Africans should concentrate on more important things, like food and education.
Yes, they should. However, Mark Shuttleworth is not your typical African. He is (like me), a educated South African of European ethnicity. And BTW, he has given some of his money to help educate poor-but-bright kids.
Mark Shuttleworth is the guy who sold his company, Thawte, to Verisign for billions of US dollars, giving Verisign a near-monopoly on the digital signature market. Remember that? Hm, wonder if Verisign thinks it was a good deal now?
If you believe in the capitalistic, entrepreneurial process, you should believe that the dosh is now Shuttleworth's to do with as he pleases, and if it doesn't feed the hungry, then that's not his problem. I doesn't matter where he lives or comes from - the internet is a global marketplace. You would not be saying that he has an obiligation as a rich individual to feed and clothe the poor if he hailed from California or London, would you, so why does geography to you matter now?
> who are you to say? Can I see your sources please?
I hate to be the one to point this out to you, but in any... debate..., where party A asserts that "X is currently doable", and another replies "no it isn't yet", the burden of proof is on party A, since it is far simpler to provide proof of the existence of a technology than it is to conclusively prove it's absence.
This is often seen in crank circles, for eg.
A: "UFO's abduct people every day!"
B: "no they don't"
A: "O yeah? prove it doesn't happen!"
While not wishing to tar you with the same brush as cranks, it is plain to see that the burden of proof is on A not B.
In short, let's see your sources on zero-g smelting, self-sustaining orbital ecologies, human bone weakness problem (or the feasablity of the alternative, rotating space staions) and radiation shielding. If they are good, I'll enjoy reading them and changing my mind.
>There is a lot we have yet to research in order to undertake a _real_ colonization effort That sort of knowledge wont just materialize from nothing.
Agreed. So don't shoot the messenger. I'm all for space migration for the Earth & for our species's sake, I'm just more realistic - I see it as a long-term project in need of basic research.
Space can be had by the common public. We don't need to wait on new technological developments, and we dont need the support of a government agency. We just need pioneers.
You haven't thought this through very far, have you? Getting to space is the least of our problems. With our current level of technology, a human population cannot survive indefinitely in space, and can only stay there temporarily at massive cost.
Living conditions, even in the brand new IIS, are cramped, noisy, smelly and life support takes lots of highly skilled maintainence.
We are nowhere close to making a safe, self-sustaining, self-feeding zero-g ecology.
We have no techniques yet for exploiting natural resources (e.g mining iron for construction) in a vacuum yet - construction work is exeedingly laborius and involves components manufactured entirely on earth.
There is no solution yet for the detrimental changes that long-term weightlessness has on human physiology - calcium loss in the bones etc.
Besides that, radiation shielding would be needed or they would die out within a generation from cancer and other detrimental mutations. That atmosphere thing protects us from most nasty solar radiation.
Whilst I agree with you genrally, Eliza did not break or pass the Turing test. Eliza can fool someone who is not expecting it for a few minutes with canned responses. It's only conversational tactic is to get the other person to talk - ie to be a good listener. Heck,/dev/nul is a good listener.
They hold contests regularly, pitting the best conversational programs against human judges (sorry... I don't remember any more details) and no programs are even close yet to being able to fool an alert judge.... human conversation is just far to bread for software.. yet.
For instance, If you say to Eliza
"My dog's name is Spot",
Eliza will reply
"Why do you say that your dog's name is Spot?"
Then a minute later, when you ask it
"What is my dog's name?"
The best that you'll get back is
"Why do you ask?"
i.e. a stock canned response indicating a general lack of comprehension:
We finally are getting to the point where machines will be able to do what the human brain alone can do," says James C. Spohrer, chief technical officer of IBM's venture capital relations group, who has studied Cyc's potential as a commercial project. "The time feels right."
The article is good, but this is a poor quote. As others have pointed out, what "the human brain alone can do" is a moving target. Remember when only humans could play world-class chess? prove theorems? Add two numbers together?
"That which makes us human and not just machines" is often defined simply as "the stuff that machiens can't do"... yet.
Just got word that a live video feed from the first total solar eclipse of the 21st century will be broadcast over the web tomorrow.
Ok, let me explain something 'cos you guys seem to be a bit lacking.
There are time zones, you see. Natures way of making sure that it isn't the same time of day everywhere at once. Africa (and Europe) being substantially east of the USA, is 12 hours or so in advance of most of the USA. Noon thursday, Cental african time, happens on your Wednesday evening. Take the time zones into account and you won't be late to the party.
You may think it's happening tomorrow, but it finished hours ago (I write this at 5:37 pm Thursday, SOuth African time). Better luck next time.
