And if he's implying that he is paying his tuition aid-free out of his own account, well, I can imagine that for him, going to an Ivy League college must be a lot more romantic and a much easier choice over going directly into the workforce, than for many others.
Damn, it's scary to know that Linux isn't in CVS. I mean, hell, all they'd have to do is use readers, writers, and avail files to ensure only Linux Gods got to commit. Sheesh...are they afraid of the box being hacked or something?
If you read the DVD board, somebody said that while he was not logged in, with cookies disabled, and a netscape cache of maximum 0 size, Amazon fluctuated the prices up and then dropped them. There doesn't seem to be any reasonable criteria dependent on the person. Either random, or raising the price each time to "scare" people into buying it early before it goes higher.
That's just plain dishonest. While you may have special discounts because you are a teacher or have some frequent customer program which has a written out set of rules, it is completely dishonest for a store, for instance, to randomly change prices on people who didn't even want to opt-in.
Why should be at all find it strange that games creating by and for a certain type of people might actually include themes and characters through which those people can live vicariously. Duh. I mean we have shoot-em-ups because it is nice to escape our mundane world of staring at screens, shuffling paper, answering phones, preparing food, etc., to go crazy and blow stuff up. We have race car games because fans can't actually race in real life. We have RPGs in which characters and themes are those which the creators, for whatever reason, would like to play out.
This is surprising? If fantasy had absolutely no roots in reality, it wouldn't be very relevant or interesting would it?
Well, IANAEconomist, but I think technically we are in a post-industrial service-oriented age (well, at least a lot of the "western" world). When you can live entirely in a house, without going outside to obtain resources, pay bills, etc., then we are starting to approach something like an "information age". Not that farmers and industrial workers disappear off the face of the earth, but that everybody is so specialized, and everything is connected via an "information" network, that the majority of people's needs can be obtained impersonally, without any interaction with people or work specifically towards that resource. Used to be if you wanted bread, you farmed and made and baked it yourself, or at least went to the baker. In an "information age" we could hypothetically have smart agents that know what we need to get and just get it for us and it arrives at the door, or better yet, right in our fridge.
Hey, is somebody archiving these gems? There should be an archive on Slashdot for these. And some of the haikus and Anonymous Emily Dickenson, and OOG the Open Source Caveman.
Well, I decided that I would finally get my stuff together and build my own system (yeah, like how hard is that?). So I read review after review on motherboards, cpus, video cards, etc. I got an AMD K6-III 400, an Asus P5a, Creative sound and video card, and cdrom, and standard 3Com NIC and modem. I decided I'd give Windows 2000 a spin because I use NT at the office, and wanted to be one of the ones on the block experimenting with Windows 2000. Well, I don't know if it is my hardware, but that Windows 2000 box is an unstable piece of shit. Totally unstable. Getting it installed was a nightmare...had to do it twice because of some goddamn BIOS option that was causing Windows to lock up on boot. I have a big honking fan over the cpu but the machine seems to still randomly reboot. My cdrom drive broke just a day or so ago and the damn machine rebooted in the middle of my writing an email to get it replaced. I get blue screens frequently. Games won't install (but stupidly if copied from another windows 95 machine, work just fine).
Moral of the story: if you are installing a windows product either make damn sure all your hardware is on the compatibility list, and then hold your breath, or pay premium and buy retail and hope you're not saddled with low quality components.
But wait, I thought no contract could take away rights. E.g., I can't sign a contract that takes away my right to free speech for some amount of money. Likewise, if reverse engineering was a "right", then no contract could prevent me from, say, buying a product and reverse engineering it. I guess the question is whether reverse engineering is a "right", or just an activity which is not illegal.
Of course I'd prefer no ads at all...but if they *have* to, then I'd prefer a tasteful and relevant ad system, instead of pasting arbitrary irrelevant ads all over the place. If I'm going to get beaten, I'd at least like to choose the instrument.
And if I understand my bio-geek gf, there are several gigantic and suspicious bottlenecks in the evolutionary tree that could suggest more than one cataclysm in the earth's history.
