everyone over, and then get sainted for giving part of his ill-gotten gains to charity. And arranging press releases to make sure everyone knows about it.
Re:It took how much work to show this is the sourc
on
Marfa Lights Explained
·
· Score: 1
> What I saw at Marfa, which everyone there explained to be the Marfa lights, where easily recognized as lights from traffic. I know the arguement is that there where lights before the highway was there, however, that doesen't mean the lights they see now are the same as what was seen then.
Probably no one would have made any fuss over the auto lights if not for the pre-existing legend.
Factor out the modern phenomenon and you're left with one of thousands of unsubstantiable claims of ghost lights around the world. Maybe some of them actually had some basis in fact, but at this date it's nigh impossible to tell which ones, let alone to investigate the source of light seen 100 years ago.
> The anti-war left loves to chant that Iraq is a war for oil. Okay, let's assume that statement is true. Now that we "occupy" Iraq, why haven't we gotten our greedy, American pig-dog capitalist hands on it? Why hasn't the worldwide market for oil reflected (via lower, not higher prices) increased supply of oil flowing out of Iraq?
a) The original plan was to "privatize" all of Iraq's assets, but they had to wait until a puppet government was in place (since the Geneva Conventions forbid occupying powers from doing that), and by the time power was nominally handed over to the puppet government the insurgency had scared off all the potential buyers.
b) The Bush administration is only interested in fuel prices when they start affecting approval ratings. Their real interest is in profits for the oil industry.
> The answer is, because the premise is false. Anyone who takes the time to understand a nit of oil production learns that Iraq's oil reserves are largely untapped because of the difficulty extracting it (Financial Times did a wonderful piece on this in May 2003). At a cost of trillions of dollars to simply prosecute the war and secure the country, if you could somehow extract the oil, it would take decades to earn a return on investment.
Ah, but the war will be paid for by you, but the profits would have gone into the pockets of megacorporations. If things had gone as planned it would have been an absolute bargain - for the right people.
As things turned out the profits haven't appeared, and don't look likely to in the future either. But you and me still get to foot the trillion dollar bill for the takeover attempt.
Slashdot Mirror
> Bruce Willis had to throw himself into the chamber and heroically sacrifice his life in order to correct the problem manually. After fixing the radiation leak, he managed to crawl into and activate an experimental cryogenic chamber stored in the same room, before expiring from the overdose of radiation. The probability of him being revived for a sequel is high.
I thought that was a Star Trek episode.
No, wait - an Andromeda episode.
Or maybe an SG-1 episode.
Or was it an Angel episode? Or maybe Buffy.
It's so hard to keep your heros straight, when they all do the same thing.
> You know, we really get tired of MOST of the dupes here and as we have discussed before, sometimes dupes are a good thing because we don't get all the stories because we're not connected all the time.
It's also nice at Christmas time, because the needy can sift through the old comments and find stuff to post under the new story to boost their karma.
Ooops. Close the bold tag after the word "software".
> Can someone please explain to me any way in which this is not a big rip-off of the American taxpayer?
Someone mentioned the Kaufmann site. There is a link to a PDF called "Open Collaboration Principles" there, and though the wording is obtuse in several places, it sounds like it's actually a good deal. For example, the "be made available free of charge for commercial and academic use" is expanded to "be made available free of charge for commercial and academic use by any member of the public free of charge for use in open source software", and standards, etc.
I.e., they're just committing to release this stuff as FOSS.
There's some more verbiage about patents, which I think says that if the group contributing the code also owns relevant patents, the code can be used free of patent restrictions.
> As I understand the situation (IANAL), one of the most important tests for "fair-use" of protected IP is whether profit is involved -- if you make a profit on someone else's IP, you can't claim fair-use.
That's not correct. Otherwise bootlegging would be perfectly legal, so long as you gave it away instead of selling it. And conversely, you wouldn't be able to sell a newspaper that quoted someone's book, even if proper attribution was given.
