Still, how many people here remember a toy called Capsela?
Oh, man! I hadn't thought about those things in years! They were pretty groovy, but not as neat at the Lego expert sets with all the gears and stuff.
I'd be very surprised if any six-year-old couldn't look at the loose connector at the end of the wire and the socket/connector on the battery and plug them together.
Sadly, I think most adults wouldn't be able to figure it out.
A few months back I saw a show about scientific "illiteracy". They went to the graduation of some Ivy League college, grabbed a couple of new grads and gave 'em a little test: given a battery, a flashlight bulb, an a piece of wire a few inches long, make the bulb light up. Something like 80 or 90 percent couldn't figure it out.
The GPL, which the Linux Kernel is distributed under, is viral.
No. A virus infects a host from the outside, and spreads to other hosts arbitrarily. If you want to use genetic metaphors, you might say that the GPL is a "dominant gene" - the "offspring" (derived work) of a GPLed work is always GPLed.
Any code that makes use of the Linux kernel must, therefore, be distributed under the GPL or a license that is compatible with the GPL.
No. Commerical Linux apps use the Linux kernel (all Linux apps use the Linux kernel, that's what makes them Linux apps!), and don't have to be GPLed. What is required is that any code that uses source from the Linux kernel must be GPLed.
Also, if the GPL'd software makes calls to other software or libraries, those software or libraries must also be distributed under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license. The only exceptions to this are, basically, operating systems.
No. GPLed code on a SPARCstation can make calls to the Solaris libc - that hardly requires that Sun release the source to its libc.
I wonder... If I signed license agreements with ASCAP and BMI, and paid them my licensing fees (for BMI, a minimum of $500 annually, or 1.75% of my gross revenues), could I run a legal, free, MP3 site?
I would guess that the folks at Imagine Radio do something like that.
They use RealAudio, not MP3, and you don't get to choose exactly what songs you get - although their client is just some JavaScript, and a fellow might hack up something more customizable, and save copies of the RealAudio files that come down the pipe. (Probably not worthwhile until they improve the quality of the audio, though.)
In theory, they work as a broadcater, same as a radio station. I guess the relevant difference between a broadcaster and a download site is who chooses the exact content that the user gets?
Of course we're better off trying to change the system peacefully. But, it is possible that the situation may deteriorate to the point where this is no longer possible. (And shame, shame, shame upon those who say "It can't happen in my country!" Friends, it can only happen where the citizens say "It can't happen here.")
So, back to the first question. Remember that armed resistance to the government is different that all-out warfare. A battalion of tanks is not particularly useful in house-to-house fighting, chasing small bands of rebels.
Being concerned about privacy means choosing what data to share and what not to share. I have my resume online, as well as a page of personal information - but I choose to publish them, and I choose the content.
Sure, they're doing quite well - because everybody else is paying the cost of lost productivity from MSWord macro viruses, Win95 crashes, et cetera - and that's for non-critical applications (no one with any sense should be using MSWord or Win95 for critical applications.)
The net economic value of Micro$oft's crappy software is certainly negative. Unfortunately, PHB's buy into the marketing.
Then you turn 40, and you notice that even though your resume is full of bleeding-edge skills, you get half as many phone calls as you did when you were 37.
Having watched my father (who's now 54) go thru this, I think it's more a matter of assumed career limits on programers than of age discrimination. There seems to be an (untrue, IMHO) assumption among employers that after, say, 10 or 15 years as a programmer, you've hit a final plateau and the only way to increase your value is to go in to (shudder) management.
They don't see 20 years of experience has being significantly more worthwhile than 10-15, so why pay for those extra years?
Of course, it is largely a matter of taste, and of what applications one is running - my most used programs emacs and exmh, where fixed-width fonts are desirable. Love the Lucida Typewriter - try
xterm -fn "-*-lucidatypewriter-bold-r-normal-sans-14-140-*" -fg white -bg black
Can't get a DOS window to look so good.
I've got no problem with the Times and Courier that I use as a default in Netscape; I use the same settings on my Win95 box at work, and like the X Courier more than the Win95 one.
WordPerfect for Linux is ugly, but so are all WYSIWYG word processors. Things that are supposed to be easy to read on paper are rarely easy to read on screen, and vice-versa.
When required, I compose in emacs then import into the word processor for formatting. But I still prefer to use Lyx for short letters and LaTeX for longer dead tree documents. (HTML for electronic ones, of course.)
I'll take my X Window System with fvwm over the MSWin GUI any day of the week and twice on Sundays. The fonts are less ugly, the scrollbars work better, I can choose the window manager that suits my fancy, and very easily configure appearance and behavior to my liking.
Yeah, the interface to exmh works a little differently than the interface to Netscape. So what? They're point and drool interfaces anyway; I could use 'em with one cerebral hemisphere tied behind my back. Speed? Only really an issue in games, so I run the SVGA version of Quake.
