Look and feel as a legal argument is quite vague. Not to mention that he gave the original away, there is no reason it shouldn't resemble the original. That would be like id releasing the quake source code and then complaining about it after the fact when some other company like sierra puts out a similar game. (doom, unreal, quake, halflife, etc are all first person shooters, that's a pretty substantial look and feel, although it's not very enforceable)
Well they do claim they scan for pillows, shields and such, BUT, can they detect kevlar underpants? And I wonder if those people who lie on the bed of nails are bothered much by this chair?
A computers hard drive is a device designed to record information in a digital format. Where does it say that the primary information source has to be can't and never could be audio? I think that since the advent of sound cards hard drives have been used as an audo recording medium. Not to mention those synthesizers that recorded to floppies or hard drives. In that case a hard drive is an audio recording medium. I have heard of audio mixing stations (personal recording studio) that use hard drives, and have very little processing power, but by definition they are still computers. Also by your definition cassette tapes aren't legal since at one time they too were used to store computer data. Primary purpose is what we define something to be, doesn't mean that definition can't change. Of course this is all just my opinion.
And what happens with the original wav is layered with "junk noise" that humans can't normally hear? The waveform is now altered and does not match the original, unless we're searching for a subset of the waveform, which is it's own headache since there are only so many notes, frequencies, etc.. how many songs have you heard that sample portions of a bassline from another song? Or if it is a legal remake of an original?
Offloading this work to the client software would turn people away from it and to something else completely, not that I use napster now, but I wouldn't want to sit at my screen for a couple hours because I decided to add a couple dozen songs to a directory and the client has to decompress and snapshot them all. Not to mention the fact that a wav generated as a decode from an mp3 would be missing a lot of data that the original wav had. Bad cpu timings or such could completely throw the process for a loop.
I think it's possible they will.
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Spidergoats
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Consider this, about a year ago on Ripley's, there was an engineering student who had developed a synthetic spider silk epoxy. He made a suit out of the stuff and they tried to crush him, shoot at him and they had footage of him facing down a bear in the wilderness wearing this outfit. They hooked chains around a car, had the chains attached to a little piece of cloth, to which a small ammount of this epoxy had been applied, the car was then suspended in the air by that little piece of cloth. Like many other proteins in nature they could be self organizing.
Now I'd have to agree with the bad side to Genetically engineering a person, we could end up with something like a eugenics war happening as the unmodified grow suspicious of the modified who may or may not be abusing their new genes. The problem with ethics is there are too many unethical people.
For all we know, we could set into motion something like the story behind the terrans in starcraft (Uneccessary mutations are outlawed and you are purged if you have them), or in the star trek episode 'space seed' the modified believe themselves to be a master race and try to exterminate everyone else. *just my rant*
Now making us more disease resistant is not in my opinion bad, however some people believe differently.
Pain isn't just in peoples minds, it's received by and interpreted by the mind, and whether you ignore it or not doesn't mean it just ceases to exist once you decide not to believe in it. It was rather callous of you to state that the girl's parents shouldn't have been allowed to breed, I would say the same about yours since in my opinion they did not do a very good job of promoting adult behaviour in you.
As someone who was considered 'different' for most of my life I can sympathize to a degree. My pain was in some cases physical due to the fact that I'd get treated rough by a large group of antagonizers. Half the time, the school refused to do a thing until I took matters into my own hands and returned the favor on a couple of them. (although I ended up punished as often or more often) Had this informant system existed then I would probably not be here today as a result of a stupid prank by one of them and they'd be out free instead of in prison like I've heard that some of them are.
Yes at times I was anti-social and depressed, not fitting in due to differences in intellect, interests, and for some people physical disabilities will do that to a person. I have a feeling more of the outcasts who would turn out to be better people if just left alone, rather than the stupid jocks or popular kids that do dumb stunts and get thrown in jail, would be the ones informed upon. Not only are institutions poorly prepared to deal with the situations, but they create them out of ignorance or out of worthless teachers who look the other way or worse even help the antagonists. If I had any mod points you'd be flamebait or troll. Just because people don't belong to your tax bracket doesn't give you the right to demoralize or defame them on a public forum. Use some sensibility in your arguments.
And I could really care less if you or any cohorts of yours come back and flame me, I've taken worse before. I'll just sit here laughing at how petty you are to pick on others who have been less fortunate. Some people have an oportunity to rise above where they started, while others spend all their time sinking to even lower levels.
It's also other media as well, television, the movie industry. Journalists who don't have a clue should not write tech stories. Since more likely than not they try to relate information with either something totally different, or inaccurate terms which they don't understand. I think as a community, any group that's gotten bad press due to stupidity should stand up and demand an apology or at least start a petition that the journalists be better educated. Symbolism can be used for good as well as bad, people need to take back symbols that had their real meaning perverted.
