Sure, it's not completely fair to judge the validity of beliefs if we're not Aboriginal or have much knowledge of them, mind you, that doesn't stop most Slashdotters from bagging out Christianity despite not knowing shit about it beyond some rhetoric about spaghetti monsters and abortion clinics being blown up. Hell, I've even read someone on slashdot being modded to +5 for blaming the holocaust on Christianity even though the Nazis killed Dietrich Bonhoeffer, chased out Karl Barth and kept the young John Paul II in hiding. The upper Nazi echelon was trying to bring back the Germanic gods/rituals to combat the Jewish origins of Christianity, but still on Slashdot you can tie Christianity to this genocide and nobody will bat an eyelid. Scientology is a constant target of ridicule of course because it was made up by some dude to make money. However Scientology is now exclusively the domain of people who really believe in it (including that nutter Miscavage) but we have no problems with laughing at those people simply because we know how the religion was founded. Now a bunch of people are bursting to trot out the old party line "information wants to be free" applied to these Aboriginal beliefs and suddenly there is the call to let them be.
So, assuming you have an S/O, you wouldn't mind if there were YouTube videos of you doing the linen fandango with him/her? For that matter, why do you even bother to wear clothing outdoors when the temperature is warm?
Totally invalid comparison. Sexual congress is widely understood and documented, you can pick up a book on sexual tips and tricks with all the information you need from a book store. Likewise with the human body, there are anatomical textbooks showing what you're body looks like inside and out. This is about certain knowledge that in aboriginal culture is completely occluded from certain members of society which does not have a parallel in western society. That doesn't make it either wrong or right.
Personally, I don't have a problem with this system, but I also don't have a problem with certain churches not allowing female ministers, Jews and Muslims mutilating their sons' wangs and other stuff that isn't ever going to affect me. If you do care about equality and freedom of information in these societies I don't see why you shouldn't get a chance to whine about it on slashdot.
Alexander and the Selucid empire that followed him came after the Achaemenid Persians but before the Parthian and Sassanid Persians. The last Persians to rule Iraq were the Islamic Safavid dynasty who lasted well into the 18th century. As for Babylon, it was founded and run by the indigenous people of the area until Cyrus II captured it and the Selucids later emptied it.
I'd love to see a software license that says something to the effect of "This software will not be used to wage war or to kill any humans".
Why?
Take WWII as an example, you've got a whole bunch of Japanese moving east killing 3M Chinese soldiers defending their homeland, murdering 17M unarmed Chinese civilians mainly with swords and small arms. Germans get in on the action, invading Czechoslovakia and Poland. They get bored and ramp up action invading Scandinavia, France and the Soviet Union killing 23M soviets (half civilian) while they were at it. Jews of course were shot on site or sent to an automated death factory, 3M all up. The Germans start bombing the crap out of the UK and the Japanese exploit the distraction and invade Singapore, capturing the defenders then starve or torture them to death in prison camps. This was the bad kind of killing, because they were killing because they desired more power.
But we all know this story and what happened next. The British Commonwealth, U.S. and Soviet Union killed a truly amazing amount of people and fixed the problem. It is completely thanks to violence that German and Japanese people are now nice rather than nasty. The US military helped get the Japanese out of China / South East Asia and the Germans out of the bulk of Europe and thus prevented them from killing any more people while they were there. This was the good kind of killing because they only started killing when they had killers to kill and they always aimed to make peace when the killers were killed. I bet you can't think of any non-violent organisation that cut short such an evil set of events.
This is why violence is only bad if you're violent to the wrong people and why I wholly endorse any of my works to be used for violence against the right people. It's not as if the Third Reich or Japanese empire would have cared about your stipulations. If someone did honour it, they must be the sort of people who care about individual freedoms and intellectual property and thus those who you'd probably want to win the conflict anyway.
Of course the problem is that the military forces of the US and my native Australia spends most of its time invading irrelevant countries to look like it is dealing with terrorists, but that does not mean that its role in the world is wholly a negative one, they beat up a lot of bad people too, like the Taliban who had it coming to them long before they helped hide Osama bin Laden. Our Aussie guys went over and kept away a bunch of armed militia that was trying to stop East Timor from regaining its independence, NATO did some bombing to stop the Serbs from killing the Muslims in Kosovo. When the military isn't killing people you get things like the Rwandan genocide in the mid 90s when nobody got around to killing the aggressors so they were able to kill whomever the hell they wanted.
Thus, killing in general is a completely morally neutral action.
