"This is almost certainly true. The days where one human could contain enough of our knowledge in order to make a technologically *useful* advance in that knowledge, in a short period of time, are long over."
Um, that has been the case since before Thomas Edison. Pretty much everything he came up with took years to develop. And he wasn't working alone; he had a team working with him.
Single inventers can still invent, but it never was an easy process.
But it took that scientist about 2 days (or less!) to find those nucleotides. It took these guys 2 years.
Maybe in X-files land she wasn't just a random scientist, but someone actually in the know. That is why she had to die in that episode; she could have become a major security risk.
Just building new and more creative x-files conspiracy theories.:>
Oddities in the genetic codes of different species have been observed before. While all known life froms have very similar genetic codes (this codon yields that amino acid) there have been some life forms that are exceptions. Several kinds of bacteria express a different amino acid for a specific codon than, say, a human cell would.
So finding a bacteria like what this artical describes is only a mild suprise.
Great detective work though. Alot of people would have decided it was alot easier to call this an abberation than to spend ~2 years finding out what was really going on.
You know how Download Accelerator lets you get files faster by downloading different parts of the same file via multiple simultaneous connections. That is what this is about, except the Swarmcast guys have each connection going to a different person rather than tons of connections going to the same server.
Maybe you didn't notice that these guys are the makers of Swarmcast. Or maybe you posted before figuring out what that meant.
Swarmcast is a (working!) program for parallel p2p file downloading. In other words, the technology IS implimented. They basically are just making a modified program to work with a somewhat different set of files. No biggie.
Recently some Mame devs (www.mame.net) have been working on some Cojag drivers(cojag is an atari arcade system that uses harddrives - Area51 is a cojag game).
Someone made compressed harddrive images that mame will eventually require. Dispite compression, two of the images were half a gig and one was a gigabyte. The guy who was distributing these files used swarmcast to prevent getting swamped.
It worked pretty well in that tons of people were able to download those huge files without killing servers. However, swarmcast is new enough that swarmcast itself had some server problems. The server had to use an older version of swarmcast to be stable. That pretty much fixed the problem. It used to be that just hoasting ~40meg neogeo roms was nearly impossible, now it is possable to host half-gig files.
I think the reason is...
on
Disconnecting
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· Score: 2
I think the reason he had trouble is because he said he was trying to cancel. He should have said he wanted to close or terminate his account.
I can see how someone may think that he signed up and then decided to cancel his account immediately afterwards, without paying fees. If they could see his info in their computers, they should have seen that he was not in his first billing period and figured out what he really meant.
"When I introduce you to my wife, go ahead and speak very slowly and in short little words. I'll be smiling as she plows your little brain into the ground."
You may be able to get away with the "You are really all 8 year olds on your pa's computer, so I am smarter than you" thing on other message boards, but that doesn't work on me. Why?
Well, I am alot older than 8.:>
You seem to have the idea that teachers are genious. Well, I have tutored far too many k-6 teachers to believe that. In my U, women who are too dumb to become nurses go the teacher route. I have tutored teachers-in-the-making who were going nuts on pre-med/pre-nursing classes and ones who took CPSC 1301 mistakenly thinking that it tought them how to use computers (In CSU that is intro to C++ programming).
Maybe your wife is smart, but she is an exception rather than the rule.
I do volunteer work at a local k-6 school. There are about 4 people there who are even marginally computer literate. One of those is the librarian, who has been desperately trying to fix their nonstop computer madness. Actually, she is pretty good, but she has problems having to fix things and run the library at the same time.
One of the neat things about teachers is that they are often nice people. You may not have to have policy to back you up. You may not really need to go blocking ports. I bet that most of the teachers will stop if you as them to. Maybe tell them a horror story two about the BSA, but I think that most teachers will stop running p2p programs when asked. Especially if you are actually helpful. If you(the origional person who asked what to do) are actually fixing their computer woes and making life easier in general, I have found that the teachers will be happy fulfill any simple requests (not running p2p in this case).
