Well, the president's plan only calls for an additional $500m/year of NASA funding (2/3 the cost of the current unmanned probes), so who's kidding who?
Sorry, not to nitpick but both you and the parent poster are equivocating.
we
(1) made Saddam Hussein, put him in power, and it was our (2) job to scrape him off the sidewalk after what he did to his own people.
1 = elements of the Reagan administration 2 = anthropomorphic current United States
If the US government (1) had cared about the plight of the victims of Hussein's government they (2) wouldn't have given him all the money and technology they did.
1 = current US gov't 2 = elements of the Reagan administration again
The US is a vague, abstract, amorphous, non-human characteristic-having blob that changes continuosly over time, and it's fallacious to refer to it as the same thing across different swaths of time, having human characteristics or to confuse the US with the US government or a past US government. People do this all the time and it annoys the hell out of me.
No, this is why the GPL is MORE free than BSD style licenses- because the changes made to them will remain free as well. Freedom that can be taken away at someone else's whim is not free.
You're talking about two different things. One is the freedom of the software, the other is the freedom of the programmer.
Under BSD-style licenses, the programmer has the freedom to do whatever he wants with the code.
GPL-licenses make the code free, not the programmer, who is limited in what he can do with the code.
Squabbles like this usually boil down to problems of definition. "Freedom" must be the "freedom of" something or someone. You are talking about the "freedom of" one thing and the parent poster is talking about the "freedom of" something else.
It's really simple: Things that are newer, more expensive, more advanced always seem "better" than fuddy-duddy punch cards ballots/smashing rocks together type stuff. It's probably because other things that have those qualities really do tend to be better.
Seriously, I used to work in software/web design, and one of the things I quickly learned was that clients were ALWAYS more impressed by how it looked rather than what it did. They were always wowed by swooping little animations in the interface rather than if it solved their problem effectively. Look at the way the people in the article respond to the voting machines -- they love it! -- but obviously they have no idea how/if the thing works.
Election Official: Can you make this voting machine more secure?
DIEbold: How about full 32 bit color menus and this cool fader effect!
Election Official: Sweet!
Look, generally, a cleaner house is probably going to be a house that is better cared for and therefore more valuable than a dirty house. People, unknowingly, start to pick up on $clean == $better. But, knowing this, haven't you ever noticed the the cars at those sleazy rip-off used car lots are kept so meticulously clean and shiny? They know people start to think $clean == $better, and act accordingly to maximize profits.
Diebold KNOWS that people tend to think newer == better, more expensive == better. Did you know that people's perception of the taste of beer CHANGES positively with how expensive they are told it is? (double-blind tested). It's this sad fact that most people are driving on autopilot that will doom us as a society, if it already hasn't. There will be no stopping e-voting until something really painful happens.
It's simple, really. If you think America has some flaw, then you must hate America. If you think America should fix some flaw, then you must REALLY hate America.
Seriously, America can't solve any of its problems because for so many Americans the only problem they can see is that their ego isn't quite big enough yet.
half of all human languages will have disappeared by the end of the century
This is sort of misleading. A better way to say it might be that half of all languages we know exist in the current day may be extinct in 100 years. All the languages that we know today probably constitute a tiny fraction of all human languages, since languages continuously are created, evolve, merge, die out, etc.
It's not just monoculture that makes viruses spread so quickly.
It's Outlook. (Only about 30% joking)
Re:How do you decompose in space?
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 1
Your body is mostly water, so in a zero-pressure environment all the H20 in you would convert from liquid -> gas state (aka boiling) which I imagine would be pretty detrimental to your structural integrity.
Beyond that, you might be pretty well-preserved (no nasty little microbes to nibble on you) but I don't know anything about what effects continuous un-atmosphere-filtered solar energy would have.
Instead of "dreaming up a use for NASA software," I'd getting a pretty damn big thrill out of fixing bugs in NASA software. Heck, this could overcome Linux in a few years.
The Apollo moon landings, one of the greatest accomplishments of humankind, were made possible only through completely childish nationalistic competition. One of the ironies of being human, I guess.
Maybe NASA would have looked at the shuttle and not see the damage or not see enough to anticipate problems. But we'll never know--not cause 'hindsight is 20/20'--cause they didn't look.
Begging the question. But seriously, in the tens of thousands of messages that were sent back and forth, there were probably things they did look into that turned out to be harmless, probably some other things they neglected to look at that were harmless as well, but the only thing you think about are those two or three messages in there that now seem applicable to the cause of the crash, but if you had read them before the crash had occurred, would the information seem as powerful and compelling as it ought to be? And even then it may have been perfectly
Of course, I'm not that familiar with what happened, so I could be totally wrong here. I assume, at least, that it's not as bad as the Challenger disaster. In the run-up to that fiasco, NASA officials essentially started to think that management concerns and engineering concerns (in other words, physical reality) were interchangeable, and if you didn't have enough of one, you could trade it for the other. In that case, those voicing technical concerns were actually pressured to silence for completely arbitrary reasons such as PR, funding, politics, etc.
Which is a shame, because it should only matter if a) the trademark is the same AND b) you are selling similar products to the trademark holder. Possibly c) you aren't making it obvious you aren't the trademark holder.
If someone searches for "Diebold", for example, you shouldn't be able to advertise "Click here for voting machines" and not be Diebold yourself. But you should be able to advertise "Diebold and a history of voting fraud" since you aren't selling anything that could be confused for a voting machine, and you could never be confused for Diebold yourself.
A murky area might be, whether you shouldn't be able to use a trademark only if c) it isn't obvious that you aren't the trademark holder. In this case, you shouldn't be able to advertise "Click here for voting machines" but you could advertise "Bob's Discount Improved Voting Machines" where it's obvious you are "Bob's" and not the Diebold company.
