While the political themes of Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy beginning with Red Mars have divided readers, I found the constitutional debates within to be fascinating. The settlers of Mars come together in a constitutional convention that takes new, present-day technology and ecological themes into account, and examine a far larger set of models of political organization than the American Founding Fathers knew about. Junking it all and starting from scratch seems like a wonderful opportunity. Ever since I read those books in the mid-1990s, I've felt sad that not only is American democracy co-opted by special interests and the inevitability of a stagnant two-party system, but even at best it would be limited to a late 18th-century worldview.
I've been a long-time DD-WRT user, but its development seemed to stagnate.
The last release of TomatoUSB was over a year ago. My own version of DD-WRT dates from about the same time. I don't see how you can hold the former up as making more progress than the latter.
If you want to see this legendary awful film, you can already buy the Mystery Science Theatre 3000's DVD set which contains the film alone on one disc, and MST3K's great comedic treatment on another.
No doubt some will wish to treat Manos on its own, in its uncommented bad-cinema purity, but I imagine a lot people would find the MST3K a better way to approach the film.
That was the result of idiots, coke fiends, and incompetents in the major labels. When kids started sharing files on Napster, that was an opportunity for the RIAA to sell more CDs, using P2P as advertising.
People would hve been moving away from CDs to downloaded media regardless of how the RIAA acted.
People like collecting "stuff". They always have. Books, records, tapes, stamps, butterflies... these are the folks the RIAA should be going for -- people who like tangible objcts. You can't hold an iTune in your hand or put it on your bookshelf, nor resell it. It is valueless.
That's wishful thinking. Even record labels that emphasized the physical artifact, attracting in days of yore a crowd that loved their design, are now finding that more and more listeners are content to get low-quality MP3s. Even among those who would call themselves connoisseurs, ultimately very few people are going to maintain that attachment to the physical artifact when digital media is becoming the norm. Hell, in my circle of friends I count some people who used to be obsessive patrons of the record store, and now they listen to what tickles their fancy off of YouTube of all things.
I got a license in 1995 and was active until 1999. Around that time, there was an early online database that would allow you to look up licensed hams in your neighbourhood. I found that several people on my street were listed, but when I asked them about it, they said they had given up on the hobby years before. My local club was mostly in their 60s and 70s, and I can't imagine it's any better now.
And the dark ages wouldn't have been quite so dark if "The Church" hadn't insisted on things like Galileo being wrong about heliocentrism until nine years ago.
Historians no longer use the term "Dark Ages" and haven't for decades. Late antiquity and the early medieval era was considerably more complicated than that oversimplification. Also, blaming Christianity for societal collapse in the Western Roman Empire ignores the fact that the Eastern Roman Empire went on for another thousand years, and if anything, it had an even greater bond between church and state.
And perhaps the content creators will realize that they are not special little snowflakes and not every idea that comes out of their heads is genius. Maybe if they start charging reasonable prices for their wares and if the governments of the world pare back copyright to a reasonable level, people will actually have respect for them again.
This claim comes up a lot on Slashdot, but I disagree. The cat is out of the bag, young people are already used to getting films and music for free. The industry could lower prices, but actually completing a financial transaction for content is more work than just going to YouTube and typing in the name of the song you want to hear for free. The physical artifact (CD, DVD) is increasingly considered a luxury, which people will pay for if they wish but avoid otherwise, so lowering prices isn't going to solve anything.
Since the copyright owner is the one who profits from their exclusive legislatively-granted monopoly, they _should_ bear the costs of enforcement.
Sadly, both the public and the government seems to have forgotten that copyright is a government fiat made with the hope of driving artistic production and not a natural right.
I don't know about Muslims, but observant Jews have made it clear that they don't accept historical conjectures like "pork was banned because trichinosis was a danger" as a reason to give up the kosher rules. Dietary prescriptions are a spiritual matter, not just the possible result of ancient hygienic norms.
I've been following the announcements of the Kindle Fire and I'm sort of wondering if Amazon is abandoning what was so good about the platform, namely electronic ink. One has always been able to read a book off the LCD screen of one's smartphone or notebook, but the Kindle was a pleasurable experience because e-ink really is easier on the eyes. If the Kindle is going LCD, then it's just like any other tablet out there.
When this news was published on another news for nerds site (Slashdot is quite slow these days), several commenters brought up Vernor Vinge's novel A Fire upon the Deep. In that far-future musing on the growth of civilizations and technological singularities, Vinge had the Milky Way galaxy divided into various zones which limited how complex technology could be. At the centre, even the simplest machines would fall apart. Further out, electronics and other 20th-century devices worked, but nanotechnology was less effective. Any race moving to the outskirts of the galaxy reached technological progress undreamed of elsewhere.
Vinge made it clear that the Zones were the artificial creation of an ancient advanced race, not the natural result of physics. This news is thought-provoking in that the constants for life and perhaps technology change naturally throughout the universe. It's not just science catching up with science-fiction, but rather science anticipating something generally unexpected., though didn't Poul Anderson write a story of changing laws of physics too?
