The will to explore. That sounds great. But we can explore just fine with robots. It doesn't have the romance of sending humans, but it's cheaper, and provides more benefits back where people actually live, on earth, by improving robotic technology.
The existance of space travel is due to the cold war, the continued existance of space travel after the cold war is due to political inertia. The only nations who ever bothered seriously with manned space travel did it purely for political reasons, the US and the USSR, and now China using it as a propaganda tool (while doing nothing with scientific value, since they're just reusing the russians' technology). The EU abandoned its manned space travel programs (and focused on the very successful ariane unmanned launcher program) when it realised how much it would cost and how little pay-off there would be.
Saying "spacetravel has enough reasons to exist because if it didn't then it wouldn't" is self-defeating. It's a circular argument. Either there are real reasons for manned space travel, and you can list them, or there aren't, and we should seriously re-evaluate whether we should be sending people out of the gravity well just for the coolness factor.
Re:Spaceflight as a religious endeavour
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 1
Many space enthusiasts believe passionately in "man's destiny in the stars"
I don't see how anyone could see this as motivation for the current manned space program. We know how to send people anywhere within the solar system. We know how to create artificial gravity, we know how to create self-sustaining bio-environments, we know how to build engines that will take a spaceship out to pluto within a matter of years. Anything within the solar system is just a matter of applying what we know. There is very little new stuff to be learned by sending people to mars. It's all basic physics and the application of proven technology.
Anything outside the solar system is unreachable. We don't have a single viable technology or even theory in physics that will help us go to any star other than our own within a reasonable timeframe. Given that we have no clue whatsoever how to actually go to the stars, why send people up at all? Incremental advances in solar system travel is just not going to get us to proxima centauri.
His followers were transformed - from frightened idiots to fearless evangelists.
What do you base this on? The bible? It was written by those same followers. How could that be a reliable source then?
Occam's razor leads to a scary conclusion. For me it did anyway - Jesus was who he said he was.
That's what occam's razor tells you? So, jesus lived, and he died, and his body can't be found, so the most reasonable explanation you can think of is that he was ressurected? Have you any idea of how many people that live, die and utterly disappear? Millions every year. Did they all get resurrected too?
For me the most reasonable explanation is that the followers stole his body, hid it, and created the resurrection myth so they could preach their faith more effectively. Ofcourse, that would require accepting the apostels were actually human and might have done things that would be frowned upon.
Also, whether the body was actually in the grave or not shouldn't have made an influence on it becoming a shrine. Think about it. Even the empty grave of Jesus would still be a very worthwile place to visit for most christians. That it didn't become a shrine is something I consider very suspicious.
The bible is not written in plain english, not even plain armaic, latin, or hebrew! Even disregarding the ambiguity of translation (Which is significant!!!)... We're still left with changing times, different societal points of view, and the fact that many of the stories were likely made up to prove a point, not to be understood as historical fact...
That doesn't even cover half of the fudge factor.
The only reason the bible exists as a canonical collection of texts is political. Originally, there was no officially sanctioned set of books regarding christianity, and as a result, gnostic faith was very strong in the early christian society. The bible was created by orthodox christians as an effort to stamp out gnosticism. And together with the act of convincing the romans that orthodox christianity was the one true faith, they were very successful at their aims. You don't hear a lot of people saying they're gnostic christians anymore.
And then ofcourse, over the years, many popes revised the contents of the bible depending on what the prevaling winds of the time considered politically correct.
From what I've seen, ebooks sell for the same or slightly more than the paperback version, even including shipment costs for the paperback. Which is entirely ridiculous, but not as ridiculous as audiobooks, which sell for more than hardbound versions.
Ofcourse, there's no real ebook market. LCD screens with cleartype are just passable for reading ebooks, but they don't come anywhere near the experience of dead tree editions. And this eink reader is the very first one I've seen that actually is usable where you'd want to use it, on the beach and on the plane (respectively overbright, and too dark).
It's well known that nike doesn't police the sweatshops to uphold their code of conduct. It has lots of nice words, but in practice nike still employs what basically amounts to slave labor.
How about doing this society-wide? Tax blank media. Use the tax to pay the artists based on popularity on filesharing networks. Make it legal to allow any kind of copying. No one would have to worry about copyright anymore, and artists would still get paid.
In fact, this is what the blank media tax in various countries was supposed to do, and how it does work in canada, if I'm not mistaken.
