I find it endlessly amusing that the same people who hark on about the hopelessness of the DRM cause and the certainty that the onwards march of technology will defeat every effort to maintain conventional copyright control of digital works somehow fail to make the connection that that self-same march will achieve much the same ends when it comes to their own online privacy. Technology is a two (or n) edged sword, it can give us freedoms we never dreamed of and expose us to scrutiny the likes of which Orwell himself never imagined. The common thread is the inevitability of it all - the technology will find a way and cares not as to whether the use to which it is being put is benign or malignant...
No offence meant to the hardworking folks at NASA, but the agency does not have a good history of checking this kind of thing in advance. In the time honoured tradition of geeks and eccentrics everywhere the simplest solution is often completely overlooked in favour of something more complex, interesting and likely to fail completely. I am, of course, fully with the aforementioned geeks and eccentrics on this one... the light-curve analysis will probably be trotted out later as a reason for why the attempt failed.
Re:I wonder how much of this is quality . . .
on
Critics Pan Nemesis
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· Score: 2
The Matrix was pretty good but a whole long way from best movie ever. I can relate to the LOTR vs SW thing too, amazing the dumb looks you get trying to get people to agree that the whole cause and effect thing would kinda preclude LOTR ripping off a movie it predates by decades...
The reason is purely related to the ease of distribution software (and the net in general) grants even the most clueless of individuals.
Before the current information age the act of duplicating a movie was a rather lengthy and technical one. I would either have to invest in a high speed copy system or a number of conventional recording machines and manually copy the tapes. I would have to purchase a physical item for each copy I made and the total copies I had available would never exceed the number I could afford to buy. This kind of operation is rather easy to detect once it reaches a certain scale (at least in the UK as recent news shows...) and requires a host of logistics and management to run smoothly.
In todays world a 12 year old with a vid card and a broadband connection can distribute that file on a scale that physical transport cannot match. It only ever has to be copied once outside DRM controls (studios should be able to attest to how difficult it is to maintain 100% security all the time without fail ever) and everyone who wants it can have it - at almost zero cost to the copier (the main difference with digital copies - total costs scale logarithmically - the difference between 1k and 1m units tiny compared to the cost of an extra 999k tapes)
Copyright law fails because they are trying to apply laws developed to control the production and distribution of physical objects to purely virtual ones that have none of the drawbacks that made the laws possible in the first place...
Sorta reminds me of a Larry Niven story (Flash Crowd I think) about dealing with the crowd dynamics of a society where anywhere was a instant teleport away. A small disturbance can become a riot in as much time as it takes all the worst rioters to get there, a celebrity appearance becomes a crush as millions try to port into spaces designed for thousands - traditional laws and practices designed to control crowds are just hopelessly outmatched by the technology, they have to adapt to the tech landscape rather than trying to cripple the systems in favour of the laws...
In trekkie physics you could actually pull it off (thanks to the near magical heisenberg compensator...) and indeed this has been the subject of many episodes.
However, the quantumn state coupled with pairing could actually deliver some form of teleportation in the long term (centuries rather than decades though...)
Excellent Idea - and hopefully we'll get there sooner or later (preferably after we manage to get the rest of humanity to a point where they can benefit from this) but I can see it getting labeled as just another form of communism, though considering the way ms is going with their software as a service plan it may just slip under the radar of the ownership is everything radicals...
but then there is the trend (especially in PDA style devices) to keep files open between user sessions on the device. As memory expands the systems will be capable of doing more and more at once and background process management may become intelligent enough to keep an entire library in an 'open but dormant' state.
We may end up requiring a micropayment every time the application gets focus...
Problem with this sort of thing could be that the asteroid may be rotating in all xyz making it difficult to a) land and b) apply a significant force to the desired vector.
I advocate keeping a ready supply of variously sized asteriods in stable orbits around earth so we can send them out to deflect incoming ones...
Would increasing the pulse speed by 1kx have any effect upon the surrounding material, destructive effects that is. I realise that the pulses are fantastically short but surely going from a thousand fempto pulses a second (roughly 1 trillionth of a second on target) to a million (roughly 1 billionth of a second on target) should negate at least some of the benefits by dint of there being a shorter gap between the pulses to allow the highly ionised material to clear out. This didn't seem to be mentioned in the article so perhaps it's not an issue...
Here is the UK the latest point update to the legal system includes removing the double jeopardy clause. I guess this is both good and bad in the same way that the original clause was both good and bad...
