Tu quoque. The fact that the US possesses and actively researches WMDs does not mean we can't criticize other countries who do. Even discounting different situations (dictatorship getting nukes vs. democracy getting nukes), at worst it only means that we are unable to live up to our own moral standards. It doesn't mean that our moral standards are invalid or that our criticisms are inappropriate.
Why not build a machine that can function as a dumb terminal for your cell phone? The whole thing could work wirelessly using, say, wireless ethernet. Comparatively big display, full-size keyboard, mouse of some kind (probably a trackball), all powered by the cell phone on your belt. When you're done, push a button on the terminal and it disconnects. You could install these things in malls, next to ATMs, whatever. And you could sell a much cheaper black box that lets you use an existing KVM this way.
Who else should they ask? They're not just going to pull random people off the street. The mess we've got now is at least partially a result of computer-illiterate politicians setting the rules. At least they're picking execs who probably know more about computers than how to operate the on/off button.
We sure won't get a great patent system out of these guys, but we may get a better one. After all, most companies don't bother enforcing patents violated by individuals - they enforce those violated by other companies. That means that while MS, eBay, et al. are some of the worst abusers of patent law, they're also the some of the hardest hit by the abuses of others.
This is a limited case of enlightened self-interest, which is why I'm optimistic we'll see some improvement. Even reducing the number of bad patents by 5% or eliminating some of the worst classes of them would be a big step.
You can't get on MS's case too bad for some of those. In the first case, they probably really did want to support all those platforms - but sales and reality intervened and forced them to change their plans. In the second, as far as I'm concerned, IE is a key component of Windows. You can remove it, but it will break a ton of stuff. What you're left with may be an OS in your opinion, but it's not in mine (or in MS's).
As far as Palladium goes, I wouldn't start panicking until you can actually buy machines that require it. Who knows what it's going to look like if/when it's actually rolled out?
And for the last, well, if I make a claim I genuinely believe is true, then I'm telling the truth to the best of my ability. This means I can make tons of truthful claims which are just wrong. Ever worked for a company of any size at all? The PR and management types make all sorts of claims based on incomplete or flat-out wrong information. They aren't a credible source of technical information, but unfortunately, they are the company's public face... so they're the ones who have to deliver whatever technical information there is.
But I guess , illusions provided by a book cannot be enjoyed by everyone... some just need a little "CG" help.
Don't be such a snobbish elitist. Just because I like the Harry Potter movies doesn't mean I lack an imagination, which is what you're claiming. All it means that I have the ability to enjoy watching someone else's imagination without sacrificing my own. After all, no interpretation is really perfectly correct, even if your name is J.K. Rowling - you make the books your own when you read them.
The diversity of interpretation is one of the really positive aspects of art, including movies and literature. Shakespeare's works are still hotly debated (among academics in the field, anyway) hundreds of years after his death. So it's good that you can read the books and get a vivid impression of the world. But if you refuse to consider other interpretations, even those which directly contradict your own, you're missing out on half the experience.
Seriously, try it. You may not like those other viewpoints, but you'll probably find them interesting - and if you get together with a few other Harry Potter (or whatever) fans, you'll probably have a great time talking about them.
Well, now you know it took me more than 7 minutes to write that out. You'll have to take my word for it that when I first started writing, your clarification hadn't made the comments yet.
Guilt by association? A lot of people work at SCO, and a lot of them are just doing it so they can pay the bills. In fact, probably the overwhelming majority of SCO employees have absolutely no influence on the company's Linux policy. Even discounting all that, this guy used to work at SCO, but doesn't now. Who knows why that is? Maybe he saw that Unix was going out of style there, and since that was his specialty he quit. Maybe he heard about the lawsuits and thought "I don't want to have anything to do with this, I'm going to find another job." Or hell, maybe they just didn't pay him enough. The point is, you have no actual information, so it's incredibly unfair to paint this guy as evil just because he, at one point, worked for a company we dislike.
Forgive me if I read too much into your words, but the blind hatred of SCO on/. means that everyone else is going to read you the same way.
Just to give you an idea, the total amount allocated to the entire US military in 2001 was $299 billion. That same year, $219 billion was spent on Medicare. NASA's budget was $14 billion. (Source: White House OMB.) That's roughly comparable to Microsoft's revenues in a single year. (Source: The Wall Street Journal.) If the figure quoted in this article is right, it would be the equivalent of Microsoft's books being off by more than the federal government spends on Defense and Medicare put together - and more than it's spent on NASA total since it was first created.
