Cloning is duplication! They just did it on Enterprise the other week! But seriously, it's true that cloning as we know it today is less like duplication than natural twinning, since even twins share the same mitochondrial DNA, whereas clones do not. Furthermore, all sorts of intrauterine conditions determine many aspects of the development of a fetus. Therefore a clone would be somewhere between a twin and a non-twin sibling.
I have only vague memories of the original BG, so I can't make any comparisons. Having said that, there were some things I liked and some I didn't like about this mini-series. One thing I didn't like was that the main premise is rather hackneyed: "We built some robots that turned evil and now want to destroy us." Even when Isaac Asimov was first starting his writing career, this was an old and tired idea. At least there should be some explanation, such as the humans oppressed them, there was some flaw in their programming, or whatever.
A minor quibble: since they were supposed to be doing it from scratch, they could have left out the references to the original BG. These seemed sort of corny to me, and if I were a big fan of the original series, I might have been offended.
On the other hand, there was a lot to like: good character development, excellent sfx and cinematography, good pacing, tension, suspense. Edward James Olmos gave a great performance.
Also, the sex/romantic themes were not, in my opinion, overdone. The fact that sex played a central role in the treason of Gaius Baltar seemed true-to-life, and was well done.
Sound in space: everybody does it. Nicholas Meyer thought about not doing it for The Wrath of Khan, but decided that the studio wouldn't go for it (and I think the Trek tradition swayed him as well).
Lastly, I liked the palpable tension between certain characters. It's good when not everybody gets along on a starship.
Since parts of Tivo/Linux are freely redistributable under the GPL, does Tivo the company have the right to order all of these images taken down? In other words, are they legally required to say, "You have to take this part down" (their proprietary stuff), but "not these other parts" (GPL'ed stuff)?
I've read the letters of both Smalley and Drexler, and as far as I can tell they're talking past each other. Drexler thinks molecular assemblers are possible, but hasn't come up with a practical way to build them. Smalley thinks that molecular assemblers are impossible, and has come up with some reasons why he thinks so.
I'm tempted to side with Drexler, but really there is no concrete evidence that either one is right. Both are proposing hypotheses now, and I see two possible outcomes: 1)Drexler will be proved right because someone will succeed in building molecular assemblers, or 2) After centuries of attempts at building molecular assemblers, engineers and scientists will give up, more or less admitting that Smalley was right.
At present, I don't think the question can really be settled by argumentation.
Of course, there is a third possibility: nobody will ever try to build a molecular assembler (though I think this is unlikely).
Regardless of where you stand on whether Linux (or GNU/Linux, or GNU/Linux+XFree) is Unix or not, it seems to me that GNU/Linux can at least be called a Unix-type or Unix-like OS. If one admits that, then just by the numbers one has to admit that Unix-like operating systems are neither dead nor dying, much as some people would like that to be the case. This much has already been said by other people. The "death of Unix" itself is actually other than what it seems. What is actually happening is that Unix and Unix-like operating systems compete with one another on merit. In this kind of competitive atmosphere, some versions of Unix and Unix-type operating systems will have to give way to others which either perform better, are more secure, more stable and so on. So while one version of "Unix" (in the very broad sense) may die out, others will take its place. This is a completely different scenario from one in which a single operating system is maintained in a dominant position by means of the leveraging of monopoly power. In such a case the merit of the OS itself has very little bearing, except in enticing existing users to adopt newer versions of such an operating system.
I've been using Mepis for a while now, definitely more than a month. It has the strengths of Debian, and is an easy install. Sure, the name of the distro is silly, but a lot of distros have silly names. It is KDE-based, but it's a breeze to install GNOME with apt-get. More than anything, Mepis is useful as a way to get Debian on your system without going through the somewhat arduous Debian install.