If 1k people did that, the RIAA would *never* have the legal resources to handle the situation.
If 1k people did that, the RIAA would just seize the pirates' computers with their new wave of lawsuits. Be glad they don't do that already, since seized hardware has a tendency to disappear into the ether, even when you're not guilty.
There's lots of great independent music on cd baby too.
I haven't met a single person who couldn't find anything on cd baby they didn't like. That's in real life mind you. On slashdot there always seem to be people who have to be stubborn just to be stubborn.
Ok lets make a dir of 100000 files of everysone possible. Faked.
Make an app that generates these files then shares them.
If 100000 people run it, (well not only will we get 'bad' fake files, but RIAA might start sueing) then you can sue them for wrongfull sue.
At least it would use up all their resources if suddendly 50000 people have 100000 files each.
You'd have to mix them in with the regular shared files in such a way that it's not possible to recognize which are real and which are fake, or the RIAA would recognize the fakes and not do anything about them.
At that point, you decrease the effectiveness of the filesharing network so dramatically it becomes inherently useless.
All of these use shared communication protocols (http, imap, pop, smtp) or file formats (bookmarks.html, mbox). The only thing not common (yet) is the ioslave/gnomevfs duality.
Oh, and different keyboard shortcuts, mime types, etc. These don't attract end users, they annoy them.
The difference between gnome and kde is getting to be quite minimal. I fully expect there to come a point where the two desktops will just be two skins on the same backend.
Can anyone but the owner of a copyright sue you for copyright infringement? The reason I ask is because I'm thinking about this concept of saving abandoned art. If no one is left alive who provably owns a work, then who is going to sue you if you copy it? If nobody can be found who has legal standing, even if copying would be illegal, wouldn't it be not much of a legal risk to go ahead and copy the work?
I think "unconditional copyright" is a good idea. I might write a hundred songs (or poems or whatever) in a year and not make any money off of them. It costs money to register your work as copyrighted.
Not needing to register each work simply puts the burden on the "fair use" user. If they want to use my work, then I can grant them the rights to use it. But that doesn't mean that I give up copyrights.
If I am required to register my copyright, then I lose some of the ability to protect it.
A few comments:
If you're not able to make a profit from a work within 50 years of creating it, then it's so unlikely you'll ever make a profit from it, that it just might as well be public domain. Remember that the goal of copyright is to ensure the public good, by promoting the creation of useful works in the arts and sciences.
Secondly, how about a system where registration and renewals would only start after 50 years past the date of creation? Most authors by that time would be either dead, or not caring anymore who copies their work. I would predict the vast majority of works over 50 would become public domain, while at the same time, such a system wouldn't have the problems you mention. Any opposition to a system like this?
Something I recently discovered, archive.org has tons of music available under terms that allow legal downloading, some of it CC, some of it even good.
So now, what Sun is trying to show off is a way of organizing. You are placing things in specific locations that will allow you to easily retrieve them earlier.
OK, so you need spatiality and persistance in your gui's. I don't see how sun's 3D environment does this any better than the best of the 2D gui's. You're still dealing with a 2D interface in every possible way except inside your mind. You're looking at a flat arrangement of pixels. If you believe it has depth then it's only because your mind is fooling you to that end. You have none of the benefits of true depth, like being able to judge distances automatically based on perspective and sharpness (the farther way, the blurrier something should get). So organising things based on depth is at best going to be clumsy.
The mouse is also very poor to use as a 3D interface. I know what I'm talking about, I've programmed 3D interface before. It is woefully inadequate as a replacement for the human hand, not only because it has only one finger, and very few actions, but also because it doesn't have a concept of depth.
The only way I could see 3D happening as an interface is with true 3D screens (likely goggles, if they ever make some that have a useful resolution and don't make you look like you're one of ming's henchmen), and 3D gloves for navigation. Since neither is likely to be found on the common desktop anytime soon, I just don't see looking glass going anywhere.
if we really do find life that evolved separately from terran life, it throws a *huge* quandary for some philosophies and a lot of world religion
Like when they first showed the earth wasn't flat, and suddenly christianity collapsed because a flat world was one of its cornerstones? Don't kid yourself, there is a world of difference between dogma and religion. Dogma comes and goes like the tides, religion is eternal. The handy thing about holy scripture is that you need to interpret it, so what it actually says is left up to the interpreter. When we do find conclusive evidence for alien life, the major religions will all come back and say "well ofcourse, our holy scripture said it all along, here's the passage that mentions it."
