Everyone screaming about the UN should be taking a long hard look at the World Trade Organisation. Coporate control of the Internet is far more likely and insidious scenario, than that of the UN getting to agree on anything of this magnitude. Mega-mergers have made the "free press" nearly a myth in the U.S. Re-read your Gibson and maybe you'll understand what he really was about.
True, the U.S. indiscriminately and criminally interned thousands of Americans with Japanese ancestry who in general endured great hardship and the loss of jobs, property, and dignity.
But comparing that to the mass-production murder factories of Auschwitz and Dachau is the fitting post of an Anonymous Coward.
AC suggests we can use a resident newbie. I think I qualify. I'm a relative latecomer to the Linux world. My first exposure to linux was the install I found on the Amiga 4000 I purchased years ago, but I did not actually do a Linux install until I put YellowDog Linux on my PowerMac last year. And YellowDog has an easy Red-Hat type installer, not something as "manly" as slackware, nor as installing via ftp. Slashdot doesn't seem intended as news for the elite, by the elite, but it's not the Sunday paper either. I don't think there will be any agreement on where on that spectrum it sits or it should sit. But the arguments are bound to be interesting.
Science/engineering, particularly science isn't as "one right answer" as you can think. Particularly in cutting edge physics, observations are typically so difficult to interpret, a variety of theories are usually propunded and often savagely debated about in the academic process. And the process can take a lot longer than you think. Physicists continue to be in severe disagreement over the nature of cosmic expansion, even the existence of black holes. And if you think physics is wooly don't even go into biology.
It's not much better in engineering either. There is ussually more than one way to build a bridge and each will have different costs, both economic and social.
The upshot is that science is like usenet/slashdot/.... real life. The more the net population becomes general, the more its going to be like the real world. And many who use science or the net to escape the frustations of that world are going to take some others as an invasion of their space. I don't think that there exists a cure that isn't more problematic than the disease.
It's known that the Soviets were working on some big boosters, including one that dwarfed the Saturn 5. Then it blew, Apollo landed and the soviet drive to the Moon went out the window, and they went down the space station route, racking up lots of cosmonaut hours. Last I heard though, the prototype space shuttle was being used as an amusement ride. The history of the Russian space program is a worthwhile read and a tragic story, with rather interesting bits, such as the destruct system on Gagarin's spacecraft and how the director committed treason by telling him in advance the sequence needed to disarm it. It was tied to the retros and ground control would send up the final numbers just before deorbit. The director I forgothisname, however had faith that Gagarin wouldnt' defect and gave him the sequence so that he wouldn't have been doomed by possible radio failure.
I was wondering when the X-File idiots would start showing up. The answer is simple. If life still existed on Mars, we wouldn't need a lander to see it. What we've learned now is that life doesn't just sit on a planeteary crevice, it expands, thrives, dominates, changes it's environment or it drops dead totally. Without the presence of life, the rising Solar temperatures would have turned Earth into Venus. Venus and Mars are the two "stable" states for terrestial planets of this group. It's the moderating presence of life which in turn, keeps Earth balanced on that delicate knife edge of habitability. In short, if life existed on Mars, we'd be able to detect it's presence with any moderate sized telescope/spectroscope combination.
Actually please DO forget Earth First. They're a great example of the true mindless bunch of fanatics. Remember groups like the Sierra Club or better yet the various Public Research Interest Groups like NJPIRG, student run corporations that acheive real results, streamwalking, taking names and measurements and going at the polluters where it really hurt, in their wallets, through a string of successful lawsuits.
What we need is a Kennedy for the Environment, something I'd like the next President to think about.
I wouldn't worry about pop culture fallout, unless NASA made the really big mistake like trying to oversell space as "Mankind's last hope" the way Walsh does above. The public has a short attention span and the next success will serve to quell the memory of the last failure, provided of course the last failure didn't kill anybody.