Of the bands/albums listed there as "important", none are all that important any more... hardly any of those artists have released what I would call a "hit" album in the past 10 years.
So what you are saying is that that Bethoven's 9th sucks just because he hasn't released anything lately?
As was pointed out in a prior slashdot discussion, music, literature and art do not cease to be relevent just because they weren't made yesterday. IMHO human nature has been the same for millenia, and if you say something novel and insightfull about it, that doesn's cease being important quickly.
The theatrical release is part of a promotion for the fall release of a DVD version (of Holy Grail).... Palin said DVD packages for "Life of Brian"... might follow.
This is disinformation at best.
I have owned both of these on DVD for over a year. Maybe he means that it is coming out in the European zone on DVD soon (this DVD zone is where I live, like that would stop me). Another reason not to play anong with this DVD zone nonsense.
However, there are tons of components & objects that aren't visual
Sorry, this is a terminology problem. Component in delphi means Descendant of TComponent. Almost all of these are visual, and most non-visual components really should just be TObjects. This isn't VB, we know how to use a constructor and destructor, we don't have to have it all dropped on the form.
The rest of your objects should compile and run just fine in Kylix.
I just wish Kylix wasn't restricted to the Intel platform...which I believe it is
Actually, the vast majority of Delphi components are written in native Delphi.
Correct
There will probably need to be some modification of the code to move them to Delphi 6/Kylix, but on the whole it's supposed to be an easy transition.
Most components, when taken from Delphi 5 to Delphi 6, will work after being recompiled. With Kylix it's a different ballgame. Delphi controls mostly either wrap a Win32 API, or wrap and aggregate other delphi controls that do it. You'll have to thow them out and start again. Like Borland did with VCL: it isn't there at all in Kylix, instead we have CLX controls.
They did model their schools, government, constitution and many other bodies after British.
Hardly suprising seeing as the British did that for them, down the barrel of a gatling gun.
All that you are saying is that there is a legacy of the colonial age, which BTW was driven by sheer greed, lust for power and belief that westerners were better and therefor allowed to exploit the natives.
because the Indian Civilisation, for all it's strengths and faults, was taken over by the British and remade in thier image, and becuase it still has a strong colonial legacy, therefor that first light of the west's wisdom brought order to the chaos that was these dark and primitive lands Give me a break.
BTW, I used to date an Indian girl. She used to tease me about our respective ancentires: "My ancestors were scholars and scribes when your were painting themselves blue!" This is factually correct.
And yes, I do live in the "third world', though not anywhere near India.
It breathed the first light of the west's wisdom on those dark and primitive lands
A highly offensive troll, and you fell for it like the morons you are. You who moderated that racist drivel up to +4, I hope you feel ashamed of yourselves.
emacs.. actually getting things done.. LaTeX... technical merit
Better than office at what? You haven't really thought about what the majority of computer users ( ie people who work at a desk in a job that doesn't involve creating software) need from thier computers at all, have you? MS has. That's why they make so much money.
Crippled by trying to have the same functionality and file formats as Office
So first this functionality is dead easy to replicate, now it's impossible?
What we need is to standardise on an international patent body which can allow patents to be filed once and once only, and be internationally binding.
Oh good. I agree. Why don't you Americans start by dismantling your patent office, which is generally acknowledged to suck more than most, and refer all patent-seekers to the European Union.
Smoking anything would be problematic in space... smoke... would just kind of cluster in a ball around the lit tip of your cigarette until it goes out. "
Not if you inhale vigorously:)
Re:All you need to know about this book
on
The Business
·
· Score: 1
It is readable but inspiring
Arrgh, need more proffraeding. Better make that "It is readable but uninspiring
All you need to know about this book
on
The Business
·
· Score: 1
Iain Banks has written some extraordinarily good books, both SF and (with varying degrees of oddness) non-SF.
This isn't one of them. Not that it actively sucks, just that I expected more given his track-record. It is readable but inspiring. It is OK but nothing to write to slashdot about.
Cue a game of cat and mouse with the hackers putting out keysets and the HDCP struggling to keep their updates moving.
Then all it takes to crash this system is that it be continually cracked. Either one of 2 scenarios will soon ensue:
1) Keys are the same over many users. Joe Hacker cracks a key, the key is revoked, lots of other honest citizens suffer:
so your copy of The Matrix will play fine, but Antitrust knows your keys are compromised and so won't play. And neither will anyone else's copy . The system gets a bad rep and tanks in the market.
2)Keys are different for each user The List of 'compromised keys', with a bit of work, soon becomes unmanagably long.
> multinational companies... just operate within the law as interpreted in the courts
That and change laws where they can to favour themselves, and buy off state officials where they can to overlook transgressions.