Note: As you may have noticed, the one edge most teachers would have over me is spelling abilities.;>
Maybe I better elaborate on that a little bit. I am not the Super Piracy King. My collection of 'real' vhs and DVDs is unreasonably large.Most won't tv shows come out on DVD ever (or hd vcds, for ebay nuts who would want to buy from them) but there is alot of stuff out on vhs. Once you watch a tv series on vhs/dvd you won't appreciate watching live cable so much. My point is that there are alternatives to watching cable associated commercials.
More and more I am waiting until a series comes out on dvd (or HK vcd) and buy the whole series. A HK vcd set for a whole season is usually $25. No commercials. Or, if it is something I really want I get a dvd set (legit + better quality;costs a ton though). Either way, I am not getting brainwashed by commercials anymore.
Part of why the PS2 is backwards compatible is that it wasn't hard to impliment. The PS2 has a chip that the PSX used, so it isn't all software based emulation.
Moreover, in a previous slashdot article it was stated that the PS3 is basically 4 PS2 units smashed into one case. Again, backwards compatability will be trivial to impliment.
You say that a big problem is getting the stuff installed...
I wonder if Gateway would want to promote this as a branch-off from their free music initiative. They already ship computers bogged down with other stuff, might as well put something useful on there too.
That could be a big deal for them. This software would add 'value' (as in functional or sales value, even though the software itself is 'free') to their products without costing them much(I say 'not much' because installing that on each computer will cost them).
MS stuff can work pretty good, once they get it working at all. It is getting to the point where it works that is the problem. Here, they will be getting a system that already does work, technology-wise (not income-wise, which never was a problem for MS).
They could possably expand a working network to do alot of the neat digital tv stuff that people have been talking about, but not actually making/getting.
My point is that, while the problems with MS are obvious (to us), there are also some possable good things that could come from this.
They would be putting themselves in a somewhat compromised position here. They are more interested in buying succeeding businesses (like their attempt at Nintendo).
What they are trying to do is expand into other markets. All big corporations try to 'diversify,' otherwise they get bloated, top-heavy and sink. MS is just looking around for other markets to get into in order to keep themselves going.
I see the same thing in Habitat for Humanity in the US. People steal everything that isn't nailed down, no matter how ugly or worthless it might be. They love to take scafolding. Old, messed up sawhoarses? Gone by the next morning. It's crazy.
I would like to see a system for drug patents that is 'the highest bid without going over' the relms of being reasonable.
IOW, it would be cool if a special exception was made for drug patents that caps their limitations in a way that is still high enough to pay for R&D and a significant profit, but low enough that thousands of people aren't dying because the cost is too high.
"Trialability: the degree to which an innovation may be experimented with on a limited basis. OK, Windows fails this too -- but people don't even know there's an alternative to be tried. Where's the *NIX equivalent of AOL's "1000 free hours" preview?"
I can see how that would be helpful.There are still two problems with that; distribution and paying for the disks themselves.
Normal people dont know about Linux. Normal people don't want to download Linux. Normal people don't know that downloading is how you get Linux. Someone needs to fix all that, and AOL has certainly demonstrated that it can be done.
In that article, it claims that several Senators are wanting a compromise, including getting rid of parts of the DMCA (although that would probably mean just the parts that wouldn't hold up in court anyway).
My idea is this: They might pass a version of the CBDTPA and at the same time weaken the DMCA. In other words, there would be copy protections but you would be allowed to circumvent them.
If you read the bill itself, it is designed to not pass. Key terms such as 'Open Source' are intentionally left out of the definitions section. Those parts would have to be modified or struck.
Either way, this is going to make it hard to sell hardware. People are, in general, able to do what they want with their current computers. Because of this, sales have been down. It is hard enough trying to sell superior computer nowadays. Trying to sell new computers that do LESS is suicide.
Here is a level that this bill doesn't make sense on that most people don't bring up.
Hollywood thinks they can make a ton of $ by making a multimedia machine, but they have all failed in the marketplace. (CDi and DivX) People don't want stripped computers and restricted players. They want the 'real thing.'
