I seem to remember a document 13 years prior that read, in part, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.."
With the unwritten addendum: 'that's WHITE men, of course. Not black or red.'
The French, at least, meant all men. As far as I know, the law in revolutionary France didn't distinguish on the grounds of race, only on whether or not you'd managed to get on the wrong side of Citizen Robespierre.
That said, neither great revolutionary manifesto addressed the obvious further objection 'so, what about women, then?'
I think you'll find if/when they release more it will become apparent how much doesn't exist any more. BBC archives of programmes like Dr. Who have been thrown out or wiped and I am sure this is true of many other recordings.
Certainly true, but still, the BBC's archive is still enormous, and has got to be one of the most valuable records we have of the 20th century. If this pilot works well, there's a lot they could add to it.
Regarding the Slashdotter's dream of a vast, legal online archive of Doctor Who - the problem there will be with copyrights and actors' contracts and so forth. For example, Terry Nation (or rather, the estate thereof) owns the Daleks. For them to confront the Ninth Doctor took a lot of negotiation by the BBC. What fee would be demanded of the BBC if they proposed to put all the old Dalek episodes online for free download? Or, suppose that, say, Tom Baker's contract says he gets x pounds every time an episode in which he appears gets repeated. How does that translate to downloads? Does he get a penny every time someone downloads an episode? Must the BBC now track down every actor in every episode and negotiate individually with them all?
They'll be busy enough digitising the old news footage for a long time yet. Time enough for a legal framework to be sorted out in which they can begin adding the adventures of the Time Lord.
While I do understand the reason for UK only use, can anyone explain to me why the need for a 'No Endorsement and No derogatory use' clause?
It has to do with the rules about what the BBC can and can't do. Among other things, the BBC has to be politically neutral, they can't openly endorse a particular policy or opinion. They're usually pretty good at managing this, to the extent that all the political parties generally think the BBC is consistently biased against them... It seems they have to impose this condition on the material they're releasing here, too.
And who's going to determine what is derogatory anyway?
Probably a judge, should it come to that. Suppose you take BBC footage and edit it together into a searing condemnation of, say, Tory policy in the latter half of the 20th century; you post this online, it spreads like crazy, as a result the Tories' hopes of winning the 2010 election are suddenly scuppered. They sue the BBC. The BBC then say that it's not their fault; what you did, you did in violation of your licence to the media you used. They can hardly be held responsible for what someone does with a pirate copy of their footage, now, can they?
12 different versions so it runs on everything from the computer to the home theater to the microwave oven
Since we/.ers delight in hearing tales of the successful installation of Linux on any electronic device that will sit still for long enough, perhaps we shouldn't criticise Microsoft for attempting the same with their OS...
It happened on November 7th, but maybe it was November 5th on the Lunar calendar? Remember the Guy! (400th anniversary.)
Well, that's basically what happened. The ol'Brigadeer and some of the lads commandeered one of Sir Richard's new spaceships, loaded it up with high-ex and launched it moonwards to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of religiously-flavoured terrorism. It was a lovely sight on takeoff, and the bonus reward two days later when it hit target was quite delightful. O'course, we had to hush it up - everyone these days is convinced UNIT doesn't even exist thanks to some really cunning TV propaganda work - but it's nice to see that someone out there noticed.
But it also negatively affects *realism*. You want to stop someone going through point X in a dungeon, do you (a) install a large monster, or do you (b) put in a door which triggers an alarm when opened, so that your bodyguards are ready and waiting further down the corridor?
Alarm traps are crap. You can just pick up your monsters with the Hand of Evil and drop them on any intruding heroes. What you want to do is to fortify your dungeon walls, and have the only approaches be via very long, snaking corridors with nothing in them. End with an iron or magical door which opens on your dungeon - with a rolling rock trap just outside it. Cue the heroes realising that there's nowhere to run to...
Dungeon Keeper aside, though, your point about realism is well taken. Dungeon economies are rarely well thought through. The best dungeon I ever saw, in fact, was Balthus Dire's citadel of chaos. The place was open. You could walk right in if you wanted. The place was full of visitors and transients: after all, any evil overlord still needs merchants to come along and trade for food, and he needs to have an open door to new recruits - orcs are all very well, but you win nothing these days without human auxiliaries. You'd blend right in until you drew your sword and started yelling about decency and justice...
Have you seen the documentary "The Money Masters: How International Bankers Gained Control of America" that you can find and download online? Interesting little "history of currency" film with a major conspiracy angle.
International Bankers: Because it sounds racist if we use the 'J' word.
