Indeed. Well spotted to all those chimps that pointed out that BBC stands for "British Broadcasting Corporation". 10/10 for general knowledge and 5/10 for understanding.
The BBC is operated under two constitutional documents: its Royal Charter and the Licence and Agreement. The Charter defines the BBC's objects, powers, obligations and the sources and uses of its income, while the Licence and Agreement sets the terms and conditions under which it must operate.
"Subject to the general law of the land and the provisions of the Charter and the Licence and Agreement, the BBC has full editorial and managerial independence in its day-to-day programme and other activities"
For more information visit this terribly informative site, which will doubtless also explain all about impartiality and public service broadcasting for you.:)
This will probably turn into a bit of an off-topic rant so feel free to mod me down if you like but this is a good a chance as any to get this off my chest.
Firstly the qualification: I'm a Brit - and I'm far from an anti-American one, although that sort of thing is definitely on the increase over here.
As flippant as it was, the parent poster actually has a point. On top of my taxes I pay a license fee so that the BBC can provide its (undeniably) excellent services to the world. Its largely English language services of course benefit the U.S. as much, if not more than they do the U.K. Perhaps all the more so given the ubiquity and uniformity of corporate media power on that side of the pond.
And so to the rant: At the moment my country does pretty much exactly what the Whitehouse (and Whitehouse-friendly corporations) want or tell it to do. But I can't vote for the president. So, since us Brits can't vote for our 'president' and, in more ways than this simple example, pay taxes and provide services for the whole English-speaking world, with very little in the form of reciprocation, is it any wonder that people over here are beginning to question the so-called 'special relationship'?
Someone on/. recently had a dig at my pro-Kerry sig when they realised that I wasn't an American Citizen. I think the jist of it was: "If you want to influence our election, come to the U.S. and become a Citizen." That was probably my main motivation for this rant. Britons haven't served a foreign ruler in such a capacity since the Roman Empire. The least us non-Citizen class provincial Romans can do these days is appeal to those that live in Rome and ask that they carry our thoughts back to the Senate/Emperor.
Right, that's the rant over - thanks for your indulgence.
Now back on-topic: That's great! But even if every one of the UK'S 60 million or so individuals (including kids etc.) paid a license fee, that still wouldn't pay for hosting the BBC's entire video output at broadband quality for the entire global English-speaking world. Hopefully non-U.K. based clients will have to pay some form of fee, perhaps even a subscription, to help pay for these services.
I would have thought LinSpire might have learned from the whole Lindows name fiasco
I thought to myself, "They did!"
Clearly they have learned from the lindows/windows fiasco. Thousands of people had never heard of them before that. Now thousands more will hear about them through this. I wonder who's next after Microsoft and Apple. Maybe they should go after one of SCO's trademarks instead?;-)
As for life on Mars... I watched a really good documentary about the moon the other day, which basically explained that without the moon -- a single moon -- to help stabilize our planet, we probably wouldn't have ever been here. It will be interesting to see if life evolved on Mars, perhaps conditions were favourable in the past. Apparently since it has multiple small moons, it wobbles on its axis, which makes the climate really unstable over very long periods of times. Or, that was the gist of it.
Maybe Mars had a perfectly capable moon but it disintegrated (or was blown up by aliens hehe), thereby inducing a wobble and buggering its fragile ecosystem - leaving the big red lump we know and love today.
If the purpose of this redesign is to better allow the armed forces to communicate on the battlefield, I highly doubt that they will embed snooping and tracing into the protocol. The military takes great pains to ensure that thier communications are kept secure, and having a secret backdoor in their entire communication system (no matter who controls it) is not something they would tolerate.
Well, no but you don't need to put in backdoors to retain ultimate control of a network. Would you want the world to be forced to use a network that is authoritatively maintained by the Pentagon? I'm not American for one thing (nor's the 'Net btw) and therefore I particularly wouldn't like to host my websites on Don Rumsfeld's network nor even a global network that his boys designed to his spec.;-) I'd end up trusting it about as much as I trust him and there's no prizes for guessing how much that is.
Think GPS. It's publicly and commercially available but the moment that shit starts going down, resolution for 'public' customers is throttled and the world is suddenly forced to remember that the USAF has the keys.
But surely that's a good point. Quoting the article:
In a press release soon to be made public, lawyers representing KB Networks (the Bennett-founded entity that owns HardOCP), refers to the suit as one based on a legal statue commonly referred to as the "Declaratory Judgment Act." HardOCP lawyers explain the act as one that "permits a person or entity being threatened with lawsuits from another party to force the issue to be decided, rather than having to operate under a cloud of uncertainty and intimidation."
