The Europa message was from 2010, which personally I think was quite a bit better than 2001. Of course from that point it went downhill to 2061 and reached "What the hell was that?" territory with 3001, so after you've read 2010 you can do yourself a favor by stopping there.
Meanwhile, on the console side, we have Metroid Prime, which took the first person shooter genre, turned it on it's ear by making it more about exploration and discovery than about mindless shooting, has a fantastic plot, tons of written text to read as you uncover the story through your use of the scanner, multiple visor types and upgrades that reveal new things about the game environment, and some platforming action with the third person morph ball puzzles.
I'm surprised, not that you posted this, but that you posted it in reply to another message which mentioned Deus Ex by name and you apparantly didn't expect anyone else to notice the irony.
So I wouldn't expect civilizations using radio to send out messages that looked completely like white noise, I'd expect the messages to look like white noise + error correction coding. How we would distinguish such messages from actual white noise, I haven't a clue.
What's more worrying is that we can really only expect to receive strong omnidirectional broadcasts. If I were designing an interplanetary/interstellar communications network I'd probably have weak omnidirectional signals for wireless end nodes, but then use wires (where possible) and lasers (where necessary) to connect all the nodes together. Why would an advanced civilization be wasting power to leak messages across the entire sky?
Why should they create a totally new filesystem when NTFS is quite good at what it does?
They keep changing the format of NTFS with every new Windows release; unless this really is a deliberate attempt to break other operating systems' NTFS drivers then they must believe there's some significant room for improvement.
Where in the world would it be safe to speak of things sensitive to the government, and not be hassled in one way or the other?
In every democratic country. Haven't you been reading Slashdot long enough to see criticism and outright condemnation of the US federal government here?
Just kidding, although I do write a lot of things for Linux...
Name two.
Just like the 2.6 kernel, what is really great and new in it that doesn't exist already in some other OS already available?
Support for computers from the "one processor without an MMU" range to the "hundreds of processors sharing NUMA memory" range.
That is one of the few things Microsoft did do right with the NT project - take un-implemented OS theories and put them together in a cohesive OS model.
However this is exactly the reason the electoral college & winner take all state by state is a good thing--it increases the power of each individual vote by increasing the probability that you or I might cast the deciding vote.
That all depends on where you live now, doesn't it? If you're in Florida then sure, you've got an increased chance of deciding the election next year. I live in Texas. I might as well write in "Elvis" for President.
Or perhaps we should just disallow 'donations' to political offices.
How far do you want to go with this? And are you imagining the probable unintended consequences while you make that decision?
You could disallow donations to political offices, but continue to allow people and groups to advertise for politicians they approve of, in which case the current practice of "people give money to candidate or party, which buys political advertising with it" will just get replaced with "people buy political advertising directly". Washington will still be ruled by money, but now it'll be exclusively money from large contributors who can afford commercial time, instead of individual contributors.
You could also disallow whatever you define as "political advertising" entirely, in which case (aside from the obvious First Amendment problems) people's opinions will be influenced by "the news" instead, and the segment of money which rules Washington will be restricted further: to those corporations large enough to own news outlets and slant the reporting they provide.
It's not as if your Senators are whoring for campaign contributions to pay for their new mansion or yacht; those campaign contributions pay for the propaganda that gets fed to voters before election day and keeps the best funded candidates in office. Any attempt to limit that propaganda will just end up as a limit on free speech. If you want to reduce the influence of money on politics, the only way to do so is with an informed electorate who will be less susceptible to expensive advertising when deciding who to vote for. What's worse, producing an informed electorate will have to happen from the ground up. You won't find any easy "campaign finance reform" answers: try and anticipate the unintended consequences of "matching funds" type ideas (hint: most involve increased barriers to entry for independent and third party candidates), for example, and you'll see why.
That being the case, why aren't distributed apps considered as part of the Super Computer list?
Most of the tasks you pick a supercomputer for aren't things you can cut up into a thousand chunks and let every computer finish it's chunk of the problem independently. In particular, the benchmarks (LINPACK) that determine who goes where on that supercomputer list generally measure a computer's performance at big linear algebra problems (which are what takes up most of the compute time for huge classes of real problems), and for those problems every node needs to share results with many other nodes after essentially every iteration: this means you need high bandwidth and very low latency connecting the nodes.
Now, the supercomputer benchmarks may make things worse than they have to be: according to this they're measuring performance on dense matrices (where every node needs to talk to every other node), whereas many real world problems can be discretized into very sparse matrices (where each node only has to talk directly to a few of the others) instead - still, even in the sparse situation you want your computers to be separated by microseconds across your high speed interconnect rather than milliseconds across the low bandwidth internet.
