The United States has agreed to provide a different version of the site which will only provide information allowed by the Chinese Government. President Bush indicated that it was better to reach the Chinese people with a "watered-down" version of the site rather than not being able to reach them at all, and he promised that in no way was this a sellout to the massive market of China and a sacrifice on the American values of free speech.
Yeah, I agree. HD DVD as an open medium sounds like a great idea to me. Why kill off a worthy format?
I'd bet, though, that Microsoft backing HD-DVD might be one of the reasons that they won't go open with it.
I'm out of mod points, too, or the grandparent would be +1 Insightful all day.
Well, your question has a fundamental problem - you assume there must be a trade-off between safety and liberty.
For hundreds of years, we have seen the opposite in this country and throughout the world. Look at a few (admittedly extreme) examples:
Prohibition. Did banning of alcoholic beverages make Americans safer or did it create a massive organized crime network?
Slavery. Were African-Americans safer during slavery when they had no liberty than they are now?
Women's Suffrage. Were women safer before they had the right to vote and when it was commonplace for men to commit domestic abuse?
Yes, those are extreme examples. However, it doesn't take away from my point - there does not have to be a trade-off between safety and liberty. The government's job is to protect us, yes. But part of protecting the United States is in protecting the liberty and freedom that American citizens have enjoyed for over two hundred years.
Too often our government has used excuses like 9/11 or communism to continually increase their control over the populace and to reduce the rights of the individual. Slashdotters are an intelligent group (overall), and generally speaking, they are more individualistic. They tend towards accomplishing goals on their own terms using their own minds... they are the type to not accept the status quo and instead commit significant resources to be free of the establishment (for example, look at the massive installed base of Linux users here.)
That's why I think you see more vocal proponents of liberty here than you would on, say, FoxNews.com or CNN.com.
I don't know, the Nokia N800 probably comes closest to an iPod Touch.
There really isn't a good comparison to the iPod Touch or iPhone because "elegant design" doesn't translate very well to a bullet point on a comparison chart (hence the famous Slashdot article about the iPod). It really comes down to whether the Apple touch interface, ease of use, and pretty hardware design are worth the extra cost to you or not.
You actually want a stylus? Wow. Why don't you just buy a Newton and call it a day?
Seriously though... if there are enough people who want a stylus, presumably that could be addressed with the SDK. All you need is a stylus with a tip that has similar properties to a finger's conductivity and someone to write a version of MacPaint and away you go.
Actually, yes. This is not new. There are already many robots out there that use this exact same technology. The only difference is that this guy used a cell phone.
This is no more "innovation" than a port of an existing software application to a new hardware architecture is "innovation."
Actually, whoever came up with the reply all button should be tried for war crimes at the Hague.
I agree completely. Actually, I was thinking that the "Reply All" feature should be granted like a privilege. Once you have violated the rules by being a complete idiot (e.g. by replying all to a company-wide email) you should have the privilege revoked.
Of course my grand plan gets fuddled up when they just stick a sniffer on the outside of my network.
This sounds a lot like Carnivore. The FBI has been indexing and searching emails for a long time. They're sent unencrypted over the wire, and the majority of Americans have no clue how easy it is to intercept email.
I agree with you to some extent, but you need to account for gonzo journalism. Hunter S. Thompson's work was brilliant.
Now, Gizmodo was just being a bunch of assholes, which is a lot different from Thompson. But stating that all times a journalist "creates" the news is bad is simply not true.
The fact that you're reading (and posting) on Slashdot actually makes you a very good candidate for his scoring system.
Slashdot is a great place to learn about the world of technology. Only people with passion about technology really bother reading Slashdot - much less take the time to post and moderate.
Now, I'm not saying all Slashdot users are good programmers - but they'd pass most of TFA's test without even being able to actually program their way out of a paper bag.
While you make a good point, it's really a non-issue. Any (good) class will have an assignment (for example) to create you own linked list class.
If I had mod points, I'd have modded you insightful.