The only hope for man's long-term survival is the wise use of space to preserve the Earth, our ownly true home. A lot of people fall into the fallacy of making space a frontier that's tamable in the same way our earthbound ones are.
Fact is, that space is an inherently hostile, unhealthy place for organic life that's not going to get better. There's hard vacum, the lack of easily obtainable volatiles, hard radiation that's extremely difficult to shield against without burying yourself under a large pile of rock.
The old pioneers went forth with the intent of settling on their own private pieces of property and living off the land. For would-be space settlers, the only thing to look forward to would be small allocted spaces living inside a glorified Mason jar. Space sounds great on paper and looks neat on the silver screen. The reality however is likely to be a lot more tedious.
Space does have a place in our future, but it won't define our future.
Fox had a short-lived series called "Embraced" which was an adaptation of White Wolf's "Vampire" adapted for California necessities. (Even vamps want to hit the beach some times I guess) by letting the Vamps get a bit of sun as long as they weren't wounded or whatever. They used 5 of the Clans and lasted a total of 6 episodes, before being unceremoniously staked.
JustShootMe asked "who could I vote for with a clear conscience". In the last Presidential election I voted for Ralph Nader, running as he traditionally runs on the Green ticket, with no active funding. I did this with the clear knowledge that he didn't have a snowball in Hell's chance of winning. Many would say that I wasted my vote. I like to think that I made a statement, albeit a small unnoticed one.
Keep in mind those third-parties folks, and not neccesarily the one funded by a Texas billionaire.
Bowie knows quit a bit about MP3's. Which is why he uses SIMD or somesuch. Keeps his publishers happy because the music can't be downloaded the way MP3 is, and locks out non-Windows users.
The initial indications of an acclerating universe were based on an assumption of a type of supernova as a "standard candle". The problem is that these distant supernovas are taking place in a considerably younger universe. (Remember the farther you look, the farther back in time you're looking at.) Sufficient differences in average star makeup can make hash of your cosmic "standard candles", this consequently throughs a bit of a spanner into theconfirmation of the Hubble expansion at those distances
The moon landing has been described as a 21st century stunt done with 20th century technology. And I believe that there's merit in that statement. After all we built a spacecraft taller and heavier than the statue of liberty and threw almost all of it away to land one small two-man capsule on the Moon. At that time the only significant problems were involved on building large enough rockets that wouldn't blow up on the launch pads. But compared to real interplanetary space flight, the moon shot was just a jaunt around the garage. People in the 40's through 50's were led to believe that space travel would ultimately evolve into another extension of commercial air travel, that one would just book flights to Luna the way we do to Paris. (Not everyone has given up on that pipe dream, judging from the stories in Wired lately, but I digress.)
Maybe shows like Star Trek share some of the blame. After seeing how easily Kirk and Picard warp from one end of the galaxy to another, how they get through even while being shot to pieces by the Villain of the Week, it's a bit of a comedown when you see the near total inability of a space station to recover from what was essentially a light bump. The bulk of our space technology after 3 decades is still a bunch of high tech cards and egg shells. And the public has come to realise that for our and their lifetimes space travel will be little more than publiscised, intensively managed,.. stunts.
VA Linux may prove to be one of Linux's success stories but as of the turn of this century, who cares besides geeks.
Amazon on the other hand has now become a new part of our national vocabulary, the only close contender I could imagine having imprinted itself so far on the public conciousness is E-Bay. But Amazon for this year has been the hotspt.
The head of NASA?, the next time anyone from NASA will ever get the chance at a MOTY will be at the next Apollo-class event, a manned landing on Mars. But don't hold your breaths for anything soon. And don't knock the politicians. America historically, has primarilly focused on short-term returns. The politician who doesn't place porbarrlels and tax breaks for his/her constituents a head of "luxury items" like space exploration is not going to be the pol who returns to the Hill next election year.
