The market will NOT be permitted to provide acceptable solutions. You'll take it up the ass from the **AA just like a law abiding good little boy or you can rot in jail with those pirate independant technologists and garage bands.
The solution is simple. If you don't like the player, don't buy it.
This assumes a fair and free market in which I can purchase a player and media for it that are acceptable. The RIAA wants no such thing. What you're really saying is that I can't have a good on terms that are acceptable to me and that it is just fine if the market is not allowed to provide it.
It's funny the way an ad can grab your attention in a way the advertisers didn't intend. There some brand of bottled water that has a really spiffy effect in their ads. A bottle of water has all these different types of athletes swimming around in it and is dripping on to some flat surface. The athletes spring up from the water droplets and bike, run, climb off or whatever.
It's a really neat effect. I don't remember and could care less which brand of bottled water it was for. They're lucky I even remembered it was for bottled water. It won't induce me to buy anything but you know....that was a neat special effect!
It's a good story so I don't want to Lone Gunman it. Suffice it to say, no one gets killed and those involved weren't QUITE that stupid. There is a true story that gave birth to the urban legend. What REALLY happened isn't quite like the parent quoted Legend.
http://www.wagoneers.com/pages/RocketCar/rockit. ht ml
Checkinstall is slick set of scripts wrapped around installwatch. Basically you do the./configure and make parts as usual. Instead of "make install" you type "checkinstall" and pick slackware, rpm, or deb from a menu. It then installs the package and builds an rpm, deb, or tgz if it needs to be reinstalled later. The best part is that the package can be removed using the distro's normal package manager.
It can even take an alternate command if "make install" isn't what installs the package. The other nice thing is that the resulting package can be installed on other machines running the same distro.
It isn't good for "core" stuff like glibc but it's great for all these little proggies and utilities that I try out from Freshmeat. I used it with good results to get the latest Audacity and Galeon when they weren't in Debian testing.
When it breaks, she won't be fixing it in either case. Since we're knowledgable and will be setting it up for them then lets opt for the system that may well be harder to set up but breaks less once it is.
I told my wife: "Windows is something they torture me with at work and I'm not putting up with it here. You want Windows? That's fine but when it breaks I'm not fixing it." To her credit, she is intelligent enough to grasp the concept of things like "spyware", "EULA", "copy prevention" and be offended by them. It really wasn't a hard sell. We run Debian now.
She complained about the spams we've been getting lately so I added Spamassassin to the machine. That won a few points for me too.
Maybe because once I buy something then it's mine. Period. End of story. We aren't talking about some sort of nebulous "intellectual property". An XBox is a physical good. If I'm not using it to play copied games then not even the DMCA remotely applies. They are getting full access to their own personal property and no one who holds copyrights on the contents of a Linux distro cares either.....as long as the changes to GPL stuff is released anyway.
Incidentally, this is how to torpedo them in any propaganda wars. No ultra conservative Republican is going to come out against private property. Once the money changes hands, it is the buyers property.
You can't anonymizer the peer you're uploading from directly. Freenet claims that that peer is not responsible, because it doesn't have direct knowledge of the infringement, however, that claim has not yet been tested in court (and is likely false).
This is true. But all that means is that the peer you are directly downloading from cached the content for you in response to a request. The content most likely wasn't there prior to the request being made.
The protocol is designed such that the "upstream" peers have no control whatsover over whats on them. What's more, how is intent to be proved against the admin of a node? If I understand correctly node contents are encrypted such that only node to node communications suffice to decrypt them. A node admin would have to make every possible query and analyse response times to actually determine what he is cacheing. If the protocol doesn't work this way then it sorely needs to be added. The network would have to provide plausible deniability to EVERYONE.
Freenet also anonymizes uploads. That's its true reason for existence. Freenet is not intended to facilitate mp3 trading. Its purpose is to circumvent censorship by repressive governments. Freenet would be useless for that if it led goon squads to dissidents.
I have little doubt it will be pressed into service as an mp3 repository though. It will be interesting to what what that does to the network.
THIS again? I've got karma to burn so why not. He who writes the code chooses the license. Get over it. Don't like GPLed code? Don't use it. There are strings attached to commercial SDKs and libraries that are far more obnoxious than the GPL. And I don't see you charging any of Microsoft's windmills.
Most of us here are fully capable of seeing when the GPL is appropriate and when it isn't. For that matter, many of us don't give a crap about RMS' polemics either. The GPL is an often useful tool. Yes it is for some people. Get over it. The last time I checked, I didn't start hemorraging internally the last time I fired up a shell linked against readline. So much for the viral thing.
And no whinging about how it hurts somebody's development business. That is sooo annoying. Any idiot who can't be bothered to read COPYING should be canned anyway. You want the functionality of some GPLed code? Don't like the terms? Tough. Find or write a replacement. This is no worse than the terms on the commercial code you seem so concerned about.
Oh yeah, in case anybody missed it. Not all GPLed code is owned or controlled by the FSF. The GPL lends itself to agendas other than theirs. So spare us the stuff about RMS' integrity or lack thereof. It's a non-issue when one chooses a licence whose properties are certainly well understood by now.
As for that hurt coming to Linux you're so pleased about, do you think that if Microsoft somehow succeeds in driving a stake through Linux' heart that it will cause a migration to BSD code? I doubt it. Once Microsoft scavenges all of the BSD code they have a use for, that development model will be targeted next. That's right. Once target numero uno is taken out (if they can that is), they will come for BSD. Better watch out for the frag damage. Sheesh! RMS is justifiably a target of derision. You don't have to be as well.
Oh yeah, the main point of all this. He who writes the code chooses the license. Licences are merely tools. Can we expect polemics against chainsaws just becuase some psychotics like the mess they can make?
To get the $100,000 prize for a fully legal way to run Linux on an unmodded Xbox it has to be FULLY LEGAL. The "developer's license" you refer to comes with SDK that embeds pieces of itself in any binaries you create. The binary won't be legal to distribute because Microsoft won't sign off on it....yes they get final approval of anything for wide distribution. The source is useless without the SDK to compile it against. Remember the whole MAME on an Xbox fiasco?
This is what gPhoto and SANE are for. I am feeling better and better about the Microsoft habit I kicked. Those assholes in Redmond are definitely outgrowing their britches and need a spanking.
MNG is a "sister" format to PNG does does indeed support multiple images and "animated" images. MNG is well supported by the free Unices; I'm not sure about Windows and Mac.
Mac-On-Linux virtualizes a Powerpc chip and allows MacOS to run on a virtual terminal. With a little work, even networking works well. The speed feels just like a native boot on my 400Mhz Pismo. Video is a bit slow because it's just a framebuffer with no accelleration. It's plenty fast enough for things like Office even if games don't play well.
It requires kernel modules that are built against the kernel running on the machine so you will need a good source tree to go along with your kernel. I mention this because many Powerpc Linux users go with precompiled kernels. MOL can be had from:
There's even a Windows version there but it's older than the current version. It's also in Debian Woody and Sid: apt-get install madbomber. This plays well with optical mice and I suppose a really tight mechanical one would work but I never did well with them.
Dooo Daaa Dooo Daaa! Pascal's Wager sing 'dis song oh doo daa daaaaayy!
Inplicit in your posts is the idea that only your belief system contains the key to moral and ethical behaivor. Everybody else must be on a greased slicky slide to Hell. The dilemma you are posing is a form of Pascal's Wager.
The most common form of Pascal's Wager goes thusly: If you believe as I do then will reward you or least refrain from punishing you. If you don't believe as I do then you risk terrible consequences for being wrong. You have nothing lose and everything to gain by converting to my beliefs. It is a false dilemma because we might both be wrong. It may actually be the case that Zeus is pissed as Hades at losing all of his followers and that we all walk around in danger of being used for lightning bolt practice.
The key phrase is "Without a set of morals based on something" "Something" most certainly isn't limited to "be a Judeo Christian or else!!!" That isn't a basis for morality anymore than being conditioned with puke-up drugs strapped down in a movie theater is (Clockwork Orange). Come to think it, the character that saw through it was a hellfire and brimstone pastor. In both cases, the motivation for "good" behaivor is avoiding pain either gagging or hellfire. I've known plenty of ethical atheists and unethical theists (and vice versa to be fair). The more thoughtful theists tend to acknowledge non theists can be ethical or even "moral".
The problem here is an implicit assumption. That assumption is "Only God is fit to decide what is good." If God suddenly decided that it's your moral duty to commit a murder a month would you do it? This is not as silly as it sounds. God is commonly held to be omnipotent. This includes the ability to reverse the meanings of "good" and "evil". If God does not define what is good and evil then those meanings are accessible even to those who are not Judeo Christians. Again, most Christians seem to grok this. I've even sat in sermons that made the point that morality requires the exercise of judgement.
If I shared your viewpoint I could logically conclude that atheists/agnostics are all homicidal libertines who just haven't been caught yet. If you don't believe this then you're engaging in some rather confusing philosophizing. Since atheists are no more murderous or larcenous than anybody else then what do you suggest keeps them in check? I think they'll take some exception to "afraid of getting caught".
This assumes that information can survive the tunneling process. There's been several quantum teleportation stories over the past few years. One feature I remember from each of them is that it tends to work well with things like lasers because unmodulated lasers have a minimum of information content. What I think your hypothetical hardware may do is provide a featureless laser at the other end of link that shares a few characteristics of the transmitting laser. That is the receiving beam may have the same frequency, polarazation, etc minus any modulation that was induced in the transmitting beam.
"Working copyright protection" is an oxymoron. It's like "sex for virginity". It doesn't mean anything. The CBPTBA is akin to legislating the value of PI to 3 even. The DMCA is like mandating that the earth is in fact flat. I'm not even sure the much ballyhooed head-implant is invincible.
You can find the following on their Sourceforge development page:
Posted By: heroines Date: 2002-03-27 14:59 Summary:Switch to windows
There's been ever increasing pressure to drop Linux and move everything to Windows. #1 developing desktop applications for what industry increasingly pushes as an embedded operating system is a bad career move. #2 for $60 you can run win32 programs on Windows or Linux natively. The $300 for VMWare didn't fly with users. The $200 for a full Windows license was still too expensive. The $0 for wine wasn't worth the crashes.
By setting the $60 price point, Codeweavers is finally making windows a better development model than Unix more than any technical decision could have.
Another poster pointed out that the source tarball contains the libraries of some 10 other OS projects. These include things like lame and libogg. Their previous product bcast2000 used it's own (ugly) widget set as well. We're probably fortunate that this NLE works as well as it does and is polished as it is.
It's hard for me to fathom just where these guys are coming from. Their methodology seems to suggest that they are talented Windows developers who don't even remotely get how UNIX works. They spring this NLE on us almost fully grown and then abruptly pull it because of some shadowy "liability" concern. They then spring its successor on us and are threatening to take it to Windows. There is also an announcement of an upcoming beta on their page where they point out that "it is STILL a native Linux program and won' t take advantage of "win32 features".
I won't be in the least optimistic about this project's long term Linux prospects until I see a credible UNIX focused fork. These guys are good and wrote some nice software in spite of themselves but as far as their UNIX support goes they're flighty.
I've got some karma to burn so here goes. I am required to use Politically Correct terminology for various disabled, diseased, and ethnic conditions. Now I suppose an extreme Trekkie could be said to have a disability of perspective but that is taking a ridiculous thing (PC) too far.
There is no such thing as a `Trekker'. It is a pathetic attempt to regain the last shard of self respect they lost when Shatner told them to move out of their parents' basement and get lives. There's the trekkie who girlfriend is going to dump him if he doesn't give up being the head of his college Vulcan council, he gave up the pussy for the pointed ears. Another trekkie showed up for OJ trial jury duty in her Starfleet uniform.
In case the point isn't clear, Trekker is a pathetic attempt of people who take a tv show waaaay too seriously to wrap the mantle of Political Correctness around themselves. So Trekkies, move out of your parents' basement! Get a girlfriend! Get a job! Show up for jury duty in sensible clothes! Get a life!
It isn't being called a deathplane because it's been used to drop napalm on villagers or something. It's notorious for killing test pilots. A couple of years ago it seemed like there was a story every month or two about an Osprey crash. Some background can be had here:
There is a Planck length and a Planck time. It is conventionally meaningless to speak of a length or a time that is smaller than these. The following URL explains it easily enough:
http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae2 81 . fm
It would seem that the Universe is inherently "grainy". Perhaps the universe is some sense analog since probability completely rules any time or space frame smaller than that but a digital computer probably isn't a completely bad model to this scale.
I also wonder if photons with a wavelength smaller than the Planck length are possible. Is 1.875x10e34 Ghz the highest possible frequency? If not, do photons of higher frequency have any special properties?
Slashdot Mirror
What's unfair or unfree?
SSSCA! CBDTPA!
The market will NOT be permitted to provide acceptable solutions. You'll take it up the ass from the **AA just like a law abiding good little boy or you can rot in jail with those pirate independant technologists and garage bands.
The solution is simple. If you don't like the player, don't buy it.
This assumes a fair and free market in which I can purchase a player and media for it that are acceptable. The RIAA wants no such thing. What you're really saying is that I can't have a good on terms that are acceptable to me and that it is just fine if the market is not allowed to provide it.
This has been definitively addressed. Archives of Debian's legacy distros are hosted here:
http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/
There are also mirrors of it.
It's funny the way an ad can grab your attention in a way the advertisers didn't intend. There some brand of bottled water that has a really spiffy effect in their ads. A bottle of water has all these different types of athletes swimming around in it and is dripping on to some flat surface. The athletes spring up from the water droplets and bike, run, climb off or whatever.
It's a really neat effect. I don't remember and could care less which brand of bottled water it was for. They're lucky I even remembered it was for bottled water. It won't induce me to buy anything but you know....that was a neat special effect!
It's a good story so I don't want to Lone Gunman it. Suffice it to say, no one gets killed and those involved weren't QUITE that stupid. There is a true story that gave birth to the urban legend. What REALLY happened isn't quite like the parent quoted Legend.
. ht ml
http://www.wagoneers.com/pages/RocketCar/rockit
Checkinstall is slick set of scripts wrapped around installwatch. Basically you do the ./configure and make parts as usual. Instead of "make install" you type "checkinstall" and pick slackware, rpm, or deb from a menu. It then installs the package and builds an rpm, deb, or tgz if it needs to be reinstalled later. The best part is that the package can be removed using the distro's normal package manager.
It can even take an alternate command if "make install" isn't what installs the package. The other nice thing is that the resulting package can be installed on other machines running the same distro.
It isn't good for "core" stuff like glibc but it's great for all these little proggies and utilities that I try out from Freshmeat. I used it with good results to get the latest Audacity and Galeon when they weren't in Debian testing.
When it breaks, she won't be fixing it in either case. Since we're knowledgable and will be setting it up for them then lets opt for the system that may well be harder to set up but breaks less once it is.
I told my wife: "Windows is something they torture me with at work and I'm not putting up with it here. You want Windows? That's fine but when it breaks I'm not fixing it." To her credit, she is intelligent enough to grasp the concept of things like "spyware", "EULA", "copy prevention" and be offended by them. It really wasn't a hard sell. We run Debian now.
She complained about the spams we've been getting lately so I added Spamassassin to the machine. That won a few points for me too.
/sbin/ifconfig|grep "inet addr">/tmp/ipoutput /tmp/ipoutput 5 70 /tmp/ipoutput
:-)
gdialog --textbox
rm
# End of script
Then you say "Mom just read what it says on the screen......"
Of course if her problem is getting online in the first place then this will be less than helpful. Be sure you set that up correctly!
Oh yeah, install gdialog while you're at it.
I know; I know; it's very quick and verrrry dirty but I'm not going to play with sed to make it look pretty just so I get an extra karma point.
ps. The lameness filter screws it up if I put in the #!/bin/bash like I'm supposed to. Grrrrr!
Maybe because once I buy something then it's mine. Period. End of story. We aren't talking about some sort of nebulous "intellectual property". An XBox is a physical good. If I'm not using it to play copied games then not even the DMCA remotely applies. They are getting full access to their own personal property and no one who holds copyrights on the contents of a Linux distro cares either.....as long as the changes to GPL stuff is released anyway.
Incidentally, this is how to torpedo them in any propaganda wars. No ultra conservative Republican is going to come out against private property. Once the money changes hands, it is the buyers property.
You can't anonymizer the peer you're uploading from directly. Freenet claims that that peer is not responsible, because it doesn't have direct knowledge of the infringement, however, that claim has not yet been tested in court (and is likely false).
This is true. But all that means is that the peer you are directly downloading from cached the content for you in response to a request. The content most likely wasn't there prior to the request being made.
The protocol is designed such that the "upstream" peers have no control whatsover over whats on them. What's more, how is intent to be proved against the admin of a node? If I understand correctly node contents are encrypted such that only node to node communications suffice to decrypt them. A node admin would have to make every possible query and analyse response times to actually determine what he is cacheing. If the protocol doesn't work this way then it sorely needs to be added. The network would have to provide plausible deniability to EVERYONE.
Freenet also anonymizes uploads. That's its true reason for existence. Freenet is not intended to facilitate mp3 trading. Its purpose is to circumvent censorship by repressive governments. Freenet would be useless for that if it led goon squads to dissidents.
I have little doubt it will be pressed into service as an mp3 repository though. It will be interesting to what what that does to the network.
THIS again? I've got karma to burn so why not. He who writes the code chooses the license. Get over it. Don't like GPLed code? Don't use it. There are strings attached to commercial SDKs and libraries that are far more obnoxious than the GPL. And I don't see you charging any of Microsoft's windmills.
Most of us here are fully capable of seeing when the GPL is appropriate and when it isn't. For that matter, many of us don't give a crap about RMS' polemics either. The GPL is an often useful tool. Yes it is for some people. Get over it. The last time I checked, I didn't start hemorraging internally the last time I fired up a shell linked against readline. So much for the viral thing.
And no whinging about how it hurts somebody's development business. That is sooo annoying. Any idiot who can't be bothered to read COPYING should be canned anyway. You want the functionality of some GPLed code? Don't like the terms? Tough. Find or write a replacement. This is no worse than the terms on the commercial code you seem so concerned about.
Oh yeah, in case anybody missed it. Not all GPLed code is owned or controlled by the FSF. The GPL lends itself to agendas other than theirs. So spare us the stuff about RMS' integrity or lack thereof. It's a non-issue when one chooses a licence whose properties are certainly well understood by now.
As for that hurt coming to Linux you're so pleased about, do you think that if Microsoft somehow succeeds in driving a stake through Linux' heart that it will cause a migration to BSD code? I doubt it. Once Microsoft scavenges all of the BSD code they have a use for, that development model will be targeted next. That's right. Once target numero uno is taken out (if they can that is), they will come for BSD. Better watch out for the frag damage. Sheesh! RMS is justifiably a target of derision. You don't have to be as well.
Oh yeah, the main point of all this. He who writes the code chooses the license. Licences are merely tools. Can we expect polemics against chainsaws just becuase some psychotics like the mess they can make?
To get the $100,000 prize for a fully legal way to run Linux on an unmodded Xbox it has to be FULLY LEGAL. The "developer's license" you refer to comes with SDK that embeds pieces of itself in any binaries you create. The binary won't be legal to distribute because Microsoft won't sign off on it....yes they get final approval of anything for wide distribution. The source is useless without the SDK to compile it against. Remember the whole MAME on an Xbox fiasco?
This is what gPhoto and SANE are for. I am feeling better and better about the Microsoft habit I kicked. Those assholes in Redmond are definitely outgrowing their britches and need a spanking.
MNG is a "sister" format to PNG does does indeed support multiple images and "animated" images. MNG is well supported by the free Unices; I'm not sure about Windows and Mac.
Mac-On-Linux virtualizes a Powerpc chip and allows MacOS to run on a virtual terminal. With a little work, even networking works well. The speed feels just like a native boot on my 400Mhz Pismo. Video is a bit slow because it's just a framebuffer with no accelleration. It's plenty fast enough for things like Office even if games don't play well.
It requires kernel modules that are built against the kernel running on the machine so you will need a good source tree to go along with your kernel. I mention this because many Powerpc Linux users go with precompiled kernels. MOL can be had from:
http://www.maconlinux.org/
Bill Kendrick wrote an excellent SDL version called Madbomber. It can be had from here:
o ad /
http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/madbomber/downl
There's even a Windows version there but it's older than the current version. It's also in Debian Woody and Sid: apt-get install madbomber. This plays well with optical mice and I suppose a really tight mechanical one would work but I never did well with them.
Dooo Daaa Dooo Daaa! Pascal's Wager sing 'dis song oh doo daa daaaaayy!
Inplicit in your posts is the idea that only your belief system contains the key to moral and ethical behaivor. Everybody else must be on a greased slicky slide to Hell. The dilemma you are posing is a form of Pascal's Wager.
The most common form of Pascal's Wager goes thusly: If you believe as I do then will reward you or least refrain from punishing you. If you don't believe as I do then you risk terrible consequences for being wrong. You have nothing lose and everything to gain by converting to my beliefs. It is a false dilemma because we might both be wrong. It may actually be the case that Zeus is pissed as Hades at losing all of his followers and that we all walk around in danger of being used for lightning bolt practice.
The key phrase is "Without a set of morals based on something" "Something" most certainly isn't limited to "be a Judeo Christian or else!!!" That isn't a basis for morality anymore than being conditioned with puke-up drugs strapped down in a movie theater is (Clockwork Orange). Come to think it, the character that saw through it was a hellfire and brimstone pastor. In both cases, the motivation for "good" behaivor is avoiding pain either gagging or hellfire. I've known plenty of ethical atheists and unethical theists (and vice versa to be fair). The more thoughtful theists tend to acknowledge non theists can be ethical or even "moral".
The problem here is an implicit assumption. That assumption is "Only God is fit to decide what is good." If God suddenly decided that it's your moral duty to commit a murder a month would you do it? This is not as silly as it sounds. God is commonly held to be omnipotent. This includes the ability to reverse the meanings of "good" and "evil". If God does not define what is good and evil then those meanings are accessible even to those who are not Judeo Christians. Again, most Christians seem to grok this. I've even sat in sermons that made the point that morality requires the exercise of judgement.
If I shared your viewpoint I could logically conclude that atheists/agnostics are all homicidal libertines who just haven't been caught yet. If you don't believe this then you're engaging in some rather confusing philosophizing. Since atheists are no more murderous or larcenous than anybody else then what do you suggest keeps them in check? I think they'll take some exception to "afraid of getting caught".
This assumes that information can survive the tunneling process. There's been several quantum teleportation stories over the past few years. One feature I remember from each of them is that it tends to work well with things like lasers because unmodulated lasers have a minimum of information content. What I think your hypothetical hardware may do is provide a featureless laser at the other end of link that shares a few characteristics of the transmitting laser. That is the receiving beam may have the same frequency, polarazation, etc minus any modulation that was induced in the transmitting beam.
"Working copyright protection" is an oxymoron. It's like "sex for virginity". It doesn't mean anything. The CBPTBA is akin to legislating the value of PI to 3 even. The DMCA is like mandating that the earth is in fact flat. I'm not even sure the much ballyhooed head-implant is invincible.
You can find the following on their Sourceforge development page:
= 16 4360
Posted By: heroines
Date: 2002-03-27 14:59
Summary:Switch to windows
There's been ever increasing pressure to drop Linux and move everything to Windows. #1 developing desktop applications for what industry increasingly pushes as an embedded operating system is a bad career move. #2 for $60 you can run win32 programs on Windows or Linux natively. The $300 for VMWare didn't fly with users. The $200 for a full Windows license was still too expensive. The $0 for wine wasn't worth the crashes.
By setting the $60 price point, Codeweavers is finally making windows a better development model than Unix more than any technical decision could have.
- end quote
That can be found at:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id
Another poster pointed out that the source tarball contains the libraries of some 10 other OS projects. These include things like lame and libogg. Their previous product bcast2000 used it's own (ugly) widget set as well. We're probably fortunate that this NLE works as well as it does and is polished as it is.
It's hard for me to fathom just where these guys are coming from. Their methodology seems to suggest that they are talented Windows developers who don't even remotely get how UNIX works. They spring this NLE on us almost fully grown and then abruptly pull it because of some shadowy "liability" concern. They then spring its successor on us and are threatening to take it to Windows. There is also an announcement of an upcoming beta on their page where they point out that "it is STILL a native Linux program and won'
t take advantage of "win32 features".
I won't be in the least optimistic about this project's long term Linux prospects until I see a credible UNIX focused fork. These guys are good and wrote some nice software in spite of themselves but as far as their UNIX support goes they're flighty.
I've got some karma to burn so here goes. I am required to use Politically Correct terminology for various disabled, diseased, and ethnic conditions. Now I suppose an extreme Trekkie could be said to have a disability of perspective but that is taking a ridiculous thing (PC) too far.
There is no such thing as a `Trekker'. It is a pathetic attempt to regain the last shard of self respect they lost when Shatner told them to move out of their parents' basement and get lives. There's the trekkie who girlfriend is going to dump him if he doesn't give up being the head of his college Vulcan council, he gave up the pussy for the pointed ears. Another trekkie showed up for OJ trial jury duty in her Starfleet uniform.
In case the point isn't clear, Trekker is a pathetic attempt of people who take a tv show waaaay too seriously to wrap the mantle of Political Correctness around themselves. So Trekkies, move out of your parents' basement! Get a girlfriend! Get a job! Show up for jury duty in sensible clothes! Get a life!
It isn't being called a deathplane because it's been used to drop napalm on villagers or something. It's notorious for killing test pilots. A couple of years ago it seemed like there was a story every month or two about an Osprey crash. Some background can be had here:
http://www.verticraft.com/v22_crashes.htm
There is a Planck length and a Planck time. It is conventionally meaningless to speak of a length or a time that is smaller than these. The following URL explains it easily enough:
2 81 . fm
http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae
It would seem that the Universe is inherently "grainy". Perhaps the universe is some sense analog since probability completely rules any time or space frame smaller than that but a digital computer probably isn't a completely bad model to this scale.
I also wonder if photons with a wavelength smaller than the Planck length are possible. Is 1.875x10e34 Ghz the highest possible frequency? If not, do photons of higher frequency have any special properties?