An error of this magnitude is inconceivable. It really makes me think the figure must be $565 million, in which case this is pretty small potatoes for a big organization that's been around for a long time. (Lose track of $28 million a year - 0.2% of your budget - for 20 years and there's your number.) It certainly reflects inefficiency at NASA, but is there anyone, anywhere, who would be surprised by inefficiency at NASA?
Of course, there's exactly as much solid scientific evidence for extraterrestrial life as there is for the existence of God, which is to say there's absolutely none. Of course, there's no evidence which refutes their existence, but that apparently hasn't stopped you from being an atheist. So you laugh at those silly scientists who waste their lives trying to get in touch with ET, right?
Your post could be summarized more briefly, and less offensively, as "Hey everybody, look at me, I'm an atheist!" Which is not really insightful. But it seems that all it takes to dupe the/. mods is an attempt at controversy. (Unless, of course, the mods disagree with you, in which case you generally get the modding you deserve - flamebait.)
KOTOR is a great game when you take it as what it is: an adventure/RPG very much like the old Sierra Quest for Glory games. If you play it hoping to get a traditional RPG in the style of Baldur's Gate, you're of course going to be disappointed, because that's not what it's supposed to be like.
Most scripted romances, whether in books, games, or movies, are pretty lame. It's really a function of the storyline. Most real-life romances don't just magically appear, they form from tons of little stuff that goes on all the time. But in a 2-hour movie you just don't have time to show enough of them for the romance to make sense. The very best movies show enough of those little things to suggest that others are going on offscreen, which can sometimes be enough to suspend your disbelief. But really, the only way to do it is to devote big parts of the plot to the romance, and it's tough to do that in the context of the greater story (saving the world, usually).
Most computer users don't have 1GB RAM. I'd put it at about 70/30 256MB/512MB. That's the target audience XP has, and that's where their aggressive swap-out strategy works best. I know that I find it useful on my 256MB system (actually I wish it were more aggressive).
I agree that XP's implementation is perhaps not so great; it should deal more gracefully with situations where you have plenty of physical memory. But that doesn't mean the entire approach is bad.
I don't think it would be a good buy. A good merger would be of, say, Unix Backup Solutions, Inc. and Windows Reliable Systems Corp. Both companies are related in purpose, so they benefit structurally. These are the "efficiency gains" that companies tout when trying to sell mergers to shareholders. But while both companies do similar things, they do them in different areas. This effectively allows both companies to expand into new areas without having to hire new people, create new products, etc. These are the most common mergers and acquisitions because they are the most successful.
I don't see Sun-Apple as working. For one thing, both companies are trying to escape from hardware-centric business models, both with limited success. A better acquisition would be of a services company (IBM did a lot of this when it was making the transition) that allowed Apple or Sun to, in essence, buy expertise in its new field. I think a merger here would just make the existing problems of both companies worse.
Simple enough. China wants Taiwan. The US views Taiwan as the hope of democracy for China, so we want Taiwan to stay de facto independent. We protect Taiwan using the Navy, so China can't invade without attacking US warships. China is developing missiles they can fire from the mainland to attack Taiwan. (This isn't WMD-ish speculation, China's admitted they're doing it.) This is actually one of the driving forces behind our "missile shield:" it's being built around Aegis cruisers because those are what we have defending Taiwan. This is 99% of the world's fear about us withdrawing from the ABM treaty, that it will, er, unbalance the balance of power in southeast Asia by rendering China's missiles worthless.
You can probably see where this starts to tie in to NASA now. NASA works a lot with satellites and advanced guidance and propulsion systems for missiles, exactly the technology we don't want China to have. Well, it's a pipe dream to hope they'll never have it, but we need to stay just enough ahead of them for our missile shield to work (at least, work as well as it ever will).
I applaud you (I'm being serious, not sarcastic) for asking, by the way. Far too many Slashdot posters are intellectually lazy and assume the easy answer is the right one: "Bush sucks at foreign relations, so this must be just another screwup." But you never learn anything unless you look deeper!
