I dunno about you, but when I was growing up, I was convinced that there was no way in hell I could be related to anyone in my family. They were just too friggin' wierd. Supposedly, many kids felt the same way. Maybe we should use DNA testing to get them to accept their roots earlier and move on to more important tasks, like asking their true parents for money.
Someone mentioned the red-pigment test that determined that it wasn't blood on the shroud. The most notable proof that it wasn't the shroud that surrounded Christ was the carbon-14 dating that dated the shroud to about the 11th or 13th century (can't remember which). In any case, it's been dated as well after Christ's death.
I suppose Rosa Parks should have just given her seat up because "breaking the law is the wrong way".
Completely incorrect. The entire Rosa Parks didn't get up from her seat is that she wasn't breaking the law. She was sitting in the black-section of the bus and refused to give up the seat that was rightfully hers to a white person. She never broke a law.
And comparing the MP3 thieves to the civil rights movement is like comparing those being prosecuted for the DeCSS program to the Jews during the Holocaust. It's a completely different order of magnitude and it does an injustice to those who actually weren't criminals.
The moral of the story is that ideas cannot be kept locked up in boxes, buried in vaults, or kept behind the magic of technology. They cannot be imprisoned.
Oh great, this has been categorized as Insightful. Wonderful. Let's get a few things straight. Music and movies are not 'ideas'. Pre-scripts, riffs, those may be ideas, but finished and produced tracks and film are not 'ideas'. They are intellectual property. They are actually a product. When someone steals this, they are stealing property, like taking someone author's novel or some company's car design. It's theft of an actual product, not an idea.
Your analogy is akin to the man walking into a music store, listening to the music, and walking out with an idea for a rock song. If he takes Metallica's Master of Puppets and re-records it and gives it away or selling it without acknowledging that it belongs to Metallica (notice the use of the word 'belongs) and/or paying a fee to use it, it is a crime. It is theft of intellectual property. If, however, he listens to Master of Puppets and then records a song with the same sort of idea, of heart-pumping, hearing-destroying pounding, jamming, and yelling based on his Master of Puppets experience, then yes, he's 'stolen' an idea (what most people call 'influenced').
People have no respect for musician's and their distributors rights. I want the system changed as much as anyone, but the fact is, there's a right way and a wrong way. Breaking the law is the wrong way. Changing the law is the right way. As soon as the immature brats who find the need to steal music in order to make their point grow up and learn to respect people, the sooner we'll get a system that benefits everyone.
NOTE 3: if you have to tell people your post was meant to be funny, you didn't do a good enough job.
No, the problem is that half of Slashdot's readers can't tell the difference between a humorous post and a delusional post. I've had posts mocking something get moderated down two points because people take it seriously and get in a complete huffy, even when it's obviously sarcastic. One time, I posted a reply saying it was just good humor, and then it got moderated up. The majority of people in this world can't tell sarcasm and tone of voice from plain text.
And humor's subjective. We had a good laugh at the studio today based off these comments (and some others that didn't make it).
I've had it up to here with NASA! This is the last straw in a series of straw that have made up an incredible straw-man argument used extensively by conspiracy theorists and dumb people alike. Let's take a look at this startling procession of NASA cover-ups:
Evolution
Everyone knows that human beings came from aliens, yet NASA repeatedly covers up alien contact it has had with the Zoltar species from quadrant Delta that has given us such great 'NASA' technological advances as the TV dinner, freeze-dried chili, and velcro. No self-thinking human being could ever have come up with these astounding inventions, and NASA should just give up the "We don't know any aliens, honest!" argument.
Moon Landing We didn't land on the friggin' moon! Hello? Have you seen the so called 'pictures' of the moon? They have black crosses all over them. I don't know about you, but when I look up at the moon, I don't see any black crosses. I see green cheese, and hell, the so-called 'moon rocks' they brought back had absolutely no cheese in them whatsoever. It doesn't surprise me that geologists analyzing the rocks concluded that they were 'just like earth rocks.' What else are earth rocks going to be like?
Face on Mars I believe the quote heard around NASA headquarters was, "Oops, how'd we let that one slip through?" Of course, there's a face on Mars. The Zoltar species put it there as a way of reminding NASA, "Hey, we're watching you." They did an awful job trying to cover it up with the MGS pictures (I could do that in Photoshop, I mean, come on!), but luckily, Hollywood called them on it in the non-fiction Oscar-caliber classic, Mission to Mars. As always, though, NASA has to send out their Slashdot goons to bad-mouth the movie and talk about what trash it is.
Eros Is A Base Why are we landing on some pitiful asteroid in the middle of a million billion pitiful asteroids? We're setting up a super-secret base from which we can defend ourselves from the Zoltar species, duh! Would you look for humans on that pitiful rock? I wouldn't, and neither will the ZOltar. NASA, obviously ungrateful for velcro has decided to strike back against the oppressors. They're not telling you or I, though, because we probably won't make it.
Is anyone listening to me? Anyone? Hello? Did I mention they knew about Mars Polar Lander's imminent failure before it was even launched, yet covered it up by throwing hundreds of millions dollars and man hours at it? It's obvious. NASA has a history of being sneaky with the public and it has to stop. I'm going to start a petition on a site and I encourage every Slashdot person to sign the petition and then maybe NASA will stop.
NOTE: This post not for the humor (or humour) impaired NOTE 2: Are we landing on Eros or some other asteroid? If it's not Eros, then it's a further NASA cover-up because they're brainwashing people one-by-one into thinking that it's Eros we're landing on, probably to fool the Zoltar when they capture us and digest our brains.