Could linux users use the same approach to sue SCO for threating them too??
Nope but thanks to new photographic evidence, Colin Powell is pretty sure that the evil-doing Martians have concealed tonnes of weaponised anthrax in underground bunkers. =)
NASA Television can be found on the satellite AMC 9 Transponder 9C, 85 degrees west longitude, vertical polarization downlink frequency - 3880 MHz, Audio is at 6.8 MHz.
The tin-foil hat brigade may want to bear in mind that Ashcroft, Tenet, Rumsfeld etc. may also take an interest in "Who's Who and Who's Doing What in Open Source";-)
I daresay spammers have had all weapons ready to lock on to the *@googlemail.com target since 2001. Frankly, I can't see many/. readers returning to a free webmail account ever again - even Theirs.
I get to make Bushies foes! It's cathartic I tell you!
And I might as well get it in: Anti-Bush != Anti-American. I'm British, I love americans, I employ americans, I love americana and that's actually why I hate Bush with such a passion. After all, as that liberal French rag Le Monde said so well, "Nous sommes tous Americains".:)
I dunno. With a background like that of Tim Roberts and a product named "Phantom", I'm sure I could be forgiven for thinking that perhaps this was the strategy from the start.
1. Produce hype and raise investment for a product that sounds like, looks like and feels like it's going to be vapourware.
2. Wait until the hordes of enthusiast web sites start labelling the product vapourware.
3. Sue the crap out of one of the smaller, juicier targets on the basis that they're having an financial impact on the product's ongoing development.
4. Rinse, repeat steps 1 and 3 until you've raised so much money you can either a) actually build the product or b) do a runner.
5. Well, profit. =P
Maybe I'm just a little jumpy in this SCO-et-al era. I'm not trying to bait but I would genuinely love to hear some/. IANAL's and IAAL's debunk this particular conspiracy theory.:)
Anyone else find it funny that Google has around one item for every man woman and child on earth?
I'd find it funnier if every man woman and child on earth at least had unrestricted access to Google and everything it links to.
Beats eternity in the freezer
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Space is infinitely big, right? Well, wrap me up and punt me out there! Surely over infinite time travelling through infinite space, the chances of an alien or future lifeform finding my bits are finite.
The little green men could restore my body from its DNA and using technologies our sci-fi writers haven't even yet come up with, they could search through spacetime and match it up to the stream of consciousness, which corresponds to my own when I was alive.
OK so it's not likely. But then again nor is the prospect of a benevolent future human resurrecting you from your frozen head.
I think the conclusion that we should draw from this is that quite simply the universe doesn't want us to be immortal. The old versions of its component modules need to be deleted and replaced by new releases regularly or it stagnates. But the universe also wants us to want immortality too - that way we strive to achieve the most amazing things within our lifetimes. This, after all, is the only option left to us if we wish to be remembered and therefore achieve the closest thing we can to true immortality.
I know, I know - the topic is space burial not immortality but let's face it - most of the egomaniac/. readers (myself included naturally) interested in space burial are a hop, skip and a jump away from admitting their craving for eternal life. Actually I think I just want to live to around 25,000 years old so I can see the conclusion of that Microsoft anti-trust story.
Surely in order to disable a watermark I could photocopy the original, et voila: I have an unprotected duplicate version of the self-same 'protected' original. Better yet I could read it and rewrite it with a sophisticated device I call a 'pencil'. =)
After all folks, remember there is no protection from the almighty A-HOLE!
I strongly recommend Shuttles. For a fraction of the price of the Dell you can buy a barebones Shuttle matched to your requirements, stick in a drive, some memory, a chip and the graphics card to meet your 3D needs and you're laughing. They're light and compact (ergo portable) and really beautifully made.
FWIW, I used to be an editor at PC Magazine (in the UK) and if I was still a hack I'd be raving about these boxes on a monthly basis. =)
P.S. No I don't have stock nor any other interest to declare - but these things are now performing wonders for me everywhere from our server farm to high end gaming PC's (well, games-testing PC's). I am simply a happy bunny. =D
Why this is perceived as such a security threat to Microsoft, when it's not for Linux?
Because Microsoft's OS was, and is, designed and developed based on a principle of closed source. Generally speaking, with closed source development potential black hats can't see how you do things without significant reverse engineering. This gives the OS programmers a 'safe' framework to work within. So when that source later becomes available to the general public, it leaves the OS programmers facing a huge legacy of problems that should, in theory, never have become problems.
