What would have been a win for the little guy, is AOL no longer claiming ownership of your creations when the act of creation occured on their systems.
I really don't see why they want to do that anyway, since some lawyers say that claiming any kind of control or ownership over something can lead to your being responsible for it later.
When I worked for an ISP, we explicitely stated to all users that they owned their content, after lawyers warned us that if we ever claimed ownership or even if we tried to control content, we could be considered by a court to be legally responsible for it.
Aside:
I think that a legal case on the AOL TOS would be interesting, since you are also simultaneously creating each "work" on your own system, and 0-N other systems.
Of course, this is common to a lot of situations involving content creation.
It's a big, sealed metal tube. I'm sure they can't be too different.
A firecracker and a thermonuclear warhead are both explosives too. The techniques involved in building spaceships are not the same as those required to build a submarine hull.
A spaceship also has to withstand the force of climbing out of the gravity well.
In both cases, the designer can make certain assumptions which make things easier to deal with.
I'm kinda assuming that by the time we develop a stardrive, the problem of lifting cheaply into orbit will have been solved.
In Arthur Clark's last novel, 3001, this was done with elevators.
They're a closely related as rowboats and fleet carriers. It's just a matter of scale.
Not hardly. A rowboat and a carrier both are dealing with the same problem. A spaceship and a submarine are dealing with opposite problems.
Move to Europe? What I hear from governments like the one in Germany bothers me as much as what I hear in the US.
I don't think the governments of any part of the west are very sane right now. Some in Europe make public displays of "we're with you" but a lot of big brother law is being passed in Europe too.
Re:They might already be dead.
on
Starcraft
·
· Score: 1
I thought we had been on the Earth for quite a bit longer than 70K years.
The documentary I saw about a year ago suggested 1.5 million years, with modern man being in the last few 10 thousand. Is that what you are talking about?
I was thinking that if people really start using things like public-key encryption en-masse, then the government will simply step up efforts to break it, and given their resources, they have a good chance of rendering it moot.
Never underestimate how much money can be blown for useless or nefarious purposes.
Ergg. My first thought was of turning on the microwave, and getting a light show with a cheesy tune played using the beeper, along with a prompt to 'Press here to skip intro and begin cooking.'
Don't laugh, it's probably coming. Just look at the horrid interfaces on stereos, both home and in-car these days.
The ideas people have about "good" interfaces these days is amazing. Yesterday I went to a restaurant web site and it was almost all flash. To get a listing of stores I had to install Flash and wait 4 minutes for the page to load. Then I needed to get an email address from Cox Cable and instead of a few bytes needed to show the email address, I got a 10 minute download and a form instead. The JavaScript and Flash code in it was 99.something percent of the page.
In what way is this better than just giving me an email address?
With examples like those in mind, I don't see a lot of benefit in embeded Flash except the hoarde of monkeys who make purchases based on what is the shiniest.
But don't you think the people who design the device and its software don't KNOW that?
I'm sure the people who designed Therac 25 knew that as well, but they still screwed up and killed patients.
I think there is some scaremongeroing going on here, sure, but I also think that our next 100 years or so is going to see a lot of problems.
We only need to look for a few minutes at most any place using technology to see people embracing mediocrity with little care. With each passing year, I worry more and more about the medical community too. The things I see in hospitals is especially worrysome.
I know it's cliche, but this is what happens when your primary focus is money. That's why the love of money is called the root of all evil. As long as profit happens, the mediocrity will continue, because the people making the money don't care about anything but making the money.
We need to change our mindset, so that profit is secondary to good engineering, even if it means living a little less like we want. As our technology becomes an ever increasing dependency, not doing so is going to have fatal consequences.
Of course, this is hardly new or rocket science. The best scientists and writers have been talking about this and warning us about it for decades now. We just tend to not listen until something bad happens.
True, but you might very well be able to upgrade CPUs, like by a single CPU system and get another AMD MP somewhere else.
Also, you can bet safely that as soon as MacOS X comes out on Intel hardware, the hackers will make it run on the commodity stuff. They'd have to really go through loops to prevent this.
Why? Because MacOS X is Darwin, which runs on x86. All you would need to do is find a way to move the parts above Darwin on to your PeeCee to make it work.
I would be surprised if Apple did this, and I understand the problems with doing it, but I would still love to see MacOS X running on something like a dual Athlon.
I don't know if anyone else touched on this or not, but the first Star Wars movies were sold on a few things which are not around any more:
* a simple story founded in fairy tales and mysticism * Harrison Ford and Carrie Fischer * then-new technical effects * it came about during a general slump in sci-fi popularity
In E1, George ruined just about all of that. He had actors which could have carried the day, but it looks like he was too heavy handed with them. Certainly they are good, but having seen them in other movies, I know that something held them back too much.
He replaced the wonderful mysticism of the Force, something perfect for dreaming about, with disappointing references to cellular anatomy and an immaculate conception. I still cannot fathom the point behind either of those.
For all the beauty of the computer graphics in E1 and E2, they didn't look real. The robots look like toys, and they moved so unnaturally, with no menace at all. If their movement had been more like ants or something, and much faster, it would have at least been interesting. The corny voice acting for them didn't help.