I read elsewhere that this is part of a broader strategy by 3Com to manage themselves for future changes in the hi-tech industry. Basically, USR and Palm function better as independent companies. The modem/low-end connection market has become pretty much saturated and the growth that allowed USR to become such a well-known and successful company has subsided, leaving 3Com with what amounts to a stable and non-developing subsidiary. This is bad for a company in the hi-tech arena because the market changes so fast that if you aren't growing, you're dying. The Palm spin-off was a different story, as 3Com wasn't getting anything from Palm that they needed for their projected focus, mainly ISP services, equipment, etc.
One can poke fun at the business model (buy a company, then spin it off), but it was just bad timing by 3Com. They picked up USR when it was at the top of the peak and now they're letting it go. It's good they recognize the harm in keeping it, because that will maybe allow them to survive. Same goes with Palm, because managing Palm took resources away from other areas they need to concentrate on. I wouldn't be surprised if they created another company or completely separate subdivision to manage their home product line either (cards, small hubs, etc.) as that market's growth is slowing down, too (supposedly, I'm no expert; just reporting what I remember reading).
With the way that Internet business world is shaping up, though, who can tell what will happen?
When I downloaded the free version of WP8 for Linux earlier this year (last year? damn time moves fast), I noticed that WordPerfect used their own font directory and 'fonts.dir' system for the application. The free version apparently doesn't let you add fonts, so I can't use any of the umpteen megabytes of fonts that are served up by xfs (including TrueType fonts). Has this been rectified in WP9?
Is Corel even going to release a version of WP9 free for educational and non-commercial use in support of the community?
I mean, seriously, if there's a potential hole in the license, why doesn't the license change to plug the hole? It won't grandfather, but it will prevent this debate from being carried mercilessly into the future.
People are lambasting this decision and chiding the selection of Spielberg based on his tendency to make mega-blockbusters that target a popular audience.
Guess what people, Speilberg is a great director. You can say what you want about his movies, but he has an uncanny way of filming movies the way they need to be seen. Films like Jurassic Park, ET, and Back to the Future sold a lot of merchandise, yes, and were targeted at mainstream America. They still amazed us (or else we wouldn't have kept going back to see them). And let's not forget Schindler's List, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the opening to Saving Private Ryan, film which was incredibly poignant and powerful. Why were these movies like this? Because they were filmed the right way by a camera under the direction of man who knows how to capture motion video.
Personally, I think Spielberg will adhere to Kubrick's wishes, especially given the reverence that he has for film in general. The fact of the matter is that this movie will probably be a good one no matter who directs it just because of its content, and in the hands of a masterful director, it could be great. I can think of maybe two or three others that might be able to do what Spielberg can do with the camera, but I don't think any of them have the vision to know what needs to be done with the futuristic vision.
If you can do better than Spielberg, then you can talk. Personally, I would rather see this movie made by Spielberg than by Slashdot.
Does this remind anyone else of the Ansible (sp?) in Ender's Game? It still maintains the limit on travel that is set by light speed, but removes the limit on communications. Maybe this is just another example of life imitating art.
Or maybe it's just some crackpot with some good drawings.
I'm sorry. First, Jeff Bezos and Amazon patent One-Click Shopping and now this!? Are they completely nuts?! Do they realize that wormhole generation technology has been alive and well on the Internet for the past umpteen years? I mean, come on, if they're giving out patents for this stuff, I'd better reserve my spot in line for Air!
It is common knowledge that transmitting and receiving electromagnetic waves which comprise opposing magnetic fields having a plane of maximum force running perpendicular to a longitudinal axis of the magnetic field; generating a heat source along an axis parallel to the longitudinal axis of the magnetic field; generating an accelerator parallel to and in close proximity to the heat source, thereby creating an input and output port; and generating a communications signal into the input and output port, thereby sending the signal at a speed faster than light is the easiest way to generate a wormhole. Other more difficult methods include being an alien species in control of vast amounts of subspace energy and doing something weird with the warp core.
If this patent goes through, it will mean the death of the Internet e-commerce for sure. Companies will have to stop using wormhole shipping techniques and revert to slower, more earthbound methods like UPS and Airborne Express. Everyone should write the USPTO right now before this thing gets approved and make sure that the system isn't abused once more and ensuring that future generations will have unlimited access to wormhole generating technology.
NOTE: This post not for the humor (or humour) impaired.
The kids who download free music from a young age as a matter of course have little awareness that they are appropriating someone else's property. Most wouldn't dream of shoplifting in a store: they consider it stealing and they might face arrest, humiliation and punishment as a consequence. But acquiring movies, music, games or other intellectual property online is so simple, so ubiquitous, that it's become almost instinctive.
Bullshit. They have plenty of awareness of what they're doing. A student in our school newspaper was quoted as saying something to the effect of, "Sure, everyone knows it's illegal, but they do it anyway because it's easy." This countered a comment by the school network administrator that most students didn't know it was illegal. Everyone knows it's illegal, and your shoplifting analogy is off-base because of that. If people could walk into a store and walk out with something that normally they would pay for and have absolutely no fear of being caught, they would. The reason they don't is because it's easier to be noticed when your not some invisible entity that's hard to track on the other end of a fiber optic cable. Just because people are harder to track doesn't make it legal.
