"I am sure Alcatel included such a clause in the contract that would allow for something like this to happen."
Since you didn't even read the article, how can you be sure of this? According to the article, the defendant was led to believe that only ideas relevant to his work would be included. Furthermore, despite the ruling, it's not at all obvious that something banging around in someone's head should be considered an "idea" to be governed by the contract.
Stick to writing "frist p0st!!!" At least that way your intentions are honest.
Re:Good idea for nuclear waste?
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 1
You know, as dangerous as nuclear fuel might be, it's not exactly time-critical. Just strap a solar sail onto the thing and use that to dissipate the energy. Maybe it'll take a few hundred orbits, but there's no rush. Alternately, you could use some solar panels to drive some cheap ion propulsion. Again, perfect if you're in no hurry.
Re:Impact on the environment (and the ground)
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 1
I think you're both wrong (responder more blatantly than the original poster).
Responder: 9.8 m/sec is the force exerted by gravity at sea level. By the time you get to the top of the cable (about 100,000 km away), the force being exerted is orders of magnitude smaller.
Original Posting Guy: You're correct that the top of the cable would be pulled on by the bottom of the cable, but it wouldn't be as bad as having the whole of the cable accelerating at 9.8 m/s/s. Remember that the acceleration of the bottom of the cable is being retarded by the inertia of the top of the cable, since the top isn't being subjected to as much gravity.
Personally, I think they ought to line the cable with explosives at periodic intervals, if the breaking of the cable is really a concern. Also, if it's made out of a dozen smaller cables instead of one large cable, the greater surface area might ensure that more of it burned up in the atmosphere.
I think you misunderstand the nature of the initiative.
First, it doesn't force any software vendor to make their source code "public domain." If I understand the initiative correctly (and I probably don't), then Peru's requirements could be met simply by keeping a copy of the source in escrow. It wouldn't be publicly available, hence it wouldn't cause a security concern. For the same reason, it wouldn't turn commercial companies into open source ones.
Second, you claim that we don't have to buy commercial software if we don't want it. That's fine for private decision-makers when they're. . . er, making private decisions. But when the government (an entity most of its constituents have to deal with on a regular basis) decides to only store its data in proprietary format X, or only support unpublished "standard" Y, then they force their constituents to either buy that software or forfeit valuable services.
You're not the first to imply that open source software can't make money. You are, however, wrong. There's serious money behind Linux, and there will always be so long as there's a critical mass of people who find it useful.
He doesn't seem to be talking about DOS attacks. It sounds more like he wants to scan the attacking system, find an open hole, and use it to paralyze the computer. No high bandwidth required.
" thus increasing the costs for people like me who actually pay for the software."
I've got a lot of concerns about the effects of piracy, but one thing it doesn't do is raise prices for consumers of the legitimate software.
Consider this: Software vendors, even if they're selling the only comparable product on the market, are still forced into competition. Their competitor? Their own illegally pirated product. In order to stay competitive, they have to keep their prices low.
I think that piracy is generally unethical. Also, it hurts the open source movement. For example, if nobody could pirate Adobe Photoshop easily, you can be sure that the interest in Gimp would skyrocket. As it stands now, who cares? They're both free, and Adobe is better known and more featureful.
How do you figure? The energy that damages your ears is that tiny fraction which actually hits your eardrums. Therefore, it's the same whether coming from a 300W speaker or a 3W headphone.
Hint: If it sounds like a jet engine to you, then it's beating on your eardrums like a jet engine would.
"Mozilla certainly eschewed the "corporate" direction, refusing still to fix rendering bugs which MSIE does not share and instead babbling about "standards"."
Personally, I use Mozilla as my primary browser. The only times I've ever noticed rendering bugs were on pages written for the sole purpose of showing them off. I dunno, maybe I don't visit enough crappy Geocities sites.
"But instead of choosing one correct direction, the Mozilla team chose ten or fifteen of them, selected an obscure computer language which nobody knew,"
C++?
"demanded 8-way cross-platform compatibility,"
What's the problem with this? Portable code is good code, unless your intention is to lock users into a single platform.
"and then proceeded to code all of this without once dropping below an 0.12% blood alcohol level."
This is a complete falsehood (with the possible exception of Chatzilla).
"Then the code was united from all its inferior "components" (Chatzilla, Gecko, Galeon, etc) into one monolith of binary terror, poised and crouching, just waiting to take a giant memory leak and a huge core dump on your desktop."
Gecko is not inferior. Galeon is not Mozilla. Chatzilla is a separate binary. Get your facts straight before you troll, as it's a hell of a lot more convincing.