Jar-Jar. I don't even want to talk about that. Meesa wanna puke...
The whole thing felt hollow, though E1 and E2 did have some great moments now and then. They were glimpses into what might have been, and seemed to occur in scenes were a director's control is at it's weakest. That speaks volumes to the problem with the new movies.
So much of E2 was improved over E1, but the characters and story were still hollow.
On a positive note, the capital planet was simply incredible. The feel for size and complexity was amazing. The Lucasfilm team could easily handle the work required for Asimov's Foundation planet of Trantor, and I think they could even do Bladerunner one better in creating a world for Wiliam Gibson's Neuromancer series (Gibson said the BR city was what he imagined when he writes about The Sprawl).
Natalie Portman, despite corny lines, still made the picture good. Her gradual change into the mother of Leia is obvious, down to her dress, her independenc, and the way she fights. Ewan McGregor gradually becoming the elder Obi-Wan was also very well done. The young Skywalker's (Hayden Christiansen) lines were also a bit rough, but I think he did a good job of showing us glimpses of Vader, although it was an uneven portrayal at times. It would have helped a lot if we had seen more of his fight with the sandpeople. That episode was treated far too lightly to be taken seriously.
Christopher Lee stole the show in many ways, and I almost hate to say this, but I hope he doesn't die before E3. The voice and the mannerisms were just about perfect. I wonder what his direction on the set was like. Likewise, Ewan McGregor in this movie seemed a bit more free to act.
Boba Fett was very good as well.
So many things were very good, but it's clear that something about the Lucas method keeps it from coming together. The potential is there, and I think that is perhaps the most frustrating thing about the new Star Wars movies.
The problem with Sun's licensing, and many others like it, is that it makes an invalid assumption: that people with, for example, >1 CPU can afford the licensing.
I can afford to get reasonably powerful 2-4 CPU systems but I can't afford the license for them.
Contrary to what someone else said, some of the old systems ARE worth a lot. A quad-CPU Sun SS20 for example, is still a decent machine, but now Sun wants way too much for the OS license.
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What would have been a win for the little guy, is AOL no longer claiming ownership of your creations when the act of creation occured on their systems.
I really don't see why they want to do that anyway, since some lawyers say that claiming any kind of control or ownership over something can lead to your being responsible for it later.
When I worked for an ISP, we explicitely stated to all users that they owned their content, after lawyers warned us that if we ever claimed ownership or even if we tried to control content, we could be considered by a court to be legally responsible for it.
Aside:
I think that a legal case on the AOL TOS would be interesting, since you are also simultaneously creating each "work" on your own system, and 0-N other systems.
Of course, this is common to a lot of situations involving content creation.
Storage systems capable of storing that much data for a usable span of time definitely do cost a million dollars, if not more.
Beyond that, there is the cost in R&D, manpower, and CPU resources to create and run software to analyze that data.
Doing any useful data mining of AOL's message traffic would be a very large project.
Realistically, what is far more likely is they would scan the incoming data and throw the majority away, storing only a few bits.
Otherwise there just isn't enough signal in the noise to even pay for such a huge project.
It's a big, sealed metal tube. I'm sure they can't be too different.
A firecracker and a thermonuclear warhead are both explosives too. The techniques involved in building spaceships are not the same as those required to build a submarine hull.
A spaceship also has to withstand the force of climbing out of the gravity well.
In both cases, the designer can make certain assumptions which make things easier to deal with.
I'm kinda assuming that by the time we develop a stardrive, the problem of lifting cheaply into orbit will have been solved.
In Arthur Clark's last novel, 3001, this was done with elevators.
They're a closely related as rowboats and fleet carriers. It's just a matter of scale.
Not hardly. A rowboat and a carrier both are dealing with the same problem. A spaceship and a submarine are dealing with opposite problems.
Move to Europe? What I hear from governments like the one in Germany bothers me as much as what I hear in the US.
I don't think the governments of any part of the west are very sane right now. Some in Europe make public displays of "we're with you" but a lot of big brother law is being passed in Europe too.
I thought we had been on the Earth for quite a bit longer than 70K years.
The documentary I saw about a year ago suggested 1.5 million years, with modern man being in the last few 10 thousand. Is that what you are talking about?
I was thinking that if people really start using things like public-key encryption en-masse, then the government will simply step up efforts to break it, and given their resources, they have a good chance of rendering it moot.
Never underestimate how much money can be blown for useless or nefarious purposes.
Even if you are a paying Yahoo customer, it's impossible to talk to them.
They absolutely suck.
Don't laugh, it's probably coming. Just look at the horrid interfaces on stereos, both home and in-car these days.
The ideas people have about "good" interfaces these days is amazing. Yesterday I went to a restaurant web site and it was almost all flash. To get a listing of stores I had to install Flash and wait 4 minutes for the page to load. Then I needed to get an email address from Cox Cable and instead of a few bytes needed to show the email address, I got a 10 minute download and a form instead. The JavaScript and Flash code in it was 99.something percent of the page.
In what way is this better than just giving me an email address?
