How can universities being profitable and students getting a taste of what the real world has in store for their futures in the professional scientific research industry be a bad thing?
I read the article twice and even after parsing Mr. Katz's loquacious sensationalism, I can't see how the loss of innocence isn't covered by the benefits of this change.
Anyone who is not convinced by now that a star having planets orbitting it is the norm, and not the exception, needs to have their head examined. As telescopes continue to get better, we're going to find more and more. It won't be a worthy headline until we're able to detect earth-sized/earth-like planets orbitting nearby stars. Which, probably isn't as far in the future as most think...
The cold, hard truth is that they are right. The document is well-written and undisputable. It doesn't matter that the RIAA is evil. The fact is, they are in the right. We should keep that in mind and pick our battles more carefully.
We do and say a lot of things behind our protective monitors that we would never do otherwise. Downloading copyrighted music via Napster isn't any different than stealing it from the music store.
I never jumped on the SETI@Home bandwagon for a bunch of reasons. The program seemed to be very poorly written, at least compared to the d-net client. I was already involved in the never-ending RC5-64 project. But, the biggest deterrent, was the simple fact that SETI@Home didn't need my processor time. They had 6 billion Windows lusers running their screensavers and a very finite amount of data to be crunched.
Has this changed recently? It seems like just as many people as ever are running the client. Since they only get x amount of telescope time per week, do they actually have enough new work to hand out to all their users?
I love the idea of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, but I think they've got it well covered. I'm sticking to d-net and optimal golomb rulers. At least I feel as though my processor time is helping to achieve a goal.
I'm a big fan of Jupiter and it's moons. And I was initally thrilled by reading the headline. However, it quickly occured to me that a Jovial moon that has not been discovered until recently, must be tiny. A space turd, if you will. Sure enough, the article mentions an estimate for the diameter of the moon at about 3 miles. It's a bit hard to get excited about an ordinary asteroid that happened to get caught in Jupiter's gravitational field.
But, technically, it's a new moon because it orbits a planet. Of course, every man-made satellite that we've put in orbit around Jupiter, not to mention the Earth, is also, technically, a moon. Not to mention other items, like the infamous glove lost by an astronaut, which will orbit the Earth as a small, insignificant moon until getting sucked in a bit too close to the atmosphere.
I even seem to remember reading, perhaps on slashdot, about a comet with a hugely erratic orbit that scientists believe centers around the earth. So, we have 2 natural moons!
In reality, if we lived on Jupiter, and scientists told us that there was a tiny 3 mile long pebble orbitting 15 million miles from the surface that we couldn't see with our naked eye, would we call it a moon? Or would we not worry about it because we're getting squished by the massive gravitational field and dealing with the fact that we're trying to stand on a gaseous planet?
Statistics say whatever you want them to say. And although I'm all for music on the internet, the reality is that we slashdot readers, morally superior and good looking, are the minority. Sure, we sample songs on Napster and then buy the CD's.
However, for every one of us, there's 20 poor college kids or script kiddies who are rapidly filling their brand new 80 GB hard drives with every MP3 they can find. I'm playing devil's advocate here; I'm certainly not siding with the RIAA, but let's be honest with ourselves.
Here again we have further evidence that the internet needs a global court system of some kind to allow justice of some sort to be served in instances like this. Wouldn't the United Nations be the perfect establishment for some sort of review panel or judicial board regarding internet law?
Katz wasn't able to review a summer movie without saying 'post-Columbine'. You would think someone who is so loquacious would manage to find a few more buzzwords to throw about...
Whoa...I need to check your sarcasm filter, I guess. Are you suggesting that your three bullet points are not valid lawsuits? Now I'm the first to agree when you say there are too many frivious lawsuits in the world, so I'll dismiss your first example. If a mechanic does a shitty job, you don't sue, you go to a different mechanic.
But, if I have my spleen removed because I was misdiagnosed and actually only needed a good foot massage to be cured, then I assure you that I'm gonna lay the wrath of Johnny Cochran on that worthless quack.
Further, the building contractor that I just put myself in debt for to build my dream house is going to either fix those cracks or face my team of legal eagles.
Or am I missing something? Anyway, it all comes down to the verbiage of the contract. I severely doubt that the web designers signed a contract that stated the client had to be happy with the work done. In my book, they get the mechanic treatment. Take your web design work to someone else.
