I think that life is quite likely (almost certain) to exist somewhere other than earth. Multi-cellular-life is significantly (orders of magnitude) less likely. Intelligent-multi-cellular-life significantly less likely again.
There's actually a short film on the internet about this kind of scenario. Here's the link to Flicka.
Love knows no boundaries or at least that is the essence of this short film from the Netherlands that tells the story of a lonely building supervisor who starts a relationship with a computer program. While she might not be, her love is real.
but one of the things about open source is that you don't just share with your existing big competitors, you also lower the barrier of entry for dozens of smaller ones. That is a good thing in the general scheme of things of course, but the original company may not see it quite that way.
You see, in American English, you have only one word for Indians, unlike in other languages where they can actually tell the difference between Native Americans and the people who invented the decimal system, grammar, and many other useful things, like "Karma".
Nice try, but actually the Incas knew about zero too. They discovered it independantly (obviously).
I use Hotmail through Outlook Express on Windows XP (there goes my credibility). It works pretty well though I have to say, though occasionally multiple accounts confuse it. I keep my Hotmail empty, and immediately move email to my regular inbox (because the quota is still very low)
It catches most of the junk mail, though I've found that if you get some spam to your Hotmail Inbox it's better to go to the webmail page, and report it as junk mail rather than just deleting it. If you don't report it they continue to let in the same type of email again and again.
The hard part is to provide an incentive to create without limiting distribution.
I think most people (even here) see nothing wrong with limiting distribution for a limited period. It's the period that is the main issue. The copyright periods we have now are laughable.
5 years should be enough to make most of the money you are going to make anyway, and short enough that most people would respect it. Even much longer would be acceptable if after that initial period it became just a non-exclusive "royalty right" for a fixed % of anybody's sale price (= zero for free sharing:-)
We are heading towards a situation where everybody in the world could carry the entire cultural content of the world in their back pocket (well I exaggerate), but we would disallow that for the profit of the very few. It seems immoral to me.
Actually, cockroaches are pretty smart for an insect. They got good reflexes and evasion strategies plus super sensory equipment and the brainpower to evaluate it. Try catching one.
Catch them yourself. I swat them! Death from above.
The wealthiest man in the world, who tries to take over any market that appears to be about to boom, has not bothered funding his own space flight project.
You mean the wealthiest man in the world, Ingvar Kamprad, doesn't have a space program? Must be having trouble fitting the rockets into a flatpack.
Welcome our new roomba overlords. Anything that depends on significant progress in AI is not something that should worry us for the forseeable future:P
Cheap shots aside, if you aren't familiar with the idea of the singularity check our www.kurzweilai.net for the lowdown. Exponentially increasing intelligence (and lifespan, and everything else) is the future of humanity. They make the point that the lack of progress in AI is essentially irellevant, since at some point you can just brute force the thing, and model every one of your neurons individually in a computer from a brain scan. From there you continue along Moore's law, and it's analog in other industries, so a 1 Human computer doubles to become a 2 human computer... until you have a 1 "humanity" computer in pretty short time.
It's all scheduled to happen within our lifetimes too, not some mythical future, so we can get to see if it's all crap, or truly visionary.
What's wrong with having a versioned API? The OS could say it implemented version 1.0 and 2.0, and 2.6.1.experimental of the device driver api. With the proviso that the obsolete versions are just wrappers onto the current official version, and won't be guarenteed work exactly 100% the same as when they used to be the official version themselves.
I agree with the previous poster that the reason is that they want to make closed source drivers hard, and thereby encourage open source ones. Of course it's their right to to that, but many companies will never support linux as a result, which is maybe fine as far as the kernel developers are concerned, but I think that linux distribution makers should've seen the development of such a stable ABI as one of their main integration tasks.
but I doubt many people have the resources to mount a media campaign to get a new liver. Roll on genetic engineering, and hopefully waiting for a liver will become a thing of the past for everyone affected.
I had some problems with inodes not being unique in earlier versions of cygwin (this caused problems in a very large "make"). This has been mostly fixed though as far as I can tell. The last version a few weeks ago I tried only had 2 non unique inodes in the filesystem for 2 files that were "the same" but stored in different locations.
