copyright double-standard
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Copyrant
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· Score: 3
It's ironic to me that, on the one hand, shrink-wrap license vendors are hiding behind copyright when it comes to piracy, yet, on the other, they sell us a 'license' so we as the all-impotent consumer have no rights under copyright law to use it as we want.
Re:Spread the message, brothers
on
Copyrant
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· Score: 1
One thing to keep in mind with advocating alternative OS's in this situation -- refuse to buy hardware from PC vendors who won't 1) ship you a windows-less machine, and 2) reduce the selling price by at least $100 to account for it. We know from past experience that MS won't refund your money.
I think it's time for you to read some Ayn Rand and get some self-esteem.
Read Anthem a few months back. Didn't like it. Fought one extreme by going to another. Main character (I forget his name) was no more balanced at the end than at the beginning. But that's an entirely different topic...
You really think you are no greater than bacteria, or your individual cells?
I do know there are bacteria in our body that we can't live without (in the stomach). Surely they're no less important than we are!
All I'm saying is that our sentience doesn't give a "right" to anything. Do what you will, but there are always consequences. If I'm an idiot for believing everything is connected, then I'm an idiot.
You know, it's funny how the restrictions on the net (UCITA, DCMA, etc.), or threat thereof, seem to often be in response to users doing things they shouldn't be anyway (ie, pirating). Looks to me like we brought it on ourselves. If you want the internet to remain free/open/anonymous, don't download those mp3's (or whatever) that you didn't pay for.
If you abuse it, don't be surprised when you lose it.
If there were complex life forms on the planet, I would agree with you in that we should leave it alone. However, there are not.
Under the assumption that all affects are limited in scope to Mars, this *might* be true. Maybe they are and maybe they're not. Who's to say us destroying a unique microbe species on Mars won't start a chain of events that cause Jupiter to blow up or something? Contrived and improbable, yes. But all actions have consequences, and we as humans aren't omniscient enough to know them.
To argue that humanity's extinction would be good is just plain silly.
Likewise, to argue that humanity's extinction would be bad is equally silly. Just because we're sentient doesn't make us any more or less important than the hypothetical microbes on Mars.
This all reminds me of the episode of ST:TNG where a planet had a colony of microbes living under the soil. The individual microbes weren't sentient, but the colony as a whole was.
Nor am I saying you're wrong, but if Helium eventually drifts out of the atmosphere into space, how is it that any is left on Earth? It's inert, so it won't be trapped in other compounds (unlike Hydrogen), meaning it must exist in the atmosphere, right? Or do we get all the He for our kids balloons from gas pockets in rocks?
Ozone from fossil-fueled engines? that's a new one on me. Last I heard, they were mostly CO. When I think of O3, I usually think of *electric* motors (electric sparks produce ozone) and the wonderful smell they produce when they're old and arcing.
Which brings up the thought that a way to start an ozone layer on Mars is via setting up weather patterns. I remember hearing somewhere that lightning is our big ozone producer here on Earth. Of course, us making weather implies atmosphere, water, and some fscking clue on how weather works.
i probably fall into the jack-of-all-trades, master of none category someone mentioned earlier. i know several languages at varying degrees of expertise: Java, Lisp, Prolog, Ada, C, SML, VHDL, Larch, VB...the list goes on. I've even done a little bit of work on designing my own. I would have to say my goal is not to learn one language well, but to code at least one good program. Up until now, most of my coding projects have been class assignments (usually in C), that get finished 15 minutes before they're due. Consequently, it's the most horrible, unreadable code imaginable. I want to write a well-thought out, well-designed program for once, instead of these embarrassing hacks that are my usual fare. I want to do quality work.
It seems we're stumbling around the real problem. Oxford did the right thing, under the conditions: the student's page was not their fight, but unfortunately for all involved, they received the cease-and-desist letter. In an ideal universe, the school, as the ISP, shouldn't be responsible for the content of hosted pages, yes? The letter should have been sent to the student, never involving the university. Why should Oxford care about DeCSS? The real issue, imho, is making the individuals, not the ISP/university/etc, responsible for what they put up on a website (as well as insuring their absolute freedom of speech, not this watered-down "say anything you like as long as you don't say anything negative about MPAA/RIAA/Greedy Corporate Interests". Anyone remember when we had the 1st Amendment?)