Oh boy, curtail excessive ammendments? Where could you possibly get that? All ammendments to date were put in place to keep the government from stomping all over the people. The founding principles that the constitution was based upon in relevance to the federalists and anti-federalists, as well as the declaration of independance state implicitly that governments of an iron hand can and will fail. Let's see enlightened european countries? you must be talking nazi germany. Hitler banned guns before he became a dictator. How many lives could have been saved had one persecuted citizen had a gun? Hate-crime? Maybe you don't know it but hate is a little hard to define. A racial slur is apparently not a hate crime. Some people would like it defined that way, however those same people turn right around and use the same slur on their own people. And anything with a double standard can't stand on it's own. Like I stated before, political correctness has done far less good than mutual tolerance. By saying that you'd like to bring us back to sanity says that we somehow left sanity behind us. That doesn't mean updating the old to fit in with the new, going back to something you left behind means undoing all the new and going back to the old. And there is a lot of the new that is both useful and necessary. And the laws we have on the books are supposed to prevent "gangs of crack dealing youths" access to such weapons. Hell, in most states you can't even get a non-automatic revolving handgun unless you're 18 or older. If they're getting these guns from somewhere, it's certainly not from law abiding gun dealers. I consider gangs to be a detriment to society. So why are we concentrating on hindering other peoples rights rather than concentrating on getting kids out of gangs and into a place in society where they benefit others? I would not support any hate crimes legislation that either imposes double standards, does not cover all races/special interest groups, or curtails the rights of free thought. Yes we should be more responsible with the environment, how do you suggest we do that? Some people have suggested we stop using coal and oil for power and instead use nuclear. I have my own concerns with that since radioactive waste is far worse in my opinion. What else? How bout hydrogen, some say that the increased use of hydrogen to generate power would cause increased precipitation and rainfall (at least it would if we didn't bother to recondense it after it leaves the fuel cell/engine. I also think this would be a good way to go because it doesn't completely destroy the economy like going to electric cars would. Think about this a minute, we stop using gasoline, that puts drillers, refiners, and service stations out of business. That's a lot of people losing jobs. And it also puts a higher strain on the electric grid. (I'm sure california appreciates their electric car initiative at the moment.) But if we go to hydrogen, we'll have electralysis plants, storage tank manufacturers, and we'll keep service stations. Another alternative would be to power engines with grain alchohol. The US exports a large quantity of surplus grain. Many times this grain is not sold and sits in silos to rot away. We could have alchohol plants to distill fuel and still keep a lot of our infrastructure intact. The only ways to be responsible with the environment is to cohabit peacefully or as some environmental extremists want, almost a full degredation of human society. Forcing peoples hands doesn't necessarily always get things done, in some cases it just makes them bitter and gives them the upper hand later (as in the california power problem, they didn't want to disturb the environment and now they get to pay the price.) I bet you think we should abolish the electoral voting system too. Personally I don't think it right that a candidate could win just by carrying the 5 largest cities in the country. Funny thing is, is that before the vote they thought gore was gonna lose the popular vote and win the electoral, Hillary Clinton was qouted as saying the popular vote didn't matter, it was the electoral that counted, and now her position as well as the results have reversed. But before you start bashing me for being a bush supporter, let me say that I didn't vote at all this time around. In my mind I didn't like either of them, but I also think the lesser of two evils won. (but that's just my opinion and you are free to agree or disagree as you choose.)
The subject title pretty much says it all. But I'll elaborate for the challenged. Multi User Dungeons, be it the old style text based or the newer graphical ala everquest, the players are not governed by any law from the real world since the players themselves do not exist inside the computer. The players have an avatar which being a figment of someones imagination do not have rights. Anything said or done in the game is considered role play. As in acting like on tv. it is not real therefore anyone taking something an actor says in a movie as context to the real world could be considered a false accusation since the event in question did not in actuallity happen due to the nature that the person who says the statement does not exist in the real sense of being a person. Yes the actor exists, but the acter is not really a nazi (at least we would hope actors aren't like the people they portray:P) Yes sometimes poeple in games will issue comments that are not "in character" and do apply to the real world. In that case perhaps the law does apply. But trying to discern which is and isn't IC and OOC is a little difficult at times. In terms of starcraft or any other strategy game, the player takes on the role of some commander. They really aren't a commander any more than the troops they command go out and die. Therefore anything said in the game against another "general" that pertains to the game cannot be construed as threatening in the real world sense. And I don't personally believe a mistyped ftp could be considered a hack attempt. Usually hackers try more than once. If a single connect could be construed as an attempt to illegally access information then I guess just about everyone is guilty. And I'm sorry to say it, but the politically correct nonsense has gone too far once again. You cannot possibly please everyone. What one person believes is obscene may not be obscene to someone else. Being able to call someone else by vulgar expressions is guaranteed (at least to americans) by the first ammendment. Whether or not you agree with it. Otherwise we'd have people finding offense at anything anyone else says or does, and we'd run out of prison space pretty quick. Not only that but unless we all lie in bed all day we're almost certain to be offending someone else. (of course lying in bed all day may be offensive to someone else.) My suggestion, live your life and let others live theirs. Mutual tolerance has done more for public relations than political correctness ever could.
