Living overseas from my family, I longed for the day when telecoms prices would be cheap enough that I could casually call home and chat without worrying about the price. That time actually came years ago. The price of phone cards become so cheap that calling home was no longer a significant financial burden starting quite a few years ago already.
Prior to cheap phone cards and subsequent cheap overseas rates directly from the phone monopoly itself, I had assumed that when telecoms prices dropped there would be revolutionary change in society as global barriers to communication fell and completely new markets and opportunities became available. Remote pools of English teachers for one seemed like an intriguing idea.
But when cheap telephony finally arrived, I realized the rather simple flaw in my vision --time zones. This is actually a bigger problem than price for international voice communication. We already had e-mail so it wasn't communication itself that was coming available, it was convenient communication. The problem is, if you have to stay up till 3:00AM to call someone it's hardly convenient.
That's not to say VoIP isn't cool. It's cool. Certinly it's cool. But it's not as big of a change for the global communications scene as I once thought.
Any Orcutteers out there on Slashdot?
Hope not.
What a scarry place. I think almost everybody I grew up with had a serious drug problem. The missles were very much related to the immense sense of doom among my childhood friends. An astonishing number of them died quite young despite the fact it's a fairly affluent area. There was just an enormous amount of self destruction.
Of course that really gloomy stuff didn't really emerge until the teen years. But I mean if you follow it back to the younger years you see the connection. I mean we'd talk about it openly, how we were all going to die anyway. We'd be out on the playground and at least once a week there would be this huge rumbling and then the trail of smoke that grew thicker and thicker as it dispersed into the atmosphere making crazy curves winding into the sky. It was quite pretty.
I recall once we had a misfire that sprayed rocket fuel all over an area between us and the base and it was a big hazmat emergency where everybody got paid overtime to pretend to be doing something. Other than that, nothing ever really came of the missles directly. But indirectly, it had an enormous impact on that community.
It's funny going back and seeing people spending a half million bucks to live there and thinking it's really great, especially the ones who sort of migrated in from the South or the Midwest. They're always really enthused about it. But those missles do leave an impression on you if you start off with it as a child. It sort of keeps mortality in your mind all the time. You have to grow up quick. After all, you might not be here tomorrow.
IP is not a problem for him - in fact he challenges the software community who reject the term IP to provide a better way of describing in cogent terms the very substance of creative thinking that is embodied in free software
I'll be happy to take a swing at this one. Actually, it might not be a swing though. I guess you could call it a duck, but it's still a fight tactic. My position would be that a replacement term is unnecessary.
This sounds a lot like the argument that without copyright law there would be no GPL. Just because that is true does not make it meaningful. It's quite a silly thing to say. Yes, it's true that without copyright law there would be no GPL, but without a copyright there would be no need for a GPL.
So, this mission to find a replacement term for intellectual property is totally unnecessary. You can call an idea, an idea. Likewise you can call software, software. There's no need to come up with a replacement for the phrase "intellectual property."
We've been seeing a lot of this "safe" nukes stuff
on
Port-A-Nuke
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· Score: 4, Informative
What is being called safe is the cooling systems and other issues involved with a properly functioning system. What none of these are addressing is that a proplerly functioning nuclear fission plant produces wastes that need to be disposed of and those disposal costs are not being calculated in these reportedly cheap price tags.
This is a very serious accounting issue and a firm that tries to play this kind of accounting game deserves to be busted for fraud.
I think the app has to be NX-aware for it to work, however...
I don't think you're right on that point. I downloaded the Knoppix3.6 iso with Bittorrent almost a week ago and I've been using Fabian's NX server the whole time since then. It gives you everything you get in a regular Knoppix KDE desktop. You can burn DVDs using K3B from a machine in another room among other things I've been doing lately.
I just wish there was some way to make it work at boot time so I could ditch my KVMs.
I did see that small/. thread on hardware IP KVMs the other day though. Sounded great, but I don't have one to play with. But hey if KVM over IP works for hardware, why not software. Sounds crazy, but you never know.
This is a very interesting language issue because so many conservative interests like to use the terms interchangeably in defense of Capitalism while they're really quite distinct and even incompatible.
In fact, free market ideas are dangerous to Capitalism. While the US is a good example of an economy that relies heavily on Capitalism, capitalist economies existed long before the US and are considered to have started in 15th Century Venice. Capitalism, as I'm referring to it, is a system where equity markets such as a stock, bond and commodities exchanges where inverstors use their capital to invest in shares play a central role in the economy. Clearly, such equities markets are very important to the US economy, so it is fair to say the US economy is heavily reliant on Capitalism.
But examples of a free market include ideas like international outsourcing. While globalization is clearly a good thing from a free market perspective, it is not necessarily a good thing for shareholders of American corporations or even for those corporations themselves. Taken to its logical conclusion, outsourcing could quickly gut a capitalist economy. So, what's good for free markets in general is not necessarily good for any particular instances of Capitalism such as the Dow or the NASDAQ.
Let's look at another example of a free market activity that hurts rather than helps Capitalist enterprises --second-hand sales. Again it is easy to see that second-hand sales are clearly free market activities, but if it becomes too popular, it begins to erode sales of new items. So, the general idea of free markets and the rather specific instances of Capitalism are often at odds rather than being interchangeable synonyms.
Reading Slashdot is like reading GRE writing topics where you're supposed to identify the logical problem hidden in the language usage.
I got this one covered.
Your assertion is based on the idea that the volume of the second-hand market is directly proportional to the market for new products. This is a false assumption for a number of reasons.
First of all, a second hand product can be sold second hand more than once while a new product can be sold as new only one time. This fact alone means that the second-hand market is potentially far, far larger than the new market.
Second of all, the major controlling factor in the size of the second-hand market is the willingness of consumers to participate in it. This psychological factor is completely independent of the size of the new product market. The fear of being labled cheap or just plain ol' cooties or of being ripped off by an unscrupulous seller has a more profound limiting effect on the second-hand market than the supply of new products. The latter is nearly insignificant in comparison.
