The current Australian government is led by an {insert expletive here} who views the 50's through rose coloured glasses and would like nothing better than to impose his 50's Methodist morality on the rest of us.
His government was trying to get a tax bill through the Federal Senate, in which no one single party has a majority.
The government chose to deal with two independents, one who split with the opposition because he missed out on a promotion and narrowly escaped criminal charges because he was too sick to stand trial (but wasn't too sick to vote in Parliament - go figure). The other can only be described as a fundamentalist Catholic who has used his position to prevent government funding for abortions and prevent RU 486, the "abortion pill" from being used in Australia.
Shortly before the tax bill was due to be debated, the Internet censorship bill was rushed through the Senate with virtually no debate. It was widely interpreted as an implicit inducement to our fundamentalist Senator.
However, once he had achieved his goal of (theoretically, of course) stopping adults looking at porn, our friendly fundamentalist Senator turned around and voted against the tax bill, basically stabbing the government in the back!
The Minister for Communications has been copping nothing but criticism for this law from the entire IT industry, but has made this monkey for his own back.
The laws start to take effect from July next year. It's generally believed that either the laws will fall into disuse or will quickly be rendered totally unworkable by people submitting so many complaints the Broadcasting Authority won't be able to deal with the backlog.
Meanwhile, Australian content providers have been gradually moving offshore.
My problem with the Artistic lience is that it's damn difficult to understand! The GPL and X licences, to me at least, are crystal-clear. The LGPL is slightly less clear, but that is mostly because the LGPL deals with the ambiguities of linking (is including a C++ header file with inline funcs linking. . . what about using a CORBA IDL to enable interprocess method activation . . and so on). The Artistic licence is just a nightmare.
If I can't understand a licence, I'm not going to use it for my own code, and I'd think twice about contributing code for a project under a screwy licence.
As someone who has taught introductory programming, my FIRST recommendation is STAY AWAY FROM Perl as a first language, unless that's the only thing you ever want to learn.
I'm not knocking Perl as a language - I use it all the time - but it's not suitable as an introduction to programming. I've not used Python, but the reasons that other posters have put forward suggest to me that it may be appropriate.
At our school we teach the functional language Haskell in our first course, then C. Java, C++, and even a little Prolog and Assembler are taught along the way through. Haskell is a great teaching language, partly because it knocks the smart-alecs who know C++ before they get in to university back on their arse, partly because it's a great introduction to some pretty clever concepts like strong typing and recursion. However, for someone having a taste of programming to see if they like it, it's probably a little intimidating and not easy to immediately write useful programs.
Consider the Hong Kong soft-serve icecream company known as Mister Softee... I nearly choked on my bottled water (and I'm not going ANYWHERE near the ice cream).
According to All Things Considered on NPR (it's relayed here on the public radio station), the US spends $1 trillion every year on health. NASA's estimate of a manned Mars Mission costs is about $50 billion over ten or so years. Frankly, if the US (or the EU, or Japan for that matter) decided to do a manned Mars mission, it could quite easily afford to do it.
I know I'd happily pay an extra percentile in taxes to fund it.
ASIO is *not* the equivalent of the CIA. ASIS, the Australian Security and Intelligence Service (acronym expansion slightly uncertain here), is the Australian equivalent of the CIA. ASIS, and the CIA, are (legally anyway) not involved with domestic intelligence. They spy on other countries, in other words, not their own citizens.
ASIO are a highly secretive, but quite small, organisation that is mainly involved with counterintelligence (ie making sure that local diplomats stick to diplomatic activities rather than spying) and tracking "internal security threats". Over the years these have historically included Communists (which seem to scare the bejeezus out of Americans, and Australians of an earlier age, but seem pretty laughable to me), and Vietnam war protesters. Not surprisingly, the political left has disliked ASIO for quite some time. It was only in the 80's that they came to accept the perceived need for an intelligence agency (and when you've got a country of 200 million people that seems to be de facto run by a rather nasty army across 100 miles of water from you, a foreign intelligence service comes in handy).
I should make clear that this is more dumb legislation from a minister who seems to make only dumb legislation. He's the one responsible for the net censorship laws (which didn't achieve their desired goal - get a tax bill past a particular Senator), he's mandating an extremely dumb HDTV broadcasting standard that no-one else in the world will use, and now this. Technologically savvy Australians are counting the days until Senator Alston gets the boot, either by election or by his own party.
