"Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker", by George Lucas
This novel was, IIRC, ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster, but published under Lucas' name. While it does provide more back-story than the movies, it also has been contradicted by some of the later additions to the saga.
Slighlty OT: My personal favorite line in the novel is the part where Obi-Wan refers to being "sitting ducks", and Luke asks "What's a duck?". So incongruous with the way the rest of the story was written, but all the more amusing because of that:-)
Then again I'm also one of those guys who think the Federalist Papers should be required reading.
There seems to be a touch of contradiction in wanting to require everyone to read a set of documents all about how the world is really better place if we're free to do as we choose;-)
All indicators point to widespread support for government funding of basic research. In 2001, 81 percent of NSF survey respondents agreed with the statement: "Even if it brings no immediate benefits, scientific research that advances the frontiers of knowledge is necessary and should be supported by the Federal Government."
Hmmmm... how surprising that an NSF survey showed overwhelming support for the continued existence of the NSF. I'm shocked. Yup. Shocked.
but apparantly you can essentially tack against the solar wind by using concentric circles and reflecting light from one circle to the other
Solar sails are propelled by photons, not by the solar wind (energetic particles). It os possibel to tack against photons becuase of two key facts:
the reflection of photons provides force via momentum transfer - so the net force on the sail is always perpendicular to the sail surface, and can be directed by changing the angle of the sail
spacecraft in heliocentric orbits can move to different orbits by changing their energy - reduce energy and you fall closer to the sun. Using fact 1, if you direct your force vector in the direction opposite to the way you are traveling (or close to it), you will reduce your velocity, and thus your energy.
The "reflecting light between circle"s that you describe is not needed for "tacking", but is IIRC intended for use in slowing interstellar solar sails around other stars.
Since this mission is backed by the Planetary Society (an American non-profit) I don't think that this counts as Russia "getting ahead". The connection with Russia is that the solar sail will be launched on a Russian launch vehicle. Could have gone on a US one, but the Russians are cheaper.
The place where Russia is getting ahead is in the commercialization of space. The US does comm sats. The Russians do tourists, ads, and anything else to turn a buck. Which is great, becuase until space is really commercialized it'll be restricted to NASA's select few astronauts, and the rest of us schmucks won't have a chance.
First rendezvous & docking in space. First reusable (at least partly) launch vehicle. First successful probe to land on Mars. First (and only) nation to send spacecraft to the outer planets. First deep space use of electric propulsion. First (and probably only) nation to send a spacecraft to the Sun-Earth L1 libration point. First to land on an asteroid. That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more...
Oh yeah, looks like they'll get "first solar sail" too, since this project is backed by the Planetary Society, which is an American non-profit. They just happen to be buying their ride to orbit on a Russian launch vehicle.
The answers to these problems are as much social engineering as technical solutions.
Ya know, I don't tend to have much of a problem with spam. The odd message every few months. Certainly not waves of the stuff. I don't use any kind of spam-blocker software (at least not yet). But then, I don't have a hotmail or yahoo account (specifically because I don't want to deal with spam), and I'm careful about where I hand out my email address.
Pop-up ads? As other posters have mentioned, you can disable javascript. Or, you can just choose to not frequent websites that have obnoxious ads. It's not like there are no alternatives, just that the alternatives won't be as "professional". In the early days there weren't any ads on the web because it was all hobbyists. There are still hobbyist websites out there - you can probably avoid the commercial web completely if you want to.
The web of yore (or even the internet of yore - usenet) is still out there. You just have to look for it.
Probably not. But these guys aren't designing - they're setting requirements. Which is the key precursor to design. Shame so many people seem to skip the requirements part and just jump into the design. Might explain why so much software is crap.
Sounds suspisciously like Lotus Notes to me. Not that I'm saying it's bad. But please, if you're going to do it, make it a better implementation than Notes...
The whole basis for the monopoly granted to artists is that it benefits society. If you want to make an ethical argument, then you need to show that violating that monopoly hurts society. You've made that assertion, but you haven't provided any evidence.
