Honestly, I'm tempted to say that what we're seeing more than anything else are isolated incidents being cherrypicked by the press. More likely than anything else, a cop got extremely overzealous, and the case will immediately be thrown out by a judge once it goes to trial.
If the police were indeed following the letter of the law, the case should work its way through the system, which should hopefully find the accused innocent, as long as their rights remain intact. The resulting public outcry should also have the law amended into something more reasonable, or repealed completely. Let the issue work its way through the system before running about claiming the sky is falling. This would appear to be a textbook example of why due process exists, and events need to be allowed to take their course before we start overreacting, running about and yelling that the sky is falling.
Yes, it's definitely true that British citizens trust their government a fair bit more than Americans traditionally have (past eight years notwithstanding). However, people also seem to be a bit more aware of the actions of their government, and if they overstep their boundaries, it's usually corrected pretty quickly.
The other thing to add is that the independent mainstream media in the UK is absolutely terrible. The BBC, which is generally quite good, has dried up the market for a second "high quality" mainstream paper eg. The NY Times or The Washington Post, and any other media outlets are either tabloids or Rupert Murdoch-owned properties. I'm sure any Americans can attest to the quality of Fox News!
The media frenzy over the "knife crime epidemic" over the past few days is a fantastic example of this. Yes, it is indeed unfortunate that over the course of a few days, two youths happened to fall victim to fatal knife crimes. Although this is indeed extremely unfortunate, on the scale of an entire nation, shit's bound to happen occasionally. Extrapolating past data suggests that just as many similar incidents occur in the city of Detroit alone, as do in all of Britain.
The media has an agenda, and it currently wants to make Britain look awful, to make Americans feel a bit better about their own current state of affairs.
I'm not saying things are great. People indeed do need to keep a watchful eye on their government. However, it's also equally important to maintain a sense of perspective and moderation, rather than screaming "1984!" every time a story appears on the news/Slashdot/BoingBoing.
Also understand that we're talking about two different cultures. Extrapolating American ideals to British politics is almost as dangerous as saying "The Iraqis will love us for our democracy."
I think it's pretty clear that it's largely a devaluation of the dollar. Gas prices are going up all around the world, and there's no one simple answer why.
The dollar has actually remained fairly stable versus the Euro and Pound over the past few months. It was a lot weaker back in October/November of last year.
The dolar's been growing weaker for quite some time, and the American public only caught on to the fact once gas prices started skyrocketing. Yes, the weak dollar is playing a factor, but it's certainly not causing the massive spike in the price of crude that we're currently seeing.
They were also shitting bricks, because they intentionally picked a very risky trajectory to land on.
Even if the craft functioned perfectly as it was deisgned, there was still an estimated 50/50 chance that the craft wouldn't make it. I'm guessing it had something to do with the inclination at which the probe entered the atmosphere, which they had very little control over, given the extremely high velocity at which it entered the atmosphere. Enter too steep, and the probe craters into the surface.
Also don't forget that Phoenix landed at a pretty early hour in the morning.
All that countdown clock and pre-information stuff can be programmed far far in advance. When the probe actually lands, like the other posters have mentioned, the scientists are most likely busy tending to the probe itself.
That all said, images were put online almost immediately. I'm guessing that there was some sort of automatic process that relayed the images directly to a webserver as they were received by NASA.
Good enough for me!
Re:Amazing how short sighted ppl are
on
The Phoenix Has Landed
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If we can effectively achieve the goals of the mission without using a nuclear reactor, we're almost certainly better off.
Although there are certainly applications for nuclear power on interplanetary spacecraft, I don't think that it would have been appropriate for a small stationary scientific probe.
Once the probe has done its stuff, and examined the surface around its landing site, there's not a whole lot much more it can do. Mission accomplished.
And even as much as fears regarding nuclear power may be overstated, Plutonium is, and will always be pretty scary stuff. We don't want to contaminate our atmosphere, oceans, and land, and also don't want to do the same to the surface of Mars.
