Also consider how special interests in other countries *will* influece a governing body's decisions, the same way they have in the states. I personally would want to keep something so crucial to us, close to the vest.
Which is exactly why other countries are getting unhappy about the US having sole control.
Sure, the US started the internet, if Europe don't like it they can build their own, yadda yadda yadda... Is that what you want, though? Is that what anyone wants? The Internet to split, EU nameservers disagreeing with US namesrvers, maybe a return to bang-path addressing? We'd rather not do it that way, neither would you, but there'll come a point at which the Internet is so crucial to national security that it's preferable to fragment it than to allow it to be controlled by a not necessarily friendly foreign power.
Much better that it be under international control. We've managed to work out a system of treaties to standardise protocols for aviation and radio and shipping, haven't we? Certainly the same can be done with the internet.
If I could take Bonzi Buddy, stick it in a really small container and carefully chop bits off it with very small scissors, that would be very cool. I could produce a bizarre midget version. Without all the evil. Bonsai Buddy, yeah, that works.
Even better would be Banzai Buddy. Just a window sitter on top of your favourite editor, which watches and whenever you pull off a particularly nifty hack it waves its arms in the air and cheers you.
Yes, mod chips can overcome region encoding. But they also overcome measures to prevent the booting of copied discs.
How unfortunate. Sucks to be Sony, huh?
In other news today, soldiers protect you from rogue states but also torture prisoners and take photos as souvenirs, Catholic priests are mostly nice old guys but sometimes they're rather too interested in children, and your computer can send information to any other machine on the internet, whether or not it's information that you should be sending.
Lets face the facts here. People who buy mod chips do so to pirate games and to play pirated games. It's a reality that no slashbot could deny. How many people do you know mod a system to play "homebrew" games or do something that doesn't involve piracy?
Nice flamebait. You didn't even read the summary, never mind the article, did you?
The ruling was that mod chips are OK because they're used to bypass region coding. Australia has a problem with region coding, and Australians generally don't see why they shouldn't buy the cheaper legal releases from their neighbours in Indonesia and Hong Kong. You seriously never met anyone who liked to play import games?
Video games down - next step, region-encoded dvd's? If only...
Actually, in Australia, region-coded DVDs have already gone. That's the precedent that was used in this argument. Multiregion DVD players are definitely legit in Australia.
imagine a robotic factory programmed to replicate itself - is it alive just because it replicates itself and not cars or whatever?
Erm... yes. Yes, it definitely is.
'A robotic factory programmed to replicate itself' is a really good definition of what a living thing actually is. It's something every living thing has in common. It takes in materials and energy from its environment, and uses them to maintain itself and to manufacture more like itself. Bacteria do it. Plants do it. Animals do it. And your robotic factory does it. That's life.
What matters is that his moral system led him to propose an illegal solution instead of a legal one. It tells me a lot about the kind of person he is.
The 'legal-illegal' axis and the 'right-wrong' axis are not the same thing. Some things are right but illegal, some things are wrong but legal.
Breaking the law isn't necessarily a moral wrong. If you don't realise that... well, it tells me a lot about the kind of person you are, and I hope like hell there aren't too many like that or freedom is dead.
The real question is when Apple or Microsoft will start/buy their own music label. Sounds easier to me than trying to negotiate with any cartel...
There are legal obstacles. Apple (computer company) have an agreement with Apple (Beatles' record company) that they won't go into the music business; they had legal quarrels a while back over the whole trademark thing. Microsoft might get into trouble if they try to use their OS monopoly to push their music business - which of course they certainly would.
I notice, incidentally, that all Apple's music business is iThis, iThat, but not so much of the Apple name itself. Possibly they could start a subsidiary company called iMusic, which would never actually use the name Apple but which would be owned by Apple Computer and tie in to the iPod / iTunes system. Would that get around their difficulties with the Beatles?
If they take postgres and roll it into the OS- that means the work they do after that wont be coming back to the postgres community? I assume that is the likely course, or am I mistaken?
