Does anyone else find it odd that Google has released a FAQ (frequenty asked questions) on something that they are just now announcing and that doesn't even actually exist yet?
How were people asking such specific questions on something non-existant? How were people asking these questions frequently?
Billions of DVDs of thousands of different movie titles already exist throughout the world. Anyone with a DVD drive can still get one of the discs that already exist and make a copy of it or rip it on their home PC.
Sure, it may affect new releases in a year or two, but with so many back titles already out there without this new copy protection it won't be preventing a whole lot of piracy.
What if governments payed for the research? Finding treatments and preventions for diseases seems like it would be in the best interest of a nation. Alas, helping people does not seem to be on the agenda of many governments or the pharm. co.'s.
It does cost the companies a lot of money to make the new drugs, but they easily make that money back and then some through defending patents that keep the price of the drug artificially high, even after the research is payed off. Pharmcos are a two sided coin: on one side they help people through tough times, on the other side they make money off of people's pain.
net energy loss
on
Gas Goes Solid
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Assuming that the laws of thermodynamics still exist on this planet, I am curious if there would be some kind of net energy loss in this process. Factoring transportation, refrigeration, and changes in states it seems like a lot of energy is being used up in this process. Just a thought.
Brazil had (has?) similar issues in using ethanol as a fuel. The machinery used to harvest and convert the sugar into ethanol used more fuel than was produced.
Also, don't forget K records out in Olympia that keeps signing so many marvelous artists that are good enough not to need promotion.
Re:Diesel Cars
on
239 MPG Car
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Exactly, it was Americans trying to do Diesel without ever having done it before. A last minute rush job to try and hold on to their shares. My grandmother has had a diesel Mercedes since 1980, and yes it still runs -- quite well actually. (And yes, she uses it EVERY day) If you stick with the companies that KNOW diesel, such as VW and Mercedes, then you should have a vehicle that will last longer than any Ford, Chrysler, or GM gasoline crap.
Re:Fritz Hollings out as commerce committee chair!
on
Indecision 2002
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· Score: 1
I'm from North Carolina, and I'm quite familiar with the politics in out sister state. I can assure you that a Southern Democrat -- especially one from South Carolina -- has an agenda closer to that of a Republican. Its an old white boy network here with either party and that freaks the hell out of me! My Senatorial election was between Dole, whom arguably does not care about this state, and Bowles, whom is an old neighbor of Senator Helms (Dixie-crat). Democrat, Republican -- whatever you wanna call them, but down here in the south its all the same shit (with a few possible exceptions such as Congressman Price). However, with my experience most true Democrats aren't the ones catering to the whims of big media.
Re:Seems like a good idea.
on
Ghost for Unix
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· Score: 1
Having used g4u in the past for setting up various amounts of linux boxes, I can tell you that its SLOW for large disks! Well...duh, I guess. Its great for small disks (up to ~2GB) because it transfers byte by byte from a compressed centralized file without any complications. I used it to set up a bunch of old Optiplexes for use as public web kiosks on my school's campus. It was quick and so super easy that I quickly trained a Windows monkey as an assistant.
However, I tried it for 20 GB drives. Byte by byte raw copy is NOT the way to go! For large disks I suggest writing something that justs copies the data you want (assuming that you don't want to copy all 20 + GB).
BTW- Does anyone know what ever happened to bpBatch? That was a pretty good system using the bootproms and TFTP.
Yes, its true that in certain parts of the South Ocean the limiting nutrient for certain types of phytoplankton is iron. It is also true that adding that nutrient will stimulate growth and reproduction of that phytoplankton. And of course phytoplankton take in carbon dioxide for photosynthesis.
BUT, how does that solve anything. Its a temporary fix for a much larger problem. Shouldn't we use that time, money, research, etc. and put it into preventing the need to strip carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the first place? I assure you the same thing that any ecologist worth their degree can tell you -- your fix won't last. We will end up with the same problems that we started with. If you stop playing with knives, then you need less band-aids.
