Most of us want more liberal masters answerable to us, Libertarians simply appear to want us to have a choice of masters who don't give a stuff what we want.
Guess what, AC? This line is a whole hell of a lot more flamebait-y than the original post.
Libertarians, like Gentoo Linux wannabies, find excuses to promote their platform regardless of how irrelevent the advocacy.
First off, they're not Gentoo "wannabies" -- they're actually running Gentoo. Unless you have evidence to the contrary. Secondly, though it's true that Libertarian Party plugs show up in inappropriate places quite often, this is not an inappropriate forum. The article was full of instances of government bodies clamping down on free expression in stultifying and overbearing ways. Pointing out a political philosophy that seeks to reduce the power of government to perform said repression seems to me fairly ontopic.
I think the moderation here was fair.
I disagree. And in any case, why do you, an Anonymous Coward, feel you have the standing to give opinions on the moderation system? Log in if you want to be taken seriously.
well, in our government's defense (this time), those curtains were bought to hide the breasts simply to stop the press from acting like 5th graders trying to get politicians into a shot with the breast.
I must chime in along with the other reply, by sg3000. Photographers have in the past been eager to shoot people with the statues in the background -- but it this acting like 5th graders? These are photos that will be published by major news outlets. The photographers know if what they're doing is appropriate for the standards of their publication; and if a photo isn't appropriate, it won't be published at all.
In any case, the statues have remained unmolested through the decades they have been in place. It's taken the "Christian", censorious attitude of Attorney General Ashcroft to spend taxpayer dollars on covering the statues.
Four dimensional universes (and higher order dimensional spaces) also have topological problems which would make life difficult though you'll have to look those up for yourself.
More specifically, IIRC there was a statement in The Elegant Universe that said life (among other things) would be impossible in even-dimensional universes, due to something about how waves propagate through space.
Okay, I ended up doing the same cvs leech. I'm running Mandrake 9.1, the libs went to/usr/local/lib, but mplayer's configure script wasn't smart enough to find them. I don't know if mplayer would have just worked w/o a recompile, but anyway... I got a clue from some output in the configure.log file, and created a symbolic link in/lib to the libfaad.so.0 in/usr/local/lib; that got faad detected in configure, and the make went fine.
First, make sure you've downloaded the Quicktime codecs here.
Unzip and untar them to/usr/lib/win32.
Now, the problem I got here was that mplayer was apparently looking for the codecs in/usr/lib/win32, instead of/usr/lib/win32/qt6dlls -- the directory that came out of the tar file. So I just copied everything from qt6dlls up a level. That got video working for me.
So I've now got the trailer video working in mplayer, but the sound is still a nogo. It's encoded in AAC; the mplayer documentation says the FAAD decoder package can deal with that, and explains how to get the tarball from FAAD's CVS. I just picked up some rpms from PLF, and they seemed to install fine. Unfortunately, even after./configure ing with --enable-faad, mplayer claims it can't find the FAAD libraries. I've been looking at the configure script, but I'm not very well versed in bash scripting so I can't make out exactly what files it's looking for.
If anyone gets it to work, please post with details.
Your objection is noted. But let's be clear: it's a trivial difference between seizing someone and placing them in an unknown facility, and seizing someone and holding them incommunicado in a known facility.
Some of the South American governments were infamous for this.
So, the issue might be that he is being detained without due process or habeas corpus rights
It rolls off the tongue so smoothly, doesn't it? No due process, habeas corpus... no big deal.
please don't confuse the issue and say the US government "disappeared" him.
It's not confusing at all; the difference is trivial. At this point, all the U.S. has going for it is that Mr. Hawash will not be killed by his captors. Give it 5 more years, though, and maybe we'll be rapidly closing in on 1984's Oceania.
You would have a point if this story had been posted to the main page.
But it wasn't.
It was posted to the BSD section, where it's perfectly appropriate. I haven't noticed monthly/. BSD-section postings of the number of packages in NetBSD, and in any case I was moderately interested by this post.
So either you took time out to visit the BSD section, or you've set the/. option to collapse sections -- either way, if you're not interested, just ignore it.
