That's a pretty wishy-washy view of the world. Where is this fantasy land where you do better by "respecting obligations"? Couldn't be the USA, the land of Chapter 11. "Self-respect"? You sound like a guidance counselor.
Here's a helpful quote (from memory): To succeed you should make many promises but keep none -- Napoleon Bonaparte.
Are you going to tell me he didn't function well in society?
You are certainly naive. Why do you think breach of contract clauses exist? Perhaps if you had actually read Adam Smith's work you would know that he addresses this in both The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Breach of contract is as integral to commerce and the free market as banking.
The key misunderstanding in all such issues is that people view domain names as a form of property. This is patently untrue. It is impossible to form a logical perspective on this case if you regard something as abstract as a domain name as if it was a subject to ownership.
Domain names are an abstraction. Essentially, they are no more than a number stored in a database or databases, none of which is owned by the domain's so-called owner. The numbers aren't owned, since we know you can't own a number. The databases are the property of whoever maintains them. Thus the principle objects of the dispute are not even the property of the disputants.
A domain name has no corporeal representation. You cannot touch it, nor can you point to it or isolate it by any means. It has no permanent existance. It must be regularly renewed. Claiming that you can own a domain name is like claiming that you can own some electricity. At best it is an illusion provoked by ignorance.
The closest a domain name gets to ownership is the contract between the "owner" and the registrar. This, however, is not a domain name. It is a contract, and covered under contract law, not IP law. The registrar has the right to terminate the contract if they see fit, provided they comply with the breach of contract conditions. If the registrar is offered a sufficiently high fee to terminate a domain name agreement in favour of a new client, they have the right to do that. If the law of supply and demand is to operate properly in the net, they have a duty to break their contract in favour of the highest bidder.
But does it support foreign key constraints yet? This oversight on the part of the developers has caused me no end of headaches. I'm tired of having to write three thousand extra lines of Java code to do something that should be automatic. I'm tired of the MySQL developers playing fast and loose with the SQL standard. It's time to fall into line.
It seems to me to be similar to Gnutella, and look how badly that suffers when more than 500 users are connected. These decentralised methods currently don't seem capable of coping with the load, unless they design some sort of higher capacity nodes into the system. Imagine using Gnutella to communicate among every cell-phone user in Manhattan!
I'm in favour of this lawsuit. Even if it loses, it will be interesting enough to offer insight into the way the courts favour corporate muscle over the little guy. Indeed, this lawsuit is a parable for the growing corporate domination of the USA (if it loses).
If Yahoo Serious wins, it will prove that, despite all that has happened to take our rights away, and all that has been done to make copyright law the tool of corporate evil, the underdog can still use copyright law to defend himself from evil corporations. It may, in fact, prove that copyright law is the tool of the common man (if it wins), despite corruption by corporate interests.
If it loses, this case will provide further evidence that copyright laws are unjust, and should be ignored at will. If it wins, this case will prove that copyright laws are just, and can still be used by ordinary people to defend themselves against corporate titans.
The fact that this case is even being fought is proof that copyright laws are able to be turned to the hands of the fading middle classes who are the heart and soul of the American Dream. The fact that it has come to the point that a man must defend his name against corporate intrusions is proof that corporations have twisted copyright law to their own ends, so that it no longer serves the purpose of good.
This is an excellent addition, and very much needed. Shadows can be one of the hardest thingsto get looking good in OpenGL, and usually they are done in a hacked out, unsatistfactory sort of way, sometimes just by copying the model, setting all textures to black and using shear and scale transforms to squish the model onto the floor. This will hopefully do a much better job.
As for titanium plating -- you don't want it, trust me. It scratches and stains far too easily, and you can't clean it when it does. Looks good when it's undamaged, though.
This sort of biometric authentication is not really all that vital for most of us, and the effort required to keep it functional, in this case at least, outweighs any advantage gained.
Don't get me wrong -- I can see this being very useful for corporations and governments who have valuable information to keep encrypted. For those applications, this is a good idea.
The problem I see is that fingerprint sensors require maintenance. The human fingertip exudes oil, used to increase the traction of the fingertip. This is not good for a sensing surface, and will necessitate regular cleaning. Anyone who has owned a trackball can tell you that anything the finger touches regularly, builds up gunk quickly.
Another problem is susceptibility to damage -- scratches in particular. I wouldn't want to be locked out of my files due to clumsiness. Also, damage to the recognition system through any form of clumsiness will keep you out of your encrypted files. Using an ordinary encryption method, you'd just hook the HD up to a different machine and be back in business.