Now, another thing I'm seeing more recently are people getting updates from websites with maybe a few links for advertising (or requests) for advertising due to people forgetting to turn off the 'email me' feature on a website when they register. Thats technically an opt-in, but they still end up complaining and screaming SPAM!
No, that's technically an opt-out. Anyone can anonymously subscribe anyone else to such a list, providing a means to untraceably mailbomb the victim of your choice. The unwanted emails will continue until the victim persuades the senders to stop: that sounds like opt-out to me.
A responsibly run mailing list will, on receipt of a new email address from some web form, send one and only one email to the recipient, informing them that their email address was submitted at thus-and-such a URL at thus-and-such a time, with the intent of subscribing to mailing list X from company Y about subject Z or product line Alpha; it will continue to say that in order to confirm that they really did want to subscribe to this list, they should click on this link - a link which will contain a randomly-generated token which an attacker will be unable to forge and which will confirm that the owner of the email address really was the person who attempted to subscribe.
Apparently, however, list operators are reluctant to implement confirmed opt-in systems such as this. They say that they get far fewer subscriptions that way. Wow, no shit Sherlock, but the ones you do get will be from people who actually want to receive your mailings, and you won't be spamming anybody...
Although I hate spam as much as the next guy, how bad would it be if someone could just fill out some forms and collect $500 from a company that sent a supposedly "unwanted" email?
Are you kidding? It would be great.
We, the hackers, the spam recipients capable reading headers and of using whois and traceroute and so forth to track down senders of emails, collect money. They, the mainstream companies who've been conned by spammers into paying for their dubious services, realise what a bad idea it is and make sure to advertise by legitimate means in future.
The only way to stop a corporation doing something is to make it cost them money, after all.
When your mind is in the algorithm, you will have no time to feel depress. Thats why whenever I feel the blues, I start coding like a mad man.
That's an old solution to the problem, and a very effective one I might add. A helpful distraction.
THE Camels hump is an ugly lump
Which well you may see at the Zoo;
But uglier yet is the hump we get
From having too little to do.
Kiddies and grown-ups too-oo-oo,
If we havent enough to do-oo-oo,
We get the hump
Cameelious hump
The hump that is black and blue!
We climb out of bed with a frouzly head
And a snarly-yarly voice.
We shiver and scowl and we grunt and we growl
At our bath and our boots and our toys;
And there ought to be a corner for me
(And I know there is one for you)
When we get the hump
Cameelious hump
The hump that is black and blue!
The cure for this ill is not to sit still,
Or frowst with a book by the fire;
But to take a large hoe and a shovel also,
And dig till you gently perspire;
And then you will find that the sun and the wind.
And the Djinn of the Garden too,
Have lifted the hump
The horrible hump
The hump that is black and blue!
I get it as well as you-oo-oo
If I havent enough to do-oo-oo
We all get hump
Cameelious hump
Kiddies and grown-ups too!
...God help any government that thinks it acceptable to give an Englishman a short measure of beer.
You know how a lot of Americans feel about their guns? Well, we're like that with beer. Any politician who gets labelled as the guy who nicked our beer... well, his career is suddenly not worth a great deal.
As resurrections of old SF shows go, it's been bloody good fun. I haven't seen any Galactica yet, but the Ninth's time in the TARDIS has got to take some beating.
Now assume someone with insufficient knowledge about such a universe who tries to model a simulation to get predictions, much like having for of war in a strategy game - when a unit disappears into fog of war (since x turns ago), it would be essentially in all places that in could reach in x turns at once.
Not quite. That would be what's called a hidden variables system: the unit still does have a real location, which is tracked by the program, even if it's inaccessible to an observer within the system. However, that doesn't appear to be the way our universe works; the Bell inequalities show that hidden variables are incompatible with locality.
if you do out the math, your average electricity cost (if you leave your computer on 24/7, running, say, bittorrent and other goodies) is going to be around a hundred bucks a month extra.
Depends on the climate where you live, though. If you're in a part of the world where you have an air conditioner on most of the time, then this thing's going to cost you extra energy. If, however, you're in a part of the world where you have central heating on most of the time, then this behemoth of a PSU shouldn't cost you anything extra. Its waste heat warms the room, and the thermostat turns down the central heating system to compensate.
I recall that sometimes in the winter back at university I was glad of my Athlon XP box:)
However, if we find life on our next door neighbor, we have some explaining to do. How did life get there? Was it transplanted from earth? Or was earth life transplanted from Mars? If life can propogate across the void of space between earth and Mars, what's to stop it from propogating across solar systems and perhaps even galaxies in astronomical time scales? How old is life anyway, and where did it really come from?
