This may be a funny quote, but it also demonstrates tremendous insight.
One of the main reasons we see time and again that X is lost to the ravages of decay is because X is present only in a static medium. Eventually, your vinyl records, your 8-track tapes, your cassettes, and yes, even your CDs, DVDs, and Flash ROM will fall victim to increasing entropy.
On the other hand, the 'net has become a marvelous dynamic archival tool. Data important to the public interest is continually shifted through a variety of physical media and logical formats through the use of peer-to-peer technologies. While dynamic archival runs the risk of failing upon occasion due to disinterest or disaster, it tremendously increases the likelihood of having some static medium contain a piece of information when the dynamic archival does fail. As long as someone is interested in some part of our culture, and someone is interested in sharing what they have, that part of our culture will be preserved dynamically, transcending format and medium intrinsically.
This is why librarians and archivists have stood up against DRM at every turn. If only librarians and archivists had the money that the content cabal has.
I have heard "faster totals"...yeah, but - is fast better than accurate?
Theoretically, an e-voting system should be faster and more accurate than punch-card or optical scan systems. For example, the contested votes in Florida in 2000 were counted a zillion times with a different answer each time. Some of this was due to vote ambiguity, and some was due to error on the part of recount officials - both of which can be alleviated by a properly designed e-voting system.
The problem is that the e-voting companies refuse to try to engineer a system that is failsafe and hackproof (whether they could succeed or not is another question, but it's not even a design goal at this point).
This is a problem with many root causes, such as inclusion of a level of complexity great enough to confuse poll workers, a refusal to program systems natively instead of using a non-crash-proof and multithreading OS, a refusal to make the firmware open-source, and generally a refusal to pay attention to the security issues that outside e-voting experts have been complaining about for years now.
That second roundabout ('like') is utterly mad. Why is there a road running straight through it?
That one isn't the worst of the three, actually.
To give a bit more detail, the third roundabout is weird because it has a four-lane divided road coming off the west end of it, but the lanes are spaced to the entire width of the roundabout itself. Traffic there is fairly high speed, and though the roundabout itself is fairly wide, there are lots of trees in the middle, reducing visibility.
The second one (with the cross-street cutting right through it) has stoplights where the cross-street intersects the roundabout. If you are in the roundabout when you get to the light, you have the option of going straight (continuing on the roundabout) or turning either left or right. If you are on the cross-street, you can turn right (following the roundabout) at the first of the two intersections, but cannot turn at all at the other one. Even more confusing, the roundabout itself has between two and four lanes at various points, and at some turnoffs, the right two lanes are allowed to turn right.
The first one is the most heinous of all, though it isn't immediately apparent from looking at the picture. My experience with most roundabouts is that traffic trying to enter the circle must stop or yield before entering. Not so in this case - you are welcome to enter the roundabout with all reckless abandon, but once you're in the roundabout, you must yield (i.e., you must stop if there is approaching traffic, but may proceed without stopping otherwise) to other traffic that is trying to enter the traffic circle. In addition, there is a street more-or-less tangent to the circle with a stoplight at the point of contact (the north-south street at the left), and so many side streets that there's actually a sign for people approaching from the west to explain it. The diagram on the sign (sorry, no picture here) looks vaguely like that symbol that Prince was calling himself for a while.
Well, the apprehension us Yanks have with roundabouts (or "traffic circles", as we often call them) probably varies from person to person, but I think a lot of it has to do with the short amount of advance warning you have of oncoming traffic. The actual reason we don't use them very often, though, is because they take up a lot more room than a normal intersection.
Think of it this way. If you're on a small side street where there's only a stop sign, about to turn right (or left in left-handed places like the UK) onto a main road, you can see pretty far to your left to see if there's anything coming before you turn out. But at a roundabout, you look to your left, and it can be really hard to tell whether there's traffic coming your way, because (a) the road has a sharp curve in it, with the center sometimes obstructed by trees/statues/whatever; (b) there are lots of other roads coming in and bringing extra traffic, and on a small roundabout, that means that the additional traffic enters the roadway pretty close to you; and (c) people already in the roundabout tend to drive like insane people trying to get out of it, especially if the roundabout has multiple lanes. It's a bit like merging onto a freeway where the merge lane ends right away, except you have to stop first.
