The biggest hassle is that governments collect enormous amounts of revenue from communications companies, so they do not look kindly on things like this. It would be very easy for anyone that wants to stop you to find you.
It's a ceramic, so would it be feasible to create bricks which could be used to line or even build smokestacks?
It depends.
Fabrication of components from ceramics can be tricky. For instance the BiSiCuYt (plus oxygen) superconductor that's been around for a few years involves mixing powders together, heating them up for a while, grinding it up again, putting the powder into the finished shape that you want and then heating it up again for a while. If the temperature isn't right, or the the atmosphere you heat it in isn't, then you get either too much or not enough oxygen and end up with a semiconductor instead of a superconductor.
After all this, it can still be made it quantity, and things have been done to get around the problem that the material is very brittle - but it would still be tricky to make something the size of a brick and get it to stick together, and still work.
If the material is easy to work with, then a powder could simply be squashed together and heated, or even slip cast like a toilet bowl. If it isn't, there are other processes like vapour deposition (condense the material out on a surface, it only works for a few things) or sol-gel (dip a substrate into a bucket of a gel containing suspended particles of the ceramic - then heat it for a while to make the ceramic stick).
he didn't know what he was doing was against the law
One point is that it was not against the law to write the program where he did. Russians inside Russia are not subject to US laws. If something is considered serious enough, and both governments agree, extradition can happen - in that case laws of another country apply.
The second point is that many think the DMCA shouldn't exist in its current form, so this law shouldn't apply to people in the US either.
A third point is that things are considered to be published anywhere where you can read them. This can make things complex - the software may be considered as a written work. This might be the justification for inflicting the DMCA on the rest of the world.
One good example of an attempt to misuse a US law and apply it to the rest of the world was the move to limit the export of Sony Playstation 2's under a hi-tech weapons restriction. There was an attempt from the US to stop a Japanese company exporting games to the rest of the world. Before anyone makes a crack about flight sim games - read the papers, the terrorists didn't use a playstation, they used a real flight simulator. The whole missile guidance system justification to stop export was also hot air - remember that PDP-11's were used as autopilots, and there's a lot of 486 chips in space hardware.
And Picard told us that the war with the Klingons was sparked by a botched first contact with them. But that contact didn't seem to be botched.
Why should this be consistent with STNG, when episodes of STNG weren't always consistent within the same episode?
About the worst I can remember went along the lines of:
The field is 200 metres in radius and is shrinking by two metres every second. That means we have exactly twenty-three minutes before it closes up
Plus of course, things like the powers of Deanna Troy fluctuating depending upon who had written a particular episode, transporters making people younger (eternal youth), and all of the universe changing inventions that were never seen again.
They should have had someone as highly trained as a checkout girl look over the STNG scripts before they went to air. Still, it was an entertaining show at times and this one looks like it may be better.
We just need to judge it on it's own merits, instead of how it relates to all of the others.
-------
Quick! Someone stop him! He's got the plot device!
what of that vaporous non-matter that is so imporant? Our memories, our knowledge, all that is us?
We don't even know whether those things are vaporous or not.
In the thirteenth century, the Emperor Frederick conducted a gruesome experiment where he sealed a man in a jar with a thin (but airtight) paper seal, to see if the escaping spirit or soul would break the seal. Theological thought at the time was that the soul was invisable, but made of solid matter.
We are still not capable of artificially creating thoughts because we still cannot define them. We will get a few more clues if we can copy someone and see whether they retain their current train of thought.
This is actually NOT teleportation;...... create an exact copy of a person on the other end of a "teleportation" machine, and then destroy the copy that currently resides on the transmitting end.
True - this is science and not magic. It will be the "murdering twinmaker" that you can read about in the SF written by those that think about their plot devices. In one novel it was justified by using the energy released in disintegration to provide most of the energy needed for reconstuction, and that there wasn't enough energy available to copy all of the matter that was being shipped about ohterwise.
This story here here uses almost the same headline as this article (AMD slashes jobs, loses Gateway), but was posted later.