Yes these robots could be quite useful in helping humanity, however we must also consider the harmful effects. If wiretapping regulations are extended to use of micro-robot spycams, what happens to the fourth ammendment on unreasonable searches? At the present I'm not even certain that people who are wiretapped even have to be notified after the fact. Why worry about the mirrors from Orwell's 1984 when we wouldn't even know if there were robot cams present. Sure you could start putting signal jammers all throughout your home, but that'd work to a disadvantage too, since you'd also be prevented from getting broadcast tv, wireless phones, or other currently useful mass technologies like wireless networking. Already people on this forum were talking about using such devices to spy on one another. Not to sound high handed with morals or anything since even I might be tempted to make use of such things, but still we should consider all applications of something before we progress in that direction.
I think you're incorrect about that. NT was booting and running natively on the Alpha platform for some time. NT also had ports out for PPC and a couple other platforms in the 4.0 release. Windows 9x of course hasn't been known to work with other architectures to my knowledge (but then I haven't seen DOS ported to other platforms either.) CE is based on the NT kernel, and NT is NOT FreeBSD based, there is an interesting article at "http://www.win2000mag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Arti cleID=4494". The NT kernel was written by the guy who had worked on DIGITAL's VMS.
As far as licensing, the BSD license allows use of BSD derived code in commercially available software as long as the clause "contains software written by the university of berkely, california" appears somewhere in the advertisements or as a disclaimer to the link where the software is distributed.
Whoa, hold on there a sec, back up the truck, doesn't pollute as badly? What are you on dude? The waste depleted uranium from reactor rods is far more dangerous than a few chemicals that can be filtered. Especially since radioactive materials take a long time to self neutralize via radioactive decay. Whereas with smoke we can filter most of the carbon and recycle it, (or devise a means to filter and recycle it) a lot easier than we can make waste rods non-harmful. What do we currently do with nuclear waste? Well we dig a big hole and bury it so that it's not our problem and we leave it for future generations to deal with. Those areas become off limits for thousands of years. And you can only dump so much into a plot of land. We haven't even begun to see the hazards of what happens when the containers start to leak, this is worse than landfill runoff. And it's not just reactor rods either, it's all the low grade radioactive waste produced as a side effect. Environmental suits, work gloves, tools. All of these things can become contaminated and also get put into sealed drums and buried. Eventually we will run out of places to put this junk. And I for one do not think launching it into the sun is an option. Tell me, do you really want people stuffing used control rods into rockets and having something like the challenger incident happening again? It would be a disaster on a scale larger than chernobyl because it'd be like having a low power nuke detonating in the air and spreading stuff all over the globe through air currents. The nuclear genie is one that we should have stuffed back into the bottle a long time ago. People living in the areas around where chernobyl happened are still feeling the effects, people who currently die as a result of that aren't counted in the death toll for the original event, even though they are linked to radiation poisoning, genetic defects and mutations. There was a documentary on what happened once, there was someone being interviewed who had growths of skin where their eyes should be. We should concentrate on safer methods of energy production. I recall an article I saw in popular mechanics (it was either that or popular science) A seven mile long stretch of land in new mexico could generate enough solar energy to extract enough hydrogen from water to power the entire united states.
Probably being redundant in posting this, but if you haven't already read the other posts about the subject here on/. you need to be whacked upside the head.
The DeCSS source code could be used for other means other than piracy. Or would you prefer that in order to play a dvd that you legally own you must have windblows since anything open source would void the copy protection code. In my case I can't really argue anyhow since I'm not using any *nix derivative on the machine that has a dvd player. (Only because it's a company loaner until they decide it's really obsolete and give it to me.) Of course this does become extremely relevant when I finish building my new system because I intend to have FreeBSD on it. Whether I keep the laptop or not, I still own the discs and they are useless without a player. And a dvd drive is useless without software.