This guy is great. If there were more like him sitting in Congress, I think we'd all have a lot more faith in our government.
He has a mixture of intelligence and common sense that I wasn't aware is allowed in Washington DC. Nothing quite like watching the record industry get slapped around by the only body in existance that can do it.
I wonder what the effect of this will be on the current MP3 wars. If people own devices that play MP3 CD's, perhaps the record companies will start releasing massive compilation CD's for reasonable amounts of money.
If they feel that they are able to make a buck off this technology, they may change their tune.
Now that all 3 modules are up there, we can relax and oppress the other countries. We have plenty of time before 2020 to finish the rest of the ship and launch for Alpha Centauri...
Pol Pot, Hitler, and Stalin's regimes are identical to what is happening today. Without doubt, allowing our government to make an attempt to prevent crime is akin to bringing to life Orwellian visions.
What is your solution? Shall we put a direct hyperlink on Yahoo! to the Anarchist's cookbook so that script kiddies can stop their DoS attacks and start making napalm in their garage?
Everyone is awfully concerned about the black ops in the big bad government reading their email and flagging them because they say the word 'bong', but I haven't seen a single suggestion for how crime could be lessened.
Come back to earth, Slashdot readers. The government isn't secretly reading all of our emails to see if we like to wear pink fuzzy slippers and listen to Duran Duran. Have you considered that there are people working for the government who care about our country as much, if not more than, we do? Why does everyone assume that the Cigarette Smoking Man is after them?
If the government has a technique that can decrease crime, prevent terrorism, and save lives, how can you be opposed to it? It's not possible to analyze all the data they could potentially retrieve. They have their hands full with the data they mean to find. I see no reason for unnecesary paranoia.
I've been in this industry for almost exactly two years. I had no background in it and have been relying entirely on aptitude to compete with the guys who were coding at birth. I'm now making three times the money I was making when I was busting my ass bartending, welding, or pretending to be a musician.
From my point of view, these technological shackles, have totally changed my life for the better. I have a house, a car that doesn't suck, a lawn that always needs watering, and a family. I have infinite free time compared to the past. If I choose to spend that free time connected to the electronic heroin at Battle.Net, you can hardly blame the laptop.
People may be dragging their cell-phones everywhere they go, but it's because they like looking important. How can we complain about people bringing palm-pilots on vacation? We can finally afford those vacations!
I see the problem as having to do more with justification than anything else. It's difficult, even for the most die-hard of us, to ask for more money for space exploration when we have so many problems at home. Does putting a man on Mars take precedece in anyone's book to curing AIDS, ending world hunger, or promoting global peace?
I agree that many of the answers may lie beyond our boundries, but we're in the minority.
When I first heard about it, I dismissed Process Tree out of hand as being some silly internet-based pyramid scheme. This article lends some credibility to it, however. It would be a great thing if this came to fruition. D-net held my loyalty for well over a year, but in the end, the lack of progress and reward overwhelmed me into giving my CPU fans a break...
This is truly an extraordinary breathrough. Creating potentially helpful persistant, synthetic chromosomes will likely revolutionize the treatment of disease. We could be on the edge of a tremendous step in evolution.
Excellent. The nation that still can't build a decent clock/radio is now moving to the next logical step past their duct-tape space station. I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot about this innovation in the future.
Humor aside, I think that NASA is overreacting. Either Europa has life or it doesn't. If it doesn't, we should hope that it is 'contaminated'. If it does, I would put my money on a planetful of life specially evolved for that planet's conditions over a couple dozen carpet-bagging bacteria from a warm and comfy inner-system world like Earth.
This is a very thoughtless opinion. You're suggesting that we risk wiping out a potentially unique lifeform because if it's not tough enough to beat out our completely alien bacteria, it doesn't deserve to live.
That's very Darwinist of you, but I doubt you would feel the same way if another, more advanced civilization allowed a craft to crash into our planet carrying contaminants that could destroy us.
I should really think up a nifty sig line if I'm going to start posting to Slashdot...
Slashdot Mirror
How can universities being profitable and students getting a taste of what the real world has in store for their futures in the professional scientific research industry be a bad thing?