Linux was open source from the outset. Therefore it is designed and developed relying absolutely on the principle that it's secure because everyone has equal access to see how things are done.
Furthermore, if and when there are security holes then at least with OSS you can never be held to ransom by the people owning the source. i.e. "Windows 98 has this huge security hole and it's no longer supported - go buy Win2k."
There's a difference between making a gun and making a gun that only kills black people, isn't there?
In the case of the former, it can certainly be argued that the gunmaker is not the killer, it's the people that use their guns maliciously.
In the case of the latter however, there is clear malice in the very act of making the gun.
Companies forsaking the most basic morals in favour of their bottom line, is certainly not new.
For some people the sound of tools which aid in rounding up dissidents is particularly unnerving. Punched cards were just a tool, but they were used to 'identify' jews, communists and other unwanted elements of the Third Reich.
Governments are unlikely to approach the open source community to build such tools for them - and companies are more likely to cooperate and cooperate quietly.
"And you have to love the bit about whether the agents had "guns drawn" when he opened the door. There's nothing to suggest they actually did - but by tossing the reference in there, the FBI sounds much more menacing, don't they?"
And quoting Toshok from the article: "I didn't watch it happen but apparently Peter awoke, naked, to a doorway full of FBI agents with guns out, yelling at him to get up."
I'll take it with a pinch of salt too, but that does sound pretty menacing to me. Maybe it's because guns aren't part of my country's constitution but unless I'm considered armed & dangerous I wouldn't expect that kind of a wake-up call. What happened to Valve was bad - but IMHO defending corporations with armed raids is very dangerous territory.
Surely this is one statistic worth gathering properly.
Quoting:
"Internet users spend at least nine hours a week on the web compared with seven hours in late 2002. Some 93 percent of users gave their ages at less than 65 years, and 60 percent were university students.
"The telephone poll, taken last November and December, surveyed 2,033 people aged above 18 years. "
IANASA but 2,000 people, mostly students - hardly seems a worthwhile sample when trying to describe a population base of 290 million people.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. Well spotted to all those chimps that pointed out that BBC stands for "British Broadcasting Corporation". 10/10 for general knowledge and 5/10 for understanding.
:)
The BBC is operated under two constitutional documents: its Royal Charter and the Licence and Agreement. The Charter defines the BBC's objects, powers, obligations and the sources and uses of its income, while the Licence and Agreement sets the terms and conditions under which it must operate.
"Subject to the general law of the land and the provisions of the Charter and the Licence and Agreement, the BBC has full editorial and managerial independence in its day-to-day programme and other activities"
For more information visit this terribly informative site, which will doubtless also explain all about impartiality and public service broadcasting for you.
This will probably turn into a bit of an off-topic rant so feel free to mod me down if you like but this is a good a chance as any to get this off my chest.
/. recently had a dig at my pro-Kerry sig when they realised that I wasn't an American Citizen. I think the jist of it was: "If you want to influence our election, come to the U.S. and become a Citizen." That was probably my main motivation for this rant. Britons haven't served a foreign ruler in such a capacity since the Roman Empire. The least us non-Citizen class provincial Romans can do these days is appeal to those that live in Rome and ask that they carry our thoughts back to the Senate/Emperor.
Firstly the qualification: I'm a Brit - and I'm far from an anti-American one, although that sort of thing is definitely on the increase over here.
As flippant as it was, the parent poster actually has a point. On top of my taxes I pay a license fee so that the BBC can provide its (undeniably) excellent services to the world. Its largely English language services of course benefit the U.S. as much, if not more than they do the U.K. Perhaps all the more so given the ubiquity and uniformity of corporate media power on that side of the pond.
And so to the rant: At the moment my country does pretty much exactly what the Whitehouse (and Whitehouse-friendly corporations) want or tell it to do. But I can't vote for the president. So, since us Brits can't vote for our 'president' and, in more ways than this simple example, pay taxes and provide services for the whole English-speaking world, with very little in the form of reciprocation, is it any wonder that people over here are beginning to question the so-called 'special relationship'?
Someone on
Right, that's the rant over - thanks for your indulgence.
Now back on-topic:
That's great! But even if every one of the UK'S 60 million or so individuals (including kids etc.) paid a license fee, that still wouldn't pay for hosting the BBC's entire video output at broadband quality for the entire global English-speaking world. Hopefully non-U.K. based clients will have to pay some form of fee, perhaps even a subscription, to help pay for these services.
When I read this in the original post:
;-)
I would have thought LinSpire might have learned from the whole Lindows name fiasco
I thought to myself, "They did!"
