From the article: technology that could revolutionize the publishing industry and help jump-start the nascent eBook market
Are they kidding? Is anyone going to pay for this? (Potential Poll Question!)
Some how I think it should say "jump on" instead of "jump start". Or possibly "stomp on".
Usually, I expect stuff like this to pop up only after a market hase been thoroughly established and monopolized. Definately not while it's still looking for a customer base.
As Mojo Nixon once said: "I ain't real fond of the phone company neither."
It looks like here's another reason to invest in 802.11 hardware for neighborhood Diablo2 games. Sure, the initial price is much higher than DSL, but at least it's a one time price. I doubt wireless has nearly the hidden costs that the phone and cable companies keep making up.
A few months ago, the company I work for made me switch my mobile service to Verizon. I insisted on doing all business at one of their stores, paid cash for the phone and setup fees, and absolutely refused to give them my social security number. In addition to all this self inflicted inconvenience, Verizon went to great efforts to make the whole process more of a huge pain in the ass because I refused to give them my SSN. It took two weeks, three visits to their store, one letter, and a lot of grief from my boss (only some of which was directed at Verizon) before my phone was finally turned on. Moreover, getting warranty service from them without giving them my SSN was also quite annoying and tedious.
Now, after reading this article, I'm damn glad I went to all that trouble, and I'll definately do exactly the same in the future.
Never give the bastards any more information than they absolutely need. And they never need your Social Security Number. If Verizon spent as much effort protecting the personal information of their customers as they did trying to get the same information out of me, they might not have had this problem. They say they need your SSN to make sure they can trust you, but the real question any time someone wants your SSN is whether or not you can trust them.
Then again, it could be there was nudity but I didn't notice because I was too involved in the plot. Damn but that's a well written series. A friend of mine was depressed for weeks after seeing the last episode.
Once the storage capacity of a hard disk can only increase by adding platters, large raid arrays are going to get huge fast. Massive databases will take up huge amounts of physical space, eat up a ton of power to run, and that is really, really expensive.
They already do, but not because of the limitations of drive size. RAIDs are used for redundancy, not just capacity. Case in point: the company I work for manages several relatively large databases. Some of them are over 300GB. Yet none of the drives that hold these databases are over 20GB in size. There are larger drives available, but we have specifically decided to limit our RAID member size to less than 20GB. This is not to consume more power and space but because of the relative risk of drive failure. It takes a lot less time to rebuild the data on a 20GB member drive than a 50GB or larger drive.
Even though drive size keeps increasing, we will probably continue to limit our RAID member drives to 20GB or less (at least until we can no longer buy drives as small as 20GB). Given the choice between a small, cheap, power efficient 560GB single drive or a big, power hungry, expensive 32 member array of 20GB drives, I'll take the array any day. If one of the array drives fails, I just have to restore 20GB of data before I'm back up to speed, and in the meantime, the database can still service requests. If the single 560GB drive fails, the database is out of action until I can restore all 560GB of data.
It's really just a question of how much data you're willing to entrust to a single drive.
The result of this is that when the 1 TB hard drives come out, they will of course be larger in size than the 80 GB hard drives of today
The way I see it, only laptops and other small physical footprint devices will be affected by this. For the rest of us, this will just mean the ressurrection of the 5.25" Full Height drive bay (Remember those?).
The article, as far as I read it, makes no mention on what's most important to most drive purchasers: the price. Most computer users out there look for storage solutions that will fit within their budget, not just their computer case.
So long as the $/MB ratio keeps dropping even after the physical size restriction is reached, I'll still be pretty happy. And I can see no reason why it shouldn't. Once the maximum paramagnetically allowed data density has been reached, the only venue for drive companies to compete with each other will be drive price.
I also suspect the drive manufactures will start concentrating on making their drives faster as another field of competition. So instead of seeing more and more sodding enormous drives, we'll start seeing merely huge drives that are either really really cheap or really really fast. And that's just fine by me.
doing awkward things, like reaching for doorknobs... on the wrong side
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this doesn't make any sense to me. How can going through doors be any more awkward for sinisters than dexters? The doorknob's position in the door depends on which way you're going. If a doorknob is inconvenient for lefties going one way, it's just as inconvenient for righties going the other way.
On a similar note, being sinister, it's a little inconvenient for me to drive a stick shift. But I bet it's just as inconvenient for righties in places like England and Japan. I wonder what the statistics are for lefties vs righties getting into car accidents in England and Japan.
Now the other major cost is their management structure. Let me inform you their engineers ergo the people really doing the work, are way under-paid. The going rate at Nasa is about 1/2 the industry rate. SO you end up with the older good engineers waiting for retirement being overworked and a bunch of college graduates who can't function without matlab holding their hands.
EXACTLY CORRECT! The easiest way to tell the difference between competent and incompetent NASA engineers: After one year, the incompetent engineers are still working with NASA. Actually, some of the old guys are pretty sharp, but just about any engineer at NASA under 50 years old has to be either really dedicated to space exploration or such a bad engineer they can't get work in the real world.
Before I did projects for NASA, I never met anyone who thought of LabVIEW as an excellent programming language for mission critical embedded controllers. God's own truth. There are "engineers" at NASA who can not do with a $5000 industrial embedded PC running LabVIEW on Windows what can easily be done by a real engineer with a $5 M68HC05.
And there is a LOT of bad engineering going on at NASA. Which is not surprising considering their (mis)management culture. In every NASA project I ever worked on, I always ended up spending most of my time and budget going to meetings and writing proposals and making presentations. By the time I'd done all the work to justify the budget for a project, there was hardly any time or budget remaining to actualy do the project.
I have only one answer to your vague and peasant like understanding of how the free market works: Wait And See.
Things would be different if all the car rental companies started doing this, but the plain fact is that they are not. And chances are that this policy will result in ACME getting such a kicking that they'll never consider it, regardless of what their insurers say or do.
Even mighty Intel stopped putting unique identity numbers into their chips once they saw what it was doing to their sales. Have you looked at the stock price and sales numbers of AMD from the same time?
the government by rights SHOULD step in NOW in a BIG WAY to put a stop to this
Uh. No.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Why is government intervention allways some people's first choice to solve problems like this? Don't they understand that that's just another huge can of worms we don't want to get into?
This "big brother" issue will most likely resolve itself without needing any intervention from "bigger brother". Once the information about this gets out, ACME Rent-A-Car will starts seeing their business going to National and Hertz. A LOT of their business.
I, for one, will now make sure none of my employees use ACME Rent-A-Car while on company trips. I don't really care whether they speed or not so long as they make it to meetings on time and don't have any accidents. If they get caught speeding by an actual police officer, then it's up to them to pay the legal fine. But I'll be d*mned if my company is going to pay ACME $150 if one of my employees speeds in a rental car on company time. And the easiest way to avoid paying that $150 is to make all my company's rentals from Hertz or National.
Why did they destroy this thing? I'll give you three reasons:
The X-43 that was destroyed wasn't all that expensive to build. It was expensive to design, but that's not the same thing. It was intended to be destroyed in the test anyways, and we have more of them.
The last thing they want to happen is for even the detached X-43 to come down on someone's head. Even in the Pacific, there'e a non zero chance of this happening because...
During every U.S. launch there are always planty of Chinese, Russian, and more recently Korean and Indian "fishing boats" out in the ocean observing the launch. They would be quite happy to collect our still intact experimental hardware. Do we really want them to be able to retreive our experimental hardware for free? U.S. technology should only go to them in exchange for illegal campaign donations.
Sure the thing tanked before it could complete its mission and NASA didn't get nearly as much data from it as they wanted. They did get some data though. If nothing else, they learned to make damn sure their reasonably reliable Pegasus boosters are thoroughly extra checked over before ignition.
Additionally, they intended to slam this thing into the ocean at the end of the run anyways. The test hardware that was destroyed wasn't all that expensive to begin with (compared to most other things at NASA). Most of the X-43 budget was spent on designing the space plane, not actually building the functioning single use model (not prototype; the eventual space plane is going to be MUCH bigger) that was destroyed today. Given my experience with NASA, I suspect the largest lost cost in today's failure was the Pegasus missile and all the red tape involved in scheduling the launch itself.
NASA still has two or three more X-43's to try again with. And they will try again, and next time it will probably work. Despite what some people here might say, they're not complete fools over at NASA.
I have to wonder just how many people out there were even aware this test was going on today before they saw this news article? How many people would have noticed or cared if it hadn't failed?
I never did want to touch those things. We make so sure that noone sees when we type in our passwords, sometimes even disguising the way we type, faking hitting certain keys etc, i've seen some Very paranoid people. I'm sure they'll not be happy to know they've been shouting their passwords and credit card numbers across the room for anyone to tune in on.
I think this goes well beyond mere privacy. When you put one of these things onto your computer, you aren't just letting anyone out there hear what you are typeing (credit cards numbers, passwords, or secret attack sequences in MK3). You are also allowing them to type things in for you.
What happens if you put one of these things on your computer and a malicious neighbor has one too? What's to stop the malicious neighbor from continually transmitting "cd/; rm -rf *" (or the windows equivalent) into your machine.
Only half of security is encryption / privacy. The other half is source verification and trust. That's why Verisign is doing so well. Until they rework these things with full on strong encryption including unique device signatures, I won't even consider putting one on my computer.
If you make a library and release it under GPL and I use it in such a way that my code can stand alone, then it does not have to be released under the GPL.
This is only true if the library is released under the LGPL, not the GPL. The LGPL was created specifically because the GPL does not allow this sort of behavior.
Avery's code is quite clearly GPL'd and not LGPL'd. Morover, it was not released as a library. Taking Avery's code and making a library of it does re-license it under the LGPL. Vidomi should release all their code or recall it completely. Anything else is intellectual property theft.
If they kept the GPL'ed code seprate from their code ie use GPL'ed librays and wrote there own interface compiled as seprate files then the files that DO NOT contain GPL'ed code would not be subject to the GPL.
If I write a program that uses one file(compiled) that has GPL'ed code then, that file is subject to the GPL any other files that do not contain GPL'ed code are NOT SUBJECT to the GPL.
WRONG!! Wrong wrong wrong!
The "How to Apply these Terms to Your New Programs" section of the GPL specifically mentions the subject of linking:
This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Library General Public License instead of this License.
Avery Lee did not release his code under the LGPL, and did not release it as a library. It was released under the GPL. Therefore, any code linking into his code must be released under the GPL. That's how it is, whether Vidomi likes it or not. Taking Avery's code and turning it into a library does NOT change the code license from the GPL to the LGPL. Morover, in their initial release, Vidomi clearly bundled Avery's GPL code with their own as one package. That means, whether Vidomi likes it or not, their code is already licensed under the GPL, and they MUST released their source code. Once GPL, always GPL.
the murder rate in US where guns are allowed are higher than (for example) Europe where they aren't?
Actually, it isn't. What you just said is a lie. It's an often repeated lie, but still a lie. The plain truth is that the per capita murder rate in the US is actualy lower than that of many European countries. This becomes obvious when you realize that the US considers suicides to also be homicides (murder) while European countries make a distinction between the two. If you compare the per capita rate of actual murders (not suicides) between the US and Europe, you'll find the US has a much lower murder rate. You'll also find that while there is a higher per capita rate of "firearms incidents" in the US, the actual per capita rate of violent crime is significantly lower in the United States than in Europe. That is because the per capita rate of firearms ownership is higher in the US, but not all "firearms incidents" are violent crimes (many times they prevent violent crimes). It is still possible to commit a violent crime in Europe using a knife (or club or hammer or whatever), and is in fact much easier to do so given the legally enforced helplessness of the average European citizen.
Where would you be safer? London, England, where they've gone beyond ineffective gun control to equally ineffective knife control and have put Big Brother style cameras on every corner? Or Portland, Oregon, where many many citizens own and legally carry concealed firearms every day(and where the Dalai Llama himself recently advocated firearms posession and use in self defense)? I know where you'd probably feel safer, but the plain truth is that you'd actually be safer in Portland, Oregon (where you also wouldn't be photographed by the police every time you scratch yourself in public).
Statistics say that a gun is considerably more likely to be used on a household member than an intruder.
Replace statistics with widely published lies and you are almost correct.
The "logic" behind the "more likely to be killed by a household member" lie is as follows:
In the United States, suicides are considered homicides.
In the United States, over 50% of the firearms "homocides" are in fact suicides.
People who commit suicide are members of their own household (and family).
Therefore a gun is conserably (slightly more than 50%) more likely to be used (in a suicide) on a household member (the suicidal person themself) than on an intruder.
When examining the data (and motives) behind the statistics, it becomes clear what they are actualy saying instead of just what they want you to think they are saying.
They also say that virtually all deaths by firearms accidents are fatal.
Well no duh!!!! Where'd you come up with that one? Sure it sound bad, but when you actually read the sentence, it becomes clear that it means absolutely nothing. Of course "virtually all deaths by firearms accidents are fatal". If they weren't fatal, they wouldn't be deaths.
What really has me wondering, though, is the use of the word "virtually". Does this mean not all deaths are fatal? Are there some people out there that are only "mostly dead" as a result of "firearms accidents"? I'll keep an eye out for them in the Weekly World News (a fine publication that caters to those with all the critical thinking skills of the average gun control advocate).
I am interested to read what examples can be provided for positive usage of P2P, but I'm afraid that like guns, it will be shown that overwhelmingly P2P is used to flout the law and that our society is better without it.
People that assume P2P is overwhelmingly used to "flout the law" only demonstrate their ignorance of P2P as well as the concepts of liberty and justice. People that do the same about guns are even worse. The plain truth is that in the United States, the number of times firearms are used to commit crimes is infinitesimal compared to the number times firearms are used lawfully and in the defense of life and property. You just only ever hear about the relatively rare criminal instances on the news. It's a "dog bites man" vs. "man bites dog" situation.
I honestly suspect the same is true for P2P. This study will probably show that there's a lot more legitimate use of P2P out there than the corporations would like you to think. It just doesn't get publicised.
But all this is irrelevant in the light of liberty and justice. Last I heard, P2P programs (and guns) are inanimate tools without a will of their own. Until an actual human being uses these tools in an illegal manner, no crime has been committed. You certainly cannot hold a tool accountable for the actions of its user. Moreover, I thought the United States has a policy of presumed innocence. Punishing someone ahead of time simply because they "might" commit a crime is unjust. Criminalizing mere posession of a tool may be more convenient to those in power than actualy pursuing the real criminals, but it is also unjust. And "liberty and justice for all" are far more important than convenience for the police.
By all means, pursue and punish those who commit crimes using P2P software (and guns). But in the meantime, do not deny me my right to use this software to trade pictures of my niece's second birthday party with my family (or to use my gun to protect her from harm should she ever be imperiled).
please... don't give theme parks ideas. (sort of like the sign, please don't feed the animals?)
While I think it's probably highly unlikely that Disney has not thought of this, you're right. I probably shouldn't have mentioned the idea. All jokes aside, I really hope I haven't just doomed the poor people in those costumes to yet another misery.
More importantly, I really hope Slashdot has a strong policy on not giving out user info. I have a bad premonition of the Seven Dwarfs, torches in hand, storming my home for some hiho song induced bloody vengeance.
The haunting repeatative song 'Its a small world after all' can follow you around the whole park, with no loss of sound quality.
Scary as it sounds, that may be pretty close to an actual application for this network. Just sew GPS or a higher resolution equivalent into the plush costumes and the "Hi-Ho" song could literally follow the seven dwarfs around the park. Then, when your little kids get their pictures taken with the Little Mermaid or get a hug from Snow White, they get the right theme song at the same time. This is just the sort of immersive media thing that Disney thrives on.
Of course, it would probably suck for the person in the costume, having to listen to the same song over and over all day long no matter where they go in the park, but that's the price you have to pay to provide the total Disney experience. Besides, if the park actors hadn't been mass murderers in their past lives, they wouldn't be wearing the overly insulated plush Disney costumes in the hot sun in this life.
A cure that's so expensive that only the top 1% can afford to pay for it might as well be no cure. But it sure makes for big profits for the drug companies.
Besides, there are corporations (yes I said corporations) in other countries that are breaking patents that other corporations have on cures for the aids virus so that they can produce a cheaper cure.
Your point being? Last I heard, patent laws only apply in the country of their jurisdiction. So a company in Zimbabwe is producing an AIDS drug that's patented in the US so they can provide relief that the many many people in Zimbabwe with AIDS can afford. That US patent doesn't exist in Zimbabwe, so they can hardly be "breaking" it.
What we have here in this distributed computing system is hardly "philanthropy". It's a for-profit scam, and has less ethical integrity than those "donate your car" or "save the children charities" where the charity managers all have seven figure salaries. At least most of those "charities" can offer you a tax write off. How do you write off CPU cycles?
If we really want to do this thing correctly, an open client could be created that would only work on cancer cures or other actual philanthropic causes. Then guaranteed CPU time could be donated freely to colleges and universities for their medical research, but only if those researchers agree to place all their findings and inventions into the public domain for everyone's benefit. This way, instead of just the paltry amount that squeezes in with all the "for profit computing projects" being sold by United Devices, more CPU cycles would go towards actual philanthropic causes, and the results truly benefit everyone.
If such a system were created, I'd probably install and run it. Until then, though, I'll just leave my box off and do more good by saving electricity so hospitals might not have to worry so much about blackouts this summer.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article:
technology that could revolutionize the publishing industry and help jump-start the nascent eBook market
Are they kidding? Is anyone going to pay for this? (Potential Poll Question!)
Some how I think it should say "jump on" instead of "jump start". Or possibly "stomp on".
Usually, I expect stuff like this to pop up only after a market hase been thoroughly established and monopolized. Definately not while it's still looking for a customer base.
As Mojo Nixon once said: "I ain't real fond of the phone company neither."
It looks like here's another reason to invest in 802.11 hardware for neighborhood Diablo2 games. Sure, the initial price is much higher than DSL, but at least it's a one time price. I doubt wireless has nearly the hidden costs that the phone and cable companies keep making up.
A few months ago, the company I work for made me switch my mobile service to Verizon. I insisted on doing all business at one of their stores, paid cash for the phone and setup fees, and absolutely refused to give them my social security number. In addition to all this self inflicted inconvenience, Verizon went to great efforts to make the whole process more of a huge pain in the ass because I refused to give them my SSN. It took two weeks, three visits to their store, one letter, and a lot of grief from my boss (only some of which was directed at Verizon) before my phone was finally turned on. Moreover, getting warranty service from them without giving them my SSN was also quite annoying and tedious.
Now, after reading this article, I'm damn glad I went to all that trouble, and I'll definately do exactly the same in the future.
Never give the bastards any more information than they absolutely need. And they never need your Social Security Number. If Verizon spent as much effort protecting the personal information of their customers as they did trying to get the same information out of me, they might not have had this problem. They say they need your SSN to make sure they can trust you, but the real question any time someone wants your SSN is whether or not you can trust them.
edit out nudity and foul language
Nudity? Foul Language? I sure don't remember any.
Then again, it could be there was nudity but I didn't notice because I was too involved in the plot. Damn but that's a well written series. A friend of mine was depressed for weeks after seeing the last episode.
Once the storage capacity of a hard disk can only increase by adding platters, large raid arrays are going to get huge fast. Massive databases will take up huge amounts of physical space, eat up a ton of power to run, and that is really, really expensive.
They already do, but not because of the limitations of drive size. RAIDs are used for redundancy, not just capacity. Case in point: the company I work for manages several relatively large databases. Some of them are over 300GB. Yet none of the drives that hold these databases are over 20GB in size. There are larger drives available, but we have specifically decided to limit our RAID member size to less than 20GB. This is not to consume more power and space but because of the relative risk of drive failure. It takes a lot less time to rebuild the data on a 20GB member drive than a 50GB or larger drive.
Even though drive size keeps increasing, we will probably continue to limit our RAID member drives to 20GB or less (at least until we can no longer buy drives as small as 20GB). Given the choice between a small, cheap, power efficient 560GB single drive or a big, power hungry, expensive 32 member array of 20GB drives, I'll take the array any day. If one of the array drives fails, I just have to restore 20GB of data before I'm back up to speed, and in the meantime, the database can still service requests. If the single 560GB drive fails, the database is out of action until I can restore all 560GB of data.
It's really just a question of how much data you're willing to entrust to a single drive.
The result of this is that when the 1 TB hard drives come out, they will of course be larger in size than the 80 GB hard drives of today
The way I see it, only laptops and other small physical footprint devices will be affected by this. For the rest of us, this will just mean the ressurrection of the 5.25" Full Height drive bay (Remember those?).
The article, as far as I read it, makes no mention on what's most important to most drive purchasers: the price. Most computer users out there look for storage solutions that will fit within their budget, not just their computer case.
So long as the $/MB ratio keeps dropping even after the physical size restriction is reached, I'll still be pretty happy. And I can see no reason why it shouldn't. Once the maximum paramagnetically allowed data density has been reached, the only venue for drive companies to compete with each other will be drive price.
I also suspect the drive manufactures will start concentrating on making their drives faster as another field of competition. So instead of seeing more and more sodding enormous drives, we'll start seeing merely huge drives that are either really really cheap or really really fast. And that's just fine by me.
doing awkward things, like reaching for doorknobs ... on the wrong side
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this doesn't make any sense to me. How can going through doors be any more awkward for sinisters than dexters? The doorknob's position in the door depends on which way you're going. If a doorknob is inconvenient for lefties going one way, it's just as inconvenient for righties going the other way.
On a similar note, being sinister, it's a little inconvenient for me to drive a stick shift. But I bet it's just as inconvenient for righties in places like England and Japan. I wonder what the statistics are for lefties vs righties getting into car accidents in England and Japan.
Now the other major cost is their management structure. Let me inform you their engineers ergo the people really doing the work, are way under-paid. The going rate at Nasa is about 1/2 the industry rate. SO you end up with the older good engineers waiting for retirement being overworked and a bunch of college graduates who can't function without matlab holding their hands.
EXACTLY CORRECT! The easiest way to tell the difference between competent and incompetent NASA engineers: After one year, the incompetent engineers are still working with NASA. Actually, some of the old guys are pretty sharp, but just about any engineer at NASA under 50 years old has to be either really dedicated to space exploration or such a bad engineer they can't get work in the real world.
Before I did projects for NASA, I never met anyone who thought of LabVIEW as an excellent programming language for mission critical embedded controllers. God's own truth. There are "engineers" at NASA who can not do with a $5000 industrial embedded PC running LabVIEW on Windows what can easily be done by a real engineer with a $5 M68HC05.
Fact: Good engineering is EXPENSIVE.
Fact: Bad engineering is also expensive.
And there is a LOT of bad engineering going on at NASA. Which is not surprising considering their (mis)management culture. In every NASA project I ever worked on, I always ended up spending most of my time and budget going to meetings and writing proposals and making presentations. By the time I'd done all the work to justify the budget for a project, there was hardly any time or budget remaining to actualy do the project.
I have only one answer to your vague and peasant like understanding of how the free market works: Wait And See.
Things would be different if all the car rental companies started doing this, but the plain fact is that they are not. And chances are that this policy will result in ACME getting such a kicking that they'll never consider it, regardless of what their insurers say or do.
Even mighty Intel stopped putting unique identity numbers into their chips once they saw what it was doing to their sales. Have you looked at the stock price and sales numbers of AMD from the same time?
the government by rights SHOULD step in NOW in a BIG WAY to put a stop to this
Uh. No.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Why is government intervention allways some people's first choice to solve problems like this? Don't they understand that that's just another huge can of worms we don't want to get into?
This "big brother" issue will most likely resolve itself without needing any intervention from "bigger brother". Once the information about this gets out, ACME Rent-A-Car will starts seeing their business going to National and Hertz. A LOT of their business.
I, for one, will now make sure none of my employees use ACME Rent-A-Car while on company trips. I don't really care whether they speed or not so long as they make it to meetings on time and don't have any accidents. If they get caught speeding by an actual police officer, then it's up to them to pay the legal fine. But I'll be d*mned if my company is going to pay ACME $150 if one of my employees speeds in a rental car on company time. And the easiest way to avoid paying that $150 is to make all my company's rentals from Hertz or National.
Why did they destroy this thing? I'll give you three reasons:
Hope this answers your questions.
Sure the thing tanked before it could complete its mission and NASA didn't get nearly as much data from it as they wanted. They did get some data though. If nothing else, they learned to make damn sure their reasonably reliable Pegasus boosters are thoroughly extra checked over before ignition.
Additionally, they intended to slam this thing into the ocean at the end of the run anyways. The test hardware that was destroyed wasn't all that expensive to begin with (compared to most other things at NASA). Most of the X-43 budget was spent on designing the space plane, not actually building the functioning single use model (not prototype; the eventual space plane is going to be MUCH bigger) that was destroyed today. Given my experience with NASA, I suspect the largest lost cost in today's failure was the Pegasus missile and all the red tape involved in scheduling the launch itself.
NASA still has two or three more X-43's to try again with. And they will try again, and next time it will probably work. Despite what some people here might say, they're not complete fools over at NASA.
I have to wonder just how many people out there were even aware this test was going on today before they saw this news article? How many people would have noticed or cared if it hadn't failed?
I know it's kind of late, but how does this work for a common lib, such as glibc? glibc, afaik, is GPL
Simple. Glibc is not GPL. It is LGPL. Check out gnu.org to learn what the difference is between the two and why the distinction is so important.
I never did want to touch those things. We make so sure that noone sees when we type in our passwords, sometimes even disguising the way we type, faking hitting certain keys etc, i've seen some Very paranoid people. I'm sure they'll not be happy to know they've been shouting their passwords and credit card numbers across the room for anyone to tune in on.
I think this goes well beyond mere privacy. When you put one of these things onto your computer, you aren't just letting anyone out there hear what you are typeing (credit cards numbers, passwords, or secret attack sequences in MK3). You are also allowing them to type things in for you.
What happens if you put one of these things on your computer and a malicious neighbor has one too? What's to stop the malicious neighbor from continually transmitting "cd /; rm -rf *" (or the windows equivalent) into your machine.
Only half of security is encryption / privacy. The other half is source verification and trust. That's why Verisign is doing so well. Until they rework these things with full on strong encryption including unique device signatures, I won't even consider putting one on my computer.
Taking Avery's code and making a library of it does re-license it under the LGPL.
That "does" should be read as "does not".
If you make a library and release it under GPL and I use it in such a way that my code can stand alone, then it does not have to be released under the GPL.
This is only true if the library is released under the LGPL, not the GPL. The LGPL was created specifically because the GPL does not allow this sort of behavior.
Avery's code is quite clearly GPL'd and not LGPL'd. Morover, it was not released as a library. Taking Avery's code and making a library of it does re-license it under the LGPL. Vidomi should release all their code or recall it completely. Anything else is intellectual property theft.
If they kept the GPL'ed code seprate from their code ie use GPL'ed librays and wrote there own interface compiled as seprate files then the files that DO NOT contain GPL'ed code would not be subject to the GPL.
If I write a program that uses one file(compiled) that has GPL'ed code then, that file is subject to the GPL any other files that do not contain GPL'ed code are NOT SUBJECT to the GPL.
WRONG!! Wrong wrong wrong!
The "How to Apply these Terms to Your New Programs" section of the GPL specifically mentions the subject of linking:
Avery Lee did not release his code under the LGPL, and did not release it as a library. It was released under the GPL. Therefore, any code linking into his code must be released under the GPL. That's how it is, whether Vidomi likes it or not. Taking Avery's code and turning it into a library does NOT change the code license from the GPL to the LGPL. Morover, in their initial release, Vidomi clearly bundled Avery's GPL code with their own as one package. That means, whether Vidomi likes it or not, their code is already licensed under the GPL, and they MUST released their source code. Once GPL, always GPL.
For those of you with a life: take a date!
I totally agree. Guys, you may have a lot of trouble getting your girlfriend to see this "cartoon", but keep at her. It will be well worth the effort.
If she actualy wants to go see it, consider yourself really , really lucky.
the murder rate in US where guns are allowed are higher than (for example) Europe where they aren't?
Actually, it isn't. What you just said is a lie. It's an often repeated lie, but still a lie. The plain truth is that the per capita murder rate in the US is actualy lower than that of many European countries. This becomes obvious when you realize that the US considers suicides to also be homicides (murder) while European countries make a distinction between the two. If you compare the per capita rate of actual murders (not suicides) between the US and Europe, you'll find the US has a much lower murder rate. You'll also find that while there is a higher per capita rate of "firearms incidents" in the US, the actual per capita rate of violent crime is significantly lower in the United States than in Europe. That is because the per capita rate of firearms ownership is higher in the US, but not all "firearms incidents" are violent crimes (many times they prevent violent crimes). It is still possible to commit a violent crime in Europe using a knife (or club or hammer or whatever), and is in fact much easier to do so given the legally enforced helplessness of the average European citizen.
Where would you be safer? London, England, where they've gone beyond ineffective gun control to equally ineffective knife control and have put Big Brother style cameras on every corner? Or Portland, Oregon, where many many citizens own and legally carry concealed firearms every day(and where the Dalai Llama himself recently advocated firearms posession and use in self defense)? I know where you'd probably feel safer, but the plain truth is that you'd actually be safer in Portland, Oregon (where you also wouldn't be photographed by the police every time you scratch yourself in public).
Statistics say that a gun is considerably more likely to be used on a household member than an intruder.
Replace statistics with widely published lies and you are almost correct.
The "logic" behind the "more likely to be killed by a household member" lie is as follows:
In the United States, suicides are considered homicides.
In the United States, over 50% of the firearms "homocides" are in fact suicides.
People who commit suicide are members of their own household (and family).
Therefore a gun is conserably (slightly more than 50%) more likely to be used (in a suicide) on a household member (the suicidal person themself) than on an intruder.
When examining the data (and motives) behind the statistics, it becomes clear what they are actualy saying instead of just what they want you to think they are saying.
They also say that virtually all deaths by firearms accidents are fatal.
Well no duh!!!! Where'd you come up with that one? Sure it sound bad, but when you actually read the sentence, it becomes clear that it means absolutely nothing. Of course "virtually all deaths by firearms accidents are fatal". If they weren't fatal, they wouldn't be deaths.
What really has me wondering, though, is the use of the word "virtually". Does this mean not all deaths are fatal? Are there some people out there that are only "mostly dead" as a result of "firearms accidents"? I'll keep an eye out for them in the Weekly World News (a fine publication that caters to those with all the critical thinking skills of the average gun control advocate).
I am interested to read what examples can be provided for positive usage of P2P, but I'm afraid that like guns, it will be shown that overwhelmingly P2P is used to flout the law and that our society is better without it.
People that assume P2P is overwhelmingly used to "flout the law" only demonstrate their ignorance of P2P as well as the concepts of liberty and justice. People that do the same about guns are even worse. The plain truth is that in the United States, the number of times firearms are used to commit crimes is infinitesimal compared to the number times firearms are used lawfully and in the defense of life and property. You just only ever hear about the relatively rare criminal instances on the news. It's a "dog bites man" vs. "man bites dog" situation.
I honestly suspect the same is true for P2P. This study will probably show that there's a lot more legitimate use of P2P out there than the corporations would like you to think. It just doesn't get publicised.
But all this is irrelevant in the light of liberty and justice. Last I heard, P2P programs (and guns) are inanimate tools without a will of their own. Until an actual human being uses these tools in an illegal manner, no crime has been committed. You certainly cannot hold a tool accountable for the actions of its user. Moreover, I thought the United States has a policy of presumed innocence. Punishing someone ahead of time simply because they "might" commit a crime is unjust. Criminalizing mere posession of a tool may be more convenient to those in power than actualy pursuing the real criminals, but it is also unjust. And "liberty and justice for all" are far more important than convenience for the police.
By all means, pursue and punish those who commit crimes using P2P software (and guns). But in the meantime, do not deny me my right to use this software to trade pictures of my niece's second birthday party with my family (or to use my gun to protect her from harm should she ever be imperiled).
please... don't give theme parks ideas. (sort of like the sign, please don't feed the animals?)
While I think it's probably highly unlikely that Disney has not thought of this, you're right. I probably shouldn't have mentioned the idea. All jokes aside, I really hope I haven't just doomed the poor people in those costumes to yet another misery.
More importantly, I really hope Slashdot has a strong policy on not giving out user info. I have a bad premonition of the Seven Dwarfs, torches in hand, storming my home for some hiho song induced bloody vengeance.
The haunting repeatative song 'Its a small world after all' can follow you around the whole park, with no loss of sound quality.
Scary as it sounds, that may be pretty close to an actual application for this network. Just sew GPS or a higher resolution equivalent into the plush costumes and the "Hi-Ho" song could literally follow the seven dwarfs around the park. Then, when your little kids get their pictures taken with the Little Mermaid or get a hug from Snow White, they get the right theme song at the same time. This is just the sort of immersive media thing that Disney thrives on.
Of course, it would probably suck for the person in the costume, having to listen to the same song over and over all day long no matter where they go in the park, but that's the price you have to pay to provide the total Disney experience. Besides, if the park actors hadn't been mass murderers in their past lives, they wouldn't be wearing the overly insulated plush Disney costumes in the hot sun in this life.
An expensive cure is better than no cure.
A cure that's so expensive that only the top 1% can afford to pay for it might as well be no cure. But it sure makes for big profits for the drug companies.
Besides, there are corporations (yes I said corporations) in other countries that are breaking patents that other corporations have on cures for the aids virus so that they can produce a cheaper cure.
Your point being? Last I heard, patent laws only apply in the country of their jurisdiction. So a company in Zimbabwe is producing an AIDS drug that's patented in the US so they can provide relief that the many many people in Zimbabwe with AIDS can afford. That US patent doesn't exist in Zimbabwe, so they can hardly be "breaking" it.
What we have here in this distributed computing system is hardly "philanthropy". It's a for-profit scam, and has less ethical integrity than those "donate your car" or "save the children charities" where the charity managers all have seven figure salaries. At least most of those "charities" can offer you a tax write off. How do you write off CPU cycles?
If we really want to do this thing correctly, an open client could be created that would only work on cancer cures or other actual philanthropic causes. Then guaranteed CPU time could be donated freely to colleges and universities for their medical research, but only if those researchers agree to place all their findings and inventions into the public domain for everyone's benefit. This way, instead of just the paltry amount that squeezes in with all the "for profit computing projects" being sold by United Devices, more CPU cycles would go towards actual philanthropic causes, and the results truly benefit everyone.
If such a system were created, I'd probably install and run it. Until then, though, I'll just leave my box off and do more good by saving electricity so hospitals might not have to worry so much about blackouts this summer.