If I change my SSID to "this_is_a_private_network" but don't turn off SSID broadcast (either because I'm too stupid to do so or my AP won't let me) any modern OS will be able to auto-detect and associate to that network. Does this mean I gave permission for the entire world to use my AP? That's a hard argument to sell, imho.
Should clicking on a link to privatenetwork.com be illegal, too? Be careful before you click: it could be someone who just wanted to share stuff over the web with their friends, and you might not have permission to use it despite the fact that they've got their computer configured to provide that use upon request.
Your vote gets tossed into the same count as all the rest of them. It's not like an election fraud would require changing *every* vote cast, just the few percent or a few tens of percent of votes necessary to change who wins. Perhaps a discrepancy between the machine votes and the handcounted votes would be noticed, but perhaps it would be explained away with "well, sure all those Luddites voted for my opponent, but the voters without tinfoil hats clearly elected me!"
My years-old Canon, and every newer USB camera I've ever seen, supports the USB storage protocol. When I got the camera I added a line to autofs's config to tell Linux to put the first USB drive at/mnt/camera, and so now using the camera means "plug it in, find pictures in that directory".
The only problem from the users point of view is that (on Red Hat at least) somebody needs to set such a config up in the first place, and that somebody still needs to know what "auto.master" and "/dev/sda" and other user-unfriendly terms mean. That problem won't be fixed by hardware vendors, though, it'll be fixed by distribution developers.
There's a standard USB Storage interface, and every modern OS (i.e. everyone but SCO) comes with its own drivers for treating devices which use that interface like removable drives. There's no obvious reason for a USB storage device vendor to produce their own drivers (which would require installation, whereas the OS drivers should just work when you plug the device in); if you've actually seen one with custom drivers maybe you really should be suspicious.
... to prevent refighting a court case? I don't think I've ever heard of an out of court settlement that didn't include an agreement by both parties that the settlement overrode (one might even say, "settled") whatever legal contentions originally forced the negotiation.
I know there's a lot of sealed information about the BSD settlement, but I'm doubtful that one of the secret clauses is "AT&T or it's successors in interest don't agree that this settles anything, and can sue you again at any time." I'm absolutely certain that the secret clauses don't include "AT&T or it's successors can magically retroactively repeal the license with which you'll be distributing your source code for the next decade," and that's the kind of thing SCO would need to make a relitigation worthwhile.
I interpreted an "or" where the sentence reads "and". Guess I should have hit preview one more time...
It's not quite as bad for SCO as I thought, then, but it's still not a non-compete clause, it's a non-compete-with-licensed-technology clause. SCO would still have to prove that SuSE contained the technology Novell sold to SCO, even if it wasn't a primary portion of SuSE.
It doesn't cover Netware or Linux.
on
SCO News Roundup
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· Score: 4, Informative
Depending on how broadly the no-compete clause was written, if it covers linux, there's a chance the same would apply to NetWare as well, cause NetWare isn't Unix either.
It doesn't cover either. The relevant line in the contract (as posted on Groklaw if anyone wants to read the whole thing) is:
Seller agrees that it shall use the Licensed Technology only (i) for internal purposes without restriction or (ii) for resale in bundled or integrated products sold by Seller which are not directly competitive with the core products of Buyer and in which the Licensed Technology does not constitute a primary portion of the value of the total bundled or integrated product.
In other words, SCO doesn't just have to prove that Linux competes with their Unices (which is probably true, at least on those computers which don't rely on new-fangled things like "USB" that SCO is still working on support for), they have to prove that the source code they bought from Novell constitutes a primary portion of the value of SuSE Linux!
This is just more BS intended to prop up their stock price; don't bother paying attention until they actually start trying to pull this stuff on a judge, instead of their current backpedaling official stance of "We only have a contract dispute with IBM, and we've never threatened Red Hat with anything more."
They were using the reverse engineering clause in the DMCA u tard.
The only reverse engineering clause in the DMCA is this one, which specifically allows reverse engineering to produce an interoperable product:
(f) REVERSE ENGINEERING- (1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.
I'll take that advice with the import it clearly deserves. You've obviously become quite the expert on "not sounding like an asshat"; have you taken formal etiquette classes or was it all self-taught?
Slashdot Mirror
The Europa message was from 2010, which personally I think was quite a bit better than 2001. Of course from that point it went downhill to 2061 and reached "What the hell was that?" territory with 3001, so after you've read 2010 you can do yourself a favor by stopping there.
