"...is currently freely available from all sorts of astonishingly illegal websites."
So these websites aren't just illegal, they're *astonishingly* illegal! This changes damn near everything about my view of the story!
Astonishingly illegal web site will contain material that illegally violates copyright laws, with exploits that will first illegally violate your computer, and after sending spam will illegally violate other peoples inboxes, and after intercepting your web banking session will illegally violate your bank account, and after getting you your web cam and photo collection may illegally violate your privacy (which may or may not involve pictures of someone being violated, but as long as it's all legal, it's not relevant here).
Sounds pretty astonishingly illegal to me.
Better stick to just non-astonishingly illegal web sites, as they'll be mostly limited to copyright infringement.
PCs come "jailbroken" by default. It didn't void the warranty on my PC when I installed Linux on it. Why should smartphones (which are just pocket sized computers) be any different?
Yeah, like if you fry your CPU by overclocking it or adjusting the fan RPM, on PCs it's covered by warranty. It's especially well covered in laptops, which have overheating warranty for life, because obviously laptops have more heat problems, and therefore overclocking consumers need better warranty protection.
Interestingly, that is only available for Symbian 5th edition devices (5xxx line started with 5800XM, N97 communicators), not for new Symbian^3 devices. Also, that seems to be... let's say politiley, limited version, compared to "desktop Silverlight". Wether that will change quickly, or not, will be quite revealing.
Ok, WTF. How have I missed that? And that's from last summer... Have to check it out, thanks for the link!
(Not that I'm excited about any MS technology, it's just that in current situation, that's something worth checking out...)
Assuming that will be part of Nokia developer story, which they'll hopefully talk more about next week(s), then choosing WP7 over Android certainly seems to make sense.
Just out of curiosity, what else were they going to do?
About what they did now, and just a bit more... Two alternatives to choose from:
1. Get the partner (Google or MS) accept adding Qt to the platform. That would have gained them a lot of developer love. Now they need to start a developer community completely from scratch, with old Nokia developers really pissed off, after the earlier Qt hype.
2. Get support for current partner platform (had it been Android or WP7) on Symbian and/or Meego. Like, Silverlight support for Symbian. This may not have gained them any Free Software love, but it would have given meaning to current Symbian line, and made a lot of commercial developers happy.
But now, they created a situation where they have no continuity between platforms, and bunch of angry developers who don't know what to do with Nokia now. I mean, isn't it practically like "if you want to develop for future Nokia, buy HTC now"? WTF.
I hope next week they'll take some corrective action. I actually hope it's been planned from the start, giving extra bad news first, then "clarifying" so bad news don't sound so horrible.
But if it is what it looks like now, who in their right mind is going to buy a Symbian phone? Nokia will run out of money before they get their first WP7 phone out of the door. But it's also quite believable that this was the plan, and MS will buy them out when the stock price is low enough.
Sure if you want to be intentionally obtuse about it. The point of "Any time you need to ask the question.....then the answer is no" is to emphasize a very important concept. Most of us have a pretty good idea of what is ethical and what is not. Of course some people don't have this ability and some things may seem ethically wrong when upon closure inspection there is no problem. These are the exceptions to the rule.
"As long as you don't question it, it's ethical" Again with the being obtuse. Clearly whether or not you question something has nothing to do with how ethical it is.
Maybe I'm overly idealistic, but I actually think that world should work so, that if it's clearly ethical or not, then one doesn't need to ask. As long as one doesn't feel the need to ask this about things one does, then one knows they're ethical (or not ethical, in which case one hopefully doesn't do them). As soon as somebody asks, we're entering territory where one should ask, as the answer isn't clear. And to be on the safe side, when asking, answer should be "yes" as often as "no", or one isn't asking often enough.
In short, in this context I don't agree with the idea, that "if one needs to ask, the answer is no".
You need math to see how it is "now" for us? Sure, some ideas of relativity are not exactly intuitive, but also not quite to such a point.
Actually, as I think I'm right here, the point of the math would be to make you understand the issue, when you can't express the "now" with maths...;-)
We can't even possibly know if 64 million years passed in the area of the supernova. Of course, it almost certainly did!...but there's no way to know, this "past" doesn't yet exist for us. Let us entertain a thought experiment with dramatic(*) differences in passage of time between "here" and the galaxy in question, after the photons were emitted. When did the event happen in such case?
That would depend on the chosen reference frame. To get the time of in any given reference frame, the normal relativistic equations are used. None of those equations produce time that is the "now". As long as you don't include any time-like loops, there won't be any contradictions, it'll all add up. And it won't add up to "now", IOW that interpretation is wrong.