Of course, my opinions are somewhat biased. I grew up in West Virginia where I don't know of any of them newfangled roundabouts, and I now live in Cleveland, Ohio, where in the suburbs, the concept of "traffic circle" ends up lookinglikethis.
Actually, Howard Coble and Orrin Hatch co-introduced this measure into their respective houses of Congress after the relevant treaty was signed by the Clinton Administration's representative at WIPO.
Sponsors of the original bills introduced into each house:
Senate: Sen Kohl, Herb [WI] Sen Leahy, Patrick J. [VT] Sen Thompson, Fred [TN]
House: Rep Conyers, John, Jr. [MI-14] Rep Frank, Barney [MA-4] Rep Hyde, Henry J. [IL-6] Rep Berman, Howard L. [CA-26] Rep McCollum, Bill [FL-8] Rep Bono, Sonny [CA-44]
These folks in the House co-sponsored it after it was amended from its original form, though it still included the anti-circumvention provision: Rep Paxon, Bill [NY-27] Rep Pickering, Charles W. (Chip) [MS-3] Rep Bono, Mary [CA-44]
Glad I thought of it.:) But seriously, I'm glad to see somebody pursuing this line of thought. I hope the guy doesn't end up settling, because these are issues of law that really need an answer from the courts.
There's an element of "doing it on principle" here, because if Joe Sixpack is jointly and severally liable with Kazaa for damages, then it means that Kazaa could (at least potentially) sue Joe for his contribution to the damages. It opens a lot of questions, like how much of the settlement Joe is actually responsible for. It's at least possible, though, that Joe would be out the same amount of money to Kazaa that he would be to the content cabal, in which case it's basically a matter of whether you want to mitigate a filesharing network's losses or put additional cash in Cary Sherman's hands.
Getting a degree in game programming instead of CS is a bit like getting a degree specifically in rap instead of all music. Sure, everyone wants the bling bling and the fly girls that most well-known rappers get for basically reciting bad poetry and appearing in videos, but the music cabal can (or will) only support so many people. If you don't make it in rap/game programming, fat lot of good that degree will do you.
That said, most CS degrees don't focus on the specific techniques used in game programming, so you will need to do some additional learning on your own if you're planning on going into games.
Why not collect sunlight here on Earth, or in Earth orbit, store it in some sort of container, and take it directly to the Martian surface where it's needed?
We could also build a transportation device - a "space bridge", if you will - that would beam these "energy cubes" (we need a slightly more futuristic sounding name for these, btw) to the surface of Mars. If we decided we needed more energy on Mars, we could simply build an even bigger space bridge that would let us bring Mars into orbit around Earth, where the resultant tidal forces would release copious amounts of energy that we could then transport for use on Mars.
We'd have to make sure to keep the space bridge well-guarded, though, lest those pesky rebels gain access to it and sabotage our plans.
So you're telling me that George Lucas had decided back in the 1970s that the Force was regulated by midichlorians, and he decided to wait two decades before mentioning it? Of course not. He made it up later and then insisted that midichlorians was always the way it was, even though it was also dumb.
Yes, yes, I know all about basic high school biology. You miss my point. In the original trilogy, the Force was a "mystical energy field that surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the universe together". If you were strong with the force, you could tell how strong someone else was just by sensing it.
Then, years later, Lucas decides that an abstract concept isn't good enough for him anymore, so he changes it to some lame pseudo-biological explanation that contradicts established lore, and tries to make us believe that it was the midichlorians doing it the whole time.
Who's liable here? 802.11 chipset manufacturers? OEMs who include those chipsets in their products (wireless routers, 802.11-equipped laptops and handhelds)?
Agreed. It's a huge leap to think that Lucas intended from the very beginning to make six films that would make sense in numerical order. "Midichlorians"? Come on. Greedo shooting first? Please. Lucas has made a bad habit of changing his mind repeatedly and then trying to convince the viewer that the new way was the way he wanted things all along. Most Star Wars fans can see right through that, though, demanding simple things like, oh, the original trilogy in its original form.
In fact, I'm pretty sure I heard a melodramatic "Nooooooooooooo!" coming from California when Fox decided to do the right thing (and make some more money in the process).