The NASA we all remember was a product of the Cold War, a civillian facade America's biggest peacetime military project in it's history. (At least the Russians were more honest about their space programs military ties>) But today, NASA is almost entirely irrelevant to the national image. There aren't any Commie Russkies racing us to Mars, the Chinese not even close to the starting gate.
NASA does have importance, but it's just not that relevant in the post-detente age.
Short answer for me is no. At worst, Amazon has merely taken advantage of a screwed up patent system. By comparison though, B&N is truly the Evil Empire, the Microsoft of the book industry. With the practical monopoly they've secured on distribution, they've succeeded in driving the small bookstore nearly to extinction. I've seen the trend here in Manhattan which small bookstores used to abound.
The painful thing is, I love going over to B&N and having cocoa and cake with friends. But if anyone deserves to be boycotted, it's Barnes and Noble.
If BeOS was truly written for geeks or at least the platform that gave it it's real start, it'd be running on my G4 now. Be doesn't need any help from apple, it just needs to remove that chip from JPG's shoulder.
What's Happen to Jobs? (Score:2) by coaxial on 05:36 PM December 1st, 1999 EST
"What has happend to the guy that said once asked, "Do you want to change the world, or do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?"? "
It's quite simple, he grew up, got older, got burned and as a result got serious. Jobs is still a visionary, he's simply exhibiting the traits of most visionaries past their prime. Perhaps its an extension of a natural response one reaches at his age, the desire to simplify and focus.
This is a good example of what I was talking about. We may be geeks, but we're a large part of normal as well, capable of making the same kind of mistakes and snap judgements, and causing the same kind of damage.
If you want to be part of the solution, bring a truckload of patience and learn the art of thinking before replying.
Unfortunately, privatizing the schools won't change the problem, it'll just take it to a venue with less accountability. One should not automatically assume that a private school is any less susceptible to this problem.
The other point is that the public school is a battleground we can't afford to give up as for a very large part of this country, it's the choice dictated by personal economics. I'm a case in point, Paterson Catholic was interested in me, but my family could not afford it.
I agree and more importantly I think we have the neccessary seeds here. I also think that we need to start slowly and carefully on this, perhaps by getting assistance from support groups like Big Brothers and Big Sisters.
I'd be insterested in helping out in setting up this, but what we really need is some slashdotters with the appropriate professional backgrounds. While we all know what it is to fit in this profile, we can't make the mistake of assuming we all are of a piece. Whoever wants to volounteer for something like this (and that would include myself) does need some of the training normally given to volounteer hotlines. The need for training should not be taken lightly.
(***... that's a thought, perhaps we could arrange a one-on one chat room (with a secure socket) that could be manned by scheduled volounteers that would be reachable by anyone with a web address. The volounteers in question would have already received the training mentioned above ***)
Well that's my submission of volounteerism and a suggestion.
Actually it's still Hydrogen fusion only by a process called the Carbon-Nitrogen cycle in which the other two elements are used as catalysts, renewed at the end of the cycle. Only problem is that we simply can't recreate the conditions neccessary artificially.
Anyhow, the farther you get from hydrogen, fusion requires greater energy to startup and yields much less in return. At Iron or above, the process requires more energy than released
There's a popular myth that fusion is some kind of environmentally friendly "Mr. Clean" sort of power source, without the nuclear garbage associated with fission. Trouble is, that's wrong. The fusion process would eventually saturate the reactor chamber with loose neutrons, making the whole apparatus both brittle and intensely radioactive. The lower power density compared to fission would neccessitate much larger reactors, creating a heat pollution problem larger than existing powerplants. But overall we're still talking about leaving our descendants with the tab of safeguarding an increasing pile of radioactive waste that will most likely be dangerous for a period of time far longer than humans have been civilised.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone screaming about the UN should be taking a long hard look at the World Trade Organisation. Coporate control of the Internet is far more likely and insidious scenario, than that of the UN getting to agree on anything of this magnitude. Mega-mergers have made the "free press" nearly a myth in the U.S. Re-read your Gibson and maybe you'll understand what he really was about.