But low-power and ideal for server use. Currently I have a old laptop functioning just as an MPD server, it's overkill for such needs. I'd love to replace it with a Raspberry Pi.
Is it a "kneejerk" reaction when people ridicule homeopathy, creationism, or politically motivated climate change deniers?
No, it's a kneejerk reaction when people make claims that e.g. postmodern literary criticism is all bullshit, which is the context where I usually see mention of the Sokal affair. While there are some publications in this field that lack merit -- and Sokal's own comments about misuse of scientific comments are worth reading -- generally people bringing up the Sokal affair throw out the baby with the bathwater just because they can't be bothered to learn what is baby and what is bathwater.
Whenever people attack bullshit publications -- or more often, only perceived bullshit, lacking training in the field and just making a kneejerk reaction against the humanities -- they make reference to the Sokal affair. However, it's important to note that Social Text was not a peer-reviewed journal. In fact, it was a fairly obscure publication even within its field.
What makes this news troubling is that the researcher succeeded in being published in Science which was supposed to have a rigorous and effective peer-review process.
This isn't a matter of freedom. He's not encouraging that the OP be locked up or that the license terms change. He's only recommending prudence to ensure that the Free Software ecosystem remains what he considers healthy.
You can bet that a lot of these Anonymous members in Mexico know each other in real life
Why do you bet that? I've observed several communities similar to Anonymous where the members not only have never met in real life, but they have no inclination to do so. Their entire relationship plays out online in relative or total anonymity.
So where can I buy audio tracks in this 'flac' common format? How many tracks/albums/artists are in their catalog?
Why buy when you can download for free? I know of sites where you can download pretty much anything -- you're continually surprised by how releases you thought were utterly obscure are easy to find there -- and the format of choice is FLAC.
So... choosing not to participate in something, without trying to stop anyone who wants to from participating in it... that makes someone a jerk?
Like it our not, one's membership in a community is based on little things such as participation in local traditions. If you live among a group of people but ignore something important to them, then it is completely understandable that they will hold it against you.
What a freedom-loving people we have become.
This isn't a matter of freedom. No one is proposing locking you up because you don't hand out candy. We are speaking of the opinions that others may form.
they will take over our satellites and force us to watch Chinese Opera on our TV sets.
Chinese opera's popularity is now quite miniscule among the Chinese. It would be like saying that an antagonistic Britain would force morris dancing on a subjugated population.
That was supposed to be the kind of thing that css could do
And CSS does it. You can set e.g. background images for a class or id from CSS, so you can change the graphic appearance of a header or footer from one central CSS file. I'd really suggest reading a rigorous introduction to CSS, or something like O'Reilly's CSS Cookbook that walk you through how to accomplish some specific task. If you don't even know the language, don't blame it for not being useful for you!
Exchange rates aren't always a good indicator of strength. For example, the Latvian lat is stronger than the euro, but Latvia's economy is in the doldrums.
It also says that some Xenon-133 may have early on in the accident
Wow, I knew that Japanese tends to leave a lot of words out compared to English (Jay Rubin's Making Sense of Japanese is an accessible introduction to this tendency), but I had no idea that it extended to leaving out the verb.
Slashdot Mirror
While the political themes of Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy beginning with Red Mars have divided readers, I found the constitutional debates within to be fascinating. The settlers of Mars come together in a constitutional convention that takes new, present-day technology and ecological themes into account, and examine a far larger set of models of political organization than the American Founding Fathers knew about. Junking it all and starting from scratch seems like a wonderful opportunity. Ever since I read those books in the mid-1990s, I've felt sad that not only is American democracy co-opted by special interests and the inevitability of a stagnant two-party system, but even at best it would be limited to a late 18th-century worldview.
Just don't tell the doctor that you slipped in the shower. They've heard it too many times before.
The last release of TomatoUSB was over a year ago. My own version of DD-WRT dates from about the same time. I don't see how you can hold the former up as making more progress than the latter.
If you want to see this legendary awful film, you can already buy the Mystery Science Theatre 3000's DVD set which contains the film alone on one disc, and MST3K's great comedic treatment on another.
No doubt some will wish to treat Manos on its own, in its uncommented bad-cinema purity, but I imagine a lot people would find the MST3K a better way to approach the film.
People would hve been moving away from CDs to downloaded media regardless of how the RIAA acted.
That's wishful thinking. Even record labels that emphasized the physical artifact, attracting in days of yore a crowd that loved their design, are now finding that more and more listeners are content to get low-quality MP3s. Even among those who would call themselves connoisseurs, ultimately very few people are going to maintain that attachment to the physical artifact when digital media is becoming the norm. Hell, in my circle of friends I count some people who used to be obsessive patrons of the record store, and now they listen to what tickles their fancy off of YouTube of all things.
I got a license in 1995 and was active until 1999. Around that time, there was an early online database that would allow you to look up licensed hams in your neighbourhood. I found that several people on my street were listed, but when I asked them about it, they said they had given up on the hobby years before. My local club was mostly in their 60s and 70s, and I can't imagine it's any better now.