My girlfriend taught a second-semester CS course last summer (in Java) where the only prerequisite was that the students had taken the first semester course (in Scheme). They constructed all the usual data structures. They were told specifically that they could not use the built-in data structures, or they would fail. It's that simple.
earlyWhat the heck is the difference if you build a linked list in C++ or in Java, really? The concept (of a linked list) is the same whether it's running in byte code or machine code. Really, the niceties of Java help the student focus on the -concept- at hand.
I'm not saying that learning about memory allocation and deallocation is bad, however. There is certainly a need for knowing how that works and how to write programs in an environment with no garbage collection.
My CS courses were in Pascal and C/C++. I really don't think it gave me an edge over a college student who learned in Java. Java coders still have to think like any other coder. Their algorithms still have to logically make sense. The concepts of memory allocation, pointer dereferencing, and compiler optimization (among others) can be taught in separate courses and don't necessarily need to be done in C/C++.
Yep, you're right. 99% of what Spirit and Opportunity have done could have been accomplished in a single day by a manned mission. And that doesn't even account all that could have been accomplished with a scientifically trained astronaut there.
Remote controls with video cameras and robotic arms are great, but they're nowhere near a good substitute for real human eyes and hands.
The plus side of robotic exploration is that it is much cheaper and safer. Even if something went catastrophically wrong with Spirit and Opportunity, the worst that would happen is a sub-$1 billion loss and some bad press. Contrast that to every Space Shuttle mission (Challenger and Columbia anyone?) and you have a pretty good idea of the risks and costs involved.
Robotic exploration certainly has its benefits -- for example, can you imagine the cost of putting a human on Mars for four years? -- but so does manned exploration. Personally, I'm ecstatic that NASA and JPL have succeeded so resoundingly well.
Exactly. And that doesn't even include the following items:
Video files. They cost a lot less per byte than songs do, that's for sure. And there are even free, legal ones you can put on your iPod (such as TV shows that release free episodes on iTunes.)
Podcasts, both video and audio. They're free, they take up a lot more space than a song, and I listen to a lot of them.
iPod being used in hard disk mode to store, *gasp*, real files.
Photos. Many people have thousands of photos on their iPods.
There are many, many ways to fill up an iPod - legally - without spending even $1000, much less $40000, on multimedia files. And, as other people have mentioned, most people don't fill up their high-capacity iPods to the maximum anyway.
Okay, so I can understand someone thinking Portal and BioShock are better games than Halo 3. I don't understand TFA calling Halo 3 a disappointment simply because they liked two other shooters more. From TFA:
The sales of Halo 3. It wasn't surprising that Halo 3 would sell like something that sells really fast, but I was saddened by how many people were exposed only to the world of the Master Chief while missing out on the amazing BioShock or my new pick for greatest game of all time, Portal. Sure, both games sold reasonably well, but when compared to the sales of Halo 3, you begin to realize that gaming accurately reflects the rest of society's entertainment; high-brow, revolutionary fare is ignored by the masses in favor of "wicked awesome explosions."
Please. Saying Halo 3 is only "wicked awesome explosions" would be like saying Star Wars is only "explosions and laser beams." Give me a break.
All of the Halo games have had wicked awesome explosions, sure. But they also have a deeply engrossing storyline, fantastic multiplayer, good AI, and unsurpassed world physics. Halo 3 is the best game in the series and was my favorite shooter (and many other people's) of the year. By no stretch of the imagination was it a bad game. Star Wars is full of light sabers and lasers - but obviously, if you look at it more closely, there's an intricate storyline with fantastic characters (in Episodes 4-6).
Sure, BioShock and Portal are arguably better games than Halo 3 but they didn't sell nearly as well. The reason? Exposure. Most people haven't even heard of Portal. There certainly aren't Portal trading cards, helmets, action figures, and TV commercials.