OF something is classified then it now becomes a crime to mirror the data.
Huh? This isn't Soviet Russia (yet). Remember the Pentagon Papers?
The Constitution, the justices asserted, has a "heavy presumption," in favor of press freedom. The Court left open the possibility that dire consequences could result from publication of classified documents by newspapers, but said that the government had failed to prove that result in this instance.
The government can, and has in the past, won temporary restraining orders against publication of classified documents in certain cases, but there is a presumption of publicability.
And were talking a Jack booted Homeland security breaking down your door sort of crime.
Certainly not. How can you use this sort of lurid language to describe something like that, and then further on support the criminalization of publishing classified papers?
A government has a valid need to keep things secret [...]
Certainly. But only very, very rarely is this need immediately dire enough for publication of these "things" to be stopped. Solicitor General Erwin Griswold, who argued the Pentagon Papers case before the Supreme Court for the government's side, recanted his position and had the following to say in an op-ed piece years later:
It quickly becomes apparent to any person who has considera[ble] experience with classified material that there is massive overclassification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but rather with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another.
As I said, only vanishingly rarely does leaked classified information actually present a threat to national security.
[...] now with that being said we do still need ballance and this looks like nothing more than keeping things in the closet duing a war.
Right... 25 year-old "things" which have nothing to do with the current conflict. I think of much more import to the government is the fact that many members of the current administration were working in Washington 25 years ago. Perhaps certain document might prove... embarrassing?
Does the reveiwer know that those are the names of kernel modules, not C functions? Or did they just want to sound "hip" and put parentheses where they don't belong [...]
She's probably just echoing how they appear on the driver selector in the sound card config tool in HardDrake. That's Mandrake's hardware setup utility.
As to why Mandrake has the parentheses there, no idea.
Given that in the process of evaporation, a black hole emits radiation, at some point the radiation pressure from the evaporation would balance out the force of gravity pulling matter into the black hole so then the black hole might stabilize in size.
Whoa, whoa. Yeah, a very small black hole would emit enough radiation to completely counterbalance its own gravitational force, so that matter would stop coming flowing into it. But how would that make the size stable? With no more matter coming in, the black hole would just keep emitting radiation, getting smaller, and losing mass, until it evaporates.
To put it another way, it's not a stable limit, it's an unstable limit. If a black hole is accreting mass at a rate less than or equal to this limit, the black hole will shrink and evaporate; if a black hole is accreting mass at a rate greater than the limit, it will grow.
I'm right in saying "the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole is proportionate to its mass", but more properly it's directly proportional; i.e., the proportionality constant is 1.
Well, as long as I'm here, let's do some calculations. The article says the black hole's mass is 3 billion times that of our Sun, so multiply 3 km by 3 billion and you get 3 km * 3*10^9 = 9 billion km. To put things in perspective: the distance to Alpha Centauri is 3.8*10^16 m = 3.8*10^15 km, so this black hole's radius is only.0002% of the distance from here to the nearest star. Quite small, astronomically-speaking.
The other reply has some good information, but he doesn't cover
Now that they have a measure of the weight, if they know anything about the density or the size, they've got the other value as well.
Actually, the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole is proportionate to its mass. A black hole with mass the same as the Sun would have a 3 km radius; so just do the math if you want to find the radius of this one.
Also, your first link, to "google.com", doesn't work. This corrected link works, but it doesn't support your claim of "that whole crashing thing" -- the reviewer only had YDL crash on him once, due to its energy-saving behavior on laptops. I can't check your other 2 links to see whether they add more evidence of laptop crashing, since neither of the sites resolve (in Mozilla 1.1).
In any case, the tone of the first review is generally positive; he ends by saying "[YDL] is still the best Linux distro for the Mac I have come across to date, and I'll certainly be keeping it around, and tracking upgrades with interest."
You are under no obligation to send your changes back to the community under the GPL.
However, if you base your product on or incorporate GPL-licensed code, and you release that product to anyone through any channel, you are required to give a machine-readable copy of your source code at no charge to anybody who asks for it. Which is effectively the same thing.
