Anyway, for a more serious response, is it really a completely separate ecosystem? I mean, a) it's only 2,500 years, and b) it still evolved (see (a)) from the same stuff we're all made of. Or maybe I'm being insufficiently semantic... There's a difference between a completely separate ecosystem and a completely independent one.
Mars. Europa. Eroticon Six. Those would be completely independent. Which then leads to another question: if all you're studying is/isolated/ populations which evolve from a genetic line which originated in more favorable conditions, does that really have anything to do with the possibility of life originating on other planets? I mean, yes, life may be able to thrive in unfavorable environments, but does that mean it would naturally start there?
Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. Shouldn't we be discussing Daylight Savings Time or something? (Aside: Don't news websites and such generally post helpful little icons that tell you when the time change is coming? Or did my ad blocking in Firefox work too well this time?)
Wait, when did we start talking about marriage and child-rearing?
Re:Broadcasting dead...
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 5, Funny
so, like, Space Spam?
Re:Pharmaceutical Industry?
on
Cyberchondria
·
· Score: 2, Funny
No. Lobotomol(tm) is just a sugar pill, you see. Generally only the smart, successful, muscular, confident, god-fearing, non-hairy, smooth-talking, clever people get modded up. I'm afraid, orthogonal, you're beyond all hope.
UNLESS YOU TRY WITTICOMEBACKINISOL(tm)(r)(c)(patent no. 7,799,842).
Recommended dosage, 14,000mg. Ask your doctor for details. You loser.
Heh, extreme pharmaceutical ads. Sorry you were the victim, orth... I'm sure you're very kind and funny.
Incidentally, my previous comment and its parent may be the two most tenuously-related comments i've ever seen... other than purely random ones. Lordy.
The thing about it is that it seems that any NASA source code would be a monument to overbuilt, overengineered, triply-redundant failsafeness. This isn't entirely on point to your (witty) comment, but, I dunno... it seems like looking at this code might be like looking on some absolute crystal perfection of 1960s-1970s code-writing. No fancy classes or object-orientedness. None of this fun stuff. Just raw, uninteresting, bulletproof code (well, except that one little bit that forgot how much flash memory the rovers have... and the unit conversion problem... ok, anyway).
My question is: how much would we learn from this? When people writing code for business are optimizing for speed and redundancy mainly in the parallel sense (i.e., a failsafe swap to a sister server), how RELEVANT is that to blocks of code written never, ever, ever, ever, ever to fail on tested but "outdated" hardware?
Furthermore, if we ever get around to privately-built spacecraft, how much NASA code will they want to use? I dunno, it's a neat idea in an historical sense, and it's an admirable sign of government openness when the government is more and more closed to us citizens... but is it more?
I'm not saying it's not. I'm just curious how it would be. Is NASA/really/ churning out scientific algorithms that are far superior to those coming out of the private sector or universities? (Note that I'm not trashing NASA software folks... I'm just saying they write code for an almost entirely different set of priorities.)
I don't know which I'm more ashamed of... that my first reaction to this headline was "HARRRRRR!" or that I'm disappointed it took 10 comments for someone else to post a pirate reference...
What's the difference between a geek with a perfectly normal rectuma and a geek with a disatrously distended rectum?
One had a lawyer to defend him after he was busted by Constitution-shredding RIAA private investigators after forgetting to load PeerGuardian while he downloaded the Complete Led Zeppelin off Suprnova, and the other one didn't.
As to the argument that "if the laws weren't so messed up, then the RIAA goons couldn't come after me" I'd ask/. collectively, when was the last time those of you who live in democracies voted? Do you vote eagerly? Do you wake up (in the US) on Primary Tuesdays and cast a vote so you won't be stuck with party candidates you hate?
And to keep this on point, when you look at the broken patent system and you see that the USPTO is backlogged with frivolous patent applications that take advantage of examiners' overburden, underpay, and (perhaps) ignorance of the technology, and when you see that this broken patent system allows the issuing of patents like this one that allows some over-egoed plaintiffs lawyer to see his big payoff day by filing a case that would be frivolous if it were based in equity rather than a letter patent issued by the US Government, do you write your representative or senator? Do you write the president? Do you organize a get out the vote campaign to support candidates who will fix what's broken?