Whether past exists before it's observed is a philosophical question, and it has nothing to do with physical time as used in equations. If you mix the concepts, you end up with photons travelling the distance from the explosion to us at infinite speed. As far as we know, at least in non-quantum scale, the past behaves like it was there all the time, even before we observed it. To assume anything else is the road to solipsism. We don't truly know if an event really happened even after observing it.
Don't know about "laws of ethics" but there are innate Natural Rights, which all human beings share simply because they are human.
But these are something some human has thought up because he thought they're logical and/or nice. Which was kind of the whole point.
Of course it's also natural, that some humans think that their personal view on "innate Natural Rights" is the absolute, non-subjective truth (not saying you do, necessarily).
How there's no privileged frame of reference, how all of them are equally valid, is the whole point. One which apparently you miss again, insisting on essentially Newtonian time tracking.
Now you must just be trolling...
But in case you aren't, show the math that says time of supernova is "now" == time of photons emitted is time of photons observed. I'm always open to updating my knowledge, and this case it'd be really easy, just look at the math. Note: Using reference frame of the photons wont' be valid math, as that produces essentially "division by zero" situation in the equations.
So what's "ethical" is not only fixed, but something everybody must intuitively know. As soon as something isn't intuitively known to be ethical, but raises question "is this ethical", then it automatically isn't?
Intriguing point of view, I must say.
Does it extend to "as long as you don't question it, it's ethical"?
It didn't exist for us, that changes quite a lot / just now observing something is simultaneity. But the point is ("Or even") - there is no difference, neither way of saying is particularly right or wrong (unless you insist on our locality / I would think we're past Newton by now)
For your information, there's no global reference frame in relativity... We have to pick a reference frame to talk about any events (such as a supernova explosion and humans observing it). And in any reference frame, the event did not happen when we observed the photons, it happened exactly distance/c=time ago. We don't have to pick any particular reference frame, the event still didn't happen "now", so that's always wrong.
Well, you could pick the reference frame of the photons, but I'm not sure that's a valid reference frame anyway, considering that frequency of the EM radiation is infinite in that reference frame...
The explosion as well as didn't exist for us until now.
That doesn't change anything. When we observed it, it started to retroactively exist for us. The time for the start of it's existence is the time it took for the light to travel that about 64 million light years. Calculating how many Earth years that is in our reference frame is left as exercise to the reader.
The star exploded in January, not when the Dinosaur's were around.
You've got some mighty fast photons then. I mean, just think, how long distance in our reference frame did the photons travel since January? Wow!
Or if you're referring to a January 64 million years ago, I'm sure there are many scientists who'd love to see the math and observations, which let you calculate it was just January, and not for instance Terturary;-)
It seems America is not the land of the free unless you can afford to pay for it!
Freedom is never free. You have to pay for either with money or with blood. And like always, you have to be careful that you buy the real stuff and don't fall for some sort of scam, wasting your blood or your money and getting nothing for it.
Get over it? As in, forget it, ignore it, accept it as fact of life? Sorry, no can do. At least some of the rest of us have a thing for this "freedom" fad. A world power restricting freedom in any particular way is and should be newsworthy.
Actually, to my knowledge, there is no reason to think that cold fusion has or every will work. It's a claim without solid theory behind it, no?
That's still better than having an established and apparently very accurate theory, that says it's impossible. So cold fusion isn't quite like perpetual motion.
Where is your peak oil now, bitches?! This is why I'm essentially a cornucopian. Never, ever underestimate the capacity of billions of minds to find some way of doing the previously impossible.
No worries, there's always going to be peak solar.
Of course it'll be a year or two before we've built the Dyson sphere, but after the last square degree of our Sun has been covered, energy prices are going to skyrocket!
Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...
on
Xfce 4.8 Released
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· Score: 1
And don't tell me that there is a single valid reason why FreeBSD should exist as a separate operating system, because there isn't (and the fact that people like Theo and Linus are jerks doesn't count).
Just to provide contrast, I'd like to point out that above you're trying to tell people to do things in a certain, very sensible (which of course is the way you think things should be done, because after all, it's a very sensible way), or they're jerks.
Think about it for a moment.
I presume you also think that either GPL or BSD "believers" (those who strongly prefer one style of license over the other) should just reject their idea of open source and embrace an idea they don't like. Just out of curiosity, which group should give up their ideals in your opinion?
Can you imagine how much it'd be worth if it was ad-supported?
Zuck would be Jimbo's bitch.