Actually, in one incarnation of the MSOffic academic versions, you weren't "licensed" to produce commercial documents (my assumption being that if you did, you were subject to additional fees equating to the "full" price).
did anyone find it funny that the pic of the Unisys CEO in the article wasn't a GIF? (JPEG in this case.) Probably would've been better as a PNG, but still some subtle irony there.
At least most other artists' songs that are on there are singles/MTV hits so there is still incentive to go get the CD.
This could work the other way, too. Often people want *just* the Top40 songs, so napster, etc, makes it easy for them to get those without paying for an album with 1 good song and 14 pieces of crap.
Hmmm... I'd been racking my brains for a while now trying to remember the name of this anime show I watched when I was wee -- 3 or 4, at the oldest. I *thought* it was named Thunderbirds, and I remember it had several vehicles that linked together. The aforementioned clips came close, except I remembered the characters wore bird-costumes, too. It was kind of Voltron-esque; each character had his/her special vehicle -- I remember a race car, a motorcycle, and a fighter plane (all tricked-out, of course). Anyone know what I'm talking about? Maybe a rip-off of TB2086?
To truly be a TR movie, the following must be adhered to:
.45's never run out of ammo.
When she's at Death's Door in the remote jungles of India, in ruins not seen by human eyes in hundreds of years, just look in that statue over there and, lo and behold, there's a full MediPak!
surviving for hours in the icy wastes of Tibet with nothing on but a flight jacket and tight shorts.
anytime she throws a switch, she clairvoyantly knows which door was opened.
One of the real beauties in this is in production is existing chips. Testing of manufactured chips can be as much as 70% of their cost (high rejection rates due to fused wires, the aforementioned crosstalk, etc.) It would certainly be nice if this could lower the chip rejection (meaning more chips/batch, higher supply, lower prices) on older, but still useful, chips (DIMMs, M68K's, FPGA's).
of course, the cynic in me says the companies would just absorb any savings as profit.:)
Why does it seem that every SF involving this sort of robot always seems to focus them on war? Well most of them I haven't really seen any SF out there that has just used an exoskeliton for labour.
go watch Aliens. although Sigourney Weaver uses the exoskeleton to beat the stuffing out of the queen alien, its intended purpose was for heavy lifting, etc, not combat.
The only logical way I can see is to tax income for people and tax profit for companies...And then we'd actually see LOWER taxes, cos a fair percentage of the fat-arsed crats employed chucking paper at each other would be surplus to requirements
Unfortunately, most people are too small minded and afraid of "more taxation" to grasp even this simple concept. sigh.
Remember that the first SPARC implmentation was a 20K gate array
I think this points out the true place FPGA's hold in hardware development: small, compact cores, probably built to serve a specialized purpose. Sound familiar? It's called embedded systems, and if you people haven't heard, that's the way the wind's blowing.
Now, if only I could afford the $700 to buy a low-end FPGA programmer... sigh.
Once a chip is made, its made. And AFAIK, most chips don't really have any problems, or at least problems which cannot be resolved.
Depends. A lot of your industrial controls and such use FPGA's now, meaning bug fixes, firmware upgrades and such can be be re-applied to the existing hardware, usually by just hooking it up to a laptop for a few minutes. It's more limited than software bug fixing, but not as much as you might think.
Of course, if you're talking custom IC's, then "bug fix" generally involves an incinerator for the old hardware and a purchase order for the new hardware.
hmmm... not sure if i'd call lisp a child of assembly programming. mathematicians were writing and executing lisp programs on paper when the *only* way you could write actual computer programs was using a hole punch and an opcode table (nothing so high-level as asm going on there). lisp isn't even based on the VonNeumann style processor (like C, Pascal, etc. are).
To put in my $.02 on the flamewars... I'm one of those system-level thinkers someone mentioned earlier. I draw blocks and arrows for a living. Ie, OO styles work best for me, for the kind of programs (event-driven simulators, program understanding tools) I need to write. If I were to write a device driver, or OS kernel, I'd probably use C. I certainly wouldn't use it for a large, complex program, though. The biggest reason is that the program structure is too hard to document; maintenance happens, folks, just not with C. Use the right tool for the right job.
And when I want to program for fun, I write in Scheme.:)
Actually, I made a minor boo-boo. At 50 Hz, the base rpm would be (50 cycles/sec)*(60 sec/min) = 3000 cycles/min = 3000 rpm, for a 5x speedup at 15000 rpm. I knew something was wrong with my numbers...