I also think that taxing blank media is a dumb idea. What happens when I don't use the blanks for "copyrighted" material, but personal stuff? Hmm? So now if I need to make a backup of corporate pdf docs, or put together a utils disc that has all the stuff a new hire might need I get taxed to support the media industry? I think not. That is nothing but a load of bull. Who decides who gets what for compensation anyhow? If you put all the taxes into a slush fund that feeds the artists, how do you decide how much an artist gets? And whether the people who made the product CLEARLY don't want it used that way in your words, have you stopped to consider that as a consumer you have a right to use the product you bought as you see fit as long as you don't profit from someone elses work? When are people going to wake up and realize that copy protection doesn't hurt pirates as much as it hurts people who have a legit copy and need to make a backup so that the original doesn't get scratched, or wants to use an alternate operating system with the software/movie. Good thing they haven't thought of taxing DNA just because someone might figure out how to store computer data on it.
One of my real pet peeves are people who think something needs to be taken away just because a few individuals can't use it properly.
I didn't mean to touch off a holy war there with my comments, I just stated that I can't open RPM on a windblows system while at work during a break or something, whereas winzip handles tgz just fine.
How does TrustedBSD compare with NSA secured linux (http://www.nsa.gov/selinux) in terms of new and or improved security features? And are there any plans to eventually integrate the rest of the TrustedBSD features back into the shared BSD source tree (the extended attributes already have been committed)? How would using TrustedBSD instead of FreeBSD impact clustering applications?
And just for my information, where did all the packages for clustering BSD go? All I can seem to find anymore is the linux stuff. And personally I don't like redhat and their rpm distribution method, all anyone wants to distribute anymore is rpms which is not near enough to standard and compatable accross the board as tar-gzip for my purposes. (One primary difference being that I can open a tar-gzip on a windows box at work during break to browse through source, and to my knowledge no one has bothered to create a "winrpm")
Maybe we should have left them to the nazi's in WWII. It is nearly impossible to ban someone who's really determined for one, and for two Yahoo hasn't violated the law. The french users have by "ENTERING" into yahoo's sites. If it's illegal for them to buy such things then they shouldn't be there in the first place should they? I believe that yahoo's TOS specifically states that items posted are not indicative of yahoo's policies, beliefs or political views. Anyone who uses said service is using it at their own risk of exposure to items that they may or may not find offensive. And by entering in the first place they give implied consent that they have read and understood beforehand and that they waive any right to a lawsuit against said company.. (standard legal jargon for we aren't responsible for anything.) People need to start taking the responsibility for their own actions. Instead of blaming it on the evil corporations which forced them to be there. (yeah right, and the chinese govt deserves the humanitarian of the year award too.....:P )
The FCC classifies the internet as a series of transmissions, the FCC also regulates radio transmissions. Why is it that no one argues that listening to the radio is theft of copyrighted material? I mean you can't download yourself to the concert after all. People still go to see those, people still buy tour shirts, or videos of the concerts. People have been recording music from the radio probably since the introduction of magnetic recording media, I see no difference between recording from a transmitted source (radio, internet) to a magnetic storage medium (casette, hard drive). Or do you honestly believe that the recording industry should have the power to throw their weight around like this? I personally don't care to end up having a credit card reader built into my walkman or car stereo just so I can subscribe to content. Which if they can force mp3 to go that way I don't think radio will be that far behind. I seem to recall that sony electronics was under a similar lawsuit when it first introduced it's minidisc technology. (in fact I think they shouldn't even have been allowed to participate in the lawsuit considering that other divisions of their company make mp3 players, storage media, and market and sell rippers along with those devices.) Their argument was that the minidisc was not cd quality of the signal and thus roughly on par with radio. True audiophiles know that radio, minidisc, and mp3 are inferior to a full cd digital track. mp3 samples the signal which means there is a lot of information being cut out. (granted most of that information cannot be heard by human ears). However minidisc does the same thing, not sampling, but cutting out useless clutter that a human is incapable of hearing. However it was proved that minidisc wouldn't severly damage the industry, just as radio and in my opinion mp3 do not. People will continue to buy cds as long as the sound quality is considered the best. As someone who has been involved with music for a while (though not professionally, why would I want to? that kind of job would suck, I much prefer the IT world.:) tours, fans, late hours... that's depressing), I personally would like the proliferation of my music. After all it's about expressing things (or at least it used to be before all this pop britney crap where all the songs are the same and there is no real message to music anymore.) In medieval times the musicians would live on the suffrance of their patrons. Todays musicians have it easy by way of comparison and should be grateful that fans appreciate their music. It's a sad day when people are more interested in money than in getting their message across. And I don't care much of people end up flaming me for my opinions. Because they are just that, opinions. I don't plan on changing my stance, this is just the way I see it. After all people have a right not to agree with me.:P
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Look and feel as a legal argument is quite vague. Not to mention that he gave the original away, there is no reason it shouldn't resemble the original. That would be like id releasing the quake source code and then complaining about it after the fact when some other company like sierra puts out a similar game. (doom, unreal, quake, halflife, etc are all first person shooters, that's a pretty substantial look and feel, although it's not very enforceable)
Well they do claim they scan for pillows, shields and such, BUT, can they detect kevlar underpants? And I wonder if those people who lie on the bed of nails are bothered much by this chair?
