I predict we'll be seeing homeopathic "medicine" made out of this magick water within a few weeks.
Correction - that would be homeopathic "medicine" that doesn't contain a single molecule of this magick water...
However, this is basically another way of making that amaxing wonder-drug called "placebo" which is so effective that it is the standard against which all other drugs are tested. And if the homeopath also sits you down, remembers your name from last time, gives you a nice cup of jasmine tea and has a nice sympathetic chat about your condition, how much stress you are under at work and whether you're eating properly... well, you probably stand a better-than-average chance of getting better.
The iPhone checks for mail manually, or (gasp!) automatically every so often. It's called "checking for mail", not "phoning home", and it's a (another big gasp!) user-selectable option.
It's an advanced concept, for sure, but maybe even a slashtard like you can understand it...
Well, my excuse for not RTFM (or iRTFM) is that I don't have an iPhone.
HOWEVER - the point is not what I understand - its what the average mobile phone user can be expected to understand.
Given that TFM for the typical consumer electronics device consists mainly of warnings aimed at the potential Darwin Award winner for whom taking a piss without drowning themselves must be a bit of a challenge, expecting a warning like "Remember to turn of automatic mail checking before travelling abroad, because contrary to all common sense its actually cheaper to hire Natalie Portman to personally carry a platinum-plated USB stick over in a private jet than to make a data call from Europe" seems eminently reasonable.
In fact, since the iPhone is meant to be this amazingly easy-to-use, drool-proof device that can even work out where it is and direct you to the nearest LobotomyULike franchise, one might expect it to have the sense to say "Hello, you appear to be automatically checking your mail over an roaming connection. Unless the country you are calling from is a member of the G8 this amount of cashflow may collapse the local economy. Do you want to continue?".
This is why things should actually be OFF when you turn them off.
Er, what if its a PHONE and if you turn it completely off people won't be able to, like, PHONE you...?
If you read on, someone posts that the iPhone (just like Windows Mobile phones) has a power-down mode if you really want it.
What other phones DON'T do is periodically phone home all by themselves - and unless AT&T/Apple have a large friendly warning* in TFM then they're probably in the wrong on that one.
(* Do not eat iPhone. Do not operate iPhone while attempting to defuse atomic bomb. Do not drop iPhone onto the head of a pedestrian from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Do not smash iPhone to pieces and stab yourself with the shards. Do not insert iPhone anally unless you are the goatse guy. If you are the goatse guy please do not return iPhone to Apple afterwards. Do not select The Lumberjack Song as ringtone while drinking in a bar in rural Canada. Turn iPhone off properly when traveling abroad. Do not take the name of Jobs in vain. Warning: this booklet may cause paper cuts if mishandled. See page 199 for more warnings)
No, not that MTV "reality" show, the thing outside the window... Rarely a day goes by without the media quoting some bit or science or statistics (and usually getting it wrong - but that's fine - get kids to critique it and write letters to the paper explaining why they agree or disagree with the figures...) You'll get into trouble, of course, but maybe in English you have slightly more leeway to discuss possibly contentious subjects.
The big problem is that the Math taught in schools is so divorced from any credible practical applications that the kids will need a lot of prompting to connect it with anything in the real world. Math lessons focus on isoated technical skills and rarely apply them to anything useful - even "word problems" are usually contrived to test a bit of math curriculum rather than to demonstrate a paractical application.
The problem with SF is that, even in "hard" SF books, the real science is intertwined with fantasy or highly speculative science, so you have to tread carefully - the most "scientific" are probably the classic short stories by the likes of Clarke and Asimov. Hard SF (i.e. with science in) is less in vogue these days, and what there is (e.g. Stephen Baxter, Greg Egan) tends to be a bit "extreme" (speculative cosmology, theories-of-everything, dark matter, posthuman intelligence...)
You won't find much science in Harry Potter... There is some science in The Golden Compass (heavily bowdlerized film coming real soon) , but it would be a brave teacher that took that into a US classroom in some States, other than to do a study of whether the amount of atheism in a book affects the temperature at which it burns...:-)
Are the World Science Fiction Society members completely unwilling to watch a show that isn't 40 seasons old a remake?
Ever since the heartbreak of Firefly (and all those other promising shows that got canned after a season or less) you can forgive people for not wanting to mentally invest in anything without a few seasons under its belt:-)
Its very ambiguous whether "Who" is a remake, a re-boot or just a show picked up after a 15-year hiatus... the format has been changed but it does have some continuity with the old version.
Also: "Who" is pretty unique because it is targetted at a mainstream "family" audience - in the UK it goes out at 7PM, Saturday on one of the main terrestrial channels - plus its one of the "main events" on Christmas Day. Its done a lot to get SF/fantasy - and general action/adventure - back on the TV map in the UK. This may not be obvious if you're watching via Bittorrent in the US...
The writing on the new series is variable - but Stephen Moffat's episodes "The Empty Child", "Girl in the Fireplace" and (this year) "Blink" are absolute gems. The latter two also make excellent use of time travel, which should give them SF brownie points.
The trouble with all these awards is how you are meant to compare "new BSG" (gritty, adult themes) with "Who" (traditionally a bit B-movie creature feature camp, aimed at kids in the 7-70 age range, tries to sneak the odd adult theme under the radar*).
* the least said about the paving-slab fellatio episode, the better... that one should be up for the Razzies:-)
It was good - I thought it had a disticnt Douglas Adams-y feel to it.