Yeah, we used several boxes with 10k SCSI drives in various raids. We used to lose a drive quite frequently (especially on shutdown-restarts) and the service contract made sure we had a replacement within 24 hours (though we kept spares for just that reason). I don't need the stress of wondering whether my HDD will come back up with my machine at home (or the extra noise) so 7.2K IDE works well enough for the moment.
There's a funny old Irish law that still holds in one of the counties making it legal for an Irishman to kill a Scotsman provided the Scot is wearing a kilt at the time...
My favourite is one from Aus (Newcastle) where beating a rug on the front lawn of your house is punishable by public flogging. I find the fact it's still [technically] law amusing but the thing that gets me chuckling is that there was a time when people beating rugs on their front lawns was such a problem they had to pass that law to make them stop... funny world.
Now if you gave a spammer 1 lash for every spam you'd soon have, well, less spammers I guess... (Mr Spammer sir, I'd like you to meet my good friend here - the Lash'o'matic, which will be administering the first million of your 250 million lashes...)
Isn't this just another strain of the MRSA [cdc.gov]
Sorta. You could probably call it VRSA (Vancomycin Resistant Stap... etc). It's a step up as Vanc & it's contempories are generally used to treat MRSA and there really isn't anything more powerful available. It's worrying as you get a bug that becomes almost impossible to treat (MRSA is a challenge to treat and people die but a full spectrum immune bug could be that Ace in the sleeve that the environment produces to curb the rampant expansion of humanity...)
ATBE we've pretty much come to the end of what can effectively be treated with Anitbiotics and a new approach must be found, something that has not gotten a lot of attention what with antibiotics being so effective and profitable...
Exactly the type of behavior that makes the patent system (I feel) unfair. If I take a patent out on a idea I don't see that I should be allowed to prevent anyone else from ever using that idea - nor should I be able to set royalty rates or licence conditions to a level that accomplishes the same thing. If I have an idea that improves on another patented idea there should be a process that determines whether awarding me a 'mandatory licence' would be better for the consumer than allowing the original patent 'owner' to continue their monopoly... unrealistic I know...
For a third party (ESA) to step in and fight with Gator over this turf, only legitimizes the position that the turf in question belongs to someone other than the users.
I agree with you and don't think the ESA should be involved (there's no logic to allowing one 3rd party the freedom to serve you adds and not another... especially when that freedom is only the consumers to give).
Essentially if Gator wins, they lose (sooner or later as someone else will usurp them with the full protection of the law and the precendent of the first case) and if they lose it put's us all in a dicey position as to what we are allowed to do with content as it arrives on our machines - do we have to view pages 'complete' and will the simplest of add blocking code become verboten in the same was as DeCSS - with all the implications that may have (considering I block most of the major ad servers at my router it could be a difficult one to properly control...)
We don't depend on open source for controlling drawbridges or handling air traffic control systems, and we shouldn't put something as fragile as our democracy in the hands of open source, either. It is not acceptible for my vote to be lost because of a bad fsck
Closed source hasn't really delivered in these areas either (perhaps in drawbridges though those I am aware of in the UK are primarily manually controlled hydraulics). Our Air Traffic control in the UK was years behind schedule and multiples of original costs. It doesn't work well, is described as already taxed by the load to date and has suffered several serious outages and errors that resulted in near misses and other opportunities for passengers to become statistics. I'm not saying OSS would automatically be better but it would be unlikely to be too much worse - and it'd be easier to debug than the monster they have now.
On the voting side I seem to remember an experiement with computer controlled voting booths in the states that may have resulted in the loss of many votes simply because the software was buggy and the operators did not know exactly how to save votes at the end...
A bad fsck will get you in CS just as easily as OSS though you'll probably never know about it...
Since I only use half my brain for language processing this must mean that I am, basically, always distracted by something else going on inside my head... This must be why I get ambushed in conversations by women capable of focusing their entire intellect on the task at hand [and so on... world's out to get me blah blah blah...
Gator's argument is that consumers should be able to decide what they see on the Web and not Web site owners
Seems more like gator's argument is that they should be able to decide what the consumer see on the web, not the web site owner and certainly not the consumer...
Some people will argue that its rendering quality is inferior to, say, Maya, but I beg to differ.
My own experience with both Maya and Max left me with the impression that both renderers create almost perfect images though I found Maya preferable. Max always seemed to produce something ever so slightly harsher than Maya, though I have friends who argue exactly the same thing from the opposite side.
Maya is best for me (inevitably what people really mean when they claim something is 'best')
Slashdot Mirror
The Firefly news is far more serious but this development makes perfect sense (see sig for clarification...)
everything I like is being cancelled this year: Firefly, Futurama (well, the F's I guess). What is it with networks and good sci-fi?
