That movie has a lot to answer for. Unfortunately the level of public education in these matters hasn't gone up much since then. Which is a shame, because soon the technology will exist that allows us to cheaply sequence anyone or anything's DNA. The potential health benefits of such technology are extraordinary. Imagine going to the doctor with a cough. The doctor takes a sample of your phlegm and ten seconds later has a full genetic sequence of the virus that has infected you. Matching it against a medical database removes the guess work from treatment. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Back in 1998 I was raided by the Australia Federal Police. They were looking for evidence on computer crimes allegedly committed by people I had allegedly spoken to on IRC. They weren't after me, but I was still thankful that my harddrive was encrypted and there we no laws, at the time, that could be used to force me to give up my encryption keys. Had there been evidence on my harddrive that I had committed a crime (there wasn't, unless I'm committing crimes and I'm not aware of it) I would have been facing jail time, even though the AFP did not have any justification to search that computer because of anything I had done.
Sounds like the borrows have the upper hand at the moment. You could borrow some money, deposit it with a bank, repay the loan at the end of the deposit term and turn a tiny profit that gets eaten up by tax.
It's just such a depressing demonstration of how little NASA is capable of acheiving these days. In a recent interview, Newt Gingrich said:
I am for a dramatic increase in our efforts to reach out into space, but I am for doing virtually all of it outside of NASA through prizes and tax incentives. NASA is an aging, unimaginative, bureaucracy committed to over-engineering and risk-avoidance which is actually diverting resources from the achievements we need and stifling the entrepreneurial and risk-taking spirit necessary to lead in space exploration.
only steel-framed structure in recorded history to suffer a complete collapse as a result of fire alone.
Call me crazy, but I kinda remember a plane crashing into it. I hardly see how that is "a result of fire alone". I would think it would "a result of a plane crashing into it and subsequent fire".
I'm guessing you've never played Second Life. The creator of any given object in Second Life can set bits that say whether or not you can copy/edit/sell that object. The game then enforces those bits. As it is done on the server and only the compiled textures and polys are sent to the client, there's no much you can do to get around this form of DRM. The end result is a pretty distopian vision of the future. You walk around in this world where you are free to conjure anything you want out of thin air, but you are prevented from using the things you see around you as a base for your creations by absentee content owners. Often an object of some beauty will be created by someone who has left the game entirely. There is absolutely no way for a regular player to get the DRM removed from the object so it can be reused. There are some players who release all their work with none of the DRM bits turned on, but they are few and far between. I can imagine a time where this ability to conjure things into existance will be provided to us in the real world using nanotechnology or some other new technology. Will our creations be DRM infested? Surely they will, because we all still live under the belief that we have some innate right control what others do with our creations.
Unless it was from Linus or some other contributor to the Linux kernel (i.e., a copyright holder) then the appropriate response is: mind your own business.
Then I discovered that if I had absolutely no interest in what I was programming I didn't get depressed when management sabotaged it. So now I work for a megacorp and just code what they tell me to code. I get my "working on something interesting/important" fix by working on open source software in my spare time.
Oh they advertise the pisser out of it. But Brisbane has traditionally been a train town and only recently have people rediscovered the buses (because of poor train service). Also, people love their cars.
As for saving the Earth, at what cost? Who are we saving it for? Us, surely. Our current climate problems will only be solved when we learn to do planet level engineering. That just ain't gunna happen any time soon unless funds start going into space research, but everyone sees space research as pie-in-the-sky or "science".
Oh please. I live in the only capital city in Australia that has decent public transport. It it good for precisely two reasons: it creates local jobs (we build our own buses) and not too many people use it. If it didn't create jobs there wouldn't be nearly as many buses as there are our now, so waiting times would be unacceptable. If more people used it you would have buses filling up real quick and apart from the unpleasant experience that would create in and of itself, you'd also soon have to wait for a bus that wasn't full before you could get on. Quite simply, no one can afford to provide transport for 100% of the population. Either you have a government that puts all its spending into public transport and neglects everything else or you have private individuals who take on cyclic debt to pay for cars. Simply put, driving across a city to go from home to work to the gym to your girlfriend's place is just not sensible. You should move closer to work. Go to a gym that is closer to where you live and ask your girlfriend to move in. But people accept the burden of debt and maintenance for a car for the convience of not doing all these things.
There's a natural resource called Methane Hydrates that has been newly discovered in large deposits in US territory. So basically they're suggesting that we replace one fossil fuel with another. The other alternative, of course, is the creation of hydrogen using traditional methods (splitting water) at nuclear power facilities. Hydrogen is basically just a convenient way to transport electricity around then.
Other than the fact that is it wrong, I guess you could do that. War is terrible enough as it is, do we really have to think up ways to commit war crimes more efficiently?