So now they are trying to force us to buy their multimedia player machines via force of law. The computer hardware industry picks up the tab for the funky hardware, and Hollywood gets the profet of selling the restricted media.
Well, there is one thing wrong with that plan. The computer hardware industry is in trouble; why buy a 1.5 ghz machine when a 350mhz machine can run word and play mp3s? The comp hardware industry is having trouble selling superior hardware right now; it certainly can't sell 'restricted' hardware! IOW, the industry can't get people to buy better hardware, they dont have a chance of getting people to buy inferior hardware. They simply won't buy; they will keep playing mp3s and typing in word on their perfectly fine 650mhz or 350mhz or whatever. It whether the protections are effective or a pain in the neck isn't really important. What is important is that people don't like things that are 'restricted,'that normal people ask the local nerd what computers to get and that right now nobody feels like they MUST get a new computer.
If the US public is forced to either buy 'restricted' computers or none at all, it will be none at all for several years. This could quite easily bury the computer hardware industry in the US, which in tern hurts the software industry.
So exactly what political party wants to pass the bill that destroys our tech economy?
I actually did read this bill. If a bill like this MUST be passed one way or another, this was the bill we would have wanted to go through. It did have alot of good stuff in there. It required open source (although that part wasn't defined properly for legal format - a sign that the whole thing was BS as you said) and that the protections were required to not hamper generation of your own files. The description basically said that popping in something cheezy like alot of SDMI implimentations we have seen is simply not acceptable.
The 'less radical' alternative they may pass later will almost certainly be worse than this bill.
The way you describe the situation sounds alot like the storyline you get at the end of the game... I guess our political problems are so bad that people in a country on the other side of the planet are making videogames base on it.:P
Wasn't the sattelite slowdown due to the cumulative effects of the (very)minor density of extremely upper atmospheric particles?
Now the probes that are pointed out of our solar system, the reason those are slowing down is a mystery. That is the case where people think our ideas of gravity/space-time are maybe a bit off.
Slashdot Mirror
"This is almost certainly true. The days where one human could contain enough of our knowledge in order to make a technologically *useful* advance in that knowledge, in a short period of time, are long over."
Um, that has been the case since before Thomas Edison. Pretty much everything he came up with took years to develop. And he wasn't working alone; he had a team working with him.
Single inventers can still invent, but it never was an easy process.
But it took that scientist about 2 days (or less!) to find those nucleotides. It took these guys 2 years.
:>
Maybe in X-files land she wasn't just a random scientist, but someone actually in the know. That is why she had to die in that episode; she could have become a major security risk.
Just building new and more creative x-files conspiracy theories.
Oddities in the genetic codes of different species have been observed before. While all known life froms have very similar genetic codes (this codon yields that amino acid) there have been some life forms that are exceptions. Several kinds of bacteria express a different amino acid for a specific codon than, say, a human cell would.
So finding a bacteria like what this artical describes is only a mild suprise.
Great detective work though. Alot of people would have decided it was alot easier to call this an abberation than to spend ~2 years finding out what was really going on.
He is going on about how software is free, but is whining about how we use/name it. Does this make sense?
You know how Download Accelerator lets you get files faster by downloading different parts of the same file via multiple simultaneous connections. That is what this is about, except the Swarmcast guys have each connection going to a different person rather than tons of connections going to the same server.
Maybe you didn't notice that these guys are the makers of Swarmcast. Or maybe you posted before figuring out what that meant.
Swarmcast is a (working!) program for parallel p2p file downloading. In other words, the technology IS implimented. They basically are just making a modified program to work with a somewhat different set of files. No biggie.
Recently some Mame devs (www.mame.net) have been working on some Cojag drivers(cojag is an atari arcade system that uses harddrives - Area51 is a cojag game).
Someone made compressed harddrive images that mame will eventually require. Dispite compression, two of the images were half a gig and one was a gigabyte. The guy who was distributing these files used swarmcast to prevent getting swamped.