"Microsoft, on the other hand, honed IE into a product which both advances their political and economic goals, and also doesn't suck balls."
The simple fact that IE does advance Microsoft's political and economic goals is reason enough to demand an alternative. The day I can disable unrequested popups on IE is the day I will agree that it doesn't suck balls.
From as high up as he is, he should break the sound barrier about three seconds after he jumps. Remember that the speed of sound depends on the medium (sound waves travel much faster through steel than air; on a neutron star, the speed of sound is approximately the speed of light). Twenty-five miles up, the atmosphere is very thin indeed.
What I can't remember is whether Mach 1 is defined as the speed of sound at a certain air density, or whether it can vary.
My advice to the jumper: If the chute doesn't open, go head first. What do you have to lose?
On behalf of the Darwin Awards Selection Committee, I would like to thank you for your interest in participating in our selection process.
However, in order to be a candidate for the Darwin Awards, one must first be a self-replicating entity whose characteristics can be transferred from one generation to the next. As the aircraft in question was unmanned, and there is no known mechanism by which the craft itself could pass its traits on to its descendants, we must respectfully deny your nomination.
Again, thank you for your interest, and if you find any stories that fulfill the above criteria, do not hesitate to send them to us.
"If you don't like something is your right to say that. On the other hand, is not your right to insult others' beliefs."
Au contraire. I have every right to insult the beliefs of whomever I see fit. That's part and parcel of free speech. I don't have the right to force others to listen to it, nor do I have a right to perform the insulting in such a manner that it would incite a reasonable person to violence. Finally, nobody is under any obligation to give my insults any weight, or accord them any other sort of respect.
It is completely asinine to think that every person's beliefs, regardless of merit, should be shielded from public criticism. It is both possible and common for two people to respect each other, even while openly acknowledging that they each think the other's beliefs are a load of crap.
So please, for Darwin's sake, stop whining about having too much freedom.
Since each Gnutella client already acts as a distributed server, why not just take it a step further? Just have every client keep and store info about what others are making available. If a client could service each request not just by checking if it was there, but by checking the information it had on ten or twenty other clients, the number of times a request would have to be forwarded would plummet.
Sure, there would be problems handling outdated information. And the bandwidth necessary to trade databases has its own performance costs. But I don't see anything insurmountable about such a proposal.
From an environmental and a containment standpoint, nuclear waste isn't that much different from other hazardous materials. The area is evacuated, cleanup crews are called in, and the material is contained and removed. Is a drum of cobalt-60 really that much scarier than a drum of methylethylketone? Only to people who think one whiff of the stuff and you grow a three-headed kid.
It's sad that this sort of agendized research discredits the message of more clear-headed environmentalists. The report is just bad science. I mean, calculating the number of new Earths that would need to be colonized is just silly. Such planets just aren't out there, and certainly aren't accessible enough to make a meaningful difference. The authors of the study knew this, and were just using the idea as a cheap debating trick: Claim that these are the only two possible solutions, prove one unworkable, and then just leave people to assume that the other solution must be the only solution.
But let's not forget that humanity really is doing things to the planet that have never been done before. Are we doing irreparable harm? Are some of our interventions actually beneficial to the environment? There aren't any certain answers (unless you talk to the WWF or Rush Limbaugh). But as our technological prowess improves, our ability to alter the planet will only become more pronounced. Reducing consumption is just a way of saying, "We've decided to proceed with caution.
Now, environmentalists have been prophesying the collapse of the ecosystem for decades now. But are they predicting something inevitable (the volcano will erupt), something mythical (Jesus is coming, so look busy), or something possible yet avoidable? I don't think that we should put the brakes on all human activity every time someone paints a doomsday scenario. On the other hand, let's not turn buying an SUV into a courageous act of hope and optimism.
See? This is exactly the sort of thing that the MPAA is trying to stop! Such shameless theft of the intellectual property of others is just further proof that the EFF is pro-piracy, not pro-consumer. </flamebait>
Who needs weight? All the gnutella clients are based off of Gnucleus which is open source. If they want their own bastardized client, they don't need a court order. Just someone with coding skills.
The preview feature would have many valid uses, but a foolproof verifier of content it is not.
I'd think a lot more of Budget's "misuse of property" concerns if they didn't stand to weasel into payments of thousands of dollars by monitoring their customers' "illegal" driving habits.
The good news is that, according to the article, this only happens with certain autonomous Budget "franchises." The outlets directly under company control only use the technology to recover unreturned vehicles.
Ethical concerns aside, this won't work. Simple reason: These people are crew, not cargo. We could never automate a ship to the extent that no expertise was required. The likelihood of finding a group of terminal patients who just happened to have the necessary skills is infinitesimal. The likelihood that this group would be physically and mentally capable (and were guaranteed to remain so for the entire six month flight) is also miniscule.
