According to the Ep. 1 scrapbook (and maybe the movie, I haven't seen it yet), another member of the Jedi council is a female of the same species named Yaddle. She has strangely human female-style long hair.
> - Greedo
At least one member of the Imperial Senate is a Greedo-species alien, again based on that scrapbook.
>He then proceeds to silly analogies, such as "Would we allow a car to be driven with features which would evade and outrun police cars?"
The real analogy Freeh should be using is would be "Would we allow a car to be driven that doesn't include a remote shutdown control so the police can stop it whenever they wish?" Or, "Would we allow people to put locks on their houses that we can't unlock without resorting to a battering ram?" Of course, then Freeh would look like an even bigger idiot if he said no to those.
Just to hit on the Darth Vader redemption bit, it should be pointed out that this is Christian-style (although not Republican "Christian"-style) redemption. That is, it doesn't matter what you've done in your past as long as you truly repent, that you have in a sense become "born again." So it wasn't just that Vader saved his son, it's that he cast aside everything -- including his own life -- to save Luke and to destroy the Emperor and his evil.
>First, IANAL, but i think it's patents which expire if not enforced.
No, it's trademarks. (Kleenex, Xerox, etc.) Trademarks last forever if protected, it's only through failure to protect that they can be lost. (This has led to some annoying abuses of the trademark concept being used as a substitute for copyright. You can distribute the original Tarzan story, but you can't write new Tarzan stories, for example.)
While open source might be trademarkable, it would be extremely hard to protect, simply because it is so widely used already.
I'd almost suggest "gnuware" as an alternate term, but I suspect X and BSD license users would object based on the implied GPL bias.
>It doesn't seem right that I should aquire a "bad moderation" record for trying to fix a problem.
On the other hand, if there are redundant posts, there's no reason for readers to read several of them. Does having a low score on a post in any way really affect you overall? My understanding is that at worst, it might trivially affect your odds of getting moderator status.
What companies have made significant enhancements to GPL code? Any of them sell proprietary code?
What I hate about the GPL is that it plays on an emotion as bad as greed; the fear that someone *else* might make money off of one's code. What makes this particularly inane is that people are making money with the aid of one's code (Red Hat, VA Linux, any commercial website using Apache) anyway, it's just other programmers you are keeping from earning a living.
Re:What hardware/software does it use?
on
Digital VCRs
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· Score: 1
>It is my understanding that doing Mpeg2 in hardware fast enough isn't even easy
The ATI All-in-Wonder 128 does MPEG-2 capture, although as yet ATI hasn't been forthcoming with Linux drivers for any of its products.
Heck, regardless of crashing or no, NT can't claim to be a real quality OS as long as it uses drive letters... They've Got To Go. Not clearly separating the OS binary files from the OS data files (and furthermore, defaulting user data to subdirectories of the OS directory) is a further sign of a poorly though-out OS.
Also, I just love the support for directory links. Click on one in the File Save dialog and it replaces the name of the file with the name of the.lnk...
Bill Gates owns ~1 billion shares of Microsoft, each worth ~$80 at last look. There's certainly more shares out there, but let's use that as an estimate. We would need to buy at least 500 million of Bill's shares (assuming he would sell, a big assumption), so the cost would be ~$40 billion. Assuming there are about 10 million Linux users, that's $4,000 apiece MINIMUM.
I think we could make Linux super-easy to install, self-updating, with consistent interfaces and support for just about every piece of non-Microsoft hardware in the world for rather less than that.
>This is cool. I wonder if they will make this in a removeable drive?
Any non-laptop drive can be removable. Just get a removable hard drive bay from any of the myriad sources, for example computergate.com. I do that with my Linux drive -- it makes sure my Windows partition doesn't mess with it!
It really depends on your needs. There's megapixel cameras for ~$300 that are pretty nice, some of which were reviewed in PC Magazine. But then what they find best might not be best for you, depending how important things like storage medium type, time between shots, transfer mechanism, etc. matter to you. A two megapixel camera may be great, but if you're taking pictures for a web site, it's overkill.