Well, they don't have to give anything back, if postgres is BSD-license. But in practice, they probably will. Not everything, but quite a bit. It's in their interests to give back to the community a lot of the changes they've made, so that the work done on the free version doesn't unnecessarily duplicate the proprietary version, and so that the next release of postgres doesn't force Sun to rewrite half their modifications. Basically, if Sun want to take advantage of progress made by the community on postgres, then they'll be giving back some of their own. They don't want to diverge too far.
the only real way to do it would be to provide the copyrighted material and catch people downloading, which would be entrapment
Not entrapment, but implied consent.
Suppose the representative of the record company goes down to the market armed with a lot of CDs of BritneysLatestAlbum. 'Roll up, roll up!' he shouts, 'Free CDs of BritneysLatestAlbum for all, no cost, just take one!' When someone comes along and takes one, the heavy squad jump on him and the record company sues them for copyright infringement.
Hmm. Something doesn't work there. In court, the guy says that the record company's representative gave him the CD. Surely he has done nothing wrong.
Same goes if the RIAA runs a P2P node and watches who downloads from it. They can argue that they haven't infringed copyright, because the record company's official representative offered them the copy and they accepted. If the record company didn't want the copy made, they could easily have refused!
Making digital copies available for download just doesn't strike me as the most legit thing in the world, especially when the prices are mere fractions of the cost for the same service in the US where the RIAA has the most influence.
Roubles aren't worth much, and Russians (apart from those based in and around Chelsea) are generally a lot poorer than Americans. Consequently, the Russian music licensing body charges far less for rights to run a download service than its American counterpart.
Furthermore, in the spirit of free trade with the new capitalist Russia, Americans are allowed to buy goods in Russia and ship them back to the USA. There'll be import tariffs, but for personal-use imports you'd have to buy a hell of a lot of mp3s at a time to reach the threshold for those.
I don't see anything wrong with it at all. If the record companies' Russian representative decides to charge far less for downloads than their American representative, then I for one will buy my music in Russian stores. This is globalisation, this is the free market in action, and for once it benefits the ordinary people rather than just the bosses.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the proceedure for installing Linux on a bare machine is: run Linux disks. The proceedure for installing Linux on a machine with Windows already on it is: Go to DOS prompt, type "format C:...y...enter volume name (I always name it something silly, like "Euclid", the computer from the movie "Pi")" then proceed as in the first example.
Huh? Assuming you don't want to dual boot, then you just run the Linux disks, same as before. There'll presumably be an opportunity in the installer to choose between dual boot and Linux-only.
It might actually be better if we don't charge foreigners for access.
Don't look at the BBC as a business. Look at it politically. Think cultural imperialism. The BBC is the outside world's most important window on British culture. Suppose now that they put their programming on the internet for free to the whole world. Bandwidth costs to the BBC, nil: hell, the ISPs of the world would pay the BBC fees for high-speed access to that resource.
That could do for British culture overseas what Hollywood did for America. Of course, if the BBC tried anything of the sort then Murdoch would have a fit and probably order Blair to put a stop to it...
As far as I know, all the Underground related items are licenced by LT, so they probably enforce copyright issues.
However, it's not as if they don't have free leaflet maps in all the Tube stations, and for that matter a handy Java applet to put on your mobile. Can't find the exact URL - I found it somewhere on O2's WAP site, but according to Transport for London's website you can text TUBEMAP to 60835 to get it.
This ipod applet sounds like the same sort of thing. Shame the NY and SF authorities weren't so cool about it.
Just spray a fine aerosol containing traces of the target molecules. Everyone in the airport terminal will trigger the detectors...
This may actually prove a better bet than conducting real attacks.
Arranging matters so that everyone in an airport sets off the 'this guy has a bomb!' machine will cause colossal disruption. Outbound flights will be delayed for hours while the mess is sorted out. Inbound flights will circle till fuel runs low then divert elsewhere, thereby disrupting traffic across a whole region. Nobody's been killed, but tens of thousands have been enormously pissed off, at an economic cost that will eventually run into many millions.
But what if the security guys say 'Aw, crap: something wrong with the This Guy Has A Bomb! machine again' and just ignore the false positives? Well, that's when you strap on your boom belt, shout Allahu Akbar and get on a plane...
However I think the caucasian segment of Old Europe has had those sentiments much diminished. Nearly a whole generation of men was wiped out in the WWI and while some of the genes clearly were passed on through women, it really weakened the gene pool for those traits.