I'll assume that the device is good enough to detect your print accurately. I wouldn't think the company would willingly release a half-engineered product in such an important area as authentication.
Those of us who maintained our interest in the stock market even after the dot-com crash are well aware that the company that currently has the world's highest market capitalisation is none other than General Electric. Knowing this information, and also knowing that GE is the company holding the largest number of patents in the world, we are lead to an obvious conclusion.
In the information economy, the only way to remain stable and in control of your destiny is to maintain control of your information resources, such as trade secrets, corporate information, and of course, maintaining ownership of your research properties through patents is vital.
Patents are the only means of survival for a late stage tertiary industry based economy such as the US has. Without patents, companies have no reason to do research and individuals have no reason to form companies. It is impossible for a nation to remain prosperous if it does not support patents. Since the primary purpose of capitalism is to encourage economic growth and prosperity, it is obvious that we must encourage the patenting of new technologies, in order to profit from our nation's successes.
I find it crucial that W3C endeavour to hold on to as much of their intellectual property through the means of patents as they can. Only through this method can the W3C guarantee success of the web for America. If they do not, there is nothing preventing foreign off-shore technology companies from undermining the US's dominance in the internet market by stealing control of vital internet research and technology. This would be catastrophic for America. If we are to encourage a dot-com bounce back, we need the W3C to defend their hold on web technology.
The reasons should be pretty obvious. You can't break copyright forever. Pirate sites on the internet that make a living stealing content and suppplying it as their own, as if they were performing a legitimate service, are being shut down faster and faster, as corporate legal teams get used to the business of internet copyright enforcement.
The lyrics on that site were the property of the singers and bands who wrote them, and I feel that lyrics are more personal a possession than any solid consumer object could ever be. Stealing artists lyrics, which come from the heart, is just a black deed, and I'm glad people are finally putting a stop to this sort of thing.
Had this been introduced in 2000, the dot-com crash might have been averted. As it happens, this will not have much of an effect, since most of the sites that ad-impressions and money might have saved are already gone. It's a nice thought, just not timely enough.
These guys would probably have ruled the dot-com world, if they'd gotten their act together and released this when it might have been useful. As it is, the internet is dying from lack of funds. I'm starting to find dead links in google for crying out loud!
I'd like to assure everyone that Generation X's cynical outlook has merely been restrained, rather than decimated by the WTC collapse, and ensuing media appearances. As an affirmed member of generation X, (aka the "cool" generation), I feel as ambivalent as always, and the primary emotional response this disaster provoked was contempt for TV anchorpersons.
Of course, posting this assurance on slashdot is meaningless, as most of the readership was born too late to be part of generation X.
One attribute of geeks that I have noticed, is that they cannot sit through a movie without picking the plot to pieces and pedantically attacking every slight deviation from reality. I have nothing in particular against this, when applied to movies that are genuinely bad, such as "Austin Powers 2", but people who apply it to all movies really get up my nose.
For some reason, however, Star Trek consistently misses out on the "Geek critique". This, despite the fact that Star Trek is guilty of some of the most contrived plots and unscientific pseudo-science.
For instance:
Spock's pure logic: This is literally impossible. Biological brains are based on pattern matching, which necessitates illogical responses.
The dilithium crystals: As a fuel source, these are contrived beyond belief. Any good crystallographer knows that crytalline structures are too inert to supply decent energy returns. Try burning a diamond, if you don't believe me.
Warp factor 9: The idea that they could exceed the speed of light exactly nine times is ludicrous. As you move further from the speed of light, the rate at which speed increases grows immeasurably larger. It would be impossible to achieve any reasonable system of measurement at these speeds.
No plants on the enterprise: Anyone else notice this? You need plants to breathe, fools.
Artificial gravity: This was never explained. In any series.
Beaming down: There's no way this could possible work. Even if you could reconstruct a body at the other end, without some kind of receiving device, it would be dead on arrival.
Despite all these obvious flaws, Star Trek gets a free ride from the geek critics. Favouritism? Hypocrisy? Blindness? I suspect the problem is really just that geeks criticise films to demonstrate their superior intellect, over the Hollywood film-makers and the audience. Since Star Trek films are considered to be a product of more thoughtful and knowledgeable writers, it does not occur to geeks that these films could be open to criticism.