The specific problem here are scale effects. Most products share an economic property, twice the marketshare will bring in more than twice the profits, since your fixed costs are spread wider across the quantity sold. As a result, there is a natural tendency for businesses to merge. It is profitable. Government's job is to ensure that the market remains a free market. This means they must constantly shoot down the top dog. It's brutal to the investors of the monopolist, but necessary for keeping the economy rolling.
Ofcourse, this blends with politics, and the bigger a company is, the more political power it has, which is why microsoft hasn't been taken down yet by the US justice department.
MP3 and DIVX are mostly used to commit crimes with. People who are using them legally tend to have bought legal software.
I see the motivation behind patent-free codecs, and I like it, but I doubt that by itself is sufficient motivation to switch. Ogg vorbis has been out for a long time now, and it's still a niche player, despite being a superior codec to mp3 in all ways possible.
He tried these 12 steps With Netscape. Then this guy went and founded LoudCloud.
In his defense, netscape was the very first of the major open source backers, before it was cool, or even acceptable in the business community. He got a lot of flack over it, but yet it still achieved its goals (apart from "save netscape, the company"). The netscape codebase, through the mozilla project, has become immortal, and has produced in a range of world class networking products (mozilla suite, firefox, thunderbird, nvu,...). Granted, it took too long to save netscape, but that was the whole point behind open-sourcing it, they knew netscape was dying, and open source for them was a long shot.
Netscape was doomed long before the mozilla project was started. They stopped innovating, and then microsoft targeted them as their number one enemy.
Slashdot Mirror
The will to explore. That sounds great. But we can explore just fine with robots. It doesn't have the romance of sending humans, but it's cheaper, and provides more benefits back where people actually live, on earth, by improving robotic technology.
The existance of space travel is due to the cold war, the continued existance of space travel after the cold war is due to political inertia. The only nations who ever bothered seriously with manned space travel did it purely for political reasons, the US and the USSR, and now China using it as a propaganda tool (while doing nothing with scientific value, since they're just reusing the russians' technology). The EU abandoned its manned space travel programs (and focused on the very successful ariane unmanned launcher program) when it realised how much it would cost and how little pay-off there would be.
Saying "spacetravel has enough reasons to exist because if it didn't then it wouldn't" is self-defeating. It's a circular argument. Either there are real reasons for manned space travel, and you can list them, or there aren't, and we should seriously re-evaluate whether we should be sending people out of the gravity well just for the coolness factor.
Many space enthusiasts believe passionately in "man's destiny in the stars"
I don't see how anyone could see this as motivation for the current manned space program. We know how to send people anywhere within the solar system. We know how to create artificial gravity, we know how to create self-sustaining bio-environments, we know how to build engines that will take a spaceship out to pluto within a matter of years. Anything within the solar system is just a matter of applying what we know. There is very little new stuff to be learned by sending people to mars. It's all basic physics and the application of proven technology.
Anything outside the solar system is unreachable. We don't have a single viable technology or even theory in physics that will help us go to any star other than our own within a reasonable timeframe. Given that we have no clue whatsoever how to actually go to the stars, why send people up at all? Incremental advances in solar system travel is just not going to get us to proxima centauri.
His followers were transformed - from frightened idiots to fearless evangelists.
What do you base this on? The bible? It was written by those same followers. How could that be a reliable source then?
Occam's razor leads to a scary conclusion. For me it did anyway - Jesus was who he said he was.
That's what occam's razor tells you? So, jesus lived, and he died, and his body can't be found, so the most reasonable explanation you can think of is that he was ressurected? Have you any idea of how many people that live, die and utterly disappear? Millions every year. Did they all get resurrected too?
For me the most reasonable explanation is that the followers stole his body, hid it, and created the resurrection myth so they could preach their faith more effectively. Ofcourse, that would require accepting the apostels were actually human and might have done things that would be frowned upon.
Also, whether the body was actually in the grave or not shouldn't have made an influence on it becoming a shrine. Think about it. Even the empty grave of Jesus would still be a very worthwile place to visit for most christians. That it didn't become a shrine is something I consider very suspicious.
I believe the point of all the gore was making people realise what "he died for our sins" exactly means.