With examples like those in mind, I don't see a lot of benefit in embeded Flash except the hoarde of monkeys who make purchases based on what is the shiniest.
But don't you think the people who design the device and its software don't KNOW
that?
I'm sure the people who designed Therac 25 knew that as well, but they still screwed up and killed patients.
I think there is some scaremongeroing going on here, sure, but I also think that our next 100 years or so is going to see a lot of problems.
We only need to look for a few minutes at most any place using technology to see people embracing mediocrity with little care. With each passing year, I worry more and more about the medical community too. The things I see in hospitals is especially worrysome.
I know it's cliche, but this is what happens when your primary focus is money. That's why the love of money is called the root of all evil. As long as profit happens, the mediocrity will continue, because the people making the money don't care about anything but making the money.
We need to change our mindset, so that profit is secondary to good engineering, even if it means living a little less like we want. As our technology becomes an ever increasing dependency, not doing so is going to have fatal consequences.
Of course, this is hardly new or rocket science. The best scientists and writers have been talking about this and warning us about it for decades now. We just tend to not listen until something bad happens.
True, but you might very well be able to upgrade CPUs, like by a single CPU system and get another AMD MP somewhere else.
Also, you can bet safely that as soon as MacOS X comes out on Intel hardware, the hackers will make it run on the commodity stuff. They'd have to really go through loops to prevent this.
Why? Because MacOS X is Darwin, which runs on x86. All you would need to do is find a way to move the parts above Darwin on to your PeeCee
to make it work.
I would be surprised if Apple did this, and I understand the problems with doing it, but I would still love to see MacOS X running on
something like a dual Athlon.
Nope.
I don't know if anyone else touched on this or not, but the first Star Wars movies were sold on a few things which are not around any more:
* a simple story founded in fairy tales and mysticism
* Harrison Ford and Carrie Fischer
* then-new technical effects
* it came about during a general slump in sci-fi popularity
In E1, George ruined just about all of that. He had actors which could have carried the day, but it looks like he was too heavy handed with them. Certainly they are good, but having seen them in other movies, I know that something held them back too much.
He replaced the wonderful mysticism of the Force, something perfect for dreaming about, with disappointing references to cellular anatomy and an immaculate conception. I still cannot fathom the point behind either of those.
For all the beauty of the computer graphics in E1 and E2, they didn't look real. The robots look like toys, and they moved so unnaturally, with no menace at all. If their movement had been more like ants or something, and much faster, it would have at least been interesting. The corny voice acting for them didn't help.
Jar-Jar. I don't even want to talk about that. Meesa wanna puke...
The whole thing felt hollow, though E1 and E2 did have some great moments now and then. They were glimpses into what might have been, and seemed to occur in scenes were a director's control is at it's weakest. That speaks volumes to the problem with the new movies.
So much of E2 was improved over E1, but the characters and story were still hollow.
On a positive note, the capital planet was simply incredible. The feel for size and complexity was amazing. The Lucasfilm team could easily handle the work required for Asimov's Foundation planet of Trantor, and I think they could even do Bladerunner one better in creating a world for Wiliam Gibson's Neuromancer series (Gibson said the BR city was what he imagined when he writes about The Sprawl).
Natalie Portman, despite corny lines, still made the picture good. Her gradual change into the mother of Leia is obvious, down to her dress, her independenc, and the way she fights. Ewan McGregor gradually becoming the elder Obi-Wan was also very well done. The young Skywalker's (Hayden Christiansen) lines were also a bit rough, but I think he did a good job of showing us glimpses of Vader, although it was an uneven portrayal at times. It would have helped a lot if we had seen more of his fight with the sandpeople. That episode was treated far too lightly to be taken seriously.
Christopher Lee stole the show in many ways, and I almost hate to say this, but I hope he doesn't die before E3. The voice and the mannerisms were just about perfect. I wonder what his direction on the set was like. Likewise, Ewan McGregor in this movie seemed a bit more free to act.
Boba Fett was very good as well.
So many things were very good, but it's clear that something about the Lucas method keeps it from coming together. The potential is there, and I think that is perhaps the most frustrating thing about the new Star Wars movies.
Gentoo is definitely nice, but assumes you have a big honkin' data pipe.
I wish they would release a CD set with sources you could fetch locally. Something like Gentoo with a subscription model might be nice to have.
I think you are overreacting to FBI files. They have files on me, so I guess that makes me an enemy of the state too, right?
Hardly. The reason is that I worked for the same people that Albert Einstein did, and they check _everything_ about _everybody_.
Hmmm... I hope it's OK if I post on /. :)
This web site has almost no useful information, like most Linux on laptops pages.
About all you can do is read current user reports, and buy the laptop from place that will take it back without asking questions.
You mean that isn't their job? Nuts, all this time...
The problem with Sun's licensing, and many others like it, is that it makes an invalid assumption: that people with, for example, >1 CPU can afford the licensing.
I can afford to get reasonably powerful 2-4 CPU systems but I can't afford the license for them.
Contrary to what someone else said, some of the old systems ARE worth a lot. A quad-CPU Sun SS20 for example, is still a decent machine, but now Sun wants way too much for the OS license.