Pay several important kernel hackers to work on the kernel.
Pay lots of people to work on GNOME, full time, and give the copyright of the core libraries to the FSF.
Developed RPM, which most of the other commercial distros use.
Have helped publicise Linux, and Open Source, more generally.
Despite some well-publicised problems, made quite a few hackers a tidy profit on their IPO.
AFAIK and IMHO, haven't abused their predominant position in the distro market.
While I don't use Redhat personally, I think that, so far, that they have been good for Open Source / free software, and that they deserve recognition and financial success.
I'm a postgrad student in the CS department Melbourne University, where several people who were involved with CSIRAC still work. There are a couple of misconceptions here on Slashdot(which I don't recall being in the article, BTW).
IMHO, there is no possibility of the machine EVER being fired up again, unfortunately. While it's a nice dream, it's likely that trying to restart the thing would do nothing but cause a large fire. These are 50-year-old vacuum tubes, people!
I believe that n emulator has been written for it, and many of the original programs (on paper tape) have been saved and run on the emulator.
The machine WILL be displayed publically in Melbourne, probably at the new Museum of Victoria that's just about completed. This will complement Sydney's Powerhouse Museum, which has a piece of Babbage's Difference Engine.
It's a fascinating device to look at - at first glance, it looks like a piece of old radar junk you'd find in a disposals store, until you talk to some of the people who understand the thing. It all starts to make sense then - the mercury tube memory is particularly clever. Even more fascinating is some of the software written for it, such as the "autocoder" program which looks suspiciously like a proto-compiler, written at or before the same time as FORTRAN and COBOL.
The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia had an arcade version of Spacewar at a recent exhibition. Vector graphics monitor, PDP-1 inside it (apparently). Had a great time playing against a 12-year-old who had absolutely no idea of the historical significance but thrashed me anyway:-)
It was quite an interesting exhibition, if you made allowances for the drool factor. An Apple I (with a label stating it had an Intel processor...), a piece of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, and a few other interesting bits and pieces. It was just so depressing that nobody was looking at the difference engine, and there were hundreds of people crowded around a ho-hum industrial robot that had be programmed to "dance" in time to some crappy 70's disco music.
No longer true. Here's what the generated parser's copyright notice says :
/* Skeleton output parser for bison, Copyright (C) 1984, 1989, 1990 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA. */
/* As a special exception, when this file is copied by Bison into a Bison output file, you may use that output file without restriction. This special exception was added by the Free Software Foundation in version 1.24 of Bison. */
/* This is the parser code that is written into each bison parser when the %semantic_parser declaration is not specified in the grammar. It was written by Richard Stallman by simplifying the hairy parser used when %semantic_parser is specified. */
And, while I agree that the LGPL has some flaws in it, fixing a bug in an LGPL library does not require you to place your entire product as LGPL. It requires you to release the source to your library patch, if you distribute a patched (or unpatched, for that matter) binary version of the library.
I can't give you a direct link, but go to the Sunday Program's site and do a search for Echelon. The head of the DSD, the local equivalent to GCHQ or the NSA, basically confirmed the existence of Echelon in writing. How much more black and white do you want?
The Online Censorship Bill was the result of a grubby little compromise between the government and a independent Senator from Tasmania who happened to hold the balance of power in the Senate at the time. The guy is a fanatical Catholic and is constantly trying to ban porn, restrict access to abortions and contraception, and generally demonstrate what a wowser he can be. The government was trying to get a tax bill through the Senate, and they needed this guy's vote. Hence, from absolutely nowhere, this ridiculous Bill was rushed through.
#endif
The local Internet industry didn't know whether to protest, laugh, or cry. Most seem to be taking a fourth option - relocating both themselves and their servers to the States, happily beyond this stupid law.Electronic Frontiers Australia is working as hard as they can to publicise the impact of the new law, but the mainstream media isn't interested.
In any case, I intend to treat the law with the contempt it deserves and set up a secure proxy connection to a US-based server. It's my guess that, before too long, the bill with either be quietly discarded through ignorance, or cause an uproar when people can't get to their favourite porn sites. Either way, watching the next few months would be fun if it wasn't so tragic.
Re:(response, getting slightly OT and onto USB)
on
SuSE Coming on DVD
·
· Score: 2
USB support is getting to be more extensive, the 2.4 kernel is going to support quite a few devices.