A computers hard drive is a device designed to record information in a digital format. Where does it say that the primary information source has to be can't and never could be audio? I think that since the advent of sound cards hard drives have been used as an audo recording medium. Not to mention those synthesizers that recorded to floppies or hard drives. In that case a hard drive is an audio recording medium. I have heard of audio mixing stations (personal recording studio) that use hard drives, and have very little processing power, but by definition they are still computers. Also by your definition cassette tapes aren't legal since at one time they too were used to store computer data. Primary purpose is what we define something to be, doesn't mean that definition can't change. Of course this is all just my opinion.
And what happens with the original wav is layered with "junk noise" that humans can't normally hear? The waveform is now altered and does not match the original, unless we're searching for a subset of the waveform, which is it's own headache since there are only so many notes, frequencies, etc.. how many songs have you heard that sample portions of a bassline from another song? Or if it is a legal remake of an original?
Offloading this work to the client software would turn people away from it and to something else completely, not that I use napster now, but I wouldn't want to sit at my screen for a couple hours because I decided to add a couple dozen songs to a directory and the client has to decompress and snapshot them all. Not to mention the fact that a wav generated as a decode from an mp3 would be missing a lot of data that the original wav had. Bad cpu timings or such could completely throw the process for a loop.
Consider this, about a year ago on Ripley's, there was an engineering student who had developed a synthetic spider silk epoxy. He made a suit out of the stuff and they tried to crush him, shoot at him and they had footage of him facing down a bear in the wilderness wearing this outfit. They hooked chains around a car, had the chains attached to a little piece of cloth, to which a small ammount of this epoxy had been applied, the car was then suspended in the air by that little piece of cloth. Like many other proteins in nature they could be self organizing.
Now I'd have to agree with the bad side to Genetically engineering a person, we could end up with something like a eugenics war happening as the unmodified grow suspicious of the modified who may or may not be abusing their new genes. The problem with ethics is there are too many unethical people.
For all we know, we could set into motion something like the story behind the terrans in starcraft (Uneccessary mutations are outlawed and you are purged if you have them), or in the star trek episode 'space seed' the modified believe themselves to be a master race and try to exterminate everyone else. *just my rant*
Now making us more disease resistant is not in my opinion bad, however some people believe differently.
Pain isn't just in peoples minds, it's received by and interpreted by the mind, and whether you ignore it or not doesn't mean it just ceases to exist once you decide not to believe in it. It was rather callous of you to state that the girl's parents shouldn't have been allowed to breed, I would say the same about yours since in my opinion they did not do a very good job of promoting adult behaviour in you.
As someone who was considered 'different' for most of my life I can sympathize to a degree. My pain was in some cases physical due to the fact that I'd get treated rough by a large group of antagonizers. Half the time, the school refused to do a thing until I took matters into my own hands and returned the favor on a couple of them. (although I ended up punished as often or more often) Had this informant system existed then I would probably not be here today as a result of a stupid prank by one of them and they'd be out free instead of in prison like I've heard that some of them are.
Yes at times I was anti-social and depressed, not fitting in due to differences in intellect, interests, and for some people physical disabilities will do that to a person. I have a feeling more of the outcasts who would turn out to be better people if just left alone, rather than the stupid jocks or popular kids that do dumb stunts and get thrown in jail, would be the ones informed upon. Not only are institutions poorly prepared to deal with the situations, but they create them out of ignorance or out of worthless teachers who look the other way or worse even help the antagonists. If I had any mod points you'd be flamebait or troll. Just because people don't belong to your tax bracket doesn't give you the right to demoralize or defame them on a public forum. Use some sensibility in your arguments.
And I could really care less if you or any cohorts of yours come back and flame me, I've taken worse before. I'll just sit here laughing at how petty you are to pick on others who have been less fortunate. Some people have an oportunity to rise above where they started, while others spend all their time sinking to even lower levels.
It's also other media as well, television, the movie industry. Journalists who don't have a clue should not write tech stories. Since more likely than not they try to relate information with either something totally different, or inaccurate terms which they don't understand. I think as a community, any group that's gotten bad press due to stupidity should stand up and demand an apology or at least start a petition that the journalists be better educated. Symbolism can be used for good as well as bad, people need to take back symbols that had their real meaning perverted.
