Step 1 is identifying the problem (and the need to resolve it). When smart, well-meaning people fail, it is usually because they don't fully and clearly define the problem before trying to solve it.
Quietly sitting on stupid patents until everyone is in violation sucks, but isn't exactly a precise description of the problem with patent law. Until we have one, you should be more interested in what's wrong than how to implement patent reform.
Ah. So it's not that the war is all about the U.S. getting Iraqi oil, it's about the U.S. getting Iraqi oil and stopping France and Russia from getting it. Well, that's much better, then!
The only "revelation" in that article is that other governments' middle-east policies are based around greed for oil, too. It's rather sad that the author, in an egregious abuse of logic, uses this fact to discredit the idea that the U.S. is mostly concerned with oil as well. You need look no farther to see who succumbed to group-think and propaganda.
I would hate to read that they went under because they didn't use a worthless format with DRM.
If Emusic goes under, I can guarantee* you it won't be because they didn't use DRM. Everyone has an mp3 player -- they're putting them in digital cameras now, not to mention cell phones. Next it'll be toasters. It's getting to be like the addage "every software application expands until it can read email" for hardware: "every appliance expands until it can play 'Who Let the Dogs Out'." With that ubiquity, mp3s have a utility factor the DRM schemes don't.
It's not like they'd be able to get all the major labels to sign on by agreeing to use DRM. The RIAA would balk at the unlimited downloads. To them it defeats the whole purpose of being able to track exactly who is playing your music every time they do it if you then just give them as much as they fucking want for a reasonable price. Emusic would go down because it had the same crap value as the RIAA-backed ventures.
Well, somebody say something about Ultima Online. I've never played it but every time I read an article [wired.com] about the game online, the focus is always on community: guilds, online weddings(?) etc etc. Never any information about "quests" or killing monsters (just the odd complaint about PKers). Maybe it's just skillful PR by Lord British?
In case you would still be interested.:)
I have an idea why. Essentially, it is because UO is a simpler game. There are minimal quests to speak of, no story at all, a limited advancement system, and fewer items with a tiny amount of rares. The hit-the-lever-1000-times-get-a-peanut factor of Diablo or Everquest just isn't there. I've played the former, not the latter, but they seem to be very similar in spirit.
So in UO you basically just kinda wander around, killing monsters if you come across them. Not much to do unless you and some friends organize it. Thus the social aspect (or anti-social, as the case may be) is emphasized.
Which is why despite ceasing to play that game long ago because it was completely buggy and unbalanced crap, I don't hate it.:)
"Playing EQ is a lot like playing in a casino; you can see your winnings vanish in the blink of an eye out of sheer bad luck." So what you're saying is playing EQ is EXACTLY the same as playing in a casino...... he's obviously never been to a casino.
Why do you get a kick out of not knowing that the words "is like" implies the use of a simile?
Interactive variable watch that you can even call functions in (eg. you can set a watch on strlen(myString), it will display the result of the strlen call (and that's just one example, works with any function/method/data).
Ah, that's cool they finally got that. I greatly missed the ability to call functions and execute code from the debugger when I had to go from gdb to VS 6-something. I was becoming one of the "printf() crowd" until I learned about this feature.:)
To quote Djikstra (more or less) "testing software can only confirm the presence of bugs, never the absence of them"
Thanks. I'd forgotten that important principle for a moment. Just normally I expect better than 25% error before people start to get all congratulatory.:)
The same way an electric field doesn't have a charge, but affects objects that do have a charge. Gravitational/electric fields are -created- by masses/charges. And don't confuse gravity with gravity waves (the speed of which being what are measured here).
By the way, did anyone else find the quoted margin of error of.25 to be kinda ridiculous? So based on their measurements, the speed of gravity could actually be anywhere from 30% slower to 20% faster than light. I mean, the article makes it sound like they're just assuming the real number is 1.0 c because anything else would be really surprising. Or maybe the article is wrong. Or I'm mis-reading it. But at the moment, it doesn't sound like "passing with flying colors" to me.
So assume that a grass-roots public internet arises based on wireless tech. Assume the Powers That Be don't like being circumvented, but they haven't managed to make this internet illegal. Okay, now for the question.