It worked pretty well in that tons of people were able to download those huge files without killing servers. However, swarmcast is new enough that swarmcast itself had some server problems. The server had to use an older version of swarmcast to be stable. That pretty much fixed the problem. It used to be that just hoasting ~40meg neogeo roms was nearly impossible, now it is possable to host half-gig files.
I think the reason he had trouble is because he said he was trying to cancel. He should have said he wanted to close or terminate his account.
:P
I can see how someone may think that he signed up and then decided to cancel his account immediately afterwards, without paying fees. If they could see his info in their computers, they should have seen that he was not in his first billing period and figured out what he really meant.
I guess in any case the are idiots/overworked.
"When I introduce you to my wife, go ahead and speak very slowly and in short little words. I'll be smiling as she plows your little brain into the ground."
:>
;>
You may be able to get away with the "You are really all 8 year olds on your pa's computer, so I am smarter than you" thing on other message boards, but that doesn't work on me. Why?
Well, I am alot older than 8.
You seem to have the idea that teachers are genious. Well, I have tutored far too many k-6 teachers to believe that. In my U, women who are too dumb to become nurses go the teacher route. I have tutored teachers-in-the-making who were going nuts on pre-med/pre-nursing classes and ones who took CPSC 1301 mistakenly thinking that it tought them how to use computers (In CSU that is intro to C++ programming).
Maybe your wife is smart, but she is an exception rather than the rule.
I do volunteer work at a local k-6 school. There are about 4 people there who are even marginally computer literate. One of those is the librarian, who has been desperately trying to fix their nonstop computer madness. Actually, she is pretty good, but she has problems having to fix things and run the library at the same time.
One of the neat things about teachers is that they are often nice people. You may not have to have policy to back you up. You may not really need to go blocking ports. I bet that most of the teachers will stop if you as them to. Maybe tell them a horror story two about the BSA, but I think that most teachers will stop running p2p programs when asked. Especially if you are actually helpful. If you(the origional person who asked what to do) are actually fixing their computer woes and making life easier in general, I have found that the teachers will be happy fulfill any simple requests (not running p2p in this case).
Note: As you may have noticed, the one edge most teachers would have over me is spelling abilities.
Maybe I better elaborate on that a little bit. I am not the Super Piracy King. My collection of 'real' vhs and DVDs is unreasonably large.Most won't tv shows come out on DVD ever (or hd vcds, for ebay nuts who would want to buy from them) but there is alot of stuff out on vhs. Once you watch a tv series on vhs/dvd you won't appreciate watching live cable so much. My point is that there are alternatives to watching cable associated commercials.
More and more I am waiting until a series comes out on dvd (or HK vcd) and buy the whole series. A HK vcd set for a whole season is usually $25. No commercials. Or, if it is something I really want I get a dvd set (legit + better quality;costs a ton though). Either way, I am not getting brainwashed by commercials anymore.
Part of why the PS2 is backwards compatible is that it wasn't hard to impliment. The PS2 has a chip that the PSX used, so it isn't all software based emulation.
Moreover, in a previous slashdot article it was stated that the PS3 is basically 4 PS2 units smashed into one case. Again, backwards compatability will be trivial to impliment.
You say that a big problem is getting the stuff installed...
I wonder if Gateway would want to promote this as a branch-off from their free music initiative. They already ship computers bogged down with other stuff, might as well put something useful on there too.
That could be a big deal for them. This software would add 'value' (as in functional or sales value, even though the software itself is 'free') to their products without costing them much(I say 'not much' because installing that on each computer will cost them).
MS stuff can work pretty good, once they get it working at all. It is getting to the point where it works that is the problem. Here, they will be getting a system that already does work, technology-wise (not income-wise, which never was a problem for MS).
They could possably expand a working network to do alot of the neat digital tv stuff that people have been talking about, but not actually making/getting.
My point is that, while the problems with MS are obvious (to us), there are also some possable good things that could come from this.
They would be putting themselves in a somewhat compromised position here. They are more interested in buying succeeding businesses (like their attempt at Nintendo).
What they are trying to do is expand into other markets. All big corporations try to 'diversify,' otherwise they get bloated, top-heavy and sink. MS is just looking around for other markets to get into in order to keep themselves going.
