An important thing to keep in mind is the scale; the catholic church has not been killing many people recently, wheras scientology has.
Remember the scientology is a small group, approximately 50000 people by current estimates; The catholic church is near a billion. Even given the sheer size of the catholic church, scientology still kills more people, and openly advocates the abuse of converts to forward the religion at all costs.
I'd really recommend you read more about them. The only real way to say it is 'Scientology is some seriously bad shit.'
I hardly see how this is different from our foreign embassies, or from the embassies on US soil. This sort of thing happens all the time and is a natural result of international politics. Please do not read more into it than there is.
Several more points here, though probably not ones you want to hear:
Americans have far less leisure time than many 3rd world people. We also have low unemployment, a government that doesn't have civil wars every fifteen years, the ability to vote, and plumbing. I'd have a hell of a lot of leisure time too, if unemployment was at 80%, I couldn't read, hadn't seen a dentist in my entire life and was starving to death.
Why are people killing themselves to get in? Not because we've destroyed their supposedly self sufficient economies. They try to come here because our system works and the one in thier home country does not. If you bust your ass in the USA, you can get ahead. That's not always guaranteed in other countries.
Say what you want about our financial system, but the simple fact is that it does work, and it works significantly better than any other system we've found so far. If you have a better solution, let's see it implemented.
And the standard of living in the US is certainly not a crock. Many people in the US live with debts people in less developed countries cannot comprehend not because they are stupid corporate sheep - they live with debt because they can, and because it's not really that big of a problem.
Five hundred dollars to me is gift money, perhaps a few days of my time. Five hundred dollars is unbelievable wealth in some countries, more than a resident might make in their entire lifetime. Of course they would have difficulty understanding the concept of a twenty thousand dollar debt - but by the same token they would have difficulty believing the amount of money I get for sitting in front of a keyboard and monitor for 8 hours a day.
Given the chance, do you think they would trade places with me? Do you think I would trade with them? If the standard of living is so low in the US, why are they killing themselves to come here?
The system in the US is far from perfect, but you are trying to make it look far worse than it is, and I think you are doing it in quite a dishonest fashion.
Almost any mud is going to be non-zero-sum. The goal is to have fun, explore the world, and try to become more powerful. But there isn't necessarily a limit to how powerful or weak you can be, and being powerful isnt necessarily the end of the game.
Helping others is one way that you can get more out than you put in - the game is usually more fun for everyone when there are more people.
You might even want to check out the mud I run, Alter Aeon. Web page is at http://www.dentinmud.org/alter, connect via telnet to dentinmud.org port 3000.
> How do you compensate someone who is totally lost to their family because they're stuck in the office 7 days a week?
You don't. That's not the companies job. And if this is your problem, you're clearly an idiot. Quit your job and work somewhere else. You should know better than to sacrifice your happiness.
> How do you compensate someone for the entire months lost due to crunch time, forced by the people who a) have the money to invest in realistic scheduling and b) aren't there with you the whole time?
Not your problem. You can only try to influence the schedules, but if it isn't your job, it isn't your job. If that's too much for you to handle, go work somewhere else.
Maybe he just thinks differently, but honestly I don't see where he can say 'I dont accept anecdotes as evidence' when his whole damn argument is based on nothing but.
It also seems to me like he really just doesn't understand it well enough to properly criticize it. OOP isn't a magic bullet, and it wont solve all problems, true - but then again, no-one was claiming that either. But it is powerful, and in most cases it is more powerful and more maintainable than procedural programming. And in large projects, it is damn near invaluable, due to the tight constraints that can be forced on the usage of objects and data.
And why the hell should it matter what the average lifetime of a project is? What if your project just happens to be one of those that lasts for 30 years? If good, maintainable designs were done in the first place, 3 years would most likely be unrealistically short. I personally think most projects are tossed because they too quickly become unmaintainable due to poor design, regardless of language.
And as for it taking many years to reap the benefits of OOP on a particular project, I certainly beg to differ. The rewards seem to come to me much quicker, on the order of months for breakeven - because the little utility classes and even large structures become like a library, a library of well tested code that does exactly what I want, and that I am very familiar with.
I remember thinking the same as this guy several years ago, when I knew C++ but didn't truly understand it. I have since learned the strengths and weaknesses of OOP, and changed my mind.
I'm one of those people on the opposite side of the spectrum, and I only install windows on a machine once per year or less. As such:
What is add/remove programs? I've never used it before. I always just run the install/remove executables from the install media or install directory, which is roughly what you would do on linux. I once removed an icon for Microsoft Network so the stupid 'would you like to subscribe to microsoft networking now?' would go away on boot, and as a result I now get a bunch of dll warnings on boot. My net point here is that you can't just assume that this magical 'add/remove programs' thing is some magical super-useful feature that linux absolutely needs - if it were that cool, I'd have found it and used it instead of just deleting the icons outright.