Clearly they have learned from the lindows/windows fiasco. Thousands of people had never heard of them before that. Now thousands more will hear about them through this. I wonder who's next after Microsoft and Apple. Maybe they should go after one of SCO's trademarks instead?
As for life on Mars... I watched a really good documentary about the moon the other day, which basically explained that without the moon -- a single moon -- to help stabilize our planet, we probably wouldn't have ever been here. It will be interesting to see if life evolved on Mars, perhaps conditions were favourable in the past. Apparently since it has multiple small moons, it wobbles on its axis, which makes the climate really unstable over very long periods of times. Or, that was the gist of it.
Maybe Mars had a perfectly capable moon but it disintegrated (or was blown up by aliens hehe), thereby inducing a wobble and buggering its fragile ecosystem - leaving the big red lump we know and love today.
If the purpose of this redesign is to better allow the armed forces to communicate on the battlefield, I highly doubt that they will embed snooping and tracing into the protocol. The military takes great pains to ensure that thier communications are kept secure, and having a secret backdoor in their entire communication system (no matter who controls it) is not something they would tolerate.
Well, no but you don't need to put in backdoors to retain ultimate control of a network. Would you want the world to be forced to use a network that is authoritatively maintained by the Pentagon? I'm not American for one thing (nor's the 'Net btw) and therefore I particularly wouldn't like to host my websites on Don Rumsfeld's network nor even a global network that his boys designed to his spec.;-) I'd end up trusting it about as much as I trust him and there's no prizes for guessing how much that is.
Think GPS. It's publicly and commercially available but the moment that shit starts going down, resolution for 'public' customers is throttled and the world is suddenly forced to remember that the USAF has the keys.
But surely that's a good point. Quoting the article:
In a press release soon to be made public, lawyers representing KB Networks (the Bennett-founded entity that owns HardOCP), refers to the suit as one based on a legal statue commonly referred to as the "Declaratory Judgment Act." HardOCP lawyers explain the act as one that "permits a person or entity being threatened with lawsuits from another party to force the issue to be decided, rather than having to operate under a cloud of uncertainty and intimidation."
Could linux users use the same approach to sue SCO for threating them too??
Nope but thanks to new photographic evidence, Colin Powell is pretty sure that the evil-doing Martians have concealed tonnes of weaponised anthrax in underground bunkers. =)
NASA Television can be found on the satellite AMC 9 Transponder 9C, 85 degrees west longitude, vertical polarization downlink frequency - 3880 MHz, Audio is at 6.8 MHz.
The tin-foil hat brigade may want to bear in mind that Ashcroft, Tenet, Rumsfeld etc. may also take an interest in "Who's Who and Who's Doing What in Open Source" ;-)
Thunderbolt and lightning-very very frightening me
Galileo, Galileo
Galileo figaro magnifico.
But I'm just a poor boy and nobody loves me.
Quick links here
I daresay spammers have had all weapons ready to lock on to the *@googlemail.com target since 2001. Frankly, I can't see many /. readers returning to a free webmail account ever again - even Theirs.
I for one welcome our new robosapien overlords.
I love
I get to make Bushies foes!
It's cathartic I tell you!
And I might as well get it in: Anti-Bush != Anti-American. I'm British, I love americans, I employ americans, I love americana and that's actually why I hate Bush with such a passion. After all, as that liberal French rag Le Monde said so well, "Nous sommes tous Americains".
I dunno. With a background like that of Tim Roberts and a product named "Phantom", I'm sure I could be forgiven for thinking that perhaps this was the strategy from the start.
/. IANAL's and IAAL's debunk this particular conspiracy theory. :)
1. Produce hype and raise investment for a product that sounds like, looks like and feels like it's going to be vapourware.
2. Wait until the hordes of enthusiast web sites start labelling the product vapourware.
3. Sue the crap out of one of the smaller, juicier targets on the basis that they're having an financial impact on the product's ongoing development.
4. Rinse, repeat steps 1 and 3 until you've raised so much money you can either a) actually build the product or b) do a runner.
5. Well, profit. =P
Maybe I'm just a little jumpy in this SCO-et-al era. I'm not trying to bait but I would genuinely love to hear some
Anyone else find it funny that Google has around one item for every man woman and child on earth?
I'd find it funnier if every man woman and child on earth at least had unrestricted access to Google and everything it links to.
Space is infinitely big, right? Well, wrap me up and punt me out there! Surely over infinite time travelling through infinite space, the chances of an alien or future lifeform finding my bits are finite.