However, there is a considerable hurdle that needs to be dealt with before USB support is truly seamless. USB devices are designed to be hot-swapped, and there can be 127 of them on the one bus. There are many, many, different types of USB devices. If you located an entry in the/dev directory for every single possible device, there would be literally thousands of entries. In addition (and I'm not a kernel hacker so I'm not exactly clear how this works) each of those entries in the/dev directory is actually a kind of pointer to a "device". Devices are each given a number, and it turns out that USB would probably exhaust the number of permissible devices.
So what's the solution? Obviously we need some kind of scheme to allocate entries in/dev, and device numbers, dynamically. Such a scheme exists already as a kernel patch called devfs. This hack allocates devices dynamically as required, and according to its backers basically solves the problem.
However, there are a lot of important kernel hackers who don't like devfs, for reasons I don't understand but these guys presumably wouldn't object just for the hell of it. The debate has raged for a considerable time now, even before the USB problem put more pressure on to find a solution. As I understand it, while Linus hasn't included devfs in the mainstream kernel, he has basically not commented on the flamewars.
So, what's the solution? #define UNINFORMED_SPECULATION I guess Linus is either working on a modified devfs or an alternative scheme that will satisfy the naysayers. #endif
Hopefully a solution will arrive before the 2.4 kernel is released.
The "distance-sensitivity problem", as you put it, is a fundamental technical limit rather than something that's going to be solved by some clever encoding algorithm. As I understand it, the permissible bandwith of a cable reduces proportionally to its length due to signal loss and interference, and the maximum data rate is relates to the bandwith through Shannon's (?) Law (which I've forgotten the exact formula for). In any case, I think the limit for VSDL-type speed is a few hundred metres - not particularly useful unless the telcos install mini-exchanges on every street.
FWIW, I'd be happy with 1mbit/sec or so, if our local Telcos/cable operators (which are basically one and the same in Oz) weren't charging 35c/MB for it!
While I would personally find internet voting easy and convenient, I'm completely and utterly against the idea, for the forseeable future.
I'm from Australia, where voting is compulsory. Whilst the policy isn't always that popular (particularly with the conservative parties who don't like it because it encourages the poor to vote . . . ), it means that participation rates are usually around 95%. People who don't want to cast a vote for a candidate can still do so by drawing obscene cartoons on their ballot papers instead of voting, but it requires people to make the effort. The participation-rate problem in the US context does not therefore apply.
Political parties tend to be full of, well, politicians, or aspiring politicians. There aren't many network security analysts amongst the ranks of our major political parties, but there are plenty of people who can look and can count. Therefore, it's much easier to demonstrate to the public and the parties that a paper-based system is transparent.
Whilst it might be possible, in a technical sense, to demonstrate a system that guaranteed both security and anonymity, it's very difficult to convince the public, who are alternately blithe about revealing their innermost details, and then paranoid that "hackers" are going to steal their life savings if they turn on their computer, that such a system would be anonymous and secure.
In a voting booth, the only person who sees your vote is you. With home Internet voting, your partner, children, or parents will probably see who you vote for.
Grandma's not likely to be using the Internet comfortably, for a while yet at least. Nor are many Aboriginals, the unemployed, and other disadvantaged groups.
Software is inherently unreliable - despite people's best efforts. What would happen if a glitch caused votes to be lost or wrongly attributed?
The benefits in vote processing are marginal anyway. In Australia, at least, most election results are known within 4 hours of the polls closing (except when the election is so close that postal votes come in). So we'd know the result within 5 minutes of polls closing? Big deal! Watching election coverage is kind of fun anyway (particularly watching the losing side start to squirm when they see that their ticket's been punched).
I see few arguments in favour of Internet elections, and considerable ones against. There are other ways to tackle the issue of participation rates.
Fred Brooks, author of "The Mythical Man-Month" had quite a lot to say about "magic bullets" like AI in the mid-eighties - basically, they might help a little, but it's not going to improve programmers productivity by orders of magnitude. On this, he's still correct today. Programming is still (almost) as hard today as it was then.
As someone who's just started playing around with CORBA, it seems like the source-code compatibility isn't too bad.
The mapping between the IDL files (Interface Descriptions - kinda like header files) and the interface to the generated code is all pretty standardised. A few #defines and a couple of macros/small inline functions should solve the residual problems. The IDL files themselves are ORB-independent - that's the entire point! Finally, code compiled with one ORB on one platform can talk to another ORB with code in another language on another platform using IIOP.