On reflection, that was probably the inexplicable Horse, plus a bit of inspiration from the Grebulons in "Mostly Harmless"... Still, what goes around comes around:-)
(FYI the late lamented Adams once worked as script editor/author on the original Doctor Who - elements of "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" and "Life, The Universe and Everything" actually started life as Doctor Who scripts)
Great thing about Stephen Moffat is that - unlike other Who authors - he realizes that time travel isn't just a plot device to take you somewhere interesting to have an advanture - same goes for his episode "Blink" that should be airing in the US about now... Not such a tear-jerker, but another contender for Best. Episode. Ever.
A: You only pay the TV license if you own TV reception equipment - whether or not that makes it a "tax" is up for debate, but it is more-or-less ring fenced for broadcasting, and doesn't (e.g.) just disappear into the Inland Revenue coffers with your income tax. (There's a side-issue with convincing the TV license stormtroopers that you don't have TV reception equipment, but that's incompetence, not the law). Actually, I'd predict that as soon as media convergence "matures" this system will collapse - I don't think extending the definition of TV reception equipment to PCs and Internet would be tolerated - big media and comms. companies are already hostile towards this system and would roll out the astroturf like mad. In a sense, by pursuing online TV in any form, the BBC turkeys are voting for Christmas.
B: The BBC is not "run" by the government - lots of effort has been made to ensure that the management from the BBC is apolitical. Of course, this is totally immune from political appointments and back-room arm twisting - not!!! - but the thought is there. Like all journalists, the BBC news service is in the business of telling ripping yarns that get the viewers in, with accuracy and objectivity distinctly optional (e.g. the recent documentary on how nasty WiFi radiation fries kids brains, in which a tinfoil-hat salesman was given an uncritical platform) and this occasionally gets mistaken for political bias.
C: As far as I am aware, the BBC has no Royal Exemption from copyright and contract law and they have to deal with rights holders - much of their content is outsourced, bought in, involves card-carrying actors or is sold overseas (with various guarantees of exclusivity).
OTOH, this is all a bit nuts, since if you bung a DVB-T (terrestrial broadcast digital TV) card in your PC you can grab Dr Who, Torchwood and Heroes in ad-free wide-screen unencrypted MPEG2 goodness anyway (and 'Who is on continual re-run on BBC3 so you can't miss it!).
Tint it green, have it flow downward, and you're Keanu Reeves...
Unfortunately TFA said ASCII - the Matrix included a lot of Japanese Katakana/Hiragana script so you'd probably need JIS, Unicode or ISO something-or-other...
Also, do not try this at home unless you are The One - otherwise, after ten minutes you'd probably go green and flow downwards.
The http://www.fi.uu.nl/wisweb/en/">Freudenthal institute have a large collection of java applets for secondary/high school education. There's lots of others out there too.
Spreadsheets also have enormous potential for teaching algebra concepts - particularly for getting over the idea of variables and functional relationships (after solving pages of simple "if x + 5 = 7 what is x?" equations, kids often get hung up on the notion that "x" is always a specific number...) Set up simple formulae in a spreadsheet, hide the formulae and have the kids reverse-engineer the formula...
[1] Although a web browser might let you download a few:-)
You confuse two different things: one thing is the coder hacking the BSD source code and turning it something of his own and incorporating that under a binary. That is OK.
The other thing is to strip the license.
I think the whole debate has got those two things mixed up - if GPL people are stripping the BSD license, then that is pretty clearly wrong (except in the previous thread on this issue it sounded as if the license had been stripped by the author - which, if true, is fair game).
However, the fact that this has (allegedly) happened has opened up a can of worms about how you do combine BSD and GPL without one voiding the other... What its sounding like is as if you can "aggregate" BSD code with GPL code - and maybe link to it - but each identifiable unit must be either GPL-only (any modifications are GPL) or BSD-only (any modifications are BSD).
The real problem is that the BSD license is that it doesn't spell out how it is intended to apply in the case of derivative or composite works or, indeed, what comprises a derivative work. If people are assuming that GPL "trumps" BSD then it may be because the GPL speaks with a clearer voice on the subject.
The irony is that one "solution" would probably be to distribute the BSD parts in Linux as binary blobs... since if there's no source distribution, the issue goes away. I think GPLv3 probably scotches that, though...:-)
Say, for example, a $15 CD gets about an hour's worth of music.
Don't know about you, but if a CD is any good, I'll get more than 100 hours of play-time out of it (maybe spread over a few years, though). While I agree that "other things to spend money on" is part of the problem, you can't make simplistic value comparisons like that. E.g. DVD movies are lousy value on the play time front (there's, like, 5 movies that you'd want to watch more than once a year...) but are a bargain c.f. going to the multiplex.
And, of course, there's the fact that not all songs on the disk are necessarily of the same quality (maybe only one or two are worth listening to, in some cases).
Probably because the whole marketing effort is pitched towards bands that churn out a radio-friendly single every few months, to keep the turnover going, rather than those that produce a decent 45-minute album every two years. The singles charts absorb all the marketing and publicity - despite the fact that the concept of the 3-minute single was obsoleted by the CD. Even a single will be deemed to have "failed" if it doesn't get into the top ten.
There is no mass-market publicity channel for album-oriented bands beyond word-of-mouth. In the case of the earlier poster raving about Evenescance - odds are that he only heard about them because they lucked out and got a song used in an iffy superhero movie.
