Yes, and that's yet another reason why Linux is not ready for the average user to use on the desktop. Whenever a distribution makes a choice to sacrifice 'freedom' to do something that an average user would actually want (like play MP3s), half the community throws up their hands in disgust. The novice user then has the choice between a distribution that is crippled or one that is generating loud complaints.
This is fundamental to free software development. The people who believe most in free software are devoted and do great work, but expect everyone downstream not just to comply with the GPL, but to adopt their philosophy. That's not really 'free', in my opinion.
And you will never get average users to care about what is (from their perspective) the abstract philosophy of a bunch of hardcore nerds.
I agree that the military is capable of great things *sometimes*. But I have been in the military, and the military basically attracts the same caliber of employee as any other government department.
What is more likely, that the military let classified data walk out the door due to incompetence, or due to some clever X-files style conspiracy? After you answer that question, replace "the military" with "the department of motor vehicles" and ask yourself again. The answer would usually be the same in both cases.
Everyone remembers the exact moment when they realized that their Phanom Menace sandwich was filled with shit.
I think that would make a good Slashdot poll. When did you realize that George Lucas had defecated on your childhood memories?
- Opening sequence: "The taxation of trade routes to outlying systems is in dispute." - First appearance of Jar Jar - First mention of midi-chlorians - The creepy virgin birth thingy - First appearance of the annoying brat who played young Anikin - First appearance of the wooden teen-aged brat who played older Anikin - ???
the Timex Sinclair 1000 was my first. Black and white TV output, no lower-case characters, a membrane keyboard, and a whopping 16 kilobytes of memory made it a wonder that I didn't move to a shack in Montana and foreswear all technology.
It's doubly surprising since my second computer was the ill-fated IBM PCjr (which, to be fair, was a decent computer once the infamous chicklet keyboard was replaced).
I've got news for you: the world is the way it is, not the way we think it should be. If you want to be convincing -- you have to look convincing and act convincing. That may include getting a haircut and wearing a suit.
At the very least there is no penalty for dressing well, in the same way that there is a penalty for having poor personal hygiene and dress standards. It doesn't matter that the penalty is irrational -- it undoubtedly exists.
I don't understand why allegedly smart people can't figure this out, and instead have to bemoan the unjust world which forces them to wear a tie. These private acts of lame, whiny rebellion are being thoroughly ignored by the rest of the world.
I love these RMS flamewars for the bizarre reasoning that always comes out of the woodwork.
Last time I checked, copyright goes completely against the laws of physics. It's a human construct designed to make bits uncopyable.
For one thing, the laws of physics say nothing about copyright.
For another thing, this same argument applies to anything artificial. You may as well say that the criminal code goes against the laws of physics, and it's just a human construct to make people un-killable. The fact that something is a "human construct" does not automatically make it a bad idea.
I don't believe the author/artist should have control of their work once it's released, but they should have a right to the FRUITS of their labour - ie. if there's money being made, they should get some of it.
They tried that once, if I recall correctly it didn't work out so well.
I am hoping that all you would need is to sneak the signal over the border into a country where the internet was still the internet, say Canada, and reach the world from there.
Not necessarily. For instance, peer-to-peer does not need to be terminated, nor does your blog, or your photo album, or e-mail if you are willing to serve it from your own machine. What you would lose under my proposal is the corporate content, but you can look at that two ways:
Firstly, some would say corporate content is not worth having. A lot of people are nostalgic for the internet as it was back when Mosaic was the browser of choice.
Secondly, if this idea takes off, corporations would serve their content over the ad-hoc wireless internet. It would cost them nothing extra to serve their info, which would be unlike the tiered telco model. There would be no reason for them not to. For those that didn't, new services would pop up to replace those from the wired world.
The telcos may own the pipes, but the internet is more a series of protocols than the infrastructure that supports them.
If the worst case happens and the telcos "destroy" the internet, why couldn't everybody with a wifi card get together over a metropolitan area and create an internet-like ad-hoc wireless network? It would be a little more complex because the nodes would be constantly moving around (so the routing tables would be hard to handle), but in principle it could work, and there would be no "pipe" for anyone to "own". Maybe this afternoon I will do some cocktail napkin calculations to see if this could work, but if anyone has a reference to something similar I'd like to hear about it.
Co-operatives could get together and arrange for microwave links between cities (or, they could buy some of the "dark fiber" that we keep hearing about).
No central servers, no routers, no single points of failure, no central logging facilities, no closed ports... maybe the internet has to be destroyed in order to save it.
Recently, he said that the shuttle and ISS were mistakes, and that the trick will be to re-make the space program without causing too much damage (like irritating the ISS partner nations).