The article is VERY similar to the CNN article. How's that for lazy journalism? Pinching a story off/. and just changing a few words, and getting paid for it by a major newspaper.
In regard to casting, I think they made an excellent choice by NOT casting big stars.
I think so too. Instead of using stars they're using people who can act! Many of the actors have been in so many different roles that you know that they will be playing the characters and not "Arnie", and we won't know exactly how they will be playing then until we see it. A lot of the cast have spent a lot of time on the stage and thus logged more hours of actual acting time than the typical Hollywood big name - and it shows.
As for the director - "Frighteners", "Beautiful Creatures", "Forgotten Silver" (an april fools day joke imitation documentary having a go at jingoistic nationalism), "Braindead" and "Meet The Feebles" are all very different movies, and among the best of their respective genres. Just don't have a big meal before the last two.
As for the scenery, in New Zealand you don't need a matte background for Mordor - just shoot the scenes in a moon-like landscape near a great big volcano.
Laurence Olivier to Dustin Hoffman after Hoffman had gone without sleep and washing for a few days to get into a role: "Can't you just act?"
Electronic consumer goods are typically expensive here in Australia, but for AU$239 ( less than US$110 and dropping like a stone) you can get a portable CD player that plays mp3s. It's hard to justify close to an order of magnitude in expense for something that is mounted in the dashboard instead of plugged into the 12V cigarette lighter output and the cassette deck.
The other staff were a bit confused and annoyed about what appeared to be frivolous spending in an environment of funding cuts and education funding increasingly driven by what could be sold to overseas students (who have to pay quite a lot).
I'm not there any more, I crashed and burned on my postgraduate studies, stopped tutoring and went back to full time work.
A few years ago Bin Laden called for a holy war against the US. No one came.
This is not about religeon, calling for an attack on moslems will give Bin Laden exactly what he wants, a religeous war. Remember that most of the countries that people are calling on the US Military to bomb were its allies during the gulf war, and will be its allies in this situation.
I'm particularly surprised about all of the people that want to see Pakistan bombed, and I suggest that they find out a little more about the world - for a start look up a list of countries in the British Commonwealth, then stories about the last few DEMOCRATIC elections in pakistan.
But one of the reasons RMS is so adamant about "GNU/Linux" is that "Linux" fosters the mistaken impression that all the GNU tools are optional....
If you look at a few things that RMS has written early on about why he insists on the prefix, you'll find that the major reason was that Linux had become popular enough for him to hear about it, so he thought adding the gnu to the front would increase the visability of the gnu project.
Few people know that Linus did not name linux, someone else did and the name stuck - It was never an exercise in ego as RMS says, unlike his continual badgering of Troll and the KDE people long after Qt was GPLed. The orginal Troll licence wasn't as bad as people said it was (few bothered to read it before complaining!), and the companys attitude was always good (it hasn't been source under glass for years if ever, many people outside of Troll contributed patches five years ago), and the company reacted to flames by steadily improving the terms of their licence. They got it into a good state, but it wasn't the GPL licence, so they still got flamed. They made it GPL, and now finally the flames have died from everywhere except from RMS.
On the positive side, I suspect that making putting Qt on the GPL was the best thing for the gnome project, it removed the political motivations and the desire to have the same release numbers as KDE, whether people thought it was ready to be called 1.0 or not. From the perspective of a user, gtk is now back to being as stable as it was before all the fuss, although somewhat larger with some weird dependencies.
I for one, dislike it when I've been calling the OS Linux for several years before the gnu prefix was even suggested, and then suddenly large numbers of people reply to any mention of the word linux that I'm using the wrong name. It tends to turn any thread into a political one
An allegory doesn't need 1:1 corresponence between characters and events. Take a look at "1984" and the state of the U.S.S.R. at the time it was written.
Tolkein protested that his carefully crafted world was not a reflection of current events (it took him years to write), but his entire theme of a world war against a single enemy and how ordinary individuals can make a decisive difference argues otherwise. He probably belived that the description of a fantasy world and the creation of langauges to specific linguistic rules was the point. People have written papers on this kind of thing (and I, being a sad fanboy that should have been using the library to study, actually read one in the past).