Jon, what happens if I were to take one of your books that you sell for money, that you make your living off of, and I copy it and redistribute it to tens of thousands of people so that they don't have to pay for it? What if I try to argue this by saying that your book is 'information' and you've released it and therefore it's freely available to everyone? What if I further try and argue my point by saying that people who get a copy of your book will be more likely to go out and buy one of your other books under your standard distribution model? Do you know what you'd do? You'd sue my ass. You'd prosecute me for criminal theft. Why? Because I have taken your intellectual property and distributed it without your permissions, effectively taking property that's yours and removing it from your control. That's stealing, Jon. Plain and simple, and it happens every day with MP3s.
Yes, I agree people aren't addressing issues created by the web, or rather, they're addressing them in ways that aren't beneficial to our ideals of an open society. Yes, I'd love to see the music industry embrace MP3 has a freely distributable form and work with it rather than against it. But the fact is that people people who do it against laws are criminals, and you can't justify that as okay. Perhaps one day, lawmakers will get together and start listening to Us(tm) instead of Them(tm), but justifying criminal actions because you think it's the Right Thing(tm) to do just adds more fuel to the fire.
What makes me even more angry is that no one ever looks at it from the music industry's viewpoint. Everyone just assumes that the way we do it is the right way. Like so many other things in life, the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle ground and as soon as everyone quits fighting each other and starts working together, the sooner we'll have a situation that benefits everyone. The geek community is not the only community in the world, and the music industry is not the only group with ideas about music distribution. My personal opinion is that both sides are being complete brats about the whole issue, and Jon Katz, you've just decided to play along with one group of brats.
Before all the geeks in the world go hurtling themselves off their rackmounts, let's take a look at some of Bill's assumptions.
Artificial Intelligence A lot of Bill's thesis is based on the assumption that we'll be able to create sentience in machines. Yes, computers are getting faster and yes they can even seem to think sometimes, but folks, we don't even understand how our own brains work, much less have the power to create artificial ones. Things like thought require a much deeper understanding than we're likely to achieve in the next 20 years. Don't get me wrong, I think someday we'll be able to do it, but the trials will be long and hard, and the people who do it will really understand how to make it right. I also don't think I'll see it in my lifetime (I'm 22 now).
Replication In terms of machines, a lot of this has to do with artificial intelligence. The creative leap required to construct something and change it is pretty huge. As for nanorobots in our blood stream, they need to find the parts, and they most likely won't be in the same environment in which they were created. Genetics is more fearful, of course, because living things already have the ability to recreate, but most work done in genetics is done under the constant shadow of "what bad things can this bring". I don't think genetics is all that easy a field for an individual to work in as a radical either. It takes an extraordinary amount of time and equipment. The most likely disaster of bioengineering is something that causes the death of a significant member of the planetary cycle (like trees or bees, for instance), which has been a constant concern from day one.
The Free Radical Try as one might, genetics and nanotechnology are not easy fields for individuals to work on their own in. They require extensive amounts of equipment, much of it high-tech since much of the work has only developed over the past twenty years. It's still much more likely that some nut is going to get his hands on some plutonium leaking out of an impoverished former superpower and create some home-made nuclear weapon than it is that someone is going to create a killer replicating robot.
And Bill ignores a lot of other ways we can kill ourselves. Civil strife, environmental pollution, global warming, and, my personal favorite, contact with a hostile alien species (didn't Independence Day look real?). The fact is, since day one, humans have been faced with causing their own extinction (overhunting, overfarming, overpolluting, travel spreading disease, etc. etc.) and we've done just fine recognizing and adapting to these problems. The one thing that nobody ever seems to factor in is the human response to adversity. We can change our environment, and once we've changed it, if something's wrong, we can change it further (not back), so that we can live in it.
p.s. And did anyone notice that Bill was called 'phlegmatic'? I thought they meant 'pragmatic', but that's one helluva typo.
Is that really necessary? I mean, the whole point of this effort was not to produce a program that could decrypt CyberPatrol's list so that millions of script kiddies could mirror away and the software could be used forever, completely destroying the decryption. The goal was to expose the list and CyberPatrol's motivations. I mean, honestly, mirror the list. That's what's damaging. A couple of lawsuits brought against this company will be enough to bring it down. It doesn't matter if they re-encrypt their list. The fact that these web sites are in there should be enough to form a case, and the list has already been decrypted. This program is not the next DeCSS, the list is.
Has it dawned on anyone else that the most offensive part of that song isn't the language it contains ('fart', whatever), but the fact that it completely ridicules Canada? I mean, honestly, if ABC is worried about offending people, why is it concerned with the word 'fart'? Their own shows contain such words as 'bitch', 'ass', and 'fart' regularly (The Drew Carey Show, Whose Line Is It, Anyway, Spin City, et al). For a network concerned about offense, they have the potential to do it regularly. The fact that Canada, the country the song is most likely to offend (both because it makes fun of Canada and because Canadians obviously are sensitive about their big flapping heads, beady little eyes, and tendency to mispronounce simple English words) is a significant of ABC's viewership seems not to have dawned on any of their directors.
I'd say they were sitting around farting, except that their heads are all up their *bleep*.
NOTE: I have censored myself to protect Slashdot's younger viewers from potentiall reading bad words like 'ass'.
