Yeah and all those darn new-fangled "web" users. It's almost as bad as those darn auto-locomotive carriages that are all over the damn streets these days.
Of course we've been using materials that simply *store* and *re-emit* light for a long time (phosphor anybody? glow in the dark?). But I think the real break through here is that these crystals not only store the amplitude of the light, they actually "store" the whole function, so that the same pulses over time can be retrieved. Would this imply a larger crystal could be used for permanent data storage? I can imagine sending one of these things out into space instead of a chiseled plate. It would seem a lot more intuitive than sending, say, a DVD or hard drive;p
Agreed. Physical brick and mortar businesses usually have to PHYSICALLY extract your personal info. You have to fill out a form, or get some stupid plastic buyers card. And you usually have the choice of NOT participating. Unfortunately the bar is significantly lower for online businesses. It's no longer an interaction directly between YOU and THEM...it's an interaction between your software and their software, and there is one big fat grey line as far as the trustworthiness of software, especially non-open-source software, which allows plenty of room for easy exploitation.
"It would be worth it for me to pay an extra $50 for my new HD if I knew I never had to hear about or deal with the RIAA again."
Except of course, those dollars would be going directly into the pockets of the RIAA, not the artists (see the figures cited in a previous post). So really this is riding on the backs of artists. The Right thing to do would be to have a system where these fees go to the artists, NOT the RIAA (did the RIAA do anything to help you get that MP3? Why should they get the money instead of the artists who are already largely getting screwed by traditional distribution?)
No C# is getting attention because it is part of.NET (or at least an language binding for the common language runtime, the basis of.NET), and lots of people give a damn about.NET and think it has significance (either bad or good). Not many people care about new compilers for functional languages that will never get above %0.01 acceptance. Actually, I would rather Slashdot *not* post frivolous stories about every compiler on earth.
I'd strongly second this. This is a "feature" that doesn't even need to be announced. Face it: most people reading slashdot are using a browser which is capable of HMTL 4.x and CSS. The rest are getting it through other means (light mode, lynx, links, etc.). Using strict HTML 4.x would also increase accessibility for the less capable browsers because certain accessibility guidelines are required.
We've also forgotten that corporations are a specific breed of company with extra rights given to it by the state through a mandated charter. It used to be we actually *thought* about these charters and these rights, watchdogged the corporation and revoked charters when they went astray. Now we hand them out like candy with nary a thought of accountability. If a corporation is doing something obviously wrong (legal or not) we don't have to squabble forever with them...just revoke their charter. That's tough shit (watch me crying for those poor poor put upon corporations) but that should be the cost associated with the extra privelages corporations get.
The problem is, this planet is all collectively ours. Let's say, for example, *everybody* consents to having their property ruined by another person if they have the privelage to ruin somebody else's property. Under Libertarian philosophy this would be a completely acceptable contract. But to *real people* who have to live on the planet, the earth is more than just individual pieces of property that people have entire sovereignty over to handle according to their whim. The United States is pretty rich...let's just buy a smaller country, sell tickets, and then nuke it! That would be fun! But entirely unacceptable.
Oh. Shut. Up. In an ideal fantasy Libertarian world sure that would work. The problem is for the free market to work, an *INFORMED* consumer is presumed. With centralization of corporate media, never-ending lawsuits, constant billion-dollar marketing campaign and spin, corporations have immense capability to obscure, redirect, minimize, confuse, bewilder, and just plain leave the consumer ignorant and uninformed. People cannot stop purchasing products from companies they don't support until they actually *know* that they don't support them. If people actually *knew* the effect of their actions down the line I'm sure they'd be disgusted. Tell me - do you know exactly where and by what process every single ingredient in the foods you eat and parts of the products you use come from? If not, then you simply CAN NOT make informed decisions to stop buying "this" or stop buying "that". I *dare* you to remove all products that have been derived from Monsanto one way or another from your life. The answer is obviously to not put the overwhelming responsibility solely on the shoulders of the consumer, but to ALSO put responsibility on the producer (since when do producers get the free ride and consumers get shafted by default?). The free market is *not magic*.
Wow that would explain my confusion waiting for all the various and sundry exciting WWII vintage weapons and gameplay to appear. Even without all these cool features, it's a decent mod though.