Public perception also plays a role. Can you imagine if Columbia had been carrying a substantial amount of fissible material? The entire state of Texas would have been launched into a state of mass-hysteria, even if the containment vessel remained intact. NASA would be dismantled within a week.
Although Spirit and Opportunity are somewhat limited by their power source, they have indeed been overwhelmingly successful missions.
Launch failures are increasingly rare, though not quite reliable enough yet that we shouldn't err on the side of caution. Radioactive materials have been released into the atmosphere before as a result of launch failures, and although it's not the end of the world, it's also something we should avoid if we can.
It's all about managing risk. Nuclear power is risky, and thus NASA avoid it unless it's necessary for the mission.
Such a license would be extremely difficult, if not impossible to enforce.
A compromise already exists in the form of the LGPL, which retains the restrictiveness of the GPL, but also allows closed-source code to link to it.
Personally, I feel that LGPL should be the default license, rather than vice versa, given what a headache the linking cause can cause to commercial developers.
This even causes problems for non-technology businesses who need to run proprietary software internally as a function of their business. this sort of practice isn't going to go away, and RMS is naieve to believe otherwise.
In a sense, the GPL forces RMS's personal view of "freedom" upon every project that even remotely goes near GPL'd code.
Similarly, were we not to have the LGPL, we wouldn't have projects like WebKit. There's no chance in hell that Apple would have open-sourced the UI toolkits that link to Safari, although they were willing to concede their modifications to the rendering core. Both Apple and the KHTML folks have openly admitted that they have enjoyed a mutually beneficial arrangement.
So perhaps the LGPL is the most conducive license to spur OSS development. It won't fall prone to greed and/or secrecy like the BSD license can, though it also won't scare commercial developers away, like the GPL is bound to do. Even so, it could do with being toned-down a notch.
Revisiting your time-limit proposal: Perhaps a compromise would be to ammend copyright laws so that a software product may only be copywritten if the developer supplies the Library of Congress with a full and complete copy of the source. Once the copyright term expires (the timeframe of which is a separate battle to be fought), or the software falls back to the public-domain, the Government releases the binaries and source to the public.
During WWII, Disney was commissioned to create a number of short films to aid/promote the war effort, along with several PSAs and the like.
A while back, a friend and I watched through a DVD of these shorts, and they were absolutely fascinating. While several of them would prove to be quite iconic, some were astonishingly offensive. I give enormous kudos to Disney for having the balls to have provided an essentially uncensored glimpse into the past. (I'm told that there are a number of pieces that didn't make the cut that would be extremely offensive to modern audiences)
At the bequest of the US Government, Disney also produced a number of "educational" films to be sent to South America in order to help them build their economies into utopic democracies, and counteract any Nazi/Communist influences that were taking hold there. These were also fairly offensive against their target audience!
If you want a great view into the not-so-distant past of American history, I'd highly recommend watching these, especially given the great deal of historical relativism that seems to be going on these days concerning that era.
None of that stuff would fly today, showing just how difficult and risky it is to draw parallels between the present, and situations that occurred 50 years ago.
However, the GPL is undoubtedly less free than the BSD license. You can do virtually anything with BSD-licensed code.
If you take the time to read it (it's about two paragraphs long in its entirety) , you'll notice that there are effectively two restrictions on using BSD-licensed code.
1) You must retain the text of the BSD license somewhere in your product. 2) You cannot advertise a product derived from BSD-licensed code in a manner that implies endorsement of the original author without his permission.
There is also a liability disclaimer that's pretty much standard for all code these days.
In many cases, the GPL is a huge liability. Corporations don't like that sort of liability, and also don't like an ideology being shoved down their throats. In contrast, the BSD license comes with no strings attached, and encourages developers to voluntarily contribute their changes back to the original project.
