What, exactly, is it you think there is on Mars to screw up? The thinly-disguised religion of nature called aesthetic environmentalism strikes again.
Look, we are part of Nature. What we do is inherently natural. Nature changes things all the time. It is prudent to avoid actions that risk our existence, and it is nice to preserve as much biological diversity as possible. But there is nothing wrong with changing an environment per se, whether Earth's or Mars's or Pluto's or any other.
Setting aside the scientific value of Mars unaltered for a moment, why exactly shouldn't we do this?
Guess what! Humans are a part of nature. We are not below it, despite what the religious fundamnentalists of the aesthetic-environmental movement/religion would have you believe. Mars posesses no right to not be modified by humans any more than it has a right to not be modified by asteroid strikes.
2.2 still has lousy SMP support, and there are a few dozen other things that could be made to work better, which is why we're bothering with 2.4 in the first place. It's the same reason we don't build cars the same way that we did in 1930, despite the fact that the automobiles of 1930 worked.
And pre-2.4 is still rather buggy, for example the IDE support is still unstable. Unknowingly releasing an OS that hoses file systems a significant amount of the time may be an acceptable practice for Microsoft (anybody remember MS-DOS 6.0 and 6.2?), but even they don't knowingly release them.
Second, Linus disagrees with the microkernel philosophy. He believes that the kernel should be close to the hardware, not insulated from it by a hardware abstraction layer. If you think the hardware should be abstracted away, you can always use Minix . . .
Okay, I've had it with the Da Vinci thing. Da Vinci's sketches of "inventions" all have one thing in common -- they don't work if you build them. They don't even come close to working. To credit Da Vinci for those "inventions" is like crediting me for inventing a perpetual motion machine -- after all, I designed one that didn't work in the third grade.
And that has to be the standard. Ideas are a dime a dozen, but you haven't invented something until it works. (Well, let's go slightly broader. Babbage invented the first general-purpose mechanical computer, since his design works if built exactly as he designed it.)
BTW, I do believe in copyright as the just recognition that one owns the product of one's own labor.
With the caveat that that means a copyright term of the creator's life, or fifty years, whichever is greater. (Limiting the term to life means a recognition that the creator has no further rights after he is dead. The fifty years merely to allow contracts to be made without the publisher worrying that the creator will get hit by a bus tomorrow, and gives a term for corporate-created works.)
The first law to ever acknowledge publishers or writers as having ownership rights to their works (as opposed to publishers having royally-granted monopolies on the buisness of publishing) was the Statute of Anne, passed in England in 1710. More than 6,000 years after the origin of the written word.
Hey! Maybe this wasn't one of those asinine "First Posts"!
It was posted in response to an article over what was the first electronic computer; perhaps there's a computer aout there dating to the early 40's or to the 30's named "Post". In that case, the terse message of the AC is that the "1st" was "Post", not ENIAC or Colossus.
You see, while JFS is available for OS/2 Warp Server for e-Buisness (Aurora, Warp 5 Server), it's not available for the workstation version of OS/2, OS/2 Warp 4.5 (Merlin with the kernel update fixpack).
So a project was put together to take the GPLed JFS code and get it to run on OS/2 4.5.
Re-read it yourself. Kahn and Cerf say "there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet."
Anyone who knew how important NSFNet was to the evolution of the Internet into the network that it is today couldn't disagree with it. The NSFNet was the major backbone of the Internet for six years, after all.
So if Gore said, "I was the primary Congressional backer of the Internet and played a major and irreplacable role in its development," that would have been absolutely true. But he said "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Gore was important to the evolution of the Internet, but he still didn't take "the initiative in creating the Internet."
Even Tim Berners-Lee wasn't the only person to create the internet
Given that Tim Berners-Lee came along and invented http a good half-decade after Gore sponsored the creation of NSFNet, a decade after an entitiy called the Internet evolved, and two decades after ARPANet was formed...
The trademark is still actually owned by Software in Public Interest
Insofar as the vacuum of space is owned by Software in Public Interest, that's an accurate statement.