Unless I'm mistaken, landing on Europa could be a very bad thing
You're right. All those worlds are ours, except Europa. We should attempt no landings there.
I heard that Iraq didn't have anything to do with 9-11. Perhaps I'm just the victim of a liberal media conspiracy.
Meanwhile, on the console side, we have Metroid Prime, which took the first person shooter genre, turned it on it's ear by making it more about exploration and discovery than about mindless shooting, has a fantastic plot, tons of written text to read as you uncover the story through your use of the scanner, multiple visor types and upgrades that reveal new things about the game environment, and some platforming action with the third person morph ball puzzles.
I'm surprised, not that you posted this, but that you posted it in reply to another message which mentioned Deus Ex by name and you apparantly didn't expect anyone else to notice the irony.
So I wouldn't expect civilizations using radio to send out messages that looked completely like white noise, I'd expect the messages to look like white noise + error correction coding. How we would distinguish such messages from actual white noise, I haven't a clue.
What's more worrying is that we can really only expect to receive strong omnidirectional broadcasts. If I were designing an interplanetary/interstellar communications network I'd probably have weak omnidirectional signals for wireless end nodes, but then use wires (where possible) and lasers (where necessary) to connect all the nodes together. Why would an advanced civilization be wasting power to leak messages across the entire sky?
You never hear these people trumpeting their success in New Hampshire, or whatever state it was they were going to take over;
It was New Hampshire, and it was voted as New Hampshire two months ago. I say we give them another week and then declare the project a failure!
Why should they create a totally new filesystem when NTFS is quite good at what it does?
They keep changing the format of NTFS with every new Windows release; unless this really is a deliberate attempt to break other operating systems' NTFS drivers then they must believe there's some significant room for improvement.
It's a suppository.
Where in the world would it be safe to speak of things sensitive to the government, and not be hassled in one way or the other?
In every democratic country. Haven't you been reading Slashdot long enough to see criticism and outright condemnation of the US federal government here?
Wait, so you're telling us your mom named you "Jafafa Hots"?
Just kidding, although I do write a lot of things for Linux...
Name two.
Just like the 2.6 kernel, what is really great and new in it that doesn't exist already in some other OS already available?
Support for computers from the "one processor without an MMU" range to the "hundreds of processors sharing NUMA memory" range.
That is one of the few things Microsoft did do right with the NT project - take un-implemented OS theories and put them together in a cohesive OS model.
Name one.
However this is exactly the reason the electoral college & winner take all state by state is a good thing--it increases the power of each individual vote by increasing the probability that you or I might cast the deciding vote.
That all depends on where you live now, doesn't it? If you're in Florida then sure, you've got an increased chance of deciding the election next year. I live in Texas. I might as well write in "Elvis" for President.
Or perhaps we should just disallow 'donations' to political offices.
How far do you want to go with this? And are you imagining the probable unintended consequences while you make that decision?
You could disallow donations to political offices, but continue to allow people and groups to advertise for politicians they approve of, in which case the current practice of "people give money to candidate or party, which buys political advertising with it" will just get replaced with "people buy political advertising directly". Washington will still be ruled by money, but now it'll be exclusively money from large contributors who can afford commercial time, instead of individual contributors.
You could also disallow whatever you define as "political advertising" entirely, in which case (aside from the obvious First Amendment problems) people's opinions will be influenced by "the news" instead, and the segment of money which rules Washington will be restricted further: to those corporations large enough to own news outlets and slant the reporting they provide.
It's not as if your Senators are whoring for campaign contributions to pay for their new mansion or yacht; those campaign contributions pay for the propaganda that gets fed to voters before election day and keeps the best funded candidates in office. Any attempt to limit that propaganda will just end up as a limit on free speech. If you want to reduce the influence of money on politics, the only way to do so is with an informed electorate who will be less susceptible to expensive advertising when deciding who to vote for. What's worse, producing an informed electorate will have to happen from the ground up. You won't find any easy "campaign finance reform" answers: try and anticipate the unintended consequences of "matching funds" type ideas (hint: most involve increased barriers to entry for independent and third party candidates), for example, and you'll see why.
That being the case, why aren't distributed apps considered as part of the Super Computer list?