Something I've never understood about American culture is that the for example the 18th amendment was obviously wrong and thus repealed but yet another law, the 2nd amendment simply cannot be questioned. Were the men who wrote the bill of rights blessed with divine insight that subsequent lawmakers lacked? Why didn't they think of the 13th amendment while they were at it? Is not the right to be not owned by another man more important than what you can carry around with you? They didn't think of it because they were just ordinary men tasked to build a new nation-state and were doing the best they could without the benefit of another 200 years of insight like we have.
As for guns, if everybody wants to have guns, they are fun, shiny and make them feel safe, that's a reason to have them. If the US is in serious danger of being invaded in the near future and it requires citizens to be armed for an impending emergency that is a better reason to have them (and the reason they were legalised in the first place). If the population required guns to obtain their food, control pests and euthanase domestic animals, that would be an an extremely valid reason to have guns.
However, it seems to me that many Americans don't like guns, the US has the most powerful armed forces in the world and is largely urbanised. It seems to me that the biggest reason that they are still around is that the law says they should be still around. Is not the constitution there to serve the wishes of the people, not the other way around? I'm not saying that America has to get rid of guns or even restrict them more than they do, I don't live in America so that doesn't affect me. All I ask is that when Americans discuss their gun laws online it be about the merits/failings of an armed population rather than debating the intentions of the mortal men who framed a 230 year old document.
That's what I thought to begin with, but then again, it's not as if kids will be snorting lines of this stuff for fun, it will be used in sealed laboritories with extreme care. If ebola must be studied in more flexible environments than BSL4 for it to be understood as the article claims, then a mutant virus that probably is harmless is probably a better choice to a natural virus that brings hemorrhagic fever to all it infects. Sure, don't give it to fresher biology classes, don't play with it without serious protection etc. but for the higher risk experements that absolutely must be done before this virus is understood, use this stuff instead of the authentic virus.
A controversial branch of GStreamer added DRM support a few years back. The idea is that a trusted module can receive data from an untrusted module but only send data to another trusted module. Trusted modules are usually based on the same source code as the signed module but have been compiled by a party that the previous trusted module trusts, and there is a PKI like system to manage which signatures are accepted by which modules and it uses some sort of an asymmetric signature checking system to verify this.
I don't know whether this is going forward or not, the very idea of this system is going to invoke the ire of the free software world and I doubt the GStreamer guys are stupid enough to go against community beliefs (and possibly prejudices) since it relies on the community for patches, bug reports and publicity. Anyway, GStreamer is a great platform that is widely used now and it is worth checking out, thought the DRM side might need a lot of TLC without much help from the community.
I hope this helps, even though I wish DRM ill in general, I admire anyone with the courage to post something like that on Slashdot, though it would have impressed me more if you had your account/email address attached.
Well, QT has been using GPL2 for quite a while now. However the big point of concern with some people is that QT does not use LGPL which would allow GPL incompatible licences to interoperate with the libraries like GTK does. Of course there is the argument, such as that that made by the FSF that ALL libraries should be GPL in order to encourage GPL compatible software to have an advantage, but in my mind having a platform open to crazy licences and/or closed software is more important and the fact that Trolltech provides a commercial licence to circumvent these restrictions indicates that they probably agree with me.
I don't believe that BSD licensed software is freer than GPL, however I do believe that the dynamic linking process provides a good boundary between licences for interoperability as per the LGPL. Trolltech who dissolve this boundary for profit and the FSF who dissolve this boundary to push their ideological agendas are not working in the spirit of openness. Switching libraries to GPL3 from GPL2 and especially LGPL will do nothing but further restrict what the program on the other side can be doing will do a lot for ideological and commercial leveraging at the expense of that library as a universal platform.
It's a trebuchet, as can clearly be seen from the sling which holds the bowling balls. It also does not have an optimal sling length, but that just makes the robot itself all the more impressive.
A trebuchet is powered by a counterweight, this thing is powered by some sort of mechanical actuators meaning that it certainly is not a trebuchet. As for slings, the Roman onager used slings despite being driven by torsion rather than counterweights. Of course back then a catapult was defined as a sinew torsion based crossbow that that fired a spear. A ballista was similar but fired rocks instead, though these days we call an onager a catapult, a catapult a ballista and don't really have a name for a ballista.
Users is first, because the first thing you do is log in. Settings is next to users because it also sets the current state of the system and may be use to edit the users preferences. Images, Music and Videos are adjacent since they all deal with media. Games comes next because they are somewhat of a media experience but are also interactive like the categories after it. Internet is next because games can be played on the internet, PSN next, because it also allows one to obtain external media, friends comes last, because it is related to PSN but not much else, except for games maybe, but none of my friends ever seem to be playing when I feel like going online so I mainly just use it like email.