Miniminalism does not necessarily imply functionality or utilitarianism.
Even in spite of the bare-bones design, Debian's site fails to organize things in a logical or comprehensable manner.
In all, the site's design feels very indicative of the GNU project in general. There's far too much space devoted to things that people simply don't care about.
The first item on the sidebar? Debian's social contract. The majority of the text in the welcome message is a paraphrasing of Stallman's GNU/Linux naming rant. Most users are interested in an operating system, not an ideology. Linux has gotten good enough that it can drop this crutch entirely.
The battle is over, and we won... not because the public woke up and realized that closed-source software is evil. F/OSS gained acceptance because the software actually became better than its commercial counterparts. Relying on ideology is a terrible marketing strategy, and implies some pretty huge weaknesses.
A better introduction would be: "Debian is a fast, reliable, and secure operating system available for several platforms. It is provided free of charge to all users, and is developed by a team of volunteers." Short, to-the-point, and pays homage to the F/OSS philosophy without forcing it down the users' throats.
The rest of that paragraph is useless. Unless you stumbled across the page by accident, you probably know what an operating system is. Nobody cares about the number of packages in the repository.
Actually attempting to download the distro is a chore as well. First the user must pick the release, then the branch, then the installation method, and finally their architecture. Most users aren't going to know what any of these things mean.
It's fine to offer a high degree of flexibility. However, when 99% of your users are going to be downloading an ISO for the most recent stable x86 build, it makes the most sense to put that option right up front.
Anyone with the need for one of the more exotic builds should be knowledgable enough to figure out where to look. A simple hyperlink to "Other Builds" that leads to a table of all the available releases would be perfectly sufficient.
I'm not even going to bother elaborating about the color scheme, inconsistent margins, or excessively linearized page flow (for both remaining Lynx users!). There are enough competent web designers out there that the crappy design of Debian's site must actually have been a conscious choice of the project's management. It achieves the impossible goal of being both condescending and incomprehensable all at the same time.
That's for full-size color images, and other non-visual uploads as well (eg. audio clips).
If we're preparing a wikipeia dump specificly for the iLiad, we can convert all of the images to 16-level grayscale, and resmple them down to a resolution appropriate for the device. Recompress, and the resulting image should be much, much smaller.
Wikipedia should probably start implementing some sort of tagging system for images to help strip out non-essential media for a "condensed" version on platforms where bandwidth/storage is limited. Images that are only peripheral to the article should get some sort of tag so that they are omitted; images that are vital to the comprehension of the article should get another so that they are sure to be included; there should be some sort of identifier to separate photographs from diagrams/maps that haven't yet been converted to SVG for devices that cannot display photos, and so on....
There's a difference between "sharing data" and connecting your control systems to the outside world. I don't doubt that it's beneficial to release efficency/monitoring data to a third party.
However, data collection and retreval should be on a completely separate network from the power plant's critical control systems. They're unrelated tasks; one requires strict reliability and security, while the other doesn't need to be any more secure than the typical business network.
More to the point.... why the hell were those control systems taught to speak TCP/IP in the first place? Aren't there other industrial control protocols designed for this sort of thing that provide better redundancy, integrity, and security?
You can cherry-pick all you want. In the end, the US government over the past 40-50 years has been defined by policies that would be considered "conservative" in most parts of the globe.
Much of the legislation you mention was either inevitable, the work of their predecessors, or had little to no impact.
That said, even though I don't particularly like Bush at all, he has had a small number of bright moments. His most recent Veto of the $288 billion farm bill was absolutely the right thing to do, even though republicans and democrats alike overwhelmingly overrode the veto to let their pork-barrel projects go forward.
Living in a society is about compromise and respect for other peoples opinions and beliefs. Groups inside a society who have no tolerance for other views are a serious issue. Most of the problems societies have are when these groups get too powerful.
Frankly sending them all out into the middle of the ocean sounds like a great idea. Living accommodations optional. England tried that a couple hundred years ago with the Puritans.