Even for singles, it is vaguely perplexing that radio stations and TV channels are expected to pay for the privilege of advertising the music industry's product. I've noticed that the free-to-air music TV channels in the UK are showing less and less actual music - and when they do its mostly back-catalogue stuff.
Then, of course, you have the problem that for a singles "artist" to be sucessful, they now have to be (a) a supermodel, (b) a trained dancer and (c) able to carry a tune - enough to give the occasional live performance and prove they're not Milli Vanilli, anyway. This thins the talent pool - if you look at classic videos from days of yore, most of them danced like a dad at a disco by modern standards - but the songs were... well... they are the songs that the modern groups are sampling and (c)rapping over:-)
First - some disambiguating. There is obviously a real issue with the correct way to handle projects containing a mixture of GPL and BSD. It seems pretty clear to me that the only thing that entitles someone to re-distribute BSD code as part of a GPL product is the BSD license - and stripping off the BSD notice is clearly Just Plain Wrong (unless you're the original author). However, unlike the GPL, the text of the BSD license says nothing about derived works, linking, aggregation etc. so I'd be slightly sympathetic towards anybody who makes a "technical" mistake in this respect - flaming doesn't help much.
OTOH - witness the title of TFA - this seems to have got tangled up with some notion that when a GPL author uses some code under the BSD license they are somehow obliged to contribute their modifications to the BSD world.
Now, there's a difference between saying "Hey GPL guys, in the spirit of free software, how about contributing some code back to BSD, please?" (quite a reasonable request) and the current flame-war (suggesting this is an obligation, or overreacting to minor licensing issues). To be fair, GPL has its share of fundamentalists who go off the deep end when someone makes a minor licensing mistake.
So, no, just "forking" something shouldn't (and AFAIK doesn't) give you the right to delete the BSD license from it, but, as your fork develops and accrues valuable new code contributed under the GPL, nor are you under any obligation to donate that code back to BSD, unless you wish to.
So how do you claim the moral high ground when you just took someone else's project and forked it so that they can't use it the way they originally intended?
How does forking a project stop the original author using their work the way they intended? The original version still exists and still belongs to the original author. Anybody who wants to use it under the BSD license can still use the original version. So, this dispute is about new work that the GPL-using authors have added and wish to distribute under their preferred license.
So what if that's what if that's what the BSD license allows people to do!
Because the requirement that you share your changes is the most fundamental difference between BSD and GPL!. If the BSD authors wanted access to all modifications as a right they could have chosen a Copyleft license (of their choice - doesn't have to be GPL) which requires this. Any hypocracy is on the part of those who have chosen not to use the GPL but are still demanding GPL-like rights.
It wasn't your project to begin with, but you're arrogant enough to fork the project and slap your own license on it, for what?
Because you want the wider community to benefit from the GPL's guarantee of perpetual access to the code and any future development thereof? The BSD license entitles you to do this. How can the original author object to this after indicating that they didn't care less if Microsoft or Apple took their code, made a closed-source derivative work and patented it?
(ring) (ring) (click) G'day, this is Tidbinbilla, how can we help?
"Er, Hi, This is Ranesh from Advanced Emulation Solutions... I'm testing the VM you commissioned to replace your legacy communications solution.
Thing is, there seems to be an undocumented bug in the command protocol and the remote client has locked
up. Could some one pop over and power-cycle the client, please?
****???^^^^!!!!
Hey - take it easy - "no worries" as you guys say - just turn off the power, count to ten and turn it on again!
$$$$!!!!##### !!!!!
Er, 15.5 billion kilometers, you say? Look, I know you guys like to boast about the size of Australia, but...
$$$$ ****ING OUTER SPACE !!!!! MOST DISTANT MAN-MADE ****ING OBJECT !!!!!
Oh. Shit. I wonderered why the ping time was 24 hours.
Actually, the main problem with Microsoft is that they have absolutely no confidence in their own ability to compete.
No - Microsoft's problem is that, for a company which has historically enjoyed a near-total monopoly in the office software market, any competition would decimate their turnover - and any executive that presides over that will be looking at a serious blot on their copybook.
We live in a world where the dice in the stock market's crap game is a company's rate of growth (if not the rate of increase of growth): if your employer makes record profits this year, that means they are under huge pressure to make even more profit next year or their growth will have stalled and all their stock-speculating friends will desert them (which is why the boss gets a big bonus and you get outsourced).
Its hard enough for a monopoly to achieve continuous growth, let alone exponential growth, and to allow a reduction in your turnover is a complete no-no. Microsoft executives are in a cleft stick between monopoly regulations and their solemn duty as a company to make their shareholders as rich as Croesus.
This is not capitalism - it is the second derivative of capitalism.
Hey NBC: I have chosen not to have cable, but want to pay you for Heroes.
Hey, Apple, I'm in the UK and buying Heroes or BSG (assuming they were available on UKiTunes) as low-res, DRM-infested downloads would cost about the same as getting the shiny DVDs from Amazon - better quality (and only the DRM equivalent of a wet paper bag that is CSS).
If a series is worth paying money for, its worth waiting for the DVDs (and you'd probably want a whole season) so I don't really give a stuff.
Where iTunes might come in is if you have missed an episode but that doesn't really figure if you're not following it on broadcast anyway.
I've said it before and say it again... these silly names are hurting Ubuntu.