Corporations control America today not because the American system is broken, but because people bitch and bitch and bitch but aren't willing to do the hard work necessary to make sure the system does what it's supposed to. You wouldn't fill your car's gas tank up with water, right? And you wouldn't use a 10-year-old rubber band in place of a bike chain? You wouldn't build your beach house out of sand, would you?
You forget that abusive plaintiff's lawyers (the ones you're really griping about) only survive because the system is currently so chaotic and broken that they're able to make loads of money working the nooks and crannies of the broken system, just like a few college students and VCs made wads of money off of ignorance and exuberance in the mid-to-late 1990s. They went where the money and the opportunity to take it were.
This patent mess makes me sick. Why isn't there a good-faith requirement in the patent code?
Arg, sorry... People make lawyer jokes, and they're funny, I suppose. But just remember something someone who was in prison after having a crappy court-appointed lawyer lose his case for him told me: the only lawyer you ever wished you could have is the one you realized you needed after a lifetime telling yourself they weren't wanted.
As for the author of the parent, I apologize, you just got caught in a drive-by...:)
If I can give you one piece of advice, don't tell anyone on/. that ever again... My sphincter hasn't rebounded since that one night back in '03 when I revealed my calling.
Then again, I tamed the hordes by reminding them that every time some sue-happy plaintiff's lawyer hops into the ring to try to make it big on the backs of ingorance, they're going to need someone who is on their side to fight the sharks back into the kiddie pool where they belong.
Ok, that mixed metaphor went a little south, but you know what I mean..:)/2L
First off, re: vivisimo, how is their folder system different, conceptually, from Northernlight? Granted, Northernlight doesn't have a public search any more, but I remember drilling through folders of search results 3 years ago.
Second, one of the things about google that's so refreshing is their sense of humor, which doesn't intrude at ALL on their usability.
Anyway, I don't see saying "Hang on, lemme vivisimo that..." any time soon.
Are games _really_ a form of expression? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps they're like a canvas: purely an instrumentality upon which ideas are painted. Maybe the game is itself inextricably linked to the expression of the ideas contained in it. I don't know which is the case, but I would lean to the first, that a game is a canvas. You might disagree, but at least we can talk about it freely.:) (And, I have to say, the responses on this thread have been thoughtful, rational, and smart... thanks/.!)
Standard examples are standard just because they are clear and easily-digestible illustrations that there are qualifications to "rules" that some people think are boolean.
Maybe the following is becoming a standard example, but here goes: You know the game that puts you in the position of a white supremacist running around killing Blacks and Jews? Should that game be legal? What if, at the end of the game, there were a splash screen that said "Now, get right out there and do it, boys!" What if the game came packaged with a Saturday Night Special? What if instead of killing Blacks and Jews, you were just catching them in nets to put them on deportation boats? What if you were just slapping them? The game engine and packaging, together, could achieve any of those results. Should a game that did those things be allowed on Wal-Mart shelves? Where, in the spectrum of behaviors, should the line be drawn? Where, fundamentally, is the difference between those examples and "Kill the Hatians!"? (I think there is a very clear difference, but others may not.)
Free-speech isn't boolean. It's not a matter of a book, necessarily, being covered under free speech (note that I didn't say protected: a trusty old book might not even be considered speech if it fell into a small set of very special categories). I've typed a lot of characters tonight to try to show the grey, and to help (maybe in vain?) show that effective free speech advocacy, especially in a ticklish area that makes suburban parents nervous, takes more than simply pounding fists and stomping feet. Free speech is too important for that.
I said it earlier, but I want to say it again: this has been a reasonable and well-argued debate. Thanks, folks, for not trolling.
You offer (thoughtful) sarcasm, but my response is "Yes! Absolutely!"
Let me ask you something. Take "Catcher in the Rye." If someone burns the book, does that destroy the concepts contained in the ? No. It destroys a means of conveying them. Does destroying a flag destroy America? No. It destroys a symbol of America.
Free speech is probably more dear to me than anything else in the political world. The Constitution, taken as a whole (along with the Bill of Rights), is a close second. Why would I take the time to post fifteen posts on Slashdot at midnight if I didn't care desperately about the protection of free speech?