The simplest system for ensuring that two entities are talking to each other, without a complex system involving third parties, seems to me to be PKI. Just embed a private key in hardware on the satellite (or perhaps several) and then use PKI as normal. This key never leaves the satellite so the risk of being "hacked" is equivalent to cracking PKI. This of course could be strengthened (or weakened??) by coupling with precise data only known through obscure methods involving lots of precise scientific hardware, e.g. stuff the crackers won't have.
So...how do they know you're 19? It's not like it's really any of their business. What would they really do if you told them you were, say, 22? Call your mother for verification? There is no law that says that you have to give them your real age (or name, or whatever). It isn't a government job is it? (in which case there *may* be laws). It's really none of their damn business how old you are and AFAIK you are not obligated give this sort of information.
And imagine, for the last decade or so, we have had the ability to basically archive *everything* of cultural value that crosses the net. In the future, even more things will be digital. If we don't reform copyright, copyright holders will not only be able to snuff out *new* creativity...they will be able to completely destroy rich records of history. Imagine if the entire contents of usenet were just thrown away or "lost" to history. What an absolute shame.
Ok, there really needs to be a peer to Godwin's Law which replaces "mentioning Nazism" with "prefacing the comment with a recantation of a lusty love affair the author had in their youth". Preferably this would be built right into the net, so such posts are automatically purged, and a squad of roughnecks with bats immediately dispatched to the author's place of posting. How about "Pygmalion's Law"...
LAZINESS: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer.
LAZINESS: The quality that make you go to great effort to reduce *immediate* energy expenditure, and little effort to reduce *future* energy expenditure (after all, it takes energy to reduce energy expenditure). It makes you write slap-shod quick and dirty programs that others may or may not find useful and will be SOL if they have a problem because you were too lazy to write documentation for it.
IMPATIENCE: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least that pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer.
IMPATIENCE: The anger you feel when a correct program is not working fast enough for you. This makes you write programs that don't necessarily react correctly to your needs, but react *faster*.
HUBRIS: Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about. Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer.
HUBRIS: Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you introduce that "harmless" bug fix or feature into production at 4:59 PM on a Friday.
Rik's right. Evolution is all about selection of a bunch of crap that was put down in the first place. In the end, the best crap wins. But that says nothing about *creating new stuff*. Sometimes the "best crap" is not good enough, so we have to start looking into stuff and saying "ok, this appendix is just useless and may give this organism appendicitis". Evolution is excellent at producing results which are "just good enough", which sadly, is the same situation in which *nix, including Linux is in: just-good-enough. Evolution is not really great at producing novel things (yes, very very very rare "mutations"), and we don't exactly have time to do "while everything_is_not_perfect; do cat/dev/random > source; perform_fitness_test; done". Yes evolution is great at (all together now) RISK AVERSION. But risk aversion doesn't necessarily lead to the best things. Witness all sorts of organims which evolve in a fragile ecosystem, and then get utterly ruined when any given variable changes (climate change, cutting down rainforests), or organisms which are good at absolutely nothing but propagating themselves (ahem, viruses). It's silly to think millions of codemonkeys will just magically produce software which is always superior. Just look at all the hundreds (maybe thousands?) of useless projects on SourceForge...has this magical "evolution" helped these projects any? No. Decent management, coherent vision, intelligent coders, and yes, very often, a well-thought-out *design* are needed.
Users most often want software with a certain set of features at a certain point in time...not a guarantee that the magical process of evolution will eventually give them a real-time, fully-pre-emptable, "multimedia", embedded operating system that will butter their toast while reading aloud cluetrain and giving them an enema.
Re:Computer Science Major and Political Science Mi
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 2
"You can rant and rave but let's face it: one of the jobs of the DoJ is to defend the government. They are the government's lawyers."
That's funny. I thought they were supposed to defend the constitution.
There will always be people willing to sell their "rights" away. So in that sense, "forcing" people to retain theirs rights could be considered less freedom ("empowerment of users") than just letting them give them up in exchange for something. Bah. The semantics are awful.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah and all those darn new-fangled "web" users. It's almost as bad as those darn auto-locomotive carriages that are all over the damn streets these days.
