You appear to be trying to install Firefox as your primary Web browser. I've deleted the downloaded installer and alerted the authorities. Is there anything else you'd like to do today?
I very much doubt that this is a correct use of "open source". The government refers to purchasing large numbers of something (or a contracted service) as "sourcing," so I suspect that what they mean is that they'll buy information from whoever's selling it, not that they're opening the process to the public in a way that could be likened to the open source development model.
Voice chat is great for small groups. It even works pretty well for short messages from one player to another. It really doesn't work so well for chat groups of 100. Nothing really works well for chat groups of 100. Voice chat can be done on that scale, though -- you just have to setup channels properly. Actually, for 100, open text channels work fine. For 1000, they break down.
the primary problem, IMHO, with MMOs on consoles is that it's a totally different play style. Children didn't get MMOs started, it was teens and young adults for the most part that created the phenomenon, going back as far as Ultima. Those people play consoles, but for the most part they play consoles as a social event, getting friends together and bashing on a few bad guys. MMOs require more time spent, and longer social interactions with others who are not present.
What I would like to see is DS-like devices or even phones (iPhone comes to mind) that can play a cut-down version of popular PC MMOs. I'd just like to be able to do things like move my characters around and list things on the auction house in WoW. Man, that would be so huge.
I disagree... and I do so as an environmentalist. The problem with the focus on global warming is that it's letting some of the worst kinds of polluters off the hook. We've stopped worrying about the tons of mercury we're dumping into the oceans. We've stopped thinking about most kinds of toxic waste. We've neglected the over-fishing issue. We're just stopped being environmentalists and started being anti-global-warmingists.
Now there are areas of compatibility. Both old and new-school environmentalism is very worried about coal for different reasons. Same goes for rain forest reductions or anything that would kill our oceans' algae.
It's just a different set of priorities.
That said, I'm at least glad that both candidates are thinking about the environment.
I think it's safe to assume that the feedback loop from the players into the TV show will be minimal at best. Reasons for this are legion, but the simplest and most compelling is that there's a legal minefield that they'd have to navigate.
No, you'll see "world events" like Warcraft's AQ gate opening or the opening event for Burning Crusade that provide elements of the TV show's plot as teasers, but the exploits of individual players will be very, very unlikely to appear in the show.
The description says it's a "Web 2.0 visualization software environment". Shouldn't that be running in a web browser then? What's with having to download and install the application itself? Being on my Mac, I can't (probably wouldn't anyway) try it out to see what happens, but that description seems a bit misleading. That's OK. You don't need their app. Since celestia is free software that runs on Windows, MacOS and Linux. If you're looking for a less powerful, but easier to use tool for just looking at the sky, stellarium also runs on all of the above platforms, and is also free software.
1. "Google's forays into Javascript"?! Where have you been living?
2. What you're describing sounds more like a limitation of the platform you're using than anything else. I'm using FF2 and scrolling like mad, trying to replicate your problem. No dice.
3. Gears != Google Maps. Nuff said.
Gears is clearly a necessary technology for the Web. The only concern I have is that it's so fundamental that it should not be part of a plugin, but rather built into the browser. I understand they're doing it as a plugin because they want it to work everywhere, but since it's open source, everyone with a browser really should be treating it as an API and writing their own browser components that map to it (or adapting the Gears source to do so).
from your local friend of thieves always peddling his dubious services here at slashdot, where the people who make the movies we watch are scum, and the people who think the world owes them a living a welcome. Of course, there's the usual answer to this: copyright infringement isn't theft.
It is critical that we not dismiss this as greedy consumers trying to scrape free stuff out of starving artists. We're just concerned about what it is that we're getting out of the deal that we made with artists and publishers over 200 years ago, and we're questioning whether or not we've actually achieved the goal of the copyright system or if we've just created a monster in the form of giant corporations with no respect for either the consumer or the producer, but which reap all nearly all of the profits.
On the music front, which is more apropos the story, it's even worse. See the links at the end of my essay, Fight against the RIAA which details some of the horrible conditions that a band can find themselves in when they sign on with a major label, and some of the ways that they're abusing their customers.