With Wikipedia we at least have the CHANCE to see the truth, since it cannot be totally controlled. As long as you don't mind looking at the edits to the article, which are all tracked.
You're assuming that someone has entered the "truth" in the first place. And how do you distinguish the truth in a page of competing entries?
Actually, this flies in the face of the Wikipedia philosophy, which is that there are no privileged viewpoints. Wikipedia operates on the principle that the "truth" is whatever most people agree it is. However, the majority viewpoint is certainly subject to control. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but you seem to believe that a lone voice crying "truth" in the wilderness has a hope of being heard (and recognized as such) on Wikipedia, any moreso than on Geocities.
That is why we should remove all sources of income from our representatives. They should A. Have to come to work for free (they get food and shelter of course), B. Should NOT be allowed to reenter the private markets after serving, etc.
That in no way follows from your second paragraph about clean politics. Indeed, the less money you pay a politician, the more likely he/she will try to line their pockets through corruption. This is true of most public offices -- the most corrupt police tend to be the worst paid. What's more, I have absolutely no problem with paying representatives well, as that is the only way to ensure that the most talented people seek the job.
He abandoned the senate race shortly thereafter. But Wikipedia reports that he has had quite the political career: 1968, campaign aide to RFK; 1970, ran for congress and lost; 1971, elected to Cincinnati city council; 1977, elected mayor of Cincinnati; 1982, lost the Dem primary for Ohio governor; 2004, member of the Ohio delegation to the DNC.
Here's what I love most about the so-called new media. It criticizes the establishment on one hand, while selectively using it for validation on the other. Roughly one out of every three articles is some diatribe against established journalism (NYT, WaPo, etc), posting a story and complaining that the blogger's pet cause is being ignored. This is generally followed by some rant about the death of the old media, and how reporters are just as corrupt as politicians, ad nauseum. The other two out of three articles are links to stories in established journalism, which happen to reinforce the blogger's pet cause, with a triumphalist post which basically says, "See! SEE! I was right."
The nice thing about having them on the ground is that you can get at them easily, even if civilization collapses. Which is pretty likely if all the crops die and there's no more food.
It reminds me of the experiments with the first atomic bombs: they didn't know that the chain reaction wouldn't ignite the atmosphere.
This is mostly a myth. Virtually every physicist associated with the Manhattan Project came independently to the conclusion that a nuclear bomb would not ignite the atmosphere, based on what was known about the nuclear cross-sections of atmospheric atoms (which was a lot).
I guess it's possible that some unknown physics could have resulted in ignition of the atmosphere anyway, but we are always at risk from that, so it's somewhat silly to worry about it. For instance, if current physics is wrong, a passing strangelet could destroy the Earth at any moment.
I know what an order of magnitude is. And it turns out that the error is more like 120 orders of magnitude from the perspective of the cosmological constant.
Source for the following (emphasis mine): Physics World
Dark energy: the suspects
- Cosmological constant (w = -1) Originally introduced by Albert Einstein, it was later suggested by Yakov Zel'dovich that quantum vacuum energy would produce a constant energy density and pressure. However, theoretical predictions yield a cosmological constant that is 120 orders of magnitude higher than the observational value. Regardless of cosmology, quantum vacuum energy exists. Whether the cosmic contribution is in fact zero, or finely tuned, is one of the outstanding challenges in physics.
Why is this embarassing? Does that have any bearing on the science of the issue?
Physicists consider it embarassing when their existing theories make predictions that are off by more than a few orders of magnitude. The apparent effect of dark energy is something like 50 orders of magnitude larger than what current theories predict. I heard a cosmologist call this one of the most spectacular failures of modern physics, even if it doesn't have much bearing on our daily lives.
I am not a physicist, please correct me if this is inaccurate...
Let's hope that the big companies calling for patent reform manage to effect some positive change. Microsoft and Oracle in that article, I'm pretty sure IBM has sounded the call, too.
Yes, because we all know that big companies like Microsoft always do what's best for consumers, innovation, and the market as a whole.
I am sure that Microsoft would be very happy to screw over legitimate small inventors while cloaking itself in the crusade against spurious patents.
I agree that the patent system needs to be reformed. But I am also saying that any initiative spearheaded by large technology corporations should be viewed with suspicion.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and that's yet another reason why Linux is not ready for the average user to use on the desktop. Whenever a distribution makes a choice to sacrifice 'freedom' to do something that an average user would actually want (like play MP3s), half the community throws up their hands in disgust. The novice user then has the choice between a distribution that is crippled or one that is generating loud complaints.
This is fundamental to free software development. The people who believe most in free software are devoted and do great work, but expect everyone downstream not just to comply with the GPL, but to adopt their philosophy. That's not really 'free', in my opinion.