Better yet, imagine if advertisers were allowed to buy space in the articles itself, and to buy removal of links to their competitors? Yearly bidding, highest bidder gets ownership of an article for a year (to improve it and make it more accurate, of course)
Then it would be worth almost nothing.
I don't think an average marketing manager would realize that, so it doesn't affect viability of the business model, at least not during the first few quarters... And majority of the articles would stay "non-sponsored" anyway, and there's no real competition, and people are dumb, so it might even be a viable long term strategy...
Long term strategy to make money that is, not a long term strategy to create a reliable encyclopedia, of course...;-)
We're talking about the prediction of the future of a complex system. While the forecasts give hard numbers (temperature forecast) or narrow ranges of outcome (precipitation amounts), it's because that's what the general public seems to understand. Those "deterministic" weather forecast should be understood to have an implicit confidence interval.
Oi, how I'd love to have weather forecast graphs with confidence intervals!
I think they run simulations several times, so they could also just show the graphs given out by different runs, perhaps weighted/colored according to how likely that graph is estimated to be. Something like, "ok, looks like tomorrow will be a nice cool winter day for skiing, but apparently there's a chance that hell starts to freeze after midday, so I'd better pack up an extra pullover".
Complete BS. Climatology as a perfected science would include realtime models applicable to the micro-scale.
Yeah, but it'd be useful only after installing trackers on every butterfly, or better yet, using mind control rays on butterflies to control the global climate...:-)
("Butterfly" above of course refers to anything that can move or produce waste heat in unpredictable ways.)
Can you imagine how much it'd be worth if it was ad-supported?
Zuck would be Jimbo's bitch.
Better yet, imagine if advertisers were allowed to buy space in the articles itself, and to buy removal of links to their competitors? Yearly bidding, highest bidder gets ownership of an article for a year (to improve it and make it more accurate, of course)
Slashdot Mirror
"...is currently freely available from all sorts of astonishingly illegal websites."
So these websites aren't just illegal, they're *astonishingly* illegal! This changes damn near everything about my view of the story!
Astonishingly illegal web site will contain material that illegally violates copyright laws, with exploits that will first illegally violate your computer, and after sending spam will illegally violate other peoples inboxes, and after intercepting your web banking session will illegally violate your bank account, and after getting you your web cam and photo collection may illegally violate your privacy (which may or may not involve pictures of someone being violated, but as long as it's all legal, it's not relevant here).
Sounds pretty astonishingly illegal to me.
Better stick to just non-astonishingly illegal web sites, as they'll be mostly limited to copyright infringement.
PCs come "jailbroken" by default. It didn't void the warranty on my PC when I installed Linux on it. Why should smartphones (which are just pocket sized computers) be any different?
Yeah, like if you fry your CPU by overclocking it or adjusting the fan RPM, on PCs it's covered by warranty. It's especially well covered in laptops, which have overheating warranty for life, because obviously laptops have more heat problems, and therefore overclocking consumers need better warranty protection.
Get support for current partner platform (had it been Android or WP7) on Symbian and/or Meego. Like, Silverlight support for Symbian.
You mean, like this?
(Second reply.)
Interestingly, that is only available for Symbian 5th edition devices (5xxx line started with 5800XM, N97 communicators), not for new Symbian^3 devices. Also, that seems to be... let's say politiley, limited version, compared to "desktop Silverlight". Wether that will change quickly, or not, will be quite revealing.
Get support for current partner platform (had it been Android or WP7) on Symbian and/or Meego. Like, Silverlight support for Symbian.
You mean, like this?
Ok, WTF. How have I missed that? And that's from last summer... Have to check it out, thanks for the link!
(Not that I'm excited about any MS technology, it's just that in current situation, that's something worth checking out...)
Assuming that will be part of Nokia developer story, which they'll hopefully talk more about next week(s), then choosing WP7 over Android certainly seems to make sense.
Just out of curiosity, what else were they going to do?
About what they did now, and just a bit more... Two alternatives to choose from:
1. Get the partner (Google or MS) accept adding Qt to the platform. That would have gained them a lot of developer love. Now they need to start a developer community completely from scratch, with old Nokia developers really pissed off, after the earlier Qt hype.
2. Get support for current partner platform (had it been Android or WP7) on Symbian and/or Meego. Like, Silverlight support for Symbian. This may not have gained them any Free Software love, but it would have given meaning to current Symbian line, and made a lot of commercial developers happy.
But now, they created a situation where they have no continuity between platforms, and bunch of angry developers who don't know what to do with Nokia now. I mean, isn't it practically like "if you want to develop for future Nokia, buy HTC now"? WTF.