The Microsoft (nee. IBM) industry sub-standard monoculture is founded on the suit-friendly "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" culture and the fact that PHBs are too insecure in their maturity to deal with computers named after fruit or star trek characters.
Publishers of Harry Potter and other "too good for children" children's literature have got the idea - produce "adult cover" editions for those sad, sad people who are too uptight to be seen dead reading a book with a brightly coloured cover on the train (and too stupid to realise that it still says "Harry Potter" in large friendly letters on the cover)*.
Of course, there is Ubuntu 6.06LTS - but there's still that tricky "Ubuntu" name - your stereotypical "conservative" PHB is usually White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, so you'd be safer with something pseudo-latin ending with "-itas", "-ia" or "-um" (justified with some pseudo-psychological newspeak about encompassing the prodynamic metaresponsive approach of something, and using "leverage" as a verb) than a Bantu word incorporating some warm fuzzy communist tree-hugging philosophy.
(*OK - I know that, in reality, this is probably more to do with getting bookshops to display them outside the kids department - also I confess to briefly owning an adult-cover copy of "The Northern Lights" but it was the only one in the shop & I gave it away as soon as I got a proper copy).
Yep.. the first Matrix film was pretty fresh and interesting (to people that don't watch a lot of anime at least!), but they even managed to mess up the sequels
But that was the problem - the first one was completely fresh and different (for mainstream audiences not into anime and extreme martial arts) - the sequels were obliged to follow broadly the same style, but by the time they came out, bullet time, wire-work Kung-Fu and "extreme" fight scenes had become cliched. Have you noticed how tame the bank lobby shootout scene looks today, compared with the first time you saw it? The long delay (probably not helped by the death of two cast members and the post-9/11 hiatus for any film in which things got blowed up) didn't help.
Its not as if the plot of the sequels was any sillier than the first movie (the whole humans as power sources thing - holy thermodynamics Batman!) just that the first film was such compellingly brilliant eye candy that your brain's services were not required, and we never worried about why someone punching you in VR should give you a fat lip in reality. By "Reloaded" we'd seen it all before (with freeze frame, commentary and white rabbits too, thanks to the original's role in popularizing DVD) and were starting to worry about plot holes.
...plus the first film had the "advantage" that it came out fairly close to Star Wars Episode one, and benefitted from rather favorable comparisons... (NB: I still think that Universal should have gambled and released "Serenity" head-to-head against "Revenge of the Sith" - then they'd have been a story, and people love to root for the little guy).
the entire frame will be in focus like a BAD cartoon.
There... corrected that for you...
...didn't Disney, even circa Snow White, have some sort of elaborate tower system for simulating "depth of field" with cells? Actually, I take it back - even BAD cartoons will often just have blur in the background to save money and allow re-use of shots (e.g. the transformation scene in just about every Japanese TV cartoon).
To be fair, maybe the answer to making something look like a cartoon is to exaggerate the flaws of cartoons - so lets not pre-judge it until we've seen it.
Darn - all I have to do is cat/etc/passwd from a regular account... let's see... gee, the sysadmin on this machine is a dumbass - what sort of root password is "x"?
OMG its on Mac OS as well - the root password here is '*' - well, at least they've used a non-alphabetic character.
What's that you say Mr Sock.../etc/passwd is a public file and no security-conscious distro has actually stored passwords in there since the encryption was cracked (at least for dictionary words) sometime in the 80s?
Wake me up if Skype actually emails a readable copy of/etc/passwd to the black hats - even then, it shouldn't be enough to compromise a system (although a list of usernames might be handy).
The nice thing about putting an "X" on a bit of paper and dropping it in a box is that, whatever inaccuracies *may* be possible, you can trust the box to anonymize your vote without changing it, and most scams can be avoided by the scrutiny of copious cross-party observers without recourse to an "expert witness".
Inability of laypersons to scrutinize computer voting -> demand for audit trail -> loss of privacy.
You can filddle around with the details, but ultimately its pretty inescapable. People won't accept a computerized black box - which is a bit of a bummer when a black box is exactly what you're trying to replicate.
You can't suddenly parachute technology into a system without completely re-evaluating the whole system.
Of course, here in the UK we just have to put one X in one of half-a-dozen boxes - I appreciate that, in the US, the zeroth amendment ("if some is good, more is better") applies to democracy, and if you're also electing the school board, agonizing over who to choose as second assistant dog-catcher and whether to support propositions 4096-8192 inclusive then you may need a voting machine...
(Here, though, the fun is over postal - and maybe internet - voting, which some politicos seem to think will encourage people to vote but - surprise surprise - has proven vulnerable to ballot stuffing...)
Why can't they simply take a nod from Israeli Airlines and stick a guy with an Uzi on board each plane?
Because opening up with an Uzi on a crowded aircraft would probably do more damage than whatever makeshift weapon the terrorist had managed to smuggle on board?
I know that the "people getting sucked out of a bullet hole" scenario comes out of the same Hollywood Physics book as the devastating hair-bleach and nail-varnish-remover bomb - but so do the magic bullets that only kill bad guys. If I was in a crowded plane with 300 people and some moron opened up with a machine gun* then whether he was a terrorist or a TSA agent would be a matter of supreme indifference... Even if a single broken window doesn't cause the plane to nosedive I'd rather keep the air in the plane, thank you.