I read the article twice and even after parsing Mr. Katz's loquacious sensationalism, I can't see how the loss of innocence isn't covered by the benefits of this change.
Anyone who is not convinced by now that a star having planets orbitting it is the norm, and not the exception, needs to have their head examined. As telescopes continue to get better, we're going to find more and more. It won't be a worthy headline until we're able to detect earth-sized/earth-like planets orbitting nearby stars. Which, probably isn't as far in the future as most think...
The cold, hard truth is that they are right. The document is well-written and undisputable. It doesn't matter that the RIAA is evil. The fact is, they are in the right. We should keep that in mind and pick our battles more carefully.
We do and say a lot of things behind our protective monitors that we would never do otherwise. Downloading copyrighted music via Napster isn't any different than stealing it from the music store.
Are we now indiscriminately submitting every story that has anything to do with the internet to Slashdot?
I wonder if this effects the deal LucasArts made with Sony/Verant, makers of EverQueer, to do something similar. Here's the press release.
I never jumped on the SETI@Home bandwagon for a bunch of reasons. The program seemed to be very poorly written, at least compared to the d-net client. I was already involved in the never-ending RC5-64 project. But, the biggest deterrent, was the simple fact that SETI@Home didn't need my processor time. They had 6 billion Windows lusers running their screensavers and a very finite amount of data to be crunched.
Has this changed recently? It seems like just as many people as ever are running the client. Since they only get x amount of telescope time per week, do they actually have enough new work to hand out to all their users?
I love the idea of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, but I think they've got it well covered. I'm sticking to d-net and optimal golomb rulers. At least I feel as though my processor time is helping to achieve a goal.
I'm a big fan of Jupiter and it's moons. And I was initally thrilled by reading the headline. However, it quickly occured to me that a Jovial moon that has not been discovered until recently, must be tiny. A space turd, if you will. Sure enough, the article mentions an estimate for the diameter of the moon at about 3 miles. It's a bit hard to get excited about an ordinary asteroid that happened to get caught in Jupiter's gravitational field.
But, technically, it's a new moon because it orbits a planet. Of course, every man-made satellite that we've put in orbit around Jupiter, not to mention the Earth, is also, technically, a moon. Not to mention other items, like the infamous glove lost by an astronaut, which will orbit the Earth as a small, insignificant moon until getting sucked in a bit too close to the atmosphere.
I even seem to remember reading, perhaps on slashdot, about a comet with a hugely erratic orbit that scientists believe centers around the earth. So, we have 2 natural moons!
In reality, if we lived on Jupiter, and scientists told us that there was a tiny 3 mile long pebble orbitting 15 million miles from the surface that we couldn't see with our naked eye, would we call it a moon? Or would we not worry about it because we're getting squished by the massive gravitational field and dealing with the fact that we're trying to stand on a gaseous planet?
Statistics say whatever you want them to say. And although I'm all for music on the internet, the reality is that we slashdot readers, morally superior and good looking, are the minority. Sure, we sample songs on Napster and then buy the CD's.
However, for every one of us, there's 20 poor college kids or script kiddies who are rapidly filling their brand new 80 GB hard drives with every MP3 they can find. I'm playing devil's advocate here; I'm certainly not siding with the RIAA, but let's be honest with ourselves.
Here again we have further evidence that the internet needs a global court system of some kind to allow justice of some sort to be served in instances like this. Wouldn't the United Nations be the perfect establishment for some sort of review panel or judicial board regarding internet law?
Katz wasn't able to review a summer movie without saying 'post-Columbine'. You would think someone who is so loquacious would manage to find a few more buzzwords to throw about...
Whoa...I need to check your sarcasm filter, I guess. Are you suggesting that your three bullet points are not valid lawsuits? Now I'm the first to agree when you say there are too many frivious lawsuits in the world, so I'll dismiss your first example. If a mechanic does a shitty job, you don't sue, you go to a different mechanic.
But, if I have my spleen removed because I was misdiagnosed and actually only needed a good foot massage to be cured, then I assure you that I'm gonna lay the wrath of Johnny Cochran on that worthless quack.
Further, the building contractor that I just put myself in debt for to build my dream house is going to either fix those cracks or face my team of legal eagles.
Or am I missing something? Anyway, it all comes down to the verbiage of the contract. I severely doubt that the web designers signed a contract that stated the client had to be happy with the work done. In my book, they get the mechanic treatment. Take your web design work to someone else.