Vertically, special functions like sorting, mass copy, user management, search network and HD space management tools come at the top so you know where to get at them. Next comes removable/external media like DVDs, SD cards, thumbdrives and network connections which pop up and go away which go on top of local media to keep them distinct. Then comes your local media which can be sorted in the way you choose. The order of the controls in the settings menu is a little arbitrary, but if you needed to go into those often then the PS3 would have far bigger problems than the layout of its interface.
My point was never that lower fidelity is just as good as higher fidelity, I personally use optical S/PDIF to a Sony digital amp with thick shielded copper to the speakers in the lounge room, or use a nice pair of Philips headphones when I'm at my PC or using my iPod at home. I don't personally deprive myself of fidelity and I don't advice others to do it either. My point is that sound quality isn't the most important part of music and thus if one equates love of sound quality with love of music one is missing the point. Nobody is asking you to encode 64-bit MP3s, buy $5 earbuds or throw out your high performance and ridiculously pricey sound rig. But if the whole car's rocking to metal on two inch cones, the guy complaining in the back seat about the disappearing bass is rarely the one who appreciates music the most. Music lovers enjoy the music they can hear, sound lovers hate the music they can't hear, music lovers cherish the new nuances they discover with a better sound system, sound lovers nervously count down the seconds in a track, preying to God that they don't miss a tone that they heard last time or hear a pop.
For people to whom music quality matters (those who "love" music), there IS a difference in sound. If you just "like" music, then you're probably not going to hear an appreciable difference.
Music isn't about sound, it is about rhythm, melody, harmony, lyrics and attitude. A beautiful work is still beautiful even with its high frequencies muddied up and a pop every few minutes. If audiophiles find momentary breaks in fidelity distracting whereas others do not, then it is the audiophiles who cannot love music. People train themselves to assess the technology, to listen for artifacts and distortion, when there is music playing all they can hear from it is that the impedance of the left woofer's coil is not matched with that of the amp. Having a nice sound system is something to be proud of, being able to hear the problems in cheaper ones is not.
Why only 4 words on the main page?
on
KDE 4.0 Is Out
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm a keen and loyal Gnome user and a former Gnome developer.
I think the 4.0 release of KDE deserves an un-abbreviated summary on the front page.
Congratulations on this milestone guys, keep up your work.
We'll all just forget about Compact Disc here for a moment and say that Sony has never been responsible for a popular format, ever. And another thing we'll forget is that Sony was a founding member of the DVD forum. Ever used a 3.5" floppy?
The fact that Sony has invented more formats than anyone else means that they have screwed up more times than anyone else, they still get their successes though. Sony tried to replace the Compact Cassette made by fellow Blueray founder Philips with DAT, but ended up replacing it with CD, they still won. Sony throws a lot of crap up in the air and it either sticks or goes away and doesn't bother us anymore.
I am glad I do not live in Australia, based on this law alone.
What an egregious violation of human freedom.
In Australia we have compulsary sufferage because we feel that having representation for those who don't feel like voting is more important than letting them spend another half hour on the lounge watching football every three years. If you want your entire electorate to be over 60 because they have nothing better to do, then enjoy what you have.
Australia lacks some of the freedoms of the US mainly because they allow one to hurt oneself, we have compulsary wearing of seatbelts etc. because people don't always do what's best for them. We have strict gun control because having a large bore semi-auto isn't as useful as knowing that muggers and bank theives don't have them. We pay other people's healthcare bills for the security of knowing that others will pay ours. We can't have certain pets but in exchange we have a country free of certain pests. We have censored computer games (no sexual violence) which I don't personally agree with, but that's mainly because of an unchangeable government act (introducing an R rating requires the unanamous agreement of 7 attorney generals). Australia is far from perfect in many ways of course, but the desire to maximise an individual's freedom in the longterm by keeping one safe and healthy for long enough for one to use this freedom isn't a bad idea, if not perfectly executed all the time.
Australia was technically under British authority until 1986 when the Australia act removed the ability for the House of Commons to pass legislation over Australian states (something that had never been done since the Statute of Westminster in 1931 had barred its intervention in federal government, but yet was possible). It also removed the ability to appeal from the Supreme Courts to the Privy Council in the UK. Australia has been completely self governing since 1901; however this, like many things in the Commonwealth was by tradition, rather than by law until 22 years ago.
I mentioned that PS3 supports Memory Stick and Blueray, as well as the competing SD, CF and DVD formats, it does not support either UMD or Beta though, I don't know why they are interesting to the topic. Who cares if it supports Sony's formats if it supports other ones also? Sure, Sony have a movie buisiness and movie buisinesses are evil here, but is that really a problem here? When Nintendo were censoring all the religious, sexy and violent parts out of their games, Sony came in and said anything goes. When Microsoft was paying to keep games off their competitors platforms, Sony kept comparitively to the highground. When Microsoft had recently made a console out of an off-the-shelf Celeron and Nintendo was researching how to re-release an overclocked Gamecube, Sony decided to try something crazy and released an 8 core asymetric processor with system RAM clocked to 1.2GHz and a 50GB optical medium. That's why this generation I switched from being a Nintendo to a Sony fanboy. Sure, Sony supports DRM, but they also support Linux, you've got to hack the others to get that. Honestly, I care more about Linux than I do about DRM.