The best we might hope for are a couple of quick moderately large size volcanic eruptions to cool the planet for a couple decades to give us a chance to change other countries actions.
So, you're saying that Dr. Evil could save the world from global warming?
A while back on Leno, they pitted a teenaged, self-proclaimed fast text messager against an old guy who knew Morse code. They gave each of them the same message to send, and started them at the same moment to see who could send their message faster.
The Morse code guy pretty much kicked that cell phone whippersnapper's ass.
Well, in Sun v Microsoft, the incompatibility issues that Sun proved in court were ruled to violate an independent term of the license agreement made between the two parties. (Microsoft made their Java incompatible with real Java, which violated the terms of their agreement.) Thus, the court said that while Microsoft had violated their agreement, it didn't mean that they violated copyright law.
In at least some OSS licenses, a license for distribution of the software is granted only as long as the express limitations of the license agreement are followed. If you violate the terms of the agreement, you expressly invalidate the license that permits you to distribute the software. If you then distribute it anyway, you are violating copyright law. As you say, it really depends on what this particular license says in this case, though if it were the GPL, it would probably be ironclad enough to withstand the issue that came up in Sun v Microsoft.
Sherman must have been talking to the telecommunications industry's marketing folks recently. This is essentially the same argument as the one that the telecoms were running in their pre-election anti-net-neutrality ads. Namely, that the electronics industry and Google want net neutrality for their own nefarious purposes that would directly conflict with the needs of the consumer. However, they (and Sherman) fail to explain why those desires are different, all the while ignoring that the real reason they want {net neutrality | more restrictive fair use} is to put the whammy on the consumer.
Slashdot Mirror
This may be a funny quote, but it also demonstrates tremendous insight.
One of the main reasons we see time and again that X is lost to the ravages of decay is because X is present only in a static medium. Eventually, your vinyl records, your 8-track tapes, your cassettes, and yes, even your CDs, DVDs, and Flash ROM will fall victim to increasing entropy.
On the other hand, the 'net has become a marvelous dynamic archival tool. Data important to the public interest is continually shifted through a variety of physical media and logical formats through the use of peer-to-peer technologies. While dynamic archival runs the risk of failing upon occasion due to disinterest or disaster, it tremendously increases the likelihood of having some static medium contain a piece of information when the dynamic archival does fail. As long as someone is interested in some part of our culture, and someone is interested in sharing what they have, that part of our culture will be preserved dynamically, transcending format and medium intrinsically.
This is why librarians and archivists have stood up against DRM at every turn. If only librarians and archivists had the money that the content cabal has.
I think you mean smartass.
I have heard "faster totals"...yeah, but - is fast better than accurate?
Theoretically, an e-voting system should be faster and more accurate than punch-card or optical scan systems. For example, the contested votes in Florida in 2000 were counted a zillion times with a different answer each time. Some of this was due to vote ambiguity, and some was due to error on the part of recount officials - both of which can be alleviated by a properly designed e-voting system.
The problem is that the e-voting companies refuse to try to engineer a system that is failsafe and hackproof (whether they could succeed or not is another question, but it's not even a design goal at this point).
This is a problem with many root causes, such as inclusion of a level of complexity great enough to confuse poll workers, a refusal to program systems natively instead of using a non-crash-proof and multithreading OS, a refusal to make the firmware open-source, and generally a refusal to pay attention to the security issues that outside e-voting experts have been complaining about for years now.
So, in other words, Miis are like Sims?
"Smellevision replaces television: Carl Stalling sez, 'It will never work!'"
That second roundabout ('like') is utterly mad. Why is there a road running straight through it?
That one isn't the worst of the three, actually.
To give a bit more detail, the third roundabout is weird because it has a four-lane divided road coming off the west end of it, but the lanes are spaced to the entire width of the roundabout itself. Traffic there is fairly high speed, and though the roundabout itself is fairly wide, there are lots of trees in the middle, reducing visibility.
The second one (with the cross-street cutting right through it) has stoplights where the cross-street intersects the roundabout. If you are in the roundabout when you get to the light, you have the option of going straight (continuing on the roundabout) or turning either left or right. If you are on the cross-street, you can turn right (following the roundabout) at the first of the two intersections, but cannot turn at all at the other one. Even more confusing, the roundabout itself has between two and four lanes at various points, and at some turnoffs, the right two lanes are allowed to turn right.
