No, I'm saying that a guy could unconsciously, repeatedly hijack a connection, and that the extent to which that process is automated complicates questions of guilt and ruins most analogies.
With this guy it looks like it was intentional, deliberate theft. But generally speaking, the "waltzes in through your open front door and takes the cookies" image is completely imprecise, as you were placed inside the house and handed the cookies. No analogy supports that accurately.
Ah, right. So if you have your door open in summer, I'm welcome to walk into your house and help myself to some of the cookies that are on the kitchen table? Or print a few copies of the document you happen to have open on your PC?
The problem is that Windows will automatically put you inside the house, and you don't have to have done anything so conscious and specific as take cookies or print documents to steal bandwidth - you could just open IE and go to Google without thinking about it too much at all.
Just because something is easy doesn't mean it's morally justified.
True. But when something's done for you, and not by you, your moral responsibility for it is rather slender.
Because the last time you made a "friend" who'd never spoken to you or given any encouragement to the notion that you had a personal relationship with them, her boyfriend strangled you?
I'm terribly impressed - 2.12 looks like it will fix basically every gripe I have with out-of-the-box GNOME. The implementation of a clipboard service and menu editor is long-overdue, and most users have had to find third-party programs like gnome-clipboard-daemon and Smeg; the switch to Clearlooks saves us all a download; the extra configurability of Sound Juicer means I'll be able to switch from Grip; DVD support in GStreamer means I won't have to change the Totem backend to XINE, and a Firefox plugin for it means I don't have to have other players installed. The GNOME project have done really great work here: 2.12 seems to be a big step towards making GNOME a self-contained and complete desktop environment.
Wow, that's so wrong it's not even funny. Slavery was the fundamental issue dividing the United States. It was a political issue from the Consitution through to the Missouri Compromise and all the way through the 1840s and 1850s. The southern states seceded precisely to preserve slavery, which they suspected a Republican President would restrict (and perhaps even abolish). Davis and other Confederate politicians can be quoted on many occasions saying that the right to hold slaves was the fundamental principle of the Confederacy distinguishing it from the Union. And then the Confederacy begun the war by attacking Fort Sumter. As it was actually the south that started it - more broadly by seceding and more immediately by attacking the north - the victors were in no position to need to justify the war.
No, it was much of the south that tried to weasel out of its earlier convictions and redefine the nature of its behaviour. One effort was to claim that the states seceded to protect state's rights. But the only state's right that concerned the south - according to their own political discourse at the time - was the right to keep slaves. Of subsequent importance was the right to secede from the Union (so as to keep slaves), but that that right was tested was a consequence of the war, not a cause of it. Equally idiotic is the idea that the north and south were driven apart by economic differences, namely that the north were coldly industrial and the south were romantically agrarian (as it is often worded). One problem with that theory is that the north was in fact overwhelmingly agrarian, so the notion of it being fundamentally different on those terms is a fallacious one. The other is that examining economic differences only reenforces the conviction that slavery, and the differing approaches of the north and the south to it (and hence to labour and capitalism, and by extension to industralization), was the central economic difference. It was a difference so profound that the two sides separated by it seemed completely irreconcilable. So then we come to your brand of "revisionism" - that the war was unnecessary, slavery would have passed away peacefully and it was those nasty northerners that gone evilly started that dang war. Except, of course, the northerners didn't start the war. It was the southerners who clung on to slavery, remember? And those southerners who considered slavery worth fighting and dying for, those southerners who recognized, rightly, that slavery was the basis of their economy and way of life, proved through their blood and sweat that they were unwilling to let it pass away, peacefully or not. There is, rather, no evidence whatsoever to suggest any such demise would have occured; there is a mountain, in the form of the war, arguing for southern resolution against it. All three approaches to revisionism can be reduced to the same tendency: to downplay the importance of slavery in the antebellum and Confederate south. That is, as I pointed out before, particularly amusing considering how noisily and repeatedly the Confederacy used slavery and its importance as a rallying cry. You'd also have to be incredibly stupid to look at the southern lifestyle before the Civil War and doubt that it was centered around, and that it depended on, slavery; it was, in fact, the core of southern identity, and showed no inclination of harmlessly halting.
All of which is disregarded by you. I honestly can't fathom how people can be so uneducated and unthinking as to believe such overtly wrong "revisionism". It resembles Nazi sympathizing and Holocaust denial. To be quite clear: the Civil War occured primarily, and almost singularly, because of slavery. The south wanted to preserve it. The north wanted, initially, to reunite the union that had been split by slavery and prevent the spread of slavery to new states; later, it wished to emancipate the slaves. Please try not to be so ill-informed next time you speak.