While we're on this subject, how the hell do you add an icon to the desktop? I've never been able to figure that one out either. It's certainly not obvious to me how it would be done.
My biggest problem with autoexec.bat/startup was that not only did I not know how it worked, but anything that I really wanted to do couldn't be done there anyway. Hence, I never tried to use it. You seem to imply that any idiot can just go in and muck with autoexec.bat/startup and get the results they want - that is as patently false for windows as for linux init scripts.
Yeah, where the hell is dialup networking? I've never had dialup on a windows machine, only ethernet. That said, I've always had to configure everything under windows by hand, and it's a complete pain in the ass. Linux is definitely easier.
The device manager, while very good when it works, is just terrible when it doesn't. I'd definitely have to say that linux device management is much, much more sane. (Except for mice that inexplicably don't work, non-standard mice are a bitch.)
Almost none of my machines run the web server, because I turn it off after I do installs. On windows, you have to get a separate web server from somewhere else, so I've never installed one there. Linux typically installs the web server with default configs, so you were probably running one without even knowing it.
I've been working for years on my own little solar system generator - a piece of code that generates star systems at random. It uses physics to constrain what's realistic and what isn't, and over time iterates the systems into being. It produces fairly sane results - star systems that look like what we expect, and even some that look remarkably like our own.
The neat thing about it however, is what it predicts for life. There is life practically everywhere. Not often does it flourish like on earth, but it is common - with around 20% of star systems having a planet with life of some sort on it (most of the time just algae or hypercycles, low level stuff.)
Habitable planets, or those requiring only minimal terraforming, are much more rare however. Around 1.5% of star systems have such a planet. The requirements for habitability are temperature, gravity, atmospheric pressure, oxygen content, sufficient existing life to maintain the oxygen content, no poisonous gasses, that sort of thing. Amazingly enough, about 1% of all star systems contain a planet you could be dropped on with minimal survival gear and live indefinitely.
I've always wondered why people didn't take simulations such as these farther. We all know about ACCRETE and its derivatives - but the science has advanced over time, and so has our knowledge about life and its initial formation. I've found that I can vary nearly all of the questionable parmeters in my simulations greatly without significantly affecting the number of habitable planets.
It seems that changing your constraints in one place just forces the life to move somewhere else, and the number of habitables stays roughly constant. It is quite interesting, and somewhat comforting knowing that there are so many habitable worlds out there when you look into the night sky.
Searching for my name pulled up zero hits.
Searching for my mud, 'Alter Aeon', pulled up many hits - none of which had anything at all to do with my mud, and none of which seemed related to each other.
Searching for 'dikumud' returned zero hits.
Searching for 'diku mud' returned 3 (!!) hits.
I seriously gotta wonder about the very concept they are using here. You can't just take the search terms, look up synonyms, and expect to get meaningful results.
I suppose there will always be a place for the traditional strict search engines. For the time being, they certainly are more reliable and sane.
Yes, I imagine that Netscape is managing to generate some revenue as a result of this. But does anyone think for even a minute that this makes up for the two years of development time that was paid for directly out of their pocket? Would there even BE a mozilla of any value without all the paid time of netscape programmers?
Open source is cool and all, but you are pretty deluded if you think that most of the mozilla code was written by volunteers. Most of it was paid for, fair and square, by netscape.
> It's called evolution. Things weren't implemented properly the first time. Now we're correcting that. A lot of modern computing was invented in
> English speaking countries, it's hardly any wonder our systems can't cater for the rest of the world. It seems rather unfair to put them at a
> disadvantage. Besides, they will eventually force a change, and we don't want incompatibilities now, so we? Personally, I can't wait for
> everybody to move to Unicode - it will make life as a software developer easier.
It's called evolution. The idiogramic languages weren't implemented properly the first time. Now, they should be correcting that. A lot of modern computing was invented in english speaking languages, partially because it's so much easier to develop with an alphabet of under a hundred characters that fits conveniently in a byte. It seems rather unfair to tear down those years of development and put programmers at a disadvantage because users of idiogram languages refuse to construct a proper alphabet. Besides, eventually they will change anyway, for reasons of international communication and improving literacy - why force programmers to introduce incompatibilities over it? Personally, I can't wait for unicode to die a horrible death. It was a brain damaged idea from the start.
I'm reminded by whoever it was here who had the.sig:
"Programmers are so enthralled by the fact that they can that they seldom think about whether they should."
I think this is a perfect example.
The fact is that the internet operates in 8 bits, with 8 bit bytes being sent across the wires. Every piece of software on the planet (almost anyway) uses 8 bit bytes. And, for convenience, 8 bit display characters. I'd just as soon not see programmers all over the world add needless layers of complexity to support all this crap. In a hundred years, there will be a global language anyway - if anything we should be vehmently refusing to pointlessly break perfectly good code to support local quirks. Not to mention the other associated hassles of translation and maintainability.
