It was a ban on spending public money on it. If individuals wanted to put together their own space project (and god damn it, a big enough Society could) there was no laws in the uk to stop it.
We could be colonizing the Moon, instead we landed on the equator, picked up a handful of rocks in walking distance and declared the new world explored.
For the last 10 years or more we've been saying there is "most likely" water in the form of ice at the poles. We have yet to land a probe, drill out a sample and test it. That'd be great science wouldn't it?
Similarly, it's largely believed that a large proportion of the millions of crater impacts on the Moon were caused the metal rich asteroid collisions. Most of the material from these collisions is expected to be on the surface of the craters. We have yet to send a probe (be it remote sensing or otherwise) to take a look at the composition of these craters. Many of which are expected to contain rare (on earth) metals that could be cheaply mined.
The focus on science is what has killed the space program. Let's start talking about the economic impact of opening the closed-loop economy of our planet.
Ultimately this conversation (like every conversation about man vs robot in space) has deteriated into the "which gives the best science" arguments. That's great and all, and it's even on topic, seeing as we were talking about why the British have snubbed manned spaceflight whenever they came asking for science funding. But it's not the whole story. The reason we should be putting humans into space is not just science. It happens to be the only way to get a significant amount of work done in space. I guess, theoretically we could send teleoperated robots into space and run them from the ground, and that might even work as far as the Moon.. so maybe this argument isn't too strong. But if you want to setup a facility on the Moon to process asteroid impacts and return the materials to earth (and I argue that you should want that) then the absolute best way to do that with today's technology is to send up a whole boatload of people, build a settlement and live there. It'd cost about a trillion dollars, but you could do it, and the rare (on earth) materials that you could ship back from the Moon would pay for it twice over the next 50 years.
Ya know, Carl Sagan was one of the most vocal scientists against the manned space program. He claimed he could do more with one automated probe than a human ever could and by sending all the probes he later did I think he proved that.
What's hard to understand? There was a ban placed on the use of public funds to do manned space exploration because it was considered a waste of money by the scientific community. When you consider how much money is wasted on the ISS every year you gotta appreciate they may have a point.
Because it was considered by just about every scientist alive at the time of Apollo that there was absolutely no scientific value in sending a man to the Moon. Not just British scientists but Americian scientists too held this opinion. Many still hold this opinion today.
To people who associate themselves more with the Free Software movement than with the Open Source movement, making any kind of proprietary software is ethically dubious.
But here's an idea. Suppose Kubuntu starts to sprint ahead of Ubuntu and Mark Shuttleworth says to the GNOME team to pull their socks up and they can't. What's gunna happen? Will they rename Kubuntu to Ubuntu and create a Gubuntu distribution? Doesn't seem very likely, unless Shuttleworth buys Trolltech. There is another way though, he could just hire 20 developers to add 20,000 lines of code to a GPL fork of Qt. If Trolltech want to use any of those changes in their proprietary product they'll have to go cap in hand to Shuttleworth and he could easily tell them to piss off. Then what? Trolltech continues on with their substandard commercial offering whilst supporting the GPL release? No, that wouldn't happen. Trolltech would take their bat and ball and go home. Meaning Shuttleworth could knife KDE right then and there by laying off those 20 developers.
Not that any of that is gunna happen. It's just fun to think about:)
Re:I don't care about what people say re: Theo...
on
OpenBSD Turns 10
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· Score: -1, Troll
And Theo is the best example of how you should not treat others. What's your point? Bill Gates gives millions of dollars to charity, but Windows still sucks.
Yes, but unlike Trolltech and Real Media and other companies, they're not asking you to sign over your copyright so they can go off and make proprietary software with it. When you sign over your copyright to the FSF you know they are not going to do something ethically dubious with it like that.
There's nonsymetric encryption ways to do it. As I said, my little brain can't fathom a way to do it but I know there are many cryptographically secure e-voting systems. In fact, entering those last 4 words into Google directed me to this PDF which describes the state of the art of e-voting. Enjoy.
That's Jack Thompson's entire point. EA can and should be stopping people from making mods of their game that exceed the rating level for which they have been granted. They have the power of copyright and trademark law. They could shut down these sites that are selling mods to make the game pornographic, but they choose not to.. why? Because they make money from these mods, because people need to buy the game to run them. That aint right. If EA wants to sell a T-rated version of their game and an AO-rated version of their game, let em do that, but don't sell the T-rated version and then pretend there's nothing they can do about people selling unrated mods to the game that exceed the T rating.