True, the U.S. indiscriminately and criminally interned thousands of Americans with Japanese ancestry who in general endured great hardship and the loss of jobs, property, and dignity.
But comparing that to the mass-production murder factories of Auschwitz and Dachau is the fitting post of an Anonymous Coward.
AC suggests we can use a resident newbie. I think I qualify. I'm a relative latecomer to the Linux world. My first exposure to linux was the install I found on the Amiga 4000 I purchased years ago, but I did not actually do a Linux install until I put YellowDog Linux on my PowerMac last year. And YellowDog has an easy Red-Hat type installer, not something as "manly" as slackware, nor as installing via ftp. Slashdot doesn't seem intended as news for the elite, by the elite, but it's not the Sunday paper either. I don't think there will be any agreement on where on that spectrum it sits or it should sit. But the arguments are bound to be interesting.
Cry havoc! and loose the dogs of war!
If I remember, the original referent for the word "Geek" refers to a sideshow carny act involving the biting off the heads of live chickens.
Now that's food for thought.
Science/engineering, particularly science isn't as "one right answer" as you can think. Particularly in cutting edge physics, observations are typically so difficult to interpret, a variety of theories are usually propunded and often savagely debated about in the academic process. And the process can take a lot longer than you think. Physicists continue to be in severe disagreement over the nature of cosmic expansion, even the existence of black holes. And if you think physics is wooly don't even go into biology.
It's not much better in engineering either. There is ussually more than one way to build a bridge and each will have different costs, both economic and social.
The upshot is that science is like usenet/slashdot/.... real life. The more the net population becomes general, the more its going to be like the real world. And many who use science or the net to escape the frustations of that world are going to take some others as an invasion of their space. I don't think that there exists a cure that isn't more problematic than the disease.
It's known that the Soviets were working on some big boosters, including one that dwarfed the Saturn 5. Then it blew, Apollo landed and the soviet drive to the Moon went out the window, and they went down the space station route, racking up lots of cosmonaut hours. Last I heard though, the prototype space shuttle was being used as an amusement ride. The history of the Russian space program is a worthwhile read and a tragic story, with rather interesting bits, such as the destruct system on Gagarin's spacecraft and how the director committed treason by telling him in advance the sequence needed to disarm it. It was tied to the retros and ground control would send up the final numbers just before deorbit. The director I forgothisname, however had faith that Gagarin wouldnt' defect and gave him the sequence so that he wouldn't have been doomed by possible radio failure.
I was wondering when the X-File idiots would start showing up. The answer is simple. If life still existed on Mars, we wouldn't need a lander to see it. What we've learned now is that life doesn't just sit on a planeteary crevice, it expands, thrives, dominates, changes it's environment or it drops dead totally. Without the presence of life, the rising Solar temperatures would have turned Earth into Venus. Venus and Mars are the two "stable" states for terrestial planets of this group. It's the moderating presence of life which in turn, keeps Earth balanced on that delicate knife edge of habitability. In short, if life existed on Mars, we'd be able to detect it's presence with any moderate sized telescope/spectroscope combination.
Actually please DO forget Earth First. They're a great example of the true mindless bunch of fanatics. Remember groups like the Sierra Club or better yet the various Public Research Interest Groups like NJPIRG, student run corporations that acheive real results, streamwalking, taking names and measurements and going at the polluters where it really hurt, in their wallets, through a string of successful lawsuits.
What we need is a Kennedy for the Environment, something I'd like the next President to think about.
I wouldn't worry about pop culture fallout, unless NASA made the really big mistake like trying to oversell space as "Mankind's last hope" the way Walsh does above. The public has a short attention span and the next success will serve to quell the memory of the last failure, provided of course the last failure didn't kill anybody.