I'm not really talking about some government mandated monopoly. I'm more interested in the fact that the artist offered up their work under certain conditions (government backed or otherwise). That was voluntary. Your accepting those conditions (be they restrictions on copying, mentary payment, or just a notice giving credit) is the "payment" the artist seeks for releasing their work. It's a voluntray, mutually beneficial transaction - the bedrock of the free market. By ignoring those conditions you make the transaction no longer voluntary - the artist is not receiving the benefit they sought. That is what makes it stealing.Just because something can be done (creating perfect digital copies) doesn't mean it should be done.
As an individual, I can honestly say that I've never copied a CD that I would have otherwise purchased. The loss to society: zero. The gain to society: I got a few minutes of entertainment. Since there seems to have been a net benefit, my conscience is clear.
I'm happy that your conscience is clear. But we're not talking about "society". We're talking about individuals. Benefit to you: you get music. Loss to you: zero. Benefit to artist: zero. Loss to artist: artist's work is taken without permission (i.e. stolen), rather than given voluntarily.
You're not required to release your software under GPL. You're prohibited from releasing your software without the GPL. In other words, you can't remove users' freedoms. That's not even vaguely similar to the situation with music and movies.
I'm sorry, perhaps I should have been clearer. What I meant was that I cannot (ethically) take GPLed code, incorporate it into my code, and then release the code under a proprietary license. By doing so I would be breaching the agreement that allowed me access to the code in the first place. The same situation does apply to music and movies, because both involve some kind of agreement, without which you would not have access to those things.
I don't know whether to call you a fascist or a communist. Either way, you may want to rethink your somewhat contradictory stance on privacy. You appear to want to force a private entity to release private information in order to allow other private entities to better protect their privacy. How's that again?
I'm not even going to start on what a mockery your law would make of private property and personal freedom...
There's the fundamental weakness of the arguement. When dealing with intellectual property the stealing doesn't cost you (the owner) anything directly. You're only losing the potential profit.
That really doesn't matter. This isn't about profit. It's about ethics. An artist or studio releases a work under certain conditions (e.g. don't copy and distribute the work, pay for each copy). The assumption is that there is a quid pro quo - in exchange for them actually releasing their work to the public (which they didn't have to do), the public agrees to abide by those conditions.
Now, it's entirely possible that some musician will release his/her music without requiring any fee (see mp3.com). That's their decision, and their right. But many artists don't do that. If you respect the artist enough to want to listen to their work, you should respect the artist enough to live with whatever conditions they impose on its distribution (which doesn't mean you shouldn't try to persuade them that there's a better way).
I don't understand why this is such a hard concept to grasp around here. I mean, the entire community
has a collective cow when someone violates the GPL. But no one seems to care when musicians have their release terms violated, or when movie studios have the same problem. It doesn't matter how much money they're making. The simple fact is that you wouldn't have the music or movie to rip off if it wasn't for the musician or studio or whatever. If you don't respect that fact they will eventually stop producing.
I'd love to see freely downloadable music. Or movies for that matter. But I'm not going to take the music or movies without permission. The same way I wouldn't use GPLed code without releasing my software under the GPL.
Actually, it'd probably be a lot easier to grab the oxygen from carbon dioxide (i.e. the atmosphere) while you're extracting the carbon, rather than trying to wrench oxygen out of surface oxides.
Anyway, on to my main point: the idea of pulling H2 out of Martian permafrost was pretty much discarded as too difficult for early automated missions - the idea was that you would send a relatively small amount of H2 from earth, and then generate CH4+02 from the atmospheric C02 and the H2 brought along for the trip. Much easier than trying to dig up ice and get H2 out of it. Now, for later manned trips maybe the ice would be useful for getting H2. But in that case I would think that you'd just go to an LH2/LOX rocket rather than a methane one. Methane rockets are a good choice for automated in-situ propellant since the CH4 is storable in the long term, and the raw materials are easily accessible from the atmosphere alone (no digging required). With people on the ground, you might as well just dig up a huge load of ice, electrolyze it to H2 and O2 and go. No need to worry about complicated automated diggers since humans will be in the loop.