Are nVidia trying to squeeze more money out of their customers with the deepest pockets, or is the Quadro line more legitimately more expensive due to the significantly higher development costs-per-unit, given that the market for workstation cards is many orders of magnitude smaller?
The hardware might be the same, but the drivers and firmware for the Quadro line are apparently quite different.
It'd be nice if nVidia provided some sort of "hobbyist upgrade" to its consumer-grade video cards with some sort of non-commercial clause added in, although until they do that, the firmware/driver hack comes across as flat-out piracy.
This may seem like a silly question, but were the astronomers able to capture data of the entire event, starting before the initial burst of energy was observed?
Were they already recording data when the new supernova became apparent, is there some sort of "astronomical TiVo that continuously records data in the hopes of inadvertently observing an event such as this one, or did the scientists need to press 'record' once they observed the initial burst of energy?
I only ask, because the article's comparision to "winning the lottery" seems fairly apt, as the odds of observing such an event purely by chance must be extremely (some would say "astronomically") low. Also, the star's behavior immediately before the supernova could possibly provide interesting data as well. Even a *lack* of "interesting" data would be useful in its own right.
Is it standard procedure to record every scrap of data that is received by such a facility, or do the scientists only record data once the telescope is in position, aimed at a relevant target, etc?
I'm not quite sure where I'm going with all this... mostly just curiosity. It seems that the scientists got very lucky with this observation. Hopefully we can learn something from it, and increase our understanding of the universe!
Yes, but Supreme Court rulings in the US do have the power to reinterpret the constitution in cases where it is vague or nonspecific.
In the US, the First ammendment may also be suspended under similar circumstances to those described above, and the Supreme Court have ruled that there are quite a few areas where it "doesn't really apply"
At the very least, you know what you're getting with the Human Rights Act just by reading the thing. Attempting to comprehensively understand the US constitution today requires a law degree.
However, the revolution doesn't have to come with eBooks. Many schools make extensive use of publishers such as Dover Books, who specialize in printing out-of-copyright material very inexpensively.
If good public-domain textbooks were available, an entire industry would quickly spring up to print these books as cheaply as possible. Printing doesn't have to be expensive, and a good book can last through several generations of student... I've been a big critic of the OLPC project, primarily because these free texts don't yet exist, and because their existance would allow us to print dozens of books for less than the cost of an XO.
Many educators are fed up with the "New Maths" that have been shoved in their faces, and I imagine that there (hopefully) will be some sort of grassroots effort to build a solid base of public-domain educational texts. Although I wouldn't be terribly keen on the government literally "writing history", I'm sure many state governments would be willing to fund such an effort.
Frankly, I preferred the old texbooks, and the traditional methods of teaching to the new stuff that was forced on us. Writing a textbook that teaches basic concepts, and provides a few homework questions for reinforcement isn't rocket science. "The rest" should be left up to the Instructor to fine-tune to their own individual students.
Also, thanks to Wikipedia, much of the framework is already in place. It should be fairly trivial to restructure (and verify) Wikipedia content into a series of educational textbooks, given that most of the hard work has already been done.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, I'm tempted to say that what we're seeing more than anything else are isolated incidents being cherrypicked by the press. More likely than anything else, a cop got extremely overzealous, and the case will immediately be thrown out by a judge once it goes to trial.
If the police were indeed following the letter of the law, the case should work its way through the system, which should hopefully find the accused innocent, as long as their rights remain intact. The resulting public outcry should also have the law amended into something more reasonable, or repealed completely. Let the issue work its way through the system before running about claiming the sky is falling. This would appear to be a textbook example of why due process exists, and events need to be allowed to take their course before we start overreacting, running about and yelling that the sky is falling.