Oh boy, curtail excessive ammendments? Where could you possibly get that? All ammendments to date were put in place to keep the government from stomping all over the people. The founding principles that the constitution was based upon in relevance to the federalists and anti-federalists, as well as the declaration of independance state implicitly that governments of an iron hand can and will fail. Let's see enlightened european countries? you must be talking nazi germany. Hitler banned guns before he became a dictator. How many lives could have been saved had one persecuted citizen had a gun? Hate-crime? Maybe you don't know it but hate is a little hard to define. A racial slur is apparently not a hate crime. Some people would like it defined that way, however those same people turn right around and use the same slur on their own people. And anything with a double standard can't stand on it's own. Like I stated before, political correctness has done far less good than mutual tolerance. By saying that you'd like to bring us back to sanity says that we somehow left sanity behind us. That doesn't mean updating the old to fit in with the new, going back to something you left behind means undoing all the new and going back to the old. And there is a lot of the new that is both useful and necessary. And the laws we have on the books are supposed to prevent "gangs of crack dealing youths" access to such weapons. Hell, in most states you can't even get a non-automatic revolving handgun unless you're 18 or older. If they're getting these guns from somewhere, it's certainly not from law abiding gun dealers. I consider gangs to be a detriment to society. So why are we concentrating on hindering other peoples rights rather than concentrating on getting kids out of gangs and into a place in society where they benefit others? I would not support any hate crimes legislation that either imposes double standards, does not cover all races/special interest groups, or curtails the rights of free thought. Yes we should be more responsible with the environment, how do you suggest we do that? Some people have suggested we stop using coal and oil for power and instead use nuclear. I have my own concerns with that since radioactive waste is far worse in my opinion. What else? How bout hydrogen, some say that the increased use of hydrogen to generate power would cause increased precipitation and rainfall (at least it would if we didn't bother to recondense it after it leaves the fuel cell/engine. I also think this would be a good way to go because it doesn't completely destroy the economy like going to electric cars would. Think about this a minute, we stop using gasoline, that puts drillers, refiners, and service stations out of business. That's a lot of people losing jobs. And it also puts a higher strain on the electric grid. (I'm sure california appreciates their electric car initiative at the moment.) But if we go to hydrogen, we'll have electralysis plants, storage tank manufacturers, and we'll keep service stations. Another alternative would be to power engines with grain alchohol. The US exports a large quantity of surplus grain. Many times this grain is not sold and sits in silos to rot away. We could have alchohol plants to distill fuel and still keep a lot of our infrastructure intact. The only ways to be responsible with the environment is to cohabit peacefully or as some environmental extremists want, almost a full degredation of human society. Forcing peoples hands doesn't necessarily always get things done, in some cases it just makes them bitter and gives them the upper hand later (as in the california power problem, they didn't want to disturb the environment and now they get to pay the price.) I bet you think we should abolish the electoral voting system too. Personally I don't think it right that a candidate could win just by carrying the 5 largest cities in the country. Funny thing is, is that before the vote they thought gore was gonna lose the popular vote and win the electoral, Hillary Clinton was qouted as saying the popular vote didn't matter, it was the electoral that counted, and now her position as well as the results have reversed. But before you start bashing me for being a bush supporter, let me say that I didn't vote at all this time around. In my mind I didn't like either of them, but I also think the lesser of two evils won. (but that's just my opinion and you are free to agree or disagree as you choose.)
The subject title pretty much says it all. But I'll elaborate for the challenged. Multi User Dungeons, be it the old style text based or the newer graphical ala everquest, the players are not governed by any law from the real world since the players themselves do not exist inside the computer. The players have an avatar which being a figment of someones imagination do not have rights. Anything said or done in the game is considered role play. As in acting like on tv. it is not real therefore anyone taking something an actor says in a movie as context to the real world could be considered a false accusation since the event in question did not in actuallity happen due to the nature that the person who says the statement does not exist in the real sense of being a person. Yes the actor exists, but the acter is not really a nazi (at least we would hope actors aren't like the people they portray :P) Yes sometimes poeple in games will issue comments that are not "in character" and do apply to the real world. In that case perhaps the law does apply. But trying to discern which is and isn't IC and OOC is a little difficult at times. In terms of starcraft or any other strategy game, the player takes on the role of some commander. They really aren't a commander any more than the troops they command go out and die. Therefore anything said in the game against another "general" that pertains to the game cannot be construed as threatening in the real world sense. And I don't personally believe a mistyped ftp could be considered a hack attempt. Usually hackers try more than once. If a single connect could be construed as an attempt to illegally access information then I guess just about everyone is guilty. And I'm sorry to say it, but the politically correct nonsense has gone too far once again. You cannot possibly please everyone. What one person believes is obscene may not be obscene to someone else. Being able to call someone else by vulgar expressions is guaranteed (at least to americans) by the first ammendment. Whether or not you agree with it. Otherwise we'd have people finding offense at anything anyone else says or does, and we'd run out of prison space pretty quick. Not only that but unless we all lie in bed all day we're almost certain to be offending someone else. (of course lying in bed all day may be offensive to someone else.) My suggestion, live your life and let others live theirs. Mutual tolerance has done more for public relations than political correctness ever could.