No comment about the poster - it speaks for itself - but the article on internetnews was really quite good. It looks like OSDL is making a concerted effort to explain the kernel development process in such a way to factually counter SCO's claims. Peer review isn't perfect, but it is a very powerful tool for oversight of a project such as software development. With the information from internetnews it should now be possible for people who were otherwise in doubt to see how unlikely it is that "one million lines" of SCO-owned code could make it into the Linux kernel.
It seems to me that Philip K. Dick was sort of science fiction's anti-George Lucas. Dick's stories got better as he got older. He wasn't satisfied with looking at the surface of reality, he wanted to dig deeper. He never got rich, so he never had a chance to have his creativity ruined by a lot of money. Hollywood was only starting to catch on to his ideas when he died, so his ego never became a bloated gas-bag, ruined by fame. I think if Phil Dick and George Lucas had ever met in real life, they would have mutually annihilated each other.
Darl McBride Claims SCO's Ownership Of All That Stuff You Guys Have Been Keeping In The Bottom Of Your Sock Drawers For Years
LINDON, UTAH -- According to a brief filed today on behalf of SCO, all that uncategorizable stuff you guys have been collecting over the years is actually the property of SCO.
Darl McBride, CEO of SCO, was quoted in a press release as saying, "Possibly millions of dollars in spare change, broken Star Wars action figures, paperclips, empty ball-point pens, and other various and sundry items are actually the property of SCO.
"That other stuff you've just been cramming into your glove compartments, that's all ours too," McBride added.
First Horseman of the Apocalypse: SCO wins lawswuit against IBM.
Second Horseman of the Apocalypse: The GPL is declared invalid, and all GPL'ed software is placed in the puplic domain.
Third Horseman of the Apocalypse: The Cubs win the World Series.
Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse: Linus Torvalds goes to work for Microsoft.
Suffice it to say that I'm not worried about the world ending anytime soon.
Long term costs could most likely be lower with a gradual phasing in of OS X in combination with OSS solutions running on Linux and the use of existing infrastructure on Windows however as a healthy computing ecosystem is diverse.
Gradual adoption of Apple/Macintosh... I don't see it happening in Brazil. It's not happening in the US, where such a move would make much more sense. Apple hardware is just too expensive compared to the alternatives. Furthermore, investing in Mac OS X would just leave Brazil beholden to another American company. This is exactly what developing countries don't need.
I'm posting this anonymously because every time I post anything remotely negative about Apple/Mac, I get modded down to "-1, Flamebait."
I was a fan of Farscape, and was saddened to see it cancelled. That the series ended with a cliffhanger was a frustrating disappointment. At least now they will be able to tidy things up a bit. I have no hope that Farscape will be revived as a series, but at least this miniseries will give it a fair ending.
"I am concerned about long-term entrenched confusions such as referring to a version of our GNU OS as 'Linux' and thinking that our work on free software was motivated by the ideas associated with 'open source.' These confusions lead users away from the basic issue: their freedom. By comparison, the events involving SCO are transitory and almost trivial," Stallman says.
I think RMS is making an excellent point here. Though the Linux kernel itself is not trivial, these issues surrounding SCO will in the long run become trivial. I have no doubt that the GPL and therefore software freedom will be upheld in court, even if worse comes to worst with the Linux kernel (however unlikely that is). Yes, SCO is crazy/dangerous, but in the long run they can't really hurt free and open source software.
I agree that copyright infringement isn't theft, and I think pre-DMCA law bears this out. Recent laws, such as the DMCA and the No Electronic Theft Act, along with the proposed law in discussion here, seem to be pushing the idea that copyright infringement is the equivalent of theft (or worse, in the case of some of the penalties). That this doesn't represent reality (i.e. copyright infringement doesn't do harm in the way that physical theft does) is being ignored. That these draconian laws are being pushed by "content providers" is no surprise - they don't want to lose contol of their "content."
When RMS launched GNU's Not Unix, he definitely intended to create a Unix-like OS which would be free, in at least two senses: free as in freedom, and free of any proprietary Unix code (and the second sense is a necessary consequence of the first sense). From all the history I've read, RMS intended GNU to be like Unix in just about every important way (though it did improve on then-existing versions of Unix). Since what we typically call "Linux" is GNU, Linux, some other stuff, XFree, some graphical interfaces, etc., it seems accurate to describe "Linux" as "based on Unix" as long as you don't mean "derived from Unix."
