Clarke's estate vs. the Olympic Committee? They could sue each other then. Clarke's last novel deals about the first Lunar Olympic Games (previously covered here on). On the other hand, this could be worth a good sponsorship deal.
I'm a "space"-fi nut, so this question's a bit of an embarassment. The Telegraph excerpt mentions a trip aboard a Skyhook. I'm puzzled by its description in one passage:
They knew how the passenger capsules worked, and what it would feel like to be borne skyward at a steady rate of metres per second.
What they had not entirely appreciated, though, was quite how many seconds, even at that speed, it was going to take to get from Sri Lanka to Sinus Iridium. This was not a weekend trip.
In the first half dozen days they had got only as far as the lower Van Allen belt, when the Subramanians - along with other families aboard, namely, the Kais, the Kosbas, and the Norwegians - had to hustle into shelter against the murderous Van Allen radiation.
My understanding is that in terms of speed, a Skyhook would be not that much different from a rocket, that is, you would be traveling at above supersonic speeds. The leisurely trip described in the passage seems to me to be more like the conventional "climber" type of space elevator. Could a better informed/.er please clarify, preferably with some links or better yet a CG/CAD rendering of an Skyhook?
This is really nitpicking of the worst sort. I don't find this contest of much use to people who really want to know the difference between bad writing and good writing. At most, it shows us (highlights) what a bad sentence is. But, hey, only in Slashdot does anything less than a paragraph's worth of keystrokes count (mostly modded as Funny).
Most people read by the paragraph (news reports or short stories) or by the chapter (novels). A bad sentence or three doesn't a bad novel make. (Nor does a few insightful sentences make a bad novel any better.) Truly bad writing is the inadvertent ability to mutilate the Queen's language with the impunity of a serial killer.
Faulkner. Ballard. Joyce. With their unusual figures of speech, the samples have a very post-modern feel. Maybe that's what make them "bad" to stodgy and self-important professors of English. But I don't think they would fare any worse than the comparisons that Shakespeare would make had the Bard been living in the 21st century:
She looked more lovely than a summer's day with its sudden winds and uncertain end.
The dangers of an on-line provider like MySpace being bought out by an "evil" megacorporation makes a clear content policy a necessity. Wikis, blogger sites and other web spaces where users provide a large part of the content should have a clear policy on who owns what. I like the lack of ambiguity in the copyright notice at the foot of each Slashdot page.
But other sites like Yahoo seem to adopt an "Obscurity is the best policy" approach to copyrights, never mind what John Dvorak might say. I'm beginning to think it's because such sites would like to distance themselves from any possible libel suits, while giving themselves the chance to claim the raw diamonds (rare as they might be) of on-line publishing.
Music downloaded as mp3s is a form of time-shifting, the way you'd program your Tivo or, in an earlier age, VCR to record your favorite show.
Which makes me wonder, what really is the difference between hearing music over the radio and listening to the same music on mp3? I think what the record labels want you to buy isn't the music, which you could hear on the radio and see on MTV anyway (especially if it's something as obnoxious as the latest Britney Spears hit), but the right to listen to the music when you want where you want. You're being deprived of the right to time-shift your pleasure.
To all you people that spend your spare time in front of your computer or watching that 60" Hi-Def... I say switch that little bastard off, go kiss your significant other right on the lips, and go out for a nice long walk.
Or you could switch off the plasma TV, stay at home and do something even nicer than a long walk.
The version already in unstable (1.0.7174-3) works fine (or no worse) with the xorg packages. There's actually even a warning attached to the experimental version (1.0.7667-1). The latest nvidia binary package supposedly does NOT support older (legacy) nvidia-based card like the TNT. Since all I have is a TNT-based card, I've decided to stick with 7174.
[...] and the Linux system which is an alien world to most people.
I can't disagree more. Most people don't use computers. Check the most bloated statistics. Windows users number in the hundreds of millions vs. a world population in the billions. So most people couldn't care a wot what the Windows XPerience is all about. There's actually still a market out there. Go after the Great Unwashed, not the Windows or Mac geeks.
Or think of it as Scholastic (or Rowling) trying to impose on readers the hardware equivalent of the EULA. This is something which already goes beyond the scope of ordinary copyright law (don't duplicate the one physical copy of the book you have). If I'm a reviewer I'd put out my review as soon as I finish speed-reading the Half-Blood Prince. Yes, I agree, someone should be testing the legality of this arrangement. But with the expenses involved in any law suit, it appears better just to respect the publisher's demands.
Blame the confusion between free enterprise and democracy for the sorry spectacle of companies from supposedly "democratic" countries going out of their way to cater to the whims of a supposedly "communist" country.