AOL has, of course, been actively lobbying Congress for open cable lines, presumably so that they could use them. When they bought Time Warner, they quit lobbying Congress, presumably because they now owned a cable network and didn't need. Today, they open up their lines. Very interesting. Are they being un-hypocritical or do they have ulterior motives. The article posits several hypotheses about how AOL doesn't think it will lose any customers because of the arrangement. I think it's more that they are going to define how open cable systems work, the way they want. This will ultimately work out to their benefit.
The articles keep referring to "consumer choice" when it comes to selecting an ISP. I thought consumers already had a choice. Are they referring to Time Warner cable customers or are they referring to AOL access? They never really make any of this clear.
What's this going to do to the bandwidth map? Is it opening up a whole lot of bandwidth to the Internet or is it opening up a specialized source of bandwidth, a sort of subset of the Internet that only a privileged few will get on? Right now, it's all very gimmicky. The maneuver is nice, but you know that AOL isn't doing this to be nice. I don't think it's an anti-trust thing, either. AOL smells some money somewhere and they must be hot on the scent.
".. and you know what happens when you make an assumption. You make an ass out of you.. and umption."
Threewave CTF's home page isn't http://threewave.com/. It's http://www.captured.com/threewave/ and it hasn't been updated since he went to work for id (if I'm not mistaken).
As always, this comes with the disclaimer that I may be wrong.
Bruce Tognazzini, founder of Apple's famous Human Interface Group and a frequent interface critic, stressed the need for a standard Linux interface and a comprehensive set of interface guidelines to ensure consistency across the system.
Ugh, no. No standards on GUI, please. The great thing about using Linux is that there isn't just one way to do something. If we start forcing GUI standards on people, we'll get bloated window managers that don't serve the needs of particular people. It's very very difficult to make one interface that suits everyone without making it be this huge Swiss Army knife of a program (see emacs, although please, no flames).
The X standard is enough. I think Eazel's efforts are great, but I like the variety that the current crop of window managers provides and if you 'standardize' an interface or the commands it can use, inevitably, something will be included that you don't need and something else will be left out that you do.
X-Files made a pretty decent movie for a television series that both drew from the history of the show and stood on its own as an excellent plot. When they returned to the series, not only did they do a great job of integrating the movie back into the plotline without too much dependency, but it almost seemed to give the series a new vibrancy.
But then again, X-Files is a very different type of television show that is almost more suited for the big screen than it is for the small screen.
This is a rant, but this is not a troll, flamebait, nor is it off-topic. So read with open ears.
I am sick of seeing linux development kernel upgrades posted on Slashdot. I think if Slashdot is going to get in the business of announcing minor software updates, they should announce all software updates. I recognize the need for Slashdot to mention major software upgrades, such as GNOME hitting the 1.0 plateau or KDE hitting the 2.0 plateau, but announcing every single minor development kernel revision is ridiculous. That's why we have places like Freshmeat, and that's why we have things like Freshmeat slashboxes. It's that simple.
But, I can understand how this might be of some value to people who can't figure out how useful Freshmeat is or even know it exists or just plain don't like it. I like people to be constructive, not destructive, so I propose that Rob et al develop a new Slashdot topic like 'kernel-development-update' and make it real specific to development kernel announcements. I like reading about major proposals to the kernel, so that shouldn't be in there, and I certainly don't want to filter out all Linux related news, so Linux development kernel updates shouldn't be under that heading. Give it a cute kernel icon, like a corn kernel or something. It's just inane to make these announcements every week or so for something that is in development. Yes, it's the road to 2.4, but let's wait until we get a 2.4pre kernel or something and the end is in sight. With Linux development kernels having a history of getting into the hundreds in minor version numbers, we don't need these. Freshmeat's good enough.
And for those who are going to say that the universe doesn't revolve around me (and I'm sure you're out there), Stephen Hawking postulated that the universe could be expanding from any point, and so right now, I'm designating that point as me. Call it the Hrunting Corollary.
My correction. After some searching, it looks like another bill was passed by the Senate just the other day, so maybe I need to further check some facts.
Eh, well, I'm human. If I could, I'd moderate this down a bit.:)
There, UCITA has been passed by the Legislature and is awaiting signature by Governor Jim Gilmore.
Only the Legislature has passed the bill. The Senate is still reviewing it. You can find bills and amendments at this site by searching for UCITA. The bill in the Senate has been referred to a committee which is to report back no later than December 1, 2000 (as of Valentine's Day). IANAL, but my understanding of Virginian law from reading the VA constitution is that both houses (the Legislature and the Senate) must pass the bill before it can become law, and they must always go through a committee before they can be voted on.
This doesn't change the need for calm activism against UCITA, but the situation is not as dire as it appears to be. Please, please, check your facts before posting a story.
This is such a major flaw in the whole concept of the product. Understanding the reasoning behind the concept, but I would think they could have found a little better architecture. From a business model, how are they going to promote a product that fundamentally compromises the privacy of the user? Doesn't make sense to me.
People don't care about their privacy to the degree that Beam-It threatens them. It's that plain and simple. We don't want our address information or phone number freely distributed out over the Internet, but we don't mind if people know what CDs we listen to. I personally don't care if they keep a database of the CDs that I frequent. Who cares what music I listen to, and conversely, who do I care knows? People are not being persecuted or harassed for it. The privacy of the user isn't completely compromised; it's just compromised enough to obtain enough information for the product to work. Phone books work the same way. E-mail directories work the same way. It's not a complete compromise, just a partial compromise.
