You know what is a hackerspace ? Go there and do that, make awesome think, attract awesome people. If you live in US, there is probably one near the place you live : http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces
There's one thing robots in space can never do that humans can: be humans in space.
That again... Right now real work gets done from orbit. We already have a map of the underground water reserves of Mars [nasa.gov], we even have a clear picture of water snow [futurehi.net] (we know it is not CO2 snow). All of these results brought from ESA orbiters. Sadly, ESA lacks the public relation office that NASA has... "Exploration" can be done from orbit. PR stunts require a silly overpriced flag-holder that lands somewhere. Humans are required for colonization, not for exploration.
It is important that a bad browser has a big share : a whole ecosystem of ad-financed websites rely on people being unable to use adblock-like filters. The FOSS fan in me yays at firefox gaining more adherents but the cynical in me thinks that he may see more sites becoming less profitable.
I have been to three kind of lectures :
- The lecturer reads the handouts.
- The lecturer tries to "interact" with a 60+ students room and ends up answering the dumbest questions and lose everyone's time.
- The handout is bad enough so that we need to copy what the lecturer says and it takes 2 or 3 years to have a student-made handout that is good enough.
Actually, there was a 4th kind : one teacher who had been a student of Feynman and apparently tried to imitate a lively form of teaching. I can't say that mimicking the behavior of electrons or declaiming propagation equations like a love song is not entertaining : his classes were full. But to learn about the subject at hand, we were lucky he was providing a good handout.
Face it : there is no way to have an efficient 60 to 1 interaction in the physical world. Small exercise classes with a lot of small 1 on 1 or 1 on 4-5 interactions are great and a teacher is necessary there. But teaching a 60 students class ? Surely not.
I went to university to get knowledge. Amphitheater classes were a huge waste of time in my opinion. I learned more from other students and books than from teachers. But hey, I needed a diploma. So please tell, if not for knowledge and for a diploma, what are the good reasons of going to a lecture ?
: using the sun as a gravitational lens. Sure, it need a spacecraft to go 13x times farther than any spacecraft ever did, but we would get gorgeous pictures. Some people say this may be our only way to ever observe directly exo-planets in details. I am not sure if it enters in the "practical within my lifetime constraint" but if you have 50 more years to go, I wouldn't rule it out.
Would such a tech has been useful in a single real-world terrorism case ? Fanatics are usually not shy about their guilt, and the hardest part in preventing a terrorist act does not seem to be to make a person admit it will happen but to transmit the information through the chain of commands (Condi Rice had warnings against the 9/11 attacks but decided to let go)
Of course not. "Terrorism", like always, is just an excuse. You know that this tech will not be used there.
Good.
Still I don't understand how works the mind of people who believe that government should depend on software they don't have the source of, they didn't compile themselves, they didn't audited, and that comes from a company that has many interest on spying on them.
Why ? For greater good.
Let's be utilitarian on this one. What are the consequences of both options ? If you give priority to the right to acquire, you end up with widespread possession of something of value, with the possible drawback of making it more difficult to make a living out of providing this content (which is not proven IMHO and highly dubious)
If you give priority to control, you end up with the nightmarish tech market of incompatible DRM schemes, tracking of users, closed apps and obfuscated "standards".
I am ok with some right to control their creations by authors, but I don't want them to be exempted from facing the consequences of the exercise of said control. An author is free to not publish his works, but once it is published, it is public, and in the world of today, it means easily copyable. "Control" does not mean that you can order the way the society works. Otherwise, I'll gently ask that this very comment I am writing can only be read by people who accept to pay 10$ for reading it. 20$ if you are reading it while using an Apple or Microsoft OS (it damages the image of my work of art)
Because rovers are PR stunts. Real work gets done from orbit. We already have a map of the underground water reserves of Mars, we even have a clear picture of water snow (we know it is not CO2 snow). All of these results brought from ESA orbiters. Sadly, ESA lacks the public relation office that NASA has...
It doesn't ask for advice (apparently he got some from the EFF) he is just making advertisement for his talk on/.
Which is totally on-topic if this is really what the summary says it is about.
Illegal in which countries ? non-commercial sharing is not illegal everywhere in the world. Did they shake the active IP addresses did not come from Spain ? There is also tolerance over content that is not legally available in a given country (ie US series in France). How is this gray zone accounted for ?