By putting Skype in play, he distracts for no money at all most of the major media companies. And while they try to figure out how to respond to VoIP, old Rupert will be attacking them on some completely other front.
Is Cringely saying that Murdoch would expand into VoIP to distract other media companies, who apparently won't be able to pay attention to more than one thing at a time? Of all the explanations Cringely gives for News Corp's contemplation of a Skype purchase, that is the least supported by any kind of logic. Media companies have tons of divisions. If merely creating a new one were enough to baffle your competitors into some non-competing stupor, then News Corp, which has expanded into TV and film, wouldn't face any competing newspapers (it does).
The rest of the article isn't so bad, but Cringely skips between explanations like a hyperactive frog. The simple fact is, Skype isn't worth $3 billion as a money-maker in its present form. It's valuable for two reasons: 1. It assails existing telephone companies, 2. It's a brand and a product with global reach, and hence a good way for a non-VoIP company to enter VoIP. Skype does 1. quite happily on its own. 2. is really the only motive for News Corp's prospective purchase.
Re:Something borrowed, nothing new
on
IE7 Bugs and Reviews
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Odd how that's in FireFox now, pixel-per-pixel copied! It's a two way street.
Yup, it makes no sense at all. Most obviously, there's a bizarre assumption of guilt in collecting levies on all blank media. Why should the RIAA be paid for me burning my children's photos to a disc? What have I gotten from the RIAA for my money? More interestingly, it means that copyright holders have been reimbursed for any piracy on that media - and that they should have waived their right to seek further damages. And if you've already paid for your piracy, haven't you a license to pirate as much as you want, then? The answer is apparently nope and nope. Which, it is equally apparent, makes no sense. The music industry wants it both ways - being paid for piracy in a way that implicitly legitimizes it while insisting on its illegality. And who can blame them for trying to get as much money as they can? What's astonishing is that they're being allowed to do it.
Mozilla Firefox 1.06 Gecko 1.9 The Gimp 2.2.8 Linux (kernel) 2.6.12 GNOME 2.10 KDE 3.4.1 Apache 2.0.54 XINE 1.0.2 KOffice 1.4 OpenOffice 1.1.4 amaroK 1.2.4 Abiword 2.2.8 GNU Chess 5.07!
It sounds as though you thought, "Gee, some open source programs aren't at 1.0 and" and, valiantly ignoring the possibility that those particular programs aren't finished, decided to post your magnificent discovery on Slashdot in general terms such as "this must be a problem with open source software." Honestly, WTF? Why would you post something so easily refuted, so flatly undercut by the most prominent projects of the movement you're trying to generalize about?
Robot Helps NASA Refocus on Hubble
Written-Off Mission to Extend Telescope's Life Is Revived Because of 'Dextre'
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 12, 2004; Page A03
The promotional video shows a multi-jointed titanium handyman untwisting knobs and disconnecting an electrical cable with slow-motion aplomb, displaying fine motor skills that the voice-over assures will enable it to install "new batteries, gyroscopes and scientific instruments" aboard the aging Hubble Space Telescope.
But the video is only a teaser. In April, when NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt showed the whole sequence to headquarters VIPs, what had first seemed an elusive dream -- a robotic mission to service Hubble and extend its life by five years or more -- suddenly became real.
"I remember coming to look at this stuff and asking, 'Is that an [animation]?' And somebody said, 'No, it's really happening,' " recalled Edward J. Weiler, who was NASA's associate administrator for space science at the time and is now Goddard's director. "I didn't think robots could do this kind of stuff."
It is by no means a sure thing. Yet largely because of the Canadian robot named "Dextre," NASA has gone in less than a year from virtually writing off the Hubble to embracing a mission that will cost between $1 billion and $1.6 billion and approach in complexity the hardest jobs the agency has ever undertaken.
"Almost as difficult as landing on Mars successfully twice," Weiler called it. Servicing the Hubble, like the nine-month tour de force that has kept two rovers tooling around the Martian countryside, will demand a host of technical tasks and tricks that have never been tried.
To do it, the United States must develop its first-ever robotic docking vehicle, fill a bag with tools that, in many cases, have not been invented, and use the robot repairman to unscrew j-hooks, open and shut doors and "drawers," disconnect and attach electric connectors, and rig jumper cables.
By the end of 2007, NASA hopes to put into orbit its Hubble Robotic Vehicle of four components: a de-orbit module designed to dock with Hubble; a grappling arm to seize the telescope during docking and serve as a repair platform; an ejection module to carry spare parts and tools; and Dextre.
