I had always hoped that the universe would collapse in a big crunch, so that there could be a point to life. Now it looks as though the universe will just keep on getting bigger and bigger and colder and colder. What kind of destiny can we have as a species in this sort of environment?
In fact, this really means that I doubt what the scientists say on this matter very much. Everything else in nature has a greater purpose and direction, a manifest destiny if you will, whether it be evolution or consciousness or even life itself. Scientists have always prided them on showing the point of life since the days of Euclid, through Newton (who was a very spiritual man) and onwards.
The entire body of science points towards there being a directional purpose to life. This discovery flies in the face of everything we have learned, and I for one am sceptical. Not until they show the higher purpose (multiuniverses?) will I be convinced of this.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
There is a central question here. Where does the responsibility lie? If a film portrays a violent act, and someone who watches that film then goes and commits that act in real life, who is responsible?
If the defendant can reasonably claim that the film he watched incited him to commit the act, and that hence he is not responsible, then he can reasonably claim to be innocent.
What this lawsuit says is that people who see a violent film and then commit a violent act are innocent. Is this reasonable?
Perhaps in some instances it is. The general public is, well, stupid and impressionable. European governments have recognised this for sometime, and take care of these issues for them by implementing strong censorship of violence. Hence there is little violence in European countries.
Should America foillow this lead? I think that if they can demonstrate the innocence of the defendant and think this is reasonable as the Europeans do, then yes. This is an undecided question though.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
Moderators, please check Olympic Sponsors userinfo. You will see that he is a denizen of (Score 0) and (Score -1) land. He is also an inhabitant of sid=trolltalk, where he is a popular poster, and is currently waging a campaign to confuse the readers of this site by accusing legitimate posters of being trolls.
OlympicSponsor, I suggest you read my comment properly and then you will see that every single thing I said was entirely legitimate and reasonable. I challenge you to find anything trollish in my post.
Back under your bridge, troll.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
Much as we should all be grateful to DARPA for inventing the internet and funding it through the early years, I am not sure if having the government involved in open source development will work in the real world. The issue is one of control.
One reason that commercial companies are reluctant to use OSS is that they do not like to relinquish control to unknown elements. We all know the standard rebuttals to this point, but the military could be worse.
The military and security agencies are incompatibvle in terms of ethos with the OSS atmosphere. Will they give outside developers, like Joe Bloggs from Birmingham, UK, or Pu Kong Yon from Bangkok, the same access to internal information and the same time of day as external developers?
I fear , very much, that there could be difficult times ahead in this project. I am hedging my bets as to the outcome.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I have tried many distros, including SuSE, Debian, Red Hat, Corel and Caldera. Out of all the distro's I have tried, it seems clear to me that Mandrake is best for the home user. It not good for business or in a server environment due to stability issues (it is so bleeding edge it is untrue), however stability doesn't really matter so much on home machines. As long as it can stay up for a couple of hours then it is good enough.
One wonders why the other distro's have so much difficulty equaling Mandrake in this arena? People like Debian and Red Hat are too purist in their respective fields to ever really become popular in the home, however as their users have accepted this it does not matter, I suppose. Still, such lack of ambition in the arena is startling.
The bleeding edge and easy to use nature of Mandrake is why it has 28% of the marketplace. More power to them, I say, and hopefully other distro's will take a leaf out of their book.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
This is part of our destiny.
on
Solar Sails
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· Score: 2
If we are to conquer space, we must develop technologies like this. I was thinking about the issues of exploring space the other day, and it struck me that the problem people have with travelling in space is one of velocity - it just takes too long to get anywhere.The obvious solution is to travel faster, and engineers spend endless time trying to provide us with the technology to do this.
But there is another way. Instead of travelling faster, we just need to travel subjectively faster. I anticipate that in 20 years time we will have the technology to upload or mindfs into computers, and send digital proxies to the stars, using solar sail technology.
Of course, the travel time would be thousands of years, but subjectively speaking it would be instantaneous.
As Einstein irrefutably proved that travelling faster than the speed of light is utterly impossible, some sort of adjustment of our subjective timeframes is the only solution to interstellar travel.
When the singularity comes, as predicted by Vernor Vinge, I shall be among the first to upload. That way I shall be at an advantage, and may perhaps be able to ascend to the stars on light sail technology.