Arrogant people who achieve power never give it up voluntarily. They hold onto every little bit of it for dear life. Torvalds would no more voluntarily give up his ultimate authority than he would jump off a cliff. You can make all the reasonable arguments in the world, it's not going to change who he is. Linux is his baby and he's a jealous parent.
Interestingly, humble but smart people would end up in the same situation : they know that arrogant and power-hungry people are there and want power for the sake of their ego. I don't know if Linus is humble or arrogant, but he gave up power a long time ago when he put his OS under an open-source licence. He has never hidden the fact that he was a "benevolent dictator" (some even say the expression comes from his second surname : Benedict). If Linus is a bottleneck and slows down kernel development, there will be a fork. Right now, as much as people say he is a problem, he is still the only solution available.
What is good about open-source is that you can say to power-hungry people "Want to be the boss of a team ? Well go find a team that will respect your work !".
You found a vulnerability.
You know your bank, your hospital, your tax center has it. You know that there is an option to deactivate as a workaround.
You know that many people are actively searcging for this kind of vulnerabilities and it may be exploited right now.
And you see Microsoft claiming their product is the best and the most secure everywhere.
You can wait, yes, but I am unsure of the more responsible way of acting.
Well, we are talking about a flash runtime here...
Ok let's be more precise. No OSS solution with a licence acceptable to the Debian project can implement DRMs on a regular PC (and be more than a joke).
The main problem of realism is that nowadays, weapons are deadly and war is not fun. Shoot someone even in the chest even with a cheap handgun, he is dead or incapacitated. Weapons are not the only thing unrealistic in a game, medical condition also is.
Guns are taking the path of swords : compared to more modern weapons like missiles, mortar, airstrikes, they are less and less efficient and useful in far less cases but we like them. As kids we were given wooden swords and plastic guns so we like our toys. Games are about fun, about fantasies of a grown-up child. I always thought that Quake 3 got it right : shooters are about running, jumping, teleporting, shooting various things at people, respawning fast and living through a very fast-paced game. You don't want realism in a shooter game. If you want to have a realistic depiction of a war zone, have a RPG with shooting scenes, but don't expect realism in a game where you expect to shoot more than ten rounds every minute.
I am all for a bill of rights that is a recommendation. Like the human rights declaration is. Provide guidelines to policy makers and to less tech-savvy people about what is technically possible, this is not even a matter of moral rights.
Nope. Servers live places. The people who do the uploading live places. The people who run the servers can be punished. The people who do the uploading can be punished.
In the 70s, maybe this was easy. Nowadays, it is cheap and easy to distribute anonymously a file that will be instantly mirrored in many countries.
There's no legal basis for your theory
Which is exactly what I am complaining about. My theory is based on technological facts and its inadequacy with various legal frameworks makes me consider the latters silly. I consider it easier to change a legal fact than a technological fact. (Incidentally, this very claim is a technological fact but also lacks a legal basis;-) )
I work with a Japanese friend on an open source project hosted on sourceforge, which has many mirrors. There might be Colombians (who live in France) and US citizen contributing, maybe Germans as well. We will have to share a lot of voluminous data (HD video streams) so we will probably do it via bittorrent. You know what ? We will maybe break many laws, or interpretations of outdated laws that no one ever adapted to this century. This situation is indeed silly. Hell, no one even can say for sure that it is legal to contribute to a GPL software for a French citizen (who do not have right to abandon some authorship rights. It used to be a very good protection for authors but begs for updating).
First we'd need to throw away IP law entirely, which is pretty much the opposite of what is going on in the world today.
Well that would be a f...ing good start. Who can deny that computers and information technologies clearly change the way one considers copies and ought to change some things the copyright laws are based on ?
Now that one can do investigation journalism in US, reverse-engineering in Finland, publish leaks in Sweden could we please recognize that preventing the publication of a file on internet is utterly silly ?
There are several projects of a "bill of rights" for "the virtual place named internet". One will maybe stick. Information may not want to be anthropomorphized, but a lot of people surely want it to be free.
Slashdot Mirror
You know what is a hackerspace ? Go there and do that, make awesome think, attract awesome people. If you live in US, there is probably one near the place you live : http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces
There's one thing robots in space can never do that humans can: be humans in space.