I hope next week they'll take some corrective action. I actually hope it's been planned from the start, giving extra bad news first, then "clarifying" so bad news don't sound so horrible.
But if it is what it looks like now, who in their right mind is going to buy a Symbian phone? Nokia will run out of money before they get their first WP7 phone out of the door. But it's also quite believable that this was the plan, and MS will buy them out when the stock price is low enough.
Sure if you want to be intentionally obtuse about it. The point of "Any time you need to ask the question.....then the answer is no" is to emphasize a very important concept. Most of us have a pretty good idea of what is ethical and what is not. Of course some people don't have this ability and some things may seem ethically wrong when upon closure inspection there is no problem. These are the exceptions to the rule.
"As long as you don't question it, it's ethical" Again with the being obtuse. Clearly whether or not you question something has nothing to do with how ethical it is.
Maybe I'm overly idealistic, but I actually think that world should work so, that if it's clearly ethical or not, then one doesn't need to ask. As long as one doesn't feel the need to ask this about things one does, then one knows they're ethical (or not ethical, in which case one hopefully doesn't do them). As soon as somebody asks, we're entering territory where one should ask, as the answer isn't clear. And to be on the safe side, when asking, answer should be "yes" as often as "no", or one isn't asking often enough.
In short, in this context I don't agree with the idea, that "if one needs to ask, the answer is no".
You need math to see how it is "now" for us? Sure, some ideas of relativity are not exactly intuitive, but also not quite to such a point.
Actually, as I think I'm right here, the point of the math would be to make you understand the issue, when you can't express the "now" with maths... ;-)
We can't even possibly know if 64 million years passed in the area of the supernova. Of course, it almost certainly did! ...but there's no way to know, this "past" doesn't yet exist for us. Let us entertain a thought experiment with dramatic(*) differences in passage of time between "here" and the galaxy in question, after the photons were emitted. When did the event happen in such case?
That would depend on the chosen reference frame. To get the time of in any given reference frame, the normal relativistic equations are used. None of those equations produce time that is the "now". As long as you don't include any time-like loops, there won't be any contradictions, it'll all add up. And it won't add up to "now", IOW that interpretation is wrong.
Whether past exists before it's observed is a philosophical question, and it has nothing to do with physical time as used in equations. If you mix the concepts, you end up with photons travelling the distance from the explosion to us at infinite speed. As far as we know, at least in non-quantum scale, the past behaves like it was there all the time, even before we observed it. To assume anything else is the road to solipsism. We don't truly know if an event really happened even after observing it.
Don't know about "laws of ethics" but there are innate Natural Rights, which all human beings share simply because they are human.
But these are something some human has thought up because he thought they're logical and/or nice. Which was kind of the whole point.
Of course it's also natural, that some humans think that their personal view on "innate Natural Rights" is the absolute, non-subjective truth (not saying you do, necessarily).
How there's no privileged frame of reference, how all of them are equally valid, is the whole point. One which apparently you miss again, insisting on essentially Newtonian time tracking.
Now you must just be trolling...
But in case you aren't, show the math that says time of supernova is "now" == time of photons emitted is time of photons observed. I'm always open to updating my knowledge, and this case it'd be really easy, just look at the math. Note: Using reference frame of the photons wont' be valid math, as that produces essentially "division by zero" situation in the equations.
Ethics are absolute. Laws are relative. There's no such thing as personal ethics.
Yeah, but ethics written by which god are absolute? Or do you believe universe itself has "laws of ethics", sort of like physical laws?
...then the answer is no.
So what's "ethical" is not only fixed, but something everybody must intuitively know. As soon as something isn't intuitively known to be ethical, but raises question "is this ethical", then it automatically isn't?
Intriguing point of view, I must say.
Does it extend to "as long as you don't question it, it's ethical"?
It didn't exist for us, that changes quite a lot / just now observing something is simultaneity. But the point is ("Or even") - there is no difference, neither way of saying is particularly right or wrong (unless you insist on our locality / I would think we're past Newton by now)
For your information, there's no global reference frame in relativity... We have to pick a reference frame to talk about any events (such as a supernova explosion and humans observing it). And in any reference frame, the event did not happen when we observed the photons, it happened exactly distance/c=time ago. We don't have to pick any particular reference frame, the event still didn't happen "now", so that's always wrong.
Well, you could pick the reference frame of the photons, but I'm not sure that's a valid reference frame anyway, considering that frequency of the EM radiation is infinite in that reference frame...
The explosion as well as didn't exist for us until now.