How do you design the protocols (routing, but possibly IP as well) to take into account not only unreliable nodes, but outright hostile ones? Nodes that would do all they could to look legitimate, but that would not actually forward any traffic (it might, for example, send responses that appear to be from the destination host, but contain garbage payloads).
It sounds like a tough problem to me, and one that such a network may have to face.
you can download their entire distro free, try that with Xandros or Lindows or whatever else.
Isn't Mandrake based off of Debian or Red Hat (can't remember)? Hmmm...;)
But you may be right, in that Mandrake has a good product and might have a good business plan now. But we won't know if it really was good unless and until they get their $2mil. Being able to stay afloat a few quarters is pretty meaningless in terms of long-term solvency. So basically it isn't clear that giving them any money would be a good idea.
This isn't some video game or cool toy like Newtons or some shit that we want to succeede. If it truly is a "cause" to anyone, then it's a cause about philosophy, not market dominance. It's about Free versus Proprietary, not market versus market. Mandrake is on our side, but they're just a corporate trapping on top of the "cause". Their survival is nice, but not necessary. Frankly, if they -- a supposedly for-profit organization -- need to beg for cache, then we'd be better off giving our money to a charity like the FSF. At least they won't vanish if the donations turn out to not be enough.
Be cautious? Why? Because it's unthinkable that the benevolent, morally superior U.S. government would engage in almost the exact same activities as the evil, evil terrorists?
Hardly. But I'm reluctant to label my own country as a terrorist organization, and to equal degree reluctant to label anyone else. I do think there are cases of "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," and that isn't meant to apply only to the U.S.
Yes, I post AC - how likely do you think it is that our ever-watchful government agencies don't read sites like this regularly for "subversive" comments? Dismiss me as paranoid if you will, but remember the Cold War and don't be so quick to assume we're past all that.
The day the you can can rationally expect the government to come after you if you point out that the U.S. has done some nasty and questionable things in the past, then you're too late to be paranoid: it's 1984 and you're already fucked.
Sheesh, if you're going to be paranoid, at least be -sufficiently- paranoid.;)
Absolutely. But when I see a guy prowling around saying "If you're a civilian-killer, you're a terrorist and deserve to die!" and in the next breath "the U.S. is the greatest country ever!", I feel the need to point the small problem with their thinking out to them. I want to make them think. Or explode, because it's funny to watch.:)
And, no, one man's freedom fighter is not another man's terrorist. If you fucking kill civilians -- innocent men, women, and children -- you're a goddamn terrorist.
You should be cautious of such absolutism. Using that argument, the U.S. is a terrorist organization a couple of orders of magnitude more deadly than al Qaeda. Though still a couple orders of magnitude behind Germany and Japan.
And what I'm saying is that this fear won't go away. Now you've actually increased the cost of losing. There should be a gigantic, capitalized and bolded "IF" instead of the word "after" in "If you're going to get your money back after the big corporation loses..."
After the first few times small companies and individuals do stand up for their rights, get smacked down and have to pay the big corporation's gigantic legal bills in addition to any other award you'll see what I'm talking about.
There were at least two palettes. You could also have white, black, brown/red, and green if you wanted. There might have been as many as four palettes, but I'm not clear.
You're losing the point that if a rich entity goes after you right now, they can beggar you (as even powerful corporations have discovered). If you are made financially whole, the corporation financially loses but you do not.
I'm sorry, that doesn't make any sense to me. What do you mean, "made financially whole", and what the corporation losing have to do with a rich entity suing me?
since plaintiffs would no longer be reckless gamblers aiming at blackmail by lawsuit and getting 'go away' settlements but people with serious issues who are willing to risk their own money to gain justice.
Or people/corporations who can afford to pay the legal costs anyway. Huge corporations already employ small armies of lawyers. Do you really think the chance of having to pay your pathetic legal bills would daunt them?
Look at the case of Walmart et al sending the Cease & Desist to that online bargain-hunters forum. If this was Loser Pays, would they not have capitulated and taken down the info? Would they have stood up and fought from the get-go? Do you really think they have that strong a case, that there was no chance they could lose? Think of it from a cost-benefit analysis -- whatever you think the chance of them losing is, multiply that by the ridiculous cost they'd have to pay for Walmart's legal expenses. I think they'd still have given in.