As for your plan to sue Microsoft.. any plan to sue Microsoft has at least some hope of working. But a primary sticking point in your plan is that Windows is not rated like games are rated. So there's no rating for your mod to exceed.
More interesting would be if you could do this with movies. Say you were to take Kill Bill Vol I and undo the sepia effect that got the hardcore sword fight scene past the censors. If you were to offer this mod on the Internet and someone was to bring it to Quentin Tarantino's attention he would probably just laugh and say "good on em". If he were to say that on the record though, he would be considered responsible, as he has the power to stop the distribution of the mod but chooses not to.
They don't accept contributions at all.. their not a community project. If you send them a patch they will request that you send them a description of the bug and a test case. They won't even read your patch because it might infect the brains of their programmers. It's a very shit way to run an open source project.
That's a bit of a cop-out isn't it? EA gets to keep the moral high ground whilst permitting people to make unregulated mods to their game. It's not like people are just giving these mods away, there are people selling them and EA is turning a blind eye because it sells more of their product.
And it's not the nudity which is an issue. It's the fact that you can select one Sim, click on another Sim and select "Fuck". If someone's kids got their hands on that and their parents found out you can be sure there would be hell to pay. Not that I think it's going to do any harm.. but those parents sure do and they should be reasonably assured that society is going to prevent their kids from buying this kind of material. Just as parents should be reasonably assured that their children will not be able to buy cigerettes or alcohol.
Bah, it should be an open source solution which anyone can inspect and prove to themselves that it is only implementing an algorithm that is cryptographical proven to guarentee their privacy. As for maintaining and running the servers, that's no more difficult to manage than ensuring the votes are counted correctly (i.e., the downfall of most democratic processes).
OpenBSD is older than you know..
on
OpenBSD Turns 10
·
· Score: -1, Troll
I prefer counting from the emergence of one integral Theo hissy fit to the emergence of the next, in which case this is the 6000th version. As you are undoubtedly gathering, the hissy fits are systemic--creating friction in even the most simplistic projects. The first BSD created was quite naturally perfect. It was a work of art...flawless, sublime. And triumphed equally only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every libre software developer.
There are cryptographic solutions to this problem. Off the top of my head I can't think of a system that would work, but you can be sure there are many possibilities. All you have to do is seperate identity from authorization and then provide your vote. i.e., you need authorization to vote, and you need to identify yourself to get authorization, but it can be cryptographically shown that you can't tie the authorization token to the identity.
His beef with EA is that they are not using their power as copyright holders (or even as trademark holders) to stop people making mods that show full frontal nudity. As such, he claims that EA is conspiring with modders to make a teen rated game an AO game without going through the classification process. He makes a very reasonable argument (ignoring his lack of understanding between the differences of trademark and copyright law) but what it really hinges on is this belief that only children play The Sims 2. That said, having mods available for download (and having a company like EA encourage such development) which have not been classified, can only weaken the already weak game classification system. EA should be forcing modders to get their mods classified as AO before they offer them to the public.
This is a really good interview and it's hard to actually disagree with Jack Thompson when it comes to how poorly games are rated in the US. But his comments on EA not enforcing their trademark against porn sites that are making mods for The Sims, although perfectly valid, are a little hard to follow as he keeps talking about copyright violations..
But other than that, how can you fault anything he says here? If you accept that "murder simulators" are harmful to children, then how can you defend the idea that these games should be sold to children? Personally I think Jack Thompson's biggest problem is that he's so tied up thinking about how much damage a game is going to do to kids that he sometimes forgets that adults play games. But so long as he only wants games to be banned to kids then I say all the better! Don't let kids play any game that isn't Mario-like, fine, go ahead. But if you want to stop me from buying games, whether they contain cop-killer violence or nudity or whatever, then I'm gunna fight you to the death. But that isn't Jack Thompson's goal.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, and the most efficient way to do that is to provide a launch subsidy for the next 10 years.
Unfortunately they cut funding to that.
Thanks, now I just gotta find that two ended headphone jack cable to make a recording.