Re:Why Do I Have a Bad Feeling About This?
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GEEK Unions?
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Sure. Why not? This is the federal goverment we're talking about here; they've done things much worse than nationalize steel mills so we could send young men off to fight in someone else's civil war. These are the folks who brought you HUAC, MK-ULTRA, COINTELPRO, the War on (Some) Drugs, the CDA, and the Waco massacre.
Re:Technocratic Party
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GEEK Unions?
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There was a Monarchist Party in the student government at the University of Maryland, College Park about a decade ago. Their campain issues included building a beer-filled moat around campus. They were actually in power for a while, and the student president was addressed as "King".
But if you're looking for a party with no connection to the real world, I don't think you can beat Lyndon LaRouche and friends.
Re:We don't need no stinking unions
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GEEK Unions?
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And let's face it, unions are essentially lower case "c" communist in nature ("Workers of the world, unite!")...
Not quite. I believe unions predate Marx's Communist Manifesto. And labor unions were illegal in the Soviet Union and its satellites - remember Solidarity?
Question: Wouldn't this be a good issue to be addressed by the ACM?
Or perhaps the IEEE? I dunno; they really seem to be more academic than activist, and I think only a very small minority of tech workers belong to either one.
Re:The revolution happened without you
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What revolution? A quick look at the sites you name shows typical neoconservative blather (with a smidge more paranoia than usual, but hey, it's the 90's - if you're not paranoid you're not paying attention); nothing at all about Geek Power or unions for technology workers.
I love Brin's novels. I just picked up Sundiver to reread for the Nth time this morning with the intent to reread all the Uplift stories from beginning to end.
But, I generally find his commentary lacking. I find his suggestions that privacy is worthless, and his rose-colored view of American culture, off the mark and disturbing.
To hit a few points from the Salon article:
The U.S. has a "culture that defies the old homogenizing impulse by worshipping eccentricity, with unprecedented hunger for the different, new or strange"? Are we living in the same country, David? I think that recent/. discussion about the treatment of geeks tells us a lot about American attitudes towards the differerent or eccentric.
Nor is valuing the new or different over the old necessarily superior. There are two sorts of fools: one that says "This is the old way, and therefore better!", and one that says "This is the new way, and therefore better!"
The redemption of Vader is not akin to letting Adolph Hitler off the hook. A better comparision would be if one of Hitler's generals had, at the urging of his son, turned against and assasinated Hitler, losing his own life in the process.
Is that enough to merit redemption? It's a heavy question. Props to Lucas for daring to bring it up - how many other popular movies can you name that deal with redemption at all?
Brin simplifies Lucas' "Dark Side" to "If you get angry -- even at injustice and murder -- it will automatically and immediately transform you into an unalloyedly evil person!" That's an unjustified exageration. But, yes, when you act from anger, even anger at injustice and murder, your actions may be wrong. Many beleive that NATO bombing of Serbia fits into this category.
That does not mean that we should not act against injustice and murder; but we must let go of anger if we are to do so properly (both tactically and morally). (If I wanted to really get controvertial, I might point out that the Nazis were initially acting from anger against the injustices perpetrated against Germany after WWI.)
Yeah, there are some plot holes in TPM. But if you start picking at those, forget about any of the Star Wars movies - remember the first few minutes of A New Hope when Artoo and Threepio walk right thru the middle of a firefight? Plot convenience, the most powerful force in any fictional universe, protects them, just as it patchs holes in TPM. It's a grand scale epic - don't sweat the small stuff. (I'm reminded of the theme song for MST3k - "Tell yourself, `It's just a show, I probably should relax.'")
Let me use tools that function properly and that I know how to use, and I don't need support.
Yes, there's an expense in supporting diversity. (With proprietary software, there are also licencing cost issues; 100 copies of M$ Exmange might be cheaper than 50 copies of Exmange plus 50 copies of Bloated Notes.) But there's more of an expense when your talented and expensive Unix geek has to waste half an hour trying to get Bloated Notes on his Win95 desktop to attach a file to a message (only to find that it's a known bug that sometimes it just plain won't), when he could do it instantly using his client of choice, exmh.
You save on training, and increase productivity, when users can use tools with which they are already skilled. Let the clueless have whatever the local default is, but don't hobble the clueful.
Yeah, hacking naked rocks. I've only done it while telecommuting though - I don't think it would go over well at my current contract, IBM. (Unless maybe I painted my whole body blue.)
I do not understand where this wrongheaded idea that "everyone needs to run the same mail client in order to work together" comes from. There's no need to all run the same software in order to work together. Using common protocols and formats, and letting users choose the software interface that they prefer, works much better.