Sony PS3 is a proprietary format, does not play games for any other platform, which is exactly the same as the other two consoles in the current generation. Sony PS3 uses USB and Bluetooth for controller communication, which are as standardised as anything else. Sony PS3 has slots for Sony's Memorystick, right next to its slots for SD and CF, the competing media. PS3 supports Sony's Blueray format as well as Toshiba's DVD and Sony's now standard CD.
As for the **AA, my (unhacked) PS3 lets me rip CDs to MP3s then copy them to other devices. I don't get what people are supposedly missing on the PS3 from those Japanese media tyrants called Sony, I can't speak for the XBox, but I've looked all through the Wii for the "Rip DVDs then share them on bittorrent channel" but if it was there I couldn't find it.
The Sony rootkit was a very evil thing to do, but it wasn't developed in house and only the music publishing division was involved. As for the competition, Microsoft calls its flagship rootkit an Operating System and still distributes it with impunity even though it contains DRM like NGSB and spyware like genuine advantage. As for Microsoft, everyone here has been chiding Sony because MS now has all the software being target for it. Doesn't this seem at all familiar to any of you? When Microsoft created the slightly cheaper platform that managed to take the market despite being not quite as powerful? All I know is that Sony's two generations of gaming hegemony were fun but Microsoft's twenty years of PC dominance brought nothing but crippled innovation and instability.
"The combined effect of slave labour, malnutrition, poor medical care and executions had an estimated death toll of 750,000 to 1.7 million."
Come on. A little perspective please. It's only a video game, for chrissakes.
Yes, Pol Pot committed more atrocities than the computer game industry ever will and that's even when you look at Jack Thompson's estimates. However if this didn't set you off as deliberate ironic hyperbole maybe the phrase "snacking on some babies with their friend Hitler" should flag me as someone who does not expect every word he says to be taken seriously.
Anyway, that link you posted had to be the best review for this game I've encountered. I would phrase my personal opinion as "a brilliant game with more devastating problems than most bad games out there", I'm very glad I bought it despite it being terrible in ways I could never have imagined, mind you if the game didn't have such great technical merits then some of its problems in other areas might not have stood out so much.
Before passing judgement on the fairness of that comic I'd have to find out whether she was involved in coming up with that stupid sci-fi "genetic memory" thing that ruined the immersion of the otherwise awesome game. If it merely got past her as part of a groupthink effect, I'd be outraged that they insulted the virtue of one of the great visionaries of our time, if she was at all involved in the original idea then I'd be outraged that it didn't show her and anyone else involved with it snacking on some babies with their friend Hitler. Those cutscenes were worse than anything Pol Pot ever did and I demand that whoever suggested them be dragged to the Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity.
The problem here is that in the near-impossible hypothetical situation that anyone will create a mod worth playing in before the cooker is released, we won't be able to play it until Epic has found it. Console gamers are not interested in beta software, as long as the software is out before the mods are, there really is no issue here whatsoever outside of the minds of the indignant few.
With the amount of games that come out these days that plain don't work until the fifth patch or so is out I don't see why everyone's getting so pissy about this. Battlefield 1942 managed to be quite successful despite not running for more than 15 seconds on most computers at launch. I remember buying Crysis a few weeks back and all I got is eyeballs floating in the darkness, now that was annoying.
Dear Jerry Holkins, I love your work but you've really gotta let this one go, compared to the multitude of sins that are committed in this world (often also involving the PS3), this one doesn't even warrant a footnote.
Then I spent 3 months in AU/NZ. There they don't have 2L bottles.
Most softdrinks come in 1.25L bottles and 2L bottles in Australia. For some reason Coca-Cola Amatil upped the bottle sizes a few years ago to 1.5L and 2.25L at the same price, presumably in order to get an edge on the smaller bottles of its competitors, but before then it was 1.25/2L. 3L bottles are becoming more common, but by and large they are from the lower-cost local manufacturers. As for your metrificaiton theory I don't think it holds water. The Coca Cola has never directly bottled too far from their own shores, for that they have shipped concentrated syrup containing neither excess water nor sweeteners to regional bottlers who handle local bottling and marketing, in the case of Australia/New Zealand this is Amatil (formerly British Tobacco) who supplies Coke to most of the Pacific and much of Asia. This allows the Coca Cola Company to focus on maintaining its brand and drawing a steady income from it without worrying about local climates and fluctuations.