I wouldnt be as pissy about it if this wasnt forcing unicode adoption. I think it would be far more effective to simply throw out the idea of unicode for any network infrastructure and force those languages that currently need it to make their own 8 bit substitutions. They are going to have to do that eventually anyway, might as well start right now.
And no, I don't care if the global language is english. Esperanto or german would be fine with me. (Side note: did you know that the german language has officially thrown out a couple of characters, most notably the s-set, for similar reasons?)
This reads to me like its fake, or planted. The irony at the end is just too much, too unlikely. It's certainly not what I would say to the employees if I were in the shoes of the real Bill Gates.
I wish there were some way to get verification. As is, this is just heresay.
> I would hope that if I am paying a fee for this new service, then I will be guaranteed to find a high quality recording of the songs I am looking for.
> This means BMG/Napster needs to set up some big honking file servers of their own for me to use.
Get real. This is BMG we're talking about here. Odds are good they won't have anything that you're looking for in their catalog. They are one record label out of thousands - and though they might be big, they still only carry perhaps 10% of the available titles at most.
Even if you listen to purely popular music, odds are good their catalog is going to be totally insufficient.
> The people that use Napster for legitimate reasons (all 10 of them), will NOT mind a $5 subscription charge to get the music they like
> *LEGALLY*. You don't want to pay $15 for a CD? Fine. Pay your subscription, and download your music from BMG/Napster's extensive
> collection. You get your music through legal distribution channels, you're getting it in mp3, AND YOU'RE SUPPORTING THE PEOPLE
> RESPONSIBLE FOR BRINGING YOU YOUR FAVORITE MUSIC.
Oh, fuck you, that's complete bullshit. BMG has brought nothing but complete crap to the table for the past ten years. I haven't bought anything from BMG for over ten years for that very reason. The last thing I want to do is support those assholes.
The people I really want to support are the bands I like. Bands like VNV Nation, In Flames, Children of Bodom - and I support them by buying their music. I find it highly offensive that I should pay BMG for the right to use napster to download bands they don't sell or promote.
BMG can screw off. I'm not going to be paying them a monthly fee to access music that they didn't so much as lift a finger to help produce.
It is absurd to think that the constants he listed are 'required' for life. Perhaps required for life exactly as we know it, but certainly not life in general. Most of them don't even preclude the formation of universes with the potential for life, and a few of them are completely broken. One at a time:
Epsilon, the '.007 figure', has little to nothing to do with whether or not complex molecules can form. If it were just a little bit smaller, stars would have to be bigger to make other elements, and the universe would contain a higher percentage of hydrogen than it currently does. If it were just a little bit bigger, it would be easier to make and fuse other elements, and perhaps helium-3 would be the fundamental element burned by stars.
In short, changing epsilon merely changes the power source of stars, and changes the stable isotopes in the periodic table. It does not eliminate the periodic table altogether.
Additionally, epsilon is derived from other fundamental constants and may in fact not be an independent constant.
N, ratio of gravity to other forces. His comment on this is totally bunk. We don't know shit about how this ratio affects the size of the universe, and current theories indicate that this constant could be grossly different and still produce a large, long lasting universe.
Omega, density of materials. Contrary to his belief, omega can also be grossly different without affecting anything. A very high omega might cause the big crunch sooner, but a low omega simply means stars and galaxies are farther apart. So the average distance goes from 8 ly apart to 80; is that really such a problem?
Lambda isn't even a real constant, and there is considerable debate as to whether it even exists, much less what its current value is. It's a little early to say that its present value is critical for life.
Q isn't even a well defined number, and certainly isn't a standard cosmological constant. Assuming the most sane definition of it I can think of, there is no reason this constant must be fixed either. It could also vary by many orders of magnitude and still result in a viable universe with stars such as we know today.
After all, don't we already have 'huge black holes' and vast clouds of dead gas out in interstellar space?
D - this one he pulls completely out of his ass. Granted, most physicists have difficulty thinking up life in two dimensions, but I know of none who think dimensions higher than 3 rule out life. There are even several theories that postulate the existance of higher dimensions (10 or 11 typically) as part of our universe, which makes his assumption that we live in 3D questionable.
In short, I find the description and importance of his constants as described in the article highly questionable and of the same caliber as 'creation science'. Perhaps the article is simply of low quality - if so, Rees should correct them. But as it stands, it is nothing more than 'pop science' and has little value in my opinion.
It's even worse than that: on my linux machine using netscape 3.0, 3 of the 22 don't render correctly; on my aix box running netscape 4.6, 10 of the 22 don't render correctly. There can only be 12 of these truly safe colors, probably less since I'll bet some of my failures don't overlap with yours.
