parent should be modded up. It's an interesting question...
Easy Travel is Bad...
on
Son of Concorde
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Okay, there are already a lot of +5 comments on this topic, so I suppose this one will probably never get read. But just in case you are reading this...
Regardless of whether it can be done or not, I want to register the opinion that easy, cheap world travel is actually a bad thing. When products and people can get anywhere in the world cheaply, then they do. This leads to single culture kinds of things, which makes you wonder why you were travelling at all! Similar to cultural diversity is the problem with bio-diversity (from which the whole arguement stems). The sheer number of biological invaders is astounding. Consider how many times you've been annoyed by those Japanese beetles (that look a lot like lady bugs). A few years ago, those didn't exist in North America. Now, they exist without bound. You can bet that there will be more and more of these problems in the future.
Yes, I enjoy travel quite a bit. And I don't like the idea of restricting travel. But we need more bio and cultural diversity. It keeps the world healthy.
funny, I kept thinking this phrase while watching the impossible battle in Zion. That was one of the high points of this movie. I sorta wish the annoying kid had said "there is no spoon" as he made his mad dash across the platform to door 3. Of course, I also think he should have been blown away by the ship tearing through that door as should have the woman that saved his skin at the last minute.
The ending was the only thing that really hurt this movie. They should have killed almost all of the principles.
1. Neo should have been left dead. No stupid remarks by the Oracle.
2. The oracle should have been left dead (would have helped stop those annoying remarks). And the loss of the actress could have been handled better, for that matter.
3. That annoying admiral _should have_ died in the battle.
4. The kid and Dozer's sister should have been killed as the ship crashed through (as said before). That would have left her husband alone - very poignant and a good twist.
5. They should have shown how torn up Zion was - people shouldn't be happy, there's going to be soup lines for a LONG time. How are they even planning on digging out? (Less orange, happy light, as my friend Brian said.)
The only one I didn't mind was the little girl. I think she should have inherited the Oracle's eyes (though some weird means) and become the next oracle (as the one preview I saw lead me to believe).
A good ending would have been her taking the Architect's hand in a much less glowy downtown Sidney.
[The city morphs back into being, Smith's damage and the battle fading back into normal streets]
girl: "Starting it over again?" Architect: "What else? There's a lot of people living in here." girl: "And you're going to let them live free?" Architect: "I made a deal with Neo. I'm not human, you know."
[Zoom to a top view of the city, as in the end of the Matrix.]
This could shape up to be a really amazing Halloween. For some reason, that 80's movie about Halley's comet's tail intersecting the earth and making zombies out of everyone that wasn't in a lead-lined room comes to mind. I, for one, will welcome our new zombie overlord masters.:-)
One other thing that flight simulators can let you do with growing capability: you can design your own planes with some tools.
In particular, X-Plane has a really cool interface that lets you build planes. It uses physical models to determine how your plane will fly, then you can jump in the simulator and give it a shot.
I'm a pilot and just recently got my instrument rating.
When getting my private pilot license, I picked up a copy of MS Flight Sim 2000 and used it a bit. 2004 came out shortly after getting my rating.
Learning to fly has a lot of facets to it. It's something that anyone can do, but it's a large quantity of knowledge that you have to get your mind around.
One of the most important is learning the muscle motor responses necessary to control the plane: how does the plane react when I do X.
To learn that, the best method is to fly real airplanes. But that's not enough. After flying, you need to go back in the privacy of your own brain and remember what you did. You need to go through the motions of landing (and other procedures) in your brain where you have the luxury of being able to stop time and analyze what's going on.
This is called "armchair flying" and it is a very importat part of the process.
The Flight Simulator is a great tool, but it doesn't replace arm chair flying. It does give you that ability to try various procedures and stuff that you can't do in a real airplane.
But most of all, what I found was that it is the most help in learning instruments. Hence, its use for VFR flight (what your private pilot ticket gives you the right to do on your own) is minimal. But it does keep you thinking about things.