Does "15000rpm" strike anyone else as odd, considering that mainstream drives have spindle speeds that are multiples of 1800rpm (e.g. 5400, 7200)?
Actually, 5400 and 7200 are multiples (1.5x and 2.0x) of 3600 (the base rpm for a 60-Hz motor). If Germany uses 50-Hz power (producing a base rpm of 2500), then 15000 rpm would be valid at 6 times the base.
I read a sci-fi novel a couple years ago dealing with a Big Brother society that had something that was just way too much like what's been described. Government buildings/areas were covered in "eyes", apparently some sort of small, circular, surveillance device. All the eyes were connected back to a central computer (supposedly), which would determine if anyone in the view of the eye were engaging in non-proper behavior. Problem was, non-proper behavior could be as simple as looking worried about something. If your behavior was deemed criminal-like, the eye would immediately douse you with a massive dose of radiation.
It turned out, later in the book, that everything was (naturally) a hoax. Eyes just irradiated people at random, just so the gov't could cash in on the fear factor to keep 'em in line.
Wish I could remember the book. It was by either Norman Spinrad or James Blish. Might have been "All the Stars a Stage".
The guts of monitors are not fun things to mess around with.
Tell me about it. About two months before I finally graduated from a 486 to a pentium, my monitor suddenly wouldn't come on. Turned out the one-click-does-it-all power button was stuck in the off position. Opened the case, couldn't free it. So I just shorted around it by soldering in extra wire, and did the on/off thing the old fashioned way: plug in, unplug. Unfortunately, on my first try, it turned out I had shorted the hot to ground. Thank heaven for circuit breakers.:)
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It's ironic to me that, on the one hand, shrink-wrap license vendors are hiding behind copyright when it comes to piracy, yet, on the other, they sell us a 'license' so we as the all-impotent consumer have no rights under copyright law to use it as we want.
One thing to keep in mind with advocating alternative OS's in this situation -- refuse to buy hardware from PC vendors who won't 1) ship you a windows-less machine, and 2) reduce the selling price by at least $100 to account for it. We know from past experience that MS won't refund your money.
Read Anthem a few months back. Didn't like it. Fought one extreme by going to another. Main character (I forget his name) was no more balanced at the end than at the beginning. But that's an entirely different topic...
You really think you are no greater than bacteria, or your individual cells?
I do know there are bacteria in our body that we can't live without (in the stomach). Surely they're no less important than we are!
All I'm saying is that our sentience doesn't give a "right" to anything. Do what you will, but there are always consequences. If I'm an idiot for believing everything is connected, then I'm an idiot.
You know, it's funny how the restrictions on the net (UCITA, DCMA, etc.), or threat thereof, seem to often be in response to users doing things they shouldn't be anyway (ie, pirating). Looks to me like we brought it on ourselves. If you want the internet to remain free/open/anonymous, don't download those mp3's (or whatever) that you didn't pay for.
If you abuse it, don't be surprised when you lose it.
preacher mode off.
Under the assumption that all affects are limited in scope to Mars, this *might* be true. Maybe they are and maybe they're not. Who's to say us destroying a unique microbe species on Mars won't start a chain of events that cause Jupiter to blow up or something? Contrived and improbable, yes. But all actions have consequences, and we as humans aren't omniscient enough to know them.
To argue that humanity's extinction would be good is just plain silly.
Likewise, to argue that humanity's extinction would be bad is equally silly. Just because we're sentient doesn't make us any more or less important than the hypothetical microbes on Mars.
This all reminds me of the episode of ST:TNG where a planet had a colony of microbes living under the soil. The individual microbes weren't sentient, but the colony as a whole was.
Nor am I saying you're wrong, but if Helium eventually drifts out of the atmosphere into space, how is it that any is left on Earth? It's inert, so it won't be trapped in other compounds (unlike Hydrogen), meaning it must exist in the atmosphere, right? Or do we get all the He for our kids balloons from gas pockets in rocks?