"Yet during his brief life he managed to create his own immediately recognizable style, and to evoke in his inimitable way a world full of gaiety and humor."
That's great. But do you think he would have traded it for the chance to have normal bones and a healthy body? Would you be willing to take on some form of debilitating disease in exchange for artistic or musical greatness? Think long and hard about whta having that disease would actually mean to your life before you answer.
So.. why do we need record labels and celebrity performers, again?
We don't. You're right, there's loads of great music out there that isn't encumbered with stupid copyrights. The people who want all of the pop crap can deal with the copyrights, the rest of us can enjoy good music.
At least, that's the way it should be. The problem is that if the RIAA clowns manage to get some kind of stranglehold on digital music distribution (since that seems to be the only way they could protect their copyrights) then you, me, and the independent artists are effectively screwed. That's why you should be interested in this issue.
The news is that this water was present relatively recently i.e. within the last 10 million years. That's the blink of an eye in geologic terms, and may imply that there's still a lot of water on Mars,
Fair enough - but why not then have $HOME/.etc? That way you get the advantage of hiding the config, but it doesn't clutter $HOME, it's all in one place, and it's roughly consistent with the Unix filesystem. Or is there some advantage to having individual dotfiles at the top level of $HOME that I'm missing?
Even more interesting than the KDE/GNOME thing is what you find when you dive down a couple of follow-ups in the email chain. Here's an RMS response to a part of a post explaining why the poster thought that the KDE/GNOME cooperation thing wouldn't happen:
Uraeus linuxrising org:
> And as the free software saying goes,
> a itch that don't itch a developer,
> doesn't get scratched.
RMS:
That was said by Eric Raymond who belongs to another movement, and it
reflects the spirit of that movement.
The spirit of the free software movement is to do projects because
they are important for the community and for our freedom. They don't
have to "scratch an itch".
Is this really an accurate portrayal of (one of) the differences between "open source" and FSF sanctioned free software? Open source developers are out to do what's best for themselves (and maybe helping
out others as a by-product by releasing their code), while free software developers are motivated only by love of their fellow (hu)man. I'm not really heavily involved in either development community, and didn't realize that there was such a sharp divide (if it actually exists outside of RMS head). Can some free software/open source developer types weigh in on this? Why do you write code?
They weren't suggest ditching the concept of user-specific configs. The question had to do with the reasons behind having the user-specific config in a dotfile vs in a $HOME/etc, the latter being somewhat more consistent with the rest of the filesystem layout. Lots of folks have $HOME/bin for user-level apps, but for some reason it was decided that user-level config would go into dotfiles. The original poster was asking why.
Yeah, this guy seems like he's pretty much full of it. And yet the sly bastard manages to get paid somehow. You have to wonder if someone shunted him into this job just so he wouldn't cause problems elsewhere.
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This novel was, IIRC, ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster, but published under Lucas' name. While it does provide more back-story than the movies, it also has been contradicted by some of the later additions to the saga.
Slighlty OT: My personal favorite line in the novel is the part where Obi-Wan refers to being "sitting ducks", and Luke asks "What's a duck?". So incongruous with the way the rest of the story was written, but all the more amusing because of that :-)
There seems to be a touch of contradiction in wanting to require everyone to read a set of documents all about how the world is really better place if we're free to do as we choose ;-)
Hmmmm... how surprising that an NSF survey showed overwhelming support for the continued existence of the NSF. I'm shocked. Yup. Shocked.
Solar sails are propelled by photons, not by the solar wind (energetic particles). It os possibel to tack against photons becuase of two key facts:
- the reflection of photons provides force via momentum transfer - so the net force on the sail is always perpendicular to the sail surface, and can be directed by changing the angle of the sail
- spacecraft in heliocentric orbits can move to different orbits by changing their energy - reduce energy and you fall closer to the sun. Using fact 1, if you direct your force vector in the direction opposite to the way you are traveling (or close to it), you will reduce your velocity, and thus your energy.