For a long time free enterprise did equal democracy. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was held up as the prime example of a non-capitalist and non-democratic state. Here was proof for the peoples of the developing world that democracy went hand-in-hand with capitalism. China's success proved that this need not be the case.
Some free enterprise appears to be necessary to promote democracy: the right to be as rich as the corrupt bureaucrat next door. But China proved that it's possible to get rich in a supposedly socialist setting even if you're not a card-carrying member of the party. You can make money if you know when to shut up.
The title of the story says the school "won't use textbooks," not won't use books at all. If eliminating textbooks is all that the move is all about, then I'm all for it. After grade school, I hated textbooks because of the way they were often used by incompetent teachers as a crutch: "Class, turn to Chapter 10, page 335."
My best teachers in college didn't prescribe any textbooks. Instead we got reading lists.
In a field such as literature, a textbook could even pose the danger that your mind would be warped by the author's presentation. More often, only the supposedly "representative" short works of an author would be included in a textbook on world literature. If they are at all included, the longer works, such as the novels or epic poetry, would be mercilessly excerpted.
Thus you don't get to read the real James Joyce or T.S. Eliot, just snapshots that don't adequately reflect their pioneering contributions to modern literature (e.g. stream of consciousness or free verse in English). The effect of a textbook-based curriculum on a literature major is no different from the cultural experience of a tourist who stays in a country for two days. You return home thinking that beer and sausages are what makes Germans tick or that people in Spain and Latin America are lazy because they like to take siestas.
You have to hire the music, which includes a fee payable to the estate of the composer in most cases.
This isn't true in most cases, as most of the really good stuff has been written by composers who have long since passed to the Great Concert Hall in the Sky. If you want to be pedantic about it, all "classical" compositions (that is, music of the Classical period) are free. All you need to do is to find a computer or a performer to turn the printed notes into music. And so the big problem is really the performance.
As for recordings not being a cash cow for classical music artists, most of the top-tier artists make their living from giving black-tie concerts. But most artists of lesser talent or promotion have to content themselves giving music lessons, either tutoring young brats on how to do-re-mi or lecturing at the music college of some university. I should know: I was the pain of quite a few such frustrated concert performers, and I still can't read a piece of simple sheet music on first sight.
I'm a bit puzzled by your statement "The first time I got 8-9 MB samples at slow speed." The downloads appear to be resumable. So I'd simply abort the download when it slows to a crawl and resume, rather than restart, the download. Of course, resuming as against restarting a 40MB download probably doesn't make much of a difference for those on a 500K pipe. But it does matter for those on a 56K dialup line (a three-hour download).
An OS for the blind should be command-driven. It might be argued that menus were designed precisely so users would not have to memorize cryptic commands. But for a blind user, it would be terribly inefficient (read, time-consuming) to be forced to listen to menu choices being read back. A command-driven OS would require an initially steeper learning curve in terms of memorizing keyboard short-cuts, but the effort is rewarded as soon as the user types "rf" for refresh, rather than wait for the text-to-speech (TTS) software to recite (1) Go to Site (2) Save Page (3) Reload Page, etc.
An OS for the blind should be linear rather than spatial. A blind user should not be forced to grope for icons or other clickable hotspots in an invisible desktop. Reducing the number of choices a blind user must make to get a task done makes the OS more rather than user-friendly.
Pasting a screen-reader atop a fancy desktop environment like Gnome or Mac OSX is not the solution. The solution is to get rid of the desktop manager and concentrate on making a better command language interpreter or shell.
Bash, or the B(ourne) A(gain) SH(ell) is already way friendlier to the blind user than Windows XP, Bash has file-name and command completion, which should make it easier to "remember" commands. Just remember the first few letters of a long command and press tab.
There are also a number of FOSS efforts to create the audio equivalent of a desktop. One is emacspeak, which is a lisp program that interfaces with the venerable emacs text editor and kitchen sink.
There are also GNU/Linux distributions geared toward blind users, such as Oralux.
I think the wave of the future isn't live DVDs, but GNU/Linux distros you can boot off the USB thumb (or pen) drive that hangs off your neck. The prices and capacities of such drives continue to fall such that 2GB versions are now within an employed geek's price range.
Having a bootable necklace is way cooler than a live DVD, almost like the stuff of a James Bond movie. For when was the last time you brought along a 12 cm data DVD to a rave party?
I see the future techniques of digital archaelogy as analogous to the tricks present-day archaelogist and paleontologist resort to to piece together the past.