Which brings up the thought that a way to start an ozone layer on Mars is via setting up weather patterns. I remember hearing somewhere that lightning is our big ozone producer here on Earth. Of course, us making weather implies atmosphere, water, and some fscking clue on how weather works.
i probably fall into the jack-of-all-trades, master of none category someone mentioned earlier. i know several languages at varying degrees of expertise: Java, Lisp, Prolog, Ada, C, SML, VHDL, Larch, VB...the list goes on. I've even done a little bit of work on designing my own. I would have to say my goal is not to learn one language well, but to code at least one good program. Up until now, most of my coding projects have been class assignments (usually in C), that get finished 15 minutes before they're due. Consequently, it's the most horrible, unreadable code imaginable. I want to write a well-thought out, well-designed program for once, instead of these embarrassing hacks that are my usual fare. I want to do quality work.
It seems we're stumbling around the real problem. Oxford did the right thing, under the conditions: the student's page was not their fight, but unfortunately for all involved, they received the cease-and-desist letter. In an ideal universe, the school, as the ISP, shouldn't be responsible for the content of hosted pages, yes? The letter should have been sent to the student, never involving the university. Why should Oxford care about DeCSS? The real issue, imho, is making the individuals, not the ISP/university/etc, responsible for what they put up on a website (as well as insuring their absolute freedom of speech, not this watered-down "say anything you like as long as you don't say anything negative about MPAA/RIAA/Greedy Corporate Interests". Anyone remember when we had the 1st Amendment?)
Actually, in one incarnation of the MSOffic academic versions, you weren't "licensed" to produce commercial documents (my assumption being that if you did, you were subject to additional fees equating to the "full" price).
This could work the other way, too. Often people want *just* the Top40 songs, so napster, etc, makes it easy for them to get those without paying for an album with 1 good song and 14 pieces of crap.
After doing a quick search, yep, that would be it. Geez, that's been a while. Before VCR's!
of course, the cynic in me says the companies would just absorb any savings as profit. :)
go watch Aliens. although Sigourney Weaver uses the exoskeleton to beat the stuffing out of the queen alien, its intended purpose was for heavy lifting, etc, not combat.
Unfortunately, most people are too small minded and afraid of "more taxation" to grasp even this simple concept. sigh.
I think this points out the true place FPGA's hold in hardware development: small, compact cores, probably built to serve a specialized purpose. Sound familiar? It's called embedded systems, and if you people haven't heard, that's the way the wind's blowing.
Now, if only I could afford the $700 to buy a low-end FPGA programmer... sigh.
Depends. A lot of your industrial controls and such use FPGA's now, meaning bug fixes, firmware upgrades and such can be be re-applied to the existing hardware, usually by just hooking it up to a laptop for a few minutes. It's more limited than software bug fixing, but not as much as you might think.
Of course, if you're talking custom IC's, then "bug fix" generally involves an incinerator for the old hardware and a purchase order for the new hardware.
To put in my $.02 on the flamewars... I'm one of those system-level thinkers someone mentioned earlier. I draw blocks and arrows for a living. Ie, OO styles work best for me, for the kind of programs (event-driven simulators, program understanding tools) I need to write. If I were to write a device driver, or OS kernel, I'd probably use C. I certainly wouldn't use it for a large, complex program, though. The biggest reason is that the program structure is too hard to document; maintenance happens, folks, just not with C. Use the right tool for the right job.
And when I want to program for fun, I write in Scheme. :)
Actually, I made a minor boo-boo. At 50 Hz, the base rpm would be (50 cycles/sec)*(60 sec/min) = 3000 cycles/min = 3000 rpm, for a 5x speedup at 15000 rpm. I knew something was wrong with my numbers...
Actually, 5400 and 7200 are multiples (1.5x and 2.0x) of 3600 (the base rpm for a 60-Hz motor). If Germany uses 50-Hz power (producing a base rpm of 2500), then 15000 rpm would be valid at 6 times the base.
It turned out, later in the book, that everything was (naturally) a hoax. Eyes just irradiated people at random, just so the gov't could cash in on the fear factor to keep 'em in line.
Wish I could remember the book. It was by either Norman Spinrad or James Blish. Might have been "All the Stars a Stage".
Tell me about it. About two months before I finally graduated from a 486 to a pentium, my monitor suddenly wouldn't come on. Turned out the one-click-does-it-all power button was stuck in the off position. Opened the case, couldn't free it. So I just shorted around it by soldering in extra wire, and did the on/off thing the old fashioned way: plug in, unplug. Unfortunately, on my first try, it turned out I had shorted the hot to ground. Thank heaven for circuit breakers. :)