The "reflecting light between circle"s that you describe is not needed for "tacking", but is IIRC intended for use in slowing interstellar solar sails around other stars.Make that five. And I'd mod it higher if I had any points to dish out. :-)
The place where Russia is getting ahead is in the commercialization of space. The US does comm sats. The Russians do tourists, ads, and anything else to turn a buck. Which is great, becuase until space is really commercialized it'll be restricted to NASA's select few astronauts, and the rest of us schmucks won't have a chance.
Oh yeah, looks like they'll get "first solar sail" too, since this project is backed by the Planetary Society, which is an American non-profit. They just happen to be buying their ride to orbit on a Russian launch vehicle.
That also saves lives - those of our troops.
Ya know, I don't tend to have much of a problem with spam. The odd message every few months. Certainly not waves of the stuff. I don't use any kind of spam-blocker software (at least not yet). But then, I don't have a hotmail or yahoo account (specifically because I don't want to deal with spam), and I'm careful about where I hand out my email address.
Pop-up ads? As other posters have mentioned, you can disable javascript. Or, you can just choose to not frequent websites that have obnoxious ads. It's not like there are no alternatives, just that the alternatives won't be as "professional". In the early days there weren't any ads on the web because it was all hobbyists. There are still hobbyist websites out there - you can probably avoid the commercial web completely if you want to.
The web of yore (or even the internet of yore - usenet) is still out there. You just have to look for it.
Probably not. But these guys aren't designing - they're setting requirements. Which is the key precursor to design. Shame so many people seem to skip the requirements part and just jump into the design. Might explain why so much software is crap.
Sounds suspisciously like Lotus Notes to me. Not that I'm saying it's bad. But please, if you're going to do it, make it a better implementation than Notes...
Who knows - might even be useful...
This post, on the other hand, is definitely off topic...
I'm not really talking about some government mandated monopoly. I'm more interested in the fact that the artist offered up their work under certain conditions (government backed or otherwise). That was voluntary. Your accepting those conditions (be they restrictions on copying, mentary payment, or just a notice giving credit) is the "payment" the artist seeks for releasing their work. It's a voluntray, mutually beneficial transaction - the bedrock of the free market. By ignoring those conditions you make the transaction no longer voluntary - the artist is not receiving the benefit they sought. That is what makes it stealing.Just because something can be done (creating perfect digital copies) doesn't mean it should be done.
As an individual, I can honestly say that I've never copied a CD that I would have otherwise purchased. The loss to society: zero. The gain to society: I got a few minutes of entertainment. Since there seems to have been a net benefit, my conscience is clear.
I'm happy that your conscience is clear. But we're not talking about "society". We're talking about individuals. Benefit to you: you get music. Loss to you: zero. Benefit to artist: zero. Loss to artist: artist's work is taken without permission (i.e. stolen), rather than given voluntarily.
You're not required to release your software under GPL. You're prohibited from releasing your software without the GPL. In other words, you can't remove users' freedoms. That's not even vaguely similar to the situation with music and movies.
I'm sorry, perhaps I should have been clearer. What I meant was that I cannot (ethically) take GPLed code, incorporate it into my code, and then release the code under a proprietary license. By doing so I would be breaching the agreement that allowed me access to the code in the first place. The same situation does apply to music and movies, because both involve some kind of agreement, without which you would not have access to those things.
I'm not even going to start on what a mockery your law would make of private property and personal freedom...
That really doesn't matter. This isn't about profit. It's about ethics. An artist or studio releases a work under certain conditions (e.g. don't copy and distribute the work, pay for each copy). The assumption is that there is a quid pro quo - in exchange for them actually releasing their work to the public (which they didn't have to do), the public agrees to abide by those conditions.
Now, it's entirely possible that some musician will release his/her music without requiring any fee (see mp3.com). That's their decision, and their right. But many artists don't do that. If you respect the artist enough to want to listen to their work, you should respect the artist enough to live with whatever conditions they impose on its distribution (which doesn't mean you shouldn't try to persuade them that there's a better way).