The first one is the most heinous of all, though it isn't immediately apparent from looking at the picture. My experience with most roundabouts is that traffic trying to enter the circle must stop or yield before entering. Not so in this case - you are welcome to enter the roundabout with all reckless abandon, but once you're in the roundabout, you must yield (i.e., you must stop if there is approaching traffic, but may proceed without stopping otherwise) to other traffic that is trying to enter the traffic circle. In addition, there is a street more-or-less tangent to the circle with a stoplight at the point of contact (the north-south street at the left), and so many side streets that there's actually a sign for people approaching from the west to explain it. The diagram on the sign (sorry, no picture here) looks vaguely like that symbol that Prince was calling himself for a while.
Well, the apprehension us Yanks have with roundabouts (or "traffic circles", as we often call them) probably varies from person to person, but I think a lot of it has to do with the short amount of advance warning you have of oncoming traffic. The actual reason we don't use them very often, though, is because they take up a lot more room than a normal intersection.
Think of it this way. If you're on a small side street where there's only a stop sign, about to turn right (or left in left-handed places like the UK) onto a main road, you can see pretty far to your left to see if there's anything coming before you turn out. But at a roundabout, you look to your left, and it can be really hard to tell whether there's traffic coming your way, because (a) the road has a sharp curve in it, with the center sometimes obstructed by trees/statues/whatever; (b) there are lots of other roads coming in and bringing extra traffic, and on a small roundabout, that means that the additional traffic enters the roadway pretty close to you; and (c) people already in the roundabout tend to drive like insane people trying to get out of it, especially if the roundabout has multiple lanes. It's a bit like merging onto a freeway where the merge lane ends right away, except you have to stop first.
Of course, my opinions are somewhat biased. I grew up in West Virginia where I don't know of any of them newfangled roundabouts, and I now live in Cleveland, Ohio, where in the suburbs, the concept of "traffic circle" ends up looking like this.
I'm not sure that makes sense to me, but on the other hand, only one of us is a lawyer, and it sure ain't me ;)
If you believe that this site should be shut down, you believe in the same principles that the DMCA was based on.
I'll take False Generalizations for $200, Alex. I believe that this guy should be put out of business, but not because of the DMCA.
Actually, Howard Coble and Orrin Hatch co-introduced this measure into their respective houses of Congress after the relevant treaty was signed by the Clinton Administration's representative at WIPO.
Sponsors of the original bills introduced into each house:
Senate:
Sen Kohl, Herb [WI]
Sen Leahy, Patrick J. [VT]
Sen Thompson, Fred [TN]
House:
Rep Conyers, John, Jr. [MI-14]
Rep Frank, Barney [MA-4]
Rep Hyde, Henry J. [IL-6]
Rep Berman, Howard L. [CA-26]
Rep McCollum, Bill [FL-8]
Rep Bono, Sonny [CA-44]
These folks in the House co-sponsored it after it was amended from its original form, though it still included the anti-circumvention provision:
Rep Paxon, Bill [NY-27]
Rep Pickering, Charles W. (Chip) [MS-3]
Rep Bono, Mary [CA-44]
Glad I thought of it. :) But seriously, I'm glad to see somebody pursuing this line of thought. I hope the guy doesn't end up settling, because these are issues of law that really need an answer from the courts.
There's an element of "doing it on principle" here, because if Joe Sixpack is jointly and severally liable with Kazaa for damages, then it means that Kazaa could (at least potentially) sue Joe for his contribution to the damages. It opens a lot of questions, like how much of the settlement Joe is actually responsible for. It's at least possible, though, that Joe would be out the same amount of money to Kazaa that he would be to the content cabal, in which case it's basically a matter of whether you want to mitigate a filesharing network's losses or put additional cash in Cary Sherman's hands.
Getting a degree in game programming instead of CS is a bit like getting a degree specifically in rap instead of all music. Sure, everyone wants the bling bling and the fly girls that most well-known rappers get for basically reciting bad poetry and appearing in videos, but the music cabal can (or will) only support so many people. If you don't make it in rap/game programming, fat lot of good that degree will do you.