This is why organizations like e-Bay and Craigs List are so revolutionary. People who would never dare to walk into a bricks and mortar thrift store are willing to participate with the Internet as a moderating medium.
Not only is second-hand fat a major market that is already well controlled by major publicly held corporations like Laidlaw and WMI among others, but the big companies that specialize in rendering services spoil their customers by allowing them to mix various fats together in giant vats along with high quantities of solids that require extensive handling to separate out.
Indeed, these steel vats themseves are already the foundation of a huge industry. Consolidated Fabricators Inc is one example of a major corporation with a division specializing in containers for the collection of fats. These containers are tightly regulated by various jurisdictions and their proper use is encoded in regulations that govern the licenses of businesses that use them. Violating those regulations could easily cost a restaurant their license.
So, in the US anyway, it's never going to be as simple as just going down to Mickie D's and filling up the tank.
That isn't to say that biodiesel is a bad idea or that it can't be done. But the idea of using restaurant grease tanks as a replacement for gas stations isn't as simple as it sounds. A more realistic alternative is to allow vegetable oil producers to market a non-edible product for vehicle use. The cost of oil in the grocery store is partly the product of processing it under conditions that guarantee its safety for human ingestion which is unnecessary for its use as a diesel fuel substitute. And of course re-processed food service oils could be a part of this mixure. Its just that getting the oil directly from a fast food joint isn't how it will work at any sort of scale.
The idea of a "Free Market" and the economic system called Capitalism are not one and the same thing.
The United States of America is historically thought of as a having a Capitalist economy with equity markets playing a central position in its economy. But Capitalism, with its implication of a central role for equity markets, is much older than the US and is often thought to have emerged in its modern form in the city-state of Venice in the fifteenth century. The word "bourse" is a French coinage that refers to what Americans call a stock market.
On the other hand, this phrase "Free Market" is little more than an idealistic slogan. It's not too far removed from the term "socialism" in the sense that both merely refer to a general tendency that is never really expected to exist in the absolute sense and would require vastly different societies than the ones we have today even to begin to approach.
I just want to remind everyone of this fact because when someone starts a thread with the phrase "Free Market Capitalism" it really just leads to a lot of misunderstandings. It's not unlike the ETS writing question that asks students to give their opinion on whether artists or engineers contribute more to society. This is a misleading question because the disctinctions upon which the topic are premised are false.
tradition in the US.
In the early part of the twentieth century, a fellow by the name of Anthony Comstock gained extrordinary powers using a similar tactic to that used by the RIAA today, ie a moral crusade against vice. Instead of thieving child porn traders Comstock was convinced obscenity and birth control would destoroy the nation.
Comstock's enormous power came from the creation of a private organization called the New York Society for the Supression of Vice. Eventually, this private organization was allowed to place officers in US Post Offices to read through the mail looking for obscenity. This had nothing to do with the law per-se, he was simply well connected and feared.
So, in the US it is quite possible, and even normal for a non-governmental agency to take on police powers despite the fact that this does not seem to make sense under law.
I wrote to the guy who makes the PeerGuardian P2P firewall for Windows asking him about setting up an additional feature that would make a log file of the break in attempts that could be sent to the offending parties in a series of e-mails that started with a polite request not to violate the network policy and showing the list of IPs that were not accepted on the local network. Subsequent violations would recieve letters showing that the policy had been violated repeatedly and finally compensation would be requested after repeated violations and failures to acknowedge the requests to stop violating network policy. A copy of each user's e-mails would be kept in a central database somehwere like Groklaw or Bluetack and become the basis for a class action law suit. The guy said he didn't want to get in that deep.
I think we're both talking theoretically. While film might have huge resolution in theory. The real question is not the theoretical maximum resolution but what is sufficient quality to please the audiance. I think you would agree that while film theoretically has enormous resolution, the typical cinema projector doesn't make use of it much less a DVD in a home theater so while that may be a valid point in theory, in practice the difference is not so great.
As for the lighting issue. I think its a little early to say that video always requires as much lighting as film to create the same or better results. There are a lot of issues involved and simply saying they are equivalent seems to be a major oversimplification that simply disregards out of hand many of the most important techniques used in digital photography.
And I'm quite serious when I ask if you are familiar with the Blender interface before you dismiss it as well. Six months ago Blender seemed totally obtuse and worthless. That was then, this is now. Now there are tutorials all over the Net and you can import and export to most of the high end systems. Are you saying that Maya, Lighwave, 3Ds and all the other commercial packages are all worthless as well?
Your response seems to consist mostly of dismissal. That's fine. We can just agree to disagree on this issue. But since I'm being open about politely disagreeing I will take this opportunity to say that I think the dismantling of the existing media infrastructure is the best thing that could happen not just to film, but to humanity itself. Without the existing infrastructure, there would be no self-censoring rating system --the old G,PG,R,X system as well as its more recent variation was voluntarily established up by the MPAA. This system is an attrocity in a nation founded on principles of free expression like that of the United States. So, the destruction of the infrastructure that led to this abomination is something I look forward to with great anticipation. The cull of commercial oriented "artists" will merely be the icing on the cake.
Well if you want to get varied, then try Socialism as opposed to Communism. In fact, you could argue that even the United States is largely Socialist in many ways already.
The US is an example of a mix of Socialism and Capitalism, though certainly just one among many.
Take for example the Interstate Freeway System. This system was a fine example of state planning. In order to make it more palatable to business, the money which was federal in origin was dispersed by the States to local private construction firms. So, the US is an economic mix of both central planning and private enterprise. So, it doesn't have to be all one way or the other and, in fact, it isn't.
The really intriguing thing is that it is in China that military privatization is far, far more advanced than in the US. The Red Army needs to turn a profit. Compare that to the US military which is comparatively a totally socialist organization. Now that's where it starts to get weird.