The jobs, in descending order of importance, are to change Hubble's batteries; install new gyroscopes; swap an old camera for a new, more sophisticated one; install a new spectrograph; and, if possible, replace a telescope pointing device and repair another spectrograph.
"There's nothing easy about it. It's all firsts," said Goddard's Preston M. Burch, Hubble's program manager. "And some of the things we're thinking about make people nervous." The fundamental tenet for a servicing mission, he noted, is the same one that doctors espouse: "Above all, do no harm."
In the past, shuttle astronauts had the job of servicing Hubble, missions that required a few days of spacewalks lasting six hours each. Dextre "can work 24-7," Weiler said -- a fortunate feature, because robots are not as supple as humans. "Watching it is like watching grass grow," Weiler said.
Burch hopes to complete the mission in a month. Some of it will be done by the robot working on its own, but most will be handled by ground controllers manipulating the robot's two arms -- like playing a video game.
"Astronauts are keen to do this," Burch said, and they will probably get the call because of their experience and knowledge of the perils inherent in handling large objects in space -- where something pushed or pulled does not slow down until it is checked.
"Hey, if they ask me, I would be very happy to do this," said Michael Massimino, an astronaut who serviced the Hubble in 2002 and has joysticked Dextre in the lab. "It's an interesting and challenging project -- it's cool, really cool."
Dextre, so nicknamed by the Canadian Space Agency,
On the topic of Engrish, my colleague tells me that in Japanese "beigo" is the word for American English and "eigo" the word for English English. They're often regarded as distinct, it seems, even if they are generally mutually intelligible.
Kind of makes you wonder how much better the world would be if that money were spent on improving things on the ground.
1.6 billion spent on a reminder that humanity can extend beyond our present and, in proportion to space, miniscule problems. And, of course, on expanding human understanding - which has always had an effect in altering our lives.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm saying that a guy could unconsciously, repeatedly hijack a connection, and that the extent to which that process is automated complicates questions of guilt and ruins most analogies.
With this guy it looks like it was intentional, deliberate theft. But generally speaking, the "waltzes in through your open front door and takes the cookies" image is completely imprecise, as you were placed inside the house and handed the cookies. No analogy supports that accurately.
Ah, right. So if you have your door open in summer, I'm welcome to walk into your house and help myself to some of the cookies that are on the kitchen table? Or print a few copies of the document you happen to have open on your PC?
The problem is that Windows will automatically put you inside the house, and you don't have to have done anything so conscious and specific as take cookies or print documents to steal bandwidth - you could just open IE and go to Google without thinking about it too much at all.
Just because something is easy doesn't mean it's morally justified.
True. But when something's done for you, and not by you, your moral responsibility for it is rather slender.
Maybe if you'd stolen a faster internet connection. :(
Yes, we daffenittlay do.
I modded it troll because I'm a fucking troll and I got mixed up. Okay?
Because the last time you made a "friend" who'd never spoken to you or given any encouragement to the notion that you had a personal relationship with them, her boyfriend strangled you?
I'm terribly impressed - 2.12 looks like it will fix basically every gripe I have with out-of-the-box GNOME. The implementation of a clipboard service and menu editor is long-overdue, and most users have had to find third-party programs like gnome-clipboard-daemon and Smeg; the switch to Clearlooks saves us all a download; the extra configurability of Sound Juicer means I'll be able to switch from Grip; DVD support in GStreamer means I won't have to change the Totem backend to XINE, and a Firefox plugin for it means I don't have to have other players installed. The GNOME project have done really great work here: 2.12 seems to be a big step towards making GNOME a self-contained and complete desktop environment.
Wow, that's so wrong it's not even funny. Slavery was the fundamental issue dividing the United States. It was a political issue from the Consitution through to the Missouri Compromise and all the way through the 1840s and 1850s. The southern states seceded precisely to preserve slavery, which they suspected a Republican President would restrict (and perhaps even abolish). Davis and other Confederate politicians can be quoted on many occasions saying that the right to hold slaves was the fundamental principle of the Confederacy distinguishing it from the Union. And then the Confederacy begun the war by attacking Fort Sumter. As it was actually the south that started it - more broadly by seceding and more immediately by attacking the north - the victors were in no position to need to justify the war.