All right, based on the good Commander's review, I'll bite. I'm going to be in Chicago next month, and since my neice lives there, maybe I can get advance tickets. Nobody who wasn't there can know what it was like to be ten years old in 1977 and watching Star Wars on the big screen. It sounds like Charles Ross has recaptured some of the magic. Lucas has certainly lost it. It can't possibly be any worse than what my family has put up with from me (Star Wars lines-wise) for the past 26 years.
I've been convinced for a while that it's not crack but acid. Cocaine isn't known for it's hallucinogenic properties, but Darl and his cronies are clearly hallucinating, as in:
D.Mc: "I am the walrus."
Lawyer1: "No way dude, I am the walrus!"
D.Mc: "The GPL violates the Constitution."
Lawyer2: "Dude. That is so wild."
D.Mc: "That wall is flowing like a waterfall."
Don't worry. The sun is still in the main sequence, so it isn't going to blow up, "or something." Furthermore, the Earth's magnetic field and our atmosphere protect us very well from just about all the negative effects (hard radiation) from this kind of solar activity.
I know this is offtopic, but I'm disappointed that William Gibson uses a Mac, not as opposed to a PC running Linux, BSD, Windows or whatever, but that that he doesn't have a machine with which he can just patch the 'trodes to his head, and you know, jack in. Yet another disillusioning realization...
Slashdot Mirror
That will be around the time I become senile enough to want a toaster for a computer, or maybe a big gumdrop.
Oh, and by the way, didn't OS X take a little something from Open Source Software?
Cloning is duplication! They just did it on Enterprise the other week! But seriously, it's true that cloning as we know it today is less like duplication than natural twinning, since even twins share the same mitochondrial DNA, whereas clones do not. Furthermore, all sorts of intrauterine conditions determine many aspects of the development of a fetus. Therefore a clone would be somewhere between a twin and a non-twin sibling.
I have only vague memories of the original BG, so I can't make any comparisons. Having said that, there were some things I liked and some I didn't like about this mini-series. One thing I didn't like was that the main premise is rather hackneyed: "We built some robots that turned evil and now want to destroy us." Even when Isaac Asimov was first starting his writing career, this was an old and tired idea. At least there should be some explanation, such as the humans oppressed them, there was some flaw in their programming, or whatever.
A minor quibble: since they were supposed to be doing it from scratch, they could have left out the references to the original BG. These seemed sort of corny to me, and if I were a big fan of the original series, I might have been offended.
On the other hand, there was a lot to like: good character development, excellent sfx and cinematography, good pacing, tension, suspense. Edward James Olmos gave a great performance.
Also, the sex/romantic themes were not, in my opinion, overdone. The fact that sex played a central role in the treason of Gaius Baltar seemed true-to-life, and was well done.
Sound in space: everybody does it. Nicholas Meyer thought about not doing it for The Wrath of Khan, but decided that the studio wouldn't go for it (and I think the Trek tradition swayed him as well).
Lastly, I liked the palpable tension between certain characters. It's good when not everybody gets along on a starship.
Since parts of Tivo/Linux are freely redistributable under the GPL, does Tivo the company have the right to order all of these images taken down? In other words, are they legally required to say, "You have to take this part down" (their proprietary stuff), but "not these other parts" (GPL'ed stuff)?
I've been staring at this pictures of Jenny McCarthy for years now, trying to discover the steganographically hidden messages.
That's what I told my girlfriend.
I've read the letters of both Smalley and Drexler, and as far as I can tell they're talking past each other. Drexler thinks molecular assemblers are possible, but hasn't come up with a practical way to build them. Smalley thinks that molecular assemblers are impossible, and has come up with some reasons why he thinks so.