And when the going gets weird. . .
The problem with your analysis is that you're assuming that the costs to produce movies or other media such as studio quality music must remain as high as it ever was. Only if this remains true can you assert that conventional funding mechanisms are essential to maintain conventional production quality levels.
If production costs were to drop by an order of magnitude then it would only be necessary to make an order of magnitude less profits in order to keep the industry at exacctly the same level of quality. Certainly is areas like special effects the changes in production costs thanks to cheap computing power are vastly lower than they were in the past.
Of course this is in theory. In reality we get into the really tricky issues about whether the money being spent on things like movies is really being spent wisely if actors are getting literally millions of dollars for a few minutes of screen time. This is a totally separate issue from the technology so we can see this is indeed a complex issue. In a way movies become a sort of sacred sacrafice to the cult of personality. In this sense conventional economics cannot even approach the topic.
But from the tech side you have to wonder where all those costs are coming from. Theaters intentionally resist digital projectors and directors don't want to shoot straight to digital. You can argue that these technologies are not quite up to snuff for theater yet. Alright then, it's just a matter of time. But eventually those film costs will be out the door along with much of the editing costs.
Now let's say what-if this cheap digital camera technology was already in use. It doesn't require the enormously complex and expensive lighting that film does. Cheap cameras allow you to capture the scene from multiple angles simultaneously drastically reducing production costs by cutting retakes to a minimum. With a higher resolution digital image, you can pan the image digitally instead of using expensive custom mechanical systems.
As for special effects. I'm not going to go there. I'll just ask if you're familiar with the Blender user interface yet. There's no reason not to be. You know that Blender comes default on the OpenMosix idiot proof clusering system for doing big renders on cheap PCs.
So, where are the costs left to justify? It looks like all we've got is the actor's, director's, producer's, staff's and MPAA's salaries. It's not the script writers. The majority of scripts are either re-used or the writers were minimally compensated. This is probably the most interesting part. You wouldn't suggest that we need to preserve the movie industry exactly as it is because the funding mechanisms are necessary to pay the prices required by the actors, the studios and the MPAA, would you?
I've never written anything in Python, but I notice that there are libraries for editing MP3s. If you or someone you know someone who uses Debian you can download those libraries easily and if you want a GUI that runs on Windows you should be able to do that as well.
Yes, it was obvious from reading the links in the submission that this is magnetic plasma confinement technology and totally separate from laser fusion.
However, I'd go with those who say it's still a pity and that the money being spent on much less worthy causes makes the figures much less significant.
Indeed, there are other approaches that aren't even being considered that I still think are worth consideration when you balance out all the benefits.
For instance, instead of lasers it should be possible to induce controlled fission with giant xeon lamps in enormous fused silica "bulbs." The strobe light from hell.
Alternately, you could ignite small scale thermonuclear bombs in an abandoned salt mine. Of course this begins to beg the question of why you wouldn't just tap the abundant geothermal energy that already exists in many many locations throughout the US and around the world.
There are countless ways to approach fission in theory, it's just a matter of engineering it in a cost effective way. If FIRE really isn't cost effective and isn't likely to provide enough knowledge to produce a cost effective reactor then perhaps its not such a bad idea to cancel the program. But fusion research certainly should continue with a degree of urgency and the best way to continue in a cost effective manner is most likely to stick with the game plan. Most of the costs are adminstrative in the end and dismantling what is already in place is incredibly wasteful.
According to the guy who runs the Internet Archive, sorry I don't have the link to the interview, but it is out there somwhere, he estimated that the sum total of studio recorded audio in existence was 160TB the vast majority not being from the US. So, you'd need ninety bucks worth of media.
He also quoted a surprisingly small number for movies which mostly comes from India apparently and he separated movies and video into two categories. It was a fascinating interview.
Cool, that was a good read for anybody who wants to comment on this story. I read it and I found a typo at the end of the page that I took the opportunity to edit. Wow, I'm so glad I could contribute. What an honor. Wiki plus Slashdot. What a combo.
I doubt that part about stem cells.
You may be surprised how close this already is to reality. Mainland China has already commercialized a form of gene therapy that has had powerful results on a broad range of cancers. It has a brand name even, it's called Gendicine. Google it if you doubt it could be real and you could have not heard of it.
In fact, Bush's science advisor has publicly stated that he thinks mortality is essential for human dignity. This is an extension of the belief that human morality is based on Christain principles in which death is a reward for those who live according the Christain version of morality in which heaven is a reward.
Hey, I wish I was making this up. This is all far too real. It's also true that both the East Coast and the West Coast urban population centers along with the Chicago area are totally out of synch politically with the rest of the country which is where the federal government is controlled. I wish it were otherwise, but this is a fact.
If Russia had stem cell therapy that worked today to cure Diabetes, Heart Disease and Parkinsons I would not expect to see it in the US any time soon. However, I expect such therapies are already quite feasible.
Well let me give you a little more detail.
The current release, well since the last time I checked, was 3.4. The hard drive installation script on 3.4 really has improved since 3.2 and this is the kind of thing I refer to when I say that Knoppix is changing so fast that anything you say this week could easily be wrong next week, but there are now three different installation possibilities. One is a hybrid of Knoppix and Debian that is very very similar to what is on the CD, the other is something almost identical to what is on the CD and the third is a more Debian-like installation.
The hybrid install works great and I use it as a daily desktop on a frequently used machine. But for whatever reason, I've had problems making it work with an ext3 as opposed to a reiserfs filesystem. This isn't a problem as long as you know about it in advance, but it give the impression that it doesn't work if you stick to the defaults.
The only slightly tricky part is that since the script defaults to ext3, you need to save it, edit the ext3 line to reiserfs and then re-load it, but the script has interactive dialogues for all of this so it is certainly within the grasp of the average user as long as they have the confidence that it will work.