Worse, a terrorist could blind the TSA agent by squirting 100ml of baby milk in his eyes, incapacitate him further by hitting him over the head with a (security sealed) bottle of duty free, suffocate him with the plastic zip-lock cosmetics bag and grab the Uzi.
Oh, and, PS - threatening to kill suicide bombers lacks something as a deterrent. Especially if they have enough smarts to build a dead-man's switch.
(* or semi-automatic or whatever variation on "thing that spits outs lots of bits of metal at very high speed and should never be let off in a confined space with lots of people" a Uzi actually is).
Slashdot Mirror
Correction - that would be homeopathic "medicine" that doesn't contain a single molecule of this magick water...
However, this is basically another way of making that amaxing wonder-drug called "placebo" which is so effective that it is the standard against which all other drugs are tested. And if the homeopath also sits you down, remembers your name from last time, gives you a nice cup of jasmine tea and has a nice sympathetic chat about your condition, how much stress you are under at work and whether you're eating properly... well, you probably stand a better-than-average chance of getting better.
Well, my excuse for not RTFM (or iRTFM) is that I don't have an iPhone.
HOWEVER - the point is not what I understand - its what the average mobile phone user can be expected to understand.
Given that TFM for the typical consumer electronics device consists mainly of warnings aimed at the potential Darwin Award winner for whom taking a piss without drowning themselves must be a bit of a challenge, expecting a warning like "Remember to turn of automatic mail checking before travelling abroad, because contrary to all common sense its actually cheaper to hire Natalie Portman to personally carry a platinum-plated USB stick over in a private jet than to make a data call from Europe" seems eminently reasonable.
In fact, since the iPhone is meant to be this amazingly easy-to-use, drool-proof device that can even work out where it is and direct you to the nearest LobotomyULike franchise, one might expect it to have the sense to say "Hello, you appear to be automatically checking your mail over an roaming connection. Unless the country you are calling from is a member of the G8 this amount of cashflow may collapse the local economy. Do you want to continue?".
"HCICWF: Human-computer interface reports client wetware failure"
"MUF: Mobility unit failure"
"TMFSC: Transport module failed sanity check"
Or maybe just:
+++ CARRIER LOST
Sums it up...
...and if you're using a digital tuner in the UK, you get listings along with the signal, which MythTV picks up quite nicely, thanks.
Er, what if its a PHONE and if you turn it completely off people won't be able to, like, PHONE you...?
If you read on, someone posts that the iPhone (just like Windows Mobile phones) has a power-down mode if you really want it.
What other phones DON'T do is periodically phone home all by themselves - and unless AT&T/Apple have a large friendly warning* in TFM then they're probably in the wrong on that one.
(* Do not eat iPhone. Do not operate iPhone while attempting to defuse atomic bomb. Do not drop iPhone onto the head of a pedestrian from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Do not smash iPhone to pieces and stab yourself with the shards. Do not insert iPhone anally unless you are the goatse guy. If you are the goatse guy please do not return iPhone to Apple afterwards. Do not select The Lumberjack Song as ringtone while drinking in a bar in rural Canada. Turn iPhone off properly when traveling abroad. Do not take the name of Jobs in vain. Warning: this booklet may cause paper cuts if mishandled. See page 199 for more warnings)
No, not that MTV "reality" show, the thing outside the window... Rarely a day goes by without the media quoting some bit or science or statistics (and usually getting it wrong - but that's fine - get kids to critique it and write letters to the paper explaining why they agree or disagree with the figures...) You'll get into trouble, of course, but maybe in English you have slightly more leeway to discuss possibly contentious subjects.
The big problem is that the Math taught in schools is so divorced from any credible practical applications that the kids will need a lot of prompting to connect it with anything in the real world. Math lessons focus on isoated technical skills and rarely apply them to anything useful - even "word problems" are usually contrived to test a bit of math curriculum rather than to demonstrate a paractical application.
The problem with SF is that, even in "hard" SF books, the real science is intertwined with fantasy or highly speculative science, so you have to tread carefully - the most "scientific" are probably the classic short stories by the likes of Clarke and Asimov. Hard SF (i.e. with science in) is less in vogue these days, and what there is (e.g. Stephen Baxter, Greg Egan) tends to be a bit "extreme" (speculative cosmology, theories-of-everything, dark matter, posthuman intelligence...)
You won't find much science in Harry Potter... There is some science in The Golden Compass (heavily bowdlerized film coming real soon) , but it would be a brave teacher that took that into a US classroom in some States, other than to do a study of whether the amount of atheism in a book affects the temperature at which it burns... :-)
Ever since the heartbreak of Firefly (and all those other promising shows that got canned after a season or less) you can forgive people for not wanting to mentally invest in anything without a few seasons under its belt :-)
Its very ambiguous whether "Who" is a remake, a re-boot or just a show picked up after a 15-year hiatus... the format has been changed but it does have some continuity with the old version.
Also: "Who" is pretty unique because it is targetted at a mainstream "family" audience - in the UK it goes out at 7PM, Saturday on one of the main terrestrial channels - plus its one of the "main events" on Christmas Day. Its done a lot to get SF/fantasy - and general action/adventure - back on the TV map in the UK. This may not be obvious if you're watching via Bittorrent in the US...
The writing on the new series is variable - but Stephen Moffat's episodes "The Empty Child", "Girl in the Fireplace" and (this year) "Blink" are absolute gems. The latter two also make excellent use of time travel, which should give them SF brownie points.