Most of them were conscripts. They didn't volunteer the first time round, they had to be rounded up by force and sent to die for someone else's cause.
I doubt Europe's current peaceful outlook is the result of genetic adaptation, but of culture, and from the effects not of the first world war but of the second.
I was amazed, during the runup to the recent fracas in Iraq, to hear Americans condemning Germany for its pacifism. That's like telling a reformed alcoholic that he's no fun at a boozeup. Do they want the old Germany back or something? We don't want to fight, not because we're afraid of the enemy, but because we're afraid of ourselves. Most of Europe was reduced to rubble by warfare within living memory; that'll do a lot to a civilisation to teach it not to go off fighting people without a bloody good reason.
Seriously, though, will we be able to actually pinpoint a time and say 'this is when the Singularity occurred'?
I shouldn't think so. Whenever singularities appear in any model of the real world, it generally means a breakdown of the model. So this singularity means an acceleration of technological advance to a point where our ability to forecast breaks down and we really can't say what will happen.
A singularity would have it that we get ever-accelerating advance, heading skyward to infinity at some finite time. I dislike, therefore, forecasts that the singularity will bring utopia. It need not. The singularity could very easily bring extinction. It could bring hell on earth. It could bring a tyranny beyond the dreams of 1984, in which no proletarian revolt could ever succeed because we've all got Seven Minute Specials waiting to go off inside us. To be quite honest, I think our best hope is extinction, but leaving successors - which is, let's face it, the best hope of any species that there ever was. In addition, I don't mind whether this means our genetically enhanced, cybernetic, hyperevolved biological descendants, or our superintelligent quantum-computing AI offspring. What do I care about DNA, after all? A sentient robot I might build is as much my offspring as a human child I might father.
I agree with the concept of the singularity - there are advances coming whose impact on society we won't be able to predict until it happens - but not that it will necessarily be good.
Hey, mad scientists can be inventors too! Remember the left-handed hammer? The salad super battery? The Sludge-o-Matic machine? The diamond-core Chron-O-John time machine? The hamster-driven high-voltage generator?
What would the world be like without mad scientists?
'Theyhateyou'. 'Fear'. 'Worry.' 'Unworthy'. 'Panic'. 'Cthulhu fh'tagn!' Just underlaid with ordinary conversation.
See how long it is before management calls in an exorcist or a Feng Shui consultant to rid the building of whatever it is that's troubling the staff...
Linus brainchild, is VERY fragamented, look at all the linux distros.
Mostly running pretty much the same kernel, though. They compile it with different options, and sometimes do some patching, but they've never outright forked it.
The difference between, say, SuSE and Ubuntu is about package management and configuration tools and desktop apps. Gnome or KDE, XFree86 or X.org, RPM or APT... But at the kernel - which is the only part Linus has anything at all to do with - there's very little in it.
What if the "meaningless snipits" just happen to have the words "fire", "bankruptcy", "layoffs", "harassment", "pregnant" or "terror" in them?
Ooh. Now I want one of these. Never mind the rest of it, just that last word and perhaps others like it. Hook it up to your VOIP system and call a likeminded prankster, and leave it running. It'd gum up Echelon something awful:-)
Slashdot Mirror
They've got an army of millions, and quite a lot of nukes.
Which is exactly why other countries are getting unhappy about the US having sole control.
Sure, the US started the internet, if Europe don't like it they can build their own, yadda yadda yadda... Is that what you want, though? Is that what anyone wants? The Internet to split, EU nameservers disagreeing with US namesrvers, maybe a return to bang-path addressing? We'd rather not do it that way, neither would you, but there'll come a point at which the Internet is so crucial to national security that it's preferable to fragment it than to allow it to be controlled by a not necessarily friendly foreign power.
Much better that it be under international control. We've managed to work out a system of treaties to standardise protocols for aviation and radio and shipping, haven't we? Certainly the same can be done with the internet.
Excuse me. StarOffice is Sun's. OpenOffice is ours.
If I could take Bonzi Buddy, stick it in a really small container and carefully chop bits off it with very small scissors, that would be very cool. I could produce a bizarre midget version. Without all the evil. Bonsai Buddy, yeah, that works.