So, for fail-proof results on a precious Windows machine filled with personal files and photos and what not that you'll never be able to replace if they're lost all you need is a network connection to a machine with enough storage capacity to back up the existing drive. Luckily, the LiveCD has all you need, just boot up the Knoppix CD, setup your netcard and image the existing disk over the network for safety's sake (very simple instructions at knoppix.net in the docs section under "disk imaging" if you need them) and then use QTParted (also on the Knoppix disk) to resize the Windows partition and add a reiserfs partition and a swap partition. The hard drive install script handles the boot configuration and partition as well as the bootloader so you don't need to add one manually. This is pretty slick because now when you boot you can choose to boot up your Windows partition, Linux with a 2.4 kernel or Linux with a 2.6 kernel.
It's quite simple really and it is a very fast install.
Among the things that are not ready for prime time once you do get the install finished is the terminal server which is a bit of a bummer because it is a nice feature if you have many PCs. Just like the hard drive install, this is a script in progress and a version of the script for hard drive installed systems hasn't been completed quite yet and may be superseded by other even better ideas before they are complete.
So the reason I went on and on here about these details is to show you what I'm specifically referring to when I say it has faults. If what you want is a rather nimble distro with a stable set of browsers, e-mail, office apps, the Gimp, Scribus and even Blender as well as an environment where you can build source packages and work fast and all this good stuff then its a hot package. I recommend it all the way and it will even handle the bootloader to give her dual booting automatically so she can keep her Windows partition and probably even run some her Windows apps through Wine. That's a pretty sweet situation.
One more caveat though is that personally I've had problems with QTParted and that is a small fly in the ointment if you want the fully GUI install experience. For whatever reason the CLI Parted program didn't seem to work on the Knoppix CD. So, in that case I used Damn Small Linux which does have the CLI version. It has no GUI, but it walks you through the process fairly nicely.
So, in the situation you're describing, it's probably a good way to go. If you're trying to take advantage of some of the more interesting Mosix facilities, then it's still not quite what it could be. But for an excape from an otherwise dreary Windows existence, hell yeah.
And of course you can do the "poor-man's" install too. That works fine, i
I use Knoppix on about six machines in various configurations ranging from CD, standard and Mosix terminals, images running off the hard drive, the entire image in RAM as well as variously configured hard drive installs and I love it.
However after having done some hard drive installs. I've backed off from pusing it on Windows users as ardantly as I used to because there are still a lot of loose ends when it comes to hard drive installations and once a windows user tries it on their own machine I find they almost inevitably want to go with a hard drive install which can get a little tricky. It's developing quickly, especially in recent months and with the 2.6 kernel I've seen it burn optical far faster than Nero on Windows, but I still think it's a bit premature compared to what it will soon be. I guess that will always be the case and there's certainly nothing wrong with giving away copies here and now, but it definitely should be presented as a work in progress and that is especially true for people doing hard drive installations.
Colonization, not exploration most definitely is what it is about.
And it doesn't even require humanity to screw up the Earth. It is a simple fact that the Earth has a finite existence with or without its life forms. It is clearly essential for Earth's life forms to proceed into the cosmos. The urgency of the current situation is debateable, but eventually it is inevitable.
In the case of an automobile, what you're really paying for is pension funds. You're quite right, most new cars are worth less than about seven thousand dollars if you were to get them for just the cost of labor and materials. What you are paying for is health care and retirement for generations of workers.
This is one reason no-brand Chinese car companies should be taken quite seriously. That lack of brand name may be their major advantage. Since engines change very little aside from electronics and it is usually the electronics that cause problems for consumers, the mixture of sturdy, componentized electronics and the lack of corporate fat will certainly lead to some interesting times for the auto industries both in the US and Japan which has the same problems at this point.
The fact of the matter is that while it is true that technical education is nothing more than a political red herring to hide from the fact that we simply have less need for bodies in the workforce, the same is true, even more so, for business education.
Suggesting that students aren't going into tech because they're all going into business is grasping as straws. The fact is, the prospects are not bright in either tech or business.
For a bit of perspective go to the Perlinger archives and download a few dozen Jim Handy movies put out by the US auto industry in the fifties. As you watch those films you see the message hammered out loud and clear that the decline in agricultural employment is nothing to worry about because all Americans can get jobs in industry.
Alright, so a few decades later industry is in the pits. Now everybody is going to be employed in "services". Ah yes, we'll all be busy with paperwork. Oh, but whadda ya know. Here comes information technology. Now the services that can't be automated can easily be exported. Hmm, how oddly similar to what happened with manufacturing.
The real issue is not what students are studying in classes, the real issue is that old economic models are coming to their logical conclusions.
the real genius part was that Doctrow is presenting this as though it was his original idea when, really, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that this has been Microsoft's internal strategy all along. As he pointed out, MS has already had products that are well suited to infringement for years. I remember the day Outlook shipped with a newsreader I was very impressed and tempted to write a letter to Gates and welcome him to the porn distribution business. Microsoft is totally in the game, who's kidding who?
So, this is a slick presntation and as things play out Doctrow can go back and take credit for guiding MS when he's really doing is clearing the air and having the balls to state out loud what everybody already knows is happening in silence.
The Carol, Bob and Alice analogy was misleading though. If Microsoft, or anybody else, really wanted to make DRM work it could be done as long as you could guarantee your user had to connect to you to view the media. Obviously with fixed media and no network this doesn't work, but nobody said fixed media was the only way to go or that authentification couldn't be combined with a network verification routine.
Microsoft could have taken any number of steps to restrict users years ago and the fact that they didn't seems to suggest that they didn't do so intentionally.
And why should this be surprising? How did they get on every desktop from the first place. This is no mystery. As far as file trading is concerned, nobody has made out anywhere near as well as Microsoft; there is no question they wouldn't be where they are today without it.
But although I'm certainly jealous of Mr. Doctrow for being in such a sweet position I'm not deriding him. He's in the right place at the right time and he deserves credit for presenting an excellent brief. Somebody had to speak up and he really did a nice job.