The trouble with all these awards is how you are meant to compare "new BSG" (gritty, adult themes) with "Who" (traditionally a bit B-movie creature feature camp, aimed at kids in the 7-70 age range, tries to sneak the odd adult theme under the radar*).
* the least said about the paving-slab fellatio episode, the better... that one should be up for the Razzies :-)
It was good - I thought it had a disticnt Douglas Adams-y feel to it.
:-)
On reflection, that was probably the inexplicable Horse, plus a bit of inspiration from the Grebulons in "Mostly Harmless"... Still, what goes around comes around
(FYI the late lamented Adams once worked as script editor/author on the original Doctor Who - elements of "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" and "Life, The Universe and Everything" actually started life as Doctor Who scripts)
Great thing about Stephen Moffat is that - unlike other Who authors - he realizes that time travel isn't just a plot device to take you somewhere interesting to have an advanture - same goes for his episode "Blink" that should be airing in the US about now... Not such a tear-jerker, but another contender for Best. Episode. Ever.
A: You only pay the TV license if you own TV reception equipment - whether or not that makes it a "tax" is up for debate, but it is more-or-less ring fenced for broadcasting, and doesn't (e.g.) just disappear into the Inland Revenue coffers with your income tax. (There's a side-issue with convincing the TV license stormtroopers that you don't have TV reception equipment, but that's incompetence, not the law). Actually, I'd predict that as soon as media convergence "matures" this system will collapse - I don't think extending the definition of TV reception equipment to PCs and Internet would be tolerated - big media and comms. companies are already hostile towards this system and would roll out the astroturf like mad. In a sense, by pursuing online TV in any form, the BBC turkeys are voting for Christmas.
B: The BBC is not "run" by the government - lots of effort has been made to ensure that the management from the BBC is apolitical. Of course, this is totally immune from political appointments and back-room arm twisting - not!!! - but the thought is there. Like all journalists, the BBC news service is in the business of telling ripping yarns that get the viewers in, with accuracy and objectivity distinctly optional (e.g. the recent documentary on how nasty WiFi radiation fries kids brains, in which a tinfoil-hat salesman was given an uncritical platform) and this occasionally gets mistaken for political bias.
C: As far as I am aware, the BBC has no Royal Exemption from copyright and contract law and they have to deal with rights holders - much of their content is outsourced, bought in, involves card-carrying actors or is sold overseas (with various guarantees of exclusivity).
OTOH, this is all a bit nuts, since if you bung a DVB-T (terrestrial broadcast digital TV) card in your PC you can grab Dr Who, Torchwood and Heroes in ad-free wide-screen unencrypted MPEG2 goodness anyway (and 'Who is on continual re-run on BBC3 so you can't miss it!).
Unfortunately TFA said ASCII - the Matrix included a lot of Japanese Katakana/Hiragana script so you'd probably need JIS, Unicode or ISO something-or-other...
Also, do not try this at home unless you are The One - otherwise, after ten minutes you'd probably go green and flow downwards.
The http://www.fi.uu.nl/wisweb/en/">Freudenthal institute have a large collection of java applets for secondary/high school education. There's lots of others out there too.
Spreadsheets also have enormous potential for teaching algebra concepts - particularly for getting over the idea of variables and functional relationships (after solving pages of simple "if x + 5 = 7 what is x?" equations, kids often get hung up on the notion that "x" is always a specific number...) Set up simple formulae in a spreadsheet, hide the formulae and have the kids reverse-engineer the formula... [1] Although a web browser might let you download a few :-)
I think the whole debate has got those two things mixed up - if GPL people are stripping the BSD license, then that is pretty clearly wrong (except in the previous thread on this issue it sounded as if the license had been stripped by the author - which, if true, is fair game).
However, the fact that this has (allegedly) happened has opened up a can of worms about how you do combine BSD and GPL without one voiding the other... What its sounding like is as if you can "aggregate" BSD code with GPL code - and maybe link to it - but each identifiable unit must be either GPL-only (any modifications are GPL) or BSD-only (any modifications are BSD).
The real problem is that the BSD license is that it doesn't spell out how it is intended to apply in the case of derivative or composite works or, indeed, what comprises a derivative work. If people are assuming that GPL "trumps" BSD then it may be because the GPL speaks with a clearer voice on the subject.
The irony is that one "solution" would probably be to distribute the BSD parts in Linux as binary blobs... since if there's no source distribution, the issue goes away. I think GPLv3 probably scotches that, though... :-)
Don't know about you, but if a CD is any good, I'll get more than 100 hours of play-time out of it (maybe spread over a few years, though). While I agree that "other things to spend money on" is part of the problem, you can't make simplistic value comparisons like that. E.g. DVD movies are lousy value on the play time front (there's, like, 5 movies that you'd want to watch more than once a year...) but are a bargain c.f. going to the multiplex.
Probably because the whole marketing effort is pitched towards bands that churn out a radio-friendly single every few months, to keep the turnover going, rather than those that produce a decent 45-minute album every two years. The singles charts absorb all the marketing and publicity - despite the fact that the concept of the 3-minute single was obsoleted by the CD. Even a single will be deemed to have "failed" if it doesn't get into the top ten.
There is no mass-market publicity channel for album-oriented bands beyond word-of-mouth. In the case of the earlier poster raving about Evenescance - odds are that he only heard about them because they lucked out and got a song used in an iffy superhero movie.