I'm tempted to side with Drexler, but really there is no concrete evidence that either one is right. Both are proposing hypotheses now, and I see two possible outcomes: 1)Drexler will be proved right because someone will succeed in building molecular assemblers, or 2) After centuries of attempts at building molecular assemblers, engineers and scientists will give up, more or less admitting that Smalley was right.
At present, I don't think the question can really be settled by argumentation.
Of course, there is a third possibility: nobody will ever try to build a molecular assembler (though I think this is unlikely).
But dude, it's a really, really big fucking monkey!
Regardless of where you stand on whether Linux (or GNU/Linux, or GNU/Linux+XFree) is Unix or not, it seems to me that GNU/Linux can at least be called a Unix-type or Unix-like OS. If one admits that, then just by the numbers one has to admit that Unix-like operating systems are neither dead nor dying, much as some people would like that to be the case. This much has already been said by other people. The "death of Unix" itself is actually other than what it seems. What is actually happening is that Unix and Unix-like operating systems compete with one another on merit. In this kind of competitive atmosphere, some versions of Unix and Unix-type operating systems will have to give way to others which either perform better, are more secure, more stable and so on. So while one version of "Unix" (in the very broad sense) may die out, others will take its place. This is a completely different scenario from one in which a single operating system is maintained in a dominant position by means of the leveraging of monopoly power. In such a case the merit of the OS itself has very little bearing, except in enticing existing users to adopt newer versions of such an operating system.
I've been using Mepis for a while now, definitely more than a month. It has the strengths of Debian, and is an easy install. Sure, the name of the distro is silly, but a lot of distros have silly names. It is KDE-based, but it's a breeze to install GNOME with apt-get. More than anything, Mepis is useful as a way to get Debian on your system without going through the somewhat arduous Debian install.
No comment about the poster - it speaks for itself - but the article on internetnews was really quite good. It looks like OSDL is making a concerted effort to explain the kernel development process in such a way to factually counter SCO's claims. Peer review isn't perfect, but it is a very powerful tool for oversight of a project such as software development. With the information from internetnews it should now be possible for people who were otherwise in doubt to see how unlikely it is that "one million lines" of SCO-owned code could make it into the Linux kernel.
It seems to me that Philip K. Dick was sort of science fiction's anti-George Lucas. Dick's stories got better as he got older. He wasn't satisfied with looking at the surface of reality, he wanted to dig deeper. He never got rich, so he never had a chance to have his creativity ruined by a lot of money. Hollywood was only starting to catch on to his ideas when he died, so his ego never became a bloated gas-bag, ruined by fame. I think if Phil Dick and George Lucas had ever met in real life, they would have mutually annihilated each other.
Darl McBride Claims SCO's Ownership Of All That Stuff You Guys Have Been Keeping In The Bottom Of Your Sock Drawers For Years
LINDON, UTAH -- According to a brief filed today on behalf of SCO, all that uncategorizable stuff you guys have been collecting over the years is actually the property of SCO.
Darl McBride, CEO of SCO, was quoted in a press release as saying, "Possibly millions of dollars in spare change, broken Star Wars action figures, paperclips, empty ball-point pens, and other various and sundry items are actually the property of SCO.
"That other stuff you've just been cramming into your glove compartments, that's all ours too," McBride added.
First Horseman of the Apocalypse: SCO wins lawswuit against IBM.
Second Horseman of the Apocalypse: The GPL is declared invalid, and all GPL'ed software is placed in the puplic domain.
Third Horseman of the Apocalypse: The Cubs win the World Series.
Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse: Linus Torvalds goes to work for Microsoft.
Suffice it to say that I'm not worried about the world ending anytime soon.
Long term costs could most likely be lower with a gradual phasing in of OS X in combination with OSS solutions running on Linux and the use of existing infrastructure on Windows however as a healthy computing ecosystem is diverse.