I can see it reducing frivolous person-person or person-corporation lawsuits, but I can't see it having any effect on corporate intimidation.
Propulsion systems would be powered a lot different from transmission systems anyhow, using a reserve of solid fuel most likely. It's not like I was proposing using a big fan off a solar cell (which would be useless).
That's not the point. The point is that you'd have to carry that fuel, and on a fixed mass budget you can either carry more fuel cells for your transmitter, or solid fuel for propulsion. That the two types of fuel are different just emphasizes that -- you can pick either to change course or to transmit. I'm saying being able to transmit gives you a greater range than having to turn around.
Save your knee-jerk reactions for the next time you decide to investigate the strange thumping noise from the room down the hall...
But the transmission was so faint that NASA engineers could not obtain any scientific readings from the craft
You could stand to RTFP yourself. If it doesn't have the energy to send a signal we can read, then how the hell do you imagine it'd have enough energy to reverse direction? If it was going to come back, it would have had to do so a long time ago. We got more data out of it this way.
A probe that wanders away isn't really very useful, unless perhaps somebody picks it up and sends it home or comes to visit.
What... the... hell?
You do understand that the probe communicates with us via radio, and that we get all of its data that way, right? As long as it has the energy to transmit what it's learned back to us, it sure as hell is useful. The only way getting it back would be useful would be if we sent it out much farther than the point at which it could no longer reach us with its signal, and then got it to return. But if we put enough fuel on the thing to enable it to reverse direction and return to earth, well... we'd be better off just using that fuel to give it more signal strength so that, once again, we don't need to get it back.
In other words, no, Pioneer is not coming back, and that's just fine.
If you care about seeing the usage of free software increase, particularly at a corporate level, then you care about this. If you don't, then you don't, and I hope you have a nice day.
Duh, that's why it's good that Linux is under the GPL -- that way, any work that Sony does to improve it gets back to us. We benefit, they benefit... It's not always a zero-sum game, you know.
Slashdot Mirror
Step 1 is identifying the problem (and the need to resolve it). When smart, well-meaning people fail, it is usually because they don't fully and clearly define the problem before trying to solve it.
Quietly sitting on stupid patents until everyone is in violation sucks, but isn't exactly a precise description of the problem with patent law. Until we have one, you should be more interested in what's wrong than how to implement patent reform.
Ah. So it's not that the war is all about the U.S. getting Iraqi oil, it's about the U.S. getting Iraqi oil and stopping France and Russia from getting it. Well, that's much better, then!
The only "revelation" in that article is that other governments' middle-east policies are based around greed for oil, too. It's rather sad that the author, in an egregious abuse of logic, uses this fact to discredit the idea that the U.S. is mostly concerned with oil as well. You need look no farther to see who succumbed to group-think and propaganda.
I would hate to read that they went under because they didn't use a worthless format with DRM.
If Emusic goes under, I can guarantee* you it won't be because they didn't use DRM. Everyone has an mp3 player -- they're putting them in digital cameras now, not to mention cell phones. Next it'll be toasters. It's getting to be like the addage "every software application expands until it can read email" for hardware: "every appliance expands until it can play 'Who Let the Dogs Out'." With that ubiquity, mp3s have a utility factor the DRM schemes don't.
It's not like they'd be able to get all the major labels to sign on by agreeing to use DRM. The RIAA would balk at the unlimited downloads. To them it defeats the whole purpose of being able to track exactly who is playing your music every time they do it if you then just give them as much as they fucking want for a reasonable price. Emusic would go down because it had the same crap value as the RIAA-backed ventures.
*not a guarantee
You should have seen it before it was called "Disaster Transport" -- it was the same bobsled ride, only out in the open. Not very exciting.
Well, somebody say something about Ultima Online. I've never played it but every time I read an article [wired.com] about the game online, the focus is always on community: guilds, online weddings(?) etc etc. Never any information about "quests" or killing monsters (just the odd complaint about PKers). Maybe it's just skillful PR by Lord British?
:)
:)
In case you would still be interested.
I have an idea why. Essentially, it is because UO is a simpler game. There are minimal quests to speak of, no story at all, a limited advancement system, and fewer items with a tiny amount of rares. The hit-the-lever-1000-times-get-a-peanut factor of Diablo or Everquest just isn't there. I've played the former, not the latter, but they seem to be very similar in spirit.