Re:geeks are to lazy to be very political in gener
on
Slashdot in Politics?
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· Score: 1
ESR and RMS are lazy. When's the last time you saw them get off their fat asses to do anything but complain? All ESR does is offer useless advice and sit on the porch shooting his guns, and all RMS does is make a pest of himself on serious developer's mailing lists.
By the way, "geeks" is a lowercase word. It isn't a nationality or anything.
What exactly is autonomous about a machining station? Can't you read? We're talking about mobile robots here. Does your machining station navaigate in an uncontrolled environment?
A million imperfections in sensing and movement prevent easy programming of autonomous robots. If you want to guarantee straight line movement, you need either a strictly controlled environment, with lots of navigation aids for the robot, or you need to use stochastic mapping and kalman filters. None of that is easy.
XML is not likely to succeed
on
XML in a Nutshell
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
I do not expect any more advances in web technologies. HTML 4 is where we are going to stick. Even CSS is not properly implemented in any browser.
XML will be useeless in web browsers, until one is released with full XSL support, or CSS3 is released and supported. Until this happens, XML is an orphaned technology.
Due to the deprecation of most of the HTML interface in XML, no web author will willingly use the new technology. It is more work for less reward. XML is a buzzword. It offers illusory benefits that only make sense to people who are pedantically concerned about hings like using em tags instead of b tags on their web pages.
The worldwide robotics industry has one primary market: toys. All robotic efforts are being directed towards this market. There is no other use for autonomous robots in the modern world.
Industrial robotics has failed due to costs of lawsuits and the success of deregulation and free trade at opening up cut price labour markets in the third world. Industrial robots are a thing of the past.
Autonomous robots are far to complex and fragile to be used for taks like space exploration. As someone who has programmed robots, I can assure you that the level of effort required to get a robot to move consistently in a straight line, let alone navigate areound obstacles through sensory input is prohibitive. Expecting a robot to work autonomously on a distant planet is absurd.
I am certain this story is mere marketing hype. In order to develop a market of "early adopters" for robot technology, an impression must be created that robots are futuristic high tech, and hence a desirable commodity to gadget freaks. This article was written to seed the market with subtle propaganda.
Expect to see this for sale at upscale electronic stores within two years. It's not the next voyager, it's the next aibo.
UN didn't send you into Iraq. The Somalia mission that tesulted in a number of US casualties was not nder UN command. The US carrier groups in the gulf aren't there on UN orders. The war on drugs in South America isn't UN ordered. Panama wasn't UN ordered. The missile attack on Quadafi wasn't UN ordered.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a pretty wishy-washy view of the world. Where is this fantasy land where you do better by "respecting obligations"? Couldn't be the USA, the land of Chapter 11. "Self-respect"? You sound like a guidance counselor.
Here's a helpful quote (from memory): To succeed you should make many promises but keep none -- Napoleon Bonaparte.
Are you going to tell me he didn't function well in society?
If breach of contract was such a terrible thing, it would be a felony. Only self-deceiving libertarians think contracts are equivalent to holy writ.
You are certainly naive. Why do you think breach of contract clauses exist? Perhaps if you had actually read Adam Smith's work you would know that he addresses this in both The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Breach of contract is as integral to commerce and the free market as banking.
The key misunderstanding in all such issues is that people view domain names as a form of property. This is patently untrue. It is impossible to form a logical perspective on this case if you regard something as abstract as a domain name as if it was a subject to ownership.
Domain names are an abstraction. Essentially, they are no more than a number stored in a database or databases, none of which is owned by the domain's so-called owner. The numbers aren't owned, since we know you can't own a number. The databases are the property of whoever maintains them. Thus the principle objects of the dispute are not even the property of the disputants.
A domain name has no corporeal representation. You cannot touch it, nor can you point to it or isolate it by any means. It has no permanent existance. It must be regularly renewed. Claiming that you can own a domain name is like claiming that you can own some electricity. At best it is an illusion provoked by ignorance.
The closest a domain name gets to ownership is the contract between the "owner" and the registrar. This, however, is not a domain name. It is a contract, and covered under contract law, not IP law. The registrar has the right to terminate the contract if they see fit, provided they comply with the breach of contract conditions. If the registrar is offered a sufficiently high fee to terminate a domain name agreement in favour of a new client, they have the right to do that. If the law of supply and demand is to operate properly in the net, they have a duty to break their contract in favour of the highest bidder.