When patents and anti-patents collide, a gigantic burst of litigation energy is released. Patents are theorized to be composed of six sub-patent particles, called "actions", named, arbitrarily: sue, settle, bribe, extort, lock-out, and monopolize. Hopefully definitive proof will come after the IES (International Ethics Smasher) collider is built.
Dammit...can I ever expect something from Katz in which he doesn't claim somebody is a hacker. It was a fine review except for that gratuitous hacker plug.
Yes, but do "more important" sites get a heavier weight of vote? I.e. if a democratically more "relevant" site links to another site, is *that* vote weightier than the others? I would then say it is more of a meritocracy. I.e., Random User's link is *less* important than MegaSite's link.
This is the type of adverstising I wouldn't mind: when you search for something that is obviously a product or service, Google would put up an ad in your search results for that product or service or related products or services. Keep the main page clean and ad-less for those who are searching for generic things. If you are doing a specific search for some product or service, or some page concerning a product or service, then, like Deja, stick in a *relevant* ad. I don't mind that all too much. What I mind is totally irrelevant garish ads distracting my eyes with flashy colors or half-nude women. I think they could do targeted ads tastefully. For example, like Slashdot has Open-source on-topic sortof ads.
The next thing that I might allow, is customization of google...say, create a *simple* profile that allows google to track the *general* type of searches you do, and organize a custom subtree of more relevant sites that it can use to search first or give more priority. I find myself searching for the same things over and over, so this would actually be useful.
Re:This is the right thing to do
on
TigerCloning
·
· Score: 3
First of all there is the matter of a viable gene pool, as somebody mentioned. Either we just clone it with itself over and over and just have a freakish line of tigers with genetic problems, or we breed it with some close relative, thereby eroding its genetic uniquiness.
That's besides the fact that its habitat has probably changed. Where would we put such a thing? What would it eat (rabbits maybe)? What would eat it? I don't see how bringing back a life form just to stick it in a cage so we can gawk at it a "net benefit". That's a waste of effort, and cruel.
You're right, there may be no cosmic plan...but that doesn't mean there doesn't *have* to be one. We can make up our own, like: we shall not bring back the dead for shits and giggles. Just because we *can* doesn't mean we *should* (and this is in a totally a-religous sense). Arrogance of doing everything we could just because we could got us some of our major problems (antibiotic resistence? new diseases emerging from strange places, due to climate changes, and/or tampering with the environment). It is a very stupid mentality to think that if something doesn't hurt us today, we might as well do it. We should be thinking in decades, not weeks or years.
And what friggen purpose (other than scientific study) would bringing back a *mammoth* have? What, let them roam the midwestern plains or something?
Ok, can somebody educate me as to where this actually fits in with XFree86? Is this just a release of X libraries? Or is this a non-free version of X that is competing with XFree86? Where does it fit in? Can I download it, recompile it, and then stick it into my XFree86 install and magically gain new features?
I would imagine in places where security is an issue, the government should be looking at BSD first. Not to diss Linux, but OpenBSD is reknowned for it's "security by default" out of the box. If anything, I would think the government would err on the side of security (so their government hire doesn't get the bleeding edge driver or graphics utility, boohoo).
If the gov does use Linux widescale, I would think they should scrutinize all the distros, and come up with one STRONGLY suggested one so all machines will be compatible and fixes can be applied everywhere at once.
I don't buy this whole "interactive thing". TV is not interactive. A net news feed is not interactive. Hell, very few games are truly interactive (unless you call just moving around the mouse and pressing keys truly interactive). None of them really inform you or engage your mind. They are all pretty much passive.
What is happening is that the internet has enabled a flood of omnipresent information. People need to filter out that information and get it when they want it. So they use "on-demand" news, or niche news sources, like Slashdot for instance. But really I think this is just having the effect of shortening attention spans. There simply is no time to slowly digest a full featured article on every news event. The next generation is not going use so much "interactive" news, but quick fast, non-substantial news.
