Thanks for perhaps the most frightening insight into the mighty jury system that I've ever read. You should be ashamed of yourself. Oh, and get some help on the workaholic front. I sure hope you're not married.
Actually it's "unlawful", the difference being you can't got to jail for giving a copy of Operation Flashpoint to your friend so you can play multiplayer at a LAN meet. However, Codemasters can sue you for giving a copy to your friend because if you hadn't given a copy to your friend he might have gone and bought a copy, so they're out the few bucks they make off the $69.95 purchase price.
Small RNAs are broadly defined as the RNAs not directly involved in protein synthesis. Small RNAs are usually in the 75-400 nucleotides range, although some are as long as thousand base pairs. They are synthesized by either RNA Polymerase I, II or III. - Small RNA database (last update January 19, 1999)
Which, btw, is about the same size as the genes in Ecoli (which _are_ responsible for protein transcription). Sounds to me like the name "small RNA" is pretty lame. Non-translation RNA or control RNA would probably have been better.
Support the FSF. It's not expensive ($60pa for a student) and they do a lot of great work. Where else could you get free legal representation and expertise than the FSF? I'm just wondering whether they'll send me my copy of Free Software: Free Society. My mum has been hassling me for a copy for xmas.
from the article: Three years ago at a nightclub I bumped into an old friend of mine who went by the nickname "Iggy". I was really amazed to see him because no one had seen nor heard from Iggy in over a year. Many of his friends had all wondered what happened to him.
Man, that is so 100% what happens to me about every two weeks. My answer is not "everquest", it's "girlfriend".
The reason is obvious however. I went to get myself a keychain USB flash storage device the other day and they wanted $99 for 16 meg. I bought 10 disks for $3.98 and went home, and then remember that I dont have a floppy drive and that's why I went out. Those disks are still sitting on my other desk.. mocking me.
For god's sake, $5 is what a 16 meg usb flash card should cost, no more.
Sigh, get a real job. Seriously, in what way does being an "artist" exempt you from earning an honest living? Artists hide behind middle men like promotionists and recording studios because they cant muster up a good sales pitch themselves. On the other hand, free music is coming along, with such great songs as Inside by Maxwell Strait and other great songs. Hopefully, one day, people will do what Max has done and wake up to the fact that you don't need a label or a promotionist to get on the cover of Rolling Stone.
That's a good point. Unfortunately, it almost always becomes the case that technical terms fall into common usage, and are perverted by the masses. For example, the word virus is often used to refer to email worms and trojans. So much so, the word has lost all technical meaning. Apparently, Zone Alarm is a firewall, which is completely different to the technical usage that I recall from 5 years ago (a firewall being a router that filters packets). There are only three attempted solutions that I have ever seen to this problem:
Complain and ridicule when someone uses the term incorrectly
Prefix the term with a clarifying qualifier (e.g., hardware firewall vs software firewall
Invent a new technical term
All are generally used in various degrees as a technical term is slowly perverted into a common use.
On a related note, who can tell me what the word scientific means? If something is considered to be a scientific argument, what critical quality must it possess? Regretably, most scientists cant even answer this question. The term has been so diluted that it simply means related to science rather than the most strict technical meaning, able to be disproven (for example, by experiment).
Leaving out the fact that this author is a crackpot, there is something annoying about the choice of measures that is the metric system. Don't get me wrong, I think the metric system is a heck of a lot better than the imperial measure, but it has room for improvement. The most obvious indication of which is the so called "constants" in any physics equation.
Consider, the equation for calculating the force (in newtons) exerted on a body with mass m (measured in grams) by another body with mass M (also measured in grams) where the distance between the two bodies is d (measured in meters):
F = G m M / d*d
To put it simply, the force exerted on a body of mass m by a body of mass M which are seperated by a distance d is proportional to the combined masses of the bodies divided by the square of the distance seperating them. What's G? G is a constant: 6.7 times 10 to the power of 8.
The constant is required to make the math work out. That's a bit of a hack in my book. If we could combine all the constants in all the formulars together, could we come up with a unit of messure that negated the need for the constants?
Unfortunately, to do this you need a unified theory, and we don't have that. Yet.
If it costs $20 million to launch 420kg into space, it is all well and good that someone can do it for $10 million. But I don't weigh 420kg.. I weigh 85kg, that's just over 1/5th, so shouldn't it cost $4 million to shoot my ass into low earth orbit? $16 million is a little expensive for a room on a space station don't ya think? How much does it cost to make a space station anyways? That's what our Space X friends should be doing, offer $5 million trips to LEO space stations, undercut the russians and herald in a new era of space tourism (for rich bastards).