I find it endlessly amusing that the same people who hark on about the hopelessness of the DRM cause and the certainty that the onwards march of technology will defeat every effort to maintain conventional copyright control of digital works somehow fail to make the connection that that self-same march will achieve much the same ends when it comes to their own online privacy. Technology is a two (or n) edged sword, it can give us freedoms we never dreamed of and expose us to scrutiny the likes of which Orwell himself never imagined. The common thread is the inevitability of it all - the technology will find a way and cares not as to whether the use to which it is being put is benign or malignant...
No offence meant to the hardworking folks at NASA, but the agency does not have a good history of checking this kind of thing in advance. In the time honoured tradition of geeks and eccentrics everywhere the simplest solution is often completely overlooked in favour of something more complex, interesting and likely to fail completely. I am, of course, fully with the aforementioned geeks and eccentrics on this one... the light-curve analysis will probably be trotted out later as a reason for why the attempt failed.
The Matrix was pretty good but a whole long way from best movie ever. I can relate to the LOTR vs SW thing too, amazing the dumb looks you get trying to get people to agree that the whole cause and effect thing would kinda preclude LOTR ripping off a movie it predates by decades...
at last, a voice of reason...
most sensible idea so far...
The reason is purely related to the ease of distribution software (and the net in general) grants even the most clueless of individuals.
Before the current information age the act of duplicating a movie was a rather lengthy and technical one. I would either have to invest in a high speed copy system or a number of conventional recording machines and manually copy the tapes. I would have to purchase a physical item for each copy I made and the total copies I had available would never exceed the number I could afford to buy. This kind of operation is rather easy to detect once it reaches a certain scale (at least in the UK as recent news shows...) and requires a host of logistics and management to run smoothly.
In todays world a 12 year old with a vid card and a broadband connection can distribute that file on a scale that physical transport cannot match. It only ever has to be copied once outside DRM controls (studios should be able to attest to how difficult it is to maintain 100% security all the time without fail ever) and everyone who wants it can have it - at almost zero cost to the copier (the main difference with digital copies - total costs scale logarithmically - the difference between 1k and 1m units tiny compared to the cost of an extra 999k tapes)
Copyright law fails because they are trying to apply laws developed to control the production and distribution of physical objects to purely virtual ones that have none of the drawbacks that made the laws possible in the first place...
Sorta reminds me of a Larry Niven story (Flash Crowd I think) about dealing with the crowd dynamics of a society where anywhere was a instant teleport away. A small disturbance can become a riot in as much time as it takes all the worst rioters to get there, a celebrity appearance becomes a crush as millions try to port into spaces designed for thousands - traditional laws and practices designed to control crowds are just hopelessly outmatched by the technology, they have to adapt to the tech landscape rather than trying to cripple the systems in favour of the laws...
In trekkie physics you could actually pull it off (thanks to the near magical heisenberg compensator...) and indeed this has been the subject of many episodes.
However, the quantumn state coupled with pairing could actually deliver some form of teleportation in the long term (centuries rather than decades though...)
Excellent Idea - and hopefully we'll get there sooner or later (preferably after we manage to get the rest of humanity to a point where they can benefit from this) but I can see it getting labeled as just another form of communism, though considering the way ms is going with their software as a service plan it may just slip under the radar of the ownership is everything radicals...
but then there is the trend (especially in PDA style devices) to keep files open between user sessions on the device. As memory expands the systems will be capable of doing more and more at once and background process management may become intelligent enough to keep an entire library in an 'open but dormant' state.
We may end up requiring a micropayment every time the application gets focus...
Problem with this sort of thing could be that the asteroid may be rotating in all xyz making it difficult to a) land and b) apply a significant force to the desired vector.
I advocate keeping a ready supply of variously sized asteriods in stable orbits around earth so we can send them out to deflect incoming ones...
Would increasing the pulse speed by 1kx have any effect upon the surrounding material, destructive effects that is. I realise that the pulses are fantastically short but surely going from a thousand fempto pulses a second (roughly 1 trillionth of a second on target) to a million (roughly 1 billionth of a second on target) should negate at least some of the benefits by dint of there being a shorter gap between the pulses to allow the highly ionised material to clear out. This didn't seem to be mentioned in the article so perhaps it's not an issue...
Here is the UK the latest point update to the legal system includes removing the double jeopardy clause. I guess this is both good and bad in the same way that the original clause was both good and bad...
Yeah, we used several boxes with 10k SCSI drives in various raids. We used to lose a drive quite frequently (especially on shutdown-restarts) and the service contract made sure we had a replacement within 24 hours (though we kept spares for just that reason). I don't need the stress of wondering whether my HDD will come back up with my machine at home (or the extra noise) so 7.2K IDE works well enough for the moment.