As far as I can see (and I admit I've only really been playing so far), CORBA will be the least of my portability worries . . . the joys of multiple GUI interfaces and incompatible build environments will probably be far nastier!
While I don't know for sure, I'd be reasonably confident that the transaction-processing network is secure. For one thing, it's not TCP/IP based, it's probably DES encrypted (and despite its vulnerability to a well-funded attack, there's no evidence that anybody other than the EFF and the various TLAs have built the necessary hardware), and the banks have had plenty of practice securing these systems. However, I'd imagine that the PC networks of your average bank is like most companies' networks - leaking like a sieve. I'm sure there's plenty of material lying around on those corporate hard drives that's quite blackmail-worthy.
I've just started a PhD in an AI-related area, and as far as I'm concerned the "machine that's intelligent as a human" is as far away now as it was back in the 50's. We are SEVERAL fundamental breakthroughs away from a general-purpose "intelligent" machine.
NONE of the currently-known AI techniques (and they're all quite old by now) holds out much promise in this regard - but that's not to say they aren't very useful for the right application. I respect Clarke's skills as a visionary, but I'm afraid that his hypothesis isn't supported by the trends in research.
Not that I intend to actually install any, but does the Internet Industry association realise that there isn't any porn-blocking client-side filtering software available for Linux?
Maybe I'll just install junkbuster - yep, I've got client-side filtering software, it filters content I don't want to see . . .
The whole sorry issue is just another reason I hdespise the current Australian Federal government - our current PM combines the bad qualities of John Major, Al Gore and Dan Quayle. . .
The Australian Library Association has a policy they call Freedom To Read. In summary, this policy states that censorship of material on the grounds that it's objectionable is incorrect. Does the American equivalent have a similar policy?
As Arthur C. Clarke also demonstrated in his classic 2001, you can easily synthesize gravity using a rotating spacecraft. If you do this, justifying further fruitless research into microgravity is just putting people's health in jeopardy.
In his excellent book, The Case For Mars, Robert Zubrin advocates a well-researched and complete plan for the exploration of Mars. It avoids extended travel through microgravity, does not require any on-orbit assembly, and could be launched with a slightly modified shuttle or even by starting up the Saturn V production line again! For not much more than we are going to waste on the space station, we could go to Mars within 10 years.
Check out Mars Direct for more information on Robert Zubrin's excellent arguments, and The Mars Society to get involved.
If a game a game won't run properly when the hardware requirements sticker on the box matches your system, go back to the shop and demand a refund. If a game is a real dog, use the Net to organise en masse to ask for refunds. If enough people complain long and loud enough (and have good reason) retailers will take notice - and will breathe down the neck of game publishers who release under-tested games.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't politics fun?
If I can't understand a licence, I'm not going to use it for my own code, and I'd think twice about contributing code for a project under a screwy licence.
I'm not knocking Perl as a language - I use it all the time - but it's not suitable as an introduction to programming. I've not used Python, but the reasons that other posters have put forward suggest to me that it may be appropriate.
At our school we teach the functional language
Haskell in our first course, then C. Java, C++, and even a little Prolog and Assembler are taught along the way through. Haskell is a great teaching language, partly because it knocks the smart-alecs who know C++ before they get in to university back on their arse, partly because it's a great introduction to some pretty clever concepts like strong typing and recursion.
However, for someone having a taste of programming to see if they like it, it's probably a little intimidating and not easy to immediately write useful programs.
Consider the Hong Kong soft-serve icecream company known as Mister Softee... I nearly choked on my bottled water (and I'm not going ANYWHERE near the ice cream).
I know I'd happily pay an extra percentile in taxes to fund it.
ASIO is *not* the equivalent of the CIA. ASIS, the Australian Security and Intelligence Service (acronym expansion slightly uncertain here), is the Australian equivalent of the CIA. ASIS, and the CIA, are (legally anyway) not involved with domestic intelligence. They spy on other countries, in other words, not their own citizens.