TLD's do not necessarily have to be 3 letters long like .com, .net, and .org.
I want my website to be http://www.bguilliams.rocksthehousemonkey.
This guy is great. If there were more like him sitting in Congress, I think we'd all have a lot more faith in our government.
He has a mixture of intelligence and common sense that I wasn't aware is allowed in Washington DC. Nothing quite like watching the record industry get slapped around by the only body in existance that can do it.
I wonder what the effect of this will be on the current MP3 wars. If people own devices that play MP3 CD's, perhaps the record companies will start releasing massive compilation CD's for reasonable amounts of money.
If they feel that they are able to make a buck off this technology, they may change their tune.
Now that all 3 modules are up there, we can relax and oppress the other countries. We have plenty of time before 2020 to finish the rest of the ship and launch for Alpha Centauri...
Pol Pot, Hitler, and Stalin's regimes are identical to what is happening today. Without doubt, allowing our government to make an attempt to prevent crime is akin to bringing to life Orwellian visions.
What is your solution? Shall we put a direct hyperlink on Yahoo! to the Anarchist's cookbook so that script kiddies can stop their DoS attacks and start making napalm in their garage?
Everyone is awfully concerned about the black ops in the big bad government reading their email and flagging them because they say the word 'bong', but I haven't seen a single suggestion for how crime could be lessened.
Come back to earth, Slashdot readers. The government isn't secretly reading all of our emails to see if we like to wear pink fuzzy slippers and listen to Duran Duran. Have you considered that there are people working for the government who care about our country as much, if not more than, we do? Why does everyone assume that the Cigarette Smoking Man is after them?
If the government has a technique that can decrease crime, prevent terrorism, and save lives, how can you be opposed to it? It's not possible to analyze all the data they could potentially retrieve. They have their hands full with the data they mean to find. I see no reason for unnecesary paranoia.
I've been in this industry for almost exactly two years. I had no background in it and have been relying entirely on aptitude to compete with the guys who were coding at birth. I'm now making three times the money I was making when I was busting my ass bartending, welding, or pretending to be a musician.
From my point of view, these technological shackles, have totally changed my life for the better. I have a house, a car that doesn't suck, a lawn that always needs watering, and a family. I have infinite free time compared to the past. If I choose to spend that free time connected to the electronic heroin at Battle.Net, you can hardly blame the laptop.
People may be dragging their cell-phones everywhere they go, but it's because they like looking important. How can we complain about people bringing palm-pilots on vacation? We can finally afford those vacations!
I guess I just don't see the downside...
I see the problem as having to do more with justification than anything else. It's difficult, even for the most die-hard of us, to ask for more money for space exploration when we have so many problems at home. Does putting a man on Mars take precedece in anyone's book to curing AIDS, ending world hunger, or promoting global peace?
I agree that many of the answers may lie beyond our boundries, but we're in the minority.
When I first heard about it, I dismissed Process Tree out of hand as being some silly internet-based pyramid scheme. This article lends some credibility to it, however. It would be a great thing if this came to fruition. D-net held my loyalty for well over a year, but in the end, the lack of progress and reward overwhelmed me into giving my CPU fans a break...
This is truly an extraordinary breathrough. Creating potentially helpful persistant, synthetic chromosomes will likely revolutionize the treatment of disease. We could be on the edge of a tremendous step in evolution.
Excellent. The nation that still can't build a decent clock/radio is now moving to the next logical step past their duct-tape space station. I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot about this innovation in the future.
Humor aside, I think that NASA is overreacting. Either Europa has life or it doesn't. If it doesn't, we should hope that it is 'contaminated'. If it does, I would put my money on a planetful of life specially evolved for that planet's conditions over a couple dozen carpet-bagging bacteria from a warm and comfy inner-system world like Earth.
This is a very thoughtless opinion. You're suggesting that we risk wiping out a potentially unique lifeform because if it's not tough enough to beat out our completely alien bacteria, it doesn't deserve to live.
That's very Darwinist of you, but I doubt you would feel the same way if another, more advanced civilization allowed a craft to crash into our planet carrying contaminants that could destroy us.
I should really think up a nifty sig line if I'm going to start posting to Slashdot...