And LOTR is rather more epic in scope, and takes the good old Wagnerian theme of an immense struggle against an old evil.
And a good dose of borrowed Wagnerian plot!
It would have been interesting to see fantasy head down the road of "The Broken Sword" by Poul Andersen which was published at the same time (and has some plot elements and sources in common - they read the same epics, but neither would have even been able to know that the other was working on a novel), but had a lot less window dressing. We've ended up with decades of watered down Tolkein with fluffy elves in books that sell by thickness, with relatively few original peices of work drifting in the flood.
I see Harry Potter as being in a different genre, it's about individuals instead of being an allagory of world war II and about the triumph of an ordinary individual. It's also aimed at a different audience, those that read to be entertained instead of marveling over the consistency of an invented langauge and reading poetry painstakingly created in that langauge.
Slashdot Mirror
One point is that IT WAS NOT AGAINST THE LAW to write the program WHERE he did.
One sentence - how's that for an attention span :)
The biggest hassle is that governments collect enormous amounts of revenue from communications companies, so they do not look kindly on things like this. It would be very easy for anyone that wants to stop you to find you.
Then again, there's also one called "smeg."
Fabrication of components from ceramics can be tricky. For instance the BiSiCuYt (plus oxygen) superconductor that's been around for a few years involves mixing powders together, heating them up for a while, grinding it up again, putting the powder into the finished shape that you want and then heating it up again for a while. If the temperature isn't right, or the the atmosphere you heat it in isn't, then you get either too much or not enough oxygen and end up with a semiconductor instead of a superconductor.
After all this, it can still be made it quantity, and things have been done to get around the problem that the material is very brittle - but it would still be tricky to make something the size of a brick and get it to stick together, and still work.
If the material is easy to work with, then a powder could simply be squashed together and heated, or even slip cast like a toilet bowl. If it isn't, there are other processes like vapour deposition (condense the material out on a surface, it only works for a few things) or sol-gel (dip a substrate into a bucket of a gel containing suspended particles of the ceramic - then heat it for a while to make the ceramic stick).
The second point is that many think the DMCA shouldn't exist in its current form, so this law shouldn't apply to people in the US either.
A third point is that things are considered to be published anywhere where you can read them. This can make things complex - the software may be considered as a written work. This might be the justification for inflicting the DMCA on the rest of the world.
One good example of an attempt to misuse a US law and apply it to the rest of the world was the move to limit the export of Sony Playstation 2's under a hi-tech weapons restriction. There was an attempt from the US to stop a Japanese company exporting games to the rest of the world. Before anyone makes a crack about flight sim games - read the papers, the terrorists didn't use a playstation, they used a real flight simulator. The whole missile guidance system justification to stop export was also hot air - remember that PDP-11's were used as autopilots, and there's a lot of 486 chips in space hardware.
They should have had someone as highly trained as a checkout girl look over the STNG scripts before they went to air. Still, it was an entertaining show at times and this one looks like it may be better.
We just need to judge it on it's own merits, instead of how it relates to all of the others.
-------
Quick! Someone stop him! He's got the plot device!
In the thirteenth century, the Emperor Frederick conducted a gruesome experiment where he sealed a man in a jar with a thin (but airtight) paper seal, to see if the escaping spirit or soul would break the seal. Theological thought at the time was that the soul was invisable, but made of solid matter.
We are still not capable of artificially creating thoughts because we still cannot define them. We will get a few more clues if we can copy someone and see whether they retain their current train of thought.
-----------------
An insubstantial man is vaporwere.
The article is VERY similar to the CNN article. How's that for lazy journalism? Pinching a story off /. and just changing a few words, and getting paid for it by a major newspaper.
Microsoft has incorporated BSOD code into Windows various times.
As for the director - "Frighteners", "Beautiful Creatures", "Forgotten Silver" (an april fools day joke imitation documentary having a go at jingoistic nationalism), "Braindead" and "Meet The Feebles" are all very different movies, and among the best of their respective genres. Just don't have a big meal before the last two.