Historians no longer use the term "Dark Ages" and haven't for decades. Late antiquity and the early medieval era was considerably more complicated than that oversimplification. Also, blaming Christianity for societal collapse in the Western Roman Empire ignores the fact that the Eastern Roman Empire went on for another thousand years, and if anything, it had an even greater bond between church and state.
This claim comes up a lot on Slashdot, but I disagree. The cat is out of the bag, young people are already used to getting films and music for free. The industry could lower prices, but actually completing a financial transaction for content is more work than just going to YouTube and typing in the name of the song you want to hear for free. The physical artifact (CD, DVD) is increasingly considered a luxury, which people will pay for if they wish but avoid otherwise, so lowering prices isn't going to solve anything.
I LOLed, but note that the character's name is actually Stefon.
Sadly, both the public and the government seems to have forgotten that copyright is a government fiat made with the hope of driving artistic production and not a natural right.
I don't know about Muslims, but observant Jews have made it clear that they don't accept historical conjectures like "pork was banned because trichinosis was a danger" as a reason to give up the kosher rules. Dietary prescriptions are a spiritual matter, not just the possible result of ancient hygienic norms.
I've been following the announcements of the Kindle Fire and I'm sort of wondering if Amazon is abandoning what was so good about the platform, namely electronic ink. One has always been able to read a book off the LCD screen of one's smartphone or notebook, but the Kindle was a pleasurable experience because e-ink really is easier on the eyes. If the Kindle is going LCD, then it's just like any other tablet out there.
When this news was published on another news for nerds site (Slashdot is quite slow these days), several commenters brought up Vernor Vinge's novel A Fire upon the Deep . In that far-future musing on the growth of civilizations and technological singularities, Vinge had the Milky Way galaxy divided into various zones which limited how complex technology could be. At the centre, even the simplest machines would fall apart. Further out, electronics and other 20th-century devices worked, but nanotechnology was less effective. Any race moving to the outskirts of the galaxy reached technological progress undreamed of elsewhere.
Vinge made it clear that the Zones were the artificial creation of an ancient advanced race, not the natural result of physics. This news is thought-provoking in that the constants for life and perhaps technology change naturally throughout the universe. It's not just science catching up with science-fiction, but rather science anticipating something generally unexpected., though didn't Poul Anderson write a story of changing laws of physics too?
But low-power and ideal for server use. Currently I have a old laptop functioning just as an MPD server, it's overkill for such needs. I'd love to replace it with a Raspberry Pi.
What does the author mean by "Bach-kabbalists"? I unfortunately don't have access to the paper at the moment.
No, it's a kneejerk reaction when people make claims that e.g. postmodern literary criticism is all bullshit, which is the context where I usually see mention of the Sokal affair. While there are some publications in this field that lack merit -- and Sokal's own comments about misuse of scientific comments are worth reading -- generally people bringing up the Sokal affair throw out the baby with the bathwater just because they can't be bothered to learn what is baby and what is bathwater.
Whenever people attack bullshit publications -- or more often, only perceived bullshit, lacking training in the field and just making a kneejerk reaction against the humanities -- they make reference to the Sokal affair. However, it's important to note that Social Text was not a peer-reviewed journal. In fact, it was a fairly obscure publication even within its field.
What makes this news troubling is that the researcher succeeded in being published in Science which was supposed to have a rigorous and effective peer-review process.
This isn't a matter of freedom. He's not encouraging that the OP be locked up or that the license terms change. He's only recommending prudence to ensure that the Free Software ecosystem remains what he considers healthy.
Why do you bet that? I've observed several communities similar to Anonymous where the members not only have never met in real life, but they have no inclination to do so. Their entire relationship plays out online in relative or total anonymity.
Why buy when you can download for free? I know of sites where you can download pretty much anything -- you're continually surprised by how releases you thought were utterly obscure are easy to find there -- and the format of choice is FLAC.
Like it our not, one's membership in a community is based on little things such as participation in local traditions. If you live among a group of people but ignore something important to them, then it is completely understandable that they will hold it against you.
This isn't a matter of freedom. No one is proposing locking you up because you don't hand out candy. We are speaking of the opinions that others may form.
Chinese opera's popularity is now quite miniscule among the Chinese. It would be like saying that an antagonistic Britain would force morris dancing on a subjugated population.
And CSS does it. You can set e.g. background images for a class or id from CSS, so you can change the graphic appearance of a header or footer from one central CSS file. I'd really suggest reading a rigorous introduction to CSS, or something like O'Reilly's CSS Cookbook that walk you through how to accomplish some specific task. If you don't even know the language, don't blame it for not being useful for you!
Exchange rates aren't always a good indicator of strength. For example, the Latvian lat is stronger than the euro, but Latvia's economy is in the doldrums.
Wow, I knew that Japanese tends to leave a lot of words out compared to English (Jay Rubin's Making Sense of Japanese is an accessible introduction to this tendency), but I had no idea that it extended to leaving out the verb.