Even for singles, it is vaguely perplexing that radio stations and TV channels are expected to pay for the privilege of advertising the music industry's product. I've noticed that the free-to-air music TV channels in the UK are showing less and less actual music - and when they do its mostly back-catalogue stuff.
Then, of course, you have the problem that for a singles "artist" to be sucessful, they now have to be (a) a supermodel, (b) a trained dancer and (c) able to carry a tune - enough to give the occasional live performance and prove they're not Milli Vanilli, anyway. This thins the talent pool - if you look at classic videos from days of yore, most of them danced like a dad at a disco by modern standards - but the songs were... well... they are the songs that the modern groups are sampling and (c)rapping over :-)
First - some disambiguating. There is obviously a real issue with the correct way to handle projects containing a mixture of GPL and BSD. It seems pretty clear to me that the only thing that entitles someone to re-distribute BSD code as part of a GPL product is the BSD license - and stripping off the BSD notice is clearly Just Plain Wrong (unless you're the original author). However, unlike the GPL, the text of the BSD license says nothing about derived works, linking, aggregation etc. so I'd be slightly sympathetic towards anybody who makes a "technical" mistake in this respect - flaming doesn't help much.
OTOH - witness the title of TFA - this seems to have got tangled up with some notion that when a GPL author uses some code under the BSD license they are somehow obliged to contribute their modifications to the BSD world.
Now, there's a difference between saying "Hey GPL guys, in the spirit of free software, how about contributing some code back to BSD, please?" (quite a reasonable request) and the current flame-war (suggesting this is an obligation, or overreacting to minor licensing issues). To be fair, GPL has its share of fundamentalists who go off the deep end when someone makes a minor licensing mistake.
So, no, just "forking" something shouldn't (and AFAIK doesn't) give you the right to delete the BSD license from it, but, as your fork develops and accrues valuable new code contributed under the GPL, nor are you under any obligation to donate that code back to BSD, unless you wish to.
How does forking a project stop the original author using their work the way they intended? The original version still exists and still belongs to the original author. Anybody who wants to use it under the BSD license can still use the original version. So, this dispute is about new work that the GPL-using authors have added and wish to distribute under their preferred license.
Because the requirement that you share your changes is the most fundamental difference between BSD and GPL!. If the BSD authors wanted access to all modifications as a right they could have chosen a Copyleft license (of their choice - doesn't have to be GPL) which requires this. Any hypocracy is on the part of those who have chosen not to use the GPL but are still demanding GPL-like rights.
Because you want the wider community to benefit from the GPL's guarantee of perpetual access to the code and any future development thereof? The BSD license entitles you to do this. How can the original author object to this after indicating that they didn't care less if Microsoft or Apple took their code, made a closed-source derivative work and patented it?
(ring) (ring) (click) G'day, this is Tidbinbilla, how can we help?
"Er, Hi, This is Ranesh from Advanced Emulation Solutions... I'm testing the VM you commissioned to replace your legacy communications solution. Thing is, there seems to be an undocumented bug in the command protocol and the remote client has locked up. Could some one pop over and power-cycle the client, please?
****???^^^^!!!!
Hey - take it easy - "no worries" as you guys say - just turn off the power, count to ten and turn it on again!
$$$$!!!!##### !!!!!
Er, 15.5 billion kilometers, you say? Look, I know you guys like to boast about the size of Australia, but...
$$$$ ****ING OUTER SPACE !!!!! MOST DISTANT MAN-MADE ****ING OBJECT !!!!!
Oh. Shit. I wonderered why the ping time was 24 hours.
Don't you guys have on-site support?
No - Microsoft's problem is that, for a company which has historically enjoyed a near-total monopoly in the office software market, any competition would decimate their turnover - and any executive that presides over that will be looking at a serious blot on their copybook.
We live in a world where the dice in the stock market's crap game is a company's rate of growth (if not the rate of increase of growth): if your employer makes record profits this year, that means they are under huge pressure to make even more profit next year or their growth will have stalled and all their stock-speculating friends will desert them (which is why the boss gets a big bonus and you get outsourced).
Its hard enough for a monopoly to achieve continuous growth, let alone exponential growth, and to allow a reduction in your turnover is a complete no-no. Microsoft executives are in a cleft stick between monopoly regulations and their solemn duty as a company to make their shareholders as rich as Croesus.
This is not capitalism - it is the second derivative of capitalism.
Hey, Apple, I'm in the UK and buying Heroes or BSG (assuming they were available on UKiTunes) as low-res, DRM-infested downloads would cost about the same as getting the shiny DVDs from Amazon - better quality (and only the DRM equivalent of a wet paper bag that is CSS).
If a series is worth paying money for, its worth waiting for the DVDs (and you'd probably want a whole season) so I don't really give a stuff.
Where iTunes might come in is if you have missed an episode but that doesn't really figure if you're not following it on broadcast anyway.
The Microsoft (nee. IBM) industry sub-standard monoculture is founded on the suit-friendly "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" culture and the fact that PHBs are too insecure in their maturity to deal with computers named after fruit or star trek characters.
Publishers of Harry Potter and other "too good for children" children's literature have got the idea - produce "adult cover" editions for those sad, sad people who are too uptight to be seen dead reading a book with a brightly coloured cover on the train (and too stupid to realise that it still says "Harry Potter" in large friendly letters on the cover)*.
