This brings to mind a current activist motion to defeat the US injustice system by demanding a speedy trial due under the Constitution and so creating a DDoS on the courts. If everybody so charged demanded their full rights, the courts must necessarily absolve most as they have not the time nor space to convict them.
"That" constitutes reams of patents so whether or not I've imagined the why of it it "that" will influence innovation for decades to come. That "that" is a lot of work to put on the word that the White Book says is an easy drop.
I was expecting this response from an anonymous coward in an attempt to shift the blame. Now who else might have funded this? Somebody with a long history of funding such things. Somebody with something to gain from it. Find the motive and you'll find the font of money. I would say it but there are limits to slashdot's anonymity and I can't bear the risk.
Cheeseburgers and Twinkies don't cause Type 2 Diabetes, they only reveal it. The tendency to lose regulation of insulin on diet is the illness, and it's congenital.
That was one reason among many. It was important that we do this for national defense, to become preeminent in space - because others were really out to get us at the time and it were better if somebody master space first it were us. Competing in the Space Games was preferable to sending our boys out to fight and die in Afghanistan. It was also important for other reasons outlined there. By having a national mission focused on peaceful space we employed a great many of people, we depleted a great deal of surplus productivity that would otherwise have been focused on aggression on the ground. And we learned some things useful in terrestrial industry that gained us dominance in tech for decades to follow. Only coincidentally (?) the resource depletion of the effort kept us from attempting to police the world.
It's a shame that we've forgotten most of that. Although we have remarkably more advanced science it would cost us 10x as much for NASA to send a man on an Apollo mission today - or more. The military-industrial complex has infiltrated NASA's sphere and is selling them the $10,000 toilet seats and the $900 hammer. They know they're not capable of progress now and so are pushing for commercial exploitation of space. We've lost our great leader. The whole evolution makes me sad.
I want to watch the video again and pretend he's still our president. I can't though right now. I was weeping like a baby 4x already the last time through.
I don't think you're getting my point, which in this comment is going to wander a bit. The actual, printed, 32 volume Encyclopedia Brittanica has considerable value in and of itself. If nothing but that its viewpoint was fixed at the time the articles were written and printed it's a useful snapshot of the cultural views of the time. As a well researched, edited and resourced reference to the available knowledge on that day it's a priceless time machine whose value can only grow. As a fixed reference it offers an anchor to the fungible nature of history - as long as a copy is preserved the Great Forgetting cannot occur. It's a priceless record even of the popular usages of the language it's written in. By doing a diff on Brittanica and Wikipedia you can get an idea of the scope of the change of understanding, a grasp of our learning, and a sense for who's rewriting the historical record behind the scenes for purposes both good and bad.
Yes it is biased, subjective to its time, and not a definitive reference at all for any individual fact. But taken as a whole it helps to prevent Orwell's editing of the past by having tangible evidence that some things that used to be true no longer are. We WERE NOT always at war with Eastasia. That its printed content is immutable and decreasingly current over time is quite the point of preserving the damned thing.
There are other doomed encyclopedias still - World Book is one. But they're not Brittanica.
And beside that, the limited number of copies and the abuse the usual have been put to means that in a few years these will be precious limited-edition collectibles in their own right worth perserving in new-in-box condition. I wonder if you could get the producers to sign copies... Maybe even the article writers. If you made it a mission, how many article writers could you get to sign a copy of the Encyclopedia Brittanica?
Let's forget the horrible wastefulness of publishing a million printed copies of the thing, since it's been a while since that happened. I'm talking about one copy - or maybe three, for redundancy. This last version only did 12,000 copies total and almost all of the 8,000 sold went to libraries serving thousands - or tens of thousands - each.
If I were a wealthy bastard like Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison or some new NFL hero, I'd buy up the whole warehouse: all 4,000 remaining copies for about $8M. Then I'd seal most of them in welded stainless steel containers in pure nitrogen atmosphere and bury them. And I'd set about sending the rest on tour to get all the signatures on the articles I could. Except for one copy that I'd cut the spines off of and scan and OCR for posterity, in the vacant hope that one day the copyright will expire - and for personal reference. Releasing a few dozen copies at a time would maximize the return on the investment and more than pay for the exercise - and my heirs would have a priceless resource to exploit long after I'm gone.
The grandparent is referring to the US use of ex-Nazi rocket scientists, notably Wernher Von Braun - chief architect of the Saturn V and previously designer of the Nazi V2 buzzbombs.
But then we're skirting perilously close to Godwin here.
Today I learned: more people were killed at forced labor producing the V2 rockets than were killed by the V2 rockets.
From my compendium of odd facts: If you carry a top-end smartphone in your pocket every day your personal compute capacity exceeds that of the entire US lunar space program (both flight and ground, not just mission control but engineering too) - even in the car.
