Personally, I'd point to the recent election broadcasts as evidence that the BBC aren't especially biased. If they have any point of view, it is a cynical point of view regarding *all* politicians. Which, in a democracy, is only healthy.
Relative to the US media, they are left wing. But the US broadcast media is very right wing, in any case.
I mean, after all, we've invested alot of time and effort into the FOSS Project. We've invested ourselves in the idea of free as in freedom. We need to question ourselves, to reassure ourselves that we are actually making a difference, and that the FOSS semi-revolution is progress like we think it is.
The alternative is to sit in our closeted communities, preaching to the choir. Only by confronting those of different opinions, and attempting to convince them, do we validate ourselves.
If it doesn't have that market share, it doesn't mean that it won't have a spyware problem. It will - but we wouldn't know it. And should someone write a spyware to exploit FF's vulnerabilities, it would be hugely damaging because of that built up complacency.
FOSS isn't about wallpapering up the cracks. The more we find, the more secure our software would be, in reality.
Why on earth do we even have commenting? I mean, we went through the whole programming language concept precisely to make instructions to computers human-readable. Ideally, commenting should be obsolete - the language and its syntax should make it obvious what needs to be done.
If it turns out that after all that, our code still isn't intelligible, then isn't this some monumental failure of C, Java, BASIC and the rest, whose whole raison d'etre is to make weird things make sense?
For those with more technical knowledge, what are the security implications of this?
I mean, suppose a hypothetical malicious program artifically induces a crash. Then, if the program finds a way to divert this information, then a cracker would be able to access all sorts of sensitive information.
Wrongo. In the long term, free software would be what guarantees the software industry's continued existence.
With closed source proprietary software, we are already seeing a drop-off in innovation. A few companies quickly gain a stranglehold. Once that happens, they merely need a release a 'new' version every few months to sustain themselves indefinitely. They can suspend changes, string things out for the next version, and swallow up any smaller projects.
And in such a situation of microscopic, pointless changes, how much room is there for young programming talent?
Nah. Software doesn't have to be distributed with the source code. Software can be sold. But if software is sold, then the customer can request the source code. I don't see any dissimilarity with the radio thing - non-GPL licenses and software patents also rule out decompiling, and so on. If you are going to accept people taking things apart to see how they work, then why make it difficult? Do manufacturers of radios try to make them specially hard to disassemble?
The Stallman ethos is that information wants to be free. In short, he's redefining software not as a commodity, but as a public service. Contributing to the free software pool is like paying tax for national defense, or scientific research, or something. Everyone benefits. Software, after all, isn't a resource that can be depleted.
Yet another stupid patenting case. It's all getting pretty monotonous.
What we really need is a patent that *hurt*. Nothing will get rid of this ridiculous system, until we find a way to grab the legislators in the balls.
Maybe we need to play dirty. We need patents that compromise the US's national defense. Patents that prevent the IRS from doing its job. Patents that hurt lawyers, and politicians, and people in charge of the system who have no idea what they are doing.
Defintely nothing like star wars. It will probably be more comparable to submarine vs submarine engagements, since it would be hard for one side to detect the other without giving away their own location.
Another parallel would be artillery engagements. Because of recoil effects, and range considerations, both sides will probably use rocket-based weapons. So space battles will probably be conducted at huge ranges, with each dodging missiles, and trying to guess where the foe will go.
Actually, that's interesting. If Microsoft had followed through with this, would we in the FOSS, non-Microsoft using community have found ourselves flooded with a tide of anti-gay software users?
Actually, this makes it especially useful for academic peer review. Scientific research is never complete, and an ongoing revision that recognises work still to done is a much more accurate depiction of real research results.
Yeah. So they think that goodness will triumph.
Fat chance. The Dark Side always wins.
Power corrupts. No matter what pledges are made, there is nothing concrete that will keep google from becoming 'evil'. After all, everyone's perception of evil changes, and who knows what would happen if Google starts thinking for people, deciding for its customers what it's best interests are?