As for the scenery, in New Zealand you don't need a matte background for Mordor - just shoot the scenes in a moon-like landscape near a great big volcano.
Laurence Olivier to Dustin Hoffman after Hoffman had gone without sleep and washing for a few days to get into a role: "Can't you just act?"
Do file permissions now work in such a way so that one ordinary user can't read all of another ordinary users files?
You won't find any mention unless you hit the newspaper archieves at a library, or look at the files in a radio station. Long live HTML!
I'm sure that they are cheaper elsewhere.
It was widely documented in the press, but too long ago for there to be a URL handy.
It was enforced by a govenment body called the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal (has since changed its name at least once).
It was more of a weird reaction than any sort of attack on liberty.
Either then, or during the Gulf war, "Imagine" by John Lennon was banned.
Both decisions appeared to be a bit strange, but were just as legal as resticting people from swearing on radio.
Australia, of course, has no free speech amendment. The USA does, for now.
The other staff were a bit confused and annoyed about what appeared to be frivolous spending in an environment of funding cuts and education funding increasingly driven by what could be sold to overseas students (who have to pay quite a lot).
I'm not there any more, I crashed and burned on my postgraduate studies, stopped tutoring and went back to full time work.
There was no real explanation why - I only have to assume that it was done to be trendy.
This is not about religeon, calling for an attack on moslems will give Bin Laden exactly what he wants, a religeous war. Remember that most of the countries that people are calling on the US Military to bomb were its allies during the gulf war, and will be its allies in this situation.
I'm particularly surprised about all of the people that want to see Pakistan bombed, and I suggest that they find out a little more about the world - for a start look up a list of countries in the British Commonwealth, then stories about the last few DEMOCRATIC elections in pakistan.
Few people know that Linus did not name linux, someone else did and the name stuck - It was never an exercise in ego as RMS says, unlike his continual badgering of Troll and the KDE people long after Qt was GPLed. The orginal Troll licence wasn't as bad as people said it was (few bothered to read it before complaining!), and the companys attitude was always good (it hasn't been source under glass for years if ever, many people outside of Troll contributed patches five years ago), and the company reacted to flames by steadily improving the terms of their licence. They got it into a good state, but it wasn't the GPL licence, so they still got flamed. They made it GPL, and now finally the flames have died from everywhere except from RMS.
On the positive side, I suspect that making putting Qt on the GPL was the best thing for the gnome project, it removed the political motivations and the desire to have the same release numbers as KDE, whether people thought it was ready to be called 1.0 or not. From the perspective of a user, gtk is now back to being as stable as it was before all the fuss, although somewhat larger with some weird dependencies.
I for one, dislike it when I've been calling the OS Linux for several years before the gnu prefix was even suggested, and then suddenly large numbers of people reply to any mention of the word linux that I'm using the wrong name. It tends to turn any thread into a political one
Tolkein protested that his carefully crafted world was not a reflection of current events (it took him years to write), but his entire theme of a world war against a single enemy and how ordinary individuals can make a decisive difference argues otherwise. He probably belived that the description of a fantasy world and the creation of langauges to specific linguistic rules was the point. People have written papers on this kind of thing (and I, being a sad fanboy that should have been using the library to study, actually read one in the past).
It would have been interesting to see fantasy head down the road of "The Broken Sword" by Poul Andersen which was published at the same time (and has some plot elements and sources in common - they read the same epics, but neither would have even been able to know that the other was working on a novel), but had a lot less window dressing. We've ended up with decades of watered down Tolkein with fluffy elves in books that sell by thickness, with relatively few original peices of work drifting in the flood.
I see Harry Potter as being in a different genre, it's about individuals instead of being an allagory of world war II and about the triumph of an ordinary individual. It's also aimed at a different audience, those that read to be entertained instead of marveling over the consistency of an invented langauge and reading poetry painstakingly created in that langauge.
With the story and cast there should be an Oscar or two in the upcoming movie - even though it wasn't made in Hollywood.