For christ's sake, you can't even BUY Portal on a console -- at most, an hour long game -- without buying a $60 package that includes another game I've already beaten (Half Life 2) and two expansion packs I don't want. If Joey asks for Portal for Christmas, his mom won't be able to find it in a store.
Sales figures are a result of many other forces besides the quality of the game itself, and that's reality. Microsoft went to bat for Halo 3 with their pocketbook, executed very well, and they reaped the rewards from it. BioShock and Portal did not pony up, and since most people don't know what they are, they aren't purchased at nearly the same rate. It has nothing to do with the average American only liking "wicked awesome explosions."
I don't think adding the Internet changes anything about the morality here. As an example -- recently I noticed that newsstands in the airport have a section for adult magazines. There's no content filter stopping a customer from buying a copy of one of these and reading it on the airplane in front of children.
What's also to stop a customer from putting in a copy of Predator or maybe an adult movie on their portable DVD player? Those are movies that most people wouldn't want their kids watching.
Additionally, content filtering doesn't stop anyone who -really- wants to get around it (e.g. SSH tunneling, VPN, proxy sites, etc) so what would the airline really stand to gain here? I'm pretty sure the WiFi access points in the airports themselves don't have content filters.
I'm pretty sure it's already illegal to display adult material in a public place where kids could see it, but IANAL. The end result of content filtering on a service that I'm paying for means that I won't pay for it twice.
NetBSD is a great OS. I've used it since version 2 and it really has improved dramatically. I've found it to be very, very useful in resurrecting old hardware, and it also runs great on current platforms, too.
NetBSD's support of so many hardware architectures speaks something about how it's designed, if you ask me. No other OS I know of supports even 1/2 as many architectures as NetBSD.
You're exactly right. And I really like how their plan to be redundant and send up two rovers in case of a failure has turned out brilliantly - it's paying dramatic dividends in that both rovers were successful and both have discovered fantastic things that we would never have known if NASA had pulled a cheapskate and only gone with one rover.
Chemical Plant Zone is actually already on my iPod - you can get a MIDI remix of it, and most older games, from VG Music. Spend a few hours on that site and relive some of the best games of all time.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, MOREINFOABOUTSHOOTINGDOWNSPYSATELLITES.US.GOV was blocked by the Great Chinese Firewall until recently, so they couldn't get through.
The United States has agreed to provide a different version of the site which will only provide information allowed by the Chinese Government. President Bush indicated that it was better to reach the Chinese people with a "watered-down" version of the site rather than not being able to reach them at all, and he promised that in no way was this a sellout to the massive market of China and a sacrifice on the American values of free speech.
Yeah, I agree. HD DVD as an open medium sounds like a great idea to me. Why kill off a worthy format? I'd bet, though, that Microsoft backing HD-DVD might be one of the reasons that they won't go open with it. I'm out of mod points, too, or the grandparent would be +1 Insightful all day.
Uh, wow. Unintentionally, it appears you have successfully refuted my argument about the intelligence of Slashdotters.
For hundreds of years, we have seen the opposite in this country and throughout the world. Look at a few (admittedly extreme) examples:
- Prohibition. Did banning of alcoholic beverages make Americans safer or did it create a massive organized crime network?
- Slavery. Were African-Americans safer during slavery when they had no liberty than they are now?
- Women's Suffrage. Were women safer before they had the right to vote and when it was commonplace for men to commit domestic abuse?
Yes, those are extreme examples. However, it doesn't take away from my point - there does not have to be a trade-off between safety and liberty. The government's job is to protect us, yes. But part of protecting the United States is in protecting the liberty and freedom that American citizens have enjoyed for over two hundred years.Too often our government has used excuses like 9/11 or communism to continually increase their control over the populace and to reduce the rights of the individual. Slashdotters are an intelligent group (overall), and generally speaking, they are more individualistic. They tend towards accomplishing goals on their own terms using their own minds... they are the type to not accept the status quo and instead commit significant resources to be free of the establishment (for example, look at the massive installed base of Linux users here.)
That's why I think you see more vocal proponents of liberty here than you would on, say, FoxNews.com or CNN.com.