It's not that we think we should get something for free. It's that we've given a free empire to these companies through copyright law, and what we're getting back in return is more and more demands for deeper controls over what we do with the output of those individuals that they have been abusing for decades.
Moore's Law reminds me of Weird Al Yankovic. Every few years, someone proclaims that it's making a "comeback". The reality is, of course, that Moore's Law was never gone in the first place.
Google did not pay for the spectrum and it lost it's rights of complaining. If they are so much for open access - they should have spent their money and provide such access to all. Put up or shut up. You understand that this is a chunk of spectrum, right? It's not property, it's a range of electromagnetic frequency. The government restricts who can use it in order to prevent overlap, but ultimately, this is a very public resource. What possible motivation could you have for coming down on a company that's trying to open up access to it? Granted, Google has their own interests in this, but they're pushing for something that would ultimately help everyone.
It just seems like you're ASKING to get locked into monopoly control of the spectrum... an odd choice.
Summary: Each of the distributions had their strengths and weaknesses when it came to hardware, but beyond that were essentially competing on common ground.
That said, Fedora 8 was tested, and the beta for Fedora 9 is currently in full-swing and will be released in 8 days, so the comparison is slightly weighted (as all Linux desktop distribution comparisons tend to be) to the most recent release: Ubuntu in this case.
I wasn't familiar with Card's views on homosexuality and other issues. I have to give it to Card that he makes a lot of sense. He knows exactly where he stands on the issue, and why, which is more than 99% of us can say. I'm curious: what issue? The issue he's addressing is how far his Church should go in enforcing their dogma through the legal system.
This is why I have no respect for ajs' comment, where ajs takes a single quote out of context The quote, in context, bears no subtler shade of meaning. He sys quite clearly that such a law should be enforced "selectively" and not "indiscriminately."
apparently in order to push an agenda of intolerance against a point of view he doesn't agree with. I'm very tolerant of his views. I just don't buy his books, and I make sure others know what his views are.
If ajs would take a minute to think about it, then he would realize that in our society, practically all laws are used "when necessary to send a clear message." This is not only wrong, but if such is demonstrated in court, it is typically used as a basis for removing the law (e.g. the Blue Laws in Massachusetts).
How many times have I been illegally parked, and not received a ticket? That's not a matter of selective enforcement. That's a matter of coverage. Just because a meter reader didn't make it to your car doesn't mean that the law is being enforced selectively.
Side point: parking tickets aren't meant as a means of dissuading people from parking illegally. Once, that was the case. Today, parking tickets are an important source of revenue for most cities, and they are well aware of the fact that their budgets will run short if parking infractions cease.
How many of us commit technically illegal acts regularly (knowingly or unknowingly) that go unpunished? Again, this is not selective enforcement any more than it would be if I killed someone and didn't get caught. The equivalent you're looking for would be a law where only individuals that police thought would make a good example get prosecuted. That's what Card is very clearly suggesting, here, and he makes no bones about it.
He's not one of those folks that you hear someone calling a homophobe and think, "gosh, that's a bit harsh." He's the real deal. He wants the laws to crack down on just enough homosexuality to keep the rest of "them" afraid so that he doesn't have to be exposed to such violations of his personal beliefs.
From ajs' comment, he appears to be an insecure person Of course, I'm insecure. I live in a country where there are people actively advocating that others should be persecuted for religious reasons. I don't like Taliban-like regimes and anyone who suggests that the U.S. should return to such a state of affairs (colonial New England was much that way) makes me feel just a little bit less secure in the freedoms that our country has afforded her citizens to date.
in the sense that if another person (in this case, Card) says one thing he doesn't like, then ajs "can't really take anything he says seriously". It sounds like you've made the same decision about me. *shrug*
It appears that ajs is able to write off an entire person Not a person. If Card were drowning, I'd save him. However, I've seen enough of his reasoning to be pretty sure that I don't trust his sense of what a nation of laws and freedom is all about, and so I can't really take his opinion seriously when it comes to anything that might touch on how best to use the legal system.