Well, the chances of Mars life reaching Earth, or of Earth life reaching Mars, are pretty good. The two planets are close together; chances are that sooner or later a rock is going to get knocked from one to the other with some spores on board. I would not be at all surprised to find that Mars life (if it exists) and Earth life share a common ancestry.
However, the interstellar spread of life seems less likely to me. While it's quite likely that a rock from Earth might by chance find its way to Mars, it's very unlikely that it would ever escape the solar system entirely. The energy needed to leave the Sun behind is enormous, and the odds of a loose rock ever actually getting somewhere of interest are minute. If life spreads from star to star, it'll do so because it's evolved a form capable of building starships.
Now, if we found HUMAN life on Mars, that would really destroy all of the ongoing theories of the origins of life on earth. Either we are a spacefaring species and thus earth is not our home, or somehow, despite all odds, humanity has evolved on two separate planets that just happen to be right next to each other.
I don't think anyone sane is suggesting that that's likely to happen.
When we look at the character of Data on Star Trek (suspending disbelief) we could easily argue that he is alive in the most important aspects of the concept, whereas in the same breath argue that the Enterprise itself is not.
I'm not so sure of that. The computer on the Enterprise is capable of an awful lot. It is capable of running a simulated AI more intelligent than Data, and flexible enough to realise that it is a simulated AI and seek to escape - and of doing this as part of a frivolous entertainment facility on top of the day-to-day running of the ship.
It made me wonder what the possibilities might be for a ship crewed solely by holodeck Moriarties. Then we met the Doctor aboard Voyager. Humanity is frighteningly close to obsolescence in the Federation.
Here's a sketch for a truly fearsome ship using known Starfleet technology. Take a warp core. Wrap it in a very minimal ship, heavy on computer hardware, and with huge arrays of holographic projectors. Have the computer emulate a crew, all of Data / Moriarty level intelligence. If it ever requires anything other than a computer (warp nacelles, shield generators, deflector dish, phasers) have it project them as holograms. Holo-weapons are just as deadly as the real thing, as the Borg discovered in First Contact...
The great advantage? The ship weighs practically nothing. It's not hauling around huge chunks of metal for living space or life support systems. In transit, it consists of nothing but a warp system, and so can really shift. If it's in combat, it can channel far more power into its shield than the Enterprise could ever have afforded, and wrap that shield over a much smaller surface area for still greater strength. It can reconfigure its armament in an instant - simply switch off the projection of ineffective weapon A and conjure up experimental weapon B. It can redesign itself on the fly.
If necessary, it could project an entire Galaxy-class starship around itself, complete with holo-simulated crew. It need not incarnate its operating AIs in this way, but perhaps it's a good idea if it has to relate to the rest of Starfleet. Now, this ship is really nothing but a powerful computer running a giant holodeck. But... if the AIs are of Moriarty's standard, how is that any different from the real thing?
How many intelligent entities are we dealing with here? Is the ship itself the living being? Or all its potential AI manifestations? Or none of them?
Slashdot Mirror
In the South Park sense, or in the 'I'm going to rip your arms off if I lose' sense?
Now, if only there was a way we could fix it so that we all saluted while the George And Tony Show heads for the front...
With the unwritten addendum: 'that's WHITE men, of course. Not black or red.'
The French, at least, meant all men. As far as I know, the law in revolutionary France didn't distinguish on the grounds of race, only on whether or not you'd managed to get on the wrong side of Citizen Robespierre.
That said, neither great revolutionary manifesto addressed the obvious further objection 'so, what about women, then?'
Certainly true, but still, the BBC's archive is still enormous, and has got to be one of the most valuable records we have of the 20th century. If this pilot works well, there's a lot they could add to it.
Regarding the Slashdotter's dream of a vast, legal online archive of Doctor Who - the problem there will be with copyrights and actors' contracts and so forth. For example, Terry Nation (or rather, the estate thereof) owns the Daleks. For them to confront the Ninth Doctor took a lot of negotiation by the BBC. What fee would be demanded of the BBC if they proposed to put all the old Dalek episodes online for free download? Or, suppose that, say, Tom Baker's contract says he gets x pounds every time an episode in which he appears gets repeated. How does that translate to downloads? Does he get a penny every time someone downloads an episode? Must the BBC now track down every actor in every episode and negotiate individually with them all?
They'll be busy enough digitising the old news footage for a long time yet. Time enough for a legal framework to be sorted out in which they can begin adding the adventures of the Time Lord.
It has to do with the rules about what the BBC can and can't do. Among other things, the BBC has to be politically neutral, they can't openly endorse a particular policy or opinion. They're usually pretty good at managing this, to the extent that all the political parties generally think the BBC is consistently biased against them... It seems they have to impose this condition on the material they're releasing here, too.