Use SMTP and POP3 for email, local newsgroups (NNTP) for open discussions, web pages for read-only information, and NFS (or SAMBA) for file sharing. Let users pick the mail, news and web clients, and OSes, that they work with best. Then, Netscapers and IE-ers and Opera-ers, Exchangers and Notesers and MHers and Piners, Linux-heads and BSD-ers and Solaris-folks and Mac-fans and NT-ites and, yea, even those poor souls trapped in DOS, can all go boldly together into the bright brave new world.
If you want to "protect" your children from pornography, try supervising them. Might find it much more effective than locking people in cages for sending out jpegs of naked people doing what naked people have been doing since there were people.
Why not an emotion register? AIBO (the robot dog) has a simple emotion" state, according to the Sony website. (Sorry, don't recall the URL - just followed a banner ad).
... if (been_kicked)
if (++anger >= BITE_THRESHHOLD)
bite_hand_that_feeds_me();
... Emotion is just a biochemical thing - the level of adrenaline and other chemicals and the excitaition of certain neurons. No reason why there can't be an equivalent in robots. (ST:TNG fans might recall Data's emotion chip.)
We have an existence proof of the possibility of intelligent, mobile, and interactive information processing systems. We call the existing ones "human beings".
There seems to be no reason why there can't be equally intelligent information processing systems based on more efficient silicon and steel rather than meat and gristle. We don't even have to be smart enough to program them - just set up genetic algorithms and let them evolve intelligence. (See Rudy Rucker's novels "Hardware" and "Software", for example.)
Turing didn't use the phrase "Artificial Intelligence" when describing his famous test. He starts with the question, "Can machines think?", and then replaces it almost immediately with the imitation game. The Turing test is concerned exclusively with human-like behavior.
AI is a much broader term. "Intelligence", in this sense, simply means problem solving ability. Old-school AI - expert systems, minimax algorithms, theorem provers, and the like - tries to mimic abstract reasoning. New-school AI - then work of folks like Rodney Brooks - asks how biological organisms interact with their environment to get things done and tries to apply that to robots and computer systems.
Expert systems are type of old-school AI - so no foul in calling this AI.
Actually, according to the article referenced above, the probe orginally was intended to crash on the lunar surface when its power ran out. They've just decided to make the crash more interesting and useful.
It's not a question of how much spam costs me personally, but how much it costs us all - users and ISPs as a whole. How much disk space gets taken up by spam? How much bandwidth is wasted? How many admin-hours are spent tracking down spammers and whacking them with clue-by-fours?
Those expenses all get folded in to your ISP fees.
Slashdot Mirror
A few months back I saw a show about scientific "illiteracy". They went to the graduation of some Ivy League college, grabbed a couple of new grads and gave 'em a little test: given a battery, a flashlight bulb, an a piece of wire a few inches long, make the bulb light up. Something like 80 or 90 percent couldn't figure it out.
Folks, the GPL isn't all that arcane of obscure. Read it for yourselves at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.
They use RealAudio, not MP3, and you don't get to choose exactly what songs you get - although their client is just some JavaScript, and a fellow might hack up something more customizable, and save copies of the RealAudio files that come down the pipe. (Probably not worthwhile until they improve the quality of the audio, though.)
In theory, they work as a broadcater, same as a radio station. I guess the relevant difference between a broadcaster and a download site is who chooses the exact content that the user gets?
So, back to the first question. Remember that armed resistance to the government is different that all-out warfare. A battalion of tanks is not particularly useful in house-to-house fighting, chasing small bands of rebels.
It's about choice, not silence.
The net economic value of Micro$oft's crappy software is certainly negative. Unfortunately, PHB's buy into the marketing.
They don't see 20 years of experience has being significantly more worthwhile than 10-15, so why pay for those extra years?
xterm -fn "-*-lucidatypewriter-bold-r-normal-sans-14-140-*" -fg white -bg black
Can't get a DOS window to look so good.
I've got no problem with the Times and Courier that I use as a default in Netscape; I use the same settings on my Win95 box at work, and like the X Courier more than the Win95 one.
WordPerfect for Linux is ugly, but so are all WYSIWYG word processors. Things that are supposed to be easy to read on paper are rarely easy to read on screen, and vice-versa.
When required, I compose in emacs then import into the word processor for formatting. But I still prefer to use Lyx for short letters and LaTeX for longer dead tree documents. (HTML for electronic ones, of course.)
Yeah, the interface to exmh works a little differently than the interface to Netscape. So what? They're point and drool interfaces anyway; I could use 'em with one cerebral hemisphere tied behind my back. Speed? Only really an issue in games, so I run the SVGA version of Quake.
Sure. Why not? This is the federal goverment we're talking about here; they've done things much worse than nationalize steel mills so we could send young men off to fight in someone else's civil war. These are the folks who brought you HUAC, MK-ULTRA, COINTELPRO, the War on (Some) Drugs, the CDA, and the Waco massacre.