Of course, many partial compromises can be put together to form the whole picture, but it's already to late for that. If anyone thinks that their privacy is completely secure, they're insane. And in light of that, it's not a big deal (especially from a promotional standpoint) that listening habits could be catalogued.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno about you, but when I was growing up, I was convinced that there was no way in hell I could be related to anyone in my family. They were just too friggin' wierd. Supposedly, many kids felt the same way. Maybe we should use DNA testing to get them to accept their roots earlier and move on to more important tasks, like asking their true parents for money.
Someone mentioned the red-pigment test that determined that it wasn't blood on the shroud. The most notable proof that it wasn't the shroud that surrounded Christ was the carbon-14 dating that dated the shroud to about the 11th or 13th century (can't remember which). In any case, it's been dated as well after Christ's death.
I suppose Rosa Parks should have just given her seat up because "breaking the law is the wrong way".
Completely incorrect. The entire Rosa Parks didn't get up from her seat is that she wasn't breaking the law. She was sitting in the black-section of the bus and refused to give up the seat that was rightfully hers to a white person. She never broke a law.
And comparing the MP3 thieves to the civil rights movement is like comparing those being prosecuted for the DeCSS program to the Jews during the Holocaust. It's a completely different order of magnitude and it does an injustice to those who actually weren't criminals.
The moral of the story is that ideas cannot be kept locked up in boxes, buried in vaults, or kept behind the magic of technology. They cannot be imprisoned.
Oh great, this has been categorized as Insightful. Wonderful. Let's get a few things straight. Music and movies are not 'ideas'. Pre-scripts, riffs, those may be ideas, but finished and produced tracks and film are not 'ideas'. They are intellectual property. They are actually a product. When someone steals this, they are stealing property, like taking someone author's novel or some company's car design. It's theft of an actual product, not an idea.
Your analogy is akin to the man walking into a music store, listening to the music, and walking out with an idea for a rock song. If he takes Metallica's Master of Puppets and re-records it and gives it away or selling it without acknowledging that it belongs to Metallica (notice the use of the word 'belongs) and/or paying a fee to use it, it is a crime. It is theft of intellectual property. If, however, he listens to Master of Puppets and then records a song with the same sort of idea, of heart-pumping, hearing-destroying pounding, jamming, and yelling based on his Master of Puppets experience, then yes, he's 'stolen' an idea (what most people call 'influenced').
People have no respect for musician's and their distributors rights. I want the system changed as much as anyone, but the fact is, there's a right way and a wrong way. Breaking the law is the wrong way. Changing the law is the right way. As soon as the immature brats who find the need to steal music in order to make their point grow up and learn to respect people, the sooner we'll get a system that benefits everyone.
NOTE 3: if you have to tell people your post was meant to be funny, you didn't do a good enough job.
No, the problem is that half of Slashdot's readers can't tell the difference between a humorous post and a delusional post. I've had posts mocking something get moderated down two points because people take it seriously and get in a complete huffy, even when it's obviously sarcastic. One time, I posted a reply saying it was just good humor, and then it got moderated up. The majority of people in this world can't tell sarcasm and tone of voice from plain text.
And humor's subjective. We had a good laugh at the studio today based off these comments (and some others that didn't make it).
Everyone knows that human beings came from aliens, yet NASA repeatedly covers up alien contact it has had with the Zoltar species from quadrant Delta that has given us such great 'NASA' technological advances as the TV dinner, freeze-dried chili, and velcro. No self-thinking human being could ever have come up with these astounding inventions, and NASA should just give up the "We don't know any aliens, honest!" argument.
We didn't land on the friggin' moon! Hello? Have you seen the so called 'pictures' of the moon? They have black crosses all over them. I don't know about you, but when I look up at the moon, I don't see any black crosses. I see green cheese, and hell, the so-called 'moon rocks' they brought back had absolutely no cheese in them whatsoever. It doesn't surprise me that geologists analyzing the rocks concluded that they were 'just like earth rocks.' What else are earth rocks going to be like?
I believe the quote heard around NASA headquarters was, "Oops, how'd we let that one slip through?" Of course, there's a face on Mars. The Zoltar species put it there as a way of reminding NASA, "Hey, we're watching you." They did an awful job trying to cover it up with the MGS pictures (I could do that in Photoshop, I mean, come on!), but luckily, Hollywood called them on it in the non-fiction Oscar-caliber classic, Mission to Mars. As always, though, NASA has to send out their Slashdot goons to bad-mouth the movie and talk about what trash it is.
Why are we landing on some pitiful asteroid in the middle of a million billion pitiful asteroids? We're setting up a super-secret base from which we can defend ourselves from the Zoltar species, duh! Would you look for humans on that pitiful rock? I wouldn't, and neither will the ZOltar. NASA, obviously ungrateful for velcro has decided to strike back against the oppressors. They're not telling you or I, though, because we probably won't make it.
Is anyone listening to me? Anyone? Hello? Did I mention they knew about Mars Polar Lander's imminent failure before it was even launched, yet covered it up by throwing hundreds of millions dollars and man hours at it? It's obvious. NASA has a history of being sneaky with the public and it has to stop. I'm going to start a petition on a site and I encourage every Slashdot person to sign the petition and then maybe NASA will stop.
NOTE: This post not for the humor (or humour) impaired
NOTE 2: Are we landing on Eros or some other asteroid? If it's not Eros, then it's a further NASA cover-up because they're brainwashing people one-by-one into thinking that it's Eros we're landing on, probably to fool the Zoltar when they capture us and digest our brains.