Speaking as a transhumanist, I must say that I consider it eminently possible, even probable, that these technologies will develop in the way I have outlined.
This is a happy day, Gentlemen.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
It seems to me that ISP's are becoming redundant. They have an almost 19th century business model, one based on dominating a segment of the market. Well, that kind of thinking doesn't work on the interent, and it is the reason why the biggies - AOL for example - will eventually collapse.
I forsee that when broadband comes, the telecoms companies will be in the most powerful position. They own the fibre that travels into the consumers home. This gives them the power. ISP's are a temporary phenomenon.
With broadband and more powerful computers, there is no reason why the average users computer cannot connect to the internet directly, and bypass the ISP model entirely.
ISP's, with their ridiculous dreams of providing direct media content and products, will die and be replaced by a devolved and more democratic network.
It is better that the communications and telecoms companies have the power than ISP's, for ISP's aim to pump media and ideas into the home whereas telecoms companies are only interested in the almighty dollar.
Communicative equality in America, land of free and equal speech, could be reborn through the arrival of P2P, IMHO.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
This discovery of life on Mars could be very bad news for manned space travel. Many think that it could be good news, because there will be pressure as never before to visit Mars and investigate the life that may be there and was once there.
However, is this the responsible thing to do? Wherever man travels he brings with him a shower of varied microrganisms, which adapt to local conditions. It would be extremely difficult to rid any travelling ship or astronaut of the organisms. If they got free in the Martian environment, they could wreak havoc.
The great irony of the War of the Worlds is that the precise opposite of the conclusion to that great tale could occur if we visit Mars - Earthly microrganisms could leak into the Martian environment and cause havoc.
Although this is unlikely, extremely unlikely in fact, even assuming that life exists on Mars now, the chance is not one we should take. I do not support a manned mission to Mars in the light of this discovery - this is rational because although the chances are so very small, we would be risking a lot - an entire ecosphere.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I have had a fearful thought....
on
KDE 2.1 Is Out
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· Score: 2
One of the most remarkable features of KDE2 is the support of textured themes and the ability to import Gnome themes to the KDE Desktop environment. Well, I have had an awful thought regarding this feature.
It is well known that KDE is ahead of Gnome on the development stakes, and that Gnome looks better and is, well, 'cooler' than KDE. However, now that KDE2 has the theme importation feature this last point is wiped out.
You may think this is nothing, but the simple fact is that the majority of users use a desktop for how good it looks and how easy it is to use. Now, through stealing the coolness of Gnome and the useability of Windows, KDE is streets ahead of the competition, from the point of view of the non-technical user.
I am extremely worried about this. What is to be done for Gnome? Someone will have to bring it on quite a lot if it is to remain valid from a Prima Facie, shallow & unthinking users perspective.
It is the morons who make the final decision regarding the fate of all software, and Open Source software is no different. I just hope that Gnome pull through.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
It is well known that everyone ignore banner ads these days, as everyone is inured to them and filters them out of their mental bandwidth.
The way that advertisers get around this in other media is to make the ads more interesting or flashy, but on the web this is not an option. The only option is to make them bigger and more intrusive.
The result of this will be successful at first, but after a time people will learn to filter out the new bigger ads too. Then advertisers will call to make them even larger.
Where will it all end? It won't.
I think until such time as banner ads incude sound and video, and can hence be creative and entertaining, they will just become more and more obnoxious.
We should be encouraging the banner ad makers to be inventive, and use flash and the like, rather than just being more obvious and intruding.
It is really the only way forward.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
The most creative of peoples always desire mind altering drugs - this is writ through history. From the High Temples of ancient Egypt, where the priests imbibed on hallucinogens, to 19th century Paris, where the most artistic and creative generation of the millenium imbibed on absinthe and booxe to the point of degeneration, creativity and drugs (here I am including alchohol as a drug) have went hand in hand.
I personally spent the majority of my university years whilst studying continental philosophy under the influence of LSD.
Question is, we know that drugs and the artistic professions go hand in hand - what about drugs and the rational, engineering professions like Software Engineering?