But if you're looking for a party with no connection to the real world, I don't think you can beat Lyndon LaRouche and friends.
Not quite. I believe unions predate Marx's Communist Manifesto. And labor unions were illegal in the Soviet Union and its satellites - remember Solidarity?
Question: Wouldn't this be a good issue to be addressed by the ACM?
Or perhaps the IEEE? I dunno; they really seem to be more academic than activist, and I think only a very small minority of tech workers belong to either one.
So, did you have a point?
But, I generally find his commentary lacking. I find his suggestions that privacy is worthless, and his rose-colored view of American culture, off the mark and disturbing.
To hit a few points from the Salon article:
- The U.S. has a "culture that defies the old homogenizing impulse by worshipping eccentricity, with unprecedented hunger for the different, new or strange"? Are we living in the same country, David? I think that recent
/. discussion about the treatment of geeks tells us a lot about American attitudes towards the differerent or eccentric. - The redemption of Vader is not akin to letting Adolph Hitler off the hook. A better comparision would be if one of Hitler's generals had, at the urging of his son, turned against and assasinated Hitler, losing his own life in the process.
- Brin simplifies Lucas' "Dark Side" to "If you get angry -- even at injustice and murder -- it will automatically and immediately transform you into an unalloyedly evil person!" That's an unjustified exageration. But, yes, when you act from anger, even anger at injustice and murder, your actions may be wrong. Many beleive that NATO bombing of Serbia fits into this category.
Yeah, there are some plot holes in TPM. But if you start picking at those, forget about any of the Star Wars movies - remember the first few minutes of A New Hope when Artoo and Threepio walk right thru the middle of a firefight? Plot convenience, the most powerful force in any fictional universe, protects them, just as it patchs holes in TPM. It's a grand scale epic - don't sweat the small stuff. (I'm reminded of the theme song for MST3k - "Tell yourself, `It's just a show, I probably should relax.'")Nor is valuing the new or different over the old necessarily superior. There are two sorts of fools: one that says "This is the old way, and therefore better!", and one that says "This is the new way, and therefore better!"
Is that enough to merit redemption? It's a heavy question. Props to Lucas for daring to bring it up - how many other popular movies can you name that deal with redemption at all?
That does not mean that we should not act against injustice and murder; but we must let go of anger if we are to do so properly (both tactically and morally). (If I wanted to really get controvertial, I might point out that the Nazis were initially acting from anger against the injustices perpetrated against Germany after WWI.)
One might think that there will be some plot points left to be revealed in the remaining films, no?
Yes, there's an expense in supporting diversity. (With proprietary software, there are also licencing cost issues; 100 copies of M$ Exmange might be cheaper than 50 copies of Exmange plus 50 copies of Bloated Notes.) But there's more of an expense when your talented and expensive Unix geek has to waste half an hour trying to get Bloated Notes on his Win95 desktop to attach a file to a message (only to find that it's a known bug that sometimes it just plain won't), when he could do it instantly using his client of choice, exmh.
You save on training, and increase productivity, when users can use tools with which they are already skilled. Let the clueless have whatever the local default is, but don't hobble the clueful.
Use SMTP and POP3 for email, local newsgroups (NNTP) for open discussions, web pages for read-only information, and NFS (or SAMBA) for file sharing. Let users pick the mail, news and web clients, and OSes, that they work with best. Then, Netscapers and IE-ers and Opera-ers, Exchangers and Notesers and MHers and Piners, Linux-heads and BSD-ers and Solaris-folks and Mac-fans and NT-ites and, yea, even those poor souls trapped in DOS, can all go boldly together into the bright brave new world.
Diversity good. Monoculture bad.
If you want to "protect" your children from pornography, try supervising them. Might find it much more effective than locking people in cages for sending out jpegs of naked people doing what naked people have been doing since there were people.
if (been_kicked)
There seems to be no reason why there can't be equally intelligent information processing systems based on more efficient silicon and steel rather than meat and gristle. We don't even have to be smart enough to program them - just set up genetic algorithms and let them evolve intelligence. (See Rudy Rucker's novels "Hardware" and "Software", for example.)
AI is a much broader term. "Intelligence", in this sense, simply means problem solving ability. Old-school AI - expert systems, minimax algorithms, theorem provers, and the like - tries to mimic abstract reasoning. New-school AI - then work of folks like Rodney Brooks - asks how biological organisms interact with their environment to get things done and tries to apply that to robots and computer systems.
Expert systems are type of old-school AI - so no foul in calling this AI.
What's on the moon? Just for starters:
Actually, according to the article referenced above, the probe orginally was intended to crash on the lunar surface when its power ran out. They've just decided to make the crash more interesting and useful.
Those expenses all get folded in to your ISP fees.