I can't really take anything he says seriously. This is the man who thinks that laws SHOULD be selectively enforced in order to keep what he considers sexual deviants afraid to express their inclinations in public. No, I'm not stretching the point.
not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message - http://www.nauvoo.com/library/card-hypocrites.html
Oh, and none of the "I got bitten by a mutant spider/got exposed to gamma ray/etc" crap that is usually associated with american super-heroes. There is nothing wrong with a deus-ex-machina origin. What I think you're confusing is science fiction and modern fantasy with science themes. That's OK, most everyone does. Modern fantasy is a completely separate genre from science fiction, but because the two are conflated so often it can be hard to accept fantasy themes. This becomes more obvious when you look back at the modern fantasy of previous generations or even centuries. There was a time when the reason that steel weapons took a central role in swords and sorcery fantasy was because they were the cool high-tech of the day. When radiation was the cool high-tech of the day, we told fantasy stories about its transformative powers. We've told stories about the transformative powers of computers, space travel, nanotech, etc. These are fantasy stories that we use to grapple with the issues that people face, and sometimes those issues are based on fear or misunderstanding. That doesn't make the process of coping with them any less valid or relevant.
When we engage in science fiction, it can be broad-strokes of extrapolation (e.g. Diamond Age) or very specific pieces of well-explained tech, but the core element of science fiction is science, not just as setting or plot device, but as a means of understanding.
You are confusing the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The Federal Circuit handled the cases that are linked in your post. I grabbed the examples quickly, but no, I'm not confusing the two.
They class OpenBSD as non-free even though the base system is 100% Free Software, because the ports system contains build infrastructure required to create packages from non-Free software (e.g. Opera). I think they also believe that OpenBSD was initially developed by the anti-Stallman, and will eventually loose a plague on the world.
Seriously, does anyone else hear the shrill voice of religion in this? What value is there in having an OS that pushes back against the user when they want to use non-free software? I can see the value in distributing an OS that has no non-free components (e.g. if you want to base your software on it, and want to be sure that the licensing is compatible with yours). I can see the value in keeping non-free software out of the core repositories (e.g. to allow different geographic locations for non-free software and free software in order to comply with different laws). What I can't see is any value at all in saying, "we're going to make it as hard as we can for you to do what you want to do."
IANAL, but seriously slashdot there are sooo many ways this would get tossed out or even if validated could be fixed by executive or legislative action. After all, last I checked, that dept _is_ part of the executive branch. You've missed the point. It's not that we won't be able to re-appoint all of these people tomorrow with the appropriate signatures on their offer letters. The problem is that they've been running the appeals courts for every headline patent case you've heard about in the last few years (and all the ones you didn't hear about), and they weren't actually appointed properly. That is going to mean a landslide of appeals to federal courts asking to have those decisions overturned on a technical basis.
This will wreak havoc with the patent system and with businesses that had put patent cases behind them and moved on.
I don't want to make this political, but no matter who was in the Whitehouse when this happened, I would be resting the blame squarely on their shoulders for this horrible mess. Here's hoping that it gets cleaned up fairly quickly and cleanly, but my hopes are not high.
I guess if his wife turns up in Russia he'll be set free fairly quickly. I don't rate the chances of an appeal at the moment though. Well, appeals are matters of law, not of guilt or innocence, typically. While the case against him has substantial issues (including his wife's friend having admitted to being a serial killer), the primary concern in an appeal is the validity of the process that lead to the conviction. If there's a process problem, then an appeal can work, and in purely technical cases (where there is no body, witnesses or confession), there are usually any number of possible angles for process questions to be raised.
That's not a statement about Reiser, his guilt, or the legal system, it's just the way it typically plays out from what I understand. Then again, I learn what I know second-hand and some of that gets polluted by the horrendously inaccurate information that I get from popular culture.
that maybe control of ReiserFS will now be in the hands of someone who is not a total **** Well, I've never been exposed to his inter-personal issues, but in reading the article, the journalist involved seems to think that ReiserFS is dead. I'd be rather surprised if that were the case. It's an amazing filesystem, and as far as I knew a few years ago, the only one capable of scaling performance reasonably for extremely large directories.