It was a ban on spending public money on it. If individuals wanted to put together their own space project (and god damn it, a big enough Society could) there was no laws in the uk to stop it.
Giant public works projects.
We could be colonizing the Moon, instead we landed on the equator, picked up a handful of rocks in walking distance and declared the new world explored.
For the last 10 years or more we've been saying there is "most likely" water in the form of ice at the poles. We have yet to land a probe, drill out a sample and test it. That'd be great science wouldn't it?
Similarly, it's largely believed that a large proportion of the millions of crater impacts on the Moon were caused the metal rich asteroid collisions. Most of the material from these collisions is expected to be on the surface of the craters. We have yet to send a probe (be it remote sensing or otherwise) to take a look at the composition of these craters. Many of which are expected to contain rare (on earth) metals that could be cheaply mined.
The focus on science is what has killed the space program. Let's start talking about the economic impact of opening the closed-loop economy of our planet.
Ultimately this conversation (like every conversation about man vs robot in space) has deteriated into the "which gives the best science" arguments. That's great and all, and it's even on topic, seeing as we were talking about why the British have snubbed manned spaceflight whenever they came asking for science funding. But it's not the whole story. The reason we should be putting humans into space is not just science. It happens to be the only way to get a significant amount of work done in space. I guess, theoretically we could send teleoperated robots into space and run them from the ground, and that might even work as far as the Moon.. so maybe this argument isn't too strong. But if you want to setup a facility on the Moon to process asteroid impacts and return the materials to earth (and I argue that you should want that) then the absolute best way to do that with today's technology is to send up a whole boatload of people, build a settlement and live there. It'd cost about a trillion dollars, but you could do it, and the rare (on earth) materials that you could ship back from the Moon would pay for it twice over the next 50 years.
Ya know, Carl Sagan was one of the most vocal scientists against the manned space program. He claimed he could do more with one automated probe than a human ever could and by sending all the probes he later did I think he proved that.
What's hard to understand? There was a ban placed on the use of public funds to do manned space exploration because it was considered a waste of money by the scientific community. When you consider how much money is wasted on the ISS every year you gotta appreciate they may have a point.
Because it was considered by just about every scientist alive at the time of Apollo that there was absolutely no scientific value in sending a man to the Moon. Not just British scientists but Americian scientists too held this opinion. Many still hold this opinion today.
To people who associate themselves more with the Free Software movement than with the Open Source movement, making any kind of proprietary software is ethically dubious.
:)
But here's an idea. Suppose Kubuntu starts to sprint ahead of Ubuntu and Mark Shuttleworth says to the GNOME team to pull their socks up and they can't. What's gunna happen? Will they rename Kubuntu to Ubuntu and create a Gubuntu distribution? Doesn't seem very likely, unless Shuttleworth buys Trolltech. There is another way though, he could just hire 20 developers to add 20,000 lines of code to a GPL fork of Qt. If Trolltech want to use any of those changes in their proprietary product they'll have to go cap in hand to Shuttleworth and he could easily tell them to piss off. Then what? Trolltech continues on with their substandard commercial offering whilst supporting the GPL release? No, that wouldn't happen. Trolltech would take their bat and ball and go home. Meaning Shuttleworth could knife KDE right then and there by laying off those 20 developers.
Not that any of that is gunna happen. It's just fun to think about
And Theo is the best example of how you should not treat others. What's your point? Bill Gates gives millions of dollars to charity, but Windows still sucks.
Yes, but unlike Trolltech and Real Media and other companies, they're not asking you to sign over your copyright so they can go off and make proprietary software with it. When you sign over your copyright to the FSF you know they are not going to do something ethically dubious with it like that.
There's nonsymetric encryption ways to do it. As I said, my little brain can't fathom a way to do it but I know there are many cryptographically secure e-voting systems. In fact, entering those last 4 words into Google directed me to this PDF which describes the state of the art of e-voting. Enjoy.
That's Jack Thompson's entire point. EA can and should be stopping people from making mods of their game that exceed the rating level for which they have been granted. They have the power of copyright and trademark law. They could shut down these sites that are selling mods to make the game pornographic, but they choose not to.. why? Because they make money from these mods, because people need to buy the game to run them. That aint right. If EA wants to sell a T-rated version of their game and an AO-rated version of their game, let em do that, but don't sell the T-rated version and then pretend there's nothing they can do about people selling unrated mods to the game that exceed the T rating.