ASIO are a highly secretive, but quite small, organisation that is mainly involved with counterintelligence (ie making sure that local diplomats stick to diplomatic activities rather than spying) and tracking "internal security threats". Over the years these have historically included Communists (which seem to scare the bejeezus out of Americans, and Australians of an earlier age, but seem pretty laughable to me), and Vietnam war protesters. Not surprisingly, the political left has disliked ASIO for quite some time. It was only in the 80's that they came to accept the perceived need for an intelligence agency (and when you've got a country of 200 million people that seems to be de facto run by a rather nasty army across 100 miles of water from you, a foreign intelligence service comes in handy).
I should make clear that this is more dumb legislation from a minister who seems to make only dumb legislation. He's the one responsible for the net censorship laws (which didn't achieve their desired goal - get a tax bill past a particular Senator), he's mandating an extremely dumb HDTV broadcasting standard that no-one else in the world will use, and now this. Technologically savvy Australians are counting the days until Senator Alston gets the boot, either by election or by his own party.
While I don't use Redhat personally, I think that, so far, that they have been good for Open Source / free software, and that they deserve recognition and financial success.
It's a fascinating device to look at - at first glance, it looks like a piece of old radar junk you'd find in a disposals store, until you talk to some of the people who understand the thing. It all starts to make sense then - the mercury tube memory is particularly clever. Even more fascinating is some of the software written for it, such as the "autocoder" program which looks suspiciously like a proto-compiler, written at or before the same time as FORTRAN and COBOL.
Check out this CSIRAC site.
It was quite an interesting exhibition, if you made allowances for the drool factor. An Apple I (with a label stating it had an Intel processor...), a piece of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, and a few other interesting bits and pieces. It was just so depressing that nobody was looking at the difference engine, and there were hundreds of people crowded around a ho-hum industrial robot that had be programmed to "dance" in time to some crappy 70's disco music.
If you need Mathematica to do your analysis, you need (La)TeX for your presentation.
/* Skeleton output parser for bison,
Copyright (C) 1984, 1989, 1990 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330,
Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA. */
/* As a special exception, when this file is copied by Bison into a
Bison output file, you may use that output file without restriction.
This special exception was added by the Free Software Foundation
in version 1.24 of Bison. */
/* This is the parser code that is written into each bison parser
when the %semantic_parser declaration is not specified in the grammar.
It was written by Richard Stallman by simplifying the hairy parser
used when %semantic_parser is specified. */
And, while I agree that the LGPL has some flaws in it, fixing a bug in an LGPL library does not require you to place your entire product as LGPL. It requires you to release the source to your library patch, if you distribute a patched (or unpatched, for that matter) binary version of the library.
I can't give you a direct link, but go to the Sunday Program's site and do a search for Echelon. The head of the DSD, the local equivalent to GCHQ or the NSA, basically confirmed the existence of Echelon in writing. How much more black and white do you want?
#define RANT_MODE
The Online Censorship Bill was the result of a grubby little compromise between the government and a independent Senator from Tasmania who happened to hold the balance of power in the Senate at the time. The guy is a fanatical Catholic and is constantly trying to ban porn, restrict access to abortions and contraception, and generally demonstrate what a wowser he can be. The government was trying to get a tax bill through the Senate, and they needed this guy's vote. Hence, from absolutely nowhere, this ridiculous Bill was rushed through.
#endif
The local Internet industry didn't know whether to protest, laugh, or cry. Most seem to be taking a fourth option - relocating both themselves and their servers to the States, happily beyond this stupid law.Electronic Frontiers Australia is working as hard as they can to publicise the impact of the new law, but the mainstream media isn't interested.
In any case, I intend to treat the law with the contempt it deserves and set up a secure proxy connection to a US-based server. It's my guess that, before too long, the bill with either be quietly discarded through ignorance, or cause an uproar when people can't get to their favourite porn sites. Either way, watching the next few months would be fun if it wasn't so tragic.
However, there is a considerable hurdle that needs to be dealt with before USB support is truly seamless. USB devices are designed to be hot-swapped, and there can be 127 of them on the one bus. There are many, many, different types of USB devices. If you located an entry in the /dev directory for every single possible device, there would be literally thousands of entries. In addition (and I'm not a kernel hacker so I'm not exactly clear how this works) each of those entries in the /dev directory is actually a kind of pointer to a "device". Devices are each given a number, and it turns out that USB would probably exhaust the number of permissible devices.
So what's the solution? Obviously we need some kind of scheme to allocate entries in /dev, and device numbers, dynamically. Such a scheme exists already as a kernel patch called devfs. This hack allocates devices dynamically as required, and according to its backers basically solves the problem.
