I never managed to figure out how to model a 3D sphere even in Blender.
Then you didn't try very hard. All you need to know is that pressing space opens the main menu, after that the basic stuff is pretty much self explanatory:
Space: Add->Mesh->UVSphere Space: Object->Insert keyframe Left/Right to go to the next frame Space: View->Playback Animation or Render->Anim
That wasn't to difficult, was it? There are certainly areas where Blender gets complicated, getting materials look right is tricky, getting an overview what all the dozens buttons for the renderer do is certainly not obvious and some advanced features can be nearly impossible to find without a tutorial, but the basic stuff is really not difficult at all.
Sure. The freedom of speech is that we can say what we want without fear of reprisals, not that the platform for saying it will be provided. So, even without internet access we can say what we want.
So the great firewall of China is OK with you? Three Strike regulations? And all kind of other stuff that makes your Internet in full or in part go away?
Having it time limited gives them more media attention and gives people more reason to buy now without much thinking instead of wait and decide later to not buy the games. Many of the games are also still sold via other channel, so having a pay-what-you-want that runs forever, could cause trouble for those. But as somebody else already mentioned, Humble2 included Humble1 as a bonus when you payed more then the average, maybe that offer will come back with Humble3.
They did have a backup plan for when the power went down.
A few hours of battery and then having the buildings blow up is not what I call a good plan. A backup plan should be there for the case where shit goes really wrong, not just enough to bridge a small temporary failure.
Work integrity doesn't help you much when you don't have a backup plan for failure. In Fukushima they not only failed at protecting the plant against a tsunami, they also failed at having a backup plan for when the power went down and then failed to have a backup when their building would fill with hydrogen, failed at having adequate backup cooling and of course the whole cleanup that happens now is heavily improvised. They basically completely failed to have preparation for a very basic and obvious failure mode, which then lead to the obvious and predicted failure cascade. They simply worked under the assumption of "that's never going to happen" and got a ton of easily preventable trouble at their hands as a result.
A 1mm cube seems to be a pretty good match for a grain of salt and while that is certainly not invisible for the human eye, if you watch it from a meter away you could certainly run into trouble finding it.
When I ask people to guess how long it would take that same probe to reach the nearest solar system (a mere 4.2 light years away), people's estimates are usually comically far off.
Going to the nearest star would take around 50-100 years with nuclear propulsion, which considering that our Voyager probes are already traveling around for 30 years doesn't look that crazy as far as time is concerned. Comparison with our current non-nuclear driven probes are misleading, as nobody would be stupid enough to launch one of those to the next star. Our current probes are slow because thats the cheapest way to them, not because they are at the limits of our technological capabilities.
While there are certainly physical limits to space travel, none of those are really a stopping block for getting to another star or even colonizing another planet, it might just take a while and cost a ton of money.
you must take on faith that those who do, a) do, and b) are relaying the correct information.
Not quite. The thing to understand is that science does not deliver truth, it delivers the best known approximation. You do not believe in those approximation with faith, you use them and test them till you have found an error or a better one. Also understanding is overrated, just because you think you understood something, doesn't mean you have, you might still be wrong. It is the testing that matters and helps in reducing that error.
if they were legal it'd be because of all the lawsuits people would bring due to all of the side effects of things like Cocaine or Meth or whatever / all the extra regulation that'd go into their manufacture.
Or maybe it would foster the development of save alternatives. A large part of the problems with drugs aren't the drugs themselves, but the shoddy conditions in which they are produced, which leads to drugs mixed with other crap or just widely varying concentration, which makes it easy to overdose.
I'd honestly bet that illegal drugs legalized and regulated would very likely cost the same or more as now.
I seriously doubt it. Ever looked at the number of people in jail for minor drug offenses? Those jail places cost a real good chunk of money. Paying a few FDI investigators to make sure the drugs are save and properly produced would be a heck of a lot cheaper and of course you get tax on the drugs.
I don't quite see the point. Sure it would be nice to have the Javascript under a Free Software license, but that would be very far down my list of priorities, as with Javascript and the Web in general there is one very fundamental difference to regular software: You neither own that stuff nor control it, they do and that is the problem that needs attacking. It doesn't make a difference if they stick a GPL header on top of their code or not, I as I would still be forced to use whatever version they ship me, keeping around an older copy with features they might have changed/removed/whatever doesn't help me when the API to their servers has changes, that old GPL copy might either break or become unusable. The real solution would be to provide standard data driven APIs for webservices, so that I wouldn't depend on their Javascript and HTML code, but could roll my own.