The online community is getting too reliant on google. We need competition. We need alternatives. If one group be allowed to dominate, it needs to be one with openness and non-profitness written into its being. And google does not have that.
What Nintendo had was a huge market share in an industry that was new and free from old preconceptions. Those days are gone. Dead. Buried. Dug up and chopped up, tossed into flames, and then buried again. Deep under the sea.
Hey, we can try to be optimistic. Gameplay these days aren't *that* bad. And one day, this graphics fetish will implode - you can only make games so much more realistic before no one can tell the difference anymore.
>Attack the author, and don't make a point to make. >Yup, Classic Wikipedian response.
Hmm... Classic anti-wikipedian response? Ditto to the above?
Sanger does have a point to make. Encyclopedias traditionally have a double role - one, they act as an indexed collation of information, and two, they act as a calibration point for points of views. In short, they act as a reference, and then they act as an authority.
Wikipedia is brilliant at the former, and in the traditional sense, non-existent at the latter.
While it's true that wikipedia lacks many dedicated experts, this isn't all *that* bad. Experts tend to assume everyone else is an expert too. An encyclopedia is not meant to replace a scientific journal, and someone looking for deep, in depth information ought not expect to look on wikipedia. (But wikipedia can help show them what to look for...) Single site resources are designed for those new to a subject, and what better as a reference for dummies than a reference written by dummies? In my experience, in terms of getting the data in, lack of experts is not a problem. It's a symptom of the fact that people's enthusiasm is unevenly spread, and there is very little you can do about that.
The only authority that wikipedia information has in the authority of the group - that the sum of so many POVs is this or that. This is, of course, a problem. In theory, with stored histories, it should be easier to get a more detailed view on each fact, but the truth is, few people use that. (I'd very much like a better way of visualising where the information on an article came from, how many revisions had it endured, and so on. Lots of highlighting and colour coding would be nice.)
But my opinion is that wikipedia doesn't *need* authority. Wikipedia is not the sole arbiter of the truth, but a snapshot of popular consensus. In itself, the project works - though not as it was designed to. Criticism of wikipedia as lacking in authority fail, because wikipedia has evolved not to be an authoritative source, but a complete one. Sanger et al do not need wikipedia to change - they need a new encyclopedia to pursue the objects they initially conceived. A reviewed copy of wikipedia may work. I hope someone does that, in fact.
Meanwhile, wikipedia has evolved a meaningfulness of its own. It is a community. And it encourages its members to improve themselves by encouraging resolution over conflict, and encouraging people to look beyond their own horizons and read into subject they normally wouldn't consider. People learn by editing wikipedia, not just by reading it.
The project is a success. There is no obvious melt-down on the horizon. The website has real momentum. Is gaining approval as a traditional encyclopedia really that important?
Really, calm down. We're anticipating a lawsuit here that hasn't happened, and that no one is intending to have happen. The key words here are unintended consequences. Fallout. Collateral damage. There is no suggestion at all of this being part of some grand plot by RMS and the FSF to bring the world into some communist fiefdom. If you want evidence of lack of such an intention, note that it is on the FSF/GNU website that the admendments are given to get rid of this legal loopyness.
For this to be abused, someone would have to create a font, bambozzle someone with valuable content into using it, and then spring a legal challenge to enforce it. This is not a very probable scenario, and there is little to gain from any such lawsuit for any side. But because of this chance of a problem, steps are being taken to resolve it.
Come on. Surely you are missing out on the point of advertising here. Advertising isn't some sort of compulsary penance you pay for illicit pleasures - advertising's role is to sell product. If someone uses Adblock, then the probability of that person responding to your advertising by buying a product is already nil.
In one way, if a website owner forces advertising onto an unwilling audience, he is doing a triple disfavour. First, he is pissing off the reader for no reason at all. Second, he is ripping off the producers that he's providing advertising for, by charging for a service that is useless to them, and possibly actually biasing people towards their product. Third, he is using up expensive bandwidth with useless data.
Adblock is advertising personalisation without the breach of personal privacy - it benefits everyone, except the webmasters who themselves are selfishly breaching their contracts to their users and to their sponsors.