I agree, it would be nice to go out with a bang. But it's just not feasible.
If you're eliminating the semi-literate from the running, aren't you also eliminating a great deal of the lotto-buying public? No offense, but it really is a tax on people who are bad at math.
Ghandi-esque motivational speeches aside, it usually ends, "Then you get your butt handed to you on a platter." There's a great deal of historical precedent for this.
That cat has several Broadway productions under its belt, and is widely recognized as the greatest non-human actor since Flipper went belly-up. Certainly he's more talented than that Lassie hack. Show the cat some respect, man.
Of course it's a troll to say so, but I wouldn't immediately say "of course I wouldn't." I don't think I could do it without knowing more, though. How old is this peasant? Is he/she in the prime of life, or just needing a slight nudge into the great hereafter? How many people depend on his/her livelihood for their survival? Does the peasant die peacefully, or is there a lot of wailing and thrashing and blood? Of course, it's easy for me to analyze it from that standpoint, since I'm in no danger of starving to death.
Of course, adding that much information kind of defeats the purpose of the question: How much respect do you have for life, and are you willing to hurt others for personal profit?
Oh, to answer your question: Starving dumpster kids, yes. Osama bin Laden, yes but keep your money. Jack Valenti and George Bush, no but could I please have a button that administers a nasty electrical shock every time they speak?
Remember a year or so back when SETI@Home stopped working for a couple of weeks? Some utter moron destroyed Berkeley's fiber optic cable while trying to steal a big strand of copper wire that didn't, at least in the legal sense, belong to him. In other words, for a couple hundred dollars profit (which he never made because he got caught), he left an entire campus with no Internet access and a monstrous repair bill. That's basically the same thing an organ harvester is doing.
Your analysis--and let's put off the question of whether you're being serious*--ignores the fact that people are almost certainly more valuable than their production cost. I think it takes about $200,000 to raise and educate an adult human. Whatever the exact figure, it isn't chump change. Every time you (the hypothetical(?) organ harvester) kidnap and dismember somebody, you actually remove value from the overall economy.** You end up making money only because you've stolen something that was valuable to other people and made a portion of that value your own. The rest is merely wasted.
Also, if you think about it, the only reason you find my organs valuable is because other people are willing to pay money to receive them. But since the people my organs would save are no more valuable than I am***, there can only be a net loss to the economy.
* Hey, it's Slashdot. It's not worth the effort to try and tell.
** That is, unless you happen to nab one of the bastards from Website Results. The economy could only benefit from such a turn of events.
*** Less valuable, in fact, since it would take all that time, talent, and effort to make them healthy again. I'm all in favor of voluntary organ donation, but killing a healthy person to make a sick person healthy doesn't make economic sense.
According to the Gnome folks, it was better to rip it out than release it with severe bugs. They've promised a fix by 2.0.1, and in the meantime just edit them by hand. And don't give me any of this "My grandma could never figure out how to do that" crap. What are you thinking subjecting the poor woman to a.0 release in the first place?
Dropping buggy features is a good thing. Releasing a product promptly is a good thing. Releasing a product without an important usability feature is a bad thing. Two out of three ain't bad. Even if you think it's an obvious blunder, try to keep your criticisms polite and constructive. It's a volunteer effort.
Slashdot Mirror
Stick to writing "frist p0st!!!" At least that way your intentions are honest.
You know, as dangerous as nuclear fuel might be, it's not exactly time-critical. Just strap a solar sail onto the thing and use that to dissipate the energy. Maybe it'll take a few hundred orbits, but there's no rush. Alternately, you could use some solar panels to drive some cheap ion propulsion. Again, perfect if you're in no hurry.
I think you're both wrong (responder more blatantly than the original poster).
Responder: 9.8 m/sec is the force exerted by gravity at sea level. By the time you get to the top of the cable (about 100,000 km away), the force being exerted is orders of magnitude smaller.
Original Posting Guy: You're correct that the top of the cable would be pulled on by the bottom of the cable, but it wouldn't be as bad as having the whole of the cable accelerating at 9.8 m/s/s. Remember that the acceleration of the bottom of the cable is being retarded by the inertia of the top of the cable, since the top isn't being subjected to as much gravity.
Personally, I think they ought to line the cable with explosives at periodic intervals, if the breaking of the cable is really a concern. Also, if it's made out of a dozen smaller cables instead of one large cable, the greater surface area might ensure that more of it burned up in the atmosphere.
I think you misunderstand the nature of the initiative.