Besides, this is the point now where we get into the really interesting stuff: whether the position is right, whether it will work the way it's supposed to, whether it's relevant... all that good stuff. It's much more fun than mindless bashing of an unpopular politician.
The XBOX version must've really been awful, but the PC version was very solid. I saw three bugs, only one of which was significant (and it was fixed less than a week after the game came out). If the XBOX version is that much worse, maybe BioWare have learned the error of their ways and KOTOR2 will be much improved.
The vagueness isn't the problem. If you make it more specific, there will be loopholes the size of trucks - the more complex and precise the law, the bigger the loopholes - so they are trying to leave it vague to leave it up to the interpretation of judges and juries. Which also carries its own set of problems.
The real issue here, from what I can see, is that we're trying to criminalize taking advantage of ignorant and/or gullible people. Yes, it's a bit of a fuzzy line. But ultimately people are responsible for their own actions. It's your responsibility, as a computer user, to ensure that you don't install spyware - if you care, anyway. It's not the responsibility of the government to prevent you from doing stupid shit.
I manage to avoid installing spyware because I am informed and cautious. Perhaps it's unfairly egalitarian of me to assume that what I can do, others can too. But I don't think it's good policy to pander to the ignorant, for all that it's what gets you reelected.
Couple ways. As other posters have already noted, Google could store your email unencrypted and only encrypt it for sending. As a slightly better alternative, it could save your private key protected by your GMail login password. That would allow GMail to decrypt your mail to search it, but only once you login. But either way it doesn't really matter, as the main goal of email encryption is protecting it from interception (and, with digital signing, alteration). You already trust Google not to abuse your email if you're using GMail.
Now that said, PGP/GPG could actually help out GMail's searching/filtering abilities. After all, if you get a message signed by someone whose key is in your GMail ring, then you know it isn't spam. This has been covered ad nauseam on Slashdot, so suffice it to say that the tradeoffs here might add up to a net gain.
Think about how great it would be if GMail automatically gave every user of its service a PGP/GPG key and automatically signed all outgoing messages. GMail would of course have access to all its users' public keys, so it could transparently verify signatures and decrypt messages from all its users. Talk about pushing email encryption into the limelight. It probably won't happen, but it's Google, so you never know.
We are in more or less the same situation here as Microsoft is with Windows. It's riddled with poor design decisions that we're more or less stuck with. So we make small fixes which deal with the symptoms rather than the root causes. As a result, the system continues to be generally usable. But we're at the point where it requires our constant attention just to function even as poorly as it does, making it impossible for us to create improvements to deal with the future.
What I'm getting at here should be obvious: the only real solution any more is a total tear-down and rebuild. We can, and indeed should, reuse a lot of stuff from our previous version, but the structural failings are so critical now they're preventing any improvement. But as Microsoft can tell you, rebuilding anything of this size is a ton of work and even more risk. (It's a guarantee that nobody will like the new version at first, just because it's new. It takes a lot of courage to do it anyway.)
Re:Wait... so you're telling me...
on
A New Ice Age?
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· Score: 1
Because regular non-scientists can see a movie like The Core or Armageddon and realize it's fiction and totally unrealistic. But global warming is such a trendy issue that it's likely that people will believe the movie, even if it's not even remotely realistic.
From there we'll lump scientists into two groups: those who find the evidence for global warming convincing, and those who don't. The first group will dislike the movie because it makes their position look bad. Debunking the movie will give the appearance of debunking global warming. The other group, those who don't buy into global warming, will dislike the movie because it's bad science - precisely their objection to the global warming theory in the first place.
Scenario: I write program which builds on GPLed code. But I choose to distribute my program as a binary patch. The end user needs to get the GPLed code/binary from somewhere else, then he applies the binary patch and gets my functionality. Is my code bounded by GPL or not?
It is considered a derived work of the original program, and therefore the GPL also applies to your code. But this is in a sense a "least common denominator" restriction, in that you can license your patch using a GPL-compatible license (one which is possibly more or less restrictive in certain areas).
One possible exception is if your patch is... "highly modular" is how I would describe it. What I mean is that it can be used to work without modification with programs other than the GPL'ed one, even if you used the GPL'ed program to develop your patch. But the chances of this applying to a patch are vanishingly small - it more often happens with programs that link to well-known libraries like libc.