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Well, the president's plan only calls for an additional $500m/year of NASA funding (2/3 the cost of the current unmanned probes), so who's kidding who?
To the ramparts, trolls!
2 = anthropomorphic current United States 1 = current US gov't
2 = elements of the Reagan administration again
The US is a vague, abstract, amorphous, non-human characteristic-having blob that changes continuosly over time, and it's fallacious to refer to it as the same thing across different swaths of time, having human characteristics or to confuse the US with the US government or a past US government. People do this all the time and it annoys the hell out of me.
Yup that's what happens when you break up a monopoly. See: Microsoft.
No, the whole point was that he really didn't strip anything out of it; he got a hold of an empty G5 case display and used that.
You're talking about two different things. One is the freedom of the software, the other is the freedom of the programmer.
Under BSD-style licenses, the programmer has the freedom to do whatever he wants with the code.
GPL-licenses make the code free, not the programmer, who is limited in what he can do with the code.
Squabbles like this usually boil down to problems of definition. "Freedom" must be the "freedom of" something or someone. You are talking about the "freedom of" one thing and the parent poster is talking about the "freedom of" something else.
Ars Technica put together a cookbook a while ago.... here it is. "The Ars Technica Cookbook of Bachelor Chow".
Seriously, I used to work in software/web design, and one of the things I quickly learned was that clients were ALWAYS more impressed by how it looked rather than what it did. They were always wowed by swooping little animations in the interface rather than if it solved their problem effectively. Look at the way the people in the article respond to the voting machines -- they love it! -- but obviously they have no idea how/if the thing works.
Election Official: Can you make this voting machine more secure?
DIEbold: How about full 32 bit color menus and this cool fader effect!
Election Official: Sweet!
Look, generally, a cleaner house is probably going to be a house that is better cared for and therefore more valuable than a dirty house. People, unknowingly, start to pick up on $clean == $better. But, knowing this, haven't you ever noticed the the cars at those sleazy rip-off used car lots are kept so meticulously clean and shiny? They know people start to think $clean == $better, and act accordingly to maximize profits.
Diebold KNOWS that people tend to think newer == better, more expensive == better. Did you know that people's perception of the taste of beer CHANGES positively with how expensive they are told it is? (double-blind tested). It's this sad fact that most people are driving on autopilot that will doom us as a society, if it already hasn't. There will be no stopping e-voting until something really painful happens.
Doesn't one of their robot arms have a brush device for brushing off rocks? Couldn't they use that?
Seriously, America can't solve any of its problems because for so many Americans the only problem they can see is that their ego isn't quite big enough yet.
But there's plenty of perl poetry!
(mod -1, Obvious)
This is sort of misleading. A better way to say it might be that half of all languages we know exist in the current day may be extinct in 100 years. All the languages that we know today probably constitute a tiny fraction of all human languages, since languages continuously are created, evolve, merge, die out, etc.
To continue with your analogy, the problem is that management has no idea how hammers work.
It's Outlook. (Only about 30% joking)
Beyond that, you might be pretty well-preserved (no nasty little microbes to nibble on you) but I don't know anything about what effects continuous un-atmosphere-filtered solar energy would have.
Instead of "dreaming up a use for NASA software," I'd getting a pretty damn big thrill out of fixing bugs in NASA software. Heck, this could overcome Linux in a few years.
IIRC, Bittorrent is tit-for-tat, and if you limit your upload rate, other peers will lower their upload rate to you. Leeching isn't possible.
But my "Internet Vote Accelerator" spyware would've made me trillions richer!
The Apollo moon landings, one of the greatest accomplishments of humankind, were made possible only through completely childish nationalistic competition. One of the ironies of being human, I guess.
You need your sarcasm meter recalibrated.
The BBC puts everything in quotes.
At the time of writing the following headlines on the BBC news page contain quotes:
Mydoom virus 'biggest in months'
Martha Stewart 'lied about tip'
'Several dead' in Baghdad blast
'Bribery' halts Kenya graft probe
Obviously the put those headlines in "scare quotes" to make them seem more suspicious!
Begging the question. But seriously, in the tens of thousands of messages that were sent back and forth, there were probably things they did look into that turned out to be harmless, probably some other things they neglected to look at that were harmless as well, but the only thing you think about are those two or three messages in there that now seem applicable to the cause of the crash, but if you had read them before the crash had occurred, would the information seem as powerful and compelling as it ought to be? And even then it may have been perfectly
Of course, I'm not that familiar with what happened, so I could be totally wrong here. I assume, at least, that it's not as bad as the Challenger disaster. In the run-up to that fiasco, NASA officials essentially started to think that management concerns and engineering concerns (in other words, physical reality) were interchangeable, and if you didn't have enough of one, you could trade it for the other. In that case, those voicing technical concerns were actually pressured to silence for completely arbitrary reasons such as PR, funding, politics, etc.
Sort of the problem is that in hindsight, mistakes seem more obvious and preventable (studies in cognitition confirm this).
We could make a more general argument against not standards, but Bad standards. Think of SMTP versus SSH.
If someone searches for "Diebold", for example, you shouldn't be able to advertise "Click here for voting machines" and not be Diebold yourself. But you should be able to advertise "Diebold and a history of voting fraud" since you aren't selling anything that could be confused for a voting machine, and you could never be confused for Diebold yourself.
A murky area might be, whether you shouldn't be able to use a trademark only if c) it isn't obvious that you aren't the trademark holder. In this case, you shouldn't be able to advertise "Click here for voting machines" but you could advertise "Bob's Discount Improved Voting Machines" where it's obvious you are "Bob's" and not the Diebold company.