On the otherhand, its use for learning to fly an instrument approach is fabulous! I've always found the computer controls to overcontrol the plane or to just not "have the right feel." But that's not a bad thing - it forces you to rely on the instruments which is exactly what you should be doing in IFR flight.
So, large grain of salt in hand, flight simulators are great!
But getting it out of the hole isn't impossible by any means. If you're going to knock over a reactor to get the uranium, you're probably prepared to use some interesting equipment to do it.
With more reactors scattered around, security of the system as a whole is more expensive and harder to do. The uranium may be sub-critical, but it could be processed into something more dangerous.
If you have one of these reactors powering a tiny town of say, 1000 people (large!), how many of these people can you spare (and pay) to guard the reactor and its uranium? Back of the envelope: I pay about 50$ per month in electricity. $50 * 12 months = $600. $600 * 1000 people = $600,000 per year gross revenue from the reactor. I don't know what the reactor actually costs direct (though the article throws around a $20M figure, you have to figure that as cap. ex. still leaving operating costs). $20M / 30 years is $666K, which is already greater than the revenue my back of the envelope calculation produced.
Regardless, all this comes down to not being able to spend millions yearly on the security of this thing. So these reactors could easily be targets for people trying to collect radioactive materials... especially being in the backwoods of Alaska.
I've seen that sort of thing before too... (even written one of them once or twice)
Whether it will work or not is highly dependent on circumstances. But it's definitely worth a try. It'll be a lot cheaper and a lot easier to do than just about any other solution (short of buying a new printer!).
"Do deadlines. No end-users requirements. No political/checkpoint milestones. No office politics."
I believe the spirit of this, but not the letter. Every human endeavor is laced with politics, including nethack. Just read a little more and you'll start seeing it.
The people saying leveling as a goal is okay are idiots. Well, maybe not idiots - people play chess over and over again because (they hope) they are getting better.
But as far as mass media goes - if you want a game to really attract a large crowd - you have to cater to people's attention spans. No one but a geek (and I am one of those) has an attention span that will sit still for this crap.
No, the games that will last through the ages will continue to engage your mind all the way through the game. Novel writers don't write the same sentence over and over (well, except Jack: "All work and no play make J a dull boy..."), movies don't show the same thing over and over (except Run Lola Run: "I don't believe there's nothing left but running here again").
Hmm... anyway, as I was saying, if you want people to care about it, you can't deaden their senses to it. You need to provide them interest all the way along.
Rudy
PS. people that say 'bots are evil aren't reckoning with the fact that they make great screensavers!
Sorry your comment is generating so much beef, but...
Flight simulators will never take you out of your living room and put you into the air. They are just a very, very complicated thought game. My CFI called it arm-chair flying and I would call it more important than the actual time you spend in the Cessna. But, I'd also say that sitting there in your chair without the flight simulator and just thinking about flying is in many ways more important than the real thing. In your chair, you have time to think about all the things that you should be doing. In the simulator, you don't have time to think about the details. In the airplane, you _have_ to have those skills polished.
Yes, it takes a large number of landings to really get a feel for all aspects of it. Other people are saying you should be landing after a couple hours - and you should be. But it's one thing to point the plane at the ground and land in one piece. It's another thing entirely to set the plane up perfectly (never needed to touch the throttle again until the threshold (or beyond)), judge your winds perfect, make your base and final turns perfect (you did remember to steepen up as you turned to the upwind, right? you did remember that left hand crab on base, right?), follow the glide slope in even when there isn't a glide slope indicator, hold that nose off the ground and flare such that the plane settles with the passengers completely unaware that they aren't flying anymore.
That takes practice. And that takes _real_ airplanes. Don't expect any simulator _ever_ (even when they have holodecks!) to take away the real world side of the equation.
That said, I'm really excited about flying on Mars! I just ordered my copy.:)
Does anyone know if this stuff can already be done with amateur radio? Could I build a radio transmitter and receiver, put up a big antenna or use a repeater, to transmit this information to myself in the car?