It wasn't really all the cold war, you know. Sure, the Toynbee Tile "footballs in space" thing had something to do with it. But it had as much to do with Kennedy's skill as an orator and a desire to build some unifying non-military national mission so we could lay off the killing foreigners thing for a while. Usually for these things I cite the text of the speech, but today I find the recording of Kennedy at Rice University is up on Youtube now.
12:15 he anticipates the home PC.
I watched it again just now. Damn, but it's dusty in here.
James Cameron could say "I want to film a space opera, on location on the moon" and investors would be lined up around the block to throw billions of dollars at him. Assuming he survives his current cinematic adventure, that is.
So send them Zimbabwe dollars instead. Better message, and legal. I have a few quadrillion Zim dollars laying around here somewhere, but you can buy yours on ebay.
Yeah, I'm sure those supercomputer geeks are a bunch of incompetent tightwads incapable of understanding the Windows ROI. What would the physics nerds at CERN know about math?
That's what I'm thinking. And of course it will always be the most current version now. And collectible - only 12,000 ever made, most gone to libraries probably to be lost or ruined one day.
This is what comes of dealing with the the devil. You get what you asked for, not what you wanted - and it costs your soul.
At that time (the hiatus when Office for Mac was poorly or not supported) - you're righ! - I can't say that was illegal. That's not for me to decide. The courts have found so, but I don't own them. They got away with it, so they won that one for the nonce. To call it a succesful strategy is to stretch it to a general case, and I can't do that.
Your own comment about how foolish they were to enter this trap and glory in their capture tells of your moral sphere. You're OK with what happens to them in the trap if you can convince them to willingly enter. No matter how foul their demise. The temptation to go Godwin's law is pretty extreme here.
You probably can't even imagine why some of us have a problem with that. It's outside your ken. I'm Symbolset. I work in words; they are my stock in trade. To me, words mean things. And yet you and I, we lack a common context, a framework, to build communication on. I'd as easily communicate with a bit of coral or a slice of jade. The words I use mean different things to me than they do to you - and yet we share a common language!
When groups of incumbent telecom providers gather together to protect consumers, it's usually to protect consumers from the distraction of non-incumbent providers striving to provide superior and less expensive service.
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations. You've said in 500 words what I said in 26 words. Are you proud of that?
Then chow down on your Mac & Cheese with bacon. That will fix everything.
This brings to mind a current activist motion to defeat the US injustice system by demanding a speedy trial due under the Constitution and so creating a DDoS on the courts. If everybody so charged demanded their full rights, the courts must necessarily absolve most as they have not the time nor space to convict them.
"That" constitutes reams of patents so whether or not I've imagined the why of it it "that" will influence innovation for decades to come. That "that" is a lot of work to put on the word that the White Book says is an easy drop.
I was expecting this response from an anonymous coward in an attempt to shift the blame. Now who else might have funded this? Somebody with a long history of funding such things. Somebody with something to gain from it. Find the motive and you'll find the font of money. I would say it but there are limits to slashdot's anonymity and I can't bear the risk.
Cheeseburgers and Twinkies don't cause Type 2 Diabetes, they only reveal it. The tendency to lose regulation of insulin on diet is the illness, and it's congenital.
That's an illness that once cured will be missed.
I'm pretty sure this is going to lead us to more advanced pRon. Among other things.
Hi! Is it time to abolish copyright yet?
Now... who paid.?
That was one reason among many. It was important that we do this for national defense, to become preeminent in space - because others were really out to get us at the time and it were better if somebody master space first it were us. Competing in the Space Games was preferable to sending our boys out to fight and die in Afghanistan. It was also important for other reasons outlined there. By having a national mission focused on peaceful space we employed a great many of people, we depleted a great deal of surplus productivity that would otherwise have been focused on aggression on the ground. And we learned some things useful in terrestrial industry that gained us dominance in tech for decades to follow. Only coincidentally (?) the resource depletion of the effort kept us from attempting to police the world.
It's a shame that we've forgotten most of that. Although we have remarkably more advanced science it would cost us 10x as much for NASA to send a man on an Apollo mission today - or more. The military-industrial complex has infiltrated NASA's sphere and is selling them the $10,000 toilet seats and the $900 hammer. They know they're not capable of progress now and so are pushing for commercial exploitation of space. We've lost our great leader. The whole evolution makes me sad.
I want to watch the video again and pretend he's still our president. I can't though right now. I was weeping like a baby 4x already the last time through.
I don't think you're getting my point, which in this comment is going to wander a bit. The actual, printed, 32 volume Encyclopedia Brittanica has considerable value in and of itself. If nothing but that its viewpoint was fixed at the time the articles were written and printed it's a useful snapshot of the cultural views of the time. As a well researched, edited and resourced reference to the available knowledge on that day it's a priceless time machine whose value can only grow. As a fixed reference it offers an anchor to the fungible nature of history - as long as a copy is preserved the Great Forgetting cannot occur. It's a priceless record even of the popular usages of the language it's written in. By doing a diff on Brittanica and Wikipedia you can get an idea of the scope of the change of understanding, a grasp of our learning, and a sense for who's rewriting the historical record behind the scenes for purposes both good and bad.