Hopefully, it will simply be forked (if needed) and continue to be developed now that the original author is clearly not going to be around to maintain it... well, maybe he won't. He can appeal, of course, and as I understand it, it's a technical case that they have against him, so there's a stronger chance that an appeal could work than if there were direct evidence of his actions.
Just remember one key phrase: litigation risk. This is the risk that you run, given that all the facts are on your side, that you'll lose in court for no predictable reason. Most lawyers like to ballpark this number around 10-20%.
But what about those 1 billion people (ok, number out of ass, but you get the point) that are starving to death and live in horrible conditions? 1. 1 billion is nearly the entire population of the country (1.12 billion est.) 2. What better way to improve living conditions than to become a hub for space technology? 3. I think you may be under some misconceptions about the state of Indian rural life as compared to, for example, the state of Mississippi.
If you're not sure that you know what you're talking about, perhaps you should do some research. If you had, you'd be able to say something like:
India has twice the poverty rate of, for example, the U.S., though that has dropped substantially since their independence and is widely seen as a potential model for a rapid exit from third-world status for other nations.
Am I missing something here? What the heck does that mean? Eclipse is a platform, much like Mozilla. When you say that something is written in/with eclipse, you mean that it's an eclipse-based application in much the same way that something written on top of XUL would be a Mozilla-based application.
I think you must have missed most of the summary, much less RTFAed... The entire point, here, is that they've replaced the entire client-side exactly because of the problems you're citing.
If they now have a client which is built on eclipse and is capable of being a one-stop-shop for the sorts of environments that would already use eclipse for development, then perhaps the time has come to consider Lotus again.
Of course assembly is losing ground. But does it matter? No.
If you still need optimum performance at any cost--like for OS's, many games, simulations, etc.--you must use assembly. If you don't, then your C, C++ or favorite business language will give you faster development time and easier deployment.
So it just doesn't matter. I still don't consider someone a proper coder unless they know assembly, though.
What's interesting about the above is that a) I changed very little of what you said and b) it's the sentiment that you would have expected to hear in the late 80s.
We're scaling our idea of "low level language" much more slowly than we're scaling compute performance, but it is scaling up, and one day in the not so distant future, I do expect the sense of what low-level is to shift up to languages that include native GC, bounds detection and a few other features that are not common to languages that we currently consider "low level." That said, I do not expect that to include Java, only because of the abstraction of the JVM.
Slashdot Mirror
You appear to be trying to install Firefox as your primary Web browser. I've deleted the downloaded installer and alerted the authorities. Is there anything else you'd like to do today?
I very much doubt that this is a correct use of "open source". The government refers to purchasing large numbers of something (or a contracted service) as "sourcing," so I suspect that what they mean is that they'll buy information from whoever's selling it, not that they're opening the process to the public in a way that could be likened to the open source development model.
the primary problem, IMHO, with MMOs on consoles is that it's a totally different play style. Children didn't get MMOs started, it was teens and young adults for the most part that created the phenomenon, going back as far as Ultima. Those people play consoles, but for the most part they play consoles as a social event, getting friends together and bashing on a few bad guys. MMOs require more time spent, and longer social interactions with others who are not present.
What I would like to see is DS-like devices or even phones (iPhone comes to mind) that can play a cut-down version of popular PC MMOs. I'd just like to be able to do things like move my characters around and list things on the auction house in WoW. Man, that would be so huge.
I disagree... and I do so as an environmentalist. The problem with the focus on global warming is that it's letting some of the worst kinds of polluters off the hook. We've stopped worrying about the tons of mercury we're dumping into the oceans. We've stopped thinking about most kinds of toxic waste. We've neglected the over-fishing issue. We're just stopped being environmentalists and started being anti-global-warmingists.
