NASA takes some $7trillion a year, and they cannot even work out that if you don't take out the trash, it starts to pile up? It's hardly rocket science!
I am so fed up with NASA wasting taxpayers dollars on what are little more than MIT-style 'hacks'. Why on earth should the taxpayer foot the bill for these boffins to do 'cool' stuff? There should be a clear payoff for any of the money NASA spends. Be it military applications or products that can be commercialised. This 'blue sky' wasting of our hard-earned cash HAS TO STOP!!!
Does the world really need this?
on
Web Search Garage
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Surely google and altavista are more than adequate?
I have some extremely expensive hi-fi equipment. Some of my more tone-deaf friends are unable to tell the difference between my $15000+ system and their low end systems. But I don't think this means there is no difference.
I have extremely good hearing, and can for example tell when an external clock is out of sync, from the artifacts produced by the 'jitter'. Likewise, I expect there are some people who will be able to tell the difference between a 3d engine using 64-bit arithmetic vs 32-bit arithmetic. It may not be everyone, but there will be some people who will always be prepared to pay a premium for quality.
Why should I have to explain anything to a police officer? If I choose to exceed the posted speed limit, sure I deserve to have the book thrown at me. But the idea that I can be forced to "explain myself" to the state seems absurd, and ludicrous.
I thought our country was founded on the ideals of freedom, and liberty, not Communistic ideas like having to 'explain oneself' to law enforcement.
I expect this system would have been declared unconstitutional before 9/11 but these days, almost anything that restricts our freedoms is seen as a 'good thing' and helping us to win the 'war on (some kinds of) terrorism'.
Right. And if that's its purpose, people should not use it when a BSD-Style license would be more appropriate. How many developers simply use the GPL without thinking it through? The point is, once you start down the GPL road, there is no turning back.
How it is flamebait to point this out is beyond me. Oh yeah, I forgot, this is slashdot. Rational discourse seldom holds sway...
All of this could easily have been avoided.
on
Mambo Users Threatened
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· Score: -1, Troll
It's obvious to anyone that this scenario could easily have been avoided. The issue here is the restrictive nature of the GPL. Had this code been released under the more flexible and free BSD license, none of these issues would arise.
Stallman has set back the cause of quality free software by 20 years with his viral-like GPL, which infects everything it comes into contact with.
Notice that Apple based their OS around the Darwin kernel, precisely because of the major problems inherant in the GPL.
How can we (the open source community) ever hope to be taken seriously by the people with the big bucks (Fortune 500 corportations and governments) when our main software license imposes so many unreasonable restrictions? It's time to kill the GPL.
I could care less about all this stuff. How does any of this really affect me? I'd be more concerned about the very real and quite insidious censorship applied by the so-called "editors" of this website.
I still find it amazing that corporations trust their enterprises to an operating system written by hackers! Who knows how many back door penetrations are allowed in the Linux kernel? I should imagine it's a very large amount.
The kind of people who trust wikipedia are basement-dwelling unwashed gnu hippies. If they get their information from wikipedia, its hardly surprising that they are so ill-informed
I can't be the only European who thinks the GTA series of games is rather US-centric? I find it hard to relate to much of what goes on in these games. Why can't Rockstar base one of their games in Continental Europe? It's not as if we don't have crime here.
Also, am I the only one worried about all the racial stereotyping that goes on in these games? Take a look at the screenshots on that website, they seem to be sending a message that 'people of color' are drug dealers and gun-toting psychopaths.
It's no wonder the black community in the US feels so victimized with an endless stream of negative images like this.
Couldn't the bad guys be mexican or white just for once?
Don't these people have anything better to do with their time?They could be out playing D&D and improving their social skills, instead they sit around hacking a calculator. What are the odds these guys never got laid in their lives?
We will never get usable software. Very few CS courses make their students study cognitive psychology, or design, or anything else in the 'creative' area of science.
Your average linux-using developer thinks that everyone else is as smart as he is, and that command line interfaces are a good thing. The GUI is seen as a fisher-price interface for retards.
We need to get rid of this way of thinking. Software should be like a vending machine. You press a button, and it does exactly what its supposed to.
Linix and Windoze have set back the cause of usable software about 20 years!
Sure, but why do you need to? The cop is just checking to make sure you are not in the process of committing a crime. What have you got to be afraid of? Law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from this, it's the criminals who should be worried and rightly so!
I am sick of all the taxpayers $$$s going into funding all this astrological nonsense. If man was meant to go into space, God would have enabled him to breathe in a vacuum. As it is, this is just another example of American taxpayers dollars going to waste. Jesus we need to get some priorities here...
What's the difference between a cop looking at you in the street, verses a cop looking at you in a street via a video camera?
I can't be the only one who thinks this whole 1984 scaremongering is just a whole load of fuss about nothing, can I?
Haven't we got more important things to worry about? The RIAA for example?
Why 'Sorcerer's Stone' and not Philosopher's stone
on
Review: Harry Potter
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· Score: 0, Troll
Do the English think that Americans are too stupid to understand what a Philosopher is ?