This sounds exactly like the propaganda that was put forth concerning Plug and Play when it was first put on the market. "It'll make all your hardware problems go away, everything will work without configuration!" Yeah, right.
I can understand the point of having gaming consoles, but lets face it: lack of upgradability is lack of upgradability. Eventually, games will come out that don't run on it, and you'll have to buy a new X-box. Or if you can upgrade it, you'll be in the same position as if you actually had a PC in the first place: replacing hardware and fiddling with the system to keep it running.
And then there are those of us for which an X-box would be yet another piece of hardware in a house that already has too many gadgets. I'm very happy that I can run my games, do my development work, export my filesystems and play my music all on one piece of hardware. I don't want to have a separate machine just for playing game Z when it could be handled happily on my current hardware.
I can't say I really expected anything else though. The answers were obviously filtered very heavily by legal and/or other staff. They are too dry and form factor to be anything else.
The lawyers would have obtained the addresses of people _exporting_ metallica tracks, not those attempting to download. Downloads they would not have been able to track. But making known copyrighted material available for public download is definitely illegal according to current copyright law (not that the law is practical or enforcable, but thats a separate issue).
It looks like complete marketing propaganda to me. There is absolutely no mention of how the actual technology works, or how the 3-d image is generated or displayed. Until I can see and read about the technical aspects, I have to regard this as 'yet another overhyped 3-D display technology' that doesn't actually work. I'm darn curious how they intend to get the appearance of depth out of a flat display without somehow getting different pictures to each eye.
I mean really, just how many press releases like this have you seen? I've seen quite a few. Don't go spending your money yet.
Has anyone actually used this kind of display before? Does anyone know what makes this special, or better than existing 3-D display devices?
The last question, 'lowest common denominator', was one that I would have most liked to see answered. I was very annoyed that the response was utterly content free, like much of the algore site appears to be. I too want to see real answers and specific statements from politicians.
But the thing to remember is that elections are about popularity, and these guys are here to try to get the most votes - and nothing more. If a propaganda web site brings in more votes than a truthful one, the propaganda will win every time. These guys only care about getting elected, and you stand a better chance of being elected if you have more people on your side.
Specifically, people who are easily swayed by propaganda of this sort: the lowest common denominator.
However, I don't think we can find fault with the web master. A question like that should really be directed at the politicians themselves, the policy makers. They are the ones who decide what the content of the site is, and it is unfair to ask a sysadmin why his users refuse to put up anything more than fluff.
I buy real cds for two very simple reasons: 1) mp3's sound like shit, and 2) finding good mp3's is a lot of work.
I don't have a super high quality stereo, and I don't listen to stuff that people would claim needs high quality to hear the distortion in. I listen to ground-pounding metal and thrash with the occasional trance and techno thrown in, and even at 192kbps the distortion is painfully obvious. Even on headphones, the sound is muddy, the cymbals are slurred, and things aren't quite right. Anyone who says mp3 is 'near lossless' has low standards. I notice marked improvement when listening to the actual cds.
And as for finding mp3's, of course they are available on napster, but invariably they are all of differing bitrate, are named funny, are sometimes cut funny, and at least half of the time have the so called 'resume download' errors in them. One particular track I downloaded had 50+ resume errors in it, and all other copies on napster were of that corrupted original.
That is why I buy cds. I make mp3's from them anyway, but at least my own mp3's dont have the resume problems. I have also burned compilations of tracks on 80 minute cds to take with me when I don't have an mp3 player available (like at work.)
I'm pretty close to being a college student, and I download tons of songs and burn mixes...
But I gotta say, there are actually quite a few albums that contain all hit songs. I've found a number of them recently - vnv nation, in flames, dimmu borgir, children of bodom - and its the bands like that that napster helps me find. I've been so impressed by bands like this that I actually have paid full retail price for their work. Maybe you just aren't looking hard enough.
I consider it survival of the fittest - those artists with only 2-3 good songs really -aren't- that good. 2-3 songs isn't good enough to justify buying the album. I expect more, and I expect better, especially if I'm going to be paying fifteen dollars per cd.
I see a couple of possibilities for this - perhaps there will be differential pricing, where one hit wonder cds are much cheaper than truly good cds, or perhaps the music industry will be forced to focus more on talent than marketing. Either possibility would be an improvement, IMO.
(As a side note, I have had quite a bit of difficulty actually purchasing cds and artwork from some of these bands. As most of them are not on major labels, availability is spotty at best. It does appear to be yet another price to pay for quality.)
Slashdot Mirror
An important thing to keep in mind is the scale; the catholic church has not been killing many people recently, wheras scientology has.
Remember the scientology is a small group, approximately 50000 people by current estimates; The catholic church is near a billion. Even given the sheer size of the catholic church, scientology still kills more people, and openly advocates the abuse of converts to forward the religion at all costs.
I'd really recommend you read more about them. The only real way to say it is 'Scientology is some seriously bad shit.'