Yes, it's definitely true that British citizens trust their government a fair bit more than Americans traditionally have (past eight years notwithstanding). However, people also seem to be a bit more aware of the actions of their government, and if they overstep their boundaries, it's usually corrected pretty quickly.
The other thing to add is that the independent mainstream media in the UK is absolutely terrible. The BBC, which is generally quite good, has dried up the market for a second "high quality" mainstream paper eg. The NY Times or The Washington Post, and any other media outlets are either tabloids or Rupert Murdoch-owned properties. I'm sure any Americans can attest to the quality of Fox News!
The media frenzy over the "knife crime epidemic" over the past few days is a fantastic example of this. Yes, it is indeed unfortunate that over the course of a few days, two youths happened to fall victim to fatal knife crimes. Although this is indeed extremely unfortunate, on the scale of an entire nation, shit's bound to happen occasionally. Extrapolating past data suggests that just as many similar incidents occur in the city of Detroit alone, as do in all of Britain.
The media has an agenda, and it currently wants to make Britain look awful, to make Americans feel a bit better about their own current state of affairs.
I'm not saying things are great. People indeed do need to keep a watchful eye on their government. However, it's also equally important to maintain a sense of perspective and moderation, rather than screaming "1984!" every time a story appears on the news/Slashdot/BoingBoing.
Also understand that we're talking about two different cultures. Extrapolating American ideals to British politics is almost as dangerous as saying "The Iraqis will love us for our democracy."
The dollar has actually remained fairly stable versus the Euro and Pound over the past few months. It was a lot weaker back in October/November of last year.
The dolar's been growing weaker for quite some time, and the American public only caught on to the fact once gas prices started skyrocketing. Yes, the weak dollar is playing a factor, but it's certainly not causing the massive spike in the price of crude that we're currently seeing.
They were also shitting bricks, because they intentionally picked a very risky trajectory to land on.
Even if the craft functioned perfectly as it was deisgned, there was still an estimated 50/50 chance that the craft wouldn't make it. I'm guessing it had something to do with the inclination at which the probe entered the atmosphere, which they had very little control over, given the extremely high velocity at which it entered the atmosphere. Enter too steep, and the probe craters into the surface.
Also don't forget that Phoenix landed at a pretty early hour in the morning.
All that countdown clock and pre-information stuff can be programmed far far in advance. When the probe actually lands, like the other posters have mentioned, the scientists are most likely busy tending to the probe itself.
That all said, images were put online almost immediately. I'm guessing that there was some sort of automatic process that relayed the images directly to a webserver as they were received by NASA.
Good enough for me!
If we can effectively achieve the goals of the mission without using a nuclear reactor, we're almost certainly better off.
Although there are certainly applications for nuclear power on interplanetary spacecraft, I don't think that it would have been appropriate for a small stationary scientific probe.
Once the probe has done its stuff, and examined the surface around its landing site, there's not a whole lot much more it can do. Mission accomplished.
And even as much as fears regarding nuclear power may be overstated, Plutonium is, and will always be pretty scary stuff. We don't want to contaminate our atmosphere, oceans, and land, and also don't want to do the same to the surface of Mars.
Public perception also plays a role. Can you imagine if Columbia had been carrying a substantial amount of fissible material? The entire state of Texas would have been launched into a state of mass-hysteria, even if the containment vessel remained intact. NASA would be dismantled within a week.
Although Spirit and Opportunity are somewhat limited by their power source, they have indeed been overwhelmingly successful missions.
Launch failures are increasingly rare, though not quite reliable enough yet that we shouldn't err on the side of caution. Radioactive materials have been released into the atmosphere before as a result of launch failures, and although it's not the end of the world, it's also something we should avoid if we can.
It's all about managing risk. Nuclear power is risky, and thus NASA avoid it unless it's necessary for the mission.
Such a license would be extremely difficult, if not impossible to enforce.
A compromise already exists in the form of the LGPL, which retains the restrictiveness of the GPL, but also allows closed-source code to link to it.