My only concern is that we frame the dispute in the correct terms and not get distracted from the moral, social, and legal questions that are raised by possibly inciting speech, just because that speech is contained in a game (or in a book or a movie). I'm fighting for the freedom of ideas, not the freedom of instrumentalities. If we have truly free ideas, then the free instrumentalities conundrum will take care of itself. Both are important, of course, but, IMHO, the core ideas are more important as well as more difficult to discern sometimes.
Sorry, you're absolutely right. I apologize profusely for carelessly omitting "falsely" because that is the essence of the arguement that speech is not always absolutely protected.
Duh? Is _all_ speech protected? Or is speech a vessel for the expression of protected ideas? You probably couldn't, after all, hold a public rally that incited people to go on a raping, pillaging rampage, or, more accurately, you could hold it, but you might be held criminally and civilly liable for the destruction you caused by your incitement.
But, to take your proposition to the extreme, could a deaf, mute, blind person with no arms and no legs engage in protected speech? Of course he or she could, because the method of speaking is not nearly as important as the thing said. So, I maintain my position that a game isn't itself protected speech (though one response gave me a serious dilemma by asking about DeCSS), but is a canvas upon which ideas are painted, metaphorically speaking.
I guess the reason I get so fired up about about this topic is exactly this collapsing of instrumentalities with ideas. The thing of a book is just a thing. Books can be burned and banned, but if the ideas they contain live on in our hearts and minds then democracy will survive the threat. If we invest all our democracy into the things themselves, then we put our foundation on tenuous ground.
Slashdot Mirror
Holy crap you mods are fast.
/isolated/ populations which evolve from a genetic line which originated in more favorable conditions, does that really have anything to do with the possibility of life originating on other planets? I mean, yes, life may be able to thrive in unfavorable environments, but does that mean it would naturally start there?
Anyway, for a more serious response, is it really a completely separate ecosystem? I mean, a) it's only 2,500 years, and b) it still evolved (see (a)) from the same stuff we're all made of. Or maybe I'm being insufficiently semantic... There's a difference between a completely separate ecosystem and a completely independent one.
Mars. Europa. Eroticon Six. Those would be completely independent. Which then leads to another question: if all you're studying is
Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. Shouldn't we be discussing Daylight Savings Time or something? (Aside: Don't news websites and such generally post helpful little icons that tell you when the time change is coming? Or did my ad blocking in Firefox work too well this time?)
Sounds like my roommate's bathroom. *shudder*
Would you rather the title be in l33t? *shudder... I'll take 80s and 90s references over l33t any day.
Wait, when did we start talking about marriage and child-rearing?
so, like, Space Spam?
No. Lobotomol(tm) is just a sugar pill, you see. Generally only the smart, successful, muscular, confident, god-fearing, non-hairy, smooth-talking, clever people get modded up. I'm afraid, orthogonal, you're beyond all hope.
UNLESS YOU TRY WITTICOMEBACKINISOL(tm)(r)(c)(patent no. 7,799,842).
Recommended dosage, 14,000mg. Ask your doctor for details. You loser.
Heh, extreme pharmaceutical ads. Sorry you were the victim, orth... I'm sure you're very kind and funny.
You didn't get modded for anything, but I wanted to say thanks for the long and thoughtful reply. Especially from "the inside."
:)
Keep the rovers roving!
I see now that I was the idiot, but thank you for your willingness to take the heat. :)
Now, I gotta go cancel an order for a plaque. Heh.
"Well written code is not to be scored."
Good lord, I'm putting that on a plaque and hanging it in my office when I finally have one.
Incidentally, my previous comment and its parent may be the two most tenuously-related comments i've ever seen... other than purely random ones. Lordy.
The thing about it is that it seems that any NASA source code would be a monument to overbuilt, overengineered, triply-redundant failsafeness. This isn't entirely on point to your (witty) comment, but, I dunno... it seems like looking at this code might be like looking on some absolute crystal perfection of 1960s-1970s code-writing. No fancy classes or object-orientedness. None of this fun stuff. Just raw, uninteresting, bulletproof code (well, except that one little bit that forgot how much flash memory the rovers have... and the unit conversion problem... ok, anyway).