I would argue that they do, but only in moderation. Drugs can be considered a break from the rational world for the mathematical software developer, and when he returns from his blissful trip he is all the more ennabled to take on the rational world, and emulate it.
Through escaping it occassionally, he can better understand it.
Drugs and software development are a natural match, so much so that I am suspicious of those who do not take drugs. Are they really creative or bold enough? No, they are cowards, afraid of the unknown and unwilling to expirement.
I would never employ a drug free software developer. Such a person is just a drudge. Only the bold, the Human Becomings rather than the Human Beings, are for me.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
People often whine about games on Linux, and how it is necessary for the platform to attract games developers if it is to invade the home marketplace.
I disagree. Linus is entering the home marketplace at the moment, but it is only the serious business types and computer enthusiasts who are doing so - this is a direct result of its assumption that the user is intelligent.
The sort of person who installs an OS purely because of the games available for the platform is just the sort of person that Linux should be shunning now as it always has in the past. The last thing Linux needs is an unearthly invasion of AOLers, which would surely destroy it as a serious platform.
It has been greatly to the advantage of Linux that games have been unavailable on it. This has given it a serious reputation. Look at wjhat happened to Amiga and Workbench - the fact that the Amiga was primarily a gaming platform killed it in the business market.
I would caution against Linux welcoming games developers to its fold, lest business types shun the platform as frivilous.
This is reality - it happened to Amiga OS, to TOS on the Atari ST. Lets not let it happen to Linux.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I have spent mush time analysing this scenario. You see, Apple is ambitious like any company - all corporations are natural monopolists. The only thing that is preventing MS's total domination, on the other hand, is Linux and the Open Source way.
It stands to reason that a monpolising company taking the fruit of the Open Source community's efforts - the BSD kernel - will be a powerful force indeed.
With the incredible combination of the rock steady core of BSD and the supple, supremely svelte GUI that is distinctive of Apples desktops, and the sublimation of Microsoft into the.NET black hole, I see no reason why Apple should not emerge as a major threat to the Linux/MS hegemony over the next 10 years.
Will Apple be the next Microsoft? I think it might.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
Yes, the Oklahoma City Bombers did have the right to a fair trial, etc etc. This is because they are assumed innocent until proven guilty. Once found guilty by the due process of law, they no longer have rights. This is why they are incarcerated in a prison, executed, whatever.
Of course, we still have a duty to look after the welfare of beings considered irresponsible, as we decide it. This is why it's not okay to torture prisoners and so forth.
You have a very screwed up idea of what rights are.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I can understand this action, it stems from a fundamental philosophical principal. In order to have rights, a creature must also be responsible (this is why talk of animal rights is so much crap. If animals had rights, my cat would have to incarcerated for murdering mice).
Now, applying this tenet to the music industry, we can see that in order to have the right to copy music, you must also be responsible with this ability.
I put it to you that the reason companies and governments are being forced into these drastic actions is because people, the geeks and high school students who use napster for one, are not responsible with the ability to copy music.
If you are not responsible, you do not have any rights, and any whining is pointless and idiotic.
Those who would copy music need to start being responsible.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
Why do we want to emulate Microsoft in this area? The last thing Linux needs is a fully integrated mail client. Such things are best left to the commercial world, where they are done well and with skill and talent. The only Open Source projects that work are the ones that can be broken down into simple components, and reused, according to the typical Unix and Linux philosophy. Something like Pine works just fine, we do not need a bloated and useless client.
Another problem is that mail clients of that sort tend to hegemonise. Before you know it, non-standard mail formats are proliferating and everybody has to use the same mail client. Look at Outlook on windows.
We should not emulate this on Linux. We would be killing ourselfs, and strangling the Linux desktop at its birth.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
This is something I really doubt. Games require a lot more than just a bunch of raggle taggle coders these days - they need graphics artists, musicians, actors. It is akin to a Hollywood production. The OSS model may be good for the core code of the game - the 3D engine and such (even then I am not sure, there are not any OSS 3D engines to rivals Id's latest work) - but it cannot compete when it comse to the actual gameplay, and all the elements of a game that impress themselves on peoples minds whilst playing them. The atmosphere of the game, if you will, is not produced by programmers, but by artists and designers, who are ignorant of the OSS philosophy and unlikely to contribute to it.