That again... Right now real work gets done from orbit. We already have a map of the underground water reserves of Mars [nasa.gov], we even have a clear picture of water snow [futurehi.net] (we know it is not CO2 snow). All of these results brought from ESA orbiters. Sadly, ESA lacks the public relation office that NASA has... "Exploration" can be done from orbit. PR stunts require a silly overpriced flag-holder that lands somewhere. Humans are required for colonization, not for exploration.
If someone is short one percent or two, he will try risky things.
It is important that a bad browser has a big share : a whole ecosystem of ad-financed websites rely on people being unable to use adblock-like filters. The FOSS fan in me yays at firefox gaining more adherents but the cynical in me thinks that he may see more sites becoming less profitable.
Google did exactly that : http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20005528-52.html
I have been to three kind of lectures :
- The lecturer reads the handouts.
- The lecturer tries to "interact" with a 60+ students room and ends up answering the dumbest questions and lose everyone's time.
- The handout is bad enough so that we need to copy what the lecturer says and it takes 2 or 3 years to have a student-made handout that is good enough.
Actually, there was a 4th kind : one teacher who had been a student of Feynman and apparently tried to imitate a lively form of teaching. I can't say that mimicking the behavior of electrons or declaiming propagation equations like a love song is not entertaining : his classes were full. But to learn about the subject at hand, we were lucky he was providing a good handout.
Face it : there is no way to have an efficient 60 to 1 interaction in the physical world. Small exercise classes with a lot of small 1 on 1 or 1 on 4-5 interactions are great and a teacher is necessary there. But teaching a 60 students class ? Surely not.
I went to university to get knowledge. Amphitheater classes were a huge waste of time in my opinion. I learned more from other students and books than from teachers. But hey, I needed a diploma. So please tell, if not for knowledge and for a diploma, what are the good reasons of going to a lecture ?
Oh, there is a crazy way around it : http://www.spaceroutes.com/astrocon/AstroconVTalks/Maccone-AstroconV.pdf
: using the sun as a gravitational lens. Sure, it need a spacecraft to go 13x times farther than any spacecraft ever did, but we would get gorgeous pictures. Some people say this may be our only way to ever observe directly exo-planets in details. I am not sure if it enters in the "practical within my lifetime constraint" but if you have 50 more years to go, I wouldn't rule it out.
The problem is that often, when "tech" is used, it doesn't make the lecture better : it makes it obsolete.
I'd like to download some human rights in my country, could you provide me with a url ? kthxbye
Would such a tech has been useful in a single real-world terrorism case ? Fanatics are usually not shy about their guilt, and the hardest part in preventing a terrorist act does not seem to be to make a person admit it will happen but to transmit the information through the chain of commands (Condi Rice had warnings against the 9/11 attacks but decided to let go)
Of course not. "Terrorism", like always, is just an excuse. You know that this tech will not be used there.
Or get some job offers spontaneously.
Good.
Still I don't understand how works the mind of people who believe that government should depend on software they don't have the source of, they didn't compile themselves, they didn't audited, and that comes from a company that has many interest on spying on them.
Why ? For greater good.
Let's be utilitarian on this one. What are the consequences of both options ? If you give priority to the right to acquire, you end up with widespread possession of something of value, with the possible drawback of making it more difficult to make a living out of providing this content (which is not proven IMHO and highly dubious)
If you give priority to control, you end up with the nightmarish tech market of incompatible DRM schemes, tracking of users, closed apps and obfuscated "standards".
I am ok with some right to control their creations by authors, but I don't want them to be exempted from facing the consequences of the exercise of said control. An author is free to not publish his works, but once it is published, it is public, and in the world of today, it means easily copyable. "Control" does not mean that you can order the way the society works. Otherwise, I'll gently ask that this very comment I am writing can only be read by people who accept to pay 10$ for reading it. 20$ if you are reading it while using an Apple or Microsoft OS (it damages the image of my work of art)
Because rovers are PR stunts. Real work gets done from orbit. We already have a map of the underground water reserves of Mars, we even have a clear picture of water snow (we know it is not CO2 snow). All of these results brought from ESA orbiters. Sadly, ESA lacks the public relation office that NASA has...
It doesn't ask for advice (apparently he got some from the EFF) he is just making advertisement for his talk on /.
Which is totally on-topic if this is really what the summary says it is about.