You see, the USPTO denied the registration request by saying that "Open Source" is a "descriptive term" that cannot be registered. So in the U.S. at least, nobody owns it. (That is, nobody has any legally enforcable rights to the term.)
Extropy is my favorite joke ideology. People who coin the name of their ideology because it "sounds good, kinda like the opposite of entropy, but not really" instead of its literal meaning are rather hard to take seriously.
ex- : out of; away from.
-tropy : indicates condition of turning.
So, "Away-turning", not as the self-named extropians claim, "the extent of a system's intelligence, information, order, vitality, and capacity for improvement".
Er, first, nothing stops one from duplicating the.sig of another.
Second, the UID number is perfectly innoncent. If some weak-minded idiots overrate it, well, it's no different than the era where every Bruce Perens comment was instantly modded up to +5.
Hey, welcome to Retro-Slashdot! Back before there was all this legal coverage, back before "grits" were ever mentioned, back before moderation reached the masses, back before user customization of displayed stories, even back before the coming of the Evil One (Jon Katz) . . . THIS is an example of what Slashdot regularly did.
Countries with parliamentary supremacy can legislatively interpret Article 41 to avoid some of the sillier implications of some of the clauses.
In the U.S., we'd have 11-year-olds suing their parents under Article 15 to overturn "no TV" rules, then legislation suing to overturn an act specifically authorizing "not TV" rules.
A feminist tried to fight this trend in her sons, giving them Barbies to play with. She was very dismayed to see them hold them by their legs, point the heads at each other, and make gun noises.
and calling for registration of all political websites.
Why not? We already let the FEC demand that you register political advocacy and expenditures in other media. Under the current unregistered undiclosed environment, the Big Evil Multinational Megacorps and The Rich could spend as much as they wanted on web sites without getting caught. So Bush isn't advocating anything different for online campaigning than John McCain, Joe Haeglin, Ralph Nader, or Al Gore advocate for all campaigning.
Of course, one could argue that free speech is important. Unfortunately, Harry Browne doessn't have a chance in hell of getting elected, and everybody else believes that there must be limits on freedom to protect the gullible public from itself.
As for the Matrix, what more do you want? A... wonderful never-done-before plot
Never done before?
Let's forget the hundreds of books that deal with similar concepts. Let's forget all the talk of "virtual reality replacing real life" that dominated the early '90s.
No, let's go back to at least four independent inventions of the basic concept, three verifiably more than a millenia old and the fourth probably that old. Those of the Ancient Greeks (Plato, the Cave of Shadows), Chinese (Lao Tzu and the Butterfly Dream), Indians (Buddha and the nature of Existence), and Australian Aboriginies (originator unknown, the Dream).
Oh, and myself, who came up with the idea in the FREAKING THIRD GRADE! I had dreamed an entire school day, complete with homework assignments, without realizing it was a dream until people started looking at me funny the next day. And it's happened to me at least three more times in my life (it may have happened a few more with my dreaming a boring day that didn't have an effect on later days -- how would I know?) I wrote a very amateur short story as a sixth grader on the theme years before the Matrix came out.
Slashdot Mirror
What, exactly, is it you think there is on Mars to screw up? The thinly-disguised religion of nature called aesthetic environmentalism strikes again.
Look, we are part of Nature. What we do is inherently natural. Nature changes things all the time. It is prudent to avoid actions that risk our existence, and it is nice to preserve as much biological diversity as possible. But there is nothing wrong with changing an environment per se, whether Earth's or Mars's or Pluto's or any other.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Setting aside the scientific value of Mars unaltered for a moment, why exactly shouldn't we do this?
Guess what! Humans are a part of nature. We are not below it, despite what the religious fundamnentalists of the aesthetic-environmental movement/religion would have you believe. Mars posesses no right to not be modified by humans any more than it has a right to not be modified by asteroid strikes.
Steven E. Ehrbar
You got a kernel, it works, end of story.
For what definitions of "works"?
2.2 still has lousy SMP support, and there are a few dozen other things that could be made to work better, which is why we're bothering with 2.4 in the first place. It's the same reason we don't build cars the same way that we did in 1930, despite the fact that the automobiles of 1930 worked.