Yes it is biased, subjective to its time, and not a definitive reference at all for any individual fact. But taken as a whole it helps to prevent Orwell's editing of the past by having tangible evidence that some things that used to be true no longer are. We WERE NOT always at war with Eastasia. That its printed content is immutable and decreasingly current over time is quite the point of preserving the damned thing.
There are other doomed encyclopedias still - World Book is one. But they're not Brittanica.
And beside that, the limited number of copies and the abuse the usual have been put to means that in a few years these will be precious limited-edition collectibles in their own right worth perserving in new-in-box condition. I wonder if you could get the producers to sign copies... Maybe even the article writers. If you made it a mission, how many article writers could you get to sign a copy of the Encyclopedia Brittanica?
Let's forget the horrible wastefulness of publishing a million printed copies of the thing, since it's been a while since that happened. I'm talking about one copy - or maybe three, for redundancy. This last version only did 12,000 copies total and almost all of the 8,000 sold went to libraries serving thousands - or tens of thousands - each.
If I were a wealthy bastard like Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison or some new NFL hero, I'd buy up the whole warehouse: all 4,000 remaining copies for about $8M. Then I'd seal most of them in welded stainless steel containers in pure nitrogen atmosphere and bury them. And I'd set about sending the rest on tour to get all the signatures on the articles I could. Except for one copy that I'd cut the spines off of and scan and OCR for posterity, in the vacant hope that one day the copyright will expire - and for personal reference. Releasing a few dozen copies at a time would maximize the return on the investment and more than pay for the exercise - and my heirs would have a priceless resource to exploit long after I'm gone.
The grandparent is referring to the US use of ex-Nazi rocket scientists, notably Wernher Von Braun - chief architect of the Saturn V and previously designer of the Nazi V2 buzzbombs.
But then we're skirting perilously close to Godwin here.
Today I learned: more people were killed at forced labor producing the V2 rockets than were killed by the V2 rockets.
From my compendium of odd facts: If you carry a top-end smartphone in your pocket every day your personal compute capacity exceeds that of the entire US lunar space program (both flight and ground, not just mission control but engineering too) - even in the car.
You're thinking Mars. Mars is the one with the active defense forces.
It wasn't really all the cold war, you know. Sure, the Toynbee Tile "footballs in space" thing had something to do with it. But it had as much to do with Kennedy's skill as an orator and a desire to build some unifying non-military national mission so we could lay off the killing foreigners thing for a while. Usually for these things I cite the text of the speech, but today I find the recording of Kennedy at Rice University is up on Youtube now.
12:15 he anticipates the home PC.
I watched it again just now. Damn, but it's dusty in here.
James Cameron could say "I want to film a space opera, on location on the moon" and investors would be lined up around the block to throw billions of dollars at him. Assuming he survives his current cinematic adventure, that is.
So send them Zimbabwe dollars instead. Better message, and legal. I have a few quadrillion Zim dollars laying around here somewhere, but you can buy yours on ebay.
Yeah, I'm sure those supercomputer geeks are a bunch of incompetent tightwads incapable of understanding the Windows ROI. What would the physics nerds at CERN know about math?
At 1G acceleration you reach lightspeed in a little under a year.
That's what I'm thinking. And of course it will always be the most current version now. And collectible - only 12,000 ever made, most gone to libraries probably to be lost or ruined one day.
I wouldn't count on it. I just tried browsing through their 2007 crawl. All the sites I tried were 404'd.
32640 pages in the set. You're going to want a color laser printer.
It would be nice to have. A grand collectible. Story says they only printed 12,000 and sold about 8,000.
This is what comes of dealing with the the devil. You get what you asked for, not what you wanted - and it costs your soul.
At that time (the hiatus when Office for Mac was poorly or not supported) - you're righ! - I can't say that was illegal. That's not for me to decide. The courts have found so, but I don't own them. They got away with it, so they won that one for the nonce. To call it a succesful strategy is to stretch it to a general case, and I can't do that.
Your own comment about how foolish they were to enter this trap and glory in their capture tells of your moral sphere. You're OK with what happens to them in the trap if you can convince them to willingly enter. No matter how foul their demise. The temptation to go Godwin's law is pretty extreme here.
You probably can't even imagine why some of us have a problem with that. It's outside your ken. I'm Symbolset. I work in words; they are my stock in trade. To me, words mean things. And yet you and I, we lack a common context, a framework, to build communication on. I'd as easily communicate with a bit of coral or a slice of jade. The words I use mean different things to me than they do to you - and yet we share a common language!
When groups of incumbent telecom providers gather together to protect consumers, it's usually to protect consumers from the distraction of non-incumbent providers striving to provide superior and less expensive service.