But does it support foreign key constraints yet? This oversight on the part of the developers has caused me no end of headaches. I'm tired of having to write three thousand extra lines of Java code to do something that should be automatic. I'm tired of the MySQL developers playing fast and loose with the SQL standard. It's time to fall into line.
It seems to me to be similar to Gnutella, and look how badly that suffers when more than 500 users are connected. These decentralised methods currently don't seem capable of coping with the load, unless they design some sort of higher capacity nodes into the system. Imagine using Gnutella to communicate among every cell-phone user in Manhattan!
I'm in favour of this lawsuit. Even if it loses, it will be interesting enough to offer insight into the way the courts favour corporate muscle over the little guy. Indeed, this lawsuit is a parable for the growing corporate domination of the USA (if it loses).
If Yahoo Serious wins, it will prove that, despite all that has happened to take our rights away, and all that has been done to make copyright law the tool of corporate evil, the underdog can still use copyright law to defend himself from evil corporations. It may, in fact, prove that copyright law is the tool of the common man (if it wins), despite corruption by corporate interests.
If it loses, this case will provide further evidence that copyright laws are unjust, and should be ignored at will. If it wins, this case will prove that copyright laws are just, and can still be used by ordinary people to defend themselves against corporate titans.
The fact that this case is even being fought is proof that copyright laws are able to be turned to the hands of the fading middle classes who are the heart and soul of the American Dream. The fact that it has come to the point that a man must defend his name against corporate intrusions is proof that corporations have twisted copyright law to their own ends, so that it no longer serves the purpose of good.
This is an excellent addition, and very much needed. Shadows can be one of the hardest thingsto get looking good in OpenGL, and usually they are done in a hacked out, unsatistfactory sort of way, sometimes just by copying the model, setting all textures to black and using shear and scale transforms to squish the model onto the floor. This will hopefully do a much better job.
As for titanium plating -- you don't want it, trust me. It scratches and stains far too easily, and you can't clean it when it does. Looks good when it's undamaged, though.
This sort of biometric authentication is not really all that vital for most of us, and the effort required to keep it functional, in this case at least, outweighs any advantage gained.
Don't get me wrong -- I can see this being very useful for corporations and governments who have valuable information to keep encrypted. For those applications, this is a good idea.
The problem I see is that fingerprint sensors require maintenance. The human fingertip exudes oil, used to increase the traction of the fingertip. This is not good for a sensing surface, and will necessitate regular cleaning. Anyone who has owned a trackball can tell you that anything the finger touches regularly, builds up gunk quickly.
Another problem is susceptibility to damage -- scratches in particular. I wouldn't want to be locked out of my files due to clumsiness. Also, damage to the recognition system through any form of clumsiness will keep you out of your encrypted files. Using an ordinary encryption method, you'd just hook the HD up to a different machine and be back in business.
I'll assume that the device is good enough to detect your print accurately. I wouldn't think the company would willingly release a half-engineered product in such an important area as authentication.
Those of us who maintained our interest in the stock market even after the dot-com crash are well aware that the company that currently has the world's highest market capitalisation is none other than General Electric. Knowing this information, and also knowing that GE is the company holding the largest number of patents in the world, we are lead to an obvious conclusion.
In the information economy, the only way to remain stable and in control of your destiny is to maintain control of your information resources, such as trade secrets, corporate information, and of course, maintaining ownership of your research properties through patents is vital.
Patents are the only means of survival for a late stage tertiary industry based economy such as the US has. Without patents, companies have no reason to do research and individuals have no reason to form companies. It is impossible for a nation to remain prosperous if it does not support patents. Since the primary purpose of capitalism is to encourage economic growth and prosperity, it is obvious that we must encourage the patenting of new technologies, in order to profit from our nation's successes.
I find it crucial that W3C endeavour to hold on to as much of their intellectual property through the means of patents as they can. Only through this method can the W3C guarantee success of the web for America. If they do not, there is nothing preventing foreign off-shore technology companies from undermining the US's dominance in the internet market by stealing control of vital internet research and technology. This would be catastrophic for America. If we are to encourage a dot-com bounce back, we need the W3C to defend their hold on web technology.
The reasons should be pretty obvious. You can't break copyright forever. Pirate sites on the internet that make a living stealing content and suppplying it as their own, as if they were performing a legitimate service, are being shut down faster and faster, as corporate legal teams get used to the business of internet copyright enforcement.