And pre-2.4 is still rather buggy, for example the IDE support is still unstable. Unknowingly releasing an OS that hoses file systems a significant amount of the time may be an acceptable practice for Microsoft (anybody remember MS-DOS 6.0 and 6.2?), but even they don't knowingly release them.
Second, Linus disagrees with the microkernel philosophy. He believes that the kernel should be close to the hardware, not insulated from it by a hardware abstraction layer. If you think the hardware should be abstracted away, you can always use Minix . . .
Steven E. Ehrbar
Can't quite force our way on the Brits, now, can we?
;-)
Nope. Only the EU is allowed to do that.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Okay, I've had it with the Da Vinci thing. Da Vinci's sketches of "inventions" all have one thing in common -- they don't work if you build them. They don't even come close to working. To credit Da Vinci for those "inventions" is like crediting me for inventing a perpetual motion machine -- after all, I designed one that didn't work in the third grade.
And that has to be the standard. Ideas are a dime a dozen, but you haven't invented something until it works. (Well, let's go slightly broader. Babbage invented the first general-purpose mechanical computer, since his design works if built exactly as he designed it.)
Steven E. Ehrbar
BTW, I do believe in copyright as the just recognition that one owns the product of one's own labor.
With the caveat that that means a copyright term of the creator's life, or fifty years, whichever is greater. (Limiting the term to life means a recognition that the creator has no further rights after he is dead. The fifty years merely to allow contracts to be made without the publisher worrying that the creator will get hit by a bus tomorrow, and gives a term for corporate-created works.)
Steven E. Ehrbar
I'd be surprised to learn that they weren't "owned" by somebody, either the composer or the person hiring the composer.
Then be suprised.
I believe information sans owner is probably the historically new idea, not the reverse
Then believe wrongly.
The first restricitions on copying were esstablished merely "to raise government revenue and to give governing authorities control over publication contents."
The first law to ever acknowledge publishers or writers as having ownership rights to their works (as opposed to publishers having royally-granted monopolies on the buisness of publishing) was the Statute of Anne, passed in England in 1710. More than 6,000 years after the origin of the written word.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Hey! Maybe this wasn't one of those asinine "First Posts"!
It was posted in response to an article over what was the first electronic computer; perhaps there's a computer aout there dating to the early 40's or to the 30's named "Post". In that case, the terse message of the AC is that the "1st" was "Post", not ENIAC or Colossus.
On the other hand . . .
Steven E. Ehrbar
Actually, he heard right ;-).
You see, while JFS is available for OS/2 Warp Server for e-Buisness (Aurora, Warp 5 Server), it's not available for the workstation version of OS/2, OS/2 Warp 4.5 (Merlin with the kernel update fixpack).
So a project was put together to take the GPLed JFS code and get it to run on OS/2 4.5.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Re-read it yourself. Kahn and Cerf say "there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet."
Anyone who knew how important NSFNet was to the evolution of the Internet into the network that it is today couldn't disagree with it. The NSFNet was the major backbone of the Internet for six years, after all.
So if Gore said, "I was the primary Congressional backer of the Internet and played a major and irreplacable role in its development," that would have been absolutely true. But he said "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Gore was important to the evolution of the Internet, but he still didn't take "the initiative in creating the Internet."
Steven E. Ehrbar
Even Tim Berners-Lee wasn't the only person to create the internet
Given that Tim Berners-Lee came along and invented http a good half-decade after Gore sponsored the creation of NSFNet, a decade after an entitiy called the Internet evolved, and two decades after ARPANet was formed...
Steven E. Ehrbar
The trademark is still actually owned by Software in Public Interest
Insofar as the vacuum of space is owned by Software in Public Interest, that's an accurate statement.
You see, the USPTO denied the registration request by saying that "Open Source" is a "descriptive term" that cannot be registered. So in the U.S. at least, nobody owns it. (That is, nobody has any legally enforcable rights to the term.)
Steven E. Ehrbar
the bill that Al Gore sponsored in Congress created something very specific, with a particular name... now, what was that name?
/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html)
NSFNet. Gore's bill, the Supercomputer Network Act of 1986, established the NSFNet in 1986.