Get a laptop instead. It'll be a lot more useful to you as a student. Wireless is everywhere. You can take it to the library. You can take it to friend's places for gaming.
I wish I had one when I was in school. You'll be happy you do. And then shipping won't be a problem.
okay, everyone is fulling up this list with suggestions. Here some of my own:
1. The "older articles" seems to be continuously busted. I click on the previous day and I get a page with all the current articles. Soemtimes the 'older articles' link disappears, sometimes it just behaves funny.
2. How about article rating and sorting? I'd like to be able to say all articles about X should be put at the top of the list and stay there for at least a day.
3. This one's not a suggestion, but a comment: I love the ability to mod down certain ratings. I've very happy to be able to add an automatic -1 to humor posts, many are actually funny, but they take up a lot of my bandwidth.
Just Linux Hardware is pretty darn limited. It doesn't even have a date or version field. (though these are sometimes in the "additional" data section)
You can't scan a list and pick out hardware that works well together.
In all, thumbs down. But maybe it could be improved...
Haystack is an interesting idea, but I have a hard time distinguishing what it does from what, say, Lotus Notes does. And Lotus is _terrible_.
I like the idea of bringing all my information together in one place. I don't like the idea of only having it in that one place. What I would like would be an application that can watch how I use the computer, then bring those applications together to make it more seemless.
For example, I have about four different calendars in my life: the work calendar, the one on the cell phone that I use for stuff that I can't miss, the calendar that schedules airplane rentals, and (of coursE) my girlfriend's calendar. So how do I bring those all together, and yet still be making entries in them separately?
The same is true for information. I have a primitive blogging system (really just a bunch of text files that are date coded), I have work documents that I use regularly, I have web pages that I monitor (sometimes a little too often) and I have textbooks that I'm reading (instrument flying at the moment). So how do I get all these forms of information - or at least an index into them - together in one place? But again, without changing the current organization scheme.
This is the tool that will make the computer a lot more useful - an actual organizational tool.
This is the text of the letter that I just sent to my congress people. The only way I feel like I get heard is when I snail-mail my congress people. I get a nice form response in about 7-10 days that usually talks all around the issue that I bring up, but at least I made someone in their staff think about what I said.
And you should too!:-)
Here's an excellent site for finding the particulars of your congress people: Vote Smart
Text:
Dear,
I writing today to ask you to take up an issue that has the potential to vastly improve the quality of public domain works out there. A strong public domain gives people a creative background and a collective sense of culture. A strong public domain will offer an alternative to whatever the media is pushing as the "special of the week." Ultimately, it is what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they created our country: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Right now, that "limited time" is much longer than the average life-span of anyone alive when the work was created. By the time the works come into the public domain, they are no longer relevant. I'd like you to introduce legislation that allows authors to be fairly compensated for their works, but also brings works into the public domain much more quickly.
There is a billed called "The Public Domain Enhancement Act" that aims to do just this. It proposes a tax of just $1 on any copyrighted work over 50 years old. If this tax is paid, the copyright stays enforced. If not, then the work enters the public domain. You can read more about the bill at a web site set up for this: http://eldred.cc/
Please help reaffirm the Constitution's concept of "limited time" and create a larger public domain by working to make this bill become a law.
If you take up this issue, the media companies will lobby, and lobby hard, against it. They'll see it as competition for the attention span of our citizens. And they're right. But competition in our society is a good thing. In the end, it's the quality of life of the citizens, over the short and the long term, that is the most important issue. A strong public domain, provided by a simple statute like this will secure a creative commons for all of us.
By the way, thank you very much for completing the National Political Awareness Test (NPAT). I appreciate your clear and concise explanation for your position on the various issues it covers.