/really/ churning out scientific algorithms that are far superior to those coming out of the private sector or universities? (Note that I'm not trashing NASA software folks... I'm just saying they write code for an almost entirely different set of priorities.)
My question is: how much would we learn from this? When people writing code for business are optimizing for speed and redundancy mainly in the parallel sense (i.e., a failsafe swap to a sister server), how RELEVANT is that to blocks of code written never, ever, ever, ever, ever to fail on tested but "outdated" hardware?
Furthermore, if we ever get around to privately-built spacecraft, how much NASA code will they want to use? I dunno, it's a neat idea in an historical sense, and it's an admirable sign of government openness when the government is more and more closed to us citizens... but is it more?
I'm not saying it's not. I'm just curious how it would be. Is NASA
Or maybe not?
I don't know which I'm more ashamed of... that my first reaction to this headline was "HARRRRRR!" or that I'm disappointed it took 10 comments for someone else to post a pirate reference...
*sigh
Oh, offtopic.
Sadly, goatse is dead. *sigh... next they'll kill zombo.com.
So, then, the way to go is security through obscurity? I thought this crowd hated that. :)
(I'm not saying you're advocating this; just that you're saying that that's what Intel is up to.)
// begin obvious
// end obvious
// begin disclaimer
// end disclaimer
// begin snickering
// end snickering
who in here has a significant other?
no, no, I know that _some_ slashdotters have mates.
*snicker
thank you.
What's the difference between a geek with a perfectly normal rectuma and a geek with a disatrously distended rectum?
/. collectively, when was the last time those of you who live in democracies voted? Do you vote eagerly? Do you wake up (in the US) on Primary Tuesdays and cast a vote so you won't be stuck with party candidates you hate?
:)
One had a lawyer to defend him after he was busted by Constitution-shredding RIAA private investigators after forgetting to load PeerGuardian while he downloaded the Complete Led Zeppelin off Suprnova, and the other one didn't.
As to the argument that "if the laws weren't so messed up, then the RIAA goons couldn't come after me" I'd ask
And to keep this on point, when you look at the broken patent system and you see that the USPTO is backlogged with frivolous patent applications that take advantage of examiners' overburden, underpay, and (perhaps) ignorance of the technology, and when you see that this broken patent system allows the issuing of patents like this one that allows some over-egoed plaintiffs lawyer to see his big payoff day by filing a case that would be frivolous if it were based in equity rather than a letter patent issued by the US Government, do you write your representative or senator? Do you write the president? Do you organize a get out the vote campaign to support candidates who will fix what's broken?
Corporations control America today not because the American system is broken, but because people bitch and bitch and bitch but aren't willing to do the hard work necessary to make sure the system does what it's supposed to. You wouldn't fill your car's gas tank up with water, right? And you wouldn't use a 10-year-old rubber band in place of a bike chain? You wouldn't build your beach house out of sand, would you?
You forget that abusive plaintiff's lawyers (the ones you're really griping about) only survive because the system is currently so chaotic and broken that they're able to make loads of money working the nooks and crannies of the broken system, just like a few college students and VCs made wads of money off of ignorance and exuberance in the mid-to-late 1990s. They went where the money and the opportunity to take it were.
This patent mess makes me sick. Why isn't there a good-faith requirement in the patent code?
Arg, sorry... People make lawyer jokes, and they're funny, I suppose. But just remember something someone who was in prison after having a crappy court-appointed lawyer lose his case for him told me: the only lawyer you ever wished you could have is the one you realized you needed after a lifetime telling yourself they weren't wanted.
As for the author of the parent, I apologize, you just got caught in a drive-by...
If I can give you one piece of advice, don't tell anyone on /. that ever again... My sphincter hasn't rebounded since that one night back in '03 when I revealed my calling.
:) /2L
Then again, I tamed the hordes by reminding them that every time some sue-happy plaintiff's lawyer hops into the ring to try to make it big on the backs of ingorance, they're going to need someone who is on their side to fight the sharks back into the kiddie pool where they belong.
Ok, that mixed metaphor went a little south, but you know what I mean..
Say it to yourself three times:
I will not link to goatse.
I will not link to goatse.
I will not link to goatse.
*shudder
First off, re: vivisimo, how is their folder system different, conceptually, from Northernlight? Granted, Northernlight doesn't have a public search any more, but I remember drilling through folders of search results 3 years ago.