Now there are areas of compatibility. Both old and new-school environmentalism is very worried about coal for different reasons. Same goes for rain forest reductions or anything that would kill our oceans' algae.
It's just a different set of priorities.
That said, I'm at least glad that both candidates are thinking about the environment.
I think it's safe to assume that the feedback loop from the players into the TV show will be minimal at best. Reasons for this are legion, but the simplest and most compelling is that there's a legal minefield that they'd have to navigate.
No, you'll see "world events" like Warcraft's AQ gate opening or the opening event for Burning Crusade that provide elements of the TV show's plot as teasers, but the exploits of individual players will be very, very unlikely to appear in the show.
Enjoy!
1. "Google's forays into Javascript"?! Where have you been living?
2. What you're describing sounds more like a limitation of the platform you're using than anything else. I'm using FF2 and scrolling like mad, trying to replicate your problem. No dice.
3. Gears != Google Maps. Nuff said.
Gears is clearly a necessary technology for the Web. The only concern I have is that it's so fundamental that it should not be part of a plugin, but rather built into the browser. I understand they're doing it as a plugin because they want it to work everywhere, but since it's open source, everyone with a browser really should be treating it as an API and writing their own browser components that map to it (or adapting the Gears source to do so).
However, there's a deeper problem, here. The people who make films aren't scum. They're hard-working men and women who do amazing things within a corrupt system that often abuses their trust and makes decisions that seem to stem from a culture long thought dead.
It is critical that we not dismiss this as greedy consumers trying to scrape free stuff out of starving artists. We're just concerned about what it is that we're getting out of the deal that we made with artists and publishers over 200 years ago, and we're questioning whether or not we've actually achieved the goal of the copyright system or if we've just created a monster in the form of giant corporations with no respect for either the consumer or the producer, but which reap all nearly all of the profits.
On the music front, which is more apropos the story, it's even worse. See the links at the end of my essay, Fight against the RIAA which details some of the horrible conditions that a band can find themselves in when they sign on with a major label, and some of the ways that they're abusing their customers.
It's not that we think we should get something for free. It's that we've given a free empire to these companies through copyright law, and what we're getting back in return is more and more demands for deeper controls over what we do with the output of those individuals that they have been abusing for decades.
Moore's Law reminds me of Weird Al Yankovic. Every few years, someone proclaims that it's making a "comeback". The reality is, of course, that Moore's Law was never gone in the first place.
It just seems like you're ASKING to get locked into monopoly control of the spectrum... an odd choice.
Summary: Each of the distributions had their strengths and weaknesses when it came to hardware, but beyond that were essentially competing on common ground.
That said, Fedora 8 was tested, and the beta for Fedora 9 is currently in full-swing and will be released in 8 days, so the comparison is slightly weighted (as all Linux desktop distribution comparisons tend to be) to the most recent release: Ubuntu in this case.
Side point: parking tickets aren't meant as a means of dissuading people from parking illegally. Once, that was the case. Today, parking tickets are an important source of revenue for most cities, and they are well aware of the fact that their budgets will run short if parking infractions cease. How many of us commit technically illegal acts regularly (knowingly or unknowingly) that go unpunished? Again, this is not selective enforcement any more than it would be if I killed someone and didn't get caught. The equivalent you're looking for would be a law where only individuals that police thought would make a good example get prosecuted. That's what Card is very clearly suggesting, here, and he makes no bones about it.
He's not one of those folks that you hear someone calling a homophobe and think, "gosh, that's a bit harsh." He's the real deal. He wants the laws to crack down on just enough homosexuality to keep the rest of "them" afraid so that he doesn't have to be exposed to such violations of his personal beliefs. From ajs' comment, he appears to be an insecure person Of course, I'm insecure. I live in a country where there are people actively advocating that others should be persecuted for religious reasons. I don't like Taliban-like regimes and anyone who suggests that the U.S. should return to such a state of affairs (colonial New England was much that way) makes me feel just a little bit less secure in the freedoms that our country has afforded her citizens to date. in the sense that if another person (in this case, Card) says one thing he doesn't like, then ajs "can't really take anything he says seriously". It sounds like you've made the same decision about me. *shrug* It appears that ajs is able to write off an entire person Not a person. If Card were drowning, I'd save him. However, I've seen enough of his reasoning to be pretty sure that I don't trust his sense of what a nation of laws and freedom is all about, and so I can't really take his opinion seriously when it comes to anything that might touch on how best to use the legal system.