Of course we've been using materials that simply *store* and *re-emit* light for a long time (phosphor anybody? glow in the dark?). But I think the real break through here is that these crystals not only store the amplitude of the light, they actually "store" the whole function, so that the same pulses over time can be retrieved. Would this imply a larger crystal could be used for permanent data storage? I can imagine sending one of these things out into space instead of a chiseled plate. It would seem a lot more intuitive than sending, say, a DVD or hard drive ;p
Agreed. Physical brick and mortar businesses usually have to PHYSICALLY extract your personal info. You have to fill out a form, or get some stupid plastic buyers card. And you usually have the choice of NOT participating. Unfortunately the bar is significantly lower for online businesses. It's no longer an interaction directly between YOU and THEM...it's an interaction between your software and their software, and there is one big fat grey line as far as the trustworthiness of software, especially non-open-source software, which allows plenty of room for easy exploitation.
Hahaha! I'm sure you were being sarcastic. But if not, here's a clue:
$which filename
which: Command not found.
"It would be worth it for me to pay an extra $50 for my new HD if I knew I never had to hear about or deal with the RIAA again."
Except of course, those dollars would be going directly into the pockets of the RIAA, not the artists (see the figures cited in a previous post). So really this is riding on the backs of artists. The Right thing to do would be to have a system where these fees go to the artists, NOT the RIAA (did the RIAA do anything to help you get that MP3? Why should they get the money instead of the artists who are already largely getting screwed by traditional distribution?)
Wow, then it was <heresy>just like the boring book</heresy>
No C# is getting attention because it is part of .NET (or at least an language binding for the common language runtime, the basis of .NET), and lots of people give a damn about .NET and think it has significance (either bad or good). Not many people care about new compilers for functional languages that will never get above %0.01 acceptance. Actually, I would rather Slashdot *not* post frivolous stories about every compiler on earth.
"Strict HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.1 + CSS"
I'd strongly second this. This is a "feature" that doesn't even need to be announced. Face it: most people reading slashdot are using a browser which is capable of HMTL 4.x and CSS. The rest are getting it through other means (light mode, lynx, links, etc.). Using strict HTML 4.x would also increase accessibility for the less capable browsers because certain accessibility guidelines are required.
We've also forgotten that corporations are a specific breed of company with extra rights given to it by the state through a mandated charter. It used to be we actually *thought* about these charters and these rights, watchdogged the corporation and revoked charters when they went astray. Now we hand them out like candy with nary a thought of accountability. If a corporation is doing something obviously wrong (legal or not) we don't have to squabble forever with them...just revoke their charter. That's tough shit (watch me crying for those poor poor put upon corporations) but that should be the cost associated with the extra privelages corporations get.
The problem is, this planet is all collectively ours. Let's say, for example, *everybody* consents to having their property ruined by another person if they have the privelage to ruin somebody else's property. Under Libertarian philosophy this would be a completely acceptable contract. But to *real people* who have to live on the planet, the earth is more than just individual pieces of property that people have entire sovereignty over to handle according to their whim. The United States is pretty rich...let's just buy a smaller country, sell tickets, and then nuke it! That would be fun! But entirely unacceptable.
Oh. Shut. Up. In an ideal fantasy Libertarian world sure that would work. The problem is for the free market to work, an *INFORMED* consumer is presumed. With centralization of corporate media, never-ending lawsuits, constant billion-dollar marketing campaign and spin, corporations have immense capability to obscure, redirect, minimize, confuse, bewilder, and just plain leave the consumer ignorant and uninformed. People cannot stop purchasing products from companies they don't support until they actually *know* that they don't support them. If people actually *knew* the effect of their actions down the line I'm sure they'd be disgusted. Tell me - do you know exactly where and by what process every single ingredient in the foods you eat and parts of the products you use come from? If not, then you simply CAN NOT make informed decisions to stop buying "this" or stop buying "that". I *dare* you to remove all products that have been derived from Monsanto one way or another from your life. The answer is obviously to not put the overwhelming responsibility solely on the shoulders of the consumer, but to ALSO put responsibility on the producer (since when do producers get the free ride and consumers get shafted by default?). The free market is *not magic*.
Wow that would explain my confusion waiting for all the various and sundry exciting WWII vintage weapons and gameplay to appear. Even without all these cool features, it's a decent mod though.
Nope, John is probably just getting what is coming to him for selling his soul to the devil for that wife of his.