Most of the tasks you pick a supercomputer for aren't things you can cut up into a thousand chunks and let every computer finish it's chunk of the problem independently. In particular, the benchmarks (LINPACK) that determine who goes where on that supercomputer list generally measure a computer's performance at big linear algebra problems (which are what takes up most of the compute time for huge classes of real problems), and for those problems every node needs to share results with many other nodes after essentially every iteration: this means you need high bandwidth and very low latency connecting the nodes.
Now, the supercomputer benchmarks may make things worse than they have to be: according to this they're measuring performance on dense matrices (where every node needs to talk to every other node), whereas many real world problems can be discretized into very sparse matrices (where each node only has to talk directly to a few of the others) instead - still, even in the sparse situation you want your computers to be separated by microseconds across your high speed interconnect rather than milliseconds across the low bandwidth internet.
If I change my SSID to "this_is_a_private_network" but don't turn off SSID broadcast (either because I'm too stupid to do so or my AP won't let me) any modern OS will be able to auto-detect and associate to that network. Does this mean I gave permission for the entire world to use my AP? That's a hard argument to sell, imho.
Should clicking on a link to privatenetwork.com be illegal, too? Be careful before you click: it could be someone who just wanted to share stuff over the web with their friends, and you might not have permission to use it despite the fact that they've got their computer configured to provide that use upon request.
Your vote gets tossed into the same count as all the rest of them. It's not like an election fraud would require changing *every* vote cast, just the few percent or a few tens of percent of votes necessary to change who wins. Perhaps a discrepancy between the machine votes and the handcounted votes would be noticed, but perhaps it would be explained away with "well, sure all those Luddites voted for my opponent, but the voters without tinfoil hats clearly elected me!"
My years-old Canon, and every newer USB camera I've ever seen, supports the USB storage protocol. When I got the camera I added a line to autofs's config to tell Linux to put the first USB drive at /mnt/camera, and so now using the camera means "plug it in, find pictures in that directory".
The only problem from the users point of view is that (on Red Hat at least) somebody needs to set such a config up in the first place, and that somebody still needs to know what "auto.master" and "/dev/sda" and other user-unfriendly terms mean. That problem won't be fixed by hardware vendors, though, it'll be fixed by distribution developers.
There's a standard USB Storage interface, and every modern OS (i.e. everyone but SCO) comes with its own drivers for treating devices which use that interface like removable drives. There's no obvious reason for a USB storage device vendor to produce their own drivers (which would require installation, whereas the OS drivers should just work when you plug the device in); if you've actually seen one with custom drivers maybe you really should be suspicious.
... to prevent refighting a court case? I don't think I've ever heard of an out of court settlement that didn't include an agreement by both parties that the settlement overrode (one might even say, "settled") whatever legal contentions originally forced the negotiation.
I know there's a lot of sealed information about the BSD settlement, but I'm doubtful that one of the secret clauses is "AT&T or it's successors in interest don't agree that this settles anything, and can sue you again at any time." I'm absolutely certain that the secret clauses don't include "AT&T or it's successors can magically retroactively repeal the license with which you'll be distributing your source code for the next decade," and that's the kind of thing SCO would need to make a relitigation worthwhile.
This is THE final, decisive battle between the forces of good and evil.
Wow. And I thought I read too much Slashdot.
I interpreted an "or" where the sentence reads "and". Guess I should have hit preview one more time...
It's not quite as bad for SCO as I thought, then, but it's still not a non-compete clause, it's a non-compete-with-licensed-technology clause. SCO would still have to prove that SuSE contained the technology Novell sold to SCO, even if it wasn't a primary portion of SuSE.
It doesn't cover either. The relevant line in the contract (as posted on Groklaw if anyone wants to read the whole thing) is:
In other words, SCO doesn't just have to prove that Linux competes with their Unices (which is probably true, at least on those computers which don't rely on new-fangled things like "USB" that SCO is still working on support for), they have to prove that the source code they bought from Novell constitutes a primary portion of the value of SuSE Linux!
This is just more BS intended to prop up their stock price; don't bother paying attention until they actually start trying to pull this stuff on a judge, instead of their current backpedaling official stance of "We only have a contract dispute with IBM, and we've never threatened Red Hat with anything more."
They were using the reverse engineering clause in the DMCA u tard.
The only reverse engineering clause in the DMCA is this one, which specifically allows reverse engineering to produce an interoperable product:
(f) REVERSE ENGINEERING- (1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.
you might not sound like such an asshat
u tard.
I'll take that advice with the import it clearly deserves. You've obviously become quite the expert on "not sounding like an asshat"; have you taken formal etiquette classes or was it all self-taught?
Is some company storing their copyrighted material in my garage now?