As for your plan to sue Microsoft.. any plan to sue Microsoft has at least some hope of working. But a primary sticking point in your plan is that Windows is not rated like games are rated. So there's no rating for your mod to exceed.
More interesting would be if you could do this with movies. Say you were to take Kill Bill Vol I and undo the sepia effect that got the hardcore sword fight scene past the censors. If you were to offer this mod on the Internet and someone was to bring it to Quentin Tarantino's attention he would probably just laugh and say "good on em". If he were to say that on the record though, he would be considered responsible, as he has the power to stop the distribution of the mod but chooses not to.
Blah, I'm sure most people would rather work on GTK+.. at least they'll accept patches.
They don't accept contributions at all.. their not a community project. If you send them a patch they will request that you send them a description of the bug and a test case. They won't even read your patch because it might infect the brains of their programmers. It's a very shit way to run an open source project.
How do you do it now? I don't know where you live but where I live there's no-one stopping a husband from entering the voting booth with his wife.
That's a bit of a cop-out isn't it? EA gets to keep the moral high ground whilst permitting people to make unregulated mods to their game. It's not like people are just giving these mods away, there are people selling them and EA is turning a blind eye because it sells more of their product.
And it's not the nudity which is an issue. It's the fact that you can select one Sim, click on another Sim and select "Fuck". If someone's kids got their hands on that and their parents found out you can be sure there would be hell to pay. Not that I think it's going to do any harm.. but those parents sure do and they should be reasonably assured that society is going to prevent their kids from buying this kind of material. Just as parents should be reasonably assured that their children will not be able to buy cigerettes or alcohol.
Bah, it should be an open source solution which anyone can inspect and prove to themselves that it is only implementing an algorithm that is cryptographical proven to guarentee their privacy. As for maintaining and running the servers, that's no more difficult to manage than ensuring the votes are counted correctly (i.e., the downfall of most democratic processes).
I prefer counting from the emergence of one integral Theo hissy fit to the emergence of the next, in which case this is the 6000th version. As you are undoubtedly gathering, the hissy fits are systemic--creating friction in even the most simplistic projects. The first BSD created was quite naturally perfect. It was a work of art...flawless, sublime. And triumphed equally only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every libre software developer.
There are cryptographic solutions to this problem. Off the top of my head I can't think of a system that would work, but you can be sure there are many possibilities. All you have to do is seperate identity from authorization and then provide your vote. i.e., you need authorization to vote, and you need to identify yourself to get authorization, but it can be cryptographically shown that you can't tie the authorization token to the identity.
His beef with EA is that they are not using their power as copyright holders (or even as trademark holders) to stop people making mods that show full frontal nudity. As such, he claims that EA is conspiring with modders to make a teen rated game an AO game without going through the classification process. He makes a very reasonable argument (ignoring his lack of understanding between the differences of trademark and copyright law) but what it really hinges on is this belief that only children play The Sims 2. That said, having mods available for download (and having a company like EA encourage such development) which have not been classified, can only weaken the already weak game classification system. EA should be forcing modders to get their mods classified as AO before they offer them to the public.
This is a really good interview and it's hard to actually disagree with Jack Thompson when it comes to how poorly games are rated in the US. But his comments on EA not enforcing their trademark against porn sites that are making mods for The Sims, although perfectly valid, are a little hard to follow as he keeps talking about copyright violations..
But other than that, how can you fault anything he says here? If you accept that "murder simulators" are harmful to children, then how can you defend the idea that these games should be sold to children? Personally I think Jack Thompson's biggest problem is that he's so tied up thinking about how much damage a game is going to do to kids that he sometimes forgets that adults play games. But so long as he only wants games to be banned to kids then I say all the better! Don't let kids play any game that isn't Mario-like, fine, go ahead. But if you want to stop me from buying games, whether they contain cop-killer violence or nudity or whatever, then I'm gunna fight you to the death. But that isn't Jack Thompson's goal.
No, you're right, I really should have said that Libertarians support laws that restrict only specific freedoms.. like the freedom to hinder others.
Dear god, they're actually serious.