The whole problem with the Web today is that I don't have direct access to my data, but instead can only access it via a whole swoop of HTML and Javascript stuff, that makes it frequently hard or even impossible to actually do certain operation. A very basic example would be backup. Yeah, I can download mail from GMail via POP or IMAP and that will give me some of my mails, but what about chat logs, mail I send, tags, contacts, etc. and a bunch of other meta data that isn't just the mail? Can I backup all that? And even more importantly: Can I actually restore it? If GMail decides to delete my account tomorrow, can I open a new one and restore my backup into the new account? Can I do that when I change mail providers? Will meta data survive the transfer? That is the problem that needs fixing, as almost all webpages suffer from it, even the glorious 100% Free Software ones generally don't give you full import and export capabilities of your data and even when they do the interfaces are often limited and cumbersome.
Why does charging money for something make a company "evil"?
The problem isn't that they are charging, but that they are charging while giving you nothing in return (and no, giving you a service that you neither need nor want doesn't count). Just because they have full control over your Xbox360 doesn't make it ok for them to install extra virtual toll booth at every turn.
try to lock you in to their products at every turn (eg. memory sticks)
PS3 supports standard USB/Blutooth webcam, headset, controller, HDD, SD, CF, etc., use whatever third party stuff you like, it will work Xbox360: proprietary HDD, proprietary Wireless, proprietary memorycards, proprietary pseudo-USB controller, blocking of third party memory cards via firmware update, blocking third party controller via lock-out chip, disallowing free DLC and a whole bunch of other crap (red-rings, scratched DVDs, etc.). Even on the PC the Xbox360 is causing trouble, thanks to their DirectInput->XInput switch with no good up- or downward compatibility, which rendered quite a few third party controllers useless (homebrew workaround exists). The Xbox360 is essentially the most locked-in console to have ever existed.
There's only one case I know of (console to console compare) where Microsoft is still more evil than Sony.
There is plenty more where Sony is still far more open. While the PS3 for example supports standard USB and Blutooth devices (headsets, controller, USB sticks, etc.), Xbox360 supports none of that, it is not only proprietary protocols, but specifically designed to block third suppliers. Only exceptions are USB sticks, which they added support for a few month back. Same with HDD, you can slam any regular HDD into the PS3, Microsoft wants you to buy a special Microsoft HDD. Basically Microsoft will try everything it can to get a monopoly and block out competition, while Sony is actually rather open. That of course doesn't stop Sony from going crazy with the copy protection and the following lawsuits, but as far as console goes, Microsoft is really no alternative. If Sony isn't good enough, there really is only one alternative: don't buy a game console and use a PC.
Half the time the food in advertisment isn't even food, but silicon models and other uneatable stuff that are airbrushed to look like food.
The point is that they're not deceiving you about anything that matters.
The trouble starts when they portrait their fiction as fact. Its not a new thing and this case doesn't even look to be that bad compared to other stuff, but with the media landscape in general it becomes really quite troublesome to distinguish between fiction and fact as the lines get more on more blurry and most of the time it is best to just assume outright fiction until proven otherwise.
The problem is that they both enforce some arbitrary rules in their api's,
The rules are not arbitrary, they are the result of hardware acceleration. You simply can't have (fast) direct access to pixels when your GPU still has a whole bunch of work to do before that pixel is even rendered.
According to TFA, the footage is being analyzed by nuclear power experts. What would be the point of disclosing it to the public
Releasing the footage would make sure that the public actually knows that. At the moment the whole crisis management looked like a complete guessing game and having a shaky handcam movie filmed from a heli as the only "public data" doesn't exactly give much trust into the quality of their data and counter messures. If they have better data, just release it, so that the public can get an idea of what data they are actually working with. A clear picture of the reactors would certainly we a good way to infuse a bit more trust then just having a "maybe the pools have water, maybe not, nobody knows".
Is there a future for open platforms, and what can the FOSS community do to keep them both 1) open and 2) safe?
1) It already is open, so nothing to fix there. I don't run any time wasting virus scanner processes in the background, as I don't need any virus scanner on Linux, not because it more secure, but because I download my apps from an official Ubuntu repository, not random webpages found on the Internet. That doesn't stop bad things from happening, but if they happen that way its unlikely that any other local measurement would have prevented them.