When we have that, then we'll need reusable vehicles (i.e., next generation X-Prize winners) but until then there's no-where to go! The X-Prize will be won by 2005, and we'll be able to pay a small fortune to "touch" space (but not LEO) in a reusable vehicle, will we have to wait until 2010 to get a reusable LEO vehicle for space tourism? By then, will there be anywhere to go?
It just doesn't add up. My kingdom for a business plan.
Games - well the funny thing is that no one seems to be crying for OS games. Funny that, as it's the one area that the supergeek is similar to the typical end user, they just want to use the software (i.e. play the game) and don't give a flip about having any source available to "fix bugs" or to "improve the software by having a million eyes looking over it".
Yeah, right. Almost every second that I play GTA3 on my windows box I say "god damn I wish I could make this game do..." and when I read technical articals about SimCity 4 and the programmer says "we're not going to make a first person view because the graphics wont look as good" I cant help but scream and complain.. I mean, come on, if you don't want to make a first person simulation, that's fine, but at least license your technology to someone who does! A GTA3 / SimCity4 cross would be one of my ideal games. You can walk around and "do shit" in a living breathing city with no consequences, brilliant! It would be fun just to get down in the street, kill 15 sims, then switch to god mode and watch their sim families go to their sim funerals. Unreal. It'll never happen though, because Maxis makes G rated games and Rockstar doesn't do simulations.
So no, open source games would be great, but unfortunately, there are few people who want to spend money to make open source, and that's what it takes to make a good game: money.
Ok. PayPal does not help you if the person you are dealing with doesn't have a PayPal account. If you could go to your PayPal account and create the equivilent of a digital note then you could give that to someone who doesn't have a PayPal account. Then they could give that note to someone else for equivilent goods/services and that person could eventually cash it in. The note could go through a dozen hands before it gets back to PayPal where it is cashed in. This gives you (and the people you deal with), two things that neither bank accounts nor PayPal can offer: anonymity, and freedom.
The fact that you don't know what digital cash is good for re-enforces my post. Digital cash companies need to stop thinking about the technology and start thinking about why, you, the customer with bank accounts and PayPal, need digital cash.
Some people are happy buying everything on their credit/debit card and never touch paper money. This is what buying online is like today. I, personally, prefer the anonymity of cash. Making a claim as to why we need digital cash is just as hard as making a claim as to why we need cash. I think the best possible reason for needing digital cash is the same reason we need cash: small transactions. I don't want to put my name on every tiny transaction I make. I don't want to go through the hastle of getting my bank involved in every small transaction I make. So what do I do? I simply don't make small transactions on the Internet, because there is no cash. I make the claim that without small transactions an economy cannot grow.
or just tie it to a physical currency, why re-invent the wheel?
Wow, with morons like this I wish I had mod points
on
Where is My Digital Cash?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Where were you and you when I had mod points two days ago? Folks, if you don't even know what digital money is, don't bother posting your ill-informed opinions!
The problem to date, dear Ask Slashdotter, is that no digital money company has been able to get their heads out of their technology centered asses and talk to their customers. They would rather put together a presentation that talks about public key cryptography and e-wallets, than actually talk about the benefits to the consumer. PayPal is leading the way because they 1) didn't create a new currency and 2) worked with a paradigm that everyone understands: bank accounts.
What should happen now is that digital money companies should create a product that uses cryptography and all those groovy things and links into systems like PayPal. When digital money companies start talking about what the customer gets out of it, then we'll get somewhere.
On a similar note, what does the customer get out of a flying car?:)
If you're talking about a bunch of people on Sourceforge (aka, The Projects) doing something because they think it is interesting them I'm all for your chocolate analogy. Unfortunately, the HURD is a project financed by donations to the Free Software Foundation. So if I don't like the particular chocolate that is the HURD, then I shouldn't donate to the FSF? That kind of seems like throwing out the baby with the bath water isn't it?
This is truely another example of democracy gone wrong. Some people get upset when others express their opinion, or try to convince you to change yours. Often their justification for this outrage is to point to the voting system, or worse yet, the market. They say "hey, don't try to make me think, just vote against me or don't buy my product". I cant count the number of times I have been in a group situation and heard the immediate call for a vote, without even the slightest preliminary discussion of the issues. Unfortunately people believe this is the only fair way to resolve conflict, but this not how democracy works!
I have a digital camera and so does my friend. We were both pleasantly surprised to find that XP didn't require any drivers when we just plugged it into the USB port. The reason it doesn't need any drivers is because the protocol that our cameras use to talk down the cable is standardized (the Picture Transfer Protocol). No driver is needed, or more precisely, only one driver is needed, for every camera that implements the protocol.