However, there are a lot of important kernel hackers who don't like devfs, for reasons I don't understand but these guys presumably wouldn't object just for the hell of it. The debate has raged for a considerable time now, even before the USB problem put more pressure on to find a solution. As I understand it, while Linus hasn't included devfs in the mainstream kernel, he has basically not commented on the flamewars.
So, what's the solution?
#define UNINFORMED_SPECULATION
I guess Linus is either working on a modified devfs or an alternative scheme that will satisfy the naysayers.
#endif
Hopefully a solution will arrive before the 2.4 kernel is released.
In any case, I think the limit for VSDL-type speed is a few hundred metres - not particularly useful unless the telcos install mini-exchanges on every street.
FWIW, I'd be happy with 1mbit/sec or so, if our local Telcos/cable operators (which are basically one and the same in Oz) weren't charging 35c/MB for it!
I see few arguments in favour of Internet elections, and considerable ones against. There are other ways to tackle the issue of participation rates.
Fred Brooks, author of "The Mythical Man-Month" had quite a lot to say about "magic bullets" like AI in the mid-eighties - basically, they might help a little, but it's not going to improve programmers productivity by orders of magnitude. On this, he's still correct today. Programming is still (almost) as hard today as it was then.
The mapping between the IDL files (Interface Descriptions - kinda like header files) and the interface to the generated code is all pretty standardised. A few #defines and a couple of macros/small inline functions should solve the residual problems. The IDL files themselves are ORB-independent - that's the entire point! Finally, code compiled with one ORB on one platform can talk to another ORB with code in another language on another platform using IIOP.
As far as I can see (and I admit I've only really been playing so far), CORBA will be the least of my portability worries . . . the joys of multiple GUI interfaces and incompatible build environments will probably be far nastier!
While I don't know for sure, I'd be reasonably confident that the transaction-processing network is secure. For one thing, it's not TCP/IP based, it's probably DES encrypted (and despite its vulnerability to a well-funded attack, there's no evidence that anybody other than the EFF and the various TLAs have built the necessary hardware), and the banks have had plenty of practice securing these systems.
However, I'd imagine that the PC networks of your average bank is like most companies' networks - leaking like a sieve. I'm sure there's plenty of material lying around on those corporate hard drives that's quite blackmail-worthy.
I've just started a PhD in an AI-related area, and as far as I'm concerned the "machine that's intelligent as a human" is as far away now as it was back in the 50's. We are SEVERAL fundamental breakthroughs away from a general-purpose "intelligent" machine.
NONE of the currently-known AI techniques (and they're all quite old by now) holds out much promise in this regard - but that's not to say they aren't very useful for the right application. I respect Clarke's skills as a visionary, but I'm afraid that his hypothesis isn't supported by the trends in research.
Maybe I'll just install junkbuster - yep, I've got client-side filtering software, it filters content I don't want to see . . .
The whole sorry issue is just another reason I hdespise the current Australian Federal government - our current PM combines the bad qualities of John Major, Al Gore and Dan Quayle. . .
Not to mention all the "World Series" and "World Champions" in domestic US sport - the Champ cars,
the baseball, the NBA . . .
The Australian Library Association has a policy they call Freedom To Read. In summary, this policy states that censorship of material on the grounds that it's objectionable is incorrect. Does the American equivalent have a similar policy?
As Arthur C. Clarke also demonstrated in his classic 2001, you can easily synthesize gravity using a rotating spacecraft. If you do this, justifying further fruitless research into microgravity is just putting people's health in jeopardy.
In his excellent book, The Case For Mars, Robert Zubrin advocates a well-researched and complete plan for the exploration of Mars. It avoids extended travel through microgravity, does not require any on-orbit assembly, and could be launched with a slightly modified shuttle or even by starting up the Saturn V production line again! For not much more than we are going to waste on the space station, we could go to Mars within 10 years.
Check out Mars Direct for more information on Robert Zubrin's excellent arguments, and The Mars Society to get involved.
If a game a game won't run properly when the hardware requirements sticker
on the box matches your system, go back to the shop and demand a refund. If a game is a real dog, use the Net to organise en masse to ask for refunds. If enough people complain long and loud enough (and have good reason) retailers will take notice - and will breathe down the neck of game publishers who release under-tested games.