So in UO you basically just kinda wander around, killing monsters if you come across them. Not much to do unless you and some friends organize it. Thus the social aspect (or anti-social, as the case may be) is emphasized.
Which is why despite ceasing to play that game long ago because it was completely buggy and unbalanced crap, I don't hate it.
"Playing EQ is a lot like playing in a casino; you can see your winnings vanish in the blink of an eye out of sheer bad luck." So what you're saying is playing EQ is EXACTLY the same as playing in a casino...... he's obviously never been to a casino.
Why do you get a kick out of not knowing that the words "is like" implies the use of a simile?
Interactive variable watch that you can even call functions in (eg. you can set a watch on strlen(myString), it will display the result of the strlen call (and that's just one example, works with any function/method/data).
:)
Ah, that's cool they finally got that. I greatly missed the ability to call functions and execute code from the debugger when I had to go from gdb to VS 6-something. I was becoming one of the "printf() crowd" until I learned about this feature.
To quote Djikstra (more or less) "testing software can only confirm the presence of bugs, never the absence of them"
:)
Thanks. I'd forgotten that important principle for a moment. Just normally I expect better than 25% error before people start to get all congratulatory.
The same way an electric field doesn't have a charge, but affects objects that do have a charge. Gravitational/electric fields are -created- by masses/charges. And don't confuse gravity with gravity waves (the speed of which being what are measured here).
.25 to be kinda ridiculous? So based on their measurements, the speed of gravity could actually be anywhere from 30% slower to 20% faster than light. I mean, the article makes it sound like they're just assuming the real number is 1.0 c because anything else would be really surprising. Or maybe the article is wrong. Or I'm mis-reading it. But at the moment, it doesn't sound like "passing with flying colors" to me.
By the way, did anyone else find the quoted margin of error of
So assume that a grass-roots public internet arises based on wireless tech. Assume the Powers That Be don't like being circumvented, but they haven't managed to make this internet illegal. Okay, now for the question.
How do you design the protocols (routing, but possibly IP as well) to take into account not only unreliable nodes, but outright hostile ones? Nodes that would do all they could to look legitimate, but that would not actually forward any traffic (it might, for example, send responses that appear to be from the destination host, but contain garbage payloads).
It sounds like a tough problem to me, and one that such a network may have to face.
you can download their entire distro free, try that with Xandros or Lindows or whatever else.
;)
Isn't Mandrake based off of Debian or Red Hat (can't remember)? Hmmm...
But you may be right, in that Mandrake has a good product and might have a good business plan now. But we won't know if it really was good unless and until they get their $2mil. Being able to stay afloat a few quarters is pretty meaningless in terms of long-term solvency. So basically it isn't clear that giving them any money would be a good idea.
This isn't some video game or cool toy like Newtons or some shit that we want to succeede. If it truly is a "cause" to anyone, then it's a cause about philosophy, not market dominance. It's about Free versus Proprietary, not market versus market. Mandrake is on our side, but they're just a corporate trapping on top of the "cause". Their survival is nice, but not necessary. Frankly, if they -- a supposedly for-profit organization -- need to beg for cache, then we'd be better off giving our money to a charity like the FSF. At least they won't vanish if the donations turn out to not be enough.
Be cautious? Why? Because it's unthinkable that the benevolent, morally superior U.S. government would engage in almost the exact same activities as the evil, evil terrorists?
;)
Hardly. But I'm reluctant to label my own country as a terrorist organization, and to equal degree reluctant to label anyone else. I do think there are cases of "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," and that isn't meant to apply only to the U.S.
Yes, I post AC - how likely do you think it is that our ever-watchful government agencies don't read sites like this regularly for "subversive" comments? Dismiss me as paranoid if you will, but remember the Cold War and don't be so quick to assume we're past all that.
The day the you can can rationally expect the government to come after you if you point out that the U.S. has done some nasty and questionable things in the past, then you're too late to be paranoid: it's 1984 and you're already fucked.
Sheesh, if you're going to be paranoid, at least be -sufficiently- paranoid.