That said, most CS degrees don't focus on the specific techniques used in game programming, so you will need to do some additional learning on your own if you're planning on going into games.
He's not a moron
Even if we all concede that he's not a moron - and I'm not saying I do - he's still wrong.
Why not collect sunlight here on Earth, or in Earth orbit, store it in some sort of container, and take it directly to the Martian surface where it's needed?
We could also build a transportation device - a "space bridge", if you will - that would beam these "energy cubes" (we need a slightly more futuristic sounding name for these, btw) to the surface of Mars. If we decided we needed more energy on Mars, we could simply build an even bigger space bridge that would let us bring Mars into orbit around Earth, where the resultant tidal forces would release copious amounts of energy that we could then transport for use on Mars.
We'd have to make sure to keep the space bridge well-guarded, though, lest those pesky rebels gain access to it and sabotage our plans.
So you're telling me that George Lucas had decided back in the 1970s that the Force was regulated by midichlorians, and he decided to wait two decades before mentioning it? Of course not. He made it up later and then insisted that midichlorians was always the way it was, even though it was also dumb.
Yes, yes, I know all about basic high school biology. You miss my point. In the original trilogy, the Force was a "mystical energy field that surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the universe together". If you were strong with the force, you could tell how strong someone else was just by sensing it.
Then, years later, Lucas decides that an abstract concept isn't good enough for him anymore, so he changes it to some lame pseudo-biological explanation that contradicts established lore, and tries to make us believe that it was the midichlorians doing it the whole time.
Who's liable here? 802.11 chipset manufacturers? OEMs who include those chipsets in their products (wireless routers, 802.11-equipped laptops and handhelds)?
Except I'll have to find a copy of The Phantom Edit.
It's amazing how much better a movie Episode I is when Jar Jar no longer speaka da English, as is the case in the "Balance of the Force" edit.
Really, it's just more evidence that Star Wars stopped belonging to George Lucas - and started belonging to the human race - a long time ago.
Agreed. It's a huge leap to think that Lucas intended from the very beginning to make six films that would make sense in numerical order. "Midichlorians"? Come on. Greedo shooting first? Please. Lucas has made a bad habit of changing his mind repeatedly and then trying to convince the viewer that the new way was the way he wanted things all along. Most Star Wars fans can see right through that, though, demanding simple things like, oh, the original trilogy in its original form.
In fact, I'm pretty sure I heard a melodramatic "Nooooooooooooo!" coming from California when Fox decided to do the right thing (and make some more money in the process).
The best we might hope for are a couple of quick moderately large size volcanic eruptions to cool the planet for a couple decades to give us a chance to change other countries actions.
So, you're saying that Dr. Evil could save the world from global warming?
The rest could probably be skipped.
In particular, God kills a kitten every time someone watches TKO.
Sadly, I don't have any mod points today, but that's the damn funniest thing I've read on Slashdot in a really long time.
A while back on Leno, they pitted a teenaged, self-proclaimed fast text messager against an old guy who knew Morse code. They gave each of them the same message to send, and started them at the same moment to see who could send their message faster.
The Morse code guy pretty much kicked that cell phone whippersnapper's ass.
Well, in Sun v Microsoft, the incompatibility issues that Sun proved in court were ruled to violate an independent term of the license agreement made between the two parties. (Microsoft made their Java incompatible with real Java, which violated the terms of their agreement.) Thus, the court said that while Microsoft had violated their agreement, it didn't mean that they violated copyright law.
In at least some OSS licenses, a license for distribution of the software is granted only as long as the express limitations of the license agreement are followed. If you violate the terms of the agreement, you expressly invalidate the license that permits you to distribute the software. If you then distribute it anyway, you are violating copyright law. As you say, it really depends on what this particular license says in this case, though if it were the GPL, it would probably be ironclad enough to withstand the issue that came up in Sun v Microsoft.
Sherman must have been talking to the telecommunications industry's marketing folks recently. This is essentially the same argument as the one that the telecoms were running in their pre-election anti-net-neutrality ads. Namely, that the electronics industry and Google want net neutrality for their own nefarious purposes that would directly conflict with the needs of the consumer. However, they (and Sherman) fail to explain why those desires are different, all the while ignoring that the real reason they want {net neutrality | more restrictive fair use} is to put the whammy on the consumer.