Games under OSS will never rival the commercial offerings.
In addition, why is the editorial on this topic so biased? 'Escape module'? This leads me to suspect that the AC's who flame the editors may be right after all. I find it very disappointing. One would not find that phrase in a professional publication. I suspect the integrity of the editors, when their words appear a few centimetres below an ad for Red Hat.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
It seems obvious to me that this concept can be easily implemented in a GUI, and hence be easier to understand. A pull down menu for the available commands would cover the first part. Usinag a similar method, one would select the options with simple clicks of the mouse. Then one would browse the file hierarchy and choose a file to operate on, and a location for the output to be piped to, STDOUT as default.
This would give newbies an easy way of using the power of the command line from an easy environment.
One could also include lots of online help, something that bash is not very good at. Man pages are notoriously dificult to understand.
I think that this schema would be an obvious first step in creating a GUI'ed shell, and could well exceed the power of the shell in terms of easy understandibility and visualisation. I am sure that Network Admins and Windows users would find it a very useful tool on Unix.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
It seems to me that the big problem is that people will be able to get genetic tests done personally, and then get insurance policies based on those claims, and then make a fortune because they know precisely what is going to happen to them!
This is the flip side of the coin.
So what are the consequences? Well, if there is no genetic testing by insurance companies then there will be no insurance industry, because insurance is all about probability, and when as far as the customer is concerned there is no uncertainty, but as far as the company is concerned there is, and insurance agreement is unattainable, and even redundant completely anyway.
The problem is that only the most intelligent and wealthy of people (the two are directly related. cf The Bell Curve) will be able to afford genetic screening and so will inevitably become genetically perfect, like a master race, while the poor remain like old fashioned Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
Do we want to see Homo Superior Plutocri overrun us all? I don't, so we must be careful what we do here.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
Okay, I am getting sick and fed up of all the bullshit that surrounds this issue. It is my indubitable opinion that the law is above the personal opinions of what the adolescent masses think the internet should be, and their half formed ideas of 'freedom of speech' and suchlike.
The simple, plain and irrefutable fact is that the internet is not above the law. The law exists to make sure that the common decencies expressed by society are enforced, and so help me God, I will fight anyone who tries to turn my country into an anarchist, lawless, libertarian hellhole.
What is wrong with requiring that websites obey the law? Nothing! There is no difference betwwen a website or any other institution - they must all obey the law.
These sniffer boxes are just online policemen, but unbiased because they are automated. Nobodies freedom is being curtailed but the lawbreakers.
This is a matter of principle: The Sword of Lady Justice must prevail against the lawless barbarians that pollute the corners of the web, or we shall all suffer even more than we do now.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I have to question the point of this exercise.
on
GeekCorps v2.0
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· Score: 4
The problem with being a 'geek' in early 20th Century USia is that one thinks the solution to all the problems of the world can be solved with an Athlon and a decent internet connection.
Well, I'm sorry to dissappoint you kids, but thats just not the case at all. What Ghana needs is not a bunch of pony tailed do gooder 'geeks' (how they can have pride in that despicable word is beyond me, but then I'm not American), its sanitation, agriculture, education, books (thats right, old fashioned books, not Internet connections), and end to civil strife and decent irrigation. Once it gets these things we can start to consider some light industrialisation, perhaps.
Doesn't it strike anybody else that this whole exercise is patronising and absurd? Jesus, save the technical talk and trying to bring them into the 21st century - lets bring them into the 19th century first.
What I have said is the plain honest truth as I see it. I have been to South Africa, Zimbabwe and Ghana, and the problems I have seen there are all the same.
This project is just a liberal dream. We need to get practical types there, who know about practical issues and can teach the practical natives. Sending people versed in OOP design is pointless, and a patronising waste of money ('Oh look! You too can be like the white man' - save it for your Imperial dreams).
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
Their claims that games such as QIII and Half Life will not continue to be produced are totally baseless. The simple fact is that the majority of these titles are aimed at the adult market of over 18's. I am not sure I would feel comfortable if my son, who is just 13, were playin Quake III all the time, just as I would not like him to watch 18 rated films. Ratings in the cinema have not meant the death of the film industry, nor have they meant the death of violent films with adult content. The same will be true of the games industry.