First, it doesn't force any software vendor to make their source code "public domain." If I understand the initiative correctly (and I probably don't), then Peru's requirements could be met simply by keeping a copy of the source in escrow. It wouldn't be publicly available, hence it wouldn't cause a security concern. For the same reason, it wouldn't turn commercial companies into open source ones.
Second, you claim that we don't have to buy commercial software if we don't want it. That's fine for private decision-makers when they're. . . er, making private decisions. But when the government (an entity most of its constituents have to deal with on a regular basis) decides to only store its data in proprietary format X, or only support unpublished "standard" Y, then they force their constituents to either buy that software or forfeit valuable services.
You're not the first to imply that open source software can't make money. You are, however, wrong. There's serious money behind Linux, and there will always be so long as there's a critical mass of people who find it useful.
From the same company that issued the original report: "Linux Operating Environments Market to Reach $280 Million by 2006 Despite Decline Last Year, IDC Says." Methinks wininformer.com is like /. for Windows fans.
He doesn't seem to be talking about DOS attacks. It sounds more like he wants to scan the attacking system, find an open hole, and use it to paralyze the computer. No high bandwidth required.
Consider this: Software vendors, even if they're selling the only comparable product on the market, are still forced into competition. Their competitor? Their own illegally pirated product. In order to stay competitive, they have to keep their prices low.
I think that piracy is generally unethical. Also, it hurts the open source movement. For example, if nobody could pirate Adobe Photoshop easily, you can be sure that the interest in Gimp would skyrocket. As it stands now, who cares? They're both free, and Adobe is better known and more featureful.
How do you figure? The energy that damages your ears is that tiny fraction which actually hits your eardrums. Therefore, it's the same whether coming from a 300W speaker or a 3W headphone.
Hint: If it sounds like a jet engine to you, then it's beating on your eardrums like a jet engine would.
From as high up as he is, he should break the sound barrier about three seconds after he jumps. Remember that the speed of sound depends on the medium (sound waves travel much faster through steel than air; on a neutron star, the speed of sound is approximately the speed of light). Twenty-five miles up, the atmosphere is very thin indeed.
What I can't remember is whether Mach 1 is defined as the speed of sound at a certain air density, or whether it can vary.
My advice to the jumper: If the chute doesn't open, go head first. What do you have to lose?
On behalf of the Darwin Awards Selection Committee, I would like to thank you for your interest in participating in our selection process.
However, in order to be a candidate for the Darwin Awards, one must first be a self-replicating entity whose characteristics can be transferred from one generation to the next. As the aircraft in question was unmanned, and there is no known mechanism by which the craft itself could pass its traits on to its descendants, we must respectfully deny your nomination.
Again, thank you for your interest, and if you find any stories that fulfill the above criteria, do not hesitate to send them to us.
The Darwin Awards Committee
It is completely asinine to think that every person's beliefs, regardless of merit, should be shielded from public criticism. It is both possible and common for two people to respect each other, even while openly acknowledging that they each think the other's beliefs are a load of crap.
So please, for Darwin's sake, stop whining about having too much freedom.
Since each Gnutella client already acts as a distributed server, why not just take it a step further? Just have every client keep and store info about what others are making available. If a client could service each request not just by checking if it was there, but by checking the information it had on ten or twenty other clients, the number of times a request would have to be forwarded would plummet.
Sure, there would be problems handling outdated information. And the bandwidth necessary to trade databases has its own performance costs. But I don't see anything insurmountable about such a proposal.
From an environmental and a containment standpoint, nuclear waste isn't that much different from other hazardous materials. The area is evacuated, cleanup crews are called in, and the material is contained and removed. Is a drum of cobalt-60 really that much scarier than a drum of methylethylketone? Only to people who think one whiff of the stuff and you grow a three-headed kid.
It's sad that this sort of agendized research discredits the message of more clear-headed environmentalists. The report is just bad science. I mean, calculating the number of new Earths that would need to be colonized is just silly. Such planets just aren't out there, and certainly aren't accessible enough to make a meaningful difference. The authors of the study knew this, and were just using the idea as a cheap debating trick: Claim that these are the only two possible solutions, prove one unworkable, and then just leave people to assume that the other solution must be the only solution.
But let's not forget that humanity really is doing things to the planet that have never been done before. Are we doing irreparable harm? Are some of our interventions actually beneficial to the environment? There aren't any certain answers (unless you talk to the WWF or Rush Limbaugh). But as our technological prowess improves, our ability to alter the planet will only become more pronounced. Reducing consumption is just a way of saying, "We've decided to proceed with caution.