And who's going to determine what is derogatory anyway?
Probably a judge, should it come to that. Suppose you take BBC footage and edit it together into a searing condemnation of, say, Tory policy in the latter half of the 20th century; you post this online, it spreads like crazy, as a result the Tories' hopes of winning the 2010 election are suddenly scuppered. They sue the BBC. The BBC then say that it's not their fault; what you did, you did in violation of your licence to the media you used. They can hardly be held responsible for what someone does with a pirate copy of their footage, now, can they?
I think you meant "the future" and "ben affleck"
Damn. For a moment there I thought they'd made a movie of The Light of Other Days and I'd somehow missed it...
Since we /.ers delight in hearing tales of the successful installation of Linux on any electronic device that will sit still for long enough, perhaps we shouldn't criticise Microsoft for attempting the same with their OS...
Well, that's basically what happened. The ol'Brigadeer and some of the lads commandeered one of Sir Richard's new spaceships, loaded it up with high-ex and launched it moonwards to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of religiously-flavoured terrorism. It was a lovely sight on takeoff, and the bonus reward two days later when it hit target was quite delightful. O'course, we had to hush it up - everyone these days is convinced UNIT doesn't even exist thanks to some really cunning TV propaganda work - but it's nice to see that someone out there noticed.
Alarm traps are crap. You can just pick up your monsters with the Hand of Evil and drop them on any intruding heroes. What you want to do is to fortify your dungeon walls, and have the only approaches be via very long, snaking corridors with nothing in them. End with an iron or magical door which opens on your dungeon - with a rolling rock trap just outside it. Cue the heroes realising that there's nowhere to run to...
Dungeon Keeper aside, though, your point about realism is well taken. Dungeon economies are rarely well thought through. The best dungeon I ever saw, in fact, was Balthus Dire's citadel of chaos. The place was open. You could walk right in if you wanted. The place was full of visitors and transients: after all, any evil overlord still needs merchants to come along and trade for food, and he needs to have an open door to new recruits - orcs are all very well, but you win nothing these days without human auxiliaries. You'd blend right in until you drew your sword and started yelling about decency and justice...
International Bankers: Because it sounds racist if we use the 'J' word.
No, that's technically an opt-out. Anyone can anonymously subscribe anyone else to such a list, providing a means to untraceably mailbomb the victim of your choice. The unwanted emails will continue until the victim persuades the senders to stop: that sounds like opt-out to me.
A responsibly run mailing list will, on receipt of a new email address from some web form, send one and only one email to the recipient, informing them that their email address was submitted at thus-and-such a URL at thus-and-such a time, with the intent of subscribing to mailing list X from company Y about subject Z or product line Alpha; it will continue to say that in order to confirm that they really did want to subscribe to this list, they should click on this link - a link which will contain a randomly-generated token which an attacker will be unable to forge and which will confirm that the owner of the email address really was the person who attempted to subscribe.
Apparently, however, list operators are reluctant to implement confirmed opt-in systems such as this. They say that they get far fewer subscriptions that way. Wow, no shit Sherlock, but the ones you do get will be from people who actually want to receive your mailings, and you won't be spamming anybody...
Are you kidding? It would be great.
We, the hackers, the spam recipients capable reading headers and of using whois and traceroute and so forth to track down senders of emails, collect money. They, the mainstream companies who've been conned by spammers into paying for their dubious services, realise what a bad idea it is and make sure to advertise by legitimate means in future.
The only way to stop a corporation doing something is to make it cost them money, after all.
That's an old solution to the problem, and a very effective one I might add. A helpful distraction.
THE Camels hump is an ugly lump
Which well you may see at the Zoo;
But uglier yet is the hump we get
From having too little to do.
Kiddies and grown-ups too-oo-oo,
If we havent enough to do-oo-oo,
We get the hump
Cameelious hump
The hump that is black and blue!
We climb out of bed with a frouzly head
And a snarly-yarly voice.
We shiver and scowl and we grunt and we growl
At our bath and our boots and our toys;
And there ought to be a corner for me
(And I know there is one for you)
When we get the hump
Cameelious hump
The hump that is black and blue!
The cure for this ill is not to sit still,
Or frowst with a book by the fire;
But to take a large hoe and a shovel also,
And dig till you gently perspire;
And then you will find that the sun and the wind.
And the Djinn of the Garden too,
Have lifted the hump
The horrible hump
The hump that is black and blue!