And you will never get average users to care about what is (from their perspective) the abstract philosophy of a bunch of hardcore nerds.
Seems they're only too happy to oblige. 1 2 3
I agree that the military is capable of great things *sometimes*. But I have been in the military, and the military basically attracts the same caliber of employee as any other government department.
What is more likely, that the military let classified data walk out the door due to incompetence, or due to some clever X-files style conspiracy? After you answer that question, replace "the military" with "the department of motor vehicles" and ask yourself again. The answer would usually be the same in both cases.
If nothing else, that picture proves that there is such a thing as the opposite of pornography.
Everyone remembers the exact moment when they realized that their Phanom Menace sandwich was filled with shit.
I think that would make a good Slashdot poll. When did you realize that George Lucas had defecated on your childhood memories?
- Opening sequence: "The taxation of trade routes to outlying systems is in dispute."
- First appearance of Jar Jar
- First mention of midi-chlorians
- The creepy virgin birth thingy
- First appearance of the annoying brat who played young Anikin
- First appearance of the wooden teen-aged brat who played older Anikin
- ???
Ah, that's interesting. I had the 16k "silo", but I thought it was an additional 14k, for a total of 16k -- not 16k by itself.
the Timex Sinclair 1000 was my first. Black and white TV output, no lower-case characters, a membrane keyboard, and a whopping 16 kilobytes of memory made it a wonder that I didn't move to a shack in Montana and foreswear all technology.
It's doubly surprising since my second computer was the ill-fated IBM PCjr (which, to be fair, was a decent computer once the infamous chicklet keyboard was replaced).
My in-depth study* of internet flame wars have shown that the root causes can be traced to these four men: 1 2 3 4
As a fun game, can you guess which one thinks he is the Son of God? (Hint: There is more than one answer.)
*By "in-depth study", I mean smart-ass remarks I thought up over my morning coffee.
I've got news for you: the world is the way it is, not the way we think it should be. If you want to be convincing -- you have to look convincing and act convincing. That may include getting a haircut and wearing a suit.
At the very least there is no penalty for dressing well, in the same way that there is a penalty for having poor personal hygiene and dress standards. It doesn't matter that the penalty is irrational -- it undoubtedly exists.
I don't understand why allegedly smart people can't figure this out, and instead have to bemoan the unjust world which forces them to wear a tie. These private acts of lame, whiny rebellion are being thoroughly ignored by the rest of the world.
I love these RMS flamewars for the bizarre reasoning that always comes out of the woodwork.
Last time I checked, copyright goes completely against the laws of physics. It's a human construct designed to make bits uncopyable.
For one thing, the laws of physics say nothing about copyright.
For another thing, this same argument applies to anything artificial. You may as well say that the criminal code goes against the laws of physics, and it's just a human construct to make people un-killable. The fact that something is a "human construct" does not automatically make it a bad idea.
I don't believe the author/artist should have control of their work once it's released, but they should have a right to the FRUITS of their labour - ie. if there's money being made, they should get some of it.
They tried that once, if I recall correctly it didn't work out so well.
Torvalds sees openness as a tool, not as an end.
The real question is, should software developers impose their value system on end users or hardware manufacturers?
Given that developers and other intelligent people disagree as to what the right value system for software should be, my answer would be "no".
I am hoping that all you would need is to sneak the signal over the border into a country where the internet was still the internet, say Canada, and reach the world from there.
Not necessarily. For instance, peer-to-peer does not need to be terminated, nor does your blog, or your photo album, or e-mail if you are willing to serve it from your own machine. What you would lose under my proposal is the corporate content, but you can look at that two ways:
Firstly, some would say corporate content is not worth having. A lot of people are nostalgic for the internet as it was back when Mosaic was the browser of choice.
Secondly, if this idea takes off, corporations would serve their content over the ad-hoc wireless internet. It would cost them nothing extra to serve their info, which would be unlike the tiered telco model. There would be no reason for them not to. For those that didn't, new services would pop up to replace those from the wired world.
The telcos may own the pipes, but the internet is more a series of protocols than the infrastructure that supports them.
... maybe the internet has to be destroyed in order to save it.
If the worst case happens and the telcos "destroy" the internet, why couldn't everybody with a wifi card get together over a metropolitan area and create an internet-like ad-hoc wireless network? It would be a little more complex because the nodes would be constantly moving around (so the routing tables would be hard to handle), but in principle it could work, and there would be no "pipe" for anyone to "own". Maybe this afternoon I will do some cocktail napkin calculations to see if this could work, but if anyone has a reference to something similar I'd like to hear about it.