Personally, I feel that LGPL should be the default license, rather than vice versa, given what a headache the linking cause can cause to commercial developers.
This even causes problems for non-technology businesses who need to run proprietary software internally as a function of their business. this sort of practice isn't going to go away, and RMS is naieve to believe otherwise.
In a sense, the GPL forces RMS's personal view of "freedom" upon every project that even remotely goes near GPL'd code.
Similarly, were we not to have the LGPL, we wouldn't have projects like WebKit. There's no chance in hell that Apple would have open-sourced the UI toolkits that link to Safari, although they were willing to concede their modifications to the rendering core. Both Apple and the KHTML folks have openly admitted that they have enjoyed a mutually beneficial arrangement.
So perhaps the LGPL is the most conducive license to spur OSS development. It won't fall prone to greed and/or secrecy like the BSD license can, though it also won't scare commercial developers away, like the GPL is bound to do. Even so, it could do with being toned-down a notch.
Revisiting your time-limit proposal: Perhaps a compromise would be to ammend copyright laws so that a software product may only be copywritten if the developer supplies the Library of Congress with a full and complete copy of the source. Once the copyright term expires (the timeframe of which is a separate battle to be fought), or the software falls back to the public-domain, the Government releases the binaries and source to the public.
You bring up something I'd forgotten completely.
During WWII, Disney was commissioned to create a number of short films to aid/promote the war effort, along with several PSAs and the like.
A while back, a friend and I watched through a DVD of these shorts, and they were absolutely fascinating. While several of them would prove to be quite iconic, some were astonishingly offensive. I give enormous kudos to Disney for having the balls to have provided an essentially uncensored glimpse into the past. (I'm told that there are a number of pieces that didn't make the cut that would be extremely offensive to modern audiences)
I believe that this is the one we watched.
At the bequest of the US Government, Disney also produced a number of "educational" films to be sent to South America in order to help them build their economies into utopic democracies, and counteract any Nazi/Communist influences that were taking hold there. These were also fairly offensive against their target audience!
If you want a great view into the not-so-distant past of American history, I'd highly recommend watching these, especially given the great deal of historical relativism that seems to be going on these days concerning that era.
None of that stuff would fly today, showing just how difficult and risky it is to draw parallels between the present, and situations that occurred 50 years ago.
If I recall correctly, Disney wasn't particularly well-liked by his employees or colleagues.
A creative force to be reckoned with, to be sure. However, not a terribly ethical individual on the other hand.
I can easily see how the analogy works, though I'm not quite sure I'd like to be compared to Walt Disney....
The Pueblo tribe have a website....and it uses Flash.
Now I've seen everything.
I don't know..... does Slashdot's network provider allow IPv6?
If they did, would anybody actually use it?
It just seems that at the moment, IPv6 doesn't appear all that necessary.
Sometimes people do good things without being forced to.
In fact, forcing good deeds can in many ways be harmful.
Apache seems to do pretty well for itself, despite not being under a restrictive OSS license.
I suppose that's all well and true.
However, the GPL is undoubtedly less free than the BSD license. You can do virtually anything with BSD-licensed code.
If you take the time to read it (it's about two paragraphs long in its entirety) , you'll notice that there are effectively two restrictions on using BSD-licensed code.
1) You must retain the text of the BSD license somewhere in your product.
2) You cannot advertise a product derived from BSD-licensed code in a manner that implies endorsement of the original author without his permission.
There is also a liability disclaimer that's pretty much standard for all code these days.
In many cases, the GPL is a huge liability. Corporations don't like that sort of liability, and also don't like an ideology being shoved down their throats. In contrast, the BSD license comes with no strings attached, and encourages developers to voluntarily contribute their changes back to the original project.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees.
Miniminalism does not necessarily imply functionality or utilitarianism.
Even in spite of the bare-bones design, Debian's site fails to organize things in a logical or comprehensable manner.
In all, the site's design feels very indicative of the GNU project in general. There's far too much space devoted to things that people simply don't care about.
The first item on the sidebar? Debian's social contract. The majority of the text in the welcome message is a paraphrasing of Stallman's GNU/Linux naming rant. Most users are interested in an operating system, not an ideology. Linux has gotten good enough that it can drop this crutch entirely.
The battle is over, and we won... not because the public woke up and realized that closed-source software is evil. F/OSS gained acceptance because the software actually became better than its commercial counterparts. Relying on ideology is a terrible marketing strategy, and implies some pretty huge weaknesses.
A better introduction would be: "Debian is a fast, reliable, and secure operating system available for several platforms. It is provided free of charge to all users, and is developed by a team of volunteers." Short, to-the-point, and pays homage to the F/OSS philosophy without forcing it down the users' throats.
The rest of that paragraph is useless. Unless you stumbled across the page by accident, you probably know what an operating system is. Nobody cares about the number of packages in the repository.
Actually attempting to download the distro is a chore as well. First the user must pick the release, then the branch, then the installation method, and finally their architecture. Most users aren't going to know what any of these things mean.
It's fine to offer a high degree of flexibility. However, when 99% of your users are going to be downloading an ISO for the most recent stable x86 build, it makes the most sense to put that option right up front.
Anyone with the need for one of the more exotic builds should be knowledgable enough to figure out where to look. A simple hyperlink to "Other Builds" that leads to a table of all the available releases would be perfectly sufficient.
I'm not even going to bother elaborating about the color scheme, inconsistent margins, or excessively linearized page flow (for both remaining Lynx users!). There are enough competent web designers out there that the crappy design of Debian's site must actually have been a conscious choice of the project's management. It achieves the impossible goal of being both condescending and incomprehensable all at the same time.
That's for full-size color images, and other non-visual uploads as well (eg. audio clips).
If we're preparing a wikipeia dump specificly for the iLiad, we can convert all of the images to 16-level grayscale, and resmple them down to a resolution appropriate for the device. Recompress, and the resulting image should be much, much smaller.
Wikipedia should probably start implementing some sort of tagging system for images to help strip out non-essential media for a "condensed" version on platforms where bandwidth/storage is limited. Images that are only peripheral to the article should get some sort of tag so that they are omitted; images that are vital to the comprehension of the article should get another so that they are sure to be included; there should be some sort of identifier to separate photographs from diagrams/maps that haven't yet been converted to SVG for devices that cannot display photos, and so on....
There's a difference between "sharing data" and connecting your control systems to the outside world. I don't doubt that it's beneficial to release efficency/monitoring data to a third party.
However, data collection and retreval should be on a completely separate network from the power plant's critical control systems. They're unrelated tasks; one requires strict reliability and security, while the other doesn't need to be any more secure than the typical business network.
More to the point.... why the hell were those control systems taught to speak TCP/IP in the first place? Aren't there other industrial control protocols designed for this sort of thing that provide better redundancy, integrity, and security?
Actually, EMACS is a pretty good example of what's wrong with the mindset of the GNU project.
It's a huge massive bloated piece of software that somehow managed to reject every single user-interface paradigm that ever caught on.
GUIs? A silly CPU-wasting trend! They'll never catch on!
Mouse support? Who needs it!
Documentation? For the weak!
I suppose xEmacs solves most of those problems, though at the end of the day, it's still emacs.
I found it ironic, that for a time, Gentoo had far and away, the best website and documentation out of any of the distributions.
Then again, I suppose nobody would have used it otherwise
You can cherry-pick all you want. In the end, the US government over the past 40-50 years has been defined by policies that would be considered "conservative" in most parts of the globe.
Much of the legislation you mention was either inevitable, the work of their predecessors, or had little to no impact.