The only hope for man's long-term survival is the wise use of space to preserve the Earth, our ownly true home. A lot of people fall into the fallacy of making space a frontier that's tamable in the same way our earthbound ones are.
Fact is, that space is an inherently hostile, unhealthy place for organic life that's not going to get better. There's hard vacum, the lack of easily obtainable volatiles, hard radiation that's extremely difficult to shield against without burying yourself under a large pile of rock.
The old pioneers went forth with the intent of settling on their own private pieces of property and living off the land. For would-be space settlers, the only thing to look forward to would be small allocted spaces living inside a glorified Mason jar. Space sounds great on paper and looks neat on the silver screen. The reality however is likely to be a lot more tedious.
Space does have a place in our future, but it won't define our future.
Fox had a short-lived series called "Embraced" which was an adaptation of White Wolf's "Vampire" adapted for California necessities. (Even vamps want to hit the beach some times I guess) by letting the Vamps get a bit of sun as long as they weren't wounded or whatever. They used 5 of the Clans and lasted a total of 6 episodes, before being unceremoniously staked.
JustShootMe asked "who could I vote for with a clear conscience". In the last Presidential election I voted for Ralph Nader, running as he traditionally runs on the Green ticket, with no active funding. I did this with the clear knowledge that he didn't have a snowball in Hell's chance of winning. Many would say that I wasted my vote. I like to think that I made a statement, albeit a small unnoticed one.
Keep in mind those third-parties folks, and not neccesarily the one funded by a Texas billionaire.
Bowie knows quit a bit about MP3's. Which is why he uses SIMD or somesuch. Keeps his publishers happy because the music can't be downloaded the way MP3 is, and locks out non-Windows users.
Wouldn't be surprised. A lot of musicians favored Mac in earlier days for music and MIDIk work.
The initial indications of an acclerating universe were based on an assumption of a type of supernova as a "standard candle". The problem is that these distant supernovas are taking place in a considerably younger universe. (Remember the farther you look, the farther back in time you're looking at.) Sufficient differences in average star makeup can make hash of your cosmic "standard candles", this consequently throughs a bit of a spanner into theconfirmation of the Hubble expansion at those distances
The moon landing has been described as a 21st century stunt done with 20th century technology. And I believe that there's merit in that statement. After all we built a spacecraft taller and heavier than the statue of liberty and threw almost all of it away to land one small two-man capsule on the Moon. At that time the only significant problems were involved on building large enough rockets that wouldn't blow up on the launch pads. But compared to real interplanetary space flight, the moon shot was just a jaunt around the garage. People in the 40's through 50's were led to believe that space travel would ultimately evolve into another extension of commercial air travel, that one would just book flights to Luna the way we do to Paris. (Not everyone has given up on that pipe dream, judging from the stories in Wired lately, but I digress.)
.. stunts.
Maybe shows like Star Trek share some of the blame. After seeing how easily Kirk and Picard warp from one end of the galaxy to another, how they get through even while being shot to pieces by the Villain of the Week, it's a bit of a comedown when you see the near total inability of a space station to recover from what was essentially a light bump. The bulk of our space technology after 3 decades is still a bunch of high tech cards and egg shells. And the public has come to realise that for our and their lifetimes space travel will be little more than publiscised, intensively managed,
VA Linux may prove to be one of Linux's success stories but as of the turn of this century, who cares besides geeks.
Amazon on the other hand has now become a new part of our national vocabulary, the only close contender I could imagine having imprinted itself so far on the public conciousness is E-Bay. But Amazon for this year has been the hotspt.
The head of NASA?, the next time anyone from NASA will ever get the chance at a MOTY will be at the next Apollo-class event, a manned landing on Mars. But don't hold your breaths for anything soon. And don't knock the politicians. America historically, has primarilly focused on short-term returns. The politician who doesn't place porbarrlels and tax breaks for his/her constituents a head of "luxury items" like space exploration is not going to be the pol who returns to the Hill next election year.