Co-operatives could get together and arrange for microwave links between cities (or, they could buy some of the "dark fiber" that we keep hearing about).
No central servers, no routers, no single points of failure, no central logging facilities, no closed ports
Recently, he said that the shuttle and ISS were mistakes, and that the trick will be to re-make the space program without causing too much damage (like irritating the ISS partner nations).
With Wikipedia we at least have the CHANCE to see the truth, since it cannot be totally controlled. As long as you don't mind looking at the edits to the article, which are all tracked.
You're assuming that someone has entered the "truth" in the first place. And how do you distinguish the truth in a page of competing entries?
Actually, this flies in the face of the Wikipedia philosophy, which is that there are no privileged viewpoints. Wikipedia operates on the principle that the "truth" is whatever most people agree it is. However, the majority viewpoint is certainly subject to control. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but you seem to believe that a lone voice crying "truth" in the wilderness has a hope of being heard (and recognized as such) on Wikipedia, any moreso than on Geocities.
That is why we should remove all sources of income from our representatives. They should A. Have to come to work for free (they get food and shelter of course), B. Should NOT be allowed to reenter the private markets after serving, etc.
That in no way follows from your second paragraph about clean politics. Indeed, the less money you pay a politician, the more likely he/she will try to line their pockets through corruption. This is true of most public offices -- the most corrupt police tend to be the worst paid. What's more, I have absolutely no problem with paying representatives well, as that is the only way to ensure that the most talented people seek the job.
What if Jerry Springer was the senator?
He abandoned the senate race shortly thereafter. But Wikipedia reports that he has had quite the political career: 1968, campaign aide to RFK; 1970, ran for congress and lost; 1971, elected to Cincinnati city council; 1977, elected mayor of Cincinnati; 1982, lost the Dem primary for Ohio governor; 2004, member of the Ohio delegation to the DNC.
Here's what I love most about the so-called new media. It criticizes the establishment on one hand, while selectively using it for validation on the other. Roughly one out of every three articles is some diatribe against established journalism (NYT, WaPo, etc), posting a story and complaining that the blogger's pet cause is being ignored. This is generally followed by some rant about the death of the old media, and how reporters are just as corrupt as politicians, ad nauseum. The other two out of three articles are links to stories in established journalism, which happen to reinforce the blogger's pet cause, with a triumphalist post which basically says, "See! SEE! I was right."
The nice thing about having them on the ground is that you can get at them easily, even if civilization collapses. Which is pretty likely if all the crops die and there's no more food.
It reminds me of the experiments with the first atomic bombs: they didn't know that the chain reaction wouldn't ignite the atmosphere.
This is mostly a myth. Virtually every physicist associated with the Manhattan Project came independently to the conclusion that a nuclear bomb would not ignite the atmosphere, based on what was known about the nuclear cross-sections of atmospheric atoms (which was a lot).
I guess it's possible that some unknown physics could have resulted in ignition of the atmosphere anyway, but we are always at risk from that, so it's somewhat silly to worry about it. For instance, if current physics is wrong, a passing strangelet could destroy the Earth at any moment.
I know what an order of magnitude is. And it turns out that the error is more like 120 orders of magnitude from the perspective of the cosmological constant.
Source for the following (emphasis mine): Physics World
Dark energy: the suspects
- Cosmological constant (w = -1)
Originally introduced by Albert Einstein, it was later suggested by Yakov Zel'dovich that quantum vacuum energy would produce a constant energy density and pressure. However, theoretical predictions yield a cosmological constant that is 120 orders of magnitude higher than the observational value. Regardless of cosmology, quantum vacuum energy exists. Whether the cosmic contribution is in fact zero, or finely tuned, is one of the outstanding challenges in physics.
Why is this embarassing? Does that have any bearing on the science of the issue?
...
Physicists consider it embarassing when their existing theories make predictions that are off by more than a few orders of magnitude. The apparent effect of dark energy is something like 50 orders of magnitude larger than what current theories predict. I heard a cosmologist call this one of the most spectacular failures of modern physics, even if it doesn't have much bearing on our daily lives.
I am not a physicist, please correct me if this is inaccurate
Let's hope that the big companies calling for patent reform manage to effect some positive change. Microsoft and Oracle in that article, I'm pretty sure IBM has sounded the call, too.
Yes, because we all know that big companies like Microsoft always do what's best for consumers, innovation, and the market as a whole.
I am sure that Microsoft would be very happy to screw over legitimate small inventors while cloaking itself in the crusade against spurious patents.
I agree that the patent system needs to be reformed. But I am also saying that any initiative spearheaded by large technology corporations should be viewed with suspicion.
I hear he does mostly pro-boner work.
Did he graduate magna cum laude?