Of course, there is Ubuntu 6.06LTS - but there's still that tricky "Ubuntu" name - your stereotypical "conservative" PHB is usually White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, so you'd be safer with something pseudo-latin ending with "-itas", "-ia" or "-um" (justified with some pseudo-psychological newspeak about encompassing the prodynamic metaresponsive approach of something, and using "leverage" as a verb) than a Bantu word incorporating some warm fuzzy communist tree-hugging philosophy.
(*OK - I know that, in reality, this is probably more to do with getting bookshops to display them outside the kids department - also I confess to briefly owning an adult-cover copy of "The Northern Lights" but it was the only one in the shop & I gave it away as soon as I got a proper copy).
But that was the problem - the first one was completely fresh and different (for mainstream audiences not into anime and extreme martial arts) - the sequels were obliged to follow broadly the same style, but by the time they came out, bullet time, wire-work Kung-Fu and "extreme" fight scenes had become cliched. Have you noticed how tame the bank lobby shootout scene looks today, compared with the first time you saw it? The long delay (probably not helped by the death of two cast members and the post-9/11 hiatus for any film in which things got blowed up) didn't help.
Its not as if the plot of the sequels was any sillier than the first movie (the whole humans as power sources thing - holy thermodynamics Batman!) just that the first film was such compellingly brilliant eye candy that your brain's services were not required, and we never worried about why someone punching you in VR should give you a fat lip in reality. By "Reloaded" we'd seen it all before (with freeze frame, commentary and white rabbits too, thanks to the original's role in popularizing DVD) and were starting to worry about plot holes.
...plus the first film had the "advantage" that it came out fairly close to Star Wars Episode one, and benefitted from rather favorable comparisons... (NB: I still think that Universal should have gambled and released "Serenity" head-to-head against "Revenge of the Sith" - then they'd have been a story, and people love to root for the little guy).
There... corrected that for you...
...didn't Disney, even circa Snow White, have some sort of elaborate tower system for simulating "depth of field" with cells? Actually, I take it back - even BAD cartoons will often just have blur in the background to save money and allow re-use of shots (e.g. the transformation scene in just about every Japanese TV cartoon).
To be fair, maybe the answer to making something look like a cartoon is to exaggerate the flaws of cartoons - so lets not pre-judge it until we've seen it.
They want their critical Unix vulnerability back.
Darn - all I have to do is cat /etc/passwd from a regular account... let's see... gee, the sysadmin on this machine is a dumbass - what sort of root password is "x"?
OMG its on Mac OS as well - the root password here is '*' - well, at least they've used a non-alphabetic character.
What's that you say Mr Sock... /etc/passwd is a public file and no security-conscious distro has actually stored passwords in there since the encryption was cracked (at least for dictionary words) sometime in the 80s?
Wake me up if Skype actually emails a readable copy of /etc/passwd to the black hats - even then, it shouldn't be enough to compromise a system (although a list of usernames might be handy).
What!!? A slashdotter who hasn't seen Donnie Darko - who let you on? :-)
Smurfs are asexual you insensitive clod!
The nice thing about putting an "X" on a bit of paper and dropping it in a box is that, whatever inaccuracies *may* be possible, you can trust the box to anonymize your vote without changing it, and most scams can be avoided by the scrutiny of copious cross-party observers without recourse to an "expert witness".
Inability of laypersons to scrutinize computer voting -> demand for audit trail -> loss of privacy.
You can filddle around with the details, but ultimately its pretty inescapable. People won't accept a computerized black box - which is a bit of a bummer when a black box is exactly what you're trying to replicate.
You can't suddenly parachute technology into a system without completely re-evaluating the whole system.
Of course, here in the UK we just have to put one X in one of half-a-dozen boxes - I appreciate that, in the US, the zeroth amendment ("if some is good, more is better") applies to democracy, and if you're also electing the school board, agonizing over who to choose as second assistant dog-catcher and whether to support propositions 4096-8192 inclusive then you may need a voting machine...
(Here, though, the fun is over postal - and maybe internet - voting, which some politicos seem to think will encourage people to vote but - surprise surprise - has proven vulnerable to ballot stuffing...)
Because opening up with an Uzi on a crowded aircraft would probably do more damage than whatever makeshift weapon the terrorist had managed to smuggle on board?
I know that the "people getting sucked out of a bullet hole" scenario comes out of the same Hollywood Physics book as the devastating hair-bleach and nail-varnish-remover bomb - but so do the magic bullets that only kill bad guys. If I was in a crowded plane with 300 people and some moron opened up with a machine gun* then whether he was a terrorist or a TSA agent would be a matter of supreme indifference... Even if a single broken window doesn't cause the plane to nosedive I'd rather keep the air in the plane, thank you.
Worse, a terrorist could blind the TSA agent by squirting 100ml of baby milk in his eyes, incapacitate him further by hitting him over the head with a (security sealed) bottle of duty free, suffocate him with the plastic zip-lock cosmetics bag and grab the Uzi.
Oh, and, PS - threatening to kill suicide bombers lacks something as a deterrent. Especially if they have enough smarts to build a dead-man's switch. (* or semi-automatic or whatever variation on "thing that spits outs lots of bits of metal at very high speed and should never be let off in a confined space with lots of people" a Uzi actually is).
I assume it involves a cat with a piece of buttered toast strapped to its back...