Blender is free, the other software packages are not. While it would be possible to get a pirated version of a more powerful set of software, it won't help. For one, your later employer will probably have a completely different set of tools - so all the time learning one particular interface will be wasted. For another, if you tell you employer you're fluent with Maya, they're going to wonder if you'll be pirating software from work, too. Of course, if you can afford to actually buy some software... then by all means do.
Still, even if you could buy the software, I think I'd still use Blender. You could equally well use that money to buy more computing hardware - either a good workstation, or the beginnings of a render cluster.
The real key is that you _must_ learn how to learn. That's not redundant. Learn what it is that you're doing, rather than how to press buttons. And think about it from the point of view of "what I'm doing" rather than what interface I'm using.
This will help you be ready to make the jump to all the different tools you're bound to use in the future. The ability to make that jump is critically important.
When you testify, how about pointing out this: before the whole fiasco about DeCSS, etc. came up, playing DVDs on Linux was below the radar screen. Sure there were linux people clamoring for it, but no one was seriously implementing it.
By locking down exactly what you can do with a media, you close off the possibilities for future innovation.
You flash the TSOP so you can put on the hacked BIOS to play pirated (excuse me, "legitimate backups").
I know that stealing is a common reason people are doing this... but personally I like the idea of trying to get MythTV running on the beast. Once again - a single box that combines as many forms of entertainment as possible. The _mythical_ TV.
That's legitimate. Maybe M$ should just release a version of linux, properly encyrpted and all that jazz, for the X-Box.
Slashdot Mirror
parent should be modded up. It's an interesting question...
Okay, there are already a lot of +5 comments on this topic, so I suppose this one will probably never get read. But just in case you are reading this...
Regardless of whether it can be done or not, I want to register the opinion that easy, cheap world travel is actually a bad thing. When products and people can get anywhere in the world cheaply, then they do. This leads to single culture kinds of things, which makes you wonder why you were travelling at all! Similar to cultural diversity is the problem with bio-diversity (from which the whole arguement stems). The sheer number of biological invaders is astounding. Consider how many times you've been annoyed by those Japanese beetles (that look a lot like lady bugs). A few years ago, those didn't exist in North America. Now, they exist without bound. You can bet that there will be more and more of these problems in the future.
Yes, I enjoy travel quite a bit. And I don't like the idea of restricting travel. But we need more bio and cultural diversity. It keeps the world healthy.
Entertaining.
R
main(O){10>5*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
7. There is no spoon.
funny, I kept thinking this phrase while watching the impossible battle in Zion. That was one of the high points of this movie. I sorta wish the annoying kid had said "there is no spoon" as he made his mad dash across the platform to door 3. Of course, I also think he should have been blown away by the ship tearing through that door as should have the woman that saved his skin at the last minute.
The ending was the only thing that really hurt this movie. They should have killed almost all of the principles.
1. Neo should have been left dead. No stupid remarks by the Oracle.
2. The oracle should have been left dead (would have helped stop those annoying remarks). And the loss of the actress could have been handled better, for that matter.
3. That annoying admiral _should have_ died in the battle.
4. The kid and Dozer's sister should have been killed as the ship crashed through (as said before). That would have left her husband alone - very poignant and a good twist.
5. They should have shown how torn up Zion was - people shouldn't be happy, there's going to be soup lines for a LONG time. How are they even planning on digging out? (Less orange, happy light, as my friend Brian said.)
The only one I didn't mind was the little girl. I think she should have inherited the Oracle's eyes (though some weird means) and become the next oracle (as the one preview I saw lead me to believe).
A good ending would have been her taking the Architect's hand in a much less glowy downtown Sidney.
[The city morphs back into being, Smith's damage and the battle fading back into normal streets]
girl: "Starting it over again?"
Architect: "What else? There's a lot of people living in here."
girl: "And you're going to let them live free?"
Architect: "I made a deal with Neo. I'm not human, you know."
[Zoom to a top view of the city, as in the end of the Matrix.]
Pun intended.