When we engage in science fiction, it can be broad-strokes of extrapolation (e.g. Diamond Age) or very specific pieces of well-explained tech, but the core element of science fiction is science, not just as setting or plot device, but as a means of understanding.
Seriously, does anyone else hear the shrill voice of religion in this? What value is there in having an OS that pushes back against the user when they want to use non-free software? I can see the value in distributing an OS that has no non-free components (e.g. if you want to base your software on it, and want to be sure that the licensing is compatible with yours). I can see the value in keeping non-free software out of the core repositories (e.g. to allow different geographic locations for non-free software and free software in order to comply with different laws). What I can't see is any value at all in saying, "we're going to make it as hard as we can for you to do what you want to do."
This will wreak havoc with the patent system and with businesses that had put patent cases behind them and moved on.
I don't want to make this political, but no matter who was in the Whitehouse when this happened, I would be resting the blame squarely on their shoulders for this horrible mess. Here's hoping that it gets cleaned up fairly quickly and cleanly, but my hopes are not high.
Some cases that come to mind:
I don't rate the chances of an appeal at the moment though. Well, appeals are matters of law, not of guilt or innocence, typically. While the case against him has substantial issues (including his wife's friend having admitted to being a serial killer), the primary concern in an appeal is the validity of the process that lead to the conviction. If there's a process problem, then an appeal can work, and in purely technical cases (where there is no body, witnesses or confession), there are usually any number of possible angles for process questions to be raised.
That's not a statement about Reiser, his guilt, or the legal system, it's just the way it typically plays out from what I understand. Then again, I learn what I know second-hand and some of that gets polluted by the horrendously inaccurate information that I get from popular culture.
Hopefully, it will simply be forked (if needed) and continue to be developed now that the original author is clearly not going to be around to maintain it... well, maybe he won't. He can appeal, of course, and as I understand it, it's a technical case that they have against him, so there's a stronger chance that an appeal could work than if there were direct evidence of his actions.
Just remember one key phrase: litigation risk. This is the risk that you run, given that all the facts are on your side, that you'll lose in court for no predictable reason. Most lawyers like to ballpark this number around 10-20%.
2. What better way to improve living conditions than to become a hub for space technology?
3. I think you may be under some misconceptions about the state of Indian rural life as compared to, for example, the state of Mississippi.
If you're not sure that you know what you're talking about, perhaps you should do some research. If you had, you'd be able to say something like:
India has twice the poverty rate of, for example, the U.S., though that has dropped substantially since their independence and is widely seen as a potential model for a rapid exit from third-world status for other nations.
I think you must have missed most of the summary, much less RTFAed... The entire point, here, is that they've replaced the entire client-side exactly because of the problems you're citing.
If they now have a client which is built on eclipse and is capable of being a one-stop-shop for the sorts of environments that would already use eclipse for development, then perhaps the time has come to consider Lotus again.
Ah... no, that would be item #2.
Of course assembly is losing ground. But does it matter? No.
If you still need optimum performance at any cost--like for OS's, many games, simulations, etc.--you must use assembly. If you don't, then your C, C++ or favorite business language will give you faster development time and easier deployment.
So it just doesn't matter. I still don't consider someone a proper coder unless they know assembly, though.
What's interesting about the above is that a) I changed very little of what you said and b) it's the sentiment that you would have expected to hear in the late 80s.
We're scaling our idea of "low level language" much more slowly than we're scaling compute performance, but it is scaling up, and one day in the not so distant future, I do expect the sense of what low-level is to shift up to languages that include native GC, bounds detection and a few other features that are not common to languages that we currently consider "low level." That said, I do not expect that to include Java, only because of the abstraction of the JVM.