The bible is not written in plain english, not even plain armaic, latin, or hebrew! Even disregarding the ambiguity of translation (Which is significant!!!)... We're still left with changing times, different societal points of view, and the fact that many of the stories were likely made up to prove a point, not to be understood as historical fact...
That doesn't even cover half of the fudge factor.
The only reason the bible exists as a canonical collection of texts is political. Originally, there was no officially sanctioned set of books regarding christianity, and as a result, gnostic faith was very strong in the early christian society. The bible was created by orthodox christians as an effort to stamp out gnosticism. And together with the act of convincing the romans that orthodox christianity was the one true faith, they were very successful at their aims. You don't hear a lot of people saying they're gnostic christians anymore.
And then ofcourse, over the years, many popes revised the contents of the bible depending on what the prevaling winds of the time considered politically correct.
From what I've seen, ebooks sell for the same or slightly more than the paperback version, even including shipment costs for the paperback. Which is entirely ridiculous, but not as ridiculous as audiobooks, which sell for more than hardbound versions.
Ofcourse, there's no real ebook market. LCD screens with cleartype are just passable for reading ebooks, but they don't come anywhere near the experience of dead tree editions. And this eink reader is the very first one I've seen that actually is usable where you'd want to use it, on the beach and on the plane (respectively overbright, and too dark).
Actually, the fine is the punishment, and the release of documentation is the remedy.
Damn. Messed up the url.
Like I said, it's 3639551843.
Hmm, I think 3639551843 would be an even cooler way of remembering that.
That's dword notation btw, conversion instructions are found here.
It's well known that nike doesn't police the sweatshops to uphold their code of conduct. It has lots of nice words, but in practice nike still employs what basically amounts to slave labor.
How about doing this society-wide? Tax blank media. Use the tax to pay the artists based on popularity on filesharing networks. Make it legal to allow any kind of copying. No one would have to worry about copyright anymore, and artists would still get paid.
In fact, this is what the blank media tax in various countries was supposed to do, and how it does work in canada, if I'm not mistaken.
If 1k people did that, the RIAA would *never* have the legal resources to handle the situation.
If 1k people did that, the RIAA would just seize the pirates' computers with their new wave of lawsuits. Be glad they don't do that already, since seized hardware has a tendency to disappear into the ether, even when you're not guilty.
There's lots of great independent music on cd baby too.
I haven't met a single person who couldn't find anything on cd baby they didn't like. That's in real life mind you. On slashdot there always seem to be people who have to be stubborn just to be stubborn.
Ok lets make a dir of 100000 files of everysone possible. Faked.
Make an app that generates these files then shares them.
If 100000 people run it, (well not only will we get 'bad' fake files, but RIAA might start sueing) then you can sue them for wrongfull sue.
At least it would use up all their resources if suddendly 50000 people have 100000 files each.
You'd have to mix them in with the regular shared files in such a way that it's not possible to recognize which are real and which are fake, or the RIAA would recognize the fakes and not do anything about them.
At that point, you decrease the effectiveness of the filesharing network so dramatically it becomes inherently useless.
# One of those being a menu of applications located at the far left
# A few shortcuts for commonyl used apps beside that
# Icons on the desktop
Shared menu's, shared icon themes
# A taskbar besides that, including pop up listy boxes for duplicate apps
Shared window manager specs, so any app will be known to a taskbar which supports the spec, and will be controllable by it.
# Some panel apps beside that, for the weather or whatever else
# A clock over on the right
Shared system tray
# A file manager
# A web browser
# An email app
All of these use shared communication protocols (http, imap, pop, smtp) or file formats (bookmarks.html, mbox). The only thing not common (yet) is the ioslave/gnomevfs duality.
Oh, and different keyboard shortcuts, mime types, etc. These don't attract end users, they annoy them.
Shared mime database, shared default key bindings (that last one is in the planning stage)
The difference between gnome and kde is getting to be quite minimal. I fully expect there to come a point where the two desktops will just be two skins on the same backend.
Do you have the audiocd io slave installed? It's an optional install, from one of the extras packages.
I'm wondering about something:
Can anyone but the owner of a copyright sue you for copyright infringement? The reason I ask is because I'm thinking about this concept of saving abandoned art. If no one is left alive who provably owns a work, then who is going to sue you if you copy it? If nobody can be found who has legal standing, even if copying would be illegal, wouldn't it be not much of a legal risk to go ahead and copy the work?