No, it was much of the south that tried to weasel out of its earlier convictions and redefine the nature of its behaviour. One effort was to claim that the states seceded to protect state's rights. But the only state's right that concerned the south - according to their own political discourse at the time - was the right to keep slaves. Of subsequent importance was the right to secede from the Union (so as to keep slaves), but that that right was tested was a consequence of the war, not a cause of it. Equally idiotic is the idea that the north and south were driven apart by economic differences, namely that the north were coldly industrial and the south were romantically agrarian (as it is often worded). One problem with that theory is that the north was in fact overwhelmingly agrarian, so the notion of it being fundamentally different on those terms is a fallacious one. The other is that examining economic differences only reenforces the conviction that slavery, and the differing approaches of the north and the south to it (and hence to labour and capitalism, and by extension to industralization), was the central economic difference. It was a difference so profound that the two sides separated by it seemed completely irreconcilable. So then we come to your brand of "revisionism" - that the war was unnecessary, slavery would have passed away peacefully and it was those nasty northerners that gone evilly started that dang war. Except, of course, the northerners didn't start the war. It was the southerners who clung on to slavery, remember? And those southerners who considered slavery worth fighting and dying for, those southerners who recognized, rightly, that slavery was the basis of their economy and way of life, proved through their blood and sweat that they were unwilling to let it pass away, peacefully or not. There is, rather, no evidence whatsoever to suggest any such demise would have occured; there is a mountain, in the form of the war, arguing for southern resolution against it. All three approaches to revisionism can be reduced to the same tendency: to downplay the importance of slavery in the antebellum and Confederate south. That is, as I pointed out before, particularly amusing considering how noisily and repeatedly the Confederacy used slavery and its importance as a rallying cry. You'd also have to be incredibly stupid to look at the southern lifestyle before the Civil War and doubt that it was centered around, and that it depended on, slavery; it was, in fact, the core of southern identity, and showed no inclination of harmlessly halting.
All of which is disregarded by you. I honestly can't fathom how people can be so uneducated and unthinking as to believe such overtly wrong "revisionism". It resembles Nazi sympathizing and Holocaust denial. To be quite clear: the Civil War occured primarily, and almost singularly, because of slavery. The south wanted to preserve it. The north wanted, initially, to reunite the union that had been split by slavery and prevent the spread of slavery to new states; later, it wished to emancipate the slaves. Please try not to be so ill-informed next time you speak.
By putting Skype in play, he distracts for no money at all most of the major media companies. And while they try to figure out how to respond to VoIP, old Rupert will be attacking them on some completely other front.
Is Cringely saying that Murdoch would expand into VoIP to distract other media companies, who apparently won't be able to pay attention to more than one thing at a time? Of all the explanations Cringely gives for News Corp's contemplation of a Skype purchase, that is the least supported by any kind of logic. Media companies have tons of divisions. If merely creating a new one were enough to baffle your competitors into some non-competing stupor, then News Corp, which has expanded into TV and film, wouldn't face any competing newspapers (it does).
The rest of the article isn't so bad, but Cringely skips between explanations like a hyperactive frog. The simple fact is, Skype isn't worth $3 billion as a money-maker in its present form. It's valuable for two reasons: 1. It assails existing telephone companies, 2. It's a brand and a product with global reach, and hence a good way for a non-VoIP company to enter VoIP. Skype does 1. quite happily on its own. 2. is really the only motive for News Corp's prospective purchase.
Odd how that's in FireFox now, pixel-per-pixel copied! It's a two way street.
Um, el wrongo. It was in Firefox first.
Yup, it makes no sense at all. Most obviously, there's a bizarre assumption of guilt in collecting levies on all blank media. Why should the RIAA be paid for me burning my children's photos to a disc? What have I gotten from the RIAA for my money? More interestingly, it means that copyright holders have been reimbursed for any piracy on that media - and that they should have waived their right to seek further damages. And if you've already paid for your piracy, haven't you a license to pirate as much as you want, then? The answer is apparently nope and nope. Which, it is equally apparent, makes no sense. The music industry wants it both ways - being paid for piracy in a way that implicitly legitimizes it while insisting on its illegality. And who can blame them for trying to get as much money as they can? What's astonishing is that they're being allowed to do it.
Mozilla Firefox 1.06
Gecko 1.9
The Gimp 2.2.8
Linux (kernel) 2.6.12
GNOME 2.10
KDE 3.4.1
Apache 2.0.54
XINE 1.0.2
KOffice 1.4
OpenOffice 1.1.4
amaroK 1.2.4
Abiword 2.2.8
GNU Chess 5.07!
It sounds as though you thought, "Gee, some open source programs aren't at 1.0 and" and, valiantly ignoring the possibility that those particular programs aren't finished, decided to post your magnificent discovery on Slashdot in general terms such as "this must be a problem with open source software." Honestly, WTF? Why would you post something so easily refuted, so flatly undercut by the most prominent projects of the movement you're trying to generalize about?