Nobody's going to voluntarily download a Google Browser that scans through their cookies and cache either, bub.
The target of spyware is always those who don't know, or don't care. Put a little link on a major web page like www.google.com, and there's a good chance of some clueless newb deciding to click on it without reading the small print.
Yeah. But that's what happens in a normal light-going-through-a-medium case. I was under the impression that with a BEC, where there are no distinct atoms, it doesn't make sense to say that the photon was scattering off electrons.
Ok, it was a bad analogy. My point was that what you put your photon through - eg. the traffic jam - doesn't change anything about your photon itself - the fact that it can make 180 mph in ideal conditions, which is what theoretical physics considers.
Real empty space (if such a thing exists) doesn't have a temperature. Temperature is about how much random kinetic energy something has, and nothing has no energy. (Actually wrong, because of virtual particles and the like, but let's just ignore this for now.)
To freeze light, you reduce the temperature of the medium it travels in. When this gets really, really cold, because of quantum uncertainty, the whole lot stops acting like normal atoms at all, but as a single, big ball of stuff, following a set of mathematical laws known as Bose-Einstein statistics.
A quick digression. How does light travel through the air? Photons and electromagnetic waves are only part of the action. Almost inevitably, a photon hits an atom of air in between. When this happens, it gets absorbed as energy, and this energy gets re-emitted as another photon. Due to the laws of physics, the probabilities are that the emmitted photon is like the original photon. So, measuring from the large scale, light seems to have been slowed down.
My understanding is that this is the same when you send light into the BEC, only that the entire BEC acts like an atom. Freezing light then, is to stop the BEC from re-emitting indefinitely, and just store the properties of the photon.
This has no effects on relativity. And it shouldn't affect our perception of the universe, because BECs are very fragile, and so probably rare.
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, there are also persistent claims of systematic pro-Israeli bias.
l
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article2402.shtm
Seems to me, they've got the balance pretty right.
Personally, I'd point to the recent election broadcasts as evidence that the BBC aren't especially biased. If they have any point of view, it is a cynical point of view regarding *all* politicians. Which, in a democracy, is only healthy.
Relative to the US media, they are left wing. But the US broadcast media is very right wing, in any case.
I mean, after all, we've invested alot of time and effort into the FOSS Project. We've invested ourselves in the idea of free as in freedom. We need to question ourselves, to reassure ourselves that we are actually making a difference, and that the FOSS semi-revolution is progress like we think it is.
The alternative is to sit in our closeted communities, preaching to the choir. Only by confronting those of different opinions, and attempting to convince them, do we validate ourselves.
Talk is good.
If it doesn't have that market share, it doesn't mean that it won't have a spyware problem. It will - but we wouldn't know it. And should someone write a spyware to exploit FF's vulnerabilities, it would be hugely damaging because of that built up complacency.
FOSS isn't about wallpapering up the cracks. The more we find, the more secure our software would be, in reality.
Why on earth do we even have commenting? I mean, we went through the whole programming language concept precisely to make instructions to computers human-readable. Ideally, commenting should be obsolete - the language and its syntax should make it obvious what needs to be done.
If it turns out that after all that, our code still isn't intelligible, then isn't this some monumental failure of C, Java, BASIC and the rest, whose whole raison d'etre is to make weird things make sense?
For those with more technical knowledge, what are the security implications of this?
I mean, suppose a hypothetical malicious program artifically induces a crash. Then, if the program finds a way to divert this information, then a cracker would be able to access all sorts of sensitive information.
Wrongo. In the long term, free software would be what guarantees the software industry's continued existence.
With closed source proprietary software, we are already seeing a drop-off in innovation. A few companies quickly gain a stranglehold. Once that happens, they merely need a release a 'new' version every few months to sustain themselves indefinitely. They can suspend changes, string things out for the next version, and swallow up any smaller projects.
And in such a situation of microscopic, pointless changes, how much room is there for young programming talent?