Hey now, don't be dissin' on Des Moines. Its a great place to raise kids and I miss it dearly. Although I WOULD like to find a better way to travel with my LCD monitor (and my big lug of a case, too). My guess with your LCD is that it may be having the same problem that some flourescent lights get with the buzzing. After all, that's whats in most (all?) LCDs.
From my understanding based on what I was reading on the linuxpackages.net forums and a few other slack boards, Gnome 2.0 just won't be stable soon enough. True, the big gnome 2 release is due later this month, but it seems like Pat really likes his packages to be tested, settled, and mostly stable and it may be a while before G2 gets to any of these points. Why wait for another Slack release, though? I'm sure it will hit the current tree soon enough, or maybe linuxpackages.net. Better, yet why not compile it yourself? That's more of the Slackware thing to do, anyway.
Then we had the Population Bomb, then Global Famine, and then to top it off Mass Extinction. All these things were predicted (as fact) by environmentalist scientists, chemists and ecologists. So yes, they have been telling fibs from a long time as none of these events have occurred.
My response to this is that in science very little can ever be correctly predicted. If it could, it would be a law or theory not just a simple pondering blown out by media. Now we talk about Global Warming and I have been freezing my ass off the whole month of May in NYC when its usually is in the 80s.
Global warming...what a misnomer. The way I understand it (and granted my understanding is only through celebrities and science polluted through politics) global warming has more to do with the overall annual mean temperature growing over a large span of time than it just "getting warmer". One of the other effects is of erratic weather conditions such as hurricanes, prolonged droughts, warmth during the winter, and yes cold in the late spring in your case. It sounds like definition of "global warming" came from some sort of media channel clouded by politics. Your reasoning is politically clouded at best, Al Gore, III. Its amazing that you think man is more powerful than nature. How truly arrogant you are.
And, yet here we both sit at our computers, in a world as far removed from nature as possible. Of course we can only see nature through the eyes of humans, that is our only capacity as humans. We constantly anthropomorphize every aspect that we see. American man really does think that (s)he is more powerful than nature. The only way away from politics (a derivite of a Greek word for human) is to get ourselves back in nature. This is hardly the rhetoric of Al Gore, but it is mine. I spend time observing and watching nature, and searching for my place within. That may be arrogant, but its a start. Of course it would be hard for someone in NYC to really understand, huh? The fact is that in order to deal with other humans and try to impact their lifestyles you must use politics. I studied this, I try to avoid this. I dislike humans, but when I do deal with them and get involved in politics I certainly do not vote for the likes of Al Gore or GW Bush or whatever is hocked at us. Fine. That's enough for me now, its getting silly and abstract.
So wait, all this time all of my chemistry, environmental science & politics, real world experience, and ecology courses have just been telling a fib to me?!?!!
All this talking about not listening to celebrities coming from a guy with a pro-Apple sig (remember, the "think different" campaign).
I am deeply curious if any of us here know how much oil is left. We keep getting more advanced technology each year from this industry so we end up "finding" more oil each year. The only problem is that we can really only get oil from an "oil reserve." I know this might have been mentioned a little before, but lets all look up the definition here. To paraphrase: an oil reserve, is a source of oil which we can extract in an economically viable fashion in our current market. So hey, I bet if we all go and look at a lot of the oil supplies being found, most of them aren't reserves. All of this doesn't matter to American's, though. We pay less for our gas than any where else in the world. Why? Government subsidies, military protection of our oil fields, ignoring the costs to the environment. Well...I guess if you look at it maybe we do pay a lot more than we think through taxes. Okay, so the purpose of this rant: media is deceptive, the Earth is a finite entity, and someday we will all have to end our current habits if we want future generations to live.
The fact is that you can find substitutes for gas power in all of these things except for possibly the airplanes. That's the problem with the Slashdot crowd and probably every crowd when it comes to the environment - too much thinking in terms of the way things are now. What ever happened to imagination and thinking towards problems? Hospitals and police stations have been using fuel cell generators for years (because of their critical needs), why not use those at worksites? Yard management things like lawnmowers and chainsaws can be replaced with electric versions, old human powered versions, or better yet none at all (which I imagine is probably the way it is in most cities). Cooking...hmmm. Alcohol or universal camp stoves. What about electric or wood stoves and grills? I think that you are overlooking some/many things, too.