I think "unconditional copyright" is a good idea. I might write a hundred songs (or poems or whatever) in a year and not make any money off of them. It costs money to register your work as copyrighted.
Not needing to register each work simply puts the burden on the "fair use" user. If they want to use my work, then I can grant them the rights to use it. But that doesn't mean that I give up copyrights.
If I am required to register my copyright, then I lose some of the ability to protect it.
A few comments:
If you're not able to make a profit from a work within 50 years of creating it, then it's so unlikely you'll ever make a profit from it, that it just might as well be public domain. Remember that the goal of copyright is to ensure the public good, by promoting the creation of useful works in the arts and sciences.
Secondly, how about a system where registration and renewals would only start after 50 years past the date of creation? Most authors by that time would be either dead, or not caring anymore who copies their work. I would predict the vast majority of works over 50 would become public domain, while at the same time, such a system wouldn't have the problems you mention. Any opposition to a system like this?
Something I recently discovered, archive.org has tons of music available under terms that allow legal downloading, some of it CC, some of it even good.
So now, what Sun is trying to show off is a way of organizing. You are placing things in specific locations that will allow you to easily retrieve them earlier.
OK, so you need spatiality and persistance in your gui's. I don't see how sun's 3D environment does this any better than the best of the 2D gui's. You're still dealing with a 2D interface in every possible way except inside your mind. You're looking at a flat arrangement of pixels. If you believe it has depth then it's only because your mind is fooling you to that end. You have none of the benefits of true depth, like being able to judge distances automatically based on perspective and sharpness (the farther way, the blurrier something should get). So organising things based on depth is at best going to be clumsy.
The mouse is also very poor to use as a 3D interface. I know what I'm talking about, I've programmed 3D interface before. It is woefully inadequate as a replacement for the human hand, not only because it has only one finger, and very few actions, but also because it doesn't have a concept of depth.
The only way I could see 3D happening as an interface is with true 3D screens (likely goggles, if they ever make some that have a useful resolution and don't make you look like you're one of ming's henchmen), and 3D gloves for navigation. Since neither is likely to be found on the common desktop anytime soon, I just don't see looking glass going anywhere.
if we really do find life that evolved separately from terran life, it throws a *huge* quandary for some philosophies and a lot of world religion
Like when they first showed the earth wasn't flat, and suddenly christianity collapsed because a flat world was one of its cornerstones? Don't kid yourself, there is a world of difference between dogma and religion. Dogma comes and goes like the tides, religion is eternal. The handy thing about holy scripture is that you need to interpret it, so what it actually says is left up to the interpreter. When we do find conclusive evidence for alien life, the major religions will all come back and say "well ofcourse, our holy scripture said it all along, here's the passage that mentions it."
Capitalism is its own worst enemy.
The specific problem here are scale effects. Most products share an economic property, twice the marketshare will bring in more than twice the profits, since your fixed costs are spread wider across the quantity sold. As a result, there is a natural tendency for businesses to merge. It is profitable. Government's job is to ensure that the market remains a free market. This means they must constantly shoot down the top dog. It's brutal to the investors of the monopolist, but necessary for keeping the economy rolling.
Ofcourse, this blends with politics, and the bigger a company is, the more political power it has, which is why microsoft hasn't been taken down yet by the US justice department.
But does invading two countries really make you conclude that Bush wants to invade the world, making it into one country, like Hitler?
I present to you: Godwin's law.
MP3 and DIVX are mostly used to commit crimes with. People who are using them legally tend to have bought legal software.
I see the motivation behind patent-free codecs, and I like it, but I doubt that by itself is sufficient motivation to switch. Ogg vorbis has been out for a long time now, and it's still a niche player, despite being a superior codec to mp3 in all ways possible.
He tried these 12 steps With Netscape. Then this guy went and founded LoudCloud.
...). Granted, it took too long to save netscape, but that was the whole point behind open-sourcing it, they knew netscape was dying, and open source for them was a long shot.
In his defense, netscape was the very first of the major open source backers, before it was cool, or even acceptable in the business community. He got a lot of flack over it, but yet it still achieved its goals (apart from "save netscape, the company"). The netscape codebase, through the mozilla project, has become immortal, and has produced in a range of world class networking products (mozilla suite, firefox, thunderbird, nvu,
Netscape was doomed long before the mozilla project was started. They stopped innovating, and then microsoft targeted them as their number one enemy.