Absolutely. But when I see a guy prowling around saying "If you're a civilian-killer, you're a terrorist and deserve to die!" and in the next breath "the U.S. is the greatest country ever!", I feel the need to point the small problem with their thinking out to them. I want to make them think. Or explode, because it's funny to watch. :)
And, no, one man's freedom fighter is not another man's terrorist. If you fucking kill civilians -- innocent men, women, and children -- you're a goddamn terrorist.
You should be cautious of such absolutism. Using that argument, the U.S. is a terrorist organization a couple of orders of magnitude more deadly than al Qaeda. Though still a couple orders of magnitude behind Germany and Japan.
Maybe it was because he had this realization while watching the film, not reading the book?
Without the fear, the strategy loses its power.
And what I'm saying is that this fear won't go away. Now you've actually increased the cost of losing. There should be a gigantic, capitalized and bolded "IF" instead of the word "after" in "If you're going to get your money back after the big corporation loses..."
After the first few times small companies and individuals do stand up for their rights, get smacked down and have to pay the big corporation's gigantic legal bills in addition to any other award you'll see what I'm talking about.
Amazing how much engineering you can apply to the problem of how to most efficiently piss people off.
There were at least two palettes. You could also have white, black, brown/red, and green if you wanted. There might have been as many as four palettes, but I'm not clear.
You're losing the point that if a rich entity goes after you right now, they can beggar you (as even powerful corporations have discovered). If you are made financially whole, the corporation financially loses but you do not.
I'm sorry, that doesn't make any sense to me. What do you mean, "made financially whole", and what the corporation losing have to do with a rich entity suing me?
since plaintiffs would no longer be reckless gamblers aiming at blackmail by lawsuit and getting 'go away' settlements but people with serious issues who are willing to risk their own money to gain justice.
Or people/corporations who can afford to pay the legal costs anyway. Huge corporations already employ small armies of lawyers. Do you really think the chance of having to pay your pathetic legal bills would daunt them?
Look at the case of Walmart et al sending the Cease & Desist to that online bargain-hunters forum. If this was Loser Pays, would they not have capitulated and taken down the info? Would they have stood up and fought from the get-go? Do you really think they have that strong a case, that there was no chance they could lose? Think of it from a cost-benefit analysis -- whatever you think the chance of them losing is, multiply that by the ridiculous cost they'd have to pay for Walmart's legal expenses. I think they'd still have given in.
I can see it reducing frivolous person-person or person-corporation lawsuits, but I can't see it having any effect on corporate intimidation.
Propulsion systems would be powered a lot different from transmission systems anyhow, using a reserve of solid fuel most likely. It's not like I was proposing using a big fan off a solar cell (which would be useless).
:)
That's not the point. The point is that you'd have to carry that fuel, and on a fixed mass budget you can either carry more fuel cells for your transmitter, or solid fuel for propulsion. That the two types of fuel are different just emphasizes that -- you can pick either to change course or to transmit. I'm saying being able to transmit gives you a greater range than having to turn around.
Save your knee-jerk reactions for the next time you decide to investigate the strange thumping noise from the room down the hall...
Knee-jerk reaction to a knee-jerk question.
But the transmission was so faint that NASA engineers could not obtain any scientific readings from the craft
You could stand to RTFP yourself. If it doesn't have the energy to send a signal we can read, then how the hell do you imagine it'd have enough energy to reverse direction? If it was going to come back, it would have had to do so a long time ago. We got more data out of it this way.
A probe that wanders away isn't really very useful, unless perhaps somebody picks it up and sends it home or comes to visit.
What... the... hell?
You do understand that the probe communicates with us via radio, and that we get all of its data that way, right? As long as it has the energy to transmit what it's learned back to us, it sure as hell is useful. The only way getting it back would be useful would be if we sent it out much farther than the point at which it could no longer reach us with its signal, and then got it to return. But if we put enough fuel on the thing to enable it to reverse direction and return to earth, well... we'd be better off just using that fuel to give it more signal strength so that, once again, we don't need to get it back.
In other words, no, Pioneer is not coming back, and that's just fine.
If you care about seeing the usage of free software increase, particularly at a corporate level, then you care about this. If you don't, then you don't, and I hope you have a nice day.
Duh, that's why it's good that Linux is under the GPL -- that way, any work that Sony does to improve it gets back to us. We benefit, they benefit... It's not always a zero-sum game, you know.