Why is this possible? Because digital cameras are smart devices. They can be programmed to conform to a previously defined protocol. This is a good thing. My mouse is not a smart device. There is no microprocessor in my mouse, it is not programmable. It would be easy to come up with a protocol that all mice are expected to implement but it would not be used because that microcontroller in the mouse would cost twice as much as any of the other parts in the mouse. The solution is to make a bit of software that translates my mouse's particular hardware protocol into the defined protocol that my operation system understands. That's why we have software drivers.
Putting a rom in something as "unsmart" as a mouse would cost too much, and the first company that came out with mice that are half the cost but require you to install a driver would capture the market. This is what actually happened, way way way back in the days of the PC wars.
But thankfully, things are looking up. Devices are getting smarter. My optical mouse has a microcontroller in it and so does my digital camera. A whole lot of things that plug into my USB port have a microcontroller in them. Does this mean we should have software drivers in rom as you suggest? I say no! Because this would mean that we would still have all the "drivers only for windows" problems that we have today, and what about when you update your operating system, is the driver on the rom still going to work? No. The solution is to have all smart devices conform to a protocol that is standardized, like the picture transfer protocol for digital cameras.
Since Microsoft is charging a royalty fee to use the communications protocols, any open-source developer - those who contend that sharing software blueprints is the best way to build products - would not be able to use them. Those companies, which include Linux firms, use a special "free software" license called the General Public License that bars any payment.
This is not FUD. I've read a few posts that say it is, and I must admit it looked like it to me at first. This is really a good idea on Microsoft's part. If they want to keep any proprietory information away from free software developers all they need do is demand a royalty be paid on every distribution of a product that uses that information. Think about it. You want to download Xine with support for the new Windows Media Player format? Ok, Microsoft is more than willing to supply the Xine folks with the specification for the new format, but they demand a royalty on each distribution of Xine. So, you, the user, are required to pay a royalty, to Microsoft, for your copy of Xine. This is pretty standard for non-free-software right? Well the GPL will not permit the Xine folks to make this requirement of you!
Bochs comes close to the mark but only implements the features of the x86 architecture needed to run specific operating systems. No-one contributes to it, which is a shame, because I can imagine that Bochs could be turned into a cycle accurate simulator with some modern hardware emulations and all the x86 feature set (for example, Superpages were only recently added and are still fundimentally broken). An emulator is the perfect OS debugging tool, it's a shame kernel developers (in particular alternative OS developers) dont embrace it more.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for perhaps the most frightening insight into the mighty jury system that I've ever read. You should be ashamed of yourself. Oh, and get some help on the workaholic front. I sure hope you're not married.
Actually it's "unlawful", the difference being you can't got to jail for giving a copy of Operation Flashpoint to your friend so you can play multiplayer at a LAN meet. However, Codemasters can sue you for giving a copy to your friend because if you hadn't given a copy to your friend he might have gone and bought a copy, so they're out the few bucks they make off the $69.95 purchase price.
Which, btw, is about the same size as the genes in Ecoli (which _are_ responsible for protein transcription). Sounds to me like the name "small RNA" is pretty lame. Non-translation RNA or control RNA would probably have been better.
Support the FSF. It's not expensive ($60pa for a student) and they do a lot of great work. Where else could you get free legal representation and expertise than the FSF? I'm just wondering whether they'll send me my copy of Free Software: Free Society. My mum has been hassling me for a copy for xmas.
from the article: Three years ago at a nightclub I bumped into an old friend of mine who went by the nickname "Iggy". I was really amazed to see him because no one had seen nor heard from Iggy in over a year. Many of his friends had all wondered what happened to him.
Man, that is so 100% what happens to me about every two weeks. My answer is not "everquest", it's "girlfriend".
Man, you would have figured they'd at least try making a visor first.
The reason is obvious however. I went to get myself a keychain USB flash storage device the other day and they wanted $99 for 16 meg. I bought 10 disks for $3.98 and went home, and then remember that I dont have a floppy drive and that's why I went out. Those disks are still sitting on my other desk.. mocking me.
For god's sake, $5 is what a 16 meg usb flash card should cost, no more.
Sigh, get a real job. Seriously, in what way does being an "artist" exempt you from earning an honest living? Artists hide behind middle men like promotionists and recording studios because they cant muster up a good sales pitch themselves. On the other hand, free music is coming along, with such great songs as Inside by Maxwell Strait and other great songs. Hopefully, one day, people will do what Max has done and wake up to the fact that you don't need a label or a promotionist to get on the cover of Rolling Stone.