Even better would be Banzai Buddy. Just a window sitter on top of your favourite editor, which watches and whenever you pull off a particularly nifty hack it waves its arms in the air and cheers you.
How unfortunate. Sucks to be Sony, huh?
In other news today, soldiers protect you from rogue states but also torture prisoners and take photos as souvenirs, Catholic priests are mostly nice old guys but sometimes they're rather too interested in children, and your computer can send information to any other machine on the internet, whether or not it's information that you should be sending.
Nice flamebait. You didn't even read the summary, never mind the article, did you?
The ruling was that mod chips are OK because they're used to bypass region coding. Australia has a problem with region coding, and Australians generally don't see why they shouldn't buy the cheaper legal releases from their neighbours in Indonesia and Hong Kong. You seriously never met anyone who liked to play import games?
Actually, in Australia, region-coded DVDs have already gone. That's the precedent that was used in this argument. Multiregion DVD players are definitely legit in Australia.
Erm... yes. Yes, it definitely is.
'A robotic factory programmed to replicate itself' is a really good definition of what a living thing actually is. It's something every living thing has in common. It takes in materials and energy from its environment, and uses them to maintain itself and to manufacture more like itself. Bacteria do it. Plants do it. Animals do it. And your robotic factory does it. That's life.
The 'legal-illegal' axis and the 'right-wrong' axis are not the same thing. Some things are right but illegal, some things are wrong but legal.
Breaking the law isn't necessarily a moral wrong. If you don't realise that... well, it tells me a lot about the kind of person you are, and I hope like hell there aren't too many like that or freedom is dead.
There are legal obstacles. Apple (computer company) have an agreement with Apple (Beatles' record company) that they won't go into the music business; they had legal quarrels a while back over the whole trademark thing. Microsoft might get into trouble if they try to use their OS monopoly to push their music business - which of course they certainly would.
I notice, incidentally, that all Apple's music business is iThis, iThat, but not so much of the Apple name itself. Possibly they could start a subsidiary company called iMusic, which would never actually use the name Apple but which would be owned by Apple Computer and tie in to the iPod / iTunes system. Would that get around their difficulties with the Beatles?
Well, they don't have to give anything back, if postgres is BSD-license. But in practice, they probably will. Not everything, but quite a bit. It's in their interests to give back to the community a lot of the changes they've made, so that the work done on the free version doesn't unnecessarily duplicate the proprietary version, and so that the next release of postgres doesn't force Sun to rewrite half their modifications. Basically, if Sun want to take advantage of progress made by the community on postgres, then they'll be giving back some of their own. They don't want to diverge too far.
Not entrapment, but implied consent.
Suppose the representative of the record company goes down to the market armed with a lot of CDs of BritneysLatestAlbum. 'Roll up, roll up!' he shouts, 'Free CDs of BritneysLatestAlbum for all, no cost, just take one!' When someone comes along and takes one, the heavy squad jump on him and the record company sues them for copyright infringement.
Hmm. Something doesn't work there. In court, the guy says that the record company's representative gave him the CD. Surely he has done nothing wrong.
Same goes if the RIAA runs a P2P node and watches who downloads from it. They can argue that they haven't infringed copyright, because the record company's official representative offered them the copy and they accepted. If the record company didn't want the copy made, they could easily have refused!
Roubles aren't worth much, and Russians (apart from those based in and around Chelsea) are generally a lot poorer than Americans. Consequently, the Russian music licensing body charges far less for rights to run a download service than its American counterpart.
Furthermore, in the spirit of free trade with the new capitalist Russia, Americans are allowed to buy goods in Russia and ship them back to the USA. There'll be import tariffs, but for personal-use imports you'd have to buy a hell of a lot of mp3s at a time to reach the threshold for those.
I don't see anything wrong with it at all. If the record companies' Russian representative decides to charge far less for downloads than their American representative, then I for one will buy my music in Russian stores. This is globalisation, this is the free market in action, and for once it benefits the ordinary people rather than just the bosses.
Huh? Assuming you don't want to dual boot, then you just run the Linux disks, same as before. There'll presumably be an opportunity in the installer to choose between dual boot and Linux-only.