Slashdot Mirror
Living overseas from my family, I longed for the day when telecoms prices would be cheap enough that I could casually call home and chat without worrying about the price. That time actually came years ago. The price of phone cards become so cheap that calling home was no longer a significant financial burden starting quite a few years ago already.
Prior to cheap phone cards and subsequent cheap overseas rates directly from the phone monopoly itself, I had assumed that when telecoms prices dropped there would be revolutionary change in society as global barriers to communication fell and completely new markets and opportunities became available. Remote pools of English teachers for one seemed like an intriguing idea.
But when cheap telephony finally arrived, I realized the rather simple flaw in my vision --time zones. This is actually a bigger problem than price for international voice communication. We already had e-mail so it wasn't communication itself that was coming available, it was convenient communication. The problem is, if you have to stay up till 3:00AM to call someone it's hardly convenient.
That's not to say VoIP isn't cool. It's cool. Certinly it's cool. But it's not as big of a change for the global communications scene as I once thought.
Any Orcutteers out there on Slashdot?
Hope not.
What a scarry place. I think almost everybody I grew up with had a serious drug problem. The missles were very much related to the immense sense of doom among my childhood friends. An astonishing number of them died quite young despite the fact it's a fairly affluent area. There was just an enormous amount of self destruction.
Of course that really gloomy stuff didn't really emerge until the teen years. But I mean if you follow it back to the younger years you see the connection. I mean we'd talk about it openly, how we were all going to die anyway. We'd be out on the playground and at least once a week there would be this huge rumbling and then the trail of smoke that grew thicker and thicker as it dispersed into the atmosphere making crazy curves winding into the sky. It was quite pretty.
I recall once we had a misfire that sprayed rocket fuel all over an area between us and the base and it was a big hazmat emergency where everybody got paid overtime to pretend to be doing something. Other than that, nothing ever really came of the missles directly. But indirectly, it had an enormous impact on that community.
It's funny going back and seeing people spending a half million bucks to live there and thinking it's really great, especially the ones who sort of migrated in from the South or the Midwest. They're always really enthused about it. But those missles do leave an impression on you if you start off with it as a child. It sort of keeps mortality in your mind all the time. You have to grow up quick. After all, you might not be here tomorrow.
IP is not a problem for him - in fact he challenges the software community who reject the term IP to provide a better way of describing in cogent terms the very substance of creative thinking that is embodied in free software
I'll be happy to take a swing at this one. Actually, it might not be a swing though. I guess you could call it a duck, but it's still a fight tactic. My position would be that a replacement term is unnecessary.
This sounds a lot like the argument that without copyright law there would be no GPL. Just because that is true does not make it meaningful. It's quite a silly thing to say. Yes, it's true that without copyright law there would be no GPL, but without a copyright there would be no need for a GPL.
So, this mission to find a replacement term for intellectual property is totally unnecessary. You can call an idea, an idea. Likewise you can call software, software. There's no need to come up with a replacement for the phrase "intellectual property."
What is being called safe is the cooling systems and other issues involved with a properly functioning system. What none of these are addressing is that a proplerly functioning nuclear fission plant produces wastes that need to be disposed of and those disposal costs are not being calculated in these reportedly cheap price tags.
This is a very serious accounting issue and a firm that tries to play this kind of accounting game deserves to be busted for fraud.
I think the app has to be NX-aware for it to work, however...
/. thread on hardware IP KVMs the other day though. Sounded great, but I don't have one to play with. But hey if KVM over IP works for hardware, why not software. Sounds crazy, but you never know.
I don't think you're right on that point. I downloaded the Knoppix3.6 iso with Bittorrent almost a week ago and I've been using Fabian's NX server the whole time since then. It gives you everything you get in a regular Knoppix KDE desktop. You can burn DVDs using K3B from a machine in another room among other things I've been doing lately.
I just wish there was some way to make it work at boot time so I could ditch my KVMs.
I did see that small
This is a very interesting language issue because so many conservative interests like to use the terms interchangeably in defense of Capitalism while they're really quite distinct and even incompatible.
In fact, free market ideas are dangerous to Capitalism. While the US is a good example of an economy that relies heavily on Capitalism, capitalist economies existed long before the US and are considered to have started in 15th Century Venice. Capitalism, as I'm referring to it, is a system where equity markets such as a stock, bond and commodities exchanges where inverstors use their capital to invest in shares play a central role in the economy. Clearly, such equities markets are very important to the US economy, so it is fair to say the US economy is heavily reliant on Capitalism.
But examples of a free market include ideas like international outsourcing. While globalization is clearly a good thing from a free market perspective, it is not necessarily a good thing for shareholders of American corporations or even for those corporations themselves. Taken to its logical conclusion, outsourcing could quickly gut a capitalist economy. So, what's good for free markets in general is not necessarily good for any particular instances of Capitalism such as the Dow or the NASDAQ.
Let's look at another example of a free market activity that hurts rather than helps Capitalist enterprises --second-hand sales. Again it is easy to see that second-hand sales are clearly free market activities, but if it becomes too popular, it begins to erode sales of new items. So, the general idea of free markets and the rather specific instances of Capitalism are often at odds rather than being interchangeable synonyms.
Reading Slashdot is like reading GRE writing topics where you're supposed to identify the logical problem hidden in the language usage.
I got this one covered.
Your assertion is based on the idea that the volume of the second-hand market is directly proportional to the market for new products. This is a false assumption for a number of reasons.
First of all, a second hand product can be sold second hand more than once while a new product can be sold as new only one time. This fact alone means that the second-hand market is potentially far, far larger than the new market.
Second of all, the major controlling factor in the size of the second-hand market is the willingness of consumers to participate in it. This psychological factor is completely independent of the size of the new product market. The fear of being labled cheap or just plain ol' cooties or of being ripped off by an unscrupulous seller has a more profound limiting effect on the second-hand market than the supply of new products. The latter is nearly insignificant in comparison.