2) Safe is relatively easy in theory, put every single application into a chroot()-alike and don't grand them full system access. The few cases where an application needs access (like files) can be handled in a secure manner without to much problem. In practice of course its not that easy, as nobody seems to be willing to take the first step and security is as always threated as an afterthought, not a core design feature.
The thing that provides hope and might be the reason to go "Safe" one day is that "Safe" isn't an opposite of "Open", they go hand in hand. A system where a single application can't destroy the system, is a system where I can run whatever I want from whoever I want. Its a system that provides the user with the most possible freedom. An unsecure system on the other side doesn't allow you to run anything you don't trust, thus drastically limiting your choices.
If you mean non-Microsoft supported homebrew then yes, but why would you need that when MS actively supports homebrew on their platform?
XNA is a very limited platform. Yes, you can do games on it. But you can't do a Linux on it or just recompile your favorite mediaplayer for it, i.e. the things where homebrew is commonly used for.
The thing is: They don't have to make it 100% unhackable, they just have to get close enough to make it completely impractical for a regular person. If its no longer about using a hacked savegame and instead requires a microscope, digging through epoxy, unsoldering chips and corrode away the chip chasing, you can be pretty sure that homebrew won't be all that popular anymore.
Hard yes, but never impossible. Question: What would stop somebody from spoofing a valid signature?
The time to crack a proper signature is in the millions or billions of years, i.e. completely impossible for practical purposes. The reason why Sony got into trouble is because they failed at their crypto and forget to put random numbers into it. You could of course try to change the keys stored for the verification in the machine, but that could quickly become completely impractical as well, as you might need to dig trough layers of epoxy or drill into some chips or whatever. The reason why it worked in the past is because they had basically hidden backdoors lying around (PSP had pandora battery, others had JTAG interfaces, etc.), when they get rid of those, you have a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
If you wanna use it now just grab the binary from the Blender page, no compilation required, just untar and run.
The only thing I hate about Gimp is that the stupid toolbox and layers windows are always on top of my images.
Press Tab, that will make them go away, press it again and they will come back. No need to actually close the windows.
I never managed to figure out how to model a 3D sphere even in Blender.
Then you didn't try very hard. All you need to know is that pressing space opens the main menu, after that the basic stuff is pretty much self explanatory:
Space: Add->Mesh->UVSphere
Space: Object->Insert keyframe
Left/Right to go to the next frame
Space: View->Playback Animation or Render->Anim
That wasn't to difficult, was it? There are certainly areas where Blender gets complicated, getting materials look right is tricky, getting an overview what all the dozens buttons for the renderer do is certainly not obvious and some advanced features can be nearly impossible to find without a tutorial, but the basic stuff is really not difficult at all.
Sure. The freedom of speech is that we can say what we want without fear of reprisals, not that the platform for saying it will be provided. So, even without internet access we can say what we want.
So the great firewall of China is OK with you? Three Strike regulations? And all kind of other stuff that makes your Internet in full or in part go away?
Having it time limited gives them more media attention and gives people more reason to buy now without much thinking instead of wait and decide later to not buy the games. Many of the games are also still sold via other channel, so having a pay-what-you-want that runs forever, could cause trouble for those. But as somebody else already mentioned, Humble2 included Humble1 as a bonus when you payed more then the average, maybe that offer will come back with Humble3.
They did have a backup plan for when the power went down.
A few hours of battery and then having the buildings blow up is not what I call a good plan. A backup plan should be there for the case where shit goes really wrong, not just enough to bridge a small temporary failure.
Work integrity doesn't help you much when you don't have a backup plan for failure. In Fukushima they not only failed at protecting the plant against a tsunami, they also failed at having a backup plan for when the power went down and then failed to have a backup when their building would fill with hydrogen, failed at having adequate backup cooling and of course the whole cleanup that happens now is heavily improvised. They basically completely failed to have preparation for a very basic and obvious failure mode, which then lead to the obvious and predicted failure cascade. They simply worked under the assumption of "that's never going to happen" and got a ton of easily preventable trouble at their hands as a result.
People confusing a 1mm cube for a "grain of salt"
A 1mm cube seems to be a pretty good match for a grain of salt and while that is certainly not invisible for the human eye, if you watch it from a meter away you could certainly run into trouble finding it.
When I ask people to guess how long it would take that same probe to reach the nearest solar system (a mere 4.2 light years away), people's estimates are usually comically far off.