I remember doing the ACM Programming Contest when I was at university. It's unfortunate that the problems were more about math than they were about programming. The contest wasn't about who could write the most maintainable code in the shortest period of time, or who could write the most elegant solution, it was primarily about who could write the most efficient algorithm to solve the given problem. 99% of the time this meant knowing that the problem was similar to some famous, already solved, problem and then reimplementing that solution with some minor modifications. But that's what happens when you let academics design a programming contest.
Yeah, I was young and money wasn't all that important to me. Now I'm old, and I like the comfort of job security, but if I was still contracting I'd love to find suckers, err, I mean, devoted clients, like that again.
Back when I used to do contract programming I'd charge something like $80 an hour to do change requests. No half hours, minimum three hours. With rates like that you'd expect my clients to wait until they had a bunch of change requests that needed to be done and give me a list right? No. I'd go out to the site, listen to them explain what they wanted, implement it in 5 minutes and say "anything else?" They'd shrug and say no. I'd offer to hang around for the remaining 2 hours and 50 minutes that I'm going to charge them and after 30 minutes they'd say "ok, that looks like it's working, we'll call you if we need anything else". At first I figured it was just that one client. Then I got another one that was just as bad. So I upped my rates and it just kept on happening. This was in my younger years and I felt that I could be better spending my time. I felt that I had something to contribute and life wasn't all about making money. So I eventually started demanding that they save up their change requests and only contact me when they had at least a days work to do. Something strange happened. They stopped calling. It seems that if you make people put up with software not being exactly the way they want it to be, even if it's just for a week, they will put up with it forever. But if you're there for them as soon as they call and sit down with them and try to make the software exactly the way they want it, they'll pay just about any price for that service.
Rather than declaring microkernels are the shit and then sitting down with a blank piece of paper and designing a microkernel architecture, how about using one or more of the dozens of microkernel-like technologies available for Linux to evolve to a microkernel architecture? We already have the technology to run Linux drivers in userland.. if it's not up to your desired microkernel-ish-ness then extend it and make it better.
It's not just piracy. It's any word. This is the battle over memes and the transnationals (err, multinationals) are way ahead of the game. Our little voices yelling can't compete with their saturation media outlets.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no more important cause for freedom than the call for action to stop DRM from crippling our digital future. The time is now. Join us.
Uhhh, WTF?
I thought I had the most alarmist views on DRM around.
Jesus guys, this doesn't help.
That movie has a lot to answer for. Unfortunately the level of public education in these matters hasn't gone up much since then. Which is a shame, because soon the technology will exist that allows us to cheaply sequence anyone or anything's DNA. The potential health benefits of such technology are extraordinary. Imagine going to the doctor with a cough. The doctor takes a sample of your phlegm and ten seconds later has a full genetic sequence of the virus that has infected you. Matching it against a medical database removes the guess work from treatment. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Back in 1998 I was raided by the Australia Federal Police. They were looking for evidence on computer crimes allegedly committed by people I had allegedly spoken to on IRC. They weren't after me, but I was still thankful that my harddrive was encrypted and there we no laws, at the time, that could be used to force me to give up my encryption keys. Had there been evidence on my harddrive that I had committed a crime (there wasn't, unless I'm committing crimes and I'm not aware of it) I would have been facing jail time, even though the AFP did not have any justification to search that computer because of anything I had done.
Sounds like the borrows have the upper hand at the moment. You could borrow some money, deposit it with a bank, repay the loan at the end of the deposit term and turn a tiny profit that gets eaten up by tax.
I think that sums it up perfectly.
only steel-framed structure in recorded history to suffer a complete collapse as a result of fire alone.
Call me crazy, but I kinda remember a plane crashing into it. I hardly see how that is "a result of fire alone". I would think it would "a result of a plane crashing into it and subsequent fire".
You know nothing about culture.
For fuck sake. You might as well say no-one likes porn because you tried to give it away at your local church and no-one wanted it.
So who's the bigger idiot, the idiot or the idiot who mods him up? (or the idiot who replies, now shut up).
I'm guessing you've never played Second Life. The creator of any given object in Second Life can set bits that say whether or not you can copy/edit/sell that object. The game then enforces those bits. As it is done on the server and only the compiled textures and polys are sent to the client, there's no much you can do to get around this form of DRM. The end result is a pretty distopian vision of the future. You walk around in this world where you are free to conjure anything you want out of thin air, but you are prevented from using the things you see around you as a base for your creations by absentee content owners. Often an object of some beauty will be created by someone who has left the game entirely. There is absolutely no way for a regular player to get the DRM removed from the object so it can be reused. There are some players who release all their work with none of the DRM bits turned on, but they are few and far between. I can imagine a time where this ability to conjure things into existance will be provided to us in the real world using nanotechnology or some other new technology. Will our creations be DRM infested? Surely they will, because we all still live under the belief that we have some innate right control what others do with our creations.
Unless it was from Linus or some other contributor to the Linux kernel (i.e., a copyright holder) then the appropriate response is: mind your own business.
Then I discovered that if I had absolutely no interest in what I was programming I didn't get depressed when management sabotaged it. So now I work for a megacorp and just code what they tell me to code. I get my "working on something interesting/important" fix by working on open source software in my spare time.
Oh they advertise the pisser out of it. But Brisbane has traditionally been a train town and only recently have people rediscovered the buses (because of poor train service). Also, people love their cars.
As for saving the Earth, at what cost? Who are we saving it for? Us, surely. Our current climate problems will only be solved when we learn to do planet level engineering. That just ain't gunna happen any time soon unless funds start going into space research, but everyone sees space research as pie-in-the-sky or "science".
Brisbane, we're bus crazy.
Oh please. I live in the only capital city in Australia that has decent public transport. It it good for precisely two reasons: it creates local jobs (we build our own buses) and not too many people use it. If it didn't create jobs there wouldn't be nearly as many buses as there are our now, so waiting times would be unacceptable. If more people used it you would have buses filling up real quick and apart from the unpleasant experience that would create in and of itself, you'd also soon have to wait for a bus that wasn't full before you could get on. Quite simply, no one can afford to provide transport for 100% of the population. Either you have a government that puts all its spending into public transport and neglects everything else or you have private individuals who take on cyclic debt to pay for cars. Simply put, driving across a city to go from home to work to the gym to your girlfriend's place is just not sensible. You should move closer to work. Go to a gym that is closer to where you live and ask your girlfriend to move in. But people accept the burden of debt and maintenance for a car for the convience of not doing all these things.
There's a natural resource called Methane Hydrates that has been newly discovered in large deposits in US territory. So basically they're suggesting that we replace one fossil fuel with another. The other alternative, of course, is the creation of hydrogen using traditional methods (splitting water) at nuclear power facilities. Hydrogen is basically just a convenient way to transport electricity around then.
Other than the fact that is it wrong, I guess you could do that. War is terrible enough as it is, do we really have to think up ways to commit war crimes more efficiently?
And as such should be called a Computer Science Contest, not a Programming Contest.
Meh. If I you don't demand source you should expect security flaws.
I remember doing the ACM Programming Contest when I was at university. It's unfortunate that the problems were more about math than they were about programming. The contest wasn't about who could write the most maintainable code in the shortest period of time, or who could write the most elegant solution, it was primarily about who could write the most efficient algorithm to solve the given problem. 99% of the time this meant knowing that the problem was similar to some famous, already solved, problem and then reimplementing that solution with some minor modifications. But that's what happens when you let academics design a programming contest.
you forgot:
40 REM FUTILE
"custom" means "made just for you".
Yeah, I was young and money wasn't all that important to me. Now I'm old, and I like the comfort of job security, but if I was still contracting I'd love to find suckers, err, I mean, devoted clients, like that again.
Back when I used to do contract programming I'd charge something like $80 an hour to do change requests. No half hours, minimum three hours. With rates like that you'd expect my clients to wait until they had a bunch of change requests that needed to be done and give me a list right? No. I'd go out to the site, listen to them explain what they wanted, implement it in 5 minutes and say "anything else?" They'd shrug and say no. I'd offer to hang around for the remaining 2 hours and 50 minutes that I'm going to charge them and after 30 minutes they'd say "ok, that looks like it's working, we'll call you if we need anything else". At first I figured it was just that one client. Then I got another one that was just as bad. So I upped my rates and it just kept on happening. This was in my younger years and I felt that I could be better spending my time. I felt that I had something to contribute and life wasn't all about making money. So I eventually started demanding that they save up their change requests and only contact me when they had at least a days work to do. Something strange happened. They stopped calling. It seems that if you make people put up with software not being exactly the way they want it to be, even if it's just for a week, they will put up with it forever. But if you're there for them as soon as they call and sit down with them and try to make the software exactly the way they want it, they'll pay just about any price for that service.
Rather than declaring microkernels are the shit and then sitting down with a blank piece of paper and designing a microkernel architecture, how about using one or more of the dozens of microkernel-like technologies available for Linux to evolve to a microkernel architecture? We already have the technology to run Linux drivers in userland.. if it's not up to your desired microkernel-ish-ness then extend it and make it better.
It's not just piracy. It's any word. This is the battle over memes and the transnationals (err, multinationals) are way ahead of the game. Our little voices yelling can't compete with their saturation media outlets.