Nah. Software doesn't have to be distributed with the source code. Software can be sold. But if software is sold, then the customer can request the source code. I don't see any dissimilarity with the radio thing - non-GPL licenses and software patents also rule out decompiling, and so on. If you are going to accept people taking things apart to see how they work, then why make it difficult? Do manufacturers of radios try to make them specially hard to disassemble?
The Stallman ethos is that information wants to be free. In short, he's redefining software not as a commodity, but as a public service. Contributing to the free software pool is like paying tax for national defense, or scientific research, or something. Everyone benefits. Software, after all, isn't a resource that can be depleted.
Yet another stupid patenting case. It's all getting pretty monotonous.
What we really need is a patent that *hurt*. Nothing will get rid of this ridiculous system, until we find a way to grab the legislators in the balls.
Maybe we need to play dirty. We need patents that compromise the US's national defense. Patents that prevent the IRS from doing its job. Patents that hurt lawyers, and politicians, and people in charge of the system who have no idea what they are doing.
Defintely nothing like star wars. It will probably be more comparable to submarine vs submarine engagements, since it would be hard for one side to detect the other without giving away their own location.
Another parallel would be artillery engagements. Because of recoil effects, and range considerations, both sides will probably use rocket-based weapons. So space battles will probably be conducted at huge ranges, with each dodging missiles, and trying to guess where the foe will go.
Actually, that's interesting. If Microsoft had followed through with this, would we in the FOSS, non-Microsoft using community have found ourselves flooded with a tide of anti-gay software users?
I suppose that's a silver lining to this cloud.
Actually, this makes it especially useful for academic peer review. Scientific research is never complete, and an ongoing revision that recognises work still to done is a much more accurate depiction of real research results.
Yeah. So they think that goodness will triumph. Fat chance. The Dark Side always wins. Power corrupts. No matter what pledges are made, there is nothing concrete that will keep google from becoming 'evil'. After all, everyone's perception of evil changes, and who knows what would happen if Google starts thinking for people, deciding for its customers what it's best interests are? The online community is getting too reliant on google. We need competition. We need alternatives. If one group be allowed to dominate, it needs to be one with openness and non-profitness written into its being. And google does not have that.
What Nintendo had was a huge market share in an industry that was new and free from old preconceptions. Those days are gone. Dead. Buried. Dug up and chopped up, tossed into flames, and then buried again. Deep under the sea. Hey, we can try to be optimistic. Gameplay these days aren't *that* bad. And one day, this graphics fetish will implode - you can only make games so much more realistic before no one can tell the difference anymore.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
>Attack the author, and don't make a point to make.
>Yup, Classic Wikipedian response.
Hmm... Classic anti-wikipedian response? Ditto to the above?
Sanger does have a point to make. Encyclopedias traditionally have a double role - one, they act as an indexed collation of information, and two, they act as a calibration point for points of views. In short, they act as a reference, and then they act as an authority.
Wikipedia is brilliant at the former, and in the traditional sense, non-existent at the latter.
While it's true that wikipedia lacks many dedicated experts, this isn't all *that* bad. Experts tend to assume everyone else is an expert too. An encyclopedia is not meant to replace a scientific journal, and someone looking for deep, in depth information ought not expect to look on wikipedia. (But wikipedia can help show them what to look for...) Single site resources are designed for those new to a subject, and what better as a reference for dummies than a reference written by dummies? In my experience, in terms of getting the data in, lack of experts is not a problem. It's a symptom of the fact that people's enthusiasm is unevenly spread, and there is very little you can do about that.
The only authority that wikipedia information has in the authority of the group - that the sum of so many POVs is this or that. This is, of course, a problem. In theory, with stored histories, it should be easier to get a more detailed view on each fact, but the truth is, few people use that. (I'd very much like a better way of visualising where the information on an article came from, how many revisions had it endured, and so on. Lots of highlighting and colour coding would be nice.)