Yes these robots could be quite useful in helping humanity, however we must also consider the harmful effects. If wiretapping regulations are extended to use of micro-robot spycams, what happens to the fourth ammendment on unreasonable searches? At the present I'm not even certain that people who are wiretapped even have to be notified after the fact. Why worry about the mirrors from Orwell's 1984 when we wouldn't even know if there were robot cams present. Sure you could start putting signal jammers all throughout your home, but that'd work to a disadvantage too, since you'd also be prevented from getting broadcast tv, wireless phones, or other currently useful mass technologies like wireless networking. Already people on this forum were talking about using such devices to spy on one another. Not to sound high handed with morals or anything since even I might be tempted to make use of such things, but still we should consider all applications of something before we progress in that direction.
Compaq stock is up, and altavista was sold to CMGI not long after the aquisition of DIGITAL
I think you're incorrect about that. NT was booting and running natively on the Alpha platform for some time. NT also had ports out for PPC and a couple other platforms in the 4.0 release. Windows 9x of course hasn't been known to work with other architectures to my knowledge (but then I haven't seen DOS ported to other platforms either.) CE is based on the NT kernel, and NT is NOT FreeBSD based, there is an interesting article at "http://www.win2000mag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Arti cleID=4494". The NT kernel was written by the guy who had worked on DIGITAL's VMS.
As far as licensing, the BSD license allows use of BSD derived code in commercially available software as long as the clause "contains software written by the university of berkely, california" appears somewhere in the advertisements or as a disclaimer to the link where the software is distributed.
Whoa, hold on there a sec, back up the truck, doesn't pollute as badly? What are you on dude? The waste depleted uranium from reactor rods is far more dangerous than a few chemicals that can be filtered. Especially since radioactive materials take a long time to self neutralize via radioactive decay. Whereas with smoke we can filter most of the carbon and recycle it, (or devise a means to filter and recycle it) a lot easier than we can make waste rods non-harmful. What do we currently do with nuclear waste? Well we dig a big hole and bury it so that it's not our problem and we leave it for future generations to deal with. Those areas become off limits for thousands of years. And you can only dump so much into a plot of land. We haven't even begun to see the hazards of what happens when the containers start to leak, this is worse than landfill runoff. And it's not just reactor rods either, it's all the low grade radioactive waste produced as a side effect. Environmental suits, work gloves, tools. All of these things can become contaminated and also get put into sealed drums and buried. Eventually we will run out of places to put this junk. And I for one do not think launching it into the sun is an option. Tell me, do you really want people stuffing used control rods into rockets and having something like the challenger incident happening again? It would be a disaster on a scale larger than chernobyl because it'd be like having a low power nuke detonating in the air and spreading stuff all over the globe through air currents. The nuclear genie is one that we should have stuffed back into the bottle a long time ago. People living in the areas around where chernobyl happened are still feeling the effects, people who currently die as a result of that aren't counted in the death toll for the original event, even though they are linked to radiation poisoning, genetic defects and mutations. There was a documentary on what happened once, there was someone being interviewed who had growths of skin where their eyes should be. We should concentrate on safer methods of energy production. I recall an article I saw in popular mechanics (it was either that or popular science) A seven mile long stretch of land in new mexico could generate enough solar energy to extract enough hydrogen from water to power the entire united states.
Probably being redundant in posting this, but if you haven't already read the other posts about the subject here on /. you need to be whacked upside the head.
The DeCSS source code could be used for other means other than piracy. Or would you prefer that in order to play a dvd that you legally own you must have windblows since anything open source would void the copy protection code. In my case I can't really argue anyhow since I'm not using any *nix derivative on the machine that has a dvd player. (Only because it's a company loaner until they decide it's really obsolete and give it to me.) Of course this does become extremely relevant when I finish building my new system because I intend to have FreeBSD on it. Whether I keep the laptop or not, I still own the discs and they are useless without a player. And a dvd drive is useless without software.