ASM instructions are just human readable mnemonics for the raw instructions. Sure, disassembly works fine but assembling something for a different architecture just leads to the assembler throwing up a huge amounts of errors about unknown symbols and exiting. Static recompilation might be slightly better whereby the ASM for one architecture may be rewritten in another's then reassembled, but generally this has been a dead end for complex programs since without some seriously complex static analysis, one is generally not able to understand an entire program's behavior without running it at the same time. The solution is dynamic recompilation, recompiling binary instructions with respect to the current state of the program, which is generally considered to be emulation.
I grew up in a small town 2000 people where rich and poor, Anglo and Aboriginal had to live together as part of a community because there is bugger all other people to meet. There was not enough people for a private school so the kids of the town's lawyer and doctors went to the public school. I now live in Sydney (population 5M) where I associate exclusively with upper middle class people with honours or postgraduate degrees from the best universities. This is of course not deliberate elitism but a factor of who I work with, who I find interesting and who finds me interesting. Sydney is extremely integrated by world standards but its cosmopolitan nature simply gives on a choice as to who one wants to associate with rather than a broader cross-section of peers. There are many people in Sydney who disagree with me on this matter of course, but it tends to be a superficial thing, I have friends that are White, Chinese and Indian, some see it expedient to befriend an Arab and maybe a Vietnamese person to collect the whole set, forgetting that on the inside, those who have been chosen are all liberal, well educated, middle class agnostics that are likely to challenge anyone's perceptions in the slightest. We build these cocoons for a reason I think, mainly so we can love and respect our peers rather than deride them as being rednecks, simpletons, illiterates, fundamentalists or whatever else we don't like in others and I would thusly call them a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, it's not completely fair to judge the validity of beliefs if we're not Aboriginal or have much knowledge of them, mind you, that doesn't stop most Slashdotters from bagging out Christianity despite not knowing shit about it beyond some rhetoric about spaghetti monsters and abortion clinics being blown up. Hell, I've even read someone on slashdot being modded to +5 for blaming the holocaust on Christianity even though the Nazis killed Dietrich Bonhoeffer, chased out Karl Barth and kept the young John Paul II in hiding. The upper Nazi echelon was trying to bring back the Germanic gods/rituals to combat the Jewish origins of Christianity, but still on Slashdot you can tie Christianity to this genocide and nobody will bat an eyelid. Scientology is a constant target of ridicule of course because it was made up by some dude to make money. However Scientology is now exclusively the domain of people who really believe in it (including that nutter Miscavage) but we have no problems with laughing at those people simply because we know how the religion was founded. Now a bunch of people are bursting to trot out the old party line "information wants to be free" applied to these Aboriginal beliefs and suddenly there is the call to let them be.
Totally invalid comparison. Sexual congress is widely understood and documented, you can pick up a book on sexual tips and tricks with all the information you need from a book store. Likewise with the human body, there are anatomical textbooks showing what you're body looks like inside and out. This is about certain knowledge that in aboriginal culture is completely occluded from certain members of society which does not have a parallel in western society. That doesn't make it either wrong or right.
Personally, I don't have a problem with this system, but I also don't have a problem with certain churches not allowing female ministers, Jews and Muslims mutilating their sons' wangs and other stuff that isn't ever going to affect me. If you do care about equality and freedom of information in these societies I don't see why you shouldn't get a chance to whine about it on slashdot.
Why?
Take WWII as an example, you've got a whole bunch of Japanese moving east killing 3M Chinese soldiers defending their homeland, murdering 17M unarmed Chinese civilians mainly with swords and small arms. Germans get in on the action, invading Czechoslovakia and Poland. They get bored and ramp up action invading Scandinavia, France and the Soviet Union killing 23M soviets (half civilian) while they were at it. Jews of course were shot on site or sent to an automated death factory, 3M all up. The Germans start bombing the crap out of the UK and the Japanese exploit the distraction and invade Singapore, capturing the defenders then starve or torture them to death in prison camps. This was the bad kind of killing, because they were killing because they desired more power.
But we all know this story and what happened next. The British Commonwealth, U.S. and Soviet Union killed a truly amazing amount of people and fixed the problem. It is completely thanks to violence that German and Japanese people are now nice rather than nasty. The US military helped get the Japanese out of China / South East Asia and the Germans out of the bulk of Europe and thus prevented them from killing any more people while they were there. This was the good kind of killing because they only started killing when they had killers to kill and they always aimed to make peace when the killers were killed. I bet you can't think of any non-violent organisation that cut short such an evil set of events.