But my opinion is that wikipedia doesn't *need* authority. Wikipedia is not the sole arbiter of the truth, but a snapshot of popular consensus. In itself, the project works - though not as it was designed to. Criticism of wikipedia as lacking in authority fail, because wikipedia has evolved not to be an authoritative source, but a complete one. Sanger et al do not need wikipedia to change - they need a new encyclopedia to pursue the objects they initially conceived. A reviewed copy of wikipedia may work. I hope someone does that, in fact.
Meanwhile, wikipedia has evolved a meaningfulness of its own. It is a community. And it encourages its members to improve themselves by encouraging resolution over conflict, and encouraging people to look beyond their own horizons and read into subject they normally wouldn't consider. People learn by editing wikipedia, not just by reading it.
The project is a success. There is no obvious melt-down on the horizon. The website has real momentum. Is gaining approval as a traditional encyclopedia really that important?
Really, calm down. We're anticipating a lawsuit here that hasn't happened, and that no one is intending to have happen. The key words here are unintended consequences. Fallout. Collateral damage. There is no suggestion at all of this being part of some grand plot by RMS and the FSF to bring the world into some communist fiefdom. If you want evidence of lack of such an intention, note that it is on the FSF/GNU website that the admendments are given to get rid of this legal loopyness.
For this to be abused, someone would have to create a font, bambozzle someone with valuable content into using it, and then spring a legal challenge to enforce it. This is not a very probable scenario, and there is little to gain from any such lawsuit for any side. But because of this chance of a problem, steps are being taken to resolve it.
There, done. Storm in a teacup.
Come on. Surely you are missing out on the point of advertising here. Advertising isn't some sort of compulsary penance you pay for illicit pleasures - advertising's role is to sell product. If someone uses Adblock, then the probability of that person responding to your advertising by buying a product is already nil.
In one way, if a website owner forces advertising onto an unwilling audience, he is doing a triple disfavour. First, he is pissing off the reader for no reason at all. Second, he is ripping off the producers that he's providing advertising for, by charging for a service that is useless to them, and possibly actually biasing people towards their product. Third, he is using up expensive bandwidth with useless data.
Adblock is advertising personalisation without the breach of personal privacy - it benefits everyone, except the webmasters who themselves are selfishly breaching their contracts to their users and to their sponsors.
There is also tab bin, which has the advantage of not having to undo in the order of closing (but check compatibility):
n
i
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/tabbi
I've written a slightly modified version to add an Empty Bin feature.
http://images.polarisboard.org/fzplus/tabbin.xp
As they say, imitation is the best form of flattery.
Yeah. But that's what happens in a normal light-going-through-a-medium case. I was under the impression that with a BEC, where there are no distinct atoms, it doesn't make sense to say that the photon was scattering off electrons.
This is very interesting - would it be possible, then, to walk outside without a space-suit? (Wearing a facemask for oxygen, of course)
Ok, it was a bad analogy. My point was that what you put your photon through - eg. the traffic jam - doesn't change anything about your photon itself - the fact that it can make 180 mph in ideal conditions, which is what theoretical physics considers.
Real empty space (if such a thing exists) doesn't have a temperature. Temperature is about how much random kinetic energy something has, and nothing has no energy. (Actually wrong, because of virtual particles and the like, but let's just ignore this for now.)
To freeze light, you reduce the temperature of the medium it travels in. When this gets really, really cold, because of quantum uncertainty, the whole lot stops acting like normal atoms at all, but as a single, big ball of stuff, following a set of mathematical laws known as Bose-Einstein statistics.
A quick digression. How does light travel through the air? Photons and electromagnetic waves are only part of the action. Almost inevitably, a photon hits an atom of air in between. When this happens, it gets absorbed as energy, and this energy gets re-emitted as another photon. Due to the laws of physics, the probabilities are that the emmitted photon is like the original photon. So, measuring from the large scale, light seems to have been slowed down.
My understanding is that this is the same when you send light into the BEC, only that the entire BEC acts like an atom. Freezing light then, is to stop the BEC from re-emitting indefinitely, and just store the properties of the photon.
This has no effects on relativity. And it shouldn't affect our perception of the universe, because BECs are very fragile, and so probably rare.