The Internet was born four years earlier, without Mr. Gore's assistance. (See http://www.isoc.org/gu est
Steven E. Ehrbar
You took the post seriously? Hint: Swift didn't really think eating Irish babies was a good idea, either.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Ok, This is coming from someone on a Unix/Linux (majority) web site?
/. crossed the barrier to a majority of readers running Windows over a year and a half ago, IIRC.
No.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Extropy is my favorite joke ideology. People who coin the name of their ideology because it "sounds good, kinda like the opposite of entropy, but not really" instead of its literal meaning are rather hard to take seriously.
ex- : out of; away from.
-tropy : indicates condition of turning.
So, "Away-turning", not as the self-named extropians claim, "the extent of a system's intelligence, information, order, vitality, and capacity for improvement".
Steven E. Ehrbar
Er, first, nothing stops one from duplicating the .sig of another.
Second, the UID number is perfectly innoncent. If some weak-minded idiots overrate it, well, it's no different than the era where every Bruce Perens comment was instantly modded up to +5.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Hey, welcome to Retro-Slashdot! Back before there was all this legal coverage, back before "grits" were ever mentioned, back before moderation reached the masses, back before user customization of displayed stories, even back before the coming of the Evil One (Jon Katz) . . . THIS is an example of what Slashdot regularly did.
Steven E. Ehrbar
s/legislation/litigaitors
Steven E. Ehrbar
Countries with parliamentary supremacy can legislatively interpret Article 41 to avoid some of the sillier implications of some of the clauses.
In the U.S., we'd have 11-year-olds suing their parents under Article 15 to overturn "no TV" rules, then legislation suing to overturn an act specifically authorizing "not TV" rules.
Steven E. Ehrbar
A feminist tried to fight this trend in her sons, giving them Barbies to play with. She was very dismayed to see them hold them by their legs, point the heads at each other, and make gun noises.
Steven E. Ehrbar
and calling for registration of all political websites.
Why not? We already let the FEC demand that you register political advocacy and expenditures in other media. Under the current unregistered undiclosed environment, the Big Evil Multinational Megacorps and The Rich could spend as much as they wanted on web sites without getting caught. So Bush isn't advocating anything different for online campaigning than John McCain, Joe Haeglin, Ralph Nader, or Al Gore advocate for all campaigning.
Of course, one could argue that free speech is important. Unfortunately, Harry Browne doessn't have a chance in hell of getting elected, and everybody else believes that there must be limits on freedom to protect the gullible public from itself.
Steven E. Ehrbar
How much would it cost to get from Earth to Mars using current technology?
According to NASA, $50 billion to get there and back on the Mars Reference Design Mission '93.
Hint: there haven't been any realistic estimates below $100 billion, and some have been as high as $400 billion.
Er, you don't think NASA's Mars Reference Design Mission '93 cost estimates are realistic?
Steven E. Ehrbar
As for the Matrix, what more do you want? A... wonderful never-done-before plot
Never done before?
Let's forget the hundreds of books that deal with similar concepts. Let's forget all the talk of "virtual reality replacing real life" that dominated the early '90s.
No, let's go back to at least four independent inventions of the basic concept, three verifiably more than a millenia old and the fourth probably that old. Those of the Ancient Greeks (Plato, the Cave of Shadows), Chinese (Lao Tzu and the Butterfly Dream), Indians (Buddha and the nature of Existence), and Australian Aboriginies (originator unknown, the Dream).
Oh, and myself, who came up with the idea in the FREAKING THIRD GRADE! I had dreamed an entire school day, complete with homework assignments, without realizing it was a dream until people started looking at me funny the next day. And it's happened to me at least three more times in my life (it may have happened a few more with my dreaming a boring day that didn't have an effect on later days -- how would I know?) I wrote a very amateur short story as a sixth grader on the theme years before the Matrix came out.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Actually, I live in the U.S. and can see live, real Olympic coverage, on broadcast TV.
There are definite advantages to living in a major U.S. metro area due north of Windsor, Canada. Vive l'Detroit!
Steven E. Ehrbar