I read elsewhere that this is part of a broader strategy by 3Com to manage themselves for future changes in the hi-tech industry. Basically, USR and Palm function better as independent companies. The modem/low-end connection market has become pretty much saturated and the growth that allowed USR to become such a well-known and successful company has subsided, leaving 3Com with what amounts to a stable and non-developing subsidiary. This is bad for a company in the hi-tech arena because the market changes so fast that if you aren't growing, you're dying. The Palm spin-off was a different story, as 3Com wasn't getting anything from Palm that they needed for their projected focus, mainly ISP services, equipment, etc.
One can poke fun at the business model (buy a company, then spin it off), but it was just bad timing by 3Com. They picked up USR when it was at the top of the peak and now they're letting it go. It's good they recognize the harm in keeping it, because that will maybe allow them to survive. Same goes with Palm, because managing Palm took resources away from other areas they need to concentrate on. I wouldn't be surprised if they created another company or completely separate subdivision to manage their home product line either (cards, small hubs, etc.) as that market's growth is slowing down, too (supposedly, I'm no expert; just reporting what I remember reading).
With the way that Internet business world is shaping up, though, who can tell what will happen?
When I downloaded the free version of WP8 for Linux earlier this year (last year? damn time moves fast), I noticed that WordPerfect used their own font directory and 'fonts.dir' system for the application. The free version apparently doesn't let you add fonts, so I can't use any of the umpteen megabytes of fonts that are served up by xfs (including TrueType fonts). Has this been rectified in WP9?
Is Corel even going to release a version of WP9 free for educational and non-commercial use in support of the community?
I mean, seriously, if there's a potential hole in the license, why doesn't the license change to plug the hole? It won't grandfather, but it will prevent this debate from being carried mercilessly into the future.
Change the GPL, effective a certain date.
People are lambasting this decision and chiding the selection of Spielberg based on his tendency to make mega-blockbusters that target a popular audience.
Guess what people, Speilberg is a great director. You can say what you want about his movies, but he has an uncanny way of filming movies the way they need to be seen. Films like Jurassic Park, ET, and Back to the Future sold a lot of merchandise, yes, and were targeted at mainstream America. They still amazed us (or else we wouldn't have kept going back to see them). And let's not forget Schindler's List, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the opening to Saving Private Ryan, film which was incredibly poignant and powerful. Why were these movies like this? Because they were filmed the right way by a camera under the direction of man who knows how to capture motion video.
Personally, I think Spielberg will adhere to Kubrick's wishes, especially given the reverence that he has for film in general. The fact of the matter is that this movie will probably be a good one no matter who directs it just because of its content, and in the hands of a masterful director, it could be great. I can think of maybe two or three others that might be able to do what Spielberg can do with the camera, but I don't think any of them have the vision to know what needs to be done with the futuristic vision.
If you can do better than Spielberg, then you can talk. Personally, I would rather see this movie made by Spielberg than by Slashdot.
Does this remind anyone else of the Ansible (sp?) in Ender's Game? It still maintains the limit on travel that is set by light speed, but removes the limit on communications. Maybe this is just another example of life imitating art.
Or maybe it's just some crackpot with some good drawings.
I'm sorry. First, Jeff Bezos and Amazon patent One-Click Shopping and now this!? Are they completely nuts?! Do they realize that wormhole generation technology has been alive and well on the Internet for the past umpteen years? I mean, come on, if they're giving out patents for this stuff, I'd better reserve my spot in line for Air!
It is common knowledge that transmitting and receiving electromagnetic waves which comprise opposing magnetic fields having a plane of maximum force running perpendicular to a longitudinal axis of the magnetic field; generating a heat source along an axis parallel to the longitudinal axis of the magnetic field; generating an accelerator parallel to and in close proximity to the heat source, thereby creating an input and output port; and generating a communications signal into the input and output port, thereby sending the signal at a speed faster than light is the easiest way to generate a wormhole. Other more difficult methods include being an alien species in control of vast amounts of subspace energy and doing something weird with the warp core.
If this patent goes through, it will mean the death of the Internet e-commerce for sure. Companies will have to stop using wormhole shipping techniques and revert to slower, more earthbound methods like UPS and Airborne Express. Everyone should write the USPTO right now before this thing gets approved and make sure that the system isn't abused once more and ensuring that future generations will have unlimited access to wormhole generating technology.
NOTE: This post not for the humor (or humour) impaired.
The kids who download free music from a young age as a matter of course have little awareness that they are appropriating someone else's property. Most wouldn't dream of shoplifting in a store: they consider it stealing and they might face arrest, humiliation and punishment as a consequence. But acquiring movies, music, games or other intellectual property online is so simple, so ubiquitous, that it's become almost instinctive.
Bullshit. They have plenty of awareness of what they're doing. A student in our school newspaper was quoted as saying something to the effect of, "Sure, everyone knows it's illegal, but they do it anyway because it's easy." This countered a comment by the school network administrator that most students didn't know it was illegal. Everyone knows it's illegal, and your shoplifting analogy is off-base because of that. If people could walk into a store and walk out with something that normally they would pay for and have absolutely no fear of being caught, they would. The reason they don't is because it's easier to be noticed when your not some invisible entity that's hard to track on the other end of a fiber optic cable. Just because people are harder to track doesn't make it legal.