So? Does every distro have to be bleeding edge with the latest daily updates? What's the point. I've learned to wait for versions to stabilize before I start to put them in daily use. Besides, that's not the point of good 'ol slack. The packages are great for the initial installs in building the directory structure and getting the system started, but beyond that Slack makes it easy for you to just do compiled source updates. After trying to deal with installing from source under RedHat's RPM packaging regime I never want to think about full package systems again.
The review was great and all, but did it really say that Galeon was a 20.0mb download? Even with downloading all of the necessary library dependencies shouldn't 20 megs seems a little high. This review stinks of Redhat/Ximian bloat. Although I am happy to see a more update review, even if the test machine may be slightly outdated to what many of us use these days. -lt
You must realize, though, that many of our great scientists and physicists (specifically ones that ended up working for NASA in the early years) were former Nazis. Whether or not they were Nazis by choice is a different subject all together. My point is that -- the Germans had very particular talents in physics and chemistry.
I used Evolution for my mail on the systems where I run Redhat 7.0 and 7.1. The problem is that on my personal machines, I run Slackware 8.0. I love Slackware and there is no way that I'll switch just for a mail client. Has anyone had much success getting around the Ximian library dependency issues? Slackware can install RPM's in its own package format and there are extension's for.TGZ's package manager to include dependencies.
Anyway, My point is that Evolution like most of Ximian's stuff needs too many weird library dependencies (which is why I try not to use Ximian GNOME anywhere). I have tried to compile it using all of the requested RPM's and I have tried installing it and all of the requested libraries from source, but with no avail. Will there ever be a way to install it cross-distro like Mozilla or StarOffice's binary install? I think that this ability would help Evolution gain more ground in the Unix world.
I personally think that Ximian has been doing a great job with Evolution. I first used it early in the beta stages. It was a promising piece of crap. Now it is just about the finest piece of graphical mail and organizing applications out there for *nix. Granted, I don't really use it, but it is nice to know that something with that many features is now available. If we want to convert over desktop users we need apps like this - friendly, easy to use...etc...etc. Either that or we could all be whiny elitists running Debian and KDE.
Of course I'm a whiny elitist running Slackware and Blackbox (but Galeon over all other browsers) so bite me.
I'm not depressed. I just lock myself inside the house for hours at a time, with the shades drawn, and listening to the Cure. I have friends! I type stuff into boxes and responds with all sorts of results! Zoloft and Prozac are foresaken! I've got Google!
Yeah, I find it outrageously funny that the same people who blatantly break the law are the ones who are the most vocal when they are put a stop to. I don't really see the whole issue as censorship, but what is cost effective. I seriously doubt that Excite@home really gives a rat's patoot whether or not you are downloading the news, the spice girls, or porno. What they want is to be able to get the most customers on the cheapest equipment with the least support so that they can bring in the largest profit margin. If that means siding with the RIAA and MPAA as an excuse for kicking off violators then so be it. The fact is, that when you get to the root of the situation there is math involved (as there is in many things):
CUSTOMERS = REVENUE
BANDWIDTH = COST
cost of total bandwidth + revenue from customers should equal a positive cash flow. --- "Duh!"
Thousands of people downloading anything large would get blocked. My college operates off of leased fiber. We recently blocked Napster, Gnutella, iMesh, and all of the other stuff. Why? Because there wasn't enough bandwidth left for students to do research. It isn't censorship, just cost effective.
By the way, if any of you are using Excite@Home in the first place, I think that you deserve the crap that they give you.
Well the first start is to quit buying crappy pop. Go out and buy yourself some music from indy labels. They don't have the resources to muddle up your cd and most of them probably wouldn't in the first place. Better yet, buy youself a vinyl LP. Most bands that I listen to still put out on records. They are cheaper, last longer, and the sound is so soul warming.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone else find it odd that Google has released a FAQ (frequenty asked questions) on something that they are just now announcing and that doesn't even actually exist yet?