Going to the nearest star would take around 50-100 years with nuclear propulsion, which considering that our Voyager probes are already traveling around for 30 years doesn't look that crazy as far as time is concerned. Comparison with our current non-nuclear driven probes are misleading, as nobody would be stupid enough to launch one of those to the next star. Our current probes are slow because thats the cheapest way to them, not because they are at the limits of our technological capabilities.
While there are certainly physical limits to space travel, none of those are really a stopping block for getting to another star or even colonizing another planet, it might just take a while and cost a ton of money.
you must take on faith that those who do, a) do, and b) are relaying the correct information.
Not quite. The thing to understand is that science does not deliver truth, it delivers the best known approximation. You do not believe in those approximation with faith, you use them and test them till you have found an error or a better one. Also understanding is overrated, just because you think you understood something, doesn't mean you have, you might still be wrong. It is the testing that matters and helps in reducing that error.
Isn't Assassins Creed: Brotherhood's multiplayer kind of like this?
if they were legal it'd be because of all the lawsuits people would bring due to all of the side effects of things like Cocaine or Meth or whatever / all the extra regulation that'd go into their manufacture.
Or maybe it would foster the development of save alternatives. A large part of the problems with drugs aren't the drugs themselves, but the shoddy conditions in which they are produced, which leads to drugs mixed with other crap or just widely varying concentration, which makes it easy to overdose.
I'd honestly bet that illegal drugs legalized and regulated would very likely cost the same or more as now.
I seriously doubt it. Ever looked at the number of people in jail for minor drug offenses? Those jail places cost a real good chunk of money. Paying a few FDI investigators to make sure the drugs are save and properly produced would be a heck of a lot cheaper and of course you get tax on the drugs.
I don't quite see the point. Sure it would be nice to have the Javascript under a Free Software license, but that would be very far down my list of priorities, as with Javascript and the Web in general there is one very fundamental difference to regular software: You neither own that stuff nor control it, they do and that is the problem that needs attacking. It doesn't make a difference if they stick a GPL header on top of their code or not, I as I would still be forced to use whatever version they ship me, keeping around an older copy with features they might have changed/removed/whatever doesn't help me when the API to their servers has changes, that old GPL copy might either break or become unusable. The real solution would be to provide standard data driven APIs for webservices, so that I wouldn't depend on their Javascript and HTML code, but could roll my own.
The whole problem with the Web today is that I don't have direct access to my data, but instead can only access it via a whole swoop of HTML and Javascript stuff, that makes it frequently hard or even impossible to actually do certain operation. A very basic example would be backup. Yeah, I can download mail from GMail via POP or IMAP and that will give me some of my mails, but what about chat logs, mail I send, tags, contacts, etc. and a bunch of other meta data that isn't just the mail? Can I backup all that? And even more importantly: Can I actually restore it? If GMail decides to delete my account tomorrow, can I open a new one and restore my backup into the new account? Can I do that when I change mail providers? Will meta data survive the transfer? That is the problem that needs fixing, as almost all webpages suffer from it, even the glorious 100% Free Software ones generally don't give you full import and export capabilities of your data and even when they do the interfaces are often limited and cumbersome.
Easier said that done, there seems to be quite a few SQL implementations that don't support binding to arrays:
SELECT * FROM foo WHERE bar IN (?);
Also, $60/year is... HOLY FUCK $5 PER MONTH!?
Thats $300 or more spread over the lifetime of the console, essentially doubling the consoles price.
Why does charging money for something make a company "evil"?
The problem isn't that they are charging, but that they are charging while giving you nothing in return (and no, giving you a service that you neither need nor want doesn't count). Just because they have full control over your Xbox360 doesn't make it ok for them to install extra virtual toll booth at every turn.
try to lock you in to their products at every turn (eg. memory sticks)
PS3 supports standard USB/Blutooth webcam, headset, controller, HDD, SD, CF, etc., use whatever third party stuff you like, it will work
Xbox360: proprietary HDD, proprietary Wireless, proprietary memorycards, proprietary pseudo-USB controller, blocking of third party memory cards via firmware update, blocking third party controller via lock-out chip, disallowing free DLC and a whole bunch of other crap (red-rings, scratched DVDs, etc.). Even on the PC the Xbox360 is causing trouble, thanks to their DirectInput->XInput switch with no good up- or downward compatibility, which rendered quite a few third party controllers useless (homebrew workaround exists). The Xbox360 is essentially the most locked-in console to have ever existed.