I think it's necessary to make a distinction between the types of digital data you're storing. There are types of data where a damaged part does not equate to a damaged whole. Take for example, an mpeg video. Just because the first five minutes of the video are damaged doesn't mean you can't watch the rest of the two hour movie. Of course if your movie is in some encrypted format where every bit counts, you're screwed.
It's just like having a Greek statue where vital parts are missing, perhaps because of vandalism. Provided enough of the statue remains standing, an archaelogist can have a fair idea of what the whole statue must have looked like from the missing pieces.
But word processing documents are another matter entirely. People care about the size and position of any item on a page. It really needs to be very exact from implementation to implementation.
The functions you describe are best covered not by a word processor but by a desktop publishing program like InDesign or Scribus. In most publishing setups, such as that of a magazine or a web site, one set of people handles the linguistic content (the writers and editors) and another set of people takes care of the graphical content (the designers, layout artists, photographers, illustrators or programmers). Of course, there should be coordination between the two. But generally their functions are distinct, like the hemispheres of the human brain.
Just in case you've been hiding under a rock the past few years: QT has already been relicensed under your choice of the GPL and Trolltech's own QPL. See http:///developer/faqs/license_gpl.html for details.
A quantum computer is probably our best bet to create artificial intelligence. I see AI as simply computing where 2 + 2 doesn't always equal 4. With the expected computing inconsistencies that such computer will produce, we could see the emergence of AI. Or maybe we should simply call it artificial consciousness, as capable of making stupid decisions as its organic creators.
Slashdot Mirror
Heard there was a fall in stock value, so now they're selling for 13.37 a share.
Don't forget the space elevator, which, according to the late Arthur C. Clarke will get built 50 years after it stops getting modded funny.
Clarke's estate vs. the Olympic Committee? They could sue each other then. Clarke's last novel deals about the first Lunar Olympic Games (previously covered here on). On the other hand, this could be worth a good sponsorship deal.
My understanding is that in terms of speed, a Skyhook would be not that much different from a rocket, that is, you would be traveling at above supersonic speeds. The leisurely trip described in the passage seems to me to be more like the conventional "climber" type of space elevator. Could a better informed /.er please clarify, preferably with some links or better yet a CG/CAD rendering of an Skyhook?
Most people read by the paragraph (news reports or short stories) or by the chapter (novels). A bad sentence or three doesn't a bad novel make. (Nor does a few insightful sentences make a bad novel any better.) Truly bad writing is the inadvertent ability to mutilate the Queen's language with the impunity of a serial killer.
Music downloaded as mp3s is a form of time-shifting, the way you'd program your Tivo or, in an earlier age, VCR to record your favorite show.
Which makes me wonder, what really is the difference between hearing music over the radio and listening to the same music on mp3? I think what the record labels want you to buy isn't the music, which you could hear on the radio and see on MTV anyway (especially if it's something as obnoxious as the latest Britney Spears hit), but the right to listen to the music when you want where you want. You're being deprived of the right to time-shift your pleasure.
The version already in unstable (1.0.7174-3) works fine (or no worse) with the xorg packages. There's actually even a warning attached to the experimental version (1.0.7667-1). The latest nvidia binary package supposedly does NOT support older (legacy) nvidia-based card like the TNT. Since all I have is a TNT-based card, I've decided to stick with 7174.
On second thought, I think you're right: Linux and Windows are alien worlds to most people in our overpopulated generation starship.
Or think of it as Scholastic (or Rowling) trying to impose on readers the hardware equivalent of the EULA. This is something which already goes beyond the scope of ordinary copyright law (don't duplicate the one physical copy of the book you have). If I'm a reviewer I'd put out my review as soon as I finish speed-reading the Half-Blood Prince. Yes, I agree, someone should be testing the legality of this arrangement. But with the expenses involved in any law suit, it appears better just to respect the publisher's demands.
Blame the confusion between free enterprise and democracy for the sorry spectacle of companies from supposedly "democratic" countries going out of their way to cater to the whims of a supposedly "communist" country.
For a long time free enterprise did equal democracy. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was held up as the prime example of a non-capitalist and non-democratic state. Here was proof for the peoples of the developing world that democracy went hand-in-hand with capitalism. China's success proved that this need not be the case.
Some free enterprise appears to be necessary to promote democracy: the right to be as rich as the corrupt bureaucrat next door. But China proved that it's possible to get rich in a supposedly socialist setting even if you're not a card-carrying member of the party. You can make money if you know when to shut up.
The title of the story says the school "won't use textbooks," not won't use books at all. If eliminating textbooks is all that the move is all about, then I'm all for it. After grade school, I hated textbooks because of the way they were often used by incompetent teachers as a crutch: "Class, turn to Chapter 10, page 335."