How were people asking such specific questions on something non-existant? How were people asking these questions frequently?
Except that the ride finder isn't really an April Fool's day joke, as it was posted to Google Labs (http://labs.google.com/) on Mar. 30th.
Maybe it is a Mar. 30th joke?
What is the point, they are too late!
Billions of DVDs of thousands of different movie titles already exist throughout the world. Anyone with a DVD drive can still get one of the discs that already exist and make a copy of it or rip it on their home PC.
Sure, it may affect new releases in a year or two, but with so many back titles already out there without this new copy protection it won't be preventing a whole lot of piracy.
What if governments payed for the research? Finding treatments and preventions for diseases seems like it would be in the best interest of a nation. Alas, helping people does not seem to be on the agenda of many governments or the pharm. co.'s.
It does cost the companies a lot of money to make the new drugs, but they easily make that money back and then some through defending patents that keep the price of the drug artificially high, even after the research is payed off. Pharmcos are a two sided coin: on one side they help people through tough times, on the other side they make money off of people's pain.
Assuming that the laws of thermodynamics still exist on this planet, I am curious if there would be some kind of net energy loss in this process. Factoring transportation, refrigeration, and changes in states it seems like a lot of energy is being used up in this process. Just a thought.
Brazil had (has?) similar issues in using ethanol as a fuel. The machinery used to harvest and convert the sugar into ethanol used more fuel than was produced.
Also, don't forget K records out in Olympia that keeps signing so many marvelous artists that are good enough not to need promotion.
Exactly, it was Americans trying to do Diesel without ever having done it before. A last minute rush job to try and hold on to their shares. My grandmother has had a diesel Mercedes since 1980, and yes it still runs -- quite well actually. (And yes, she uses it EVERY day) If you stick with the companies that KNOW diesel, such as VW and Mercedes, then you should have a vehicle that will last longer than any Ford, Chrysler, or GM gasoline crap.
I'm from North Carolina, and I'm quite familiar with the politics in out sister state. I can assure you that a Southern Democrat -- especially one from South Carolina -- has an agenda closer to that of a Republican. Its an old white boy network here with either party and that freaks the hell out of me! My Senatorial election was between Dole, whom arguably does not care about this state, and Bowles, whom is an old neighbor of Senator Helms (Dixie-crat). Democrat, Republican -- whatever you wanna call them, but down here in the south its all the same shit (with a few possible exceptions such as Congressman Price).
However, with my experience most true Democrats aren't the ones catering to the whims of big media.
Having used g4u in the past for setting up various amounts of linux boxes, I can tell you that its SLOW for large disks! Well...duh, I guess. Its great for small disks (up to ~2GB) because it transfers byte by byte from a compressed centralized file without any complications. I used it to set up a bunch of old Optiplexes for use as public web kiosks on my school's campus. It was quick and so super easy that I quickly trained a Windows monkey as an assistant.
However, I tried it for 20 GB drives. Byte by byte raw copy is NOT the way to go! For large disks I suggest writing something that justs copies the data you want (assuming that you don't want to copy all 20 + GB).
BTW- Does anyone know what ever happened to bpBatch? That was a pretty good system using the bootproms and TFTP.
I cannot express how much respect I just lost for society.
Yes, its true that in certain parts of the South Ocean the limiting nutrient for certain types of phytoplankton is iron. It is also true that adding that nutrient will stimulate growth and reproduction of that phytoplankton. And of course phytoplankton take in carbon dioxide for photosynthesis.
BUT, how does that solve anything. Its a temporary fix for a much larger problem. Shouldn't we use that time, money, research, etc. and put it into preventing the need to strip carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the first place? I assure you the same thing that any ecologist worth their degree can tell you -- your fix won't last. We will end up with the same problems that we started with. If you stop playing with knives, then you need less band-aids.