There's only one case I know of (console to console compare) where Microsoft is still more evil than Sony.
There is plenty more where Sony is still far more open. While the PS3 for example supports standard USB and Blutooth devices (headsets, controller, USB sticks, etc.), Xbox360 supports none of that, it is not only proprietary protocols, but specifically designed to block third suppliers. Only exceptions are USB sticks, which they added support for a few month back. Same with HDD, you can slam any regular HDD into the PS3, Microsoft wants you to buy a special Microsoft HDD. Basically Microsoft will try everything it can to get a monopoly and block out competition, while Sony is actually rather open. That of course doesn't stop Sony from going crazy with the copy protection and the following lawsuits, but as far as console goes, Microsoft is really no alternative. If Sony isn't good enough, there really is only one alternative: don't buy a game console and use a PC.
and there was a family there enjoying the food.
Half the time the food in advertisment isn't even food, but silicon models and other uneatable stuff that are airbrushed to look like food.
The point is that they're not deceiving you about anything that matters.
The trouble starts when they portrait their fiction as fact. Its not a new thing and this case doesn't even look to be that bad compared to other stuff, but with the media landscape in general it becomes really quite troublesome to distinguish between fiction and fact as the lines get more on more blurry and most of the time it is best to just assume outright fiction until proven otherwise.
The problem is that they both enforce some arbitrary rules in their api's,
The rules are not arbitrary, they are the result of hardware acceleration. You simply can't have (fast) direct access to pixels when your GPU still has a whole bunch of work to do before that pixel is even rendered.
Ok, why exactly is that a crime in the first place? Has that something to do with tax evasion or whatever or is that just moral code enforced by law?
According to TFA, the footage is being analyzed by nuclear power experts. What would be the point of disclosing it to the public
Releasing the footage would make sure that the public actually knows that. At the moment the whole crisis management looked like a complete guessing game and having a shaky handcam movie filmed from a heli as the only "public data" doesn't exactly give much trust into the quality of their data and counter messures. If they have better data, just release it, so that the public can get an idea of what data they are actually working with. A clear picture of the reactors would certainly we a good way to infuse a bit more trust then just having a "maybe the pools have water, maybe not, nobody knows".
Is there a future for open platforms, and what can the FOSS community do to keep them both 1) open and 2) safe?
1) It already is open, so nothing to fix there. I don't run any time wasting virus scanner processes in the background, as I don't need any virus scanner on Linux, not because it more secure, but because I download my apps from an official Ubuntu repository, not random webpages found on the Internet. That doesn't stop bad things from happening, but if they happen that way its unlikely that any other local measurement would have prevented them.
2) Safe is relatively easy in theory, put every single application into a chroot()-alike and don't grand them full system access. The few cases where an application needs access (like files) can be handled in a secure manner without to much problem. In practice of course its not that easy, as nobody seems to be willing to take the first step and security is as always threated as an afterthought, not a core design feature.
The thing that provides hope and might be the reason to go "Safe" one day is that "Safe" isn't an opposite of "Open", they go hand in hand. A system where a single application can't destroy the system, is a system where I can run whatever I want from whoever I want. Its a system that provides the user with the most possible freedom. An unsecure system on the other side doesn't allow you to run anything you don't trust, thus drastically limiting your choices.
If you mean non-Microsoft supported homebrew then yes, but why would you need that when MS actively supports homebrew on their platform?
XNA is a very limited platform. Yes, you can do games on it. But you can't do a Linux on it or just recompile your favorite mediaplayer for it, i.e. the things where homebrew is commonly used for.
The thing is: They don't have to make it 100% unhackable, they just have to get close enough to make it completely impractical for a regular person. If its no longer about using a hacked savegame and instead requires a microscope, digging through epoxy, unsoldering chips and corrode away the chip chasing, you can be pretty sure that homebrew won't be all that popular anymore.
Hard yes, but never impossible. Question: What would stop somebody from spoofing a valid signature?
The time to crack a proper signature is in the millions or billions of years, i.e. completely impossible for practical purposes. The reason why Sony got into trouble is because they failed at their crypto and forget to put random numbers into it. You could of course try to change the keys stored for the verification in the machine, but that could quickly become completely impractical as well, as you might need to dig trough layers of epoxy or drill into some chips or whatever. The reason why it worked in the past is because they had basically hidden backdoors lying around (PSP had pandora battery, others had JTAG interfaces, etc.), when they get rid of those, you have a problem.