Jon, what happens if I were to take one of your books that you sell for money, that you make your living off of, and I copy it and redistribute it to tens of thousands of people so that they don't have to pay for it? What if I try to argue this by saying that your book is 'information' and you've released it and therefore it's freely available to everyone? What if I further try and argue my point by saying that people who get a copy of your book will be more likely to go out and buy one of your other books under your standard distribution model? Do you know what you'd do? You'd sue my ass. You'd prosecute me for criminal theft. Why? Because I have taken your intellectual property and distributed it without your permissions, effectively taking property that's yours and removing it from your control. That's stealing, Jon. Plain and simple, and it happens every day with MP3s.
Yes, I agree people aren't addressing issues created by the web, or rather, they're addressing them in ways that aren't beneficial to our ideals of an open society. Yes, I'd love to see the music industry embrace MP3 has a freely distributable form and work with it rather than against it. But the fact is that people people who do it against laws are criminals, and you can't justify that as okay. Perhaps one day, lawmakers will get together and start listening to Us(tm) instead of Them(tm), but justifying criminal actions because you think it's the Right Thing(tm) to do just adds more fuel to the fire.
What makes me even more angry is that no one ever looks at it from the music industry's viewpoint. Everyone just assumes that the way we do it is the right way. Like so many other things in life, the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle ground and as soon as everyone quits fighting each other and starts working together, the sooner we'll have a situation that benefits everyone. The geek community is not the only community in the world, and the music industry is not the only group with ideas about music distribution. My personal opinion is that both sides are being complete brats about the whole issue, and Jon Katz, you've just decided to play along with one group of brats.
Before all the geeks in the world go hurtling themselves off their rackmounts, let's take a look at some of Bill's assumptions.
Artificial Intelligence
A lot of Bill's thesis is based on the assumption that we'll be able to create sentience in machines. Yes, computers are getting faster and yes they can even seem to think sometimes, but folks, we don't even understand how our own brains work, much less have the power to create artificial ones. Things like thought require a much deeper understanding than we're likely to achieve in the next 20 years. Don't get me wrong, I think someday we'll be able to do it, but the trials will be long and hard, and the people who do it will really understand how to make it right. I also don't think I'll see it in my lifetime (I'm 22 now).
Replication
In terms of machines, a lot of this has to do with artificial intelligence. The creative leap required to construct something and change it is pretty huge. As for nanorobots in our blood stream, they need to find the parts, and they most likely won't be in the same environment in which they were created. Genetics is more fearful, of course, because living things already have the ability to recreate, but most work done in genetics is done under the constant shadow of "what bad things can this bring". I don't think genetics is all that easy a field for an individual to work in as a radical either. It takes an extraordinary amount of time and equipment. The most likely disaster of bioengineering is something that causes the death of a significant member of the planetary cycle (like trees or bees, for instance), which has been a constant concern from day one.
The Free Radical
Try as one might, genetics and nanotechnology are not easy fields for individuals to work on their own in. They require extensive amounts of equipment, much of it high-tech since much of the work has only developed over the past twenty years. It's still much more likely that some nut is going to get his hands on some plutonium leaking out of an impoverished former superpower and create some home-made nuclear weapon than it is that someone is going to create a killer replicating robot.
And Bill ignores a lot of other ways we can kill ourselves. Civil strife, environmental pollution, global warming, and, my personal favorite, contact with a hostile alien species (didn't Independence Day look real?). The fact is, since day one, humans have been faced with causing their own extinction (overhunting, overfarming, overpolluting, travel spreading disease, etc. etc.) and we've done just fine recognizing and adapting to these problems. The one thing that nobody ever seems to factor in is the human response to adversity. We can change our environment, and once we've changed it, if something's wrong, we can change it further (not back), so that we can live in it.
p.s. And did anyone notice that Bill was called 'phlegmatic'? I thought they meant 'pragmatic', but that's one helluva typo.
Is that really necessary? I mean, the whole point of this effort was not to produce a program that could decrypt CyberPatrol's list so that millions of script kiddies could mirror away and the software could be used forever, completely destroying the decryption. The goal was to expose the list and CyberPatrol's motivations. I mean, honestly, mirror the list. That's what's damaging. A couple of lawsuits brought against this company will be enough to bring it down. It doesn't matter if they re-encrypt their list. The fact that these web sites are in there should be enough to form a case, and the list has already been decrypted. This program is not the next DeCSS, the list is.
Has it dawned on anyone else that the most offensive part of that song isn't the language it contains ('fart', whatever), but the fact that it completely ridicules Canada? I mean, honestly, if ABC is worried about offending people, why is it concerned with the word 'fart'? Their own shows contain such words as 'bitch', 'ass', and 'fart' regularly (The Drew Carey Show, Whose Line Is It, Anyway, Spin City, et al). For a network concerned about offense, they have the potential to do it regularly. The fact that Canada, the country the song is most likely to offend (both because it makes fun of Canada and because Canadians obviously are sensitive about their big flapping heads, beady little eyes, and tendency to mispronounce simple English words) is a significant of ABC's viewership seems not to have dawned on any of their directors.
I'd say they were sitting around farting, except that their heads are all up their *bleep*.
NOTE: I have censored myself to protect Slashdot's younger viewers from potentiall reading bad words like 'ass'.
AOL has, of course, been actively lobbying Congress for open cable lines, presumably so that they could use them. When they bought Time Warner, they quit lobbying Congress, presumably because they now owned a cable network and didn't need. Today, they open up their lines. Very interesting. Are they being un-hypocritical or do they have ulterior motives. The article posits several hypotheses about how AOL doesn't think it will lose any customers because of the arrangement. I think it's more that they are going to define how open cable systems work, the way they want. This will ultimately work out to their benefit.