-dentin
I hardly see how this is different from our foreign embassies, or from the embassies on US soil. This sort of thing happens all the time and is a natural result of international politics. Please do not read more into it than there is.
-dennis T
Several more points here, though probably not ones you want to hear:
Americans have far less leisure time than many 3rd world people. We also have low unemployment, a government that doesn't have civil wars every fifteen years, the ability to vote, and plumbing. I'd have a hell of a lot of leisure time too, if unemployment was at 80%, I couldn't read, hadn't seen a dentist in my entire life and was starving to death.
Why are people killing themselves to get in? Not because we've destroyed their supposedly self sufficient economies. They try to come here because our system works and the one in thier home country does not. If you bust your ass in the USA, you can get ahead. That's not always guaranteed in other countries.
Say what you want about our financial system, but the simple fact is that it does work, and it works significantly better than any other system we've found so far. If you have a better solution, let's see it implemented.
And the standard of living in the US is certainly not a crock. Many people in the US live with debts people in less developed countries cannot comprehend not because they are stupid corporate sheep - they live with debt because they can, and because it's not really that big of a problem.
Five hundred dollars to me is gift money, perhaps a few days of my time. Five hundred dollars is unbelievable wealth in some countries, more than a resident might make in their entire lifetime. Of course they would have difficulty understanding the concept of a twenty thousand dollar debt - but by the same token they would have difficulty believing the amount of money I get for sitting in front of a keyboard and monitor for 8 hours a day.
Given the chance, do you think they would trade places with me? Do you think I would trade with them? If the standard of living is so low in the US, why are they killing themselves to come here?
The system in the US is far from perfect, but you are trying to make it look far worse than it is, and I think you are doing it in quite a dishonest fashion.
-dennis T
Almost any mud is going to be non-zero-sum. The goal is to have fun, explore the world, and try to become more powerful. But there isn't necessarily a limit to how powerful or weak you can be, and being powerful isnt necessarily the end of the game.
Helping others is one way that you can get more out than you put in - the game is usually more fun for everyone when there are more people.
You might even want to check out the mud I run, Alter Aeon. Web page is at http://www.dentinmud.org/alter, connect via telnet to dentinmud.org port 3000.
-dentin
> How do you compensate someone who is totally lost to their family because they're stuck in the office 7 days a week?
You don't. That's not the companies job. And if this is your problem, you're clearly an idiot. Quit your job and work somewhere else. You should know better than to sacrifice your happiness.
> How do you compensate someone for the entire months lost due to crunch time, forced by the people who a) have the money to invest in realistic scheduling and b) aren't there with you the whole time?
Not your problem. You can only try to influence the schedules, but if it isn't your job, it isn't your job. If that's too much for you to handle, go work somewhere else.
-dentin
Maybe he just thinks differently, but honestly I don't see where he can say 'I dont accept anecdotes as evidence' when his whole damn argument is based on nothing but.
It also seems to me like he really just doesn't understand it well enough to properly criticize it. OOP isn't a magic bullet, and it wont solve all problems, true - but then again, no-one was claiming that either. But it is powerful, and in most cases it is more powerful and more maintainable than procedural programming. And in large projects, it is damn near invaluable, due to the tight constraints that can be forced on the usage of objects and data.
And why the hell should it matter what the average lifetime of a project is? What if your project just happens to be one of those that lasts for 30 years? If good, maintainable designs were done in the first place, 3 years would most likely be unrealistically short. I personally think most projects are tossed because they too quickly become unmaintainable due to poor design, regardless of language.
And as for it taking many years to reap the benefits of OOP on a particular project, I certainly beg to differ. The rewards seem to come to me much quicker, on the order of months for breakeven - because the little utility classes and even large structures become like a library, a library of well tested code that does exactly what I want, and that I am very familiar with.
I remember thinking the same as this guy several years ago, when I knew C++ but didn't truly understand it. I have since learned the strengths and weaknesses of OOP, and changed my mind.
Anyway, I think I'm done with my rant...
-dentin
All I hear is people saying this is bad; however, is there any possibility that the addition of strong cryptography to hardware might be a good thing?
Suppose someone wanted to make use of hardware disk encryption for personal security?
Perhaps enhancements to tools like tripwire or sshd which could use some secure hardware storage of data?
In other words, would it be possible to convert the spec into something positive, that could be used by free software to its benefit?
-dentin
I'm one of those people on the opposite side of the spectrum, and I only install windows on a machine once per year or less. As such:
What is add/remove programs? I've never used it before. I always just run the install/remove executables from the install media or install directory, which is roughly what you would do on linux. I once removed an icon for Microsoft Network so the stupid 'would you like to subscribe to microsoft networking now?' would go away on boot, and as a result I now get a bunch of dll warnings on boot. My net point here is that you can't just assume that this magical 'add/remove programs' thing is some magical super-useful feature that linux absolutely needs - if it were that cool, I'd have found it and used it instead of just deleting the icons outright.