Hey now, don't be dissin' on Des Moines. Its a great place to raise kids and I miss it dearly. Although I WOULD like to find a better way to travel with my LCD monitor (and my big lug of a case, too). My guess with your LCD is that it may be having the same problem that some flourescent lights get with the buzzing. After all, that's whats in most (all?) LCDs.
From my understanding based on what I was reading on the linuxpackages.net forums and a few other slack boards, Gnome 2.0 just won't be stable soon enough. True, the big gnome 2 release is due later this month, but it seems like Pat really likes his packages to be tested, settled, and mostly stable and it may be a while before G2 gets to any of these points.
Why wait for another Slack release, though? I'm sure it will hit the current tree soon enough, or maybe linuxpackages.net. Better, yet why not compile it yourself? That's more of the Slackware thing to do, anyway.
Then we had the Population Bomb, then Global Famine, and then to top it off Mass Extinction. All these things were predicted (as fact) by environmentalist scientists, chemists and ecologists. So yes, they have been telling fibs from a long time as none of these events have occurred.
My response to this is that in science very little can ever be correctly predicted. If it could, it would be a law or theory not just a simple pondering blown out by media.
Now we talk about Global Warming and I have been freezing my ass off the whole month of May in NYC when its usually is in the 80s.
Global warming...what a misnomer. The way I understand it (and granted my understanding is only through celebrities and science polluted through politics) global warming has more to do with the overall annual mean temperature growing over a large span of time than it just "getting warmer". One of the other effects is of erratic weather conditions such as hurricanes, prolonged droughts, warmth during the winter, and yes cold in the late spring in your case. It sounds like definition of "global warming" came from some sort of media channel clouded by politics.
Your reasoning is politically clouded at best, Al Gore, III. Its amazing that you think man is more powerful than nature. How truly arrogant you are.
And, yet here we both sit at our computers, in a world as far removed from nature as possible. Of course we can only see nature through the eyes of humans, that is our only capacity as humans. We constantly anthropomorphize every aspect that we see. American man really does think that (s)he is more powerful than nature. The only way away from politics (a derivite of a Greek word for human) is to get ourselves back in nature. This is hardly the rhetoric of Al Gore, but it is mine. I spend time observing and watching nature, and searching for my place within. That may be arrogant, but its a start. Of course it would be hard for someone in NYC to really understand, huh? The fact is that in order to deal with other humans and try to impact their lifestyles you must use politics. I studied this, I try to avoid this. I dislike humans, but when I do deal with them and get involved in politics I certainly do not vote for the likes of Al Gore or GW Bush or whatever is hocked at us. Fine. That's enough for me now, its getting silly and abstract.
So wait, all this time all of my chemistry, environmental science & politics, real world experience, and ecology courses have just been telling a fib to me?!?!!
All this talking about not listening to celebrities coming from a guy with a pro-Apple sig (remember, the "think different" campaign).
Your reasoning is specious, at best.
I am deeply curious if any of us here know how much oil is left. We keep getting more advanced technology each year from this industry so we end up "finding" more oil each year. The only problem is that we can really only get oil from an "oil reserve." I know this might have been mentioned a little before, but lets all look up the definition here. To paraphrase: an oil reserve, is a source of oil which we can extract in an economically viable fashion in our current market. So hey, I bet if we all go and look at a lot of the oil supplies being found, most of them aren't reserves.
All of this doesn't matter to American's, though. We pay less for our gas than any where else in the world. Why? Government subsidies, military protection of our oil fields, ignoring the costs to the environment. Well...I guess if you look at it maybe we do pay a lot more than we think through taxes.
Okay, so the purpose of this rant: media is deceptive, the Earth is a finite entity, and someday we will all have to end our current habits if we want future generations to live.
The fact is that you can find substitutes for gas power in all of these things except for possibly the airplanes. That's the problem with the Slashdot crowd and probably every crowd when it comes to the environment - too much thinking in terms of the way things are now. What ever happened to imagination and thinking towards problems? Hospitals and police stations have been using fuel cell generators for years (because of their critical needs), why not use those at worksites? Yard management things like lawnmowers and chainsaws can be replaced with electric versions, old human powered versions, or better yet none at all (which I imagine is probably the way it is in most cities). Cooking...hmmm. Alcohol or universal camp stoves. What about electric or wood stoves and grills? I think that you are overlooking some/many things, too.