This is why organizations like e-Bay and Craigs List are so revolutionary. People who would never dare to walk into a bricks and mortar thrift store are willing to participate with the Internet as a moderating medium.
Not only is second-hand fat a major market that is already well controlled by major publicly held corporations like Laidlaw and WMI among others, but the big companies that specialize in rendering services spoil their customers by allowing them to mix various fats together in giant vats along with high quantities of solids that require extensive handling to separate out.
Indeed, these steel vats themseves are already the foundation of a huge industry. Consolidated Fabricators Inc is one example of a major corporation with a division specializing in containers for the collection of fats. These containers are tightly regulated by various jurisdictions and their proper use is encoded in regulations that govern the licenses of businesses that use them. Violating those regulations could easily cost a restaurant their license.
So, in the US anyway, it's never going to be as simple as just going down to Mickie D's and filling up the tank.
That isn't to say that biodiesel is a bad idea or that it can't be done. But the idea of using restaurant grease tanks as a replacement for gas stations isn't as simple as it sounds. A more realistic alternative is to allow vegetable oil producers to market a non-edible product for vehicle use. The cost of oil in the grocery store is partly the product of processing it under conditions that guarantee its safety for human ingestion which is unnecessary for its use as a diesel fuel substitute. And of course re-processed food service oils could be a part of this mixure. Its just that getting the oil directly from a fast food joint isn't how it will work at any sort of scale.
The idea of a "Free Market" and the economic system called Capitalism are not one and the same thing.
The United States of America is historically thought of as a having a Capitalist economy with equity markets playing a central position in its economy. But Capitalism, with its implication of a central role for equity markets, is much older than the US and is often thought to have emerged in its modern form in the city-state of Venice in the fifteenth century. The word "bourse" is a French coinage that refers to what Americans call a stock market.
On the other hand, this phrase "Free Market" is little more than an idealistic slogan. It's not too far removed from the term "socialism" in the sense that both merely refer to a general tendency that is never really expected to exist in the absolute sense and would require vastly different societies than the ones we have today even to begin to approach.
I just want to remind everyone of this fact because when someone starts a thread with the phrase "Free Market Capitalism" it really just leads to a lot of misunderstandings. It's not unlike the ETS writing question that asks students to give their opinion on whether artists or engineers contribute more to society. This is a misleading question because the disctinctions upon which the topic are premised are false.
tradition in the US.
In the early part of the twentieth century, a fellow by the name of Anthony Comstock gained extrordinary powers using a similar tactic to that used by the RIAA today, ie a moral crusade against vice. Instead of thieving child porn traders Comstock was convinced obscenity and birth control would destoroy the nation.
Comstock's enormous power came from the creation of a private organization called the New York Society for the Supression of Vice. Eventually, this private organization was allowed to place officers in US Post Offices to read through the mail looking for obscenity. This had nothing to do with the law per-se, he was simply well connected and feared.
So, in the US it is quite possible, and even normal for a non-governmental agency to take on police powers despite the fact that this does not seem to make sense under law.
I wrote to the guy who makes the PeerGuardian P2P firewall for Windows asking him about setting up an additional feature that would make a log file of the break in attempts that could be sent to the offending parties in a series of e-mails that started with a polite request not to violate the network policy and showing the list of IPs that were not accepted on the local network. Subsequent violations would recieve letters showing that the policy had been violated repeatedly and finally compensation would be requested after repeated violations and failures to acknowedge the requests to stop violating network policy. A copy of each user's e-mails would be kept in a central database somehwere like Groklaw or Bluetack and become the basis for a class action law suit. The guy said he didn't want to get in that deep.
I think we're both talking theoretically. While film might have huge resolution in theory. The real question is not the theoretical maximum resolution but what is sufficient quality to please the audiance. I think you would agree that while film theoretically has enormous resolution, the typical cinema projector doesn't make use of it much less a DVD in a home theater so while that may be a valid point in theory, in practice the difference is not so great.
As for the lighting issue. I think its a little early to say that video always requires as much lighting as film to create the same or better results. There are a lot of issues involved and simply saying they are equivalent seems to be a major oversimplification that simply disregards out of hand many of the most important techniques used in digital photography.
And I'm quite serious when I ask if you are familiar with the Blender interface before you dismiss it as well. Six months ago Blender seemed totally obtuse and worthless. That was then, this is now. Now there are tutorials all over the Net and you can import and export to most of the high end systems. Are you saying that Maya, Lighwave, 3Ds and all the other commercial packages are all worthless as well?
Your response seems to consist mostly of dismissal. That's fine. We can just agree to disagree on this issue. But since I'm being open about politely disagreeing I will take this opportunity to say that I think the dismantling of the existing media infrastructure is the best thing that could happen not just to film, but to humanity itself. Without the existing infrastructure, there would be no self-censoring rating system --the old G,PG,R,X system as well as its more recent variation was voluntarily established up by the MPAA. This system is an attrocity in a nation founded on principles of free expression like that of the United States. So, the destruction of the infrastructure that led to this abomination is something I look forward to with great anticipation. The cull of commercial oriented "artists" will merely be the icing on the cake.
Well if you want to get varied, then try Socialism as opposed to Communism. In fact, you could argue that even the United States is largely Socialist in many ways already.
The US is an example of a mix of Socialism and Capitalism, though certainly just one among many.
Take for example the Interstate Freeway System. This system was a fine example of state planning. In order to make it more palatable to business, the money which was federal in origin was dispersed by the States to local private construction firms. So, the US is an economic mix of both central planning and private enterprise. So, it doesn't have to be all one way or the other and, in fact, it isn't.
The really intriguing thing is that it is in China that military privatization is far, far more advanced than in the US. The Red Army needs to turn a profit. Compare that to the US military which is comparatively a totally socialist organization. Now that's where it starts to get weird.
And when the going gets weird. . .