Actually that's a good point. Anyone remember Daikatana? If that game doesn't epitomize this problem, I don't know what does.
I don't know, the Nokia N800 probably comes closest to an iPod Touch.
There really isn't a good comparison to the iPod Touch or iPhone because "elegant design" doesn't translate very well to a bullet point on a comparison chart (hence the famous Slashdot article about the iPod). It really comes down to whether the Apple touch interface, ease of use, and pretty hardware design are worth the extra cost to you or not.
You actually want a stylus? Wow. Why don't you just buy a Newton and call it a day?
Seriously though... if there are enough people who want a stylus, presumably that could be addressed with the SDK. All you need is a stylus with a tip that has similar properties to a finger's conductivity and someone to write a version of MacPaint and away you go.
Actually, yes. This is not new. There are already many robots out there that use this exact same technology. The only difference is that this guy used a cell phone.
This is no more "innovation" than a port of an existing software application to a new hardware architecture is "innovation."
Amazing! That's the same combination that I have on my luggage!
$100/month? What country do you live in? I'm paying $60/month and that includes unlimited data.
Actually, whoever came up with the reply all button should be tried for war crimes at the Hague.
I agree completely. Actually, I was thinking that the "Reply All" feature should be granted like a privilege. Once you have violated the rules by being a complete idiot (e.g. by replying all to a company-wide email) you should have the privilege revoked.
The Bush Administration has been requesting search results for a long time, too.
Which begs the question - WHY ARE WE LETTING THESE OPPRESSIVE JERKS GET AWAY WITH THIS?
I agree with you to some extent, but you need to account for gonzo journalism. Hunter S. Thompson's work was brilliant.
Now, Gizmodo was just being a bunch of assholes, which is a lot different from Thompson. But stating that all times a journalist "creates" the news is bad is simply not true.
The fact that you're reading (and posting) on Slashdot actually makes you a very good candidate for his scoring system.
Slashdot is a great place to learn about the world of technology. Only people with passion about technology really bother reading Slashdot - much less take the time to post and moderate.
Now, I'm not saying all Slashdot users are good programmers - but they'd pass most of TFA's test without even being able to actually program their way out of a paper bag.
My girlfriend taught a second-semester CS course last summer (in Java) where the only prerequisite was that the students had taken the first semester course (in Scheme). They constructed all the usual data structures. They were told specifically that they could not use the built-in data structures, or they would fail. It's that simple.
earlyWhat the heck is the difference if you build a linked list in C++ or in Java, really? The concept (of a linked list) is the same whether it's running in byte code or machine code. Really, the niceties of Java help the student focus on the -concept- at hand.
I'm not saying that learning about memory allocation and deallocation is bad, however. There is certainly a need for knowing how that works and how to write programs in an environment with no garbage collection.
My CS courses were in Pascal and C/C++. I really don't think it gave me an edge over a college student who learned in Java. Java coders still have to think like any other coder. Their algorithms still have to logically make sense. The concepts of memory allocation, pointer dereferencing, and compiler optimization (among others) can be taught in separate courses and don't necessarily need to be done in C/C++.
Yep, you're right. 99% of what Spirit and Opportunity have done could have been accomplished in a single day by a manned mission. And that doesn't even account all that could have been accomplished with a scientifically trained astronaut there.
Remote controls with video cameras and robotic arms are great, but they're nowhere near a good substitute for real human eyes and hands.
The plus side of robotic exploration is that it is much cheaper and safer. Even if something went catastrophically wrong with Spirit and Opportunity, the worst that would happen is a sub-$1 billion loss and some bad press. Contrast that to every Space Shuttle mission (Challenger and Columbia anyone?) and you have a pretty good idea of the risks and costs involved.
Robotic exploration certainly has its benefits -- for example, can you imagine the cost of putting a human on Mars for four years? -- but so does manned exploration. Personally, I'm ecstatic that NASA and JPL have succeeded so resoundingly well.