So I don't think all this push, on-demand, niche, news coverage is really going to overcome the traditional forms completely. People *like* to sit down with a newspaper or magazine and read at liesure. People *like* large features with a lot of content (I'm guessing part of the reason we have a traditional journalist like John Katz around). Unfortunately, those "static" mediums have just turned into advertising mediums with some tidbits of news thrown in. Watch the BBC on PBS, and then watch your local "international" news coverage.
"Hey, polluting is bad"
"So why aren't YOU out cleaning up pollution"
Supporting lesser goods is NOT mutually exclusive with supporting greater goods. Sheesh. We can support "freedom" of software AND freedom of people. I don't think either hurts the other. In fact I think reinforcing ANY good helps ALL good.
I really see the application/applet/web site merging into this Webplication thing. I am a Java developer and I write middleware CORBA infrastructure for our app developers. Every time a new application comes a long a standalone application is written, then perhaps an applet, and then maybe a web page backended by JSP or Servlets. If you think about it, the piece in the middle tier is really doing the *exact* same functionality for each of these pieces. Each of these pieces is just a presentation layer. I'm had thoughts in my head about how these things could merge. I have a set of classes that enable a standalone application to seamlessly double as an applet (it detects its environment and reacts accordingly) making life much easier for the developer. But that doesn't really supply the web page aspect of it. What one could do is use some of the GUI/HTML mappings to use pseudo-widgets in the middle-tier code to make it easy to map a GUI to HTML. But that just presents more work. What really needs to be done, and I see it happening now, is that the *client* must have a _standard presentation layer_ for all applications, distributed or not. I think Mozilla, and SlashXB are the signs of this. Now, I don't have to think about writing standalone applications, or applets, or a web page. Using a unified presentation layer, the same middle-tier logic object can feed all these clients no matter where they are, with *identical* user interfaces. Needless to say, this is cool.
Yeah, but Yahoo links to Slashdot which links to which might link to something which might link to DeCSS...at what point does it become illegal? It's just stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just about to say the same thing: HA!
I'd like to hear his opinion in four years.
And if he's implying that he is paying his tuition aid-free out of his own account, well, I can imagine that for him, going to an Ivy League college must be a lot more romantic and a much easier choice over going directly into the workforce, than for many others.
Also I suppose "older" people have higher maintenance costs, as far as health care, and family leave, and basically having a life.
Damn, it's scary to know that Linux isn't in CVS. I mean, hell, all they'd have to do is use readers, writers, and avail files to ensure only Linux Gods got to commit. Sheesh...are they afraid of the box being hacked or something?
If you read the DVD board, somebody said that while he was not logged in, with cookies disabled, and a netscape cache of maximum 0 size, Amazon fluctuated the prices up and then dropped them. There doesn't seem to be any reasonable criteria dependent on the person. Either random, or raising the price each time to "scare" people into buying it early before it goes higher.
That's just plain dishonest. While you may have special discounts because you are a teacher or have some frequent customer program which has a written out set of rules, it is completely dishonest for a store, for instance, to randomly change prices on people who didn't even want to opt-in.
Sorry, I can't spell...
Why should be at all find it strange that games creating by and for a certain type of people might actually include themes and characters through which those people can live vicariously. Duh. I mean we have shoot-em-ups because it is nice to escape our mundane world of staring at screens, shuffling paper, answering phones, preparing food, etc., to go crazy and blow stuff up. We have race car games because fans can't actually race in real life. We have RPGs in which characters and themes are those which the creators, for whatever reason, would like to play out.
This is surprising? If fantasy had absolutely no roots in reality, it wouldn't be very relevant or interesting would it?
Well, IANAEconomist, but I think technically we are in a post-industrial service-oriented age (well, at least a lot of the "western" world). When you can live entirely in a house, without going outside to obtain resources, pay bills, etc., then we are starting to approach something like an "information age". Not that farmers and industrial workers disappear off the face of the earth, but that everybody is so specialized, and everything is connected via an "information" network, that the majority of people's needs can be obtained impersonally, without any interaction with people or work specifically towards that resource. Used to be if you wanted bread, you farmed and made and baked it yourself, or at least went to the baker. In an "information age" we could hypothetically have smart agents that know what we need to get and just get it for us and it arrives at the door, or better yet, right in our fridge.