Other issues are that it's better to do everything in cygwin, or everything in windows rather than mixing the two, as translating the paths from one to the other can cause a lot of annoyance. Personally I'm veering towards the opinion that, at least for what I do, it's better to use native windows versions of the GNU tools if you can find them rather than the cygwin ones.
Actually he's not interested in OSS at all. He's interested in Free Software. Ordinarily I wouldn't nitpick between the two, but he specifically makes a clear distinction himself.
I have tried 3 different times to get this story submitted in one way or the other for the past several months (including one earlier today that got rejected within less than an hour!). They have all been rejected. Several other members of the project have also tried repeatedly to get a submission and those too got rejected. I don't like doing this anymore than you do but it seems that's what it takes to get a submission accepted.
But you know, this isn't Freshmeat. It's a discussion forum. Maybe the fact that is was rejected 3 times should tell you something.
The point release notifications of famous apps like Mozilla are bad enough, but some library we haven't heard of before that does the same as a bunch of other libraries out there?
If the news that Mozilla or OpenOffice or something like that was switching to VCF then it might be newsworthy.
I have no idea about the lead time for life in the universe, but I was reading Stephen Jay Gould's "eight little piggies" recently, and in one essay he says that the oldest rocks on earth are 3.8 billion years old, but they are too deformed by heat to contain fossils, however the earliest ones that could theoretically contain fossils are about 3.6 billion years old. And, actually they do contain fossils. The point being that (simple) life on earth began basically as soon as it possibly could rather than waiting around for eons.
Of course if earth is the only such planet that's something else entirely, but it seems unlikely to me just given the size of the universe, and the fact that the universe is made up of the same elements all over.
Auto-concat is not guarenteed to be correct, how can a system know which lines definitely should be joined? It can only guess by using some arbitrary rules?
Auto-split, since it is just splitting at the nearest word boundary to 80 will always be correct.
80 columns is a display issue, and should be handled by the system doing the display.
By selling, people will pay you for what they percieve as the value of future profits (and maybe some growth potential). You don't have to wait around for it to happen, or work your ass off to make it happen.
Alternatively, if you don't want to sell entirely, but have a company that can turn X dollars into X*Y dollars. Investment in the company will allow you to increase X (and so presumably increasing X*Y).
If you have more than one member in your company, and IPO creates a market for those shares allowing the members to leave when they want.
Finally, the goal (more or less) of a business is to make money. Neither profiting nor trading are excluded from the means except if you state it in the company charter.
Fair point, but only to a degree. Windows 95 was a mass market operating system, and while not without it's faults would be considered by most people "ready for the desktop".
Slashdot Mirror
I think that life is quite likely (almost certain) to exist somewhere other than earth. Multi-cellular-life is significantly (orders of magnitude) less likely. Intelligent-multi-cellular-life significantly less likely again.
There's actually a short film on the internet about this kind of scenario. Here's the link to Flicka.
Love knows no boundaries or at least that is the essence of this short film from the Netherlands that tells the story of a lonely building supervisor who starts a relationship with a computer program. While she might not be, her love is real.
but one of the things about open source is that you don't just share with your existing big competitors, you also lower the barrier of entry for dozens of smaller ones. That is a good thing in the general scheme of things of course, but the original company may not see it quite that way.
I use Hotmail through Outlook Express on Windows XP (there goes my credibility). It works pretty well though I have to say, though occasionally multiple accounts confuse it. I keep my Hotmail empty, and immediately move email to my regular inbox (because the quota is still very low)
It catches most of the junk mail, though I've found that if you get some spam to your Hotmail Inbox it's better to go to the webmail page, and report it as junk mail rather than just deleting it. If you don't report it they continue to let in the same type of email again and again.
5 years should be enough to make most of the money you are going to make anyway, and short enough that most people would respect it. Even much longer would be acceptable if after that initial period it became just a non-exclusive "royalty right" for a fixed % of anybody's sale price (= zero for free sharing
We are heading towards a situation where everybody in the world could carry the entire cultural content of the world in their back pocket (well I exaggerate), but we would disallow that for the profit of the very few. It seems immoral to me.
This would be the same CD that fucked up my father's windows install.
Family disaster recovery tech support from the other side of the world is no fun let me tell you.
"Only autocracies maintain spies, these are not needed in democracies" - Woodrow Wilson
Welcome our new roomba overlords. Anything that depends on significant progress in AI is not something that should worry us for the forseeable future :P
Cheap shots aside, if you aren't familiar with the idea of the singularity check our www.kurzweilai.net for the lowdown. Exponentially increasing intelligence (and lifespan, and everything else) is the future of humanity. They make the point that the lack of progress in AI is essentially irellevant, since at some point you can just brute force the thing, and model every one of your neurons individually in a computer from a brain scan. From there you continue along Moore's law, and it's analog in other industries, so a 1 Human computer doubles to become a 2 human computer... until you have a 1 "humanity" computer in pretty short time.
It's all scheduled to happen within our lifetimes too, not some mythical future, so we can get to see if it's all crap, or truly visionary.
What's wrong with having a versioned API? The OS could say it implemented version 1.0 and 2.0, and 2.6.1.experimental of the device driver api. With the proviso that the obsolete versions are just wrappers onto the current official version, and won't be guarenteed work exactly 100% the same as when they used to be the official version themselves.
I agree with the previous poster that the reason is that they want to make closed source drivers hard, and thereby encourage open source ones. Of course it's their right to to that, but many companies will never support linux as a result, which is maybe fine as far as the kernel developers are concerned, but I think that linux distribution makers should've seen the development of such a stable ABI as one of their main integration tasks.
but I doubt many people have the resources to mount a media campaign to get a new liver. Roll on genetic engineering, and hopefully waiting for a liver will become a thing of the past for everyone affected.
I had some problems with inodes not being unique in earlier versions of cygwin (this caused problems in a very large "make"). This has been mostly fixed though as far as I can tell. The last version a few weeks ago I tried only had 2 non unique inodes in the filesystem for 2 files that were "the same" but stored in different locations.
Other issues are that it's better to do everything in cygwin, or everything in windows rather than mixing the two, as translating the paths from one to the other can cause a lot of annoyance. Personally I'm veering towards the opinion that, at least for what I do, it's better to use native windows versions of the GNU tools if you can find them rather than the cygwin ones.
or how about letting people choose what they want to do, and stop trying to social engineer everything.
Actually he's not interested in OSS at all. He's interested in Free Software. Ordinarily I wouldn't nitpick between the two, but he specifically makes a clear distinction himself.
The point release notifications of famous apps like Mozilla are bad enough, but some library we haven't heard of before that does the same as a bunch of other libraries out there?
If the news that Mozilla or OpenOffice or something like that was switching to VCF then it might be newsworthy.
Space Shu.. oh sorry, you said "less than the value of the sattelite"
They're fuel, not crew!
I have no idea about the lead time for life in the universe, but I was reading Stephen Jay Gould's "eight little piggies" recently, and in one essay he says that the oldest rocks on earth are 3.8 billion years old, but they are too deformed by heat to contain fossils, however the earliest ones that could theoretically contain fossils are about 3.6 billion years old. And, actually they do contain fossils. The point being that (simple) life on earth began basically as soon as it possibly could rather than waiting around for eons.
Of course if earth is the only such planet that's something else entirely, but it seems unlikely to me just given the size of the universe, and the fact that the universe is made up of the same elements all over.
Auto-concat is not guarenteed to be correct, how can a system know which lines definitely should be joined? It can only guess by using some arbitrary rules?
Auto-split, since it is just splitting at the nearest word boundary to 80 will always be correct.
80 columns is a display issue, and should be handled by the system doing the display.
There are lots of reasons.
By selling, people will pay you for what they percieve as the value of future profits (and maybe some growth potential). You don't have to wait around for it to happen, or work your ass off to make it happen.
Alternatively, if you don't want to sell entirely, but have a company that can turn X dollars into X*Y dollars. Investment in the company will allow you to increase X (and so presumably increasing X*Y).
If you have more than one member in your company, and IPO creates a market for those shares allowing the members to leave when they want.
Finally, the goal (more or less) of a business is to make money. Neither profiting nor trading are excluded from the means except if you state it in the company charter.
Proposed solution: Use emacs instead of vi to edit the makefile.
Fair point, but only to a degree. Windows 95 was a mass market operating system, and while not without it's faults would be considered by most people "ready for the desktop".
How kind of them to allow us to use human genes if there is no money in it. And how surprising that people are willing to spend money on their health.