While we're on this subject, how the hell do you add an icon to the desktop? I've never been able to figure that one out either. It's certainly not obvious to me how it would be done.
My biggest problem with autoexec.bat/startup was that not only did I not know how it worked, but anything that I really wanted to do couldn't be done there anyway. Hence, I never tried to use it. You seem to imply that any idiot can just go in and muck with autoexec.bat/startup and get the results they want - that is as patently false for windows as for linux init scripts.
Yeah, where the hell is dialup networking? I've never had dialup on a windows machine, only ethernet. That said, I've always had to configure everything under windows by hand, and it's a complete pain in the ass. Linux is definitely easier.
The device manager, while very good when it works, is just terrible when it doesn't. I'd definitely have to say that linux device management is much, much more sane. (Except for mice that inexplicably don't work, non-standard mice are a bitch.)
Almost none of my machines run the web server, because I turn it off after I do installs. On windows, you have to get a separate web server from somewhere else, so I've never installed one there. Linux typically installs the web server with default configs, so you were probably running one without even knowing it.
-dentin
I've been working for years on my own little solar system generator - a piece of code that generates star systems at random. It uses physics to constrain what's realistic and what isn't, and over time iterates the systems into being. It produces fairly sane results - star systems that look like what we expect, and even some that look remarkably like our own.
The neat thing about it however, is what it predicts for life. There is life practically everywhere. Not often does it flourish like on earth, but it is common - with around 20% of star systems having a planet with life of some sort on it (most of the time just algae or hypercycles, low level stuff.)
Habitable planets, or those requiring only minimal terraforming, are much more rare however. Around 1.5% of star systems have such a planet. The requirements for habitability are temperature, gravity, atmospheric pressure, oxygen content, sufficient existing life to maintain the oxygen content, no poisonous gasses, that sort of thing. Amazingly enough, about 1% of all star systems contain a planet you could be dropped on with minimal survival gear and live indefinitely.
I've always wondered why people didn't take simulations such as these farther. We all know about ACCRETE and its derivatives - but the science has advanced over time, and so has our knowledge about life and its initial formation. I've found that I can vary nearly all of the questionable parmeters in my simulations greatly without significantly affecting the number of habitable planets.
It seems that changing your constraints in one place just forces the life to move somewhere else, and the number of habitables stays roughly constant. It is quite interesting, and somewhat comforting knowing that there are so many habitable worlds out there when you look into the night sky.
-dentin
Searching for my name pulled up zero hits.
Searching for my mud, 'Alter Aeon', pulled up many hits - none of which had anything at all to do with my mud, and none of which seemed related to each other.
Searching for 'dikumud' returned zero hits.
Searching for 'diku mud' returned 3 (!!) hits.
I seriously gotta wonder about the very concept they are using here. You can't just take the search terms, look up synonyms, and expect to get meaningful results.
I suppose there will always be a place for the traditional strict search engines. For the time being, they certainly are more reliable and sane.
-dentin
Yes, I imagine that Netscape is managing to generate some revenue as a result of this. But does anyone think for even a minute that this makes up for the two years of development time that was paid for directly out of their pocket? Would there even BE a mozilla of any value without all the paid time of netscape programmers?
Open source is cool and all, but you are pretty deluded if you think that most of the mozilla code was written by volunteers. Most of it was paid for, fair and square, by netscape.
-dentin
> It's called evolution. Things weren't implemented properly the first time. Now we're correcting that. A lot of modern computing was invented in
> English speaking countries, it's hardly any wonder our systems can't cater for the rest of the world. It seems rather unfair to put them at a
> disadvantage. Besides, they will eventually force a change, and we don't want incompatibilities now, so we? Personally, I can't wait for
> everybody to move to Unicode - it will make life as a software developer easier.
It's called evolution. The idiogramic languages weren't implemented properly the first time. Now, they should be correcting that. A lot of modern computing was invented in english speaking languages, partially because it's so much easier to develop with an alphabet of under a hundred characters that fits conveniently in a byte. It seems rather unfair to tear down those years of development and put programmers at a disadvantage because users of idiogram languages refuse to construct a proper alphabet. Besides, eventually they will change anyway, for reasons of international communication and improving literacy - why force programmers to introduce incompatibilities over it? Personally, I can't wait for unicode to die a horrible death. It was a brain damaged idea from the start.
-dentin
I'm reminded by whoever it was here who had the .sig:
"Programmers are so enthralled by the fact that they can that they seldom think about whether they should."
I think this is a perfect example.