Hey, is somebody archiving these gems? There should be an archive on Slashdot for these. And some of the haikus and Anonymous Emily Dickenson, and OOG the Open Source Caveman.
Well, I decided that I would finally get my stuff together and build my own system (yeah, like how hard is that?). So I read review after review on motherboards, cpus, video cards, etc. I got an AMD K6-III 400, an Asus P5a, Creative sound and video card, and cdrom, and standard 3Com NIC and modem. I decided I'd give Windows 2000 a spin because I use NT at the office, and wanted to be one of the ones on the block experimenting with Windows 2000. Well, I don't know if it is my hardware, but that Windows 2000 box is an unstable piece of shit. Totally unstable. Getting it installed was a nightmare...had to do it twice because of some goddamn BIOS option that was causing Windows to lock up on boot. I have a big honking fan over the cpu but the machine seems to still randomly reboot. My cdrom drive broke just a day or so ago and the damn machine rebooted in the middle of my writing an email to get it replaced. I get blue screens frequently. Games won't install (but stupidly if copied from another windows 95 machine, work just fine).
Moral of the story: if you are installing a windows product either make damn sure all your hardware is on the compatibility list, and then hold your breath, or pay premium and buy retail and hope you're not saddled with low quality components.
But wait, I thought no contract could take away rights. E.g., I can't sign a contract that takes away my right to free speech for some amount of money. Likewise, if reverse engineering was a "right", then no contract could prevent me from, say, buying a product and reverse engineering it. I guess the question is whether reverse engineering is a "right", or just an activity which is not illegal.
Of course I'd prefer no ads at all...but if they *have* to, then I'd prefer a tasteful and relevant ad system, instead of pasting arbitrary irrelevant ads all over the place. If I'm going to get beaten, I'd at least like to choose the instrument.
And if I understand my bio-geek gf, there are several gigantic and suspicious bottlenecks in the evolutionary tree that could suggest more than one cataclysm in the earth's history.
When patents and anti-patents collide, a gigantic burst of litigation energy is released. Patents are theorized to be composed of six sub-patent particles, called "actions", named, arbitrarily: sue, settle, bribe, extort, lock-out, and monopolize. Hopefully definitive proof will come after the IES (International Ethics Smasher) collider is built.
WTF!? There was a *guy* *inside* R2D2??
*totally aghast*
Dammit...can I ever expect something from Katz in which he doesn't claim somebody is a hacker. It was a fine review except for that gratuitous hacker plug.
Yes, but do "more important" sites get a heavier weight of vote? I.e. if a democratically more "relevant" site links to another site, is *that* vote weightier than the others? I would then say it is more of a meritocracy. I.e., Random User's link is *less* important than MegaSite's link.
This is the type of adverstising I wouldn't mind: when you search for something that is obviously a product or service, Google would put up an ad in your search results for that product or service or related products or services. Keep the main page clean and ad-less for those who are searching for generic things. If you are doing a specific search for some product or service, or some page concerning a product or service, then, like Deja, stick in a *relevant* ad. I don't mind that all too much. What I mind is totally irrelevant garish ads distracting my eyes with flashy colors or half-nude women. I think they could do targeted ads tastefully. For example, like Slashdot has Open-source on-topic sortof ads.
The next thing that I might allow, is customization of google...say, create a *simple* profile that allows google to track the *general* type of searches you do, and organize a custom subtree of more relevant sites that it can use to search first or give more priority. I find myself searching for the same things over and over, so this would actually be useful.
I am reminded of Mel, a Real Programmer
First of all there is the matter of a viable gene pool, as somebody mentioned. Either we just clone it with itself over and over and just have a freakish line of tigers with genetic problems, or we breed it with some close relative, thereby eroding its genetic uniquiness.
That's besides the fact that its habitat has probably changed. Where would we put such a thing? What would it eat (rabbits maybe)? What would eat it? I don't see how bringing back a life form just to stick it in a cage so we can gawk at it a "net benefit". That's a waste of effort, and cruel.