Third party has always been an issue, due to software houses not appreciating the "draconian" nature employed by Nintendo to prevent shoddy games from making it onto their system. (If more people took this stance, we might avoid travesties such as Enter the Matrix.)
The concern is that at a certain point it ceases to be quality controls and becomes censorship. And how many good games have Nintendo rejected because they were afraid their "family-friendly" image was going to be tarnished? Now if that's the target audience Nintendo want, that's fine. So I have no problem with Nintendo having a policy. I have a problem with everybody having the same policy, since then you don't get edgier material that deserves to be published despite not meeting Nintendo's criteria.
I'm not really seeing where government control would change that. If they were quicker to pull the trigger and cut power to 100,000 homes, we'd just be seeing that every 3 months as soon as anything trivial went wrong. And because it's the government, there's nothing you can do about it.
No, I'm not ready to give up on an industry that, so far, is so exceptionally reliable that most people are without electricity for maybe 5 hours out of the year. We get excited just for approaching that level of reliability in computers.
Slashdot Mirror
Tu quoque. The fact that the US possesses and actively researches WMDs does not mean we can't criticize other countries who do. Even discounting different situations (dictatorship getting nukes vs. democracy getting nukes), at worst it only means that we are unable to live up to our own moral standards. It doesn't mean that our moral standards are invalid or that our criticisms are inappropriate.
Why not build a machine that can function as a dumb terminal for your cell phone? The whole thing could work wirelessly using, say, wireless ethernet. Comparatively big display, full-size keyboard, mouse of some kind (probably a trackball), all powered by the cell phone on your belt. When you're done, push a button on the terminal and it disconnects. You could install these things in malls, next to ATMs, whatever. And you could sell a much cheaper black box that lets you use an existing KVM this way.
We sure won't get a great patent system out of these guys, but we may get a better one. After all, most companies don't bother enforcing patents violated by individuals - they enforce those violated by other companies. That means that while MS, eBay, et al. are some of the worst abusers of patent law, they're also the some of the hardest hit by the abuses of others.
This is a limited case of enlightened self-interest, which is why I'm optimistic we'll see some improvement. Even reducing the number of bad patents by 5% or eliminating some of the worst classes of them would be a big step.
As far as Palladium goes, I wouldn't start panicking until you can actually buy machines that require it. Who knows what it's going to look like if/when it's actually rolled out?
And for the last, well, if I make a claim I genuinely believe is true, then I'm telling the truth to the best of my ability. This means I can make tons of truthful claims which are just wrong. Ever worked for a company of any size at all? The PR and management types make all sorts of claims based on incomplete or flat-out wrong information. They aren't a credible source of technical information, but unfortunately, they are the company's public face... so they're the ones who have to deliver whatever technical information there is.
The diversity of interpretation is one of the really positive aspects of art, including movies and literature. Shakespeare's works are still hotly debated (among academics in the field, anyway) hundreds of years after his death. So it's good that you can read the books and get a vivid impression of the world. But if you refuse to consider other interpretations, even those which directly contradict your own, you're missing out on half the experience.
Seriously, try it. You may not like those other viewpoints, but you'll probably find them interesting - and if you get together with a few other Harry Potter (or whatever) fans, you'll probably have a great time talking about them.
You're kidding, nobody has posted the Life of Brian bit yet? And you call yourselves nerds!
Well, now you know it took me more than 7 minutes to write that out. You'll have to take my word for it that when I first started writing, your clarification hadn't made the comments yet.
Forgive me if I read too much into your words, but the blind hatred of SCO on /. means that everyone else is going to read you the same way.
An error of this magnitude is inconceivable. It really makes me think the figure must be $565 million, in which case this is pretty small potatoes for a big organization that's been around for a long time. (Lose track of $28 million a year - 0.2% of your budget - for 20 years and there's your number.) It certainly reflects inefficiency at NASA, but is there anyone, anywhere, who would be surprised by inefficiency at NASA?
Your post could be summarized more briefly, and less offensively, as "Hey everybody, look at me, I'm an atheist!" Which is not really insightful. But it seems that all it takes to dupe the /. mods is an attempt at controversy. (Unless, of course, the mods disagree with you, in which case you generally get the modding you deserve - flamebait.)