Are there any, preferably either open source products available that produce realistic speech from an arbitrary (English) text?
If it existed it'd be in government (though the Bush model is obviously a pre alpha leak..)
There's a funny old Irish law that still holds in one of the counties making it legal for an Irishman to kill a Scotsman provided the Scot is wearing a kilt at the time...
My favourite is one from Aus (Newcastle) where beating a rug on the front lawn of your house is punishable by public flogging. I find the fact it's still [technically] law amusing but the thing that gets me chuckling is that there was a time when people beating rugs on their front lawns was such a problem they had to pass that law to make them stop... funny world.
Now if you gave a spammer 1 lash for every spam you'd soon have, well, less spammers I guess...
(Mr Spammer sir, I'd like you to meet my good friend here - the Lash'o'matic, which will be administering the first million of your 250 million lashes...)
completely agree, have an old 4 way xeon (450's with 1Mb) and it smokes my 2Ghz on anything remotely complicated...
Isn't this just another strain of the MRSA [cdc.gov]
Sorta. You could probably call it VRSA (Vancomycin Resistant Stap... etc). It's a step up as Vanc & it's contempories are generally used to treat MRSA and there really isn't anything more powerful available. It's worrying as you get a bug that becomes almost impossible to treat (MRSA is a challenge to treat and people die but a full spectrum immune bug could be that Ace in the sleeve that the environment produces to curb the rampant expansion of humanity...)
ATBE we've pretty much come to the end of what can effectively be treated with Anitbiotics and a new approach must be found, something that has not gotten a lot of attention what with antibiotics being so effective and profitable...
Exactly the type of behavior that makes the patent system (I feel) unfair. If I take a patent out on a idea I don't see that I should be allowed to prevent anyone else from ever using that idea - nor should I be able to set royalty rates or licence conditions to a level that accomplishes the same thing. If I have an idea that improves on another patented idea there should be a process that determines whether awarding me a 'mandatory licence' would be better for the consumer than allowing the original patent 'owner' to continue their monopoly... unrealistic I know...
For a third party (ESA) to step in and fight with Gator over this turf, only legitimizes the position that the turf in question belongs to someone other than the users.
I agree with you and don't think the ESA should be involved (there's no logic to allowing one 3rd party the freedom to serve you adds and not another... especially when that freedom is only the consumers to give).
Essentially if Gator wins, they lose (sooner or later as someone else will usurp them with the full protection of the law and the precendent of the first case) and if they lose it put's us all in a dicey position as to what we are allowed to do with content as it arrives on our machines - do we have to view pages 'complete' and will the simplest of add blocking code become verboten in the same was as DeCSS - with all the implications that may have (considering I block most of the major ad servers at my router it could be a difficult one to properly control...)
We don't depend on open source for controlling drawbridges or handling air traffic control systems, and we shouldn't put something as fragile as our democracy in the hands of open source, either. It is not acceptible for my vote to be lost because of a bad fsck
Closed source hasn't really delivered in these areas either (perhaps in drawbridges though those I am aware of in the UK are primarily manually controlled hydraulics). Our Air Traffic control in the UK was years behind schedule and multiples of original costs. It doesn't work well, is described as already taxed by the load to date and has suffered several serious outages and errors that resulted in near misses and other opportunities for passengers to become statistics.
I'm not saying OSS would automatically be better but it would be unlikely to be too much worse - and it'd be easier to debug than the monster they have now.
On the voting side I seem to remember an experiement with computer controlled voting booths in the states that may have resulted in the loss of many votes simply because the software was buggy and the operators did not know exactly how to save votes at the end...
A bad fsck will get you in CS just as easily as OSS though you'll probably never know about it...
Since I only use half my brain for language processing this must mean that I am, basically, always distracted by something else going on inside my head... This must be why I get ambushed in conversations by women capable of focusing their entire intellect on the task at hand [and so on... world's out to get me blah blah blah...
Gator's argument is that consumers should be able to decide what they see on the Web and not Web site owners
Seems more like gator's argument is that they should be able to decide what the consumer see on the web, not the web site owner and certainly not the consumer...
Some people will argue that its rendering quality is inferior to, say, Maya, but I beg to differ.
My own experience with both Maya and Max left me with the impression that both renderers create almost perfect images though I found Maya preferable. Max always seemed to produce something ever so slightly harsher than Maya, though I have friends who argue exactly the same thing from the opposite side.
Maya is best for me (inevitably what people really mean when they claim something is 'best')