That doesn't change anything. When we observed it, it started to retroactively exist for us. The time for the start of it's existence is the time it took for the light to travel that about 64 million light years. Calculating how many Earth years that is in our reference frame is left as exercise to the reader.
The star exploded in January, not when the Dinosaur's were around.
You've got some mighty fast photons then. I mean, just think, how long distance in our reference frame did the photons travel since January? Wow!
Or if you're referring to a January 64 million years ago, I'm sure there are many scientists who'd love to see the math and observations, which let you calculate it was just January, and not for instance Terturary ;-)
Or even: the supernova happened now (well, a month ago) - as far as our frame of reference (and of dinosaurs, or what's left of them) is concerned.
Now it didn't. How far away is the point where the photons got emitted, as measured in our reference frame?
How long time does it take for photons to travel that distance, as measured in our reference frame?
Did the photons get emitted at the time of the explosion?
It seems America is not the land of the free unless you can afford to pay for it!
Freedom is never free. You have to pay for either with money or with blood. And like always, you have to be careful that you buy the real stuff and don't fall for some sort of scam, wasting your blood or your money and getting nothing for it.
Get over it? As in, forget it, ignore it, accept it as fact of life? Sorry, no can do. At least some of the rest of us have a thing for this "freedom" fad. A world power restricting freedom in any particular way is and should be newsworthy.
So the public don't like the law because they can get ratted out.
The ISPs don't like the law either
Why is there this law again?
The usual: too long time since the last total overhaul of the ruling class.
Actually, to my knowledge, there is no reason to think that cold fusion has or every will work. It's a claim without solid theory behind it, no?
That's still better than having an established and apparently very accurate theory, that says it's impossible. So cold fusion isn't quite like perpetual motion.
Where is your peak oil now, bitches?! This is why I'm essentially a cornucopian. Never, ever underestimate the capacity of billions of minds to find some way of doing the previously impossible.
No worries, there's always going to be peak solar.
Of course it'll be a year or two before we've built the Dyson sphere, but after the last square degree of our Sun has been covered, energy prices are going to skyrocket!
And don't tell me that there is a single valid reason why FreeBSD should exist as a separate operating system, because there isn't (and the fact that people like Theo and Linus are jerks doesn't count).
Just to provide contrast, I'd like to point out that above you're trying to tell people to do things in a certain, very sensible (which of course is the way you think things should be done, because after all, it's a very sensible way), or they're jerks.
Think about it for a moment.
I presume you also think that either GPL or BSD "believers" (those who strongly prefer one style of license over the other) should just reject their idea of open source and embrace an idea they don't like. Just out of curiosity, which group should give up their ideals in your opinion?
That revenue stream is tiny.
Can you imagine how much it'd be worth if it was ad-supported?
Zuck would be Jimbo's bitch.
Better yet, imagine if advertisers were allowed to buy space in the articles itself, and to buy removal of links to their competitors? Yearly bidding, highest bidder gets ownership of an article for a year (to improve it and make it more accurate, of course)
Then it would be worth almost nothing.
I don't think an average marketing manager would realize that, so it doesn't affect viability of the business model, at least not during the first few quarters... And majority of the articles would stay "non-sponsored" anyway, and there's no real competition, and people are dumb, so it might even be a viable long term strategy...
Long term strategy to make money that is, not a long term strategy to create a reliable encyclopedia, of course... ;-)
For some definition of wrong.
We're talking about the prediction of the future of a complex system. While the forecasts give hard numbers (temperature forecast) or narrow ranges of outcome (precipitation amounts), it's because that's what the general public seems to understand. Those "deterministic" weather forecast should be understood to have an implicit confidence interval.
Oi, how I'd love to have weather forecast graphs with confidence intervals!
I think they run simulations several times, so they could also just show the graphs given out by different runs, perhaps weighted/colored according to how likely that graph is estimated to be. Something like, "ok, looks like tomorrow will be a nice cool winter day for skiing, but apparently there's a chance that hell starts to freeze after midday, so I'd better pack up an extra pullover".
Complete BS. Climatology as a perfected science would include realtime models applicable to the micro-scale.
Yeah, but it'd be useful only after installing trackers on every butterfly, or better yet, using mind control rays on butterflies to control the global climate... :-)
("Butterfly" above of course refers to anything that can move or produce waste heat in unpredictable ways.)
That revenue stream is tiny.
Can you imagine how much it'd be worth if it was ad-supported?
Zuck would be Jimbo's bitch.
Better yet, imagine if advertisers were allowed to buy space in the articles itself, and to buy removal of links to their competitors? Yearly bidding, highest bidder gets ownership of an article for a year (to improve it and make it more accurate, of course)