It seems to me that this movie has been dumbed down for an American audience.
And to be quite honest, I could not understand about 40% of what people were saying because of their thick English accents. Would captions have been so difficult to produce ?
Also, It is a bit disturbing that adequacy.org beat you to it with this one. Come on slashdot editors, try to keep up!!!.
Its terrifying enough that the terrorists have got Anthrax and Sarin, without them having smallpox as well.
I sometimes wonder if it might not be easier if we all just converted to Islam, and had done with it. It sure would put an end to lots of religious arguments.
Anyway, I think that while the prognosis for an individual infected with smallpox is not good, I suspect mankind as a whole would survive it. And if we don't survive, hey - it was evolution in action, and maybe the Elephants, Dolphins and Whales and other intelligent animals will be glad to see the back of us.
What the hell do you expect when the public has decided that space exploration is no longer important so it's not worth spending any money on anymore?
Well, I expect them not to spend money on it anymore. After all, this is supposed to be a capitalist democracy.
If they want to waste money on going to mars, let them get it from speculative investors, people who take risks for a living, and not from the poor taxpayer.
Goatse.cx is a picture of a hugely distended anus, adequacy seems to be the home of intelligent debate on the Internet. Kind of like slashdot about 3 or 4 years ago.
Anyway, lets appeal to the moderators. Must ensure the collective groupthink holds sway!.
Did it ever occur to you that he was using sarcasm to illustrate his points??
You're new here, aren't you ? Don't worry, stick around and you will get the hang of it. This site is frequented by people known as 'slashbots'. They are around 14 years old, and they just LOVE Linux. (Not enough to use it, mind you over 70% of slashdot's readership uses Internet Explorer)
These slashbots or bots for short, are arrogant teenagers who think that the 'libertarian party' present a valid form of government, and that the answer to every software problem is 'open source'.
Its fair to say that sarcasm is wasted on these people. In between downloading porn and MP3s and playing Quake III Arena, these people have little time to actually write code, but the irony of their pro-open-source position (like sarcasm) is wasted on them.
The site which has been referred to as 'worse than goatse.cx' is in fact a discussion site which has a very different approach to debate.
Slashdot's moderation system amounts to a form of censorship whereby the groupthink of posters is rewarded with 'karma' and any controversial opinion is immediately labelled as 'troll' regardless of the merits of the arguement.
Instead of pretending to be against censorship, whilst covertly practicing it, the editors at adequacy simply banned trolling. Anyone posting a troll is likely to have their post deleted. Apparently this hardcore approach has caused people to stop and think before posting, and the signal to noise ratio is very good over there.
Adequacy tends to steer clear of the tech/nerd stories, so it is not exactly a drop-in replacement for slashdot, but it shows how the slashdot moderation system could be improved upon.
Anyway, I think adequacy shows slashdot the way forward in terms of controlling the excesses of the 'first posters' and 'penis birds' and 'goatse.cx' and 'hot grits' etc etc. They just delete them. And the debate is better for that. Censorship is not always a bad thing.
If they cannot even get their dumb explorer to land there. Hell if I was an astronaut I would think twice and three times about getting on board any spacecraft built by NASA.
Have they decided whether to use metric or imperial measurments yet ?
Slashdot Mirror
NASA takes some $7trillion a year, and they cannot even work out that if you don't take out the trash, it starts to pile up? It's hardly rocket science!
I am so fed up with NASA wasting taxpayers dollars on what are little more than MIT-style 'hacks'. Why on earth should the taxpayer foot the bill for these boffins to do 'cool' stuff? There should be a clear payoff for any of the money NASA spends. Be it military applications or products that can be commercialised. This 'blue sky' wasting of our hard-earned cash HAS TO STOP!!!
Surely google and altavista are more than adequate?
The green felt marker thing is based on sound physics. Not only that, in double-blind tests, listeners have reported audible improvements.
I have extremely good hearing, and can for example tell when an external clock is out of sync, from the artifacts produced by the 'jitter'. Likewise, I expect there are some people who will be able to tell the difference between a 3d engine using 64-bit arithmetic vs 32-bit arithmetic. It may not be everyone, but there will be some people who will always be prepared to pay a premium for quality.
I thought our country was founded on the ideals of freedom, and liberty, not Communistic ideas like having to 'explain oneself' to law enforcement.
I expect this system would have been declared unconstitutional before 9/11 but these days, almost anything that restricts our freedoms is seen as a 'good thing' and helping us to win the 'war on (some kinds of) terrorism'.
How it is flamebait to point this out is beyond me. Oh yeah, I forgot, this is slashdot. Rational discourse seldom holds sway...
Stallman has set back the cause of quality free software by 20 years with his viral-like GPL, which infects everything it comes into contact with.
Notice that Apple based their OS around the Darwin kernel, precisely because of the major problems inherant in the GPL.
How can we (the open source community) ever hope to be taken seriously by the people with the big bucks (Fortune 500 corportations and governments) when our main software license imposes so many unreasonable restrictions? It's time to kill the GPL.