The problem with your analysis is that you're assuming that the costs to produce movies or other media such as studio quality music must remain as high as it ever was. Only if this remains true can you assert that conventional funding mechanisms are essential to maintain conventional production quality levels.
If production costs were to drop by an order of magnitude then it would only be necessary to make an order of magnitude less profits in order to keep the industry at exacctly the same level of quality. Certainly is areas like special effects the changes in production costs thanks to cheap computing power are vastly lower than they were in the past.
Of course this is in theory. In reality we get into the really tricky issues about whether the money being spent on things like movies is really being spent wisely if actors are getting literally millions of dollars for a few minutes of screen time. This is a totally separate issue from the technology so we can see this is indeed a complex issue. In a way movies become a sort of sacred sacrafice to the cult of personality. In this sense conventional economics cannot even approach the topic.
But from the tech side you have to wonder where all those costs are coming from. Theaters intentionally resist digital projectors and directors don't want to shoot straight to digital. You can argue that these technologies are not quite up to snuff for theater yet. Alright then, it's just a matter of time. But eventually those film costs will be out the door along with much of the editing costs.
Now let's say what-if this cheap digital camera technology was already in use. It doesn't require the enormously complex and expensive lighting that film does. Cheap cameras allow you to capture the scene from multiple angles simultaneously drastically reducing production costs by cutting retakes to a minimum. With a higher resolution digital image, you can pan the image digitally instead of using expensive custom mechanical systems.
As for special effects. I'm not going to go there. I'll just ask if you're familiar with the Blender user interface yet. There's no reason not to be. You know that Blender comes default on the OpenMosix idiot proof clusering system for doing big renders on cheap PCs.
So, where are the costs left to justify? It looks like all we've got is the actor's, director's, producer's, staff's and MPAA's salaries. It's not the script writers. The majority of scripts are either re-used or the writers were minimally compensated. This is probably the most interesting part. You wouldn't suggest that we need to preserve the movie industry exactly as it is because the funding mechanisms are necessary to pay the prices required by the actors, the studios and the MPAA, would you?
I've never written anything in Python, but I notice that there are libraries for editing MP3s. If you or someone you know someone who uses Debian you can download those libraries easily and if you want a GUI that runs on Windows you should be able to do that as well.
Yes, it was obvious from reading the links in the submission that this is magnetic plasma confinement technology and totally separate from laser fusion.
However, I'd go with those who say it's still a pity and that the money being spent on much less worthy causes makes the figures much less significant.
Indeed, there are other approaches that aren't even being considered that I still think are worth consideration when you balance out all the benefits.
For instance, instead of lasers it should be possible to induce controlled fission with giant xeon lamps in enormous fused silica "bulbs." The strobe light from hell.
Alternately, you could ignite small scale thermonuclear bombs in an abandoned salt mine. Of course this begins to beg the question of why you wouldn't just tap the abundant geothermal energy that already exists in many many locations throughout the US and around the world.
There are countless ways to approach fission in theory, it's just a matter of engineering it in a cost effective way. If FIRE really isn't cost effective and isn't likely to provide enough knowledge to produce a cost effective reactor then perhaps its not such a bad idea to cancel the program. But fusion research certainly should continue with a degree of urgency and the best way to continue in a cost effective manner is most likely to stick with the game plan. Most of the costs are adminstrative in the end and dismantling what is already in place is incredibly wasteful.
According to the guy who runs the Internet Archive, sorry I don't have the link to the interview, but it is out there somwhere, he estimated that the sum total of studio recorded audio in existence was 160TB the vast majority not being from the US. So, you'd need ninety bucks worth of media.
He also quoted a surprisingly small number for movies which mostly comes from India apparently and he separated movies and video into two categories. It was a fascinating interview.
Cool, that was a good read for anybody who wants to comment on this story. I read it and I found a typo at the end of the page that I took the opportunity to edit. Wow, I'm so glad I could contribute. What an honor. Wiki plus Slashdot. What a combo.
I doubt that part about stem cells.
You may be surprised how close this already is to reality. Mainland China has already commercialized a form of gene therapy that has had powerful results on a broad range of cancers. It has a brand name even, it's called Gendicine. Google it if you doubt it could be real and you could have not heard of it.
In fact, Bush's science advisor has publicly stated that he thinks mortality is essential for human dignity. This is an extension of the belief that human morality is based on Christain principles in which death is a reward for those who live according the Christain version of morality in which heaven is a reward.
Hey, I wish I was making this up. This is all far too real. It's also true that both the East Coast and the West Coast urban population centers along with the Chicago area are totally out of synch politically with the rest of the country which is where the federal government is controlled. I wish it were otherwise, but this is a fact.
If Russia had stem cell therapy that worked today to cure Diabetes, Heart Disease and Parkinsons I would not expect to see it in the US any time soon. However, I expect such therapies are already quite feasible.
Well let me give you a little more detail.
The current release, well since the last time I checked, was 3.4. The hard drive installation script on 3.4 really has improved since 3.2 and this is the kind of thing I refer to when I say that Knoppix is changing so fast that anything you say this week could easily be wrong next week, but there are now three different installation possibilities. One is a hybrid of Knoppix and Debian that is very very similar to what is on the CD, the other is something almost identical to what is on the CD and the third is a more Debian-like installation.
The hybrid install works great and I use it as a daily desktop on a frequently used machine. But for whatever reason, I've had problems making it work with an ext3 as opposed to a reiserfs filesystem. This isn't a problem as long as you know about it in advance, but it give the impression that it doesn't work if you stick to the defaults.
The only slightly tricky part is that since the script defaults to ext3, you need to save it, edit the ext3 line to reiserfs and then re-load it, but the script has interactive dialogues for all of this so it is certainly within the grasp of the average user as long as they have the confidence that it will work.