So? Does every distro have to be bleeding edge with the latest daily updates? What's the point. I've learned to wait for versions to stabilize before I start to put them in daily use. Besides, that's not the point of good 'ol slack. The packages are great for the initial installs in building the directory structure and getting the system started, but beyond that Slack makes it easy for you to just do compiled source updates. After trying to deal with installing from source under RedHat's RPM packaging regime I never want to think about full package systems again.
The review was great and all, but did it really say that Galeon was a 20.0mb download? Even with downloading all of the necessary library dependencies shouldn't 20 megs seems a little high. This review stinks of Redhat/Ximian bloat. Although I am happy to see a more update review, even if the test machine may be slightly outdated to what many of us use these days.
-lt
You must realize, though, that many of our great scientists and physicists (specifically ones that ended up working for NASA in the early years) were former Nazis. Whether or not they were Nazis by choice is a different subject all together. My point is that -- the Germans had very particular talents in physics and chemistry.
I used Evolution for my mail on the systems where I run Redhat 7.0 and 7.1. The problem is that on my personal machines, I run Slackware 8.0. I love Slackware and there is no way that I'll switch just for a mail client. Has anyone had much success getting around the Ximian library dependency issues? Slackware can install RPM's in its own package format and there are extension's for .TGZ's package manager to include dependencies.
Anyway, My point is that Evolution like most of Ximian's stuff needs too many weird library dependencies (which is why I try not to use Ximian GNOME anywhere). I have tried to compile it using all of the requested RPM's and I have tried installing it and all of the requested libraries from source, but with no avail. Will there ever be a way to install it cross-distro like Mozilla or StarOffice's binary install? I think that this ability would help Evolution gain more ground in the Unix world.
I personally think that Ximian has been doing a great job with Evolution. I first used it early in the beta stages. It was a promising piece of crap. Now it is just about the finest piece of graphical mail and organizing applications out there for *nix. Granted, I don't really use it, but it is nice to know that something with that many features is now available. If we want to convert over desktop users we need apps like this - friendly, easy to use...etc...etc. Either that or we could all be whiny elitists running Debian and KDE.
Of course I'm a whiny elitist running Slackware and Blackbox (but Galeon over all other browsers) so bite me.
I'm not depressed. I just lock myself inside the house for hours at a time, with the shades drawn, and listening to the Cure. I have friends! I type stuff into boxes and responds with all sorts of results! Zoloft and Prozac are foresaken! I've got Google!
Yeah, I find it outrageously funny that the same people who blatantly break the law are the ones who are the most vocal when they are put a stop to. I don't really see the whole issue as censorship, but what is cost effective. I seriously doubt that Excite@home really gives a rat's patoot whether or not you are downloading the news, the spice girls, or porno. What they want is to be able to get the most customers on the cheapest equipment with the least support so that they can bring in the largest profit margin. If that means siding with the RIAA and MPAA as an excuse for kicking off violators then so be it. The fact is, that when you get to the root of the situation there is math involved (as there is in many things):
CUSTOMERS = REVENUE
BANDWIDTH = COST
cost of total bandwidth + revenue from customers should equal a positive cash flow. --- "Duh!"
Thousands of people downloading anything large would get blocked. My college operates off of leased fiber. We recently blocked Napster, Gnutella, iMesh, and all of the other stuff. Why? Because there wasn't enough bandwidth left for students to do research. It isn't censorship, just cost effective.
By the way, if any of you are using Excite@Home in the first place, I think that you deserve the crap that they give you.
Well the first start is to quit buying crappy pop. Go out and buy yourself some music from indy labels. They don't have the resources to muddle up your cd and most of them probably wouldn't in the first place. Better yet, buy youself a vinyl LP. Most bands that I listen to still put out on records. They are cheaper, last longer, and the sound is so soul warming.