The fact is that the internet operates in 8 bits, with 8 bit bytes being sent across the wires. Every piece of software on the planet (almost anyway) uses 8 bit bytes. And, for convenience, 8 bit display characters. I'd just as soon not see programmers all over the world add needless layers of complexity to support all this crap. In a hundred years, there will be a global language anyway - if anything we should be vehmently refusing to pointlessly break perfectly good code to support local quirks. Not to mention the other associated hassles of translation and maintainability.
I wouldnt be as pissy about it if this wasnt forcing unicode adoption. I think it would be far more effective to simply throw out the idea of unicode for any network infrastructure and force those languages that currently need it to make their own 8 bit substitutions. They are going to have to do that eventually anyway, might as well start right now.
And no, I don't care if the global language is english. Esperanto or german would be fine with me. (Side note: did you know that the german language has officially thrown out a couple of characters, most notably the s-set, for similar reasons?)
-dentin
This reads to me like its fake, or planted. The irony at the end is just too much, too unlikely. It's certainly not what I would say to the employees if I were in the shoes of the real Bill Gates.
I wish there were some way to get verification. As is, this is just heresay.
-dentin
> I would hope that if I am paying a fee for this new service, then I will be guaranteed to find a high quality recording of the songs I am looking for.
> This means BMG/Napster needs to set up some big honking file servers of their own for me to use.
Get real. This is BMG we're talking about here. Odds are good they won't have anything that you're looking for in their catalog. They are one record label out of thousands - and though they might be big, they still only carry perhaps 10% of the available titles at most.
Even if you listen to purely popular music, odds are good their catalog is going to be totally insufficient.
-dentin
> The people that use Napster for legitimate reasons (all 10 of them), will NOT mind a $5 subscription charge to get the music they like
> *LEGALLY*. You don't want to pay $15 for a CD? Fine. Pay your subscription, and download your music from BMG/Napster's extensive
> collection. You get your music through legal distribution channels, you're getting it in mp3, AND YOU'RE SUPPORTING THE PEOPLE
> RESPONSIBLE FOR BRINGING YOU YOUR FAVORITE MUSIC.
Oh, fuck you, that's complete bullshit. BMG has brought nothing but complete crap to the table for the past ten years. I haven't bought anything from BMG for over ten years for that very reason. The last thing I want to do is support those assholes.
The people I really want to support are the bands I like. Bands like VNV Nation, In Flames, Children of Bodom - and I support them by buying their music. I find it highly offensive that I should pay BMG for the right to use napster to download bands they don't sell or promote.
BMG can screw off. I'm not going to be paying them a monthly fee to access music that they didn't so much as lift a finger to help produce.
-dentin
It is absurd to think that the constants he listed are 'required' for life. Perhaps required for life exactly as we know it, but certainly not life in general. Most of them don't even preclude the formation of universes with the potential for life, and a few of them are completely broken. One at a time:
Epsilon, the '.007 figure', has little to nothing to do with whether or not complex molecules can form. If it were just a little bit smaller, stars would have to be bigger to make other elements, and the universe would contain a higher percentage of hydrogen than it currently does. If it were just a little bit bigger, it would be easier to make and fuse other elements, and perhaps helium-3 would be the fundamental element burned by stars.
In short, changing epsilon merely changes the power source of stars, and changes the stable isotopes in the periodic table. It does not eliminate the periodic table altogether.
Additionally, epsilon is derived from other fundamental constants and may in fact not be an independent constant.
N, ratio of gravity to other forces. His comment on this is totally bunk. We don't know shit about how this ratio affects the size of the universe, and current theories indicate that this constant could be grossly different and still produce a large, long lasting universe.
Omega, density of materials. Contrary to his belief, omega can also be grossly different without affecting anything. A very high omega might cause the big crunch sooner, but a low omega simply means stars and galaxies are farther apart. So the average distance goes from 8 ly apart to 80; is that really such a problem?
Lambda isn't even a real constant, and there is considerable debate as to whether it even exists, much less what its current value is. It's a little early to say that its present value is critical for life.
Q isn't even a well defined number, and certainly isn't a standard cosmological constant. Assuming the most sane definition of it I can think of, there is no reason this constant must be fixed either. It could also vary by many orders of magnitude and still result in a viable universe with stars such as we know today.
After all, don't we already have 'huge black holes' and vast clouds of dead gas out in interstellar space?
D - this one he pulls completely out of his ass. Granted, most physicists have difficulty thinking up life in two dimensions, but I know of none who think dimensions higher than 3 rule out life. There are even several theories that postulate the existance of higher dimensions (10 or 11 typically) as part of our universe, which makes his assumption that we live in 3D questionable.
In short, I find the description and importance of his constants as described in the article highly questionable and of the same caliber as 'creation science'. Perhaps the article is simply of low quality - if so, Rees should correct them. But as it stands, it is nothing more than 'pop science' and has little value in my opinion.