:-)
This could shape up to be a really amazing Halloween. For some reason, that 80's movie about Halley's comet's tail intersecting the earth and making zombies out of everyone that wasn't in a lead-lined room comes to mind. I, for one, will welcome our new zombie overlord masters.
One other thing that flight simulators can let you do with growing capability: you can design your own planes with some tools.
In particular, X-Plane has a really cool interface that lets you build planes. It uses physical models to determine how your plane will fly, then you can jump in the simulator and give it a shot.
Pretty neat.
I'm a pilot and just recently got my instrument rating.
When getting my private pilot license, I picked up a copy of MS Flight Sim 2000 and used it a bit. 2004 came out shortly after getting my rating.
Learning to fly has a lot of facets to it. It's something that anyone can do, but it's a large quantity of knowledge that you have to get your mind around.
One of the most important is learning the muscle motor responses necessary to control the plane: how does the plane react when I do X.
To learn that, the best method is to fly real airplanes. But that's not enough. After flying, you need to go back in the privacy of your own brain and remember what you did. You need to go through the motions of landing (and other procedures) in your brain where you have the luxury of being able to stop time and analyze what's going on.
This is called "armchair flying" and it is a very importat part of the process.
The Flight Simulator is a great tool, but it doesn't replace arm chair flying. It does give you that ability to try various procedures and stuff that you can't do in a real airplane.
But most of all, what I found was that it is the most help in learning instruments. Hence, its use for VFR flight (what your private pilot ticket gives you the right to do on your own) is minimal. But it does keep you thinking about things.
On the otherhand, its use for learning to fly an instrument approach is fabulous! I've always found the computer controls to overcontrol the plane or to just not "have the right feel." But that's not a bad thing - it forces you to rely on the instruments which is exactly what you should be doing in IFR flight.
So, large grain of salt in hand, flight simulators are great!
heheh.. that would be pretty entertaining.
But getting it out of the hole isn't impossible by any means. If you're going to knock over a reactor to get the uranium, you're probably prepared to use some interesting equipment to do it.
With more reactors scattered around, security of the system as a whole is more expensive and harder to do. The uranium may be sub-critical, but it could be processed into something more dangerous.
If you have one of these reactors powering a tiny town of say, 1000 people (large!), how many of these people can you spare (and pay) to guard the reactor and its uranium? Back of the envelope: I pay about 50$ per month in electricity. $50 * 12 months = $600. $600 * 1000 people = $600,000 per year gross revenue from the reactor. I don't know what the reactor actually costs direct (though the article throws around a $20M figure, you have to figure that as cap. ex. still leaving operating costs). $20M / 30 years is $666K, which is already greater than the revenue my back of the envelope calculation produced.
Regardless, all this comes down to not being able to spend millions yearly on the security of this thing. So these reactors could easily be targets for people trying to collect radioactive materials... especially being in the backwoods of Alaska.
Big problem.
I've seen that sort of thing before too... (even written one of them once or twice)
Whether it will work or not is highly dependent on circumstances. But it's definitely worth a try. It'll be a lot cheaper and a lot easier to do than just about any other solution (short of buying a new printer!).
Just find a 10bT hub and hook one end to your 10/100 switch and the other to your printer. Let TCP handle all your buffering for you.
Those hubs are probably sitting on the trash pile of countless IT departments right now. You might be able to pick one up on e-bay...
Rudy
When in Japan for work, I found these at lots of buildings. I thought of them as car vending machines - stick a ticket in, get a car out.
They even used a giant motorized lazy susan to turn your car around for you.
What a great country.
"Do deadlines. No end-users requirements. No political/checkpoint milestones. No office politics."
I believe the spirit of this, but not the letter. Every human endeavor is laced with politics, including nethack. Just read a little more and you'll start seeing it.
The people saying leveling as a goal is okay are idiots. Well, maybe not idiots - people play chess over and over again because (they hope) they are getting better.
But as far as mass media goes - if you want a game to really attract a large crowd - you have to cater to people's attention spans. No one but a geek (and I am one of those) has an attention span that will sit still for this crap.