> Making the patent law the same everywhere could just as easily reduce the dominance of US-
Making the rest of the world adopt US laws and atittudes, as usually happens (cf legislation on Illegal drugs or software patents), does nothing to reduce US dominance.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, they should. However, Mark Shuttleworth is not your typical African. He is (like me), a educated South African of European ethnicity. And BTW, he has given some of his money to help educate poor-but-bright kids.
Mark Shuttleworth is the guy who sold his company, Thawte, to Verisign for billions of US dollars, giving Verisign a near-monopoly on the digital signature market. Remember that? Hm, wonder if Verisign thinks it was a good deal now?
If you believe in the capitalistic, entrepreneurial process, you should believe that the dosh is now Shuttleworth's to do with as he pleases, and if it doesn't feed the hungry, then that's not his problem. I doesn't matter where he lives or comes from - the internet is a global marketplace. You would not be saying that he has an obiligation as a rich individual to feed and clothe the poor if he hailed from California or London, would you, so why does geography to you matter now?
It does none of these, clearly. In that sense it is not a competitor to .NET at all. The article is misleading in that sense.
.NET.
It is more of a competitor to MS's vision of subscription-based services (e.g. Passport) and software leases. These form another part of
In fact the closeset analogy in MS-land is Windows update.
> who are you to say? Can I see your sources please?
... debate ..., where party A asserts that "X is currently doable", and another replies "no it isn't yet", the burden of proof is on party A, since it is far simpler to provide proof of the existence of a technology than it is to conclusively prove it's absence.
I hate to be the one to point this out to you, but in any
This is often seen in crank circles, for eg.
A: "UFO's abduct people every day!"
B: "no they don't"
A: "O yeah? prove it doesn't happen!"
While not wishing to tar you with the same brush as cranks, it is plain to see that the burden of proof is on A not B.
In short, let's see your sources on zero-g smelting, self-sustaining orbital ecologies, human bone weakness problem (or the feasablity of the alternative, rotating space staions) and radiation shielding. If they are good, I'll enjoy reading them and changing my mind.
>There is a lot we have yet to research in order to undertake a _real_ colonization effort That sort of knowledge wont just materialize from nothing.
Agreed. So don't shoot the messenger. I'm all for space migration for the Earth & for our species's sake, I'm just more realistic - I see it as a long-term project in need of basic research.
You haven't thought this through very far, have you? Getting to space is the least of our problems. With our current level of technology, a human population cannot survive indefinitely in space, and can only stay there temporarily at massive cost.
Living conditions, even in the brand new IIS, are cramped, noisy, smelly and life support takes lots of highly skilled maintainence.
We are nowhere close to making a safe, self-sustaining, self-feeding zero-g ecology.
We have no techniques yet for exploiting natural resources (e.g mining iron for construction) in a vacuum yet - construction work is exeedingly laborius and involves components manufactured entirely on earth.
There is no solution yet for the detrimental changes that long-term weightlessness has on human physiology - calcium loss in the bones etc.
Besides that, radiation shielding would be needed or they would die out within a generation from cancer and other detrimental mutations. That atmosphere thing protects us from most nasty solar radiation.
We don't need pioneers ... yet.
Whilst I agree with you genrally, Eliza did not break or pass the Turing test. Eliza can fool someone who is not expecting it for a few minutes with canned responses. It's only conversational tactic is to get the other person to talk - ie to be a good listener. Heck, /dev/nul is a good listener.
... human conversation is just far to bread for software .. yet.
They hold contests regularly, pitting the best conversational programs against human judges (sorry... I don't remember any more details) and no programs are even close yet to being able to fool an alert judge.
For instance, If you say to Eliza
"My dog's name is Spot",
Eliza will reply
"Why do you say that your dog's name is Spot?"
Then a minute later, when you ask it
"What is my dog's name?"
The best that you'll get back is
"Why do you ask?"
i.e. a stock canned response indicating a general lack of comprehension:
The article is good, but this is a poor quote. As others have pointed out, what "the human brain alone can do" is a moving target. Remember when only humans could play world-class chess? prove theorems? Add two numbers together?
"That which makes us human and not just machines" is often defined simply as "the stuff that machiens can't do" ... yet.
Ok, let me explain something 'cos you guys seem to be a bit lacking.
There are time zones, you see. Natures way of making sure that it isn't the same time of day everywhere at once. Africa (and Europe) being substantially east of the USA, is 12 hours or so in advance of most of the USA. Noon thursday, Cental african time, happens on your Wednesday evening. Take the time zones into account and you won't be late to the party.
You may think it's happening tomorrow, but it finished hours ago (I write this at 5:37 pm Thursday, SOuth African time). Better luck next time.