This is why violence is only bad if you're violent to the wrong people and why I wholly endorse any of my works to be used for violence against the right people. It's not as if the Third Reich or Japanese empire would have cared about your stipulations. If someone did honour it, they must be the sort of people who care about individual freedoms and intellectual property and thus those who you'd probably want to win the conflict anyway.
Of course the problem is that the military forces of the US and my native Australia spends most of its time invading irrelevant countries to look like it is dealing with terrorists, but that does not mean that its role in the world is wholly a negative one, they beat up a lot of bad people too, like the Taliban who had it coming to them long before they helped hide Osama bin Laden. Our Aussie guys went over and kept away a bunch of armed militia that was trying to stop East Timor from regaining its independence, NATO did some bombing to stop the Serbs from killing the Muslims in Kosovo. When the military isn't killing people you get things like the Rwandan genocide in the mid 90s when nobody got around to killing the aggressors so they were able to kill whomever the hell they wanted.
Thus, killing in general is a completely morally neutral action.
Something I've never understood about American culture is that the for example the 18th amendment was obviously wrong and thus repealed but yet another law, the 2nd amendment simply cannot be questioned. Were the men who wrote the bill of rights blessed with divine insight that subsequent lawmakers lacked? Why didn't they think of the 13th amendment while they were at it? Is not the right to be not owned by another man more important than what you can carry around with you? They didn't think of it because they were just ordinary men tasked to build a new nation-state and were doing the best they could without the benefit of another 200 years of insight like we have.
As for guns, if everybody wants to have guns, they are fun, shiny and make them feel safe, that's a reason to have them. If the US is in serious danger of being invaded in the near future and it requires citizens to be armed for an impending emergency that is a better reason to have them (and the reason they were legalised in the first place). If the population required guns to obtain their food, control pests and euthanase domestic animals, that would be an an extremely valid reason to have guns.
However, it seems to me that many Americans don't like guns, the US has the most powerful armed forces in the world and is largely urbanised. It seems to me that the biggest reason that they are still around is that the law says they should be still around. Is not the constitution there to serve the wishes of the people, not the other way around? I'm not saying that America has to get rid of guns or even restrict them more than they do, I don't live in America so that doesn't affect me. All I ask is that when Americans discuss their gun laws online it be about the merits/failings of an armed population rather than debating the intentions of the mortal men who framed a 230 year old document.
That's what I thought to begin with, but then again, it's not as if kids will be snorting lines of this stuff for fun, it will be used in sealed laboritories with extreme care. If ebola must be studied in more flexible environments than BSL4 for it to be understood as the article claims, then a mutant virus that probably is harmless is probably a better choice to a natural virus that brings hemorrhagic fever to all it infects. Sure, don't give it to fresher biology classes, don't play with it without serious protection etc. but for the higher risk experements that absolutely must be done before this virus is understood, use this stuff instead of the authentic virus.
A controversial branch of GStreamer added DRM support a few years back. The idea is that a trusted module can receive data from an untrusted module but only send data to another trusted module. Trusted modules are usually based on the same source code as the signed module but have been compiled by a party that the previous trusted module trusts, and there is a PKI like system to manage which signatures are accepted by which modules and it uses some sort of an asymmetric signature checking system to verify this.
I don't know whether this is going forward or not, the very idea of this system is going to invoke the ire of the free software world and I doubt the GStreamer guys are stupid enough to go against community beliefs (and possibly prejudices) since it relies on the community for patches, bug reports and publicity. Anyway, GStreamer is a great platform that is widely used now and it is worth checking out, thought the DRM side might need a lot of TLC without much help from the community.
I hope this helps, even though I wish DRM ill in general, I admire anyone with the courage to post something like that on Slashdot, though it would have impressed me more if you had your account/email address attached.
Well, QT has been using GPL2 for quite a while now. However the big point of concern with some people is that QT does not use LGPL which would allow GPL incompatible licences to interoperate with the libraries like GTK does. Of course there is the argument, such as that that made by the FSF that ALL libraries should be GPL in order to encourage GPL compatible software to have an advantage, but in my mind having a platform open to crazy licences and/or closed software is more important and the fact that Trolltech provides a commercial licence to circumvent these restrictions indicates that they probably agree with me.
I don't believe that BSD licensed software is freer than GPL, however I do believe that the dynamic linking process provides a good boundary between licences for interoperability as per the LGPL. Trolltech who dissolve this boundary for profit and the FSF who dissolve this boundary to push their ideological agendas are not working in the spirit of openness. Switching libraries to GPL3 from GPL2 and especially LGPL will do nothing but further restrict what the program on the other side can be doing will do a lot for ideological and commercial leveraging at the expense of that library as a universal platform.
13 year old lobbyist's Letter to Congress: H4l0 3 r00ls, 1f j00 d0n'7 LiK3 1t, j00 5uXx0rZ n00b!