The NASA we all remember was a product of the Cold War, a civillian facade America's biggest peacetime military project in it's history. (At least the Russians were more honest about their space programs military ties>) But today, NASA is almost entirely irrelevant to the national image. There aren't any Commie Russkies racing us to Mars, the Chinese not even close to the starting gate.
NASA does have importance, but it's just not that relevant in the post-detente age.
Short answer for me is no. At worst, Amazon has merely taken advantage of a screwed up patent system. By comparison though, B&N is truly the Evil Empire, the Microsoft of the book industry. With the practical monopoly they've secured on distribution, they've succeeded in driving the small bookstore nearly to extinction. I've seen the trend here in Manhattan which small bookstores used to abound.
The painful thing is, I love going over to B&N and having cocoa and cake with friends. But if anyone deserves to be boycotted, it's Barnes and Noble.
If BeOS was truly written for geeks or at least the platform that gave it it's real start, it'd be running on my G4 now. Be doesn't need any help from apple, it just needs to remove that chip from JPG's shoulder.
I always did like that Poof! button though.
What's Happen to Jobs? (Score:2)
by coaxial on 05:36 PM December 1st, 1999 EST
"What has happend to the guy that said once asked, "Do you want to change the world, or do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?"? "
It's quite simple, he grew up, got older, got burned and as a result got serious. Jobs is still a visionary, he's simply exhibiting the traits of most visionaries past their prime. Perhaps its an extension of a natural response one reaches at his age, the desire to simplify and focus.
This is a good example of what I was talking about. We may be geeks, but we're a large part of normal as well, capable of making the same kind of mistakes and snap judgements, and causing the same kind of damage.
If you want to be part of the solution, bring a truckload of patience and learn the art of thinking before replying.
Unfortunately, privatizing the schools won't change the problem, it'll just take it to a venue with less accountability. One should not automatically assume that a private school is any less susceptible to this problem.
The other point is that the public school is a battleground we can't afford to give up as for a very large part of this country, it's the choice dictated by personal economics. I'm a case in point, Paterson Catholic was interested in me, but my family could not afford it.
I agree and more importantly I think we have the neccessary seeds here. I also think that we need to start slowly and carefully on this, perhaps by getting assistance from support groups like Big Brothers and Big Sisters.
I'd be insterested in helping out in setting up this, but what we really need is some slashdotters with the appropriate professional backgrounds. While we all know what it is to fit in this profile, we can't make the mistake of assuming we all are of a piece. Whoever wants to volounteer for something like this (and that would include myself) does need some of the training normally given to volounteer hotlines. The need for training should not be taken lightly.
(***... that's a thought, perhaps we could arrange a one-on one chat room (with a secure socket) that could be manned by scheduled volounteers that would be reachable by anyone with a web address. The volounteers in question would have already received the training mentioned above ***)
Well that's my submission of volounteerism and a suggestion.
Actually it's still Hydrogen fusion only by a process called the Carbon-Nitrogen cycle in which the other two elements are used as catalysts, renewed at the end of the cycle. Only problem is that we simply can't recreate the conditions neccessary artificially.
Anyhow, the farther you get from hydrogen, fusion requires greater energy to startup and yields much less in return. At Iron or above, the process requires more energy than released
There's a popular myth that fusion is some kind of environmentally friendly "Mr. Clean" sort of power source, without the nuclear garbage associated with fission. Trouble is, that's wrong. The fusion process would eventually saturate the reactor chamber with loose neutrons, making the whole apparatus both brittle and intensely radioactive. The lower power density compared to fission would neccessitate much larger reactors, creating a heat pollution problem larger than existing powerplants. But overall we're still talking about leaving our descendants with the tab of safeguarding an increasing pile of radioactive waste that will most likely be dangerous for a period of time far longer than humans have been civilised.
And the light WILL be on for you. :)