I see the same thing in Habitat for Humanity in the US. People steal everything that isn't nailed down, no matter how ugly or worthless it might be. They love to take scafolding. Old, messed up sawhoarses? Gone by the next morning. It's crazy.
I would like to see a system for drug patents that is 'the highest bid without going over' the relms of being reasonable.
IOW, it would be cool if a special exception was made for drug patents that caps their limitations in a way that is still high enough to pay for R&D and a significant profit, but low enough that thousands of people aren't dying because the cost is too high.
"Trialability: the degree to which an innovation may be experimented with on a limited basis. OK, Windows fails this too -- but people don't even know there's an alternative to be tried. Where's the *NIX equivalent of AOL's "1000 free hours" preview?"
I can see how that would be helpful.There are still two problems with that; distribution and paying for the disks themselves.
Normal people dont know about Linux. Normal people don't want to download Linux. Normal people don't know that downloading is how you get Linux. Someone needs to fix all that, and AOL has certainly demonstrated that it can be done.
In that article, it claims that several Senators are wanting a compromise, including getting rid of parts of the DMCA (although that would probably mean just the parts that wouldn't hold up in court anyway).
My idea is this: They might pass a version of the CBDTPA and at the same time weaken the DMCA. In other words, there would be copy protections but you would be allowed to circumvent them.
If you read the bill itself, it is designed to not pass. Key terms such as 'Open Source' are intentionally left out of the definitions section. Those parts would have to be modified or struck.
Either way, this is going to make it hard to sell hardware. People are, in general, able to do what they want with their current computers. Because of this, sales have been down. It is hard enough trying to sell superior computer nowadays. Trying to sell new computers that do LESS is suicide.
Please don't bury the computer hardware market!
Here is a level that this bill doesn't make sense on that most people don't bring up.
Hollywood thinks they can make a ton of $ by making a multimedia machine, but they have all failed in the marketplace. (CDi and DivX) People don't want stripped computers and restricted players. They want the 'real thing.'
So now they are trying to force us to buy their multimedia player machines via force of law. The computer hardware industry picks up the tab for the funky hardware, and Hollywood gets the profet of selling the restricted media.
Well, there is one thing wrong with that plan. The computer hardware industry is in trouble; why buy a 1.5 ghz machine when a 350mhz machine can run word and play mp3s? The comp hardware industry is having trouble selling superior hardware right now; it certainly can't sell 'restricted' hardware! IOW, the industry can't get people to buy better hardware, they dont have a chance of getting people to buy inferior hardware. They simply won't buy; they will keep playing mp3s and typing in word on their perfectly fine 650mhz or 350mhz or whatever. It whether the protections are effective or a pain in the neck isn't really important. What is important is that people don't like things that are 'restricted,'that normal people ask the local nerd what computers to get and that right now nobody feels like they MUST get a new computer.
If the US public is forced to either buy 'restricted' computers or none at all, it will be none at all for several years. This could quite easily bury the computer hardware industry in the US, which in tern hurts the software industry.
So exactly what political party wants to pass the bill that destroys our tech economy?
I actually did read this bill. If a bill like this MUST be passed one way or another, this was the bill we would have wanted to go through. It did have alot of good stuff in there. It required open source (although that part wasn't defined properly for legal format - a sign that the whole thing was BS as you said) and that the protections were required to not hamper generation of your own files. The description basically said that popping in something cheezy like alot of SDMI implimentations we have seen is simply not acceptable.
The 'less radical' alternative they may pass later will almost certainly be worse than this bill.
'The Sons of Liberty'
:P
The way you describe the situation sounds alot like the storyline you get at the end of the game... I guess our political problems are so bad that people in a country on the other side of the planet are making videogames base on it.
Wasn't the sattelite slowdown due to the cumulative effects of the (very)minor density of extremely upper atmospheric particles?
Now the probes that are pointed out of our solar system, the reason those are slowing down is a mystery. That is the case where people think our ideas of gravity/space-time are maybe a bit off.