I was refering to the utopian comment about never having to take a bath.. humour is so lost on some people. Oh, and Bill Joy is a dickhead.
[insert obvious RMS reference here]
All are generally used in various degrees as a technical term is slowly perverted into a common use.
On a related note, who can tell me what the word scientific means? If something is considered to be a scientific argument, what critical quality must it possess? Regretably, most scientists cant even answer this question. The term has been so diluted that it simply means related to science rather than the most strict technical meaning, able to be disproven (for example, by experiment).
Surely the air in a sealed vessel will last you until you get to a space station. If not, take a plant and put it near the window.
Leaving out the fact that this author is a crackpot, there is something annoying about the choice of measures that is the metric system. Don't get me wrong, I think the metric system is a heck of a lot better than the imperial measure, but it has room for improvement. The most obvious indication of which is the so called "constants" in any physics equation.
Consider, the equation for calculating the force (in newtons) exerted on a body with mass m (measured in grams) by another body with mass M (also measured in grams) where the distance between the two bodies is d (measured in meters):
F = G m M / d*d
To put it simply, the force exerted on a body of mass m by a body of mass M which are seperated by a distance d is proportional to the combined masses of the bodies divided by the square of the distance seperating them. What's G? G is a constant: 6.7 times 10 to the power of 8.
The constant is required to make the math work out. That's a bit of a hack in my book. If we could combine all the constants in all the formulars together, could we come up with a unit of messure that negated the need for the constants?
Unfortunately, to do this you need a unified theory, and we don't have that. Yet.
If it costs $20 million to launch 420kg into space, it is all well and good that someone can do it for $10 million. But I don't weigh 420kg.. I weigh 85kg, that's just over 1/5th, so shouldn't it cost $4 million to shoot my ass into low earth orbit? $16 million is a little expensive for a room on a space station don't ya think? How much does it cost to make a space station anyways? That's what our Space X friends should be doing, offer $5 million trips to LEO space stations, undercut the russians and herald in a new era of space tourism (for rich bastards).
When we have that, then we'll need reusable vehicles (i.e., next generation X-Prize winners) but until then there's no-where to go! The X-Prize will be won by 2005, and we'll be able to pay a small fortune to "touch" space (but not LEO) in a reusable vehicle, will we have to wait until 2010 to get a reusable LEO vehicle for space tourism? By then, will there be anywhere to go?
It just doesn't add up. My kingdom for a business plan.
:)
Games - well the funny thing is that no one seems to be crying for OS games. Funny that, as it's the one area that the supergeek is similar to the typical end user, they just want to use the software (i.e. play the game) and don't give a flip about having any source available to "fix bugs" or to "improve the software by having a million eyes looking over it".
Yeah, right. Almost every second that I play GTA3 on my windows box I say "god damn I wish I could make this game do..." and when I read technical articals about SimCity 4 and the programmer says "we're not going to make a first person view because the graphics wont look as good" I cant help but scream and complain.. I mean, come on, if you don't want to make a first person simulation, that's fine, but at least license your technology to someone who does! A GTA3 / SimCity4 cross would be one of my ideal games. You can walk around and "do shit" in a living breathing city with no consequences, brilliant! It would be fun just to get down in the street, kill 15 sims, then switch to god mode and watch their sim families go to their sim funerals. Unreal. It'll never happen though, because Maxis makes G rated games and Rockstar doesn't do simulations.
So no, open source games would be great, but unfortunately, there are few people who want to spend money to make open source, and that's what it takes to make a good game: money.
Sure, but you use nutrasweet the minute it hits the shelves.
Ok. PayPal does not help you if the person you are dealing with doesn't have a PayPal account. If you could go to your PayPal account and create the equivilent of a digital note then you could give that to someone who doesn't have a PayPal account. Then they could give that note to someone else for equivilent goods/services and that person could eventually cash it in. The note could go through a dozen hands before it gets back to PayPal where it is cashed in. This gives you (and the people you deal with), two things that neither bank accounts nor PayPal can offer: anonymity, and freedom.
The fact that you don't know what digital cash is good for re-enforces my post. Digital cash companies need to stop thinking about the technology and start thinking about why, you, the customer with bank accounts and PayPal, need digital cash.
Some people are happy buying everything on their credit/debit card and never touch paper money. This is what buying online is like today. I, personally, prefer the anonymity of cash. Making a claim as to why we need digital cash is just as hard as making a claim as to why we need cash. I think the best possible reason for needing digital cash is the same reason we need cash: small transactions. I don't want to put my name on every tiny transaction I make. I don't want to go through the hastle of getting my bank involved in every small transaction I make. So what do I do? I simply don't make small transactions on the Internet, because there is no cash. I make the claim that without small transactions an economy cannot grow.
or just tie it to a physical currency, why re-invent the wheel?