This is wrong. I believe you're referring to option (b) of the following GPL section:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
Note the "or"s. If you release your product "to anyone through any channel", as you say, then you could use option (a) and accompany the product with its source. You need not do anything more than that, for anyone else.
Was anyone else disturbed by a demeaning and negative tone from the article's writer toward modern games and gamers? I don't think he's ever played any computer games at all.
It begins at the end of the first page, with "But her predictions and passionate beliefs have been lost in the glitz, megahertz and adrenaline of modern gaming." This line makes me think the author just needed an "angle" to make the story interesting, and the one he chose was "Bunten battles the monolithic Orwellian forces of modern game publishing".
Here's some more, from the second page:
Most of the above genres are extinct today. Instead, the industry has narrowed its focus to just a few, mostly violent, niches, guaranteed to sell: the D&D franchise product, the first-person shooter, the real-time strategy game. Increasingly, Bunten found the gaming industry unreceptive to her ideas.
That's just total bullshit. The kind of mega-corp stagnation that companies like EA have brought to the games they produce does stifle innovation, but it's not a case of "we will only make these game genres". Saying there's a "D&D franchise product" niche is ludicrous; there have been maybe 5 of those in the past 5 years (Baldur's Gate, BGII, Planescape: Torment, Pool of Radiance, Neverwinter Nights,... ?). Though there may be many first-person games, most of them aren't straight FPS. That doesn't encompass games like Half-Life, Counterstrike, Deus Ex, etc., that just happen to be played from the first person. And there are as many turn-based strategy games as there are RTS, and many of the turn-based ones are quite unique. Anyway, I'm not familiar with her history, but no game publisher would be unreceptive to a talented designer whose games had been fun, and sold sufficiently. No one cares what your ideas are, as long as they work.
More:
Unfortunately, a weird and wonderful multiplayer game about capitalistic robots was destined for trouble in the dawning mass market of late '80s solo games. With graphics-intensive games like Wing Commander, glitzy "bells and whistles" were becoming increasingly important in selling software.
Total bullshit. Wing Commander did well because it kicked ass. It was fun; that's all that mattered then, it's all that matters now. What the fuck is he talking about with "destined for trouble", anyway? The game was released; did it not sell well or something?
But now, formerly inconceivable amounts of computing power are splurged on the visceral thrill of the death match.
You've never played a deathmatch, so what would you know about it?
When was the last time a computer game felt like something other than a sequel or an incremental improvement? And how many young would-be Buntens are stuck coding yet another snowboarding game?
Jesus fucking christ. He wants recent great games? How about Deus Ex, Homeworld, Baldur's Gate, Half-Life? And if that snowboarding game is a good game, that's all that matters.
The article mentions the "education" efforts the RIAA, MPAA, etc., have been putting out, trying to convince people that filesharing is immoral, unethical, whatever. If large segments of the population don't think this is the case, the *AAs are going to have a devil of a time convincing them.
What percentage of heroin users think there's anything wrong with their actions ?
There's nothing morally wrong with heroin use -- if someone wants to fuck themself up, that's his right.
What percentage of the 9/11 terrorists thought there's anything wrong with their actions ?
Uh oh, filesharing == terrorism? Where to begin...
What percentage of Timothy McVeigh's philosophical brethren think anything's wrong with his actions ?
More terrorism comparison...
What percentage of NAMBLA members think they're doing anything wrong.
Oooooh, child molestation! You're really going at it.
Hey, this isn't a flame.
I'm afraid a/. poll would return overwhelming results against you on that one, buddy.
It's just that when someone trots out an obviously meaningless statement, they need to be called out.
It's not meaningless, it's the opinion of a segment of the population. They asked other questions too, so it doesn't all boil down to a "criminals don't think what they're doing is wrong" statement.
I can see how the sentiment for something like this might develop in the university's administration, but this is fucked up.
They'll shut down network access for a student automatically, at the first receipt of any DMCA complaint? No investigation, nothing? I'm sure groups like the Scientologists, whom/. has covered previously, will find this much to their liking. Some student has posted information on a school site that some group doesn't like? Send a DMCA complaint, and the school won't blink twice before taking that shit down.