Ah, the GNAA: robotic humanoids.
Yeah, I'm talkin' DIRTY.
Just do what you're told, or you hate freedom.
No longer is Linux kernel source locked up on BitMover servers with BitMover holding the only key. Thank you, Tridge.
I need to impress you, and I feel dirty about it.
Thanks for your time.
polished look 2, you really speak to me. To other people as well, presumably, but not just to other people. Also to me. Thank you.
Here is the print version of this article, and alternate news coverage.
Made me laugh.
Robot Helps NASA Refocus on Hubble
Written-Off Mission to Extend Telescope's Life Is Revived Because of 'Dextre'
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 12, 2004; Page A03
The promotional video shows a multi-jointed titanium handyman untwisting knobs and disconnecting an electrical cable with slow-motion aplomb, displaying fine motor skills that the voice-over assures will enable it to install "new batteries, gyroscopes and scientific instruments" aboard the aging Hubble Space Telescope.
But the video is only a teaser. In April, when NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt showed the whole sequence to headquarters VIPs, what had first seemed an elusive dream -- a robotic mission to service Hubble and extend its life by five years or more -- suddenly became real.
"I remember coming to look at this stuff and asking, 'Is that an [animation]?' And somebody said, 'No, it's really happening,' " recalled Edward J. Weiler, who was NASA's associate administrator for space science at the time and is now Goddard's director. "I didn't think robots could do this kind of stuff."
It is by no means a sure thing. Yet largely because of the Canadian robot named "Dextre," NASA has gone in less than a year from virtually writing off the Hubble to embracing a mission that will cost between $1 billion and $1.6 billion and approach in complexity the hardest jobs the agency has ever undertaken.
"Almost as difficult as landing on Mars successfully twice," Weiler called it. Servicing the Hubble, like the nine-month tour de force that has kept two rovers tooling around the Martian countryside, will demand a host of technical tasks and tricks that have never been tried.
To do it, the United States must develop its first-ever robotic docking vehicle, fill a bag with tools that, in many cases, have not been invented, and use the robot repairman to unscrew j-hooks, open and shut doors and "drawers," disconnect and attach electric connectors, and rig jumper cables.
By the end of 2007, NASA hopes to put into orbit its Hubble Robotic Vehicle of four components: a de-orbit module designed to dock with Hubble; a grappling arm to seize the telescope during docking and serve as a repair platform; an ejection module to carry spare parts and tools; and Dextre.
The jobs, in descending order of importance, are to change Hubble's batteries; install new gyroscopes; swap an old camera for a new, more sophisticated one; install a new spectrograph; and, if possible, replace a telescope pointing device and repair another spectrograph.
"There's nothing easy about it. It's all firsts," said Goddard's Preston M. Burch, Hubble's program manager. "And some of the things we're thinking about make people nervous." The fundamental tenet for a servicing mission, he noted, is the same one that doctors espouse: "Above all, do no harm."
In the past, shuttle astronauts had the job of servicing Hubble, missions that required a few days of spacewalks lasting six hours each. Dextre "can work 24-7," Weiler said -- a fortunate feature, because robots are not as supple as humans. "Watching it is like watching grass grow," Weiler said.
Burch hopes to complete the mission in a month. Some of it will be done by the robot working on its own, but most will be handled by ground controllers manipulating the robot's two arms -- like playing a video game.
"Astronauts are keen to do this," Burch said, and they will probably get the call because of their experience and knowledge of the perils inherent in handling large objects in space -- where something pushed or pulled does not slow down until it is checked.
"Hey, if they ask me, I would be very happy to do this," said Michael Massimino, an astronaut who serviced the Hubble in 2002 and has joysticked Dextre in the lab. "It's an interesting and challenging project -- it's cool, really cool."
Dextre, so nicknamed by the Canadian Space Agency,
Is there really any reason to worry about this?
A better question would be, Is there really any reason to worry Slashdot about this? I wished you'd asked yourself that before making me read that.
On the topic of Engrish, my colleague tells me that in Japanese "beigo" is the word for American English and "eigo" the word for English English. They're often regarded as distinct, it seems, even if they are generally mutually intelligible.
Kind of makes you wonder how much better the world would be if that money were spent on improving things on the ground.
1.6 billion spent on a reminder that humanity can extend beyond our present and, in proportion to space, miniscule problems. And, of course, on expanding human understanding - which has always had an effect in altering our lives.
Just kidding. I voted for him. But we've got to compete with Canada somehow!
Oh, that's right, we have Hubble.