The simplest system for ensuring that two entities are talking to each other, without a complex system involving third parties, seems to me to be PKI. Just embed a private key in hardware on the satellite (or perhaps several) and then use PKI as normal. This key never leaves the satellite so the risk of being "hacked" is equivalent to cracking PKI. This of course could be strengthened (or weakened??) by coupling with precise data only known through obscure methods involving lots of precise scientific hardware, e.g. stuff the crackers won't have.
So...how do they know you're 19? It's not like it's really any of their business. What would they really do if you told them you were, say, 22? Call your mother for verification? There is no law that says that you have to give them your real age (or name, or whatever). It isn't a government job is it? (in which case there *may* be laws). It's really none of their damn business how old you are and AFAIK you are not obligated give this sort of information.
And imagine, for the last decade or so, we have had the ability to basically archive *everything* of cultural value that crosses the net. In the future, even more things will be digital. If we don't reform copyright, copyright holders will not only be able to snuff out *new* creativity...they will be able to completely destroy rich records of history. Imagine if the entire contents of usenet were just thrown away or "lost" to history. What an absolute shame.
...ok, start working on those underwater bases. Somebody hire some scientists to start researching sonic rifles. I'll go and warm up the interceptors.
I wrote a patch which adds "interceptors" ("filters", whatever) to the library, which allow manipulation of the data stream and arguments.
http://aeolus.cit.cornell.edu/xmlrpc.html
I posted this to both lists, and so far nothing as far as responses.
Ok, there really needs to be a peer to Godwin's Law which replaces "mentioning Nazism" with "prefacing the comment with a recantation of a lusty love affair the author had in their youth". Preferably this would be built right into the net, so such posts are automatically purged, and a squad of roughnecks with bats immediately dispatched to the author's place of posting. How about "Pygmalion's Law"...
LAZINESS: The quality that make you go to great effort to reduce *immediate* energy expenditure, and little effort to reduce *future* energy expenditure (after all, it takes energy to reduce energy expenditure). It makes you write slap-shod quick and dirty programs that others may or may not find useful and will be SOL if they have a problem because you were too lazy to write documentation for it.
IMPATIENCE: The anger you feel when a correct program is not working fast enough for you. This makes you write programs that don't necessarily react correctly to your needs, but react *faster*.
HUBRIS: Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you introduce that "harmless" bug fix or feature into production at 4:59 PM on a Friday.
Wow, have you applied for employment at Slashdot? Because you'd be a great addition. Thanks.
Rik's right. Evolution is all about selection of a bunch of crap that was put down in the first place. In the end, the best crap wins. But that says nothing about *creating new stuff*. Sometimes the "best crap" is not good enough, so we have to start looking into stuff and saying "ok, this appendix is just useless and may give this organism appendicitis". Evolution is excellent at producing results which are "just good enough", which sadly, is the same situation in which *nix, including Linux is in: just-good-enough. Evolution is not really great at producing novel things (yes, very very very rare "mutations"), and we don't exactly have time to do "while everything_is_not_perfect; do cat /dev/random > source; perform_fitness_test; done". Yes evolution is great at (all together now) RISK AVERSION. But risk aversion doesn't necessarily lead to the best things. Witness all sorts of organims which evolve in a fragile ecosystem, and then get utterly ruined when any given variable changes (climate change, cutting down rainforests), or organisms which are good at absolutely nothing but propagating themselves (ahem, viruses). It's silly to think millions of codemonkeys will just magically produce software which is always superior. Just look at all the hundreds (maybe thousands?) of useless projects on SourceForge...has this magical "evolution" helped these projects any? No. Decent management, coherent vision, intelligent coders, and yes, very often, a well-thought-out *design* are needed.
Users most often want software with a certain set of features at a certain point in time...not a guarantee that the magical process of evolution will eventually give them a real-time, fully-pre-emptable, "multimedia", embedded operating system that will butter their toast while reading aloud cluetrain and giving them an enema.
"You can rant and rave but let's face it: one of the jobs of the DoJ is to defend the government. They are the government's lawyers."
That's funny. I thought they were supposed to defend the constitution.
Just remember - DVRs don't infringe copyright, people infringe copyright.
There will always be people willing to sell their "rights" away. So in that sense, "forcing" people to retain theirs rights could be considered less freedom ("empowerment of users") than just letting them give them up in exchange for something. Bah. The semantics are awful.