The articles keep referring to "consumer choice" when it comes to selecting an ISP. I thought consumers already had a choice. Are they referring to Time Warner cable customers or are they referring to AOL access? They never really make any of this clear.
What's this going to do to the bandwidth map? Is it opening up a whole lot of bandwidth to the Internet or is it opening up a specialized source of bandwidth, a sort of subset of the Internet that only a privileged few will get on? Right now, it's all very gimmicky. The maneuver is nice, but you know that AOL isn't doing this to be nice. I don't think it's an anti-trust thing, either. AOL smells some money somewhere and they must be hot on the scent.
".. and you know what happens when you make an assumption. You make an ass out of you .. and umption."
Threewave CTF's home page isn't http://threewave.com/. It's http://www.captured.com/threewave/ and it hasn't been updated since he went to work for id (if I'm not mistaken).
As always, this comes with the disclaimer that I may be wrong.
Bruce Tognazzini, founder of Apple's famous Human Interface Group and a frequent interface critic, stressed the need for a standard Linux interface and a comprehensive set of interface guidelines to ensure consistency across the system.
Ugh, no. No standards on GUI, please. The great thing about using Linux is that there isn't just one way to do something. If we start forcing GUI standards on people, we'll get bloated window managers that don't serve the needs of particular people. It's very very difficult to make one interface that suits everyone without making it be this huge Swiss Army knife of a program (see emacs, although please, no flames).
The X standard is enough. I think Eazel's efforts are great, but I like the variety that the current crop of window managers provides and if you 'standardize' an interface or the commands it can use, inevitably, something will be included that you don't need and something else will be left out that you do.
X-Files.
X-Files made a pretty decent movie for a television series that both drew from the history of the show and stood on its own as an excellent plot. When they returned to the series, not only did they do a great job of integrating the movie back into the plotline without too much dependency, but it almost seemed to give the series a new vibrancy.
But then again, X-Files is a very different type of television show that is almost more suited for the big screen than it is for the small screen.
This is a rant, but this is not a troll, flamebait, nor is it off-topic. So read with open ears.
I am sick of seeing linux development kernel upgrades posted on Slashdot. I think if Slashdot is going to get in the business of announcing minor software updates, they should announce all software updates. I recognize the need for Slashdot to mention major software upgrades, such as GNOME hitting the 1.0 plateau or KDE hitting the 2.0 plateau, but announcing every single minor development kernel revision is ridiculous. That's why we have places like Freshmeat, and that's why we have things like Freshmeat slashboxes. It's that simple.
But, I can understand how this might be of some value to people who can't figure out how useful Freshmeat is or even know it exists or just plain don't like it. I like people to be constructive, not destructive, so I propose that Rob et al develop a new Slashdot topic like 'kernel-development-update' and make it real specific to development kernel announcements. I like reading about major proposals to the kernel, so that shouldn't be in there, and I certainly don't want to filter out all Linux related news, so Linux development kernel updates shouldn't be under that heading. Give it a cute kernel icon, like a corn kernel or something. It's just inane to make these announcements every week or so for something that is in development. Yes, it's the road to 2.4, but let's wait until we get a 2.4pre kernel or something and the end is in sight. With Linux development kernels having a history of getting into the hundreds in minor version numbers, we don't need these. Freshmeat's good enough.
And for those who are going to say that the universe doesn't revolve around me (and I'm sure you're out there), Stephen Hawking postulated that the universe could be expanding from any point, and so right now, I'm designating that point as me. Call it the Hrunting Corollary.
*wheeze wheeze*
My correction. After some searching, it looks like another bill was passed by the Senate just the other day, so maybe I need to further check some facts.
:)
Eh, well, I'm human. If I could, I'd moderate this down a bit.
Turn the apple backwards.
There, UCITA has been passed by the Legislature and is awaiting signature by Governor Jim Gilmore.
Only the Legislature has passed the bill. The Senate is still reviewing it. You can find bills and amendments at this site by searching for UCITA. The bill in the Senate has been referred to a committee which is to report back no later than December 1, 2000 (as of Valentine's Day). IANAL, but my understanding of Virginian law from reading the VA constitution is that both houses (the Legislature and the Senate) must pass the bill before it can become law, and they must always go through a committee before they can be voted on.
This doesn't change the need for calm activism against UCITA, but the situation is not as dire as it appears to be. Please, please, check your facts before posting a story.
This is such a major flaw in the whole concept of the product. Understanding the reasoning behind the concept, but I would think they could have found a little better architecture. From a business model, how are they going to promote a product that fundamentally compromises the privacy of the user? Doesn't make sense to me.
People don't care about their privacy to the degree that Beam-It threatens them. It's that plain and simple. We don't want our address information or phone number freely distributed out over the Internet, but we don't mind if people know what CDs we listen to. I personally don't care if they keep a database of the CDs that I frequent. Who cares what music I listen to, and conversely, who do I care knows? People are not being persecuted or harassed for it. The privacy of the user isn't completely compromised; it's just compromised enough to obtain enough information for the product to work. Phone books work the same way. E-mail directories work the same way. It's not a complete compromise, just a partial compromise.
Of course, many partial compromises can be put together to form the whole picture, but it's already to late for that. If anyone thinks that their privacy is completely secure, they're insane. And in light of that, it's not a big deal (especially from a promotional standpoint) that listening habits could be catalogued.