My best teachers in college didn't prescribe any textbooks. Instead we got reading lists.
In a field such as literature, a textbook could even pose the danger that your mind would be warped by the author's presentation. More often, only the supposedly "representative" short works of an author would be included in a textbook on world literature. If they are at all included, the longer works, such as the novels or epic poetry, would be mercilessly excerpted.
Thus you don't get to read the real James Joyce or T.S. Eliot, just snapshots that don't adequately reflect their pioneering contributions to modern literature (e.g. stream of consciousness or free verse in English). The effect of a textbook-based curriculum on a literature major is no different from the cultural experience of a tourist who stays in a country for two days. You return home thinking that beer and sausages are what makes Germans tick or that people in Spain and Latin America are lazy because they like to take siestas.
As for recordings not being a cash cow for classical music artists, most of the top-tier artists make their living from giving black-tie concerts. But most artists of lesser talent or promotion have to content themselves giving music lessons, either tutoring young brats on how to do-re-mi or lecturing at the music college of some university. I should know: I was the pain of quite a few such frustrated concert performers, and I still can't read a piece of simple sheet music on first sight.
I'm a bit puzzled by your statement "The first time I got 8-9 MB samples at slow speed." The downloads appear to be resumable. So I'd simply abort the download when it slows to a crawl and resume, rather than restart, the download. Of course, resuming as against restarting a 40MB download probably doesn't make much of a difference for those on a 500K pipe. But it does matter for those on a 56K dialup line (a three-hour download).
An OS for the blind should be command-driven. It might be argued that menus were designed precisely so users would not have to memorize cryptic commands. But for a blind user, it would be terribly inefficient (read, time-consuming) to be forced to listen to menu choices being read back. A command-driven OS would require an initially steeper learning curve in terms of memorizing keyboard short-cuts, but the effort is rewarded as soon as the user types "rf" for refresh, rather than wait for the text-to-speech (TTS) software to recite (1) Go to Site (2) Save Page (3) Reload Page, etc.
An OS for the blind should be linear rather than spatial. A blind user should not be forced to grope for icons or other clickable hotspots in an invisible desktop. Reducing the number of choices a blind user must make to get a task done makes the OS more rather than user-friendly.
Pasting a screen-reader atop a fancy desktop environment like Gnome or Mac OSX is not the solution. The solution is to get rid of the desktop manager and concentrate on making a better command language interpreter or shell.
Bash, or the B(ourne) A(gain) SH(ell) is already way friendlier to the blind user than Windows XP, Bash has file-name and command completion, which should make it easier to "remember" commands. Just remember the first few letters of a long command and press tab.
There are also a number of FOSS efforts to create the audio equivalent of a desktop. One is emacspeak, which is a lisp program that interfaces with the venerable emacs text editor and kitchen sink.
There are also GNU/Linux distributions geared toward blind users, such as Oralux.
I think the wave of the future isn't live DVDs, but GNU/Linux distros you can boot off the USB thumb (or pen) drive that hangs off your neck. The prices and capacities of such drives continue to fall such that 2GB versions are now within an employed geek's price range.
Having a bootable necklace is way cooler than a live DVD, almost like the stuff of a James Bond movie. For when was the last time you brought along a 12 cm data DVD to a rave party?
Here's one. It only tops off at 128MB though. So it's little more than a bootable business card.
I see the future techniques of digital archaelogy as analogous to the tricks present-day archaelogist and paleontologist resort to to piece together the past.
I think it's necessary to make a distinction between the types of digital data you're storing. There are types of data where a damaged part does not equate to a damaged whole. Take for example, an mpeg video. Just because the first five minutes of the video are damaged doesn't mean you can't watch the rest of the two hour movie. Of course if your movie is in some encrypted format where every bit counts, you're screwed.
It's just like having a Greek statue where vital parts are missing, perhaps because of vandalism. Provided enough of the statue remains standing, an archaelogist can have a fair idea of what the whole statue must have looked like from the missing pieces.
The link was intended as a demo. Register and you become the spam zombie's next victim.
Does this mean we could run the Hurd on the coming Mactel PCs?
Just in case you've been hiding under a rock the past few years: QT has already been relicensed under your choice of the GPL and Trolltech's own QPL. See http:///developer/faqs/license_gpl.html for details.
A quantum computer is probably our best bet to create artificial intelligence. I see AI as simply computing where 2 + 2 doesn't always equal 4. With the expected computing inconsistencies that such computer will produce, we could see the emergence of AI. Or maybe we should simply call it artificial consciousness, as capable of making stupid decisions as its organic creators.