Where were you and you when I had mod points two days ago? Folks, if you don't even know what digital money is, don't bother posting your ill-informed opinions!
:)
The problem to date, dear Ask Slashdotter, is that no digital money company has been able to get their heads out of their technology centered asses and talk to their customers. They would rather put together a presentation that talks about public key cryptography and e-wallets, than actually talk about the benefits to the consumer. PayPal is leading the way because they 1) didn't create a new currency and 2) worked with a paradigm that everyone understands: bank accounts.
What should happen now is that digital money companies should create a product that uses cryptography and all those groovy things and links into systems like PayPal. When digital money companies start talking about what the customer gets out of it, then we'll get somewhere.
On a similar note, what does the customer get out of a flying car?
If you're talking about a bunch of people on
Sourceforge (aka, The Projects) doing something because they think it is interesting them I'm all for your chocolate analogy. Unfortunately, the HURD is a project financed by donations to the Free Software Foundation. So if I don't like the particular chocolate that is the HURD, then I shouldn't donate to the FSF? That kind of seems like throwing out the baby with the bath water isn't it?
This is truely another example of democracy gone wrong. Some people get upset when others express their opinion, or try to convince you to change yours. Often their justification for this outrage is to point to the voting system, or worse yet, the market. They say "hey, don't try to make me think, just vote against me or don't buy my product". I cant count the number of times I have been in a group situation and heard the immediate call for a vote, without even the slightest preliminary discussion of the issues. Unfortunately people believe this is the only fair way to resolve conflict, but this not how democracy works!
I have a digital camera and so does my friend. We were both pleasantly surprised to find that XP didn't require any drivers when we just plugged it into the USB port. The reason it doesn't need any drivers is because the protocol that our cameras use to talk down the cable is standardized (the Picture Transfer Protocol). No driver is needed, or more precisely, only one driver is needed, for every camera that implements the protocol.
Why is this possible? Because digital cameras are smart devices. They can be programmed to conform to a previously defined protocol. This is a good thing. My mouse is not a smart device. There is no microprocessor in my mouse, it is not programmable. It would be easy to come up with a protocol that all mice are expected to implement but it would not be used because that microcontroller in the mouse would cost twice as much as any of the other parts in the mouse. The solution is to make a bit of software that translates my mouse's particular hardware protocol into the defined protocol that my operation system understands. That's why we have software drivers.
Putting a rom in something as "unsmart" as a mouse would cost too much, and the first company that came out with mice that are half the cost but require you to install a driver would capture the market. This is what actually happened, way way way back in the days of the PC wars.
But thankfully, things are looking up. Devices are getting smarter. My optical mouse has a microcontroller in it and so does my digital camera. A whole lot of things that plug into my USB port have a microcontroller in them. Does this mean we should have software drivers in rom as you suggest? I say no! Because this would mean that we would still have all the "drivers only for windows" problems that we have today, and what about when you update your operating system, is the driver on the rom still going to work? No. The solution is to have all smart devices conform to a protocol that is standardized, like the picture transfer protocol for digital cameras.
Since Microsoft is charging a royalty fee to use the communications protocols, any open-source developer - those who contend that sharing software blueprints is the best way to build products - would not be able to use them. Those companies, which include Linux firms, use a special "free software" license called the General Public License that bars any payment.
This is not FUD. I've read a few posts that say it is, and I must admit it looked like it to me at first. This is really a good idea on Microsoft's part. If they want to keep any proprietory information away from free software developers all they need do is demand a royalty be paid on every distribution of a product that uses that information. Think about it. You want to download Xine with support for the new Windows Media Player format? Ok, Microsoft is more than willing to supply the Xine folks with the specification for the new format, but they demand a royalty on each distribution of Xine. So, you, the user, are required to pay a royalty, to Microsoft, for your copy of Xine. This is pretty standard for non-free-software right? Well the GPL will not permit the Xine folks to make this requirement of you!
Good show Microsoft, very evil.
Agreed. It's useful, just dont try to do anything *new* with it.
Bochs comes close to the mark but only implements the features of the x86 architecture needed to run specific operating systems. No-one contributes to it, which is a shame, because I can imagine that Bochs could be turned into a cycle accurate simulator with some modern hardware emulations and all the x86 feature set (for example, Superpages were only recently added and are still fundimentally broken). An emulator is the perfect OS debugging tool, it's a shame kernel developers (in particular alternative OS developers) dont embrace it more.