My recommendation? Figure out what's important to you, and then look for magazine and on-line reviews. The reviews will help judge image quality as well as describing the feature sets of the individual cameras.
Your science is woeful, but amazingly, your hypothesis is probably correct.
RF travels at about the speed of light. It's sound that travels much slower (and not at all, through a vacuum like deep space).
Odds are, though, any alien race we encounter will be far more advanced than us. Why? Because we have been transmitting significant RF signals for less than 100 years of our planet's 5 billion year history. Assuming advanced civs aren't inherently unstable, we should be transmitting RF for many thousands, millions, or even billions of years to come, and advancing technologically all along the way. Persumably other alien civilizations would develop similarly. The odds, then, that we would receive a signal from exactly that tiny window of time when their civilization is near the same point of development as ours seems pretty darned small.
It's possible, of course, that for various reasons technological advances tend to slow beyond a certain point. (Perhaps once a civ gets "holosuites" and "replicators", technological advancement slows.) Or it may be that civs only generate significant enough RF emissions to be detected from other stars for a very brief time, so we would miss the even more advanced civs due to their radio silence. In that case or for other reasons, it might be more likely that the only civs we could hear were (at the time of transmission) at a similar level of technological development.
>so forget about compatability, forget about case space, forget about this.
I think you're being a little overly harsh.
Sure, many people took a glance at it and thought it was a slocket you could plug into any motherboard. If that's what you wanted, indeed, that's not an option.
However, a motherboard like this has real potential. With the single slot 1, the motherboard can be smaller -- the same size as a single processor system. While some cases may have power supplies in the way of a tall riser like this, others should work just fine. A single slot 1 is cheaper to build than 2, and a single large riser card is cheaper to build than two single CPU riser cards. So viewed as a possible dual-processor motherboard choice, it may be an attractive option. Heat is potentially an issue from having two CPUs so close together, but on the other hand it may make arranging a cooling system easier.
>FDT: Why should a company pay for software it will not control?
First off, most companies pay lots of money for a whole lot of software they don't control. I work for a company that develops proprietary software, and we certainly pay substantial amounts for development tools, revision control, word processing, etc. over which we have little or no influence. If there's a bug in that software that requires workarounds or (worse) may lead to a problem with our software, we're out of luck.
Paying for bug fixes or new features in open source tools might be less expensive than buying proprietary stuff, and would allow us to exert more control over the issues that matter to us most. Would sponsors be exerting control over the direction of development? Of course they would be! But that wouldn't necessarily make the software less useful to others; at worst it could be forked.
These are probably the same pundits who spread FUD about the "social security cut" the Evil Republicans (tm) were planning. The planned social security budget was actually more than the previous years, but not by the expected amount so it was called a "cut" by opponents.
Last I checked, we had an ever-increasing number of senior citizens. So even if the overall budget goes up, it's quite possible that the amounts for each individual go down. I'm not saying this *is* the case in this case -- I don't know -- but remember the bit about "lies, damned lies, and statistics." A good healthy dose of skepticism is always justified.
>What does this mean? It means that Microsoft can call Windows 2000 "Open Source" if they want to.
No they can't. The phrase has meaning even if not trademarked, and for Microsoft to make that claim about an OS that clearly does not approach any publicly accepted definition of open source would be false advertising.
As a parallel, you can't advertise a car as having air bags just because it has a couple of balloons in it. "Air bags" has a meaning without a certification mark and organization enforcing a definition.
>Uh, orbits degrade because of atmospheric drag. No atmosphere on the moon.
There are multiple reasons that an object's orbital trajectory might change, including changing in such a fashion that it strikes the orbited object.
The most prevalent in this case is the presence of other significant gravitational fields, namely those of the Earth and the Sun. Just as the moon's presence makes the Earth's trajectory around the sun "wobble" (basically the center of mass of the earth/moon system has a smooth orbital path), an object orbiting the moon would have its trajectory perturbed as it neared the Earth or the Sