After all, he said, he spent more than $250,000 of his own money unearthing the dinosaur. And he'll give 10 percent of the proceeds to the owners of the cattle ranch where the rock-encased skeleton was found, he said.
What a nice guy. I wonder if he accurately represented the value to this skeleton to the owners of the cattle ranch before he unearthed it.
I also wonder if they could have made more by dealing with a museum or university directly, which would have ensured that all people could experience the value of such a treasure.
Because you don't realize that you can't trust any compromized system, because you have no way of knowing if trojans and backdoors have been installed. That these systems must be repaired from backups, and the effort involved can take hours and cost thousands of dollars on large production systems.
How do you know that these viruses aren't in fact modifying our genetic code to cause us "to grow wings?" The inablity to forsee all posiblities is not an excuse for inaction, and certainly not an excuse to submit people to pain and death for your "darwinian fitness".
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
The purpose of IP laws is to protect the owner of the IP.
HOW can victimless crimes really be a crime? But more importantly WHERE do the police get the jurisdiction to give you a ticket in the first place since the roads ARE PUBLIC!?
Funny, the thousands of people, including me, who have lost relatives to reckless drivers would hardly call it victimless. Police have the strongest jurisdiction on public property. Who else is going to protect it?
And btw, an International Driver's License is meaningless in Georgia (and probably most other states) unless accompanied by a valid license from another country. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably running a scam to sell them to unsuspecting illegal immigrants.
A big push to go to space, like the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo missions, has the same effect on the economy as war. Both endeavors dump a great deal of money into research, much more so than the private sector would ever do on its own in the same amount of time. And both endeavors focus large segments of the economy on specific goals.
The difference is it much easier to justify a war to the taxpayers than space exploration. And without the technology already developed for the military, and the propoganda coup of beating the Russians, Apollo would have never happened.
That could have merit. I've heard of people being sued over photographing certain buildings without permission, because apparantly some form of copyright law covers architecture. Placing ads on the buildings certainly invalidates any claim of fair use from the news people.
Or, from a different angle, the owners of the building could sue on the grounds that by placing a false ad on their building, the news organization is implying that the building owners are endorsing the product/show/whatever, when in fact they are not.
Dont forget, the audience is what dictates the content. If you want to see something, you'll figure out a way to find it and someone will figure out a way to bring it to you. This isn't TV. It does not cost millions of dollars for a transmitter and FCC license. Any slob can set up a web site, as long as people read, it will stay.
That's exactly what you sould be worried about. As it is, any slob can't put up a web site, because not every "slob" has access to a machine with the connection and bandwith to perform any serious publishing. As bandwidth gets cheaper, and more homes are wired up, that will change.
But if your home access is controlled by the very people who have large stake in traditional corporate media, why the hell would they ever give you the ability to publish anything. Your net connection exists to consume content content, not create it. Even if you've got bandwith out the wazoo, all to bring you pay-per-view TV on demand, don't expect them to let you utilize it to do anything other than sit on your ass and buy things.
These folks' ideas are about nothing but politics, the politics of resentment, of entitlement, of discrimination, of [...] advancement.
I don't disagree with you, but I want to point out that these are the primary foci of politics and philosophy since both were established as disciplines. For a brief moment, these people cleared away all the crap we've created to justify our own stupidity. But they then proceeded to shovel in their own smelly dogma to fill the vacancy. -- Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
Science in the wrong hands, used for the wrong reasons, is scary stuff.
Not nearly so scary as the people who prompte ignorance, superstition, fear, and confusion.
In the media age, these scientific stumbles are particularly dangerous, as they become powerful memes that are rapidly and virally transmitted to the general population by information technologies like TV and the Net.
Like you, Mr. Katz. These kinds of screw ups do not happen in a cultural vacuum, as they generally fill an existing need to justify self-delusion, rather than create that delusion. The danger starts primarily with the ideologue and the sensationalist journalist, not with the errant scientist. -- Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
Now, are you aware that there have been problems between Athlon motherboards and GeForce-based cards? There are fixes, but they reduce overall performance. I'm waiting for those to be fixed, and for the cards using DDR.
I'm wondering, have any slashdotters experienced the Athlon problems? With XF86 4.0 coming out soon and the DDR cards going to market this month, will it be worth it to get my quake3 fix ASAP on less-than-optimal hardware? I just can't stand waiting...
One of the most important parts of the GNU license and open source definition is that you cannot place clauses in a license that restrict the distribution of the software to specific groups.
Now, consider which kind software a developing nation is going to prefer. What's reliable, secure, free, and mostly unhindered by export law?
You got it. In the not so distant future, these "cyber-soldiers" will be trying to break and subvert the very stuff we write and give away. They may even, posing as real hackers, try to sneak trojans into some software to make their jobs easier. And you certainly can't expect them to tell us about the security flaws they find.
And if the military finds it is too hard to break the worldwide infrastructure of open source software, they may just pressure the bureaucrats into making laws that restrict its distribution. Hey, it happened to encryption, right? And supercomputers. And certain types of radio equipment.
We should protest this sort of thing now, before it comes back to bite us on the ass.
Though the plot features interstellar travel and first contact with an alien race, it is not strictly a science fiction novel - it's been summarized as "A comic, tragic, category-defying exploration of the human condition."
Ok, so what makes it's not strictly a science fiction novel?
If you're the same anonymous coward throwing around "GPV" in practically every other thread under this story, you really need to get your thoughts better organized. Do you want authors to give away their code unencumbered by a license, or do you want them to receive monetary compensation?
Since you use the Randian catch-phrase "collectivist", I assume you understand what a big fraud the concept of "altruism" is. So why do have the gall to criticize people want something in return for the value they create? Some people want money for their code, and others want access to the code build upon it.
The GPL ensures that everybody gets a dacha, whether the party likes it or not. Under BSDL, theres no guarantee you'll even get bread.
The difference is that nobody really gives a damn about the IP owned by RedHat or VA. Everything of actual value, the GPL code, will always remain available to to everyone. And since Redhat is actually adding value to it, by writing new code and producing a viable market for it, we all win by helping them out, whether we own stock or not. The relationship is symbiotic, rather than parasitical.
Where do you get this assumption that you have to sacrifice anything to get the freedom you desire? The goal is to make sure no tyrant ever gets the power that requires violence and self-sacrifice to take down.
My problem with that quote is that throughout history, is has been that the people who call for self-sacrifice that seldom sacrifice much themselves. And the issues they often call for it are trivial and self-serving.
I corrected your version because it inadvertantly serves as better propoganda, because "enemies" can be applied to anyone.
Talk about the danger of ideologies... what makes you think other people must agree with what you believe "make[s] life worth living?" Why should they sacrifice anything so you may achieve your ends?
You mangled Jefferson's quote, btw. Here it is, with more context:
Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure.
It's sounds righteous, gets the blood pumping, makes you want to go knock the heads of tyrants, right?
There's another quote I like, and it occurs quite often in dumb action movies, when a writer wants to make sure the audience knows just how bad the bad guy is. It's goes something like "You've got to break a few eggs to make an omlette."
Stalin thought that way when he slaughtered millions in an attempt to recover the economy of the Soviet Union.
To mix metaphors, Jefferson is saying that to water the tree of liberty you've got to break a few eggs.
Think about that. How many "eggs" usually have much choice on when they are broken?
Yea, there were two. And like Alien 3, the second movie completely invalidates the one before it, rendering the entire struggle pointless.
Of course, not only do the little girl's parents die, her brother dies as well, within the first ten minutes of the movie. Man, talk about disturbing to little kids. Of course, my sister and I were the approximate ages of the characters, so I was furious that they didn't off the annoying little twit instead.
I also remember a Star Wars cartoon hour on saturday mornings, with one set of stories about ewoks, and the others about the adventures of R2-D2 and C3PO.
And for some strange reason I have vague memories about an ewok holiday special. I think it even featured that same doomed family from the movies. Can someone validate this?
And you know, why weren't there spinoffs of Empire Strikes Back? No sitcoms set on the Cloud City of Bespin? No Yoda song and dance numbers with other muppets? And come on, Hoth is the perfect place to stage a Santa story. I mean, where else is his galactic headquarters going to be?
Re:Just thought this was important to say
on
Quake 1 GPL'ed
·
· Score: 2
If you DO want a fair game, you'll have to invent one that runs off a central server which arbitrates all actions. Then you have a single point of trust-- the server. As long as you are depending upon the clients to not cheat, you cannot guarantee anything.
To a large degree, Quake already does this. If I remember correctly, the server makes all decisions on collisions and movement. The client simply says "I want to move here, I want to rotate this much, I want to fire a rocket, etc.."
The biggest problem is the ability to create client that completely ignore the rules on redering the scene. It will be much like the feature in qtest that allowed people to turn off texturing and shading, which, though it made the maps hard to navigate, also made all other players and objects stick out like a sore thumb.
Now people will be able to play this game with no lighting, or with flat shading, and it will be much easier to see. Of course, it will also be possible to integerate "Stoogebots" into the client, but that's always been a problem, and those people are usually pretty easy to identify. Its the ability to add small, undetectable advantages that will ruin the game.
I really hope Carmack had altrusitic motives in releasing the source. The proximity to Quake 3's release makes me suspicious. There are a lot of us "old school" Quake players who prefer it to Quake 2, for it's faster response time and less use of system resources. Though releasing the source may spawn a great deal of community creativity, I, like the original poster on this thread, think it is going to the kill the actual Quake "gaming" scene. Now to get my Quake fix, I'll have to play Quake 2 (yeck), or buy Quake 3 and play on those servers. (And also buy a whole new system that will be able to run it!)
\begin{Homer}Sure Carmack is generous... LIKE A FOX! \end{Homer}
Re:Off Topic, but a real pet peeve
on
CFP2000
·
· Score: 1
2. America is made up of sovereign states not provinces.
heheh, I'd say Canadian provinces are more sovereign than any US state. At least they let Quebec vote on independance. People here have hissy fits because Alaska wants to legalize pot, and Montana wants to do away with speed limits.
4. Like it or not, the U.S. is the center of western culture.
Kind of like Virginia is the center of the internet, no?
Slashdot Mirror
After all, he said, he spent more than $250,000 of his own money unearthing the dinosaur. And he'll give 10 percent of the proceeds to the owners of the cattle ranch where the rock-encased skeleton was found, he said.
What a nice guy. I wonder if he accurately represented the value to this skeleton to the owners of the cattle ranch before he unearthed it.
I also wonder if they could have made more by dealing with a museum or university directly, which would have ensured that all people could experience the value of such a treasure.
Because you're a clueless wannabe script kiddie?
Because you don't realize that you can't trust any compromized system, because you have no way of knowing if trojans and backdoors have been installed. That these systems must be repaired from backups, and the effort involved can take hours and cost thousands of dollars on large production systems.
Luddite paranoia coupled with social darwinism?
How do you know that these viruses aren't in fact modifying our genetic code to cause us "to grow wings?" The inablity to forsee all posiblities is not an excuse for inaction, and certainly not an excuse to submit people to pain and death for your "darwinian fitness".
Dang, slashdot needs a cancel-post feature for registered users.
Lest I confuse anyone with my poor quoting,
this is most certainly NOT in the US Constitution:
The purpose of IP laws is to protect the owner of the IP.
Which is a self-referencing definition.
In other words, how does one own a legal abstraction without the law that defines that legal abstraction?
You're both right. From the US Constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
The purpose of IP laws is to protect the owner of the IP.
...which is a self-refencing definition.
Oh, I see, speeding is victimless until you actually hit something or somebody...
Thanks for clearing that up. I was under the silly impression that "public safety" was a legitimate goal of law.
HOW can victimless crimes really be a crime? But more importantly WHERE do the police get the jurisdiction to give you a ticket in the first place since the roads ARE PUBLIC!?
Funny, the thousands of people, including me, who have lost relatives to reckless drivers would hardly call it victimless. Police have the strongest jurisdiction on public property. Who else is going to protect it?
And btw, an International Driver's License is meaningless in Georgia (and probably most other states) unless accompanied by a valid license from another country. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably running a scam to sell them to unsuspecting illegal immigrants.
A big push to go to space, like the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo missions, has the same effect on the economy as war. Both endeavors dump a great deal of money into research, much more so than the private sector would ever do on its own in the same amount of time. And both endeavors focus large segments of the economy on specific goals.
The difference is it much easier to justify a war to the taxpayers than space exploration. And without the technology already developed for the military, and the propoganda coup of beating the Russians, Apollo would have never happened.
That could have merit. I've heard of people being sued over photographing certain buildings without permission, because apparantly some form of copyright law covers architecture. Placing ads on the buildings certainly invalidates any claim of fair use from the news people.
Or, from a different angle, the owners of the building could sue on the grounds that by placing a false ad on their building, the news organization is implying that the building owners are endorsing the product/show/whatever, when in fact they are not.
Then again, IANAAC*, so don't take my word on it.
*I Am Not An Ambulance Chaser
Dont forget, the audience is what dictates the content. If you want to see something, you'll figure out a way to find it and someone will figure out a way to bring it to you. This isn't TV. It does not cost millions of dollars for a transmitter and FCC license. Any slob can set up a web site, as long as people read, it will stay.
That's exactly what you sould be worried about. As it is, any slob can't put up a web site, because not every "slob" has access to a machine with the connection and bandwith to perform any serious publishing. As bandwidth gets cheaper, and more homes are wired up, that will change.
But if your home access is controlled by the very people who have large stake in traditional corporate media, why the hell would they ever give you the ability to publish anything. Your net connection exists to consume content content, not create it. Even if you've got bandwith out the wazoo, all to bring you pay-per-view TV on demand, don't expect them to let you utilize it to do anything other than sit on your ass and buy things.
These folks' ideas are about nothing but politics, the politics of resentment, of entitlement, of discrimination, of [...] advancement.
I don't disagree with you, but I want to point out that these are the primary foci of politics and philosophy since both were established as disciplines. For a brief moment, these people cleared away all the crap we've created to justify our own stupidity. But they then proceeded to shovel in their own smelly dogma to fill the vacancy.
--
Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
Science in the wrong hands, used for the wrong reasons, is scary stuff.
Not nearly so scary as the people who prompte ignorance, superstition, fear, and confusion.
In the media age, these scientific stumbles are particularly dangerous, as they become powerful memes that are rapidly and virally transmitted to the general population by information technologies like TV and the Net.
Like you, Mr. Katz. These kinds of screw ups do not happen in a cultural vacuum, as they generally fill an existing need to justify self-delusion, rather than create that delusion. The danger starts primarily with the ideologue and the sensationalist journalist, not with the errant scientist.
--
Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
Me too!
Now, are you aware that there have been problems between Athlon motherboards and GeForce-based cards? There are fixes, but they reduce overall performance. I'm waiting for those to be fixed, and for the cards using DDR.
I'm wondering, have any slashdotters experienced the Athlon problems? With XF86 4.0 coming out soon and the DDR cards going to market this month, will it be worth it to get my quake3 fix ASAP on less-than-optimal hardware? I just can't stand waiting...
One of the most important parts of the GNU license and open source definition is that you cannot place clauses in a license that restrict the distribution of the software to specific groups.
Now, consider which kind software a developing nation is going to prefer. What's reliable, secure, free, and mostly unhindered by export law?
You got it. In the not so distant future, these "cyber-soldiers" will be trying to break and subvert the very stuff we write and give away. They may even, posing as real hackers, try to sneak trojans into some software to make their jobs easier. And you certainly can't expect them to tell us about the security flaws they find.
And if the military finds it is too hard to break the worldwide infrastructure of open source software, they may just pressure the bureaucrats into making laws that restrict its distribution. Hey, it happened to encryption, right? And supercomputers. And certain types of radio equipment.
We should protest this sort of thing now, before it comes back to bite us on the ass.
Oh man, that McCullagh guy is a jerk. I found the Livid archive at
http://livid.on.openprojects. net/pipermail/livid-dev/. You can see his posts in the Nove mber archive.
Though the plot features interstellar travel and first contact with an alien race, it is not strictly a science fiction novel - it's been summarized as "A comic, tragic, category-defying exploration of the human condition."
Ok, so what makes it's not strictly a science fiction novel?
If you're the same anonymous coward throwing around "GPV" in practically every other thread under this story, you really need to get your thoughts better organized. Do you want authors to give away their code unencumbered by a license, or do you want them to receive monetary compensation?
Since you use the Randian catch-phrase "collectivist", I assume you understand what a big fraud the concept of "altruism" is. So why do have the gall to criticize people want something in return for the value they create? Some people want money for their code, and others want access to the code build upon it.
The GPL ensures that everybody gets a dacha, whether the party likes it or not. Under BSDL, theres no guarantee you'll even get bread.
The difference is that nobody really gives a damn about the IP owned by RedHat or VA. Everything of actual value, the GPL code, will always remain available to to everyone. And since Redhat is actually adding value to it, by writing new code and producing a viable market for it, we all win by helping them out, whether we own stock or not. The relationship is symbiotic, rather than parasitical.
#ifdef HUMOR
But think of all the resources saved by leaving off those two digits for all these years! Memory and disk ain't cheap ya know!
#endif
Or that boring and stupid people are sheep who follow every trendy gimmick in order to conform.
Where do you get this assumption that you have to sacrifice anything to get the freedom you desire? The goal is to make sure no tyrant ever gets the power that requires violence and self-sacrifice to take down.
My problem with that quote is that throughout history, is has been that the people who call for self-sacrifice that seldom sacrifice much themselves. And the issues they often call for it are trivial and self-serving.
I corrected your version because it inadvertantly serves as better propoganda, because "enemies" can be applied to anyone.
Talk about the danger of ideologies... what makes you think other people must agree with what you believe "make[s] life worth living?" Why should they sacrifice anything so you may achieve your ends?
You mangled Jefferson's quote, btw. Here it is, with more context:
Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure.
It's sounds righteous, gets the blood pumping, makes you want to go knock the heads of tyrants, right?
There's another quote I like, and it occurs quite often in dumb action movies, when a writer wants to make sure the audience knows just how bad the bad guy is. It's goes something like "You've got to break a few eggs to make an omlette."
Stalin thought that way when he slaughtered millions in an attempt to recover the economy of the Soviet Union.
To mix metaphors, Jefferson is saying that to water the tree of liberty you've got to break a few eggs.
Think about that. How many "eggs" usually have much choice on when they are broken?
*SPLOILERS* (as if anyone cares)
Yea, there were two. And like Alien 3, the second movie completely invalidates the one before it, rendering the entire struggle pointless.
Of course, not only do the little girl's parents die, her brother dies as well, within the first ten minutes of the movie. Man, talk about disturbing to little kids. Of course, my sister and I were the approximate ages of the characters, so I was furious that they didn't off the annoying little twit instead.
I also remember a Star Wars cartoon hour on saturday mornings, with one set of stories about ewoks, and the others about the adventures of R2-D2 and C3PO.
And for some strange reason I have vague memories about an ewok holiday special. I think it even featured that same doomed family from the movies. Can someone validate this?
And you know, why weren't there spinoffs of Empire Strikes Back? No sitcoms set on the Cloud City of Bespin? No Yoda song and dance numbers with other muppets? And come on, Hoth is the perfect place to stage a Santa story. I mean, where else is his galactic headquarters going to be?
If you DO want a fair game, you'll have to invent one that runs off a central server which arbitrates all actions. Then you have a single point of trust-- the server. As long as you are depending upon the clients to not cheat, you cannot guarantee anything.
To a large degree, Quake already does this. If I remember correctly, the server makes all decisions on collisions and movement. The client simply says "I want to move here, I want to rotate this much, I want to fire a rocket, etc.."
The biggest problem is the ability to create client that completely ignore the rules on redering the scene. It will be much like the feature in qtest that allowed people to turn off texturing and shading, which, though it made the maps hard to navigate, also made all other players and objects stick out like a sore thumb.
Now people will be able to play this game with no lighting, or with flat shading, and it will be much easier to see. Of course, it will also be possible to integerate "Stoogebots" into the client, but that's always been a problem, and those people are usually pretty easy to identify. Its the ability to add small, undetectable advantages that will ruin the game.
I really hope Carmack had altrusitic motives in releasing the source. The proximity to Quake 3's release makes me suspicious. There are a lot of us "old school" Quake players who prefer it to Quake 2, for it's faster response time and less use of system resources. Though releasing the source may spawn a great deal of community creativity, I, like the original poster on this thread, think it is going to the kill the actual Quake "gaming" scene. Now to get my Quake fix, I'll have to play Quake 2 (yeck), or buy Quake 3 and play on those servers. (And also buy a whole new system that will be able to run it!)
\begin{Homer}Sure Carmack is generous... LIKE A FOX! \end{Homer}
2. America is made up of sovereign states not provinces.
heheh, I'd say Canadian provinces are more sovereign than any US state. At least they let Quebec vote on independance. People here have hissy fits because Alaska wants to legalize pot, and Montana wants to do away with speed limits.
4. Like it or not, the U.S. is the center of western culture.
Kind of like Virginia is the center of the internet, no?