Does the games industry want to be tarred with the same reputation as the cigarette industry? They will get it if they continue saying that they have to market violent QIII type games at children, right or wrong (rightly, in my view).
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
Good, The New Workers need to unionise.
on
The Jungle
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· Score: 1
Many think that workers unions are a thing of the past, and that they are somehow outdated in todays modern economy. Well, I would vehemently disagree with this preposteroud idea.
Ever since the Satanic Mills of 19th century Lancashire, which were so wonderfully described in the literature of the period, companies and corporations have tried to stop their workers from unionising and gaining their rights to protect themselves from abuse by their employer. It is thanks to their struggles, and the efforts of people such as Keir Hardie, that we enjoy the freedoms we do today.
So why are people so complacent about the unions these days in the tech industry? A modern technological company has just as much motivation to deny the rights of its workers as did the coal mines and weaving mills of 1820's Britain.
Even if you have no intention of ever using your union, it is best to join it anyway, so as to provide it some support. You may need it one day, after all.
I know that many here on Slashdot consider unions to be beyond the pale, and be instruments of socialism, but in reality they are the devices of a free nation and a free minded people. This is why governments and corporations try and stamp them out.
In many ways, the modern workers union is like the 'well armed militia' described in the constitution, and we should protect it as such.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
As this chip was designed for the console, rather than the PC, I have to question how good it is going to be, and how well developed for the PC market. It is designed for consoles, which have very wide busses between graphics ram and main ram, and fast dedicated support chips for this environment.
However, the PC does not have those high speed wide busses for interchange between main and graphics ram. I fear that this may cause some performance loss, as although the chip will still be good, it will not be optimal.
The limiting factor on games and graphics performance these days is not calculation speeds;it is bandwidth, pur and simple. In ten years, everything will be bandwidth. If you consider that in one clock cycle on a mosern chip in the 1 GHz range light travel only a foot or so, we can see that information interchange between CPU's and memory will become fundamentally limited by the speed of light within 18 months, as the distance from CPU to memory exceeds the distance that light travels in a clock cycle. The only way to improve is via bandwidth increases, and better use of cache.
But that is the future, and it is the future that this chip was designed for, in the form of consoles, which are always technologically ahead.
I fear this chip will suffer through being ahead of its time.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
We all dislike advertising. Although we will dislike P2P advertising also, there is no reason we should dislike it as much as current advertising methods. It will be better, because it will be more relevant.
The amount of information you can glean about someone purely from his musical tastes is quite remarkable, and is bound to lead to more focused, relevant advertising for us all, which will be more bearable for us all. The person who listens to Chopin is clearly more intelligent and cultured that the person who listens to Nirvana. The advertising should reflect this. In some cases it may even be useful.
I just hope that they don't use IM too much, and instead use email or something easily filtered. IM is under the power of AOL, and email under the power of Microsoft. It is far easier to filter the latter for those reasons.
You know exactly what to do- Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, this really means that I doubt what the scientists say on this matter very much. Everything else in nature has a greater purpose and direction, a manifest destiny if you will, whether it be evolution or consciousness or even life itself. Scientists have always prided them on showing the point of life since the days of Euclid, through Newton (who was a very spiritual man) and onwards.
The entire body of science points towards there being a directional purpose to life. This discovery flies in the face of everything we have learned, and I for one am sceptical. Not until they show the higher purpose (multiuniverses?) will I be convinced of this.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
If the defendant can reasonably claim that the film he watched incited him to commit the act, and that hence he is not responsible, then he can reasonably claim to be innocent.
What this lawsuit says is that people who see a violent film and then commit a violent act are innocent. Is this reasonable?
Perhaps in some instances it is. The general public is, well, stupid and impressionable. European governments have recognised this for sometime, and take care of these issues for them by implementing strong censorship of violence. Hence there is little violence in European countries.
Should America foillow this lead? I think that if they can demonstrate the innocence of the defendant and think this is reasonable as the Europeans do, then yes. This is an undecided question though.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
OlympicSponsor, I suggest you read my comment properly and then you will see that every single thing I said was entirely legitimate and reasonable. I challenge you to find anything trollish in my post.