Gradual adoption of Apple/Macintosh ... I don't see it happening in Brazil. It's not happening in the US, where such a move would make much more sense. Apple hardware is just too expensive compared to the alternatives. Furthermore, investing in Mac OS X would just leave Brazil beholden to another American company. This is exactly what developing countries don't need.
I'm posting this anonymously because every time I post anything remotely negative about Apple/Mac, I get modded down to "-1, Flamebait."
I was a fan of Farscape, and was saddened to see it cancelled. That the series ended with a cliffhanger was a frustrating disappointment. At least now they will be able to tidy things up a bit. I have no hope that Farscape will be revived as a series, but at least this miniseries will give it a fair ending.
"I am concerned about long-term entrenched confusions such as referring to a version of our GNU OS as 'Linux' and thinking that our work on free software was motivated by the ideas associated with 'open source.' These confusions lead users away from the basic issue: their freedom. By comparison, the events involving SCO are transitory and almost trivial," Stallman says.
I think RMS is making an excellent point here. Though the Linux kernel itself is not trivial, these issues surrounding SCO will in the long run become trivial. I have no doubt that the GPL and therefore software freedom will be upheld in court, even if worse comes to worst with the Linux kernel (however unlikely that is). Yes, SCO is crazy/dangerous, but in the long run they can't really hurt free and open source software.
I agree that copyright infringement isn't theft, and I think pre-DMCA law bears this out. Recent laws, such as the DMCA and the No Electronic Theft Act, along with the proposed law in discussion here, seem to be pushing the idea that copyright infringement is the equivalent of theft (or worse, in the case of some of the penalties). That this doesn't represent reality (i.e. copyright infringement doesn't do harm in the way that physical theft does) is being ignored. That these draconian laws are being pushed by "content providers" is no surprise - they don't want to lose contol of their "content."
When RMS launched GNU's Not Unix, he definitely intended to create a Unix-like OS which would be free, in at least two senses: free as in freedom, and free of any proprietary Unix code (and the second sense is a necessary consequence of the first sense). From all the history I've read, RMS intended GNU to be like Unix in just about every important way (though it did improve on then-existing versions of Unix). Since what we typically call "Linux" is GNU, Linux, some other stuff, XFree, some graphical interfaces, etc., it seems accurate to describe "Linux" as "based on Unix" as long as you don't mean "derived from Unix."
1. Fusion Power Still Fifty Years Away.
2. No Cure For Cancer Yet.
3. Where The Hell Is My Robot Butler!?!
4. Still No Cities On The Moon.
All right, based on the good Commander's review, I'll bite. I'm going to be in Chicago next month, and since my neice lives there, maybe I can get advance tickets. Nobody who wasn't there can know what it was like to be ten years old in 1977 and watching Star Wars on the big screen. It sounds like Charles Ross has recaptured some of the magic. Lucas has certainly lost it. It can't possibly be any worse than what my family has put up with from me (Star Wars lines-wise) for the past 26 years.
I've been convinced for a while that it's not crack but acid. Cocaine isn't known for it's hallucinogenic properties, but Darl and his cronies are clearly hallucinating, as in:
D.Mc: "I am the walrus."
Lawyer1: "No way dude, I am the walrus!"
D.Mc: "The GPL violates the Constitution."
Lawyer2: "Dude. That is so wild."
D.Mc: "That wall is flowing like a waterfall."
Don't worry. The sun is still in the main sequence, so it isn't going to blow up, "or something." Furthermore, the Earth's magnetic field and our atmosphere protect us very well from just about all the negative effects (hard radiation) from this kind of solar activity.
Since everyone else is doing it now, why isn't there a *.torrent file for this release of OpenBSD?
I know this is offtopic, but I'm disappointed that William Gibson uses a Mac, not as opposed to a PC running Linux, BSD, Windows or whatever, but that that he doesn't have a machine with which he can just patch the 'trodes to his head, and you know, jack in. Yet another disillusioning realization ...
How about a piece of software that automatically checks spelling so you don't get things such as "teh," "adn," "destracted," etc., ... oh, wait ...