No, the games that will last through the ages will continue to engage your mind all the way through the game. Novel writers don't write the same sentence over and over (well, except Jack: "All work and no play make J a dull boy..."), movies don't show the same thing over and over (except Run Lola Run: "I don't believe there's nothing left but running here again").
Hmm... anyway, as I was saying, if you want people to care about it, you can't deaden their senses to it. You need to provide them interest all the way along.
Rudy
PS. people that say 'bots are evil aren't reckoning with the fact that they make great screensavers!
Sorry your comment is generating so much beef, but...
:)
Flight simulators will never take you out of your living room and put you into the air. They are just a very, very complicated thought game. My CFI called it arm-chair flying and I would call it more important than the actual time you spend in the Cessna. But, I'd also say that sitting there in your chair without the flight simulator and just thinking about flying is in many ways more important than the real thing. In your chair, you have time to think about all the things that you should be doing. In the simulator, you don't have time to think about the details. In the airplane, you _have_ to have those skills polished.
Yes, it takes a large number of landings to really get a feel for all aspects of it. Other people are saying you should be landing after a couple hours - and you should be. But it's one thing to point the plane at the ground and land in one piece. It's another thing entirely to set the plane up perfectly (never needed to touch the throttle again until the threshold (or beyond)), judge your winds perfect, make your base and final turns perfect (you did remember to steepen up as you turned to the upwind, right? you did remember that left hand crab on base, right?), follow the glide slope in even when there isn't a glide slope indicator, hold that nose off the ground and flare such that the plane settles with the passengers completely unaware that they aren't flying anymore.
That takes practice. And that takes _real_ airplanes. Don't expect any simulator _ever_ (even when they have holodecks!) to take away the real world side of the equation.
That said, I'm really excited about flying on Mars! I just ordered my copy.
Hey,
Does anyone know if this stuff can already be done with amateur radio? Could I build a radio transmitter and receiver, put up a big antenna or use a repeater, to transmit this information to myself in the car?
If not, why not?
Rudy
Get a laptop instead. It'll be a lot more useful to you as a student. Wireless is everywhere. You can take it to the library. You can take it to friend's places for gaming.
I wish I had one when I was in school. You'll be happy you do. And then shipping won't be a problem.
okay, everyone is fulling up this list with suggestions. Here some of my own:
1. The "older articles" seems to be continuously busted. I click on the previous day and I get a page with all the current articles. Soemtimes the 'older articles' link disappears, sometimes it just behaves funny.
2. How about article rating and sorting? I'd like to be able to say all articles about X should be put at the top of the list and stay there for at least a day.
3. This one's not a suggestion, but a comment: I love the ability to mod down certain ratings. I've very happy to be able to add an automatic -1 to humor posts, many are actually funny, but they take up a lot of my bandwidth.
Just Linux Hardware is pretty darn limited. It doesn't even have a date or version field. (though these are sometimes in the "additional" data section)
You can't scan a list and pick out hardware that works well together.
In all, thumbs down. But maybe it could be improved...
Try the following bit of code...
:link, :link * { color: #0000EE !important } :visited, :visited * { color: #551A8B !important }'; if(document.createStyleSheet) { document.createStyleSheet("javascript:'"+styles+"' "); } else { newSS=document.createElement('link'); newSS.rel='stylesheet'; newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles); document.documentElement.childNodes[0].appendChild (newSS); } })();
If you copy and paste that into a bookmark, that book mark will have the function of removing all colors from a page. Any page.
The 4D cube page has TERRIBLE coloration. This helps.
Rudy
javascript:(function(){var newSS, styles='* { background: white ! important; color: black !important }
Haystack is an interesting idea, but I have a hard time distinguishing what it does from what, say, Lotus Notes does. And Lotus is _terrible_.
I like the idea of bringing all my information together in one place. I don't like the idea of only having it in that one place. What I would like would be an application that can watch how I use the computer, then bring those applications together to make it more seemless.