I could care less about all this stuff. How does any of this really affect me? I'd be more concerned about the very real and quite insidious censorship applied by the so-called "editors" of this website.
The kind of people who trust wikipedia are basement-dwelling unwashed gnu hippies. If they get their information from wikipedia, its hardly surprising that they are so ill-informed
Also, am I the only one worried about all the racial stereotyping that goes on in these games? Take a look at the screenshots on that website, they seem to be sending a message that 'people of color' are drug dealers and gun-toting psychopaths.
It's no wonder the black community in the US feels so victimized with an endless stream of negative images like this.
Couldn't the bad guys be mexican or white just for once?
Don't these people have anything better to do with their time?They could be out playing D&D and improving their social skills, instead they sit around hacking a calculator. What are the odds these guys never got laid in their lives?
Your average linux-using developer thinks that everyone else is as smart as he is, and that command line interfaces are a good thing. The GUI is seen as a fisher-price interface for retards.
We need to get rid of this way of thinking. Software should be like a vending machine. You press a button, and it does exactly what its supposed to.
Linix and Windoze have set back the cause of usable software about 20 years!
Sure, but why do you need to? The cop is just checking to make sure you are not in the process of committing a crime. What have you got to be afraid of? Law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from this, it's the criminals who should be worried and rightly so!
I am sick of all the taxpayers $$$s going into funding all this astrological nonsense. If man was meant to go into space, God would have enabled him to breathe in a vacuum. As it is, this is just another example of American taxpayers dollars going to waste. Jesus we need to get some priorities here...
I can't be the only one who thinks this whole 1984 scaremongering is just a whole load of fuss about nothing, can I?
Haven't we got more important things to worry about? The RIAA for example?
It seems to me that this movie has been dumbed down for an American audience.
And to be quite honest, I could not understand about 40% of what people were saying because of their thick English accents. Would captions have been so difficult to produce ?
Also, It is a bit disturbing that adequacy.org beat you to it with this one. Come on slashdot editors, try to keep up!!!.
I sometimes wonder if it might not be easier if we all just converted to Islam, and had done with it. It sure would put an end to lots of religious arguments.
Anyway, I think that while the prognosis for an individual infected with smallpox is not good, I suspect mankind as a whole would survive it. And if we don't survive, hey - it was evolution in action, and maybe the Elephants, Dolphins and Whales and other intelligent animals will be glad to see the back of us.
It seems un-American, bordering on the Communist to suggest that Apple should simply give away their intellectual property.
You would not expect them to give away their computers, since they would go bankrupt overnight. Why should intellectual property be any different ?
The anti capitalism of slashdot is becoming very tiresome.
I point out the fact that adequacy is not like goatse.cx (a fact) and it gets moderated as a Troll ?
What the fuck is wrong with this place ?
thank you.
Well, I expect them not to spend money on it anymore. After all, this is supposed to be a capitalist democracy.
If they want to waste money on going to mars, let them get it from speculative investors, people who take risks for a living, and not from the poor taxpayer.
Goatse.cx is a picture of a hugely distended anus, adequacy seems to be the home of intelligent debate on the Internet. Kind of like slashdot about 3 or 4 years ago.
Anyway, lets appeal to the moderators. Must ensure the collective groupthink holds sway!.
Moron.
You're new here, aren't you ? Don't worry, stick around and you will get the hang of it. This site is frequented by people known as 'slashbots'. They are around 14 years old, and they just LOVE Linux. (Not enough to use it, mind you over 70% of slashdot's readership uses Internet Explorer)
These slashbots or bots for short, are arrogant teenagers who think that the 'libertarian party' present a valid form of government, and that the answer to every software problem is 'open source'.
Its fair to say that sarcasm is wasted on these people. In between downloading porn and MP3s and playing Quake III Arena, these people have little time to actually write code, but the irony of their pro-open-source position (like sarcasm) is wasted on them.
The site which has been referred to as 'worse than goatse.cx' is in fact a discussion site which has a very different approach to debate.
Slashdot's moderation system amounts to a form of censorship whereby the groupthink of posters is rewarded with 'karma' and any controversial opinion is immediately labelled as 'troll' regardless of the merits of the arguement.
On the other hand, the clever people at the site which is worse than goatse.cx have taken a different approach.
Instead of pretending to be against censorship, whilst covertly practicing it, the editors at adequacy simply banned trolling. Anyone posting a troll is likely to have their post deleted. Apparently this hardcore approach has caused people to stop and think before posting, and the signal to noise ratio is very good over there.
Adequacy tends to steer clear of the tech/nerd stories, so it is not exactly a drop-in replacement for slashdot, but it shows how the slashdot moderation system could be improved upon.
Anyway, I think adequacy shows slashdot the way forward in terms of controlling the excesses of the 'first posters' and 'penis birds' and 'goatse.cx' and 'hot grits' etc etc. They just delete them. And the debate is better for that. Censorship is not always a bad thing.
Have they decided whether to use metric or imperial measurments yet ?
Amateurs.