I don't understand why this is such a hard concept to grasp around here. I mean, the entire community has a collective cow when someone violates the GPL. But no one seems to care when musicians have their release terms violated, or when movie studios have the same problem. It doesn't matter how much money they're making. The simple fact is that you wouldn't have the music or movie to rip off if it wasn't for the musician or studio or whatever. If you don't respect that fact they will eventually stop producing.
I'd love to see freely downloadable music. Or movies for that matter. But I'm not going to take the music or movies without permission. The same way I wouldn't use GPLed code without releasing my software under the GPL.
Actually, it'd probably be a lot easier to grab the oxygen from carbon dioxide (i.e. the atmosphere) while you're extracting the carbon, rather than trying to wrench oxygen out of surface oxides.
Anyway, on to my main point: the idea of pulling H2 out of Martian permafrost was pretty much discarded as too difficult for early automated missions - the idea was that you would send a relatively small amount of H2 from earth, and then generate CH4+02 from the atmospheric C02 and the H2 brought along for the trip. Much easier than trying to dig up ice and get H2 out of it. Now, for later manned trips maybe the ice would be useful for getting H2. But in that case I would think that you'd just go to an LH2/LOX rocket rather than a methane one. Methane rockets are a good choice for automated in-situ propellant since the CH4 is storable in the long term, and the raw materials are easily accessible from the atmosphere alone (no digging required). With people on the ground, you might as well just dig up a huge load of ice, electrolyze it to H2 and O2 and go. No need to worry about complicated automated diggers since humans will be in the loop.
That's great. But do you think he would have traded it for the chance to have normal bones and a healthy body? Would you be willing to take on some form of debilitating disease in exchange for artistic or musical greatness? Think long and hard about whta having that disease would actually mean to your life before you answer.
We don't. You're right, there's loads of great music out there that isn't encumbered with stupid copyrights. The people who want all of the pop crap can deal with the copyrights, the rest of us can enjoy good music.
At least, that's the way it should be. The problem is that if the RIAA clowns manage to get some kind of stranglehold on digital music distribution (since that seems to be the only way they could protect their copyrights) then you, me, and the independent artists are effectively screwed. That's why you should be interested in this issue.
The news is that this water was present relatively recently i.e. within the last 10 million years. That's the blink of an eye in geologic terms, and may imply that there's still a lot of water on Mars,
Fair enough - but why not then have $HOME/.etc? That way you get the advantage of hiding the config, but it doesn't clutter $HOME, it's all in one place, and it's roughly consistent with the Unix filesystem. Or is there some advantage to having individual dotfiles at the top level of $HOME that I'm missing?
Uraeus linuxrising org:
> And as the free software saying goes,
> a itch that don't itch a developer,
> doesn't get scratched.
RMS:
That was said by Eric Raymond who belongs to another movement, and it reflects the spirit of that movement. The spirit of the free software movement is to do projects because they are important for the community and for our freedom. They don't have to "scratch an itch".
Is this really an accurate portrayal of (one of) the differences between "open source" and FSF sanctioned free software? Open source developers are out to do what's best for themselves (and maybe helping out others as a by-product by releasing their code), while free software developers are motivated only by love of their fellow (hu)man. I'm not really heavily involved in either development community, and didn't realize that there was such a sharp divide (if it actually exists outside of RMS head). Can some free software/open source developer types weigh in on this? Why do you write code?
They weren't suggest ditching the concept of user-specific configs. The question had to do with the reasons behind having the user-specific config in a dotfile vs in a $HOME/etc, the latter being somewhat more consistent with the rest of the filesystem layout. Lots of folks have $HOME/bin for user-level apps, but for some reason it was decided that user-level config would go into dotfiles. The original poster was asking why.
Yeah, this guy seems like he's pretty much full of it. And yet the sly bastard manages to get paid somehow. You have to wonder if someone shunted him into this job just so he wouldn't cause problems elsewhere.