Beyond that, there's a sort of war on the fair use doctrine going on in the USA anyway, as part of the general shift in IP law that the *AA has been pursuing.
> A billion dollars has nine zeros not twelve so he is actually contributing 2% of his wealth.
I did indeed write too many zeros, but I think my calculation was correct. (If I had used the numbers I typed I would have been off by a factor of 1000 rather than a factor of 10.)
> I'm an astrophysicist, currently not working in academia. This is the sort of thing we dream of - the opportunity to pitch our ideas to someone who is interested in and understands the value of science.
> I once had a high tech compnay tell me they "didn't have much call for physics", I didn't have the heart to tell them it was physics than made their computers work and not magic.
Be sure to spellcheck your grant application...
> How about just not doing anything wrong in the first place and putting some belife in the judicial system, im not sure about you yanks, but i know that i generally trust the judicial system over here in the good ol' UK.
Yeah, the worst they'll do if you're innocent is chase you through the subways and shoot you six times in the head.
> Coat Hangers in the ceiling does nothing, nor does the tinfoil/aluminum foil hat.
Sure they do. After spending a few hours watching you putting up the hangers and making the hat, they'll write you off as a kook and spend their time spying on someone else.
Get fat and walk around naked.
> I'm not sure I'd be smiling as much as Bill is if Bono were standing between me and my wife with such a smug look on his face.
Especially someone named 'Bono', though I suppose that's better than 'Dick'.
> My choice would have been the millions of Iraqi's who despite death threats from terrorists voted three times this year - for a provisional government, a new constitution, and a parliament. But the story wasn't particularly well covered, so I can understand how the editors of Time could have missed it.
Or to Murtha, for pointing out the emperor's nudity.
"They'll never get that to fit on the album cover!"
(From the Cheech & Chong "bailiff, whack his pee-pee" skit.)
> and also demonstrate how blatantly ridiculous the US sense of morality has become.
Surely no more ridiculous than a man running around in blue tights and a red cape.
> Am I the only one who feels really sorry for the guy spending the whole editing process digitally reducing supermans bulge?
If he has inadequacy concerns he will probably enjoy it.
> I see all this crap bashing time for hitler being man of the year. well he was man of the year before world war 2 and he did some real good things for germany, he more or less brought them out of massive debt after world war 1.
He got MotY in 1938, after his government had been introducing racist laws for five years.
Also, though not known in 1938, his policies ultimately brought a ruin on his country that couldn't have been imagined even in the gloomiest days of the interwar period.
> and he was a brilliant strategist, he just went a little off in the late 1930s and wanted to take over the world.
I'm not aware that he ever did anything that would qualify him as "good strategist", let alone "brilliant strategist". His country's military fortunes waned pretty much in proportion to how much he involved himself in the military decision-making process.
By the time of the Battle of Stalingrad he was sitting in Germany looking at maps and issuing orders for the placement of individual anti-tank guns, while the whole southern half of the front line was being routed.
> If you feed a million people hungry people now and DO NOT address the underlying conditions that contributed to the hunger in the first place then you will just have several miilion hungry people in a generation. You have to address the root causes of hunger, not merely treat the symptom which is the hunger itself. The underlying problems are not transporting excess food, they are local political, economic, religious, and cultural. These are very hard to change. This problem is far more complex than you suggest. If it were as easy to fix as you suggest it would have been fixed long ago.
"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist."
- Dom Hélder Câmara
> For every illegal practice Bill's company has been accused of, there are at least a few practices that have helped bring computers and the internet to the masses.
I'm not convinced that he has made all that much difference. Cheap computers and the internet are simply technologies whose time has come, and if one individual hadn't been there to help things along some other would have. (Heck, in is 1995 "Road Ahead" book Bill still didn't realize that the internet revolution was already underway.)
Probably the most important single event in hurrying computers to the masses was breaking Intel's patent on the x86 architecture.