Second, one of the things about google that's so refreshing is their sense of humor, which doesn't intrude at ALL on their usability.
Anyway, I don't see saying "Hang on, lemme vivisimo that..." any time soon.
Eh, except that guy in OfficeSpace.. I remember him shutting down OS9 to a DOS prompt...
I wonder how they did that... *cough*
Are games _really_ a form of expression? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps they're like a canvas: purely an instrumentality upon which ideas are painted. Maybe the game is itself inextricably linked to the expression of the ideas contained in it. I don't know which is the case, but I would lean to the first, that a game is a canvas. You might disagree, but at least we can talk about it freely. :) (And, I have to say, the responses on this thread have been thoughtful, rational, and smart... thanks /.!)
Standard examples are standard just because they are clear and easily-digestible illustrations that there are qualifications to "rules" that some people think are boolean.
Maybe the following is becoming a standard example, but here goes: You know the game that puts you in the position of a white supremacist running around killing Blacks and Jews? Should that game be legal? What if, at the end of the game, there were a splash screen that said "Now, get right out there and do it, boys!" What if the game came packaged with a Saturday Night Special? What if instead of killing Blacks and Jews, you were just catching them in nets to put them on deportation boats? What if you were just slapping them? The game engine and packaging, together, could achieve any of those results. Should a game that did those things be allowed on Wal-Mart shelves? Where, in the spectrum of behaviors, should the line be drawn? Where, fundamentally, is the difference between those examples and "Kill the Hatians!"? (I think there is a very clear difference, but others may not.)
Free-speech isn't boolean. It's not a matter of a book, necessarily, being covered under free speech (note that I didn't say protected: a trusty old book might not even be considered speech if it fell into a small set of very special categories). I've typed a lot of characters tonight to try to show the grey, and to help (maybe in vain?) show that effective free speech advocacy, especially in a ticklish area that makes suburban parents nervous, takes more than simply pounding fists and stomping feet. Free speech is too important for that.
I said it earlier, but I want to say it again: this has been a reasonable and well-argued debate. Thanks, folks, for not trolling.
You offer (thoughtful) sarcasm, but my response is "Yes! Absolutely!"
Let me ask you something. Take "Catcher in the Rye." If someone burns the book, does that destroy the concepts contained in the ? No. It destroys a means of conveying them. Does destroying a flag destroy America? No. It destroys a symbol of America.
Free speech is probably more dear to me than anything else in the political world. The Constitution, taken as a whole (along with the Bill of Rights), is a close second. Why would I take the time to post fifteen posts on Slashdot at midnight if I didn't care desperately about the protection of free speech?
My only concern is that we frame the dispute in the correct terms and not get distracted from the moral, social, and legal questions that are raised by possibly inciting speech, just because that speech is contained in a game (or in a book or a movie). I'm fighting for the freedom of ideas, not the freedom of instrumentalities. If we have truly free ideas, then the free instrumentalities conundrum will take care of itself. Both are important, of course, but, IMHO, the core ideas are more important as well as more difficult to discern sometimes.
Sorry, you're absolutely right. I apologize profusely for carelessly omitting "falsely" because that is the essence of the arguement that speech is not always absolutely protected.
Thank you for your clarification.
Duh? Is _all_ speech protected? Or is speech a vessel for the expression of protected ideas? You probably couldn't, after all, hold a public rally that incited people to go on a raping, pillaging rampage, or, more accurately, you could hold it, but you might be held criminally and civilly liable for the destruction you caused by your incitement. But, to take your proposition to the extreme, could a deaf, mute, blind person with no arms and no legs engage in protected speech? Of course he or she could, because the method of speaking is not nearly as important as the thing said. So, I maintain my position that a game isn't itself protected speech (though one response gave me a serious dilemma by asking about DeCSS), but is a canvas upon which ideas are painted, metaphorically speaking.
I guess the reason I get so fired up about about this topic is exactly this collapsing of instrumentalities with ideas. The thing of a book is just a thing. Books can be burned and banned, but if the ideas they contain live on in our hearts and minds then democracy will survive the threat. If we invest all our democracy into the things themselves, then we put our foundation on tenuous ground.