You're right, there may be no cosmic plan...but that doesn't mean there doesn't *have* to be one. We can make up our own, like: we shall not bring back the dead for shits and giggles. Just because we *can* doesn't mean we *should* (and this is in a totally a-religous sense). Arrogance of doing everything we could just because we could got us some of our major problems (antibiotic resistence? new diseases emerging from strange places, due to climate changes, and/or tampering with the environment). It is a very stupid mentality to think that if something doesn't hurt us today, we might as well do it. We should be thinking in decades, not weeks or years.
And what friggen purpose (other than scientific study) would bringing back a *mammoth* have? What, let them roam the midwestern plains or something?
Ok, can somebody educate me as to where this actually fits in with XFree86? Is this just a release of X libraries? Or is this a non-free version of X that is competing with XFree86? Where does it fit in? Can I download it, recompile it, and then stick it into my XFree86 install and magically gain new features?
I would imagine in places where security is an issue, the government should be looking at BSD first. Not to diss Linux, but OpenBSD is reknowned for it's "security by default" out of the box. If anything, I would think the government would err on the side of security (so their government hire doesn't get the bleeding edge driver or graphics utility, boohoo).
If the gov does use Linux widescale, I would think they should scrutinize all the distros, and come up with one STRONGLY suggested one so all machines will be compatible and fixes can be applied everywhere at once.
I don't buy this whole "interactive thing". TV is not interactive. A net news feed is not interactive. Hell, very few games are truly interactive (unless you call just moving around the mouse and pressing keys truly interactive). None of them really inform you or engage your mind. They are all pretty much passive.
What is happening is that the internet has enabled a flood of omnipresent information. People need to filter out that information and get it when they want it. So they use "on-demand" news, or niche news sources, like Slashdot for instance. But really I think this is just having the effect of shortening attention spans. There simply is no time to slowly digest a full featured article on every news event. The next generation is not going use so much "interactive" news, but quick fast, non-substantial news.
So I don't think all this push, on-demand, niche, news coverage is really going to overcome the traditional forms completely. People *like* to sit down with a newspaper or magazine and read at liesure. People *like* large features with a lot of content (I'm guessing part of the reason we have a traditional journalist like John Katz around). Unfortunately, those "static" mediums have just turned into advertising mediums with some tidbits of news thrown in. Watch the BBC on PBS, and then watch your local "international" news coverage.
Oh stop it. This is the same argument as:
"Hey, polluting is bad"
"So why aren't YOU out cleaning up pollution"
Supporting lesser goods is NOT mutually exclusive with supporting greater goods. Sheesh. We can support "freedom" of software AND freedom of people. I don't think either hurts the other. In fact I think reinforcing ANY good helps ALL good.
I really see the application/applet/web site merging into this Webplication thing. I am a Java developer and I write middleware CORBA infrastructure for our app developers. Every time a new application comes a long a standalone application is written, then perhaps an applet, and then maybe a web page backended by JSP or Servlets. If you think about it, the piece in the middle tier is really doing the *exact* same functionality for each of these pieces. Each of these pieces is just a presentation layer. I'm had thoughts in my head about how these things could merge. I have a set of classes that enable a standalone application to seamlessly double as an applet (it detects its environment and reacts accordingly) making life much easier for the developer. But that doesn't really supply the web page aspect of it. What one could do is use some of the GUI/HTML mappings to use pseudo-widgets in the middle-tier code to make it easy to map a GUI to HTML. But that just presents more work. What really needs to be done, and I see it happening now, is that the *client* must have a _standard presentation layer_ for all applications, distributed or not. I think Mozilla, and SlashXB are the signs of this. Now, I don't have to think about writing standalone applications, or applets, or a web page. Using a unified presentation layer, the same middle-tier logic object can feed all these clients no matter where they are, with *identical* user interfaces. Needless to say, this is cool.
Yeah, but Yahoo links to Slashdot which links to which might link to something which might link to DeCSS...at what point does it become illegal? It's just stupid.