Don't look at the BBC as a business. Look at it politically. Think cultural imperialism. The BBC is the outside world's most important window on British culture. Suppose now that they put their programming on the internet for free to the whole world. Bandwidth costs to the BBC, nil: hell, the ISPs of the world would pay the BBC fees for high-speed access to that resource.
That could do for British culture overseas what Hollywood did for America. Of course, if the BBC tried anything of the sort then Murdoch would have a fit and probably order Blair to put a stop to it...
However, it's not as if they don't have free leaflet maps in all the Tube stations, and for that matter a handy Java applet to put on your mobile. Can't find the exact URL - I found it somewhere on O2's WAP site, but according to Transport for London's website you can text TUBEMAP to 60835 to get it.
This ipod applet sounds like the same sort of thing. Shame the NY and SF authorities weren't so cool about it.
This may actually prove a better bet than conducting real attacks.
Arranging matters so that everyone in an airport sets off the 'this guy has a bomb!' machine will cause colossal disruption. Outbound flights will be delayed for hours while the mess is sorted out. Inbound flights will circle till fuel runs low then divert elsewhere, thereby disrupting traffic across a whole region. Nobody's been killed, but tens of thousands have been enormously pissed off, at an economic cost that will eventually run into many millions.
But what if the security guys say 'Aw, crap: something wrong with the This Guy Has A Bomb! machine again' and just ignore the false positives? Well, that's when you strap on your boom belt, shout Allahu Akbar and get on a plane...
Although in the post-apocalyptic world, ohmu shell is the material of choice.
If you expect to stay "civilized". . .money.
Not dollars, though. Nuka-Cola bottle caps.
Most of them were conscripts. They didn't volunteer the first time round, they had to be rounded up by force and sent to die for someone else's cause.
I doubt Europe's current peaceful outlook is the result of genetic adaptation, but of culture, and from the effects not of the first world war but of the second.
I was amazed, during the runup to the recent fracas in Iraq, to hear Americans condemning Germany for its pacifism. That's like telling a reformed alcoholic that he's no fun at a boozeup. Do they want the old Germany back or something? We don't want to fight, not because we're afraid of the enemy, but because we're afraid of ourselves. Most of Europe was reduced to rubble by warfare within living memory; that'll do a lot to a civilisation to teach it not to go off fighting people without a bloody good reason.
I shouldn't think so. Whenever singularities appear in any model of the real world, it generally means a breakdown of the model. So this singularity means an acceleration of technological advance to a point where our ability to forecast breaks down and we really can't say what will happen.
A singularity would have it that we get ever-accelerating advance, heading skyward to infinity at some finite time. I dislike, therefore, forecasts that the singularity will bring utopia. It need not. The singularity could very easily bring extinction. It could bring hell on earth. It could bring a tyranny beyond the dreams of 1984, in which no proletarian revolt could ever succeed because we've all got Seven Minute Specials waiting to go off inside us. To be quite honest, I think our best hope is extinction, but leaving successors - which is, let's face it, the best hope of any species that there ever was. In addition, I don't mind whether this means our genetically enhanced, cybernetic, hyperevolved biological descendants, or our superintelligent quantum-computing AI offspring. What do I care about DNA, after all? A sentient robot I might build is as much my offspring as a human child I might father.
I agree with the concept of the singularity - there are advances coming whose impact on society we won't be able to predict until it happens - but not that it will necessarily be good.
What would the world be like without mad scientists?
Let's fill it up with subliminal hints.
'Theyhateyou'. 'Fear'. 'Worry.' 'Unworthy'. 'Panic'. 'Cthulhu fh'tagn!' Just underlaid with ordinary conversation.
See how long it is before management calls in an exorcist or a Feng Shui consultant to rid the building of whatever it is that's troubling the staff...
Mostly running pretty much the same kernel, though. They compile it with different options, and sometimes do some patching, but they've never outright forked it.
The difference between, say, SuSE and Ubuntu is about package management and configuration tools and desktop apps. Gnome or KDE, XFree86 or X.org, RPM or APT... But at the kernel - which is the only part Linus has anything at all to do with - there's very little in it.
Ooh. Now I want one of these. Never mind the rest of it, just that last word and perhaps others like it. Hook it up to your VOIP system and call a likeminded prankster, and leave it running. It'd gum up Echelon something awful :-)
You misspelled /dev/ttyS0.