I also think that taxing blank media is a dumb idea. What happens when I don't use the blanks for "copyrighted" material, but personal stuff? Hmm? So now if I need to make a backup of corporate pdf docs, or put together a utils disc that has all the stuff a new hire might need I get taxed to support the media industry? I think not. That is nothing but a load of bull. Who decides who gets what for compensation anyhow? If you put all the taxes into a slush fund that feeds the artists, how do you decide how much an artist gets? And whether the people who made the product CLEARLY don't want it used that way in your words, have you stopped to consider that as a consumer you have a right to use the product you bought as you see fit as long as you don't profit from someone elses work? When are people going to wake up and realize that copy protection doesn't hurt pirates as much as it hurts people who have a legit copy and need to make a backup so that the original doesn't get scratched, or wants to use an alternate operating system with the software/movie. Good thing they haven't thought of taxing DNA just because someone might figure out how to store computer data on it.
One of my real pet peeves are people who think something needs to be taken away just because a few individuals can't use it properly.
I didn't mean to touch off a holy war there with my comments, I just stated that I can't open RPM on a windblows system while at work during a break or something, whereas winzip handles tgz just fine.
How does TrustedBSD compare with NSA secured linux (http://www.nsa.gov/selinux) in terms of new and or improved security features? And are there any plans to eventually integrate the rest of the TrustedBSD features back into the shared BSD source tree (the extended attributes already have been committed)? How would using TrustedBSD instead of FreeBSD impact clustering applications?
And just for my information, where did all the packages for clustering BSD go? All I can seem to find anymore is the linux stuff. And personally I don't like redhat and their rpm distribution method, all anyone wants to distribute anymore is rpms which is not near enough to standard and compatable accross the board as tar-gzip for my purposes. (One primary difference being that I can open a tar-gzip on a windows box at work during break to browse through source, and to my knowledge no one has bothered to create a "winrpm")
Maybe we should have left them to the nazi's in WWII. It is nearly impossible to ban someone who's really determined for one, and for two Yahoo hasn't violated the law. The french users have by "ENTERING" into yahoo's sites. If it's illegal for them to buy such things then they shouldn't be there in the first place should they? I believe that yahoo's TOS specifically states that items posted are not indicative of yahoo's policies, beliefs or political views. Anyone who uses said service is using it at their own risk of exposure to items that they may or may not find offensive. And by entering in the first place they give implied consent that they have read and understood beforehand and that they waive any right to a lawsuit against said company.. (standard legal jargon for we aren't responsible for anything.) People need to start taking the responsibility for their own actions. Instead of blaming it on the evil corporations which forced them to be there. (yeah right, and the chinese govt deserves the humanitarian of the year award too..... :P )
The FCC classifies the internet as a series of transmissions, the FCC also regulates radio transmissions. Why is it that no one argues that listening to the radio is theft of copyrighted material? I mean you can't download yourself to the concert after all. People still go to see those, people still buy tour shirts, or videos of the concerts. People have been recording music from the radio probably since the introduction of magnetic recording media, I see no difference between recording from a transmitted source (radio, internet) to a magnetic storage medium (casette, hard drive). Or do you honestly believe that the recording industry should have the power to throw their weight around like this? I personally don't care to end up having a credit card reader built into my walkman or car stereo just so I can subscribe to content. Which if they can force mp3 to go that way I don't think radio will be that far behind. I seem to recall that sony electronics was under a similar lawsuit when it first introduced it's minidisc technology. (in fact I think they shouldn't even have been allowed to participate in the lawsuit considering that other divisions of their company make mp3 players, storage media, and market and sell rippers along with those devices.) Their argument was that the minidisc was not cd quality of the signal and thus roughly on par with radio. True audiophiles know that radio, minidisc, and mp3 are inferior to a full cd digital track. mp3 samples the signal which means there is a lot of information being cut out. (granted most of that information cannot be heard by human ears). However minidisc does the same thing, not sampling, but cutting out useless clutter that a human is incapable of hearing. However it was proved that minidisc wouldn't severly damage the industry, just as radio and in my opinion mp3 do not. People will continue to buy cds as long as the sound quality is considered the best. As someone who has been involved with music for a while (though not professionally, why would I want to? that kind of job would suck, I much prefer the IT world. :) tours, fans, late hours... that's depressing), I personally would like the proliferation of my music. After all it's about expressing things (or at least it used to be before all this pop britney crap where all the songs are the same and there is no real message to music anymore.) In medieval times the musicians would live on the suffrance of their patrons. Todays musicians have it easy by way of comparison and should be grateful that fans appreciate their music. It's a sad day when people are more interested in money than in getting their message across. And I don't care much of people end up flaming me for my opinions. Because they are just that, opinions. I don't plan on changing my stance, this is just the way I see it. After all people have a right not to agree with me. :P