That said, even though I don't particularly like Bush at all, he has had a small number of bright moments. His most recent Veto of the $288 billion farm bill was absolutely the right thing to do, even though republicans and democrats alike overwhelmingly overrode the veto to let their pork-barrel projects go forward.
But it's not a hardwrae hack per se. You're loading code into the programable logic of that hardware that you aren't licensed to use.
Now, if there were a way to accomplish this using only GPL'd drivers, the issue would be greatly reduced.
Frankly sending them all out into the middle of the ocean sounds like a great idea. Living accommodations optional. England tried that a couple hundred years ago with the Puritans.
I wonder what ever became of them.....
What are the ethical implications of doing that?
Are nVidia trying to squeeze more money out of their customers with the deepest pockets, or is the Quadro line more legitimately more expensive due to the significantly higher development costs-per-unit, given that the market for workstation cards is many orders of magnitude smaller?
The hardware might be the same, but the drivers and firmware for the Quadro line are apparently quite different.
It'd be nice if nVidia provided some sort of "hobbyist upgrade" to its consumer-grade video cards with some sort of non-commercial clause added in, although until they do that, the firmware/driver hack comes across as flat-out piracy.
This may seem like a silly question, but were the astronomers able to capture data of the entire event, starting before the initial burst of energy was observed?
Were they already recording data when the new supernova became apparent, is there some sort of "astronomical TiVo that continuously records data in the hopes of inadvertently observing an event such as this one, or did the scientists need to press 'record' once they observed the initial burst of energy?
I only ask, because the article's comparision to "winning the lottery" seems fairly apt, as the odds of observing such an event purely by chance must be extremely (some would say "astronomically") low.
Also, the star's behavior immediately before the supernova could possibly provide interesting data as well. Even a *lack* of "interesting" data would be useful in its own right.
Is it standard procedure to record every scrap of data that is received by such a facility, or do the scientists only record data once the telescope is in position, aimed at a relevant target, etc?
I'm not quite sure where I'm going with all this... mostly just curiosity. It seems that the scientists got very lucky with this observation. Hopefully we can learn something from it, and increase our understanding of the universe!
I'm guessing that the "Save to ODF" option will prodouce horrendously mangled XML that will "poison" the format altogether.
Of course, that could also be grounds for a lawsuit if they screw it up badly enough....
Yes, but Supreme Court rulings in the US do have the power to reinterpret the constitution in cases where it is vague or nonspecific.
In the US, the First ammendment may also be suspended under similar circumstances to those described above, and the Supreme Court have ruled that there are quite a few areas where it "doesn't really apply"
At the very least, you know what you're getting with the Human Rights Act just by reading the thing. Attempting to comprehensively understand the US constitution today requires a law degree.
I agree with you to a very large degree.
However, the revolution doesn't have to come with eBooks. Many schools make extensive use of publishers such as Dover Books, who specialize in printing out-of-copyright material very inexpensively.
If good public-domain textbooks were available, an entire industry would quickly spring up to print these books as cheaply as possible. Printing doesn't have to be expensive, and a good book can last through several generations of student... I've been a big critic of the OLPC project, primarily because these free texts don't yet exist, and because their existance would allow us to print dozens of books for less than the cost of an XO.
Many educators are fed up with the "New Maths" that have been shoved in their faces, and I imagine that there (hopefully) will be some sort of grassroots effort to build a solid base of public-domain educational texts. Although I wouldn't be terribly keen on the government literally "writing history", I'm sure many state governments would be willing to fund such an effort.
Frankly, I preferred the old texbooks, and the traditional methods of teaching to the new stuff that was forced on us. Writing a textbook that teaches basic concepts, and provides a few homework questions for reinforcement isn't rocket science. "The rest" should be left up to the Instructor to fine-tune to their own individual students.
Also, thanks to Wikipedia, much of the framework is already in place. It should be fairly trivial to restructure (and verify) Wikipedia content into a series of educational textbooks, given that most of the hard work has already been done.