Users is first, because the first thing you do is log in. Settings is next to users because it also sets the current state of the system and may be use to edit the users preferences. Images, Music and Videos are adjacent since they all deal with media. Games comes next because they are somewhat of a media experience but are also interactive like the categories after it. Internet is next because games can be played on the internet, PSN next, because it also allows one to obtain external media, friends comes last, because it is related to PSN but not much else, except for games maybe, but none of my friends ever seem to be playing when I feel like going online so I mainly just use it like email.
Vertically, special functions like sorting, mass copy, user management, search network and HD space management tools come at the top so you know where to get at them. Next comes removable/external media like DVDs, SD cards, thumbdrives and network connections which pop up and go away which go on top of local media to keep them distinct. Then comes your local media which can be sorted in the way you choose. The order of the controls in the settings menu is a little arbitrary, but if you needed to go into those often then the PS3 would have far bigger problems than the layout of its interface.
My point was never that lower fidelity is just as good as higher fidelity, I personally use optical S/PDIF to a Sony digital amp with thick shielded copper to the speakers in the lounge room, or use a nice pair of Philips headphones when I'm at my PC or using my iPod at home. I don't personally deprive myself of fidelity and I don't advice others to do it either. My point is that sound quality isn't the most important part of music and thus if one equates love of sound quality with love of music one is missing the point. Nobody is asking you to encode 64-bit MP3s, buy $5 earbuds or throw out your high performance and ridiculously pricey sound rig. But if the whole car's rocking to metal on two inch cones, the guy complaining in the back seat about the disappearing bass is rarely the one who appreciates music the most. Music lovers enjoy the music they can hear, sound lovers hate the music they can't hear, music lovers cherish the new nuances they discover with a better sound system, sound lovers nervously count down the seconds in a track, preying to God that they don't miss a tone that they heard last time or hear a pop.
I'm a keen and loyal Gnome user and a former Gnome developer.
I think the 4.0 release of KDE deserves an un-abbreviated summary on the front page.
Congratulations on this milestone guys, keep up your work.
We'll all just forget about Compact Disc here for a moment and say that Sony has never been responsible for a popular format, ever. And another thing we'll forget is that Sony was a founding member of the DVD forum. Ever used a 3.5" floppy?
The fact that Sony has invented more formats than anyone else means that they have screwed up more times than anyone else, they still get their successes though. Sony tried to replace the Compact Cassette made by fellow Blueray founder Philips with DAT, but ended up replacing it with CD, they still won. Sony throws a lot of crap up in the air and it either sticks or goes away and doesn't bother us anymore.
In Australia we have compulsary sufferage because we feel that having representation for those who don't feel like voting is more important than letting them spend another half hour on the lounge watching football every three years. If you want your entire electorate to be over 60 because they have nothing better to do, then enjoy what you have.
Australia lacks some of the freedoms of the US mainly because they allow one to hurt oneself, we have compulsary wearing of seatbelts etc. because people don't always do what's best for them. We have strict gun control because having a large bore semi-auto isn't as useful as knowing that muggers and bank theives don't have them. We pay other people's healthcare bills for the security of knowing that others will pay ours. We can't have certain pets but in exchange we have a country free of certain pests. We have censored computer games (no sexual violence) which I don't personally agree with, but that's mainly because of an unchangeable government act (introducing an R rating requires the unanamous agreement of 7 attorney generals). Australia is far from perfect in many ways of course, but the desire to maximise an individual's freedom in the longterm by keeping one safe and healthy for long enough for one to use this freedom isn't a bad idea, if not perfectly executed all the time.
Australia was technically under British authority until 1986 when the Australia act removed the ability for the House of Commons to pass legislation over Australian states (something that had never been done since the Statute of Westminster in 1931 had barred its intervention in federal government, but yet was possible). It also removed the ability to appeal from the Supreme Courts to the Privy Council in the UK. Australia has been completely self governing since 1901; however this, like many things in the Commonwealth was by tradition, rather than by law until 22 years ago.
I mentioned that PS3 supports Memory Stick and Blueray, as well as the competing SD, CF and DVD formats, it does not support either UMD or Beta though, I don't know why they are interesting to the topic. Who cares if it supports Sony's formats if it supports other ones also? Sure, Sony have a movie buisiness and movie buisinesses are evil here, but is that really a problem here? When Nintendo were censoring all the religious, sexy and violent parts out of their games, Sony came in and said anything goes. When Microsoft was paying to keep games off their competitors platforms, Sony kept comparitively to the highground. When Microsoft had recently made a console out of an off-the-shelf Celeron and Nintendo was researching how to re-release an overclocked Gamecube, Sony decided to try something crazy and released an 8 core asymetric processor with system RAM clocked to 1.2GHz and a 50GB optical medium. That's why this generation I switched from being a Nintendo to a Sony fanboy. Sure, Sony supports DRM, but they also support Linux, you've got to hack the others to get that. Honestly, I care more about Linux than I do about DRM.