Illegal in which countries ? non-commercial sharing is not illegal everywhere in the world. Did they shake the active IP addresses did not come from Spain ? There is also tolerance over content that is not legally available in a given country (ie US series in France). How is this gray zone accounted for ?
Arrogant people who achieve power never give it up voluntarily. They hold onto every little bit of it for dear life. Torvalds would no more voluntarily give up his ultimate authority than he would jump off a cliff. You can make all the reasonable arguments in the world, it's not going to change who he is. Linux is his baby and he's a jealous parent.
Interestingly, humble but smart people would end up in the same situation : they know that arrogant and power-hungry people are there and want power for the sake of their ego. I don't know if Linus is humble or arrogant, but he gave up power a long time ago when he put his OS under an open-source licence. He has never hidden the fact that he was a "benevolent dictator" (some even say the expression comes from his second surname : Benedict). If Linus is a bottleneck and slows down kernel development, there will be a fork. Right now, as much as people say he is a problem, he is still the only solution available.
What is good about open-source is that you can say to power-hungry people "Want to be the boss of a team ? Well go find a team that will respect your work !".
You found a vulnerability.
You know your bank, your hospital, your tax center has it.
You know that there is an option to deactivate as a workaround.
You know that many people are actively searcging for this kind of vulnerabilities and it may be exploited right now.
And you see Microsoft claiming their product is the best and the most secure everywhere.
You can wait, yes, but I am unsure of the more responsible way of acting.
Well, we are talking about a flash runtime here...
Ok let's be more precise. No OSS solution with a licence acceptable to the Debian project can implement DRMs on a regular PC (and be more than a joke).
The main problem of realism is that nowadays, weapons are deadly and war is not fun. Shoot someone even in the chest even with a cheap handgun, he is dead or incapacitated. Weapons are not the only thing unrealistic in a game, medical condition also is.
Guns are taking the path of swords : compared to more modern weapons like missiles, mortar, airstrikes, they are less and less efficient and useful in far less cases but we like them. As kids we were given wooden swords and plastic guns so we like our toys. Games are about fun, about fantasies of a grown-up child. I always thought that Quake 3 got it right : shooters are about running, jumping, teleporting, shooting various things at people, respawning fast and living through a very fast-paced game. You don't want realism in a shooter game. If you want to have a realistic depiction of a war zone, have a RPG with shooting scenes, but don't expect realism in a game where you expect to shoot more than ten rounds every minute.
Open source software is technically incompatible with DRMs.
I am all for a bill of rights that is a recommendation. Like the human rights declaration is. Provide guidelines to policy makers and to less tech-savvy people about what is technically possible, this is not even a matter of moral rights.
Nope. Servers live places. The people who do the uploading live places. The people who run the servers can be punished. The people who do the uploading can be punished.
In the 70s, maybe this was easy. Nowadays, it is cheap and easy to distribute anonymously a file that will be instantly mirrored in many countries.
There's no legal basis for your theory
Which is exactly what I am complaining about. My theory is based on technological facts and its inadequacy with various legal frameworks makes me consider the latters silly. I consider it easier to change a legal fact than a technological fact. (Incidentally, this very claim is a technological fact but also lacks a legal basis ;-) )
I work with a Japanese friend on an open source project hosted on sourceforge, which has many mirrors. There might be Colombians (who live in France) and US citizen contributing, maybe Germans as well. We will have to share a lot of voluminous data (HD video streams) so we will probably do it via bittorrent. You know what ? We will maybe break many laws, or interpretations of outdated laws that no one ever adapted to this century. This situation is indeed silly. Hell, no one even can say for sure that it is legal to contribute to a GPL software for a French citizen (who do not have right to abandon some authorship rights. It used to be a very good protection for authors but begs for updating).
First we'd need to throw away IP law entirely, which is pretty much the opposite of what is going on in the world today.
Well that would be a f...ing good start. Who can deny that computers and information technologies clearly change the way one considers copies and ought to change some things the copyright laws are based on ?
Well there is a need to protect rights because there is a trend to remove them. Have you heard about ACTA lately ?
Now that one can do investigation journalism in US, reverse-engineering in Finland, publish leaks in Sweden could we please recognize that preventing the publication of a file on internet is utterly silly ?
There are several projects of a "bill of rights" for "the virtual place named internet". One will maybe stick. Information may not want to be anthropomorphized, but a lot of people surely want it to be free.