/. readers (myself included naturally) interested in space burial are a hop, skip and a jump away from admitting their craving for eternal life. Actually I think I just want to live to around 25,000 years old so I can see the conclusion of that Microsoft anti-trust story.
The little green men could restore my body from its DNA and using technologies our sci-fi writers haven't even yet come up with, they could search through spacetime and match it up to the stream of consciousness, which corresponds to my own when I was alive.
OK so it's not likely. But then again nor is the prospect of a benevolent future human resurrecting you from your frozen head.
I think the conclusion that we should draw from this is that quite simply the universe doesn't want us to be immortal. The old versions of its component modules need to be deleted and replaced by new releases regularly or it stagnates. But the universe also wants us to want immortality too - that way we strive to achieve the most amazing things within our lifetimes. This, after all, is the only option left to us if we wish to be remembered and therefore achieve the closest thing we can to true immortality.
I know, I know - the topic is space burial not immortality but let's face it - most of the egomaniac
Surely in order to disable a watermark I could photocopy the original, et voila: I have an unprotected duplicate version of the self-same 'protected' original.
Better yet I could read it and rewrite it with a sophisticated device I call a 'pencil'. =)
After all folks, remember there is no protection from the almighty A-HOLE!
Sure the notebook only weighs 9 pounds, but the batteries are a bitch.
I strongly recommend Shuttles. For a fraction of the price of the Dell you can buy a barebones Shuttle matched to your requirements, stick in a drive, some memory, a chip and the graphics card to meet your 3D needs and you're laughing. They're light and compact (ergo portable) and really beautifully made.
FWIW, I used to be an editor at PC Magazine (in the UK) and if I was still a hack I'd be raving about these boxes on a monthly basis. =)
P.S. No I don't have stock nor any other interest to declare - but these things are now performing wonders for me everywhere from our server farm to high end gaming PC's (well, games-testing PC's). I am simply a happy bunny. =D
Why this is perceived as such a security threat to Microsoft, when it's not for Linux?
Because Microsoft's OS was, and is, designed and developed based on a principle of closed source. Generally speaking, with closed source development potential black hats can't see how you do things without significant reverse engineering. This gives the OS programmers a 'safe' framework to work within. So when that source later becomes available to the general public, it leaves the OS programmers facing a huge legacy of problems that should, in theory, never have become problems.
Linux was open source from the outset. Therefore it is designed and developed relying absolutely on the principle that it's secure because everyone has equal access to see how things are done.
Furthermore, if and when there are security holes then at least with OSS you can never be held to ransom by the people owning the source. i.e. "Windows 98 has this huge security hole and it's no longer supported - go buy Win2k."
There's a difference between making a gun and making a gun that only kills black people, isn't there?
In the case of the former, it can certainly be argued that the gunmaker is not the killer, it's the people that use their guns maliciously.
In the case of the latter however, there is clear malice in the very act of making the gun.
Companies forsaking the most basic morals in favour of their bottom line, is certainly not new.
For some people the sound of tools which aid in rounding up dissidents is particularly unnerving. Punched cards were just a tool, but they were used to 'identify' jews, communists and other unwanted elements of the Third Reich.
Governments are unlikely to approach the open source community to build such tools for them - and companies are more likely to cooperate and cooperate quietly.
IANAC (Christian) but didn't Jesus have something to say about testing the Lord? ;-)
And why did that study have to focus on the Abrahamic faiths anyway? I'd bet a buck on the buddhists. =D
"And you have to love the bit about whether the agents had "guns drawn" when he opened the door. There's nothing to suggest they actually did - but by tossing the reference in there, the FBI sounds much more menacing, don't they?"
And quoting Toshok from the article:
"I didn't watch it happen but apparently Peter awoke, naked, to a doorway full of FBI agents with guns out, yelling at him to get up."
I'll take it with a pinch of salt too, but that does sound pretty menacing to me. Maybe it's because guns aren't part of my country's constitution but unless I'm considered armed & dangerous I wouldn't expect that kind of a wake-up call. What happened to Valve was bad - but IMHO defending corporations with armed raids is very dangerous territory.
Surely this is one statistic worth gathering properly.
Quoting:
"Internet users spend at least nine hours a week on the web compared with seven hours in late 2002. Some 93 percent of users gave their ages at less than 65 years, and 60 percent were university students.
"The telephone poll, taken last November and December, surveyed 2,033 people aged above 18 years. "
IANASA but 2,000 people, mostly students - hardly seems a worthwhile sample when trying to describe a population base of 290 million people.