So, for fail-proof results on a precious Windows machine filled with personal files and photos and what not that you'll never be able to replace if they're lost all you need is a network connection to a machine with enough storage capacity to back up the existing drive. Luckily, the LiveCD has all you need, just boot up the Knoppix CD, setup your netcard and image the existing disk over the network for safety's sake (very simple instructions at knoppix.net in the docs section under "disk imaging" if you need them) and then use QTParted (also on the Knoppix disk) to resize the Windows partition and add a reiserfs partition and a swap partition. The hard drive install script handles the boot configuration and partition as well as the bootloader so you don't need to add one manually. This is pretty slick because now when you boot you can choose to boot up your Windows partition, Linux with a 2.4 kernel or Linux with a 2.6 kernel.
It's quite simple really and it is a very fast install.
Among the things that are not ready for prime time once you do get the install finished is the terminal server which is a bit of a bummer because it is a nice feature if you have many PCs. Just like the hard drive install, this is a script in progress and a version of the script for hard drive installed systems hasn't been completed quite yet and may be superseded by other even better ideas before they are complete.
So the reason I went on and on here about these details is to show you what I'm specifically referring to when I say it has faults. If what you want is a rather nimble distro with a stable set of browsers, e-mail, office apps, the Gimp, Scribus and even Blender as well as an environment where you can build source packages and work fast and all this good stuff then its a hot package. I recommend it all the way and it will even handle the bootloader to give her dual booting automatically so she can keep her Windows partition and probably even run some her Windows apps through Wine. That's a pretty sweet situation.
One more caveat though is that personally I've had problems with QTParted and that is a small fly in the ointment if you want the fully GUI install experience. For whatever reason the CLI Parted program didn't seem to work on the Knoppix CD. So, in that case I used Damn Small Linux which does have the CLI version. It has no GUI, but it walks you through the process fairly nicely.
So, in the situation you're describing, it's probably a good way to go. If you're trying to take advantage of some of the more interesting Mosix facilities, then it's still not quite what it could be. But for an excape from an otherwise dreary Windows existence, hell yeah.
And of course you can do the "poor-man's" install too. That works fine, i
I use Knoppix on about six machines in various configurations ranging from CD, standard and Mosix terminals, images running off the hard drive, the entire image in RAM as well as variously configured hard drive installs and I love it.
However after having done some hard drive installs. I've backed off from pusing it on Windows users as ardantly as I used to because there are still a lot of loose ends when it comes to hard drive installations and once a windows user tries it on their own machine I find they almost inevitably want to go with a hard drive install which can get a little tricky. It's developing quickly, especially in recent months and with the 2.6 kernel I've seen it burn optical far faster than Nero on Windows, but I still think it's a bit premature compared to what it will soon be. I guess that will always be the case and there's certainly nothing wrong with giving away copies here and now, but it definitely should be presented as a work in progress and that is especially true for people doing hard drive installations.
Colonization, not exploration most definitely is what it is about.
And it doesn't even require humanity to screw up the Earth. It is a simple fact that the Earth has a finite existence with or without its life forms. It is clearly essential for Earth's life forms to proceed into the cosmos. The urgency of the current situation is debateable, but eventually it is inevitable.
In the case of an automobile, what you're really paying for is pension funds. You're quite right, most new cars are worth less than about seven thousand dollars if you were to get them for just the cost of labor and materials. What you are paying for is health care and retirement for generations of workers.
This is one reason no-brand Chinese car companies should be taken quite seriously. That lack of brand name may be their major advantage. Since engines change very little aside from electronics and it is usually the electronics that cause problems for consumers, the mixture of sturdy, componentized electronics and the lack of corporate fat will certainly lead to some interesting times for the auto industries both in the US and Japan which has the same problems at this point.
The fact of the matter is that while it is true that technical education is nothing more than a political red herring to hide from the fact that we simply have less need for bodies in the workforce, the same is true, even more so, for business education.
Suggesting that students aren't going into tech because they're all going into business is grasping as straws. The fact is, the prospects are not bright in either tech or business.
For a bit of perspective go to the Perlinger archives and download a few dozen Jim Handy movies put out by the US auto industry in the fifties. As you watch those films you see the message hammered out loud and clear that the decline in agricultural employment is nothing to worry about because all Americans can get jobs in industry.
Alright, so a few decades later industry is in the pits. Now everybody is going to be employed in "services". Ah yes, we'll all be busy with paperwork. Oh, but whadda ya know. Here comes information technology. Now the services that can't be automated can easily be exported. Hmm, how oddly similar to what happened with manufacturing.
The real issue is not what students are studying in classes, the real issue is that old economic models are coming to their logical conclusions.
the real genius part was that Doctrow is presenting this as though it was his original idea when, really, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that this has been Microsoft's internal strategy all along. As he pointed out, MS has already had products that are well suited to infringement for years. I remember the day Outlook shipped with a newsreader I was very impressed and tempted to write a letter to Gates and welcome him to the porn distribution business. Microsoft is totally in the game, who's kidding who?
So, this is a slick presntation and as things play out Doctrow can go back and take credit for guiding MS when he's really doing is clearing the air and having the balls to state out loud what everybody already knows is happening in silence.
The Carol, Bob and Alice analogy was misleading though. If Microsoft, or anybody else, really wanted to make DRM work it could be done as long as you could guarantee your user had to connect to you to view the media. Obviously with fixed media and no network this doesn't work, but nobody said fixed media was the only way to go or that authentification couldn't be combined with a network verification routine.
Microsoft could have taken any number of steps to restrict users years ago and the fact that they didn't seems to suggest that they didn't do so intentionally.
And why should this be surprising? How did they get on every desktop from the first place. This is no mystery. As far as file trading is concerned, nobody has made out anywhere near as well as Microsoft; there is no question they wouldn't be where they are today without it.
But although I'm certainly jealous of Mr. Doctrow for being in such a sweet position I'm not deriding him. He's in the right place at the right time and he deserves credit for presenting an excellent brief. Somebody had to speak up and he really did a nice job.