I get it as well as you-oo-oo
If I havent enough to do-oo-oo
We all get hump
Cameelious hump
Kiddies and grown-ups too!
from How the Camel Got His Hump , Rudyard Kipling
RSS support will be built into not just Internet Explorer 7.0, but also Outlook 12 and Windows Vista itself
and given Microsoft's past record on integrating network functionality into the OS, I'm looking forward to a new market for RSS virus scanners.
Er... well, you just move your head closer to the object.
I'd say by about 50.
You know how a lot of Americans feel about their guns? Well, we're like that with beer. Any politician who gets labelled as the guy who nicked our beer... well, his career is suddenly not worth a great deal.
As resurrections of old SF shows go, it's been bloody good fun. I haven't seen any Galactica yet, but the Ninth's time in the TARDIS has got to take some beating.
Really? It's good. Myself, I've never tried the true Canadian Big Mac, though I'm told it's an excellent burger.
linux.slishdot.org?
Not quite. That would be what's called a hidden variables system: the unit still does have a real location, which is tracked by the program, even if it's inaccessible to an observer within the system. However, that doesn't appear to be the way our universe works; the Bell inequalities show that hidden variables are incompatible with locality.
Well, if that's the problem, then perhaps we should start doing advanced theoretical physics research in Kansas?
Depends on the climate where you live, though. If you're in a part of the world where you have an air conditioner on most of the time, then this thing's going to cost you extra energy. If, however, you're in a part of the world where you have central heating on most of the time, then this behemoth of a PSU shouldn't cost you anything extra. Its waste heat warms the room, and the thermostat turns down the central heating system to compensate.
I recall that sometimes in the winter back at university I was glad of my Athlon XP box :)
However, if we find life on our next door neighbor, we have some explaining to do. How did life get there? Was it transplanted from earth? Or was earth life transplanted from Mars? If life can propogate across the void of space between earth and Mars, what's to stop it from propogating across solar systems and perhaps even galaxies in astronomical time scales? How old is life anyway, and where did it really come from?
Well, the chances of Mars life reaching Earth, or of Earth life reaching Mars, are pretty good. The two planets are close together; chances are that sooner or later a rock is going to get knocked from one to the other with some spores on board. I would not be at all surprised to find that Mars life (if it exists) and Earth life share a common ancestry.
However, the interstellar spread of life seems less likely to me. While it's quite likely that a rock from Earth might by chance find its way to Mars, it's very unlikely that it would ever escape the solar system entirely. The energy needed to leave the Sun behind is enormous, and the odds of a loose rock ever actually getting somewhere of interest are minute. If life spreads from star to star, it'll do so because it's evolved a form capable of building starships.
Now, if we found HUMAN life on Mars, that would really destroy all of the ongoing theories of the origins of life on earth. Either we are a spacefaring species and thus earth is not our home, or somehow, despite all odds, humanity has evolved on two separate planets that just happen to be right next to each other.
I don't think anyone sane is suggesting that that's likely to happen.
I'm not so sure of that. The computer on the Enterprise is capable of an awful lot. It is capable of running a simulated AI more intelligent than Data, and flexible enough to realise that it is a simulated AI and seek to escape - and of doing this as part of a frivolous entertainment facility on top of the day-to-day running of the ship.
It made me wonder what the possibilities might be for a ship crewed solely by holodeck Moriarties. Then we met the Doctor aboard Voyager. Humanity is frighteningly close to obsolescence in the Federation.
Here's a sketch for a truly fearsome ship using known Starfleet technology. Take a warp core. Wrap it in a very minimal ship, heavy on computer hardware, and with huge arrays of holographic projectors. Have the computer emulate a crew, all of Data / Moriarty level intelligence. If it ever requires anything other than a computer (warp nacelles, shield generators, deflector dish, phasers) have it project them as holograms. Holo-weapons are just as deadly as the real thing, as the Borg discovered in First Contact...
The great advantage? The ship weighs practically nothing. It's not hauling around huge chunks of metal for living space or life support systems. In transit, it consists of nothing but a warp system, and so can really shift. If it's in combat, it can channel far more power into its shield than the Enterprise could ever have afforded, and wrap that shield over a much smaller surface area for still greater strength. It can reconfigure its armament in an instant - simply switch off the projection of ineffective weapon A and conjure up experimental weapon B. It can redesign itself on the fly.
If necessary, it could project an entire Galaxy-class starship around itself, complete with holo-simulated crew. It need not incarnate its operating AIs in this way, but perhaps it's a good idea if it has to relate to the rest of Starfleet. Now, this ship is really nothing but a powerful computer running a giant holodeck. But... if the AIs are of Moriarty's standard, how is that any different from the real thing?
How many intelligent entities are we dealing with here? Is the ship itself the living being? Or all its potential AI manifestations? Or none of them?