Back under your bridge, troll.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
One reason that commercial companies are reluctant to use OSS is that they do not like to relinquish control to unknown elements. We all know the standard rebuttals to this point, but the military could be worse.
The military and security agencies are incompatibvle in terms of ethos with the OSS atmosphere. Will they give outside developers, like Joe Bloggs from Birmingham, UK, or Pu Kong Yon from Bangkok, the same access to internal information and the same time of day as external developers?
I fear , very much, that there could be difficult times ahead in this project. I am hedging my bets as to the outcome.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
One wonders why the other distro's have so much difficulty equaling Mandrake in this arena? People like Debian and Red Hat are too purist in their respective fields to ever really become popular in the home, however as their users have accepted this it does not matter, I suppose. Still, such lack of ambition in the arena is startling.
The bleeding edge and easy to use nature of Mandrake is why it has 28% of the marketplace. More power to them, I say, and hopefully other distro's will take a leaf out of their book.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
But there is another way. Instead of travelling faster, we just need to travel subjectively faster. I anticipate that in 20 years time we will have the technology to upload or mindfs into computers, and send digital proxies to the stars, using solar sail technology.
Of course, the travel time would be thousands of years, but subjectively speaking it would be instantaneous.
As Einstein irrefutably proved that travelling faster than the speed of light is utterly impossible, some sort of adjustment of our subjective timeframes is the only solution to interstellar travel.
When the singularity comes, as predicted by Vernor Vinge, I shall be among the first to upload. That way I shall be at an advantage, and may perhaps be able to ascend to the stars on light sail technology.
Speaking as a transhumanist, I must say that I consider it eminently possible, even probable, that these technologies will develop in the way I have outlined.
This is a happy day, Gentlemen.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I forsee that when broadband comes, the telecoms companies will be in the most powerful position. They own the fibre that travels into the consumers home. This gives them the power. ISP's are a temporary phenomenon.
With broadband and more powerful computers, there is no reason why the average users computer cannot connect to the internet directly, and bypass the ISP model entirely.
ISP's, with their ridiculous dreams of providing direct media content and products, will die and be replaced by a devolved and more democratic network.
It is better that the communications and telecoms companies have the power than ISP's, for ISP's aim to pump media and ideas into the home whereas telecoms companies are only interested in the almighty dollar.
Communicative equality in America, land of free and equal speech, could be reborn through the arrival of P2P, IMHO.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
However, is this the responsible thing to do? Wherever man travels he brings with him a shower of varied microrganisms, which adapt to local conditions. It would be extremely difficult to rid any travelling ship or astronaut of the organisms. If they got free in the Martian environment, they could wreak havoc.
The great irony of the War of the Worlds is that the precise opposite of the conclusion to that great tale could occur if we visit Mars - Earthly microrganisms could leak into the Martian environment and cause havoc.
Although this is unlikely, extremely unlikely in fact, even assuming that life exists on Mars now, the chance is not one we should take. I do not support a manned mission to Mars in the light of this discovery - this is rational because although the chances are so very small, we would be risking a lot - an entire ecosphere.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
It is well known that KDE is ahead of Gnome on the development stakes, and that Gnome looks better and is, well, 'cooler' than KDE. However, now that KDE2 has the theme importation feature this last point is wiped out.
You may think this is nothing, but the simple fact is that the majority of users use a desktop for how good it looks and how easy it is to use. Now, through stealing the coolness of Gnome and the useability of Windows, KDE is streets ahead of the competition, from the point of view of the non-technical user.
I am extremely worried about this. What is to be done for Gnome? Someone will have to bring it on quite a lot if it is to remain valid from a Prima Facie, shallow & unthinking users perspective.
It is the morons who make the final decision regarding the fate of all software, and Open Source software is no different. I just hope that Gnome pull through.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
The way that advertisers get around this in other media is to make the ads more interesting or flashy, but on the web this is not an option. The only option is to make them bigger and more intrusive.
The result of this will be successful at first, but after a time people will learn to filter out the new bigger ads too. Then advertisers will call to make them even larger.
Where will it all end? It won't.
I think until such time as banner ads incude sound and video, and can hence be creative and entertaining, they will just become more and more obnoxious.
We should be encouraging the banner ad makers to be inventive, and use flash and the like, rather than just being more obvious and intruding.