I'm sure the school thinks there will be a great deal of volume of complaints, much too many for it to deal fairly with each case, so it's better to just err on the side of caution and presume students are guilty from the get-go. Well, there will be a large volume of complaints, now that the school has completely dropped trow and spread cheeks.
[RIAA guy]Hey, Valenti! And you, BSA whore! Point your complaint mills at the University of Utah! They don't even check 'em![/]
We've all heard about crap like complaints from the MPAA (under penalty of perjury!) about someone sharing sharing Harry Potter files, only to find they're actually Harry Potter book reports. Yes, I'm sure the amount of legitimate stuff is swamped by the illegal copyright infringement, but that's no excuse for an institution with as important a role as a university to bend over like this.
"We'll correct the oversight of something not happening by making that thing happen?"
Yes, that does make sense.
You see, right now, classic gaming and arcade culture haven't been recognized by any segment of popular culture. However, a large percentage of young adults (and, indeed, older adults) today played video games as a child (or still do). Hence, writing an accessible book that recognizes this experience will automatically become a part of "popular" culture, since a large portion of the population will be interested in the book's subject matter.
QED, baby. Take a philosophy course sometime, it really can change the way you perceive the world.
Sure, they stole the idea for from another old game....
Freelancer was developed by a company called Digital Anvil, which was acquired by Microsoft a couple of years ago. Digital Anvil started development on Freelancer ~5 years ago, so Microsoft hasn't had so much of an influence on it.
But more importantly, Digital Anvil was founded by Chris (and Erin) Roberts, who made the Wing Commander and Privateer games at Origin. So Microsoft didn't steal the idea for Freelancer; Chris Roberts took it with him from Privateer. Unless you were referring to Elite, in which case Roberts stole that idea for Privateer.
Dude, I just want to salute your post. Sometimes one of the best things about/. is finding like-minded people who share one's opinion on a topic. Like reading a thread on evolution and finding that the almost all of the creationist lunatics have been modded below one's threshold, so you don't even have to see them.
I agree with you 100%. On with genetic design; Gattaca, here we come!
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In any case, the statues have remained unmolested through the decades they have been in place. It's taken the "Christian", censorious attitude of Attorney General Ashcroft to spend taxpayer dollars on covering the statues.
After all that, the trailer's not bad, either.
First, make sure you've downloaded the Quicktime codecs here.
Unzip and untar them to /usr/lib/win32.
Now, the problem I got here was that mplayer was apparently looking for the codecs in /usr/lib/win32, instead of /usr/lib/win32/qt6dlls -- the directory that came out of the tar file. So I just copied everything from qt6dlls up a level. That got video working for me.
So I've now got the trailer video working in mplayer, but the sound is still a nogo. It's encoded in AAC; the mplayer documentation says the FAAD decoder package can deal with that, and explains how to get the tarball from FAAD's CVS. I just picked up some rpms from PLF, and they seemed to install fine. Unfortunately, even after ./configure ing with --enable-faad, mplayer claims it can't find the FAAD libraries. I've been looking at the configure script, but I'm not very well versed in bash scripting so I can't make out exactly what files it's looking for.
If anyone gets it to work, please post with details.
Bilbo's Party Chart.
But it wasn't.
It was posted to the BSD section, where it's perfectly appropriate. I haven't noticed monthly /. BSD-section postings of the number of packages in NetBSD, and in any case I was moderately interested by this post.
So either you took time out to visit the BSD section, or you've set the /. option to collapse sections -- either way, if you're not interested, just ignore it.
As to why Mandrake has the parentheses there, no idea.
To put it another way, it's not a stable limit, it's an unstable limit. If a black hole is accreting mass at a rate less than or equal to this limit, the black hole will shrink and evaporate; if a black hole is accreting mass at a rate greater than the limit, it will grow.
I'm right in saying "the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole is proportionate to its mass", but more properly it's directly proportional; i.e., the proportionality constant is 1.
Well, as long as I'm here, let's do some calculations. The article says the black hole's mass is 3 billion times that of our Sun, so multiply 3 km by 3 billion and you get 3 km * 3*10^9 = 9 billion km. To put things in perspective: the distance to Alpha Centauri is 3.8*10^16 m = 3.8*10^15 km, so this black hole's radius is only .0002% of the distance from here to the nearest star. Quite small, astronomically-speaking.
This page has some good info.
Also, this page, at least, says it would take 88 TB = 704 Tb to digitize the LoC.
That's correct; 30.992 Tb/hour. With 1 LoC = 80 Tb, we now get 30.992 Tb/hour / 80 Tb =With the much larger figure of 1 LoC = 88 TB = 704 Tb, we get 30.992 Tb/hour / 704 Tb = .044 LoC/hour.
Also, your first link, to "google.com", doesn't work. This corrected link works, but it doesn't support your claim of "that whole crashing thing" -- the reviewer only had YDL crash on him once, due to its energy-saving behavior on laptops. I can't check your other 2 links to see whether they add more evidence of laptop crashing, since neither of the sites resolve (in Mozilla 1.1).
In any case, the tone of the first review is generally positive; he ends by saying "[YDL] is still the best Linux distro for the Mac I have come across to date, and I'll certainly be keeping it around, and tracking upgrades with interest."
It begins at the end of the first page, with "But her predictions and passionate beliefs have been lost in the glitz, megahertz and adrenaline of modern gaming." This line makes me think the author just needed an "angle" to make the story interesting, and the one he chose was "Bunten battles the monolithic Orwellian forces of modern game publishing".
Here's some more, from the second page:
That's just total bullshit. The kind of mega-corp stagnation that companies like EA have brought to the games they produce does stifle innovation, but it's not a case of "we will only make these game genres". Saying there's a "D&D franchise product" niche is ludicrous; there have been maybe 5 of those in the past 5 years (Baldur's Gate, BGII, Planescape: Torment, Pool of Radiance, Neverwinter Nights,More:
Total bullshit. Wing Commander did well because it kicked ass. It was fun; that's all that mattered then, it's all that matters now. What the fuck is he talking about with "destined for trouble", anyway? The game was released; did it not sell well or something? You've never played a deathmatch, so what would you know about it? Jesus fucking christ. He wants recent great games? How about Deus Ex, Homeworld, Baldur's Gate, Half-Life? And if that snowboarding game is a good game, that's all that matters.They'll shut down network access for a student automatically, at the first receipt of any DMCA complaint? No investigation, nothing? I'm sure groups like the Scientologists, whom /. has covered previously, will find this much to their liking. Some student has posted information on a school site that some group doesn't like? Send a DMCA complaint, and the school won't blink twice before taking that shit down.
I'm sure the school thinks there will be a great deal of volume of complaints, much too many for it to deal fairly with each case, so it's better to just err on the side of caution and presume students are guilty from the get-go. Well, there will be a large volume of complaints, now that the school has completely dropped trow and spread cheeks.
[RIAA guy]Hey, Valenti! And you, BSA whore! Point your complaint mills at the University of Utah! They don't even check 'em![/]
We've all heard about crap like complaints from the MPAA (under penalty of perjury!) about someone sharing sharing Harry Potter files, only to find they're actually Harry Potter book reports. Yes, I'm sure the amount of legitimate stuff is swamped by the illegal copyright infringement, but that's no excuse for an institution with as important a role as a university to bend over like this.
Yes, that does make sense.
You see, right now, classic gaming and arcade culture haven't been recognized by any segment of popular culture. However, a large percentage of young adults (and, indeed, older adults) today played video games as a child (or still do). Hence, writing an accessible book that recognizes this experience will automatically become a part of "popular" culture, since a large portion of the population will be interested in the book's subject matter.
QED, baby. Take a philosophy course sometime, it really can change the way you perceive the world.
But more importantly, Digital Anvil was founded by Chris (and Erin) Roberts, who made the Wing Commander and Privateer games at Origin. So Microsoft didn't steal the idea for Freelancer; Chris Roberts took it with him from Privateer. Unless you were referring to Elite, in which case Roberts stole that idea for Privateer.
I agree with you 100%. On with genetic design; Gattaca, here we come!