So what you are saying is that that Bethoven's 9th sucks just because he hasn't released anything lately?
As was pointed out in a prior slashdot discussion, music, literature and art do not cease to be relevent just because they weren't made yesterday. IMHO human nature has been the same for millenia, and if you say something novel and insightfull about it, that doesn's cease being important quickly.
This is disinformation at best.
I have owned both of these on DVD for over a year. Maybe he means that it is coming out in the European zone on DVD soon (this DVD zone is where I live, like that would stop me). Another reason not to play anong with this DVD zone nonsense.
Sorry, this is a terminology problem. Component in delphi means Descendant of TComponent. Almost all of these are visual, and most non-visual components really should just be TObjects. This isn't VB, we know how to use a constructor and destructor, we don't have to have it all dropped on the form.
The rest of your objects should compile and run just fine in Kylix.
I just wish Kylix wasn't restricted to the Intel platform...which I believe it is
Correct
Correct
There will probably need to be some modification of the code to move them to Delphi 6/Kylix, but on the whole it's supposed to be an easy transition.
Most components, when taken from Delphi 5 to Delphi 6, will work after being recompiled. With Kylix it's a different ballgame. Delphi controls mostly either wrap a Win32 API, or wrap and aggregate other delphi controls that do it. You'll have to thow them out and start again. Like Borland did with VCL: it isn't there at all in Kylix, instead we have CLX controls.
I've had to put up with FUD like that from management types Since Delphi 2's days. Delphi 6 has just shipped, stronger than ever.
Even if it was dead, which it isn't, I'd still code in it, because it is both productive and fun. Hm, maybe that's why it's going so strong.
Hardly suprising seeing as the British did that for them, down the barrel of a gatling gun.
All that you are saying is that there is a legacy of the colonial age, which BTW was driven by sheer greed, lust for power and belief that westerners were better and therefor allowed to exploit the natives.
because the Indian Civilisation, for all it's strengths and faults, was taken over by the British and remade in thier image, and becuase it still has a strong colonial legacy, therefor that first light of the west's wisdom brought order to the chaos that was these dark and primitive lands Give me a break.
BTW, I used to date an Indian girl. She used to tease me about our respective ancentires: "My ancestors were scholars and scribes when your were painting themselves blue!" This is factually correct.
And yes, I do live in the "third world', though not anywhere near India.
A highly offensive troll, and you fell for it like the morons you are. You who moderated that racist drivel up to +4, I hope you feel ashamed of yourselves.
Oddly enough, this is not original see ther E2 node for : /dev/bong
> but doesn't it look like the (Mega) Corporations run things now?
Yeah, but they can only buy one country's government at a time. Looks like that this corp has the USA sewn up, but they forgot Oz.
> he proposes a hierarchical model that fits to data rather than fitting the data to the model
... the ones that relational databases obsoleted.
Ah yes, hierarchical databases
Better than office at what? You haven't really thought about what the majority of computer users ( ie people who work at a desk in a job that doesn't involve creating software) need from thier computers at all, have you? MS has. That's why they make so much money.
Crippled by trying to have the same functionality and file formats as Office
So first this functionality is dead easy to replicate, now it's impossible?
Somebody mod this troll down please.
Oh good. I agree. Why don't you Americans start by dismantling your patent office, which is generally acknowledged to suck more than most, and refer all patent-seekers to the European Union.
Point made?
Not if you inhale vigorously :)
It is readable but inspiring
Arrgh, need more proffraeding. Better make that "It is readable but uninspiring
Iain Banks has written some extraordinarily good books, both SF and (with varying degrees of oddness) non-SF.
This isn't one of them. Not that it actively sucks, just that I expected more given his track-record. It is readable but inspiring. It is OK but nothing to write to slashdot about.
Then all it takes to crash this system is that it be continually cracked. Either one of 2 scenarios will soon ensue:
1) Keys are the same over many users. Joe Hacker cracks a key, the key is revoked, lots of other honest citizens suffer:
so your copy of The Matrix will play fine, but Antitrust knows your keys are compromised and so won't play. And neither will anyone else's copy . The system gets a bad rep and tanks in the market.
2)Keys are different for each user The List of 'compromised keys', with a bit of work, soon becomes unmanagably long.
> multinational companies ... just operate within the law as interpreted in the courts
That and change laws where they can to favour themselves, and buy off state officials where they can to overlook transgressions.
> Making the patent law the same everywhere could just as easily reduce the dominance of US-
Making the rest of the world adopt US laws and atittudes, as usually happens (cf legislation on Illegal drugs or software patents), does nothing to reduce US dominance.