-dennis towne
It's even worse than that: on my linux machine using netscape 3.0, 3 of the 22 don't render correctly; on my aix box running netscape 4.6, 10 of the 22 don't render correctly. There can only be 12 of these truly safe colors, probably less since I'll bet some of my failures don't overlap with yours.
-dentin
This sounds exactly like the propaganda that was put forth concerning Plug and Play when it was first put on the market. "It'll make all your hardware problems go away, everything will work without configuration!" Yeah, right.
I can understand the point of having gaming consoles, but lets face it: lack of upgradability is lack of upgradability. Eventually, games will come out that don't run on it, and you'll have to buy a new X-box. Or if you can upgrade it, you'll be in the same position as if you actually had a PC in the first place: replacing hardware and fiddling with the system to keep it running.
And then there are those of us for which an X-box would be yet another piece of hardware in a house that already has too many gadgets. I'm very happy that I can run my games, do my development work, export my filesystems and play my music all on one piece of hardware. I don't want to have a separate machine just for playing game Z when it could be handled happily on my current hardware.
-dentin
Seems fairly content free. Kinda like this post.
I can't say I really expected anything else though. The answers were obviously filtered very heavily by legal and/or other staff. They are too dry and form factor to be anything else.
-dennis towne
The lawyers would have obtained the addresses of people _exporting_ metallica tracks, not those attempting to download. Downloads they would not have been able to track. But making known copyrighted material available for public download is definitely illegal according to current copyright law (not that the law is practical or enforcable, but thats a separate issue).
It looks like complete marketing propaganda to me. There is absolutely no mention of how the actual technology works, or how the 3-d image is generated or displayed. Until I can see and read about the technical aspects, I have to regard this as 'yet another overhyped 3-D display technology' that doesn't actually work. I'm darn curious how they intend to get the appearance of depth out of a flat display without somehow getting different pictures to each eye.
I mean really, just how many press releases like this have you seen? I've seen quite a few. Don't go spending your money yet.
Has anyone actually used this kind of display before? Does anyone know what makes this special, or better than existing 3-D display devices?
-dennis towne
The last question, 'lowest common denominator', was one that I would have most liked to see answered. I was very annoyed that the response was utterly content free, like much of the algore site appears to be. I too want to see real answers and specific statements from politicians.
But the thing to remember is that elections are about popularity, and these guys are here to try to get the most votes - and nothing more. If a propaganda web site brings in more votes than a truthful one, the propaganda will win every time. These guys only care about getting elected, and you stand a better chance of being elected if you have more people on your side.
Specifically, people who are easily swayed by propaganda of this sort: the lowest common denominator.
However, I don't think we can find fault with the web master. A question like that should really be directed at the politicians themselves, the policy makers. They are the ones who decide what the content of the site is, and it is unfair to ask a sysadmin why his users refuse to put up anything more than fluff.
-dennis towne
I buy real cds for two very simple reasons: 1) mp3's sound like shit, and 2) finding good mp3's is a lot of work.
:)
I don't have a super high quality stereo, and I don't listen to stuff that people would claim needs high quality to hear the distortion in. I listen to ground-pounding metal and thrash with the occasional trance and techno thrown in, and even at 192kbps the distortion is painfully obvious. Even on headphones, the sound is muddy, the cymbals are slurred, and things aren't quite right. Anyone who says mp3 is 'near lossless' has low standards. I notice marked improvement when listening to the actual cds.
And as for finding mp3's, of course they are available on napster, but invariably they are all of differing bitrate, are named funny, are sometimes cut funny, and at least half of the time have the so called 'resume download' errors in them. One particular track I downloaded had 50+ resume errors in it, and all other copies on napster were of that corrupted original.
That is why I buy cds. I make mp3's from them anyway, but at least my own mp3's dont have the resume problems. I have also burned compilations of tracks on 80 minute cds to take with me when I don't have an mp3 player available (like at work.)
And of course, the cover art is neat
-dentin
I'm pretty close to being a college student, and I download tons of songs and burn mixes...
But I gotta say, there are actually quite a few albums that contain all hit songs. I've found a number of them recently - vnv nation, in flames, dimmu borgir, children of bodom - and its the bands like that that napster helps me find. I've been so impressed by bands like this that I actually have paid full retail price for their work. Maybe you just aren't looking hard enough.
I consider it survival of the fittest - those artists with only 2-3 good songs really -aren't- that good. 2-3 songs isn't good enough to justify buying the album. I expect more, and I expect better, especially if I'm going to be paying fifteen dollars per cd.
I see a couple of possibilities for this - perhaps there will be differential pricing, where one hit wonder cds are much cheaper than truly good cds, or perhaps the music industry will be forced to focus more on talent than marketing. Either possibility would be an improvement, IMO.
(As a side note, I have had quite a bit of difficulty actually purchasing cds and artwork from some of these bands. As most of them are not on major labels, availability is spotty at best. It does appear to be yet another price to pay for quality.)
-dentin