Sony PS3 is a proprietary format, does not play games for any other platform, which is exactly the same as the other two consoles in the current generation. Sony PS3 uses USB and Bluetooth for controller communication, which are as standardised as anything else. Sony PS3 has slots for Sony's Memorystick, right next to its slots for SD and CF, the competing media. PS3 supports Sony's Blueray format as well as Toshiba's DVD and Sony's now standard CD.
As for the **AA, my (unhacked) PS3 lets me rip CDs to MP3s then copy them to other devices. I don't get what people are supposedly missing on the PS3 from those Japanese media tyrants called Sony, I can't speak for the XBox, but I've looked all through the Wii for the "Rip DVDs then share them on bittorrent channel" but if it was there I couldn't find it.
The Sony rootkit was a very evil thing to do, but it wasn't developed in house and only the music publishing division was involved. As for the competition, Microsoft calls its flagship rootkit an Operating System and still distributes it with impunity even though it contains DRM like NGSB and spyware like genuine advantage. As for Microsoft, everyone here has been chiding Sony because MS now has all the software being target for it. Doesn't this seem at all familiar to any of you? When Microsoft created the slightly cheaper platform that managed to take the market despite being not quite as powerful? All I know is that Sony's two generations of gaming hegemony were fun but Microsoft's twenty years of PC dominance brought nothing but crippled innovation and instability.
Yes, Pol Pot committed more atrocities than the computer game industry ever will and that's even when you look at Jack Thompson's estimates. However if this didn't set you off as deliberate ironic hyperbole maybe the phrase "snacking on some babies with their friend Hitler" should flag me as someone who does not expect every word he says to be taken seriously.
Anyway, that link you posted had to be the best review for this game I've encountered. I would phrase my personal opinion as "a brilliant game with more devastating problems than most bad games out there", I'm very glad I bought it despite it being terrible in ways I could never have imagined, mind you if the game didn't have such great technical merits then some of its problems in other areas might not have stood out so much.
Before passing judgement on the fairness of that comic I'd have to find out whether she was involved in coming up with that stupid sci-fi "genetic memory" thing that ruined the immersion of the otherwise awesome game. If it merely got past her as part of a groupthink effect, I'd be outraged that they insulted the virtue of one of the great visionaries of our time, if she was at all involved in the original idea then I'd be outraged that it didn't show her and anyone else involved with it snacking on some babies with their friend Hitler. Those cutscenes were worse than anything Pol Pot ever did and I demand that whoever suggested them be dragged to the Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity.
The problem here is that in the near-impossible hypothetical situation that anyone will create a mod worth playing in before the cooker is released, we won't be able to play it until Epic has found it. Console gamers are not interested in beta software, as long as the software is out before the mods are, there really is no issue here whatsoever outside of the minds of the indignant few.
With the amount of games that come out these days that plain don't work until the fifth patch or so is out I don't see why everyone's getting so pissy about this. Battlefield 1942 managed to be quite successful despite not running for more than 15 seconds on most computers at launch. I remember buying Crysis a few weeks back and all I got is eyeballs floating in the darkness, now that was annoying.
Dear Jerry Holkins, I love your work but you've really gotta let this one go, compared to the multitude of sins that are committed in this world (often also involving the PS3), this one doesn't even warrant a footnote.
I grew up in a small town 2000 people where rich and poor, Anglo and Aboriginal had to live together as part of a community because there is bugger all other people to meet. There was not enough people for a private school so the kids of the town's lawyer and doctors went to the public school. I now live in Sydney (population 5M) where I associate exclusively with upper middle class people with honours or postgraduate degrees from the best universities. This is of course not deliberate elitism but a factor of who I work with, who I find interesting and who finds me interesting. Sydney is extremely integrated by world standards but its cosmopolitan nature simply gives on a choice as to who one wants to associate with rather than a broader cross-section of peers. There are many people in Sydney who disagree with me on this matter of course, but it tends to be a superficial thing, I have friends that are White, Chinese and Indian, some see it expedient to befriend an Arab and maybe a Vietnamese person to collect the whole set, forgetting that on the inside, those who have been chosen are all liberal, well educated, middle class agnostics that are likely to challenge anyone's perceptions in the slightest. We build these cocoons for a reason I think, mainly so we can love and respect our peers rather than deride them as being rednecks, simpletons, illiterates, fundamentalists or whatever else we don't like in others and I would thusly call them a good thing.