(So much for the argument that patents promote progress in the technical arts.)
> Let us not forget that Bill Gates went to India in 2002 and gave $100 million to fight AIDS, which received great press.
Also, $100,000,000 / $51,000,000,000,000 = 0.2% of his net worth.
Suppose you're far better off than most people, to the point of having $100,000 socked away in the bank, and you decide to be equally generous. Should you expect kudos for your $200 donation?
What about all the people working their way through college, who still find a way to dro $5 or $10 in their church's collection plate every week?
> Although they did give a large amount back, what percentage is this to what was taken in? There are a lot of people that don't make a lot of money and give a large percentage to charities. The total amount given is really not a measure of one's thoughtfulness, the percentage is really where it counts.
I don't know what his lifetime's effort has been, but I know that he has previously been in the news - and on Slashdot - for a contribution that represented about the same fraction of his wealth as what a college student spends on tips for the pizza delivery boy over the course of a year.
It's great that some of his money is going to a good cause, but shameful that the media is portraying him as a saint for it. And that he makes sure the media knows about it.
> Percentage of income doesn't really tell us anything. He could give away 99% of his salary, and still have more money than he could ever need. Not many of us could say live off that small a pproportion of our income. Even giving 5% would hurt the income of a lot of families.
Yeah, the actual measure should be how much of your disposable income you give away. Of course, the definition of disposable income is a bit tricky.
> the Seattle-based foundation has an endowment of approximately $28.8 billion. (Thats from: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/AboutUs/ ) 28.8 billion. Buh-ill-eee-on. LARGE number. And even quite a healthy percentage of Gate's own personal fortune. He's worth about sixty billion right now.
The link doesn't actually say how much of that came from Bill himself. Nor how much of a tax break he got for whatever he did contribute.
I have a problem with the notion that a prick can get filthy rich by screwing everyone over, and then get sainted for giving part of his ill-gotten gains to charity. And arranging press releases to make sure everyone knows about it.
> What I saw at Marfa, which everyone there explained to be the Marfa lights, where easily recognized as lights from traffic. I know the arguement is that there where lights before the highway was there, however, that doesen't mean the lights they see now are the same as what was seen then.
Probably no one would have made any fuss over the auto lights if not for the pre-existing legend.
Factor out the modern phenomenon and you're left with one of thousands of unsubstantiable claims of ghost lights around the world. Maybe some of them actually had some basis in fact, but at this date it's nigh impossible to tell which ones, let alone to investigate the source of light seen 100 years ago.
> Similar legend here...
And at Bailey's Prairie, Texas.
And probably 10,000 other places around the world.
> The anti-war left loves to chant that Iraq is a war for oil. Okay, let's assume that statement is true. Now that we "occupy" Iraq, why haven't we gotten our greedy, American pig-dog capitalist hands on it? Why hasn't the worldwide market for oil reflected (via lower, not higher prices) increased supply of oil flowing out of Iraq?
a) The original plan was to "privatize" all of Iraq's assets, but they had to wait until a puppet government was in place (since the Geneva Conventions forbid occupying powers from doing that), and by the time power was nominally handed over to the puppet government the insurgency had scared off all the potential buyers.
b) The Bush administration is only interested in fuel prices when they start affecting approval ratings. Their real interest is in profits for the oil industry.
> The answer is, because the premise is false. Anyone who takes the time to understand a nit of oil production learns that Iraq's oil reserves are largely untapped because of the difficulty extracting it (Financial Times did a wonderful piece on this in May 2003). At a cost of trillions of dollars to simply prosecute the war and secure the country, if you could somehow extract the oil, it would take decades to earn a return on investment.
Ah, but the war will be paid for by you, but the profits would have gone into the pockets of megacorporations. If things had gone as planned it would have been an absolute bargain - for the right people.
As things turned out the profits haven't appeared, and don't look likely to in the future either. But you and me still get to foot the trillion dollar bill for the takeover attempt.