The lyrics on that site were the property of the singers and bands who wrote them, and I feel that lyrics are more personal a possession than any solid consumer object could ever be. Stealing artists lyrics, which come from the heart, is just a black deed, and I'm glad people are finally putting a stop to this sort of thing.
How old do you think I am?
Had this been introduced in 2000, the dot-com crash might have been averted. As it happens, this will not have much of an effect, since most of the sites that ad-impressions and money might have saved are already gone. It's a nice thought, just not timely enough.
These guys would probably have ruled the dot-com world, if they'd gotten their act together and released this when it might have been useful. As it is, the internet is dying from lack of funds. I'm starting to find dead links in google for crying out loud!
I'd like to assure everyone that Generation X's cynical outlook has merely been restrained, rather than decimated by the WTC collapse, and ensuing media appearances. As an affirmed member of generation X, (aka the "cool" generation), I feel as ambivalent as always, and the primary emotional response this disaster provoked was contempt for TV anchorpersons.
Of course, posting this assurance on slashdot is meaningless, as most of the readership was born too late to be part of generation X.
For some reason, however, Star Trek consistently misses out on the "Geek critique". This, despite the fact that Star Trek is guilty of some of the most contrived plots and unscientific pseudo-science.
For instance:
Despite all these obvious flaws, Star Trek gets a free ride from the geek critics. Favouritism? Hypocrisy? Blindness? I suspect the problem is really just that geeks criticise films to demonstrate their superior intellect, over the Hollywood film-makers and the audience. Since Star Trek films are considered to be a product of more thoughtful and knowledgeable writers, it does not occur to geeks that these films could be open to criticism.
I certainly hope so! RROWRR!
ESR and RMS are lazy. When's the last time you saw them get off their fat asses to do anything but complain? All ESR does is offer useless advice and sit on the porch shooting his guns, and all RMS does is make a pest of himself on serious developer's mailing lists.
By the way, "geeks" is a lowercase word. It isn't a nationality or anything.
I wonder how many can actually name their congressman.
What exactly is autonomous about a machining station? Can't you read? We're talking about mobile robots here. Does your machining station navaigate in an uncontrolled environment?
A million imperfections in sensing and movement prevent easy programming of autonomous robots. If you want to guarantee straight line movement, you need either a strictly controlled environment, with lots of navigation aids for the robot, or you need to use stochastic mapping and kalman filters. None of that is easy.
I do not expect any more advances in web technologies. HTML 4 is where we are going to stick. Even CSS is not properly implemented in any browser.
XML will be useeless in web browsers, until one is released with full XSL support, or CSS3 is released and supported. Until this happens, XML is an orphaned technology.
Due to the deprecation of most of the HTML interface in XML, no web author will willingly use the new technology. It is more work for less reward. XML is a buzzword. It offers illusory benefits that only make sense to people who are pedantically concerned about hings like using em tags instead of b tags on their web pages.
I didn't say I can't do it. I have done it. That's why i can say it's fucken hard.
There's nothing I hate worse than the mentality of inexperienced teenagers who think they know it all.
The worldwide robotics industry has one primary market: toys. All robotic efforts are being directed towards this market. There is no other use for autonomous robots in the modern world.
Industrial robotics has failed due to costs of lawsuits and the success of deregulation and free trade at opening up cut price labour markets in the third world. Industrial robots are a thing of the past.
Autonomous robots are far to complex and fragile to be used for taks like space exploration. As someone who has programmed robots, I can assure you that the level of effort required to get a robot to move consistently in a straight line, let alone navigate areound obstacles through sensory input is prohibitive. Expecting a robot to work autonomously on a distant planet is absurd.
I am certain this story is mere marketing hype. In order to develop a market of "early adopters" for robot technology, an impression must be created that robots are futuristic high tech, and hence a desirable commodity to gadget freaks. This article was written to seed the market with subtle propaganda.
Expect to see this for sale at upscale electronic stores within two years. It's not the next voyager, it's the next aibo.
damn it.
The UN wasn't in any way involved in the US mission in Iraq that resulted in US deaths. That's a misconception spread by the US media.
The UN's humanitarian aid work in Somalia went quite well, despite what you may have been lead to believe.
UN didn't send you into Iraq. The Somalia mission that tesulted in a number of US casualties was not nder UN command. The US carrier groups in the gulf aren't there on UN orders. The war on drugs in South America isn't UN ordered. Panama wasn't UN ordered. The missile attack on Quadafi wasn't UN ordered.