Now, environmentalists have been prophesying the collapse of the ecosystem for decades now. But are they predicting something inevitable (the volcano will erupt), something mythical (Jesus is coming, so look busy), or something possible yet avoidable? I don't think that we should put the brakes on all human activity every time someone paints a doomsday scenario. On the other hand, let's not turn buying an SUV into a courageous act of hope and optimism.
See? This is exactly the sort of thing that the MPAA is trying to stop! Such shameless theft of the intellectual property of others is just further proof that the EFF is pro-piracy, not pro-consumer. </flamebait>
Support the EFF.
Who needs weight? All the gnutella clients are based off of Gnucleus which is open source. If they want their own bastardized client, they don't need a court order. Just someone with coding skills.
The preview feature would have many valid uses, but a foolproof verifier of content it is not.
I'd think a lot more of Budget's "misuse of property" concerns if they didn't stand to weasel into payments of thousands of dollars by monitoring their customers' "illegal" driving habits.
The good news is that, according to the article, this only happens with certain autonomous Budget "franchises." The outlets directly under company control only use the technology to recover unreturned vehicles.
Ethical concerns aside, this won't work. Simple reason: These people are crew, not cargo. We could never automate a ship to the extent that no expertise was required. The likelihood of finding a group of terminal patients who just happened to have the necessary skills is infinitesimal. The likelihood that this group would be physically and mentally capable (and were guaranteed to remain so for the entire six month flight) is also miniscule.
I agree, it would be nice to go out with a bang. But it's just not feasible.
If you're eliminating the semi-literate from the running, aren't you also eliminating a great deal of the lotto-buying public? No offense, but it really is a tax on people who are bad at math.
Not that I wouldn't buy five tickets myself.
Ghandi-esque motivational speeches aside, it usually ends, "Then you get your butt handed to you on a platter." There's a great deal of historical precedent for this.
That cat has several Broadway productions under its belt, and is widely recognized as the greatest non-human actor since Flipper went belly-up. Certainly he's more talented than that Lassie hack. Show the cat some respect, man.
Of course it's a troll to say so, but I wouldn't immediately say "of course I wouldn't." I don't think I could do it without knowing more, though. How old is this peasant? Is he/she in the prime of life, or just needing a slight nudge into the great hereafter? How many people depend on his/her livelihood for their survival? Does the peasant die peacefully, or is there a lot of wailing and thrashing and blood? Of course, it's easy for me to analyze it from that standpoint, since I'm in no danger of starving to death.
Of course, adding that much information kind of defeats the purpose of the question: How much respect do you have for life, and are you willing to hurt others for personal profit?
Oh, to answer your question: Starving dumpster kids, yes. Osama bin Laden, yes but keep your money. Jack Valenti and George Bush, no but could I please have a button that administers a nasty electrical shock every time they speak?
Remember a year or so back when SETI@Home stopped working for a couple of weeks? Some utter moron destroyed Berkeley's fiber optic cable while trying to steal a big strand of copper wire that didn't, at least in the legal sense, belong to him. In other words, for a couple hundred dollars profit (which he never made because he got caught), he left an entire campus with no Internet access and a monstrous repair bill. That's basically the same thing an organ harvester is doing.
Your analysis--and let's put off the question of whether you're being serious*--ignores the fact that people are almost certainly more valuable than their production cost. I think it takes about $200,000 to raise and educate an adult human. Whatever the exact figure, it isn't chump change. Every time you (the hypothetical(?) organ harvester) kidnap and dismember somebody, you actually remove value from the overall economy.** You end up making money only because you've stolen something that was valuable to other people and made a portion of that value your own. The rest is merely wasted.
Also, if you think about it, the only reason you find my organs valuable is because other people are willing to pay money to receive them. But since the people my organs would save are no more valuable than I am***, there can only be a net loss to the economy.
* Hey, it's Slashdot. It's not worth the effort to try and tell.
** That is, unless you happen to nab one of the bastards from Website Results. The economy could only benefit from such a turn of events.
*** Less valuable, in fact, since it would take all that time, talent, and effort to make them healthy again. I'm all in favor of voluntary organ donation, but killing a healthy person to make a sick person healthy doesn't make economic sense.
According to the Gnome folks, it was better to rip it out than release it with severe bugs. They've promised a fix by 2.0.1, and in the meantime just edit them by hand. And don't give me any of this "My grandma could never figure out how to do that" crap. What are you thinking subjecting the poor woman to a .0 release in the first place?
Dropping buggy features is a good thing. Releasing a product promptly is a good thing. Releasing a product without an important usability feature is a bad thing. Two out of three ain't bad. Even if you think it's an obvious blunder, try to keep your criticisms polite and constructive. It's a volunteer effort.