Most scripted romances, whether in books, games, or movies, are pretty lame. It's really a function of the storyline. Most real-life romances don't just magically appear, they form from tons of little stuff that goes on all the time. But in a 2-hour movie you just don't have time to show enough of them for the romance to make sense. The very best movies show enough of those little things to suggest that others are going on offscreen, which can sometimes be enough to suspend your disbelief. But really, the only way to do it is to devote big parts of the plot to the romance, and it's tough to do that in the context of the greater story (saving the world, usually).
I agree that XP's implementation is perhaps not so great; it should deal more gracefully with situations where you have plenty of physical memory. But that doesn't mean the entire approach is bad.
I don't see Sun-Apple as working. For one thing, both companies are trying to escape from hardware-centric business models, both with limited success. A better acquisition would be of a services company (IBM did a lot of this when it was making the transition) that allowed Apple or Sun to, in essence, buy expertise in its new field. I think a merger here would just make the existing problems of both companies worse.
You can probably see where this starts to tie in to NASA now. NASA works a lot with satellites and advanced guidance and propulsion systems for missiles, exactly the technology we don't want China to have. Well, it's a pipe dream to hope they'll never have it, but we need to stay just enough ahead of them for our missile shield to work (at least, work as well as it ever will).
I applaud you (I'm being serious, not sarcastic) for asking, by the way. Far too many Slashdot posters are intellectually lazy and assume the easy answer is the right one: "Bush sucks at foreign relations, so this must be just another screwup." But you never learn anything unless you look deeper!
Besides, this is the point now where we get into the really interesting stuff: whether the position is right, whether it will work the way it's supposed to, whether it's relevant... all that good stuff. It's much more fun than mindless bashing of an unpopular politician.
Assuming you're a nerd, then Slashdot has fulfilled its objective, though not in the way you expected.
The XBOX version must've really been awful, but the PC version was very solid. I saw three bugs, only one of which was significant (and it was fixed less than a week after the game came out). If the XBOX version is that much worse, maybe BioWare have learned the error of their ways and KOTOR2 will be much improved.
The real issue here, from what I can see, is that we're trying to criminalize taking advantage of ignorant and/or gullible people. Yes, it's a bit of a fuzzy line. But ultimately people are responsible for their own actions. It's your responsibility, as a computer user, to ensure that you don't install spyware - if you care, anyway. It's not the responsibility of the government to prevent you from doing stupid shit.
I manage to avoid installing spyware because I am informed and cautious. Perhaps it's unfairly egalitarian of me to assume that what I can do, others can too. But I don't think it's good policy to pander to the ignorant, for all that it's what gets you reelected.
Now that said, PGP/GPG could actually help out GMail's searching/filtering abilities. After all, if you get a message signed by someone whose key is in your GMail ring, then you know it isn't spam. This has been covered ad nauseam on Slashdot, so suffice it to say that the tradeoffs here might add up to a net gain.
Think about how great it would be if GMail automatically gave every user of its service a PGP/GPG key and automatically signed all outgoing messages. GMail would of course have access to all its users' public keys, so it could transparently verify signatures and decrypt messages from all its users. Talk about pushing email encryption into the limelight. It probably won't happen, but it's Google, so you never know.
What I'm getting at here should be obvious: the only real solution any more is a total tear-down and rebuild. We can, and indeed should, reuse a lot of stuff from our previous version, but the structural failings are so critical now they're preventing any improvement. But as Microsoft can tell you, rebuilding anything of this size is a ton of work and even more risk. (It's a guarantee that nobody will like the new version at first, just because it's new. It takes a lot of courage to do it anyway.)
From there we'll lump scientists into two groups: those who find the evidence for global warming convincing, and those who don't. The first group will dislike the movie because it makes their position look bad. Debunking the movie will give the appearance of debunking global warming. The other group, those who don't buy into global warming, will dislike the movie because it's bad science - precisely their objection to the global warming theory in the first place.
One possible exception is if your patch is... "highly modular" is how I would describe it. What I mean is that it can be used to work without modification with programs other than the GPL'ed one, even if you used the GPL'ed program to develop your patch. But the chances of this applying to a patch are vanishingly small - it more often happens with programs that link to well-known libraries like libc.
No, I'm not ready to give up on an industry that, so far, is so exceptionally reliable that most people are without electricity for maybe 5 hours out of the year. We get excited just for approaching that level of reliability in computers.
(Seriously, how high were the people behind this event when they thought of the idea?)