For example, I have about four different calendars in my life: the work calendar, the one on the cell phone that I use for stuff that I can't miss, the calendar that schedules airplane rentals, and (of coursE) my girlfriend's calendar. So how do I bring those all together, and yet still be making entries in them separately?
The same is true for information. I have a primitive blogging system (really just a bunch of text files that are date coded), I have work documents that I use regularly, I have web pages that I monitor (sometimes a little too often) and I have textbooks that I'm reading (instrument flying at the moment). So how do I get all these forms of information - or at least an index into them - together in one place? But again, without changing the current organization scheme.
This is the tool that will make the computer a lot more useful - an actual organizational tool.
Rudy
This is the text of the letter that I just sent to my congress people. The only way I feel like I get heard is when I snail-mail my congress people. I get a nice form response in about 7-10 days that usually talks all around the issue that I bring up, but at least I made someone in their staff think about what I said.
:-)
,
And you should too!
Here's an excellent site for finding the particulars of your congress people: Vote Smart
Text:
Dear
I writing today to ask you to take up an issue that has the potential to vastly improve the quality of public domain works out there. A strong public domain gives people a creative background and a collective sense of culture. A strong public domain will offer an alternative to whatever the media is pushing as the "special of the week." Ultimately, it is what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they created our country: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Right now, that "limited time" is much longer than the average life-span of anyone alive when the work was created. By the time the works come into the public domain, they are no longer relevant. I'd like you to introduce legislation that allows authors to be fairly compensated for their works, but also brings works into the public domain much more quickly.
There is a billed called "The Public Domain Enhancement Act" that aims to do just this. It proposes a tax of just $1 on any copyrighted work over 50 years old. If this tax is paid, the copyright stays enforced. If not, then the work enters the public domain. You can read more about the bill at a web site set up for this: http://eldred.cc/
Please help reaffirm the Constitution's concept of "limited time" and create a larger public domain by working to make this bill become a law.
If you take up this issue, the media companies will lobby, and lobby hard, against it. They'll see it as competition for the attention span of our citizens. And they're right. But competition in our society is a good thing. In the end, it's the quality of life of the citizens, over the short and the long term, that is the most important issue. A strong public domain, provided by a simple statute like this will secure a creative commons for all of us.
By the way, thank you very much for completing the National Political Awareness Test (NPAT). I appreciate your clear and concise explanation for your position on the various issues it covers.
Thank you,
Pick Blender.
Blender is free, the other software packages are not. While it would be possible to get a pirated version of a more powerful set of software, it won't help. For one, your later employer will probably have a completely different set of tools - so all the time learning one particular interface will be wasted. For another, if you tell you employer you're fluent with Maya, they're going to wonder if you'll be pirating software from work, too. Of course, if you can afford to actually buy some software... then by all means do.
Still, even if you could buy the software, I think I'd still use Blender. You could equally well use that money to buy more computing hardware - either a good workstation, or the beginnings of a render cluster.
The real key is that you _must_ learn how to learn. That's not redundant. Learn what it is that you're doing, rather than how to press buttons. And think about it from the point of view of "what I'm doing" rather than what interface I'm using.
This will help you be ready to make the jump to all the different tools you're bound to use in the future. The ability to make that jump is critically important.
When you testify, how about pointing out this: before the whole fiasco about DeCSS, etc. came up, playing DVDs on Linux was below the radar screen. Sure there were linux people clamoring for it, but no one was seriously implementing it.
By locking down exactly what you can do with a media, you close off the possibilities for future innovation.
I know that stealing is a common reason people are doing this... but personally I like the idea of trying to get MythTV running on the beast. Once again - a single box that combines as many forms of entertainment as possible. The _mythical_ TV.
That's legitimate. Maybe M$ should just release a version of linux, properly encyrpted and all that jazz, for the X-Box.
Wouldn't that be a hoot.