Note to self: never, under any circumstances, capitalize an adjective when describing yourself. It would make you sound like a conceited asshole.
Exactly. How many people have 40,000 songs - even illegally - in their iTunes library? At 5mb per song, that's what, 200 gigabytes of audio?
I'd estimate one in 20 users of iTunes, if that.
The real reason high-capacity iPods sell so well is because of their ability to store and play VIDEO (and really, any other file in disk mode).
- Video files. They cost a lot less per byte than songs do, that's for sure. And there are even free, legal ones you can put on your iPod (such as TV shows that release free episodes on iTunes.)
- Podcasts, both video and audio. They're free, they take up a lot more space than a song, and I listen to a lot of them.
- iPod being used in hard disk mode to store, *gasp*, real files.
- Photos. Many people have thousands of photos on their iPods.
There are many, many ways to fill up an iPod - legally - without spending even $1000, much less $40000, on multimedia files. And, as other people have mentioned, most people don't fill up their high-capacity iPods to the maximum anyway.All of the Halo games have had wicked awesome explosions, sure. But they also have a deeply engrossing storyline, fantastic multiplayer, good AI, and unsurpassed world physics. Halo 3 is the best game in the series and was my favorite shooter (and many other people's) of the year. By no stretch of the imagination was it a bad game. Star Wars is full of light sabers and lasers - but obviously, if you look at it more closely, there's an intricate storyline with fantastic characters (in Episodes 4-6).
Sure, BioShock and Portal are arguably better games than Halo 3 but they didn't sell nearly as well. The reason? Exposure. Most people haven't even heard of Portal. There certainly aren't Portal trading cards, helmets, action figures, and TV commercials.
For christ's sake, you can't even BUY Portal on a console -- at most, an hour long game -- without buying a $60 package that includes another game I've already beaten (Half Life 2) and two expansion packs I don't want. If Joey asks for Portal for Christmas, his mom won't be able to find it in a store.
Sales figures are a result of many other forces besides the quality of the game itself, and that's reality. Microsoft went to bat for Halo 3 with their pocketbook, executed very well, and they reaped the rewards from it. BioShock and Portal did not pony up, and since most people don't know what they are, they aren't purchased at nearly the same rate. It has nothing to do with the average American only liking "wicked awesome explosions."
Exactly.
I don't think adding the Internet changes anything about the morality here. As an example -- recently I noticed that newsstands in the airport have a section for adult magazines. There's no content filter stopping a customer from buying a copy of one of these and reading it on the airplane in front of children.
What's also to stop a customer from putting in a copy of Predator or maybe an adult movie on their portable DVD player? Those are movies that most people wouldn't want their kids watching.
Additionally, content filtering doesn't stop anyone who -really- wants to get around it (e.g. SSH tunneling, VPN, proxy sites, etc) so what would the airline really stand to gain here? I'm pretty sure the WiFi access points in the airports themselves don't have content filters.
I'm pretty sure it's already illegal to display adult material in a public place where kids could see it, but IANAL. The end result of content filtering on a service that I'm paying for means that I won't pay for it twice.
Patience, young padowan learner. The SDK is being released in February (or sooner). You'll see an eBook reader.
NetBSD is a great OS. I've used it since version 2 and it really has improved dramatically. I've found it to be very, very useful in resurrecting old hardware, and it also runs great on current platforms, too.
NetBSD's support of so many hardware architectures speaks something about how it's designed, if you ask me. No other OS I know of supports even 1/2 as many architectures as NetBSD.
You're exactly right. And I really like how their plan to be redundant and send up two rovers in case of a failure has turned out brilliantly - it's paying dramatic dividends in that both rovers were successful and both have discovered fantastic things that we would never have known if NASA had pulled a cheapskate and only gone with one rover.
Chemical Plant Zone is actually already on my iPod - you can get a MIDI remix of it, and most older games, from VG Music. Spend a few hours on that site and relive some of the best games of all time.