It is really the only way forward.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I personally spent the majority of my university years whilst studying continental philosophy under the influence of LSD.
Question is, we know that drugs and the artistic professions go hand in hand - what about drugs and the rational, engineering professions like Software Engineering?
I would argue that they do, but only in moderation. Drugs can be considered a break from the rational world for the mathematical software developer, and when he returns from his blissful trip he is all the more ennabled to take on the rational world, and emulate it.
Through escaping it occassionally, he can better understand it.
Drugs and software development are a natural match, so much so that I am suspicious of those who do not take drugs. Are they really creative or bold enough? No, they are cowards, afraid of the unknown and unwilling to expirement.
I would never employ a drug free software developer. Such a person is just a drudge. Only the bold, the Human Becomings rather than the Human Beings, are for me.
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I disagree. Linus is entering the home marketplace at the moment, but it is only the serious business types and computer enthusiasts who are doing so - this is a direct result of its assumption that the user is intelligent.
The sort of person who installs an OS purely because of the games available for the platform is just the sort of person that Linux should be shunning now as it always has in the past. The last thing Linux needs is an unearthly invasion of AOLers, which would surely destroy it as a serious platform.
It has been greatly to the advantage of Linux that games have been unavailable on it. This has given it a serious reputation. Look at wjhat happened to Amiga and Workbench - the fact that the Amiga was primarily a gaming platform killed it in the business market.
I would caution against Linux welcoming games developers to its fold, lest business types shun the platform as frivilous.
This is reality - it happened to Amiga OS, to TOS on the Atari ST. Lets not let it happen to Linux.
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It stands to reason that a monpolising company taking the fruit of the Open Source community's efforts - the BSD kernel - will be a powerful force indeed.
With the incredible combination of the rock steady core of BSD and the supple, supremely svelte GUI that is distinctive of Apples desktops, and the sublimation of Microsoft into the .NET black hole, I see no reason why Apple should not emerge as a major threat to the Linux/MS hegemony over the next 10 years.
Will Apple be the next Microsoft? I think it might.
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Of course, we still have a duty to look after the welfare of beings considered irresponsible, as we decide it. This is why it's not okay to torture prisoners and so forth.
You have a very screwed up idea of what rights are.
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Now, applying this tenet to the music industry, we can see that in order to have the right to copy music, you must also be responsible with this ability.
I put it to you that the reason companies and governments are being forced into these drastic actions is because people, the geeks and high school students who use napster for one, are not responsible with the ability to copy music.
If you are not responsible, you do not have any rights, and any whining is pointless and idiotic.
Those who would copy music need to start being responsible.
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Another problem is that mail clients of that sort tend to hegemonise. Before you know it, non-standard mail formats are proliferating and everybody has to use the same mail client. Look at Outlook on windows.
We should not emulate this on Linux. We would be killing ourselfs, and strangling the Linux desktop at its birth.
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Games under OSS will never rival the commercial offerings.
In addition, why is the editorial on this topic so biased? 'Escape module'? This leads me to suspect that the AC's who flame the editors may be right after all. I find it very disappointing. One would not find that phrase in a professional publication. I suspect the integrity of the editors, when their words appear a few centimetres below an ad for Red Hat.
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COMMAND -option1... -optionn file/object/ output location
It seems obvious to me that this concept can be easily implemented in a GUI, and hence be easier to understand. A pull down menu for the available commands would cover the first part. Usinag a similar method, one would select the options with simple clicks of the mouse. Then one would browse the file hierarchy and choose a file to operate on, and a location for the output to be piped to, STDOUT as default.
This would give newbies an easy way of using the power of the command line from an easy environment.
One could also include lots of online help, something that bash is not very good at. Man pages are notoriously dificult to understand.
I think that this schema would be an obvious first step in creating a GUI'ed shell, and could well exceed the power of the shell in terms of easy understandibility and visualisation. I am sure that Network Admins and Windows users would find it a very useful tool on Unix.
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This is the flip side of the coin.
So what are the consequences? Well, if there is no genetic testing by insurance companies then there will be no insurance industry, because insurance is all about probability, and when as far as the customer is concerned there is no uncertainty, but as far as the company is concerned there is, and insurance agreement is unattainable, and even redundant completely anyway.
The problem is that only the most intelligent and wealthy of people (the two are directly related. cf The Bell Curve) will be able to afford genetic screening and so will inevitably become genetically perfect, like a master race, while the poor remain like old fashioned Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
Do we want to see Homo Superior Plutocri overrun us all? I don't, so we must be careful what we do here.
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The simple, plain and irrefutable fact is that the internet is not above the law. The law exists to make sure that the common decencies expressed by society are enforced, and so help me God, I will fight anyone who tries to turn my country into an anarchist, lawless, libertarian hellhole.
What is wrong with requiring that websites obey the law? Nothing! There is no difference betwwen a website or any other institution - they must all obey the law.
These sniffer boxes are just online policemen, but unbiased because they are automated. Nobodies freedom is being curtailed but the lawbreakers.
This is a matter of principle: The Sword of Lady Justice must prevail against the lawless barbarians that pollute the corners of the web, or we shall all suffer even more than we do now.
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Well, I'm sorry to dissappoint you kids, but thats just not the case at all. What Ghana needs is not a bunch of pony tailed do gooder 'geeks' (how they can have pride in that despicable word is beyond me, but then I'm not American), its sanitation, agriculture, education, books (thats right, old fashioned books, not Internet connections), and end to civil strife and decent irrigation. Once it gets these things we can start to consider some light industrialisation, perhaps.
Doesn't it strike anybody else that this whole exercise is patronising and absurd? Jesus, save the technical talk and trying to bring them into the 21st century - lets bring them into the 19th century first.
What I have said is the plain honest truth as I see it. I have been to South Africa, Zimbabwe and Ghana, and the problems I have seen there are all the same.
This project is just a liberal dream. We need to get practical types there, who know about practical issues and can teach the practical natives. Sending people versed in OOP design is pointless, and a patronising waste of money ('Oh look! You too can be like the white man' - save it for your Imperial dreams).
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Does the games industry want to be tarred with the same reputation as the cigarette industry? They will get it if they continue saying that they have to market violent QIII type games at children, right or wrong (rightly, in my view).
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Ever since the Satanic Mills of 19th century Lancashire, which were so wonderfully described in the literature of the period, companies and corporations have tried to stop their workers from unionising and gaining their rights to protect themselves from abuse by their employer. It is thanks to their struggles, and the efforts of people such as Keir Hardie, that we enjoy the freedoms we do today.
So why are people so complacent about the unions these days in the tech industry? A modern technological company has just as much motivation to deny the rights of its workers as did the coal mines and weaving mills of 1820's Britain.
Even if you have no intention of ever using your union, it is best to join it anyway, so as to provide it some support. You may need it one day, after all.
I know that many here on Slashdot consider unions to be beyond the pale, and be instruments of socialism, but in reality they are the devices of a free nation and a free minded people. This is why governments and corporations try and stamp them out.
In many ways, the modern workers union is like the 'well armed militia' described in the constitution, and we should protect it as such.
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However, the PC does not have those high speed wide busses for interchange between main and graphics ram. I fear that this may cause some performance loss, as although the chip will still be good, it will not be optimal.
The limiting factor on games and graphics performance these days is not calculation speeds;it is bandwidth, pur and simple. In ten years, everything will be bandwidth. If you consider that in one clock cycle on a mosern chip in the 1 GHz range light travel only a foot or so, we can see that information interchange between CPU's and memory will become fundamentally limited by the speed of light within 18 months, as the distance from CPU to memory exceeds the distance that light travels in a clock cycle. The only way to improve is via bandwidth increases, and better use of cache.
But that is the future, and it is the future that this chip was designed for, in the form of consoles, which are always technologically ahead.
I fear this chip will suffer through being ahead of its time.
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The amount of information you can glean about someone purely from his musical tastes is quite remarkable, and is bound to lead to more focused, relevant advertising for us all, which will be more bearable for us all. The person who listens to Chopin is clearly more intelligent and cultured that the person who listens to Nirvana. The advertising should reflect this. In some cases it may even be useful.
I just hope that they don't use IM too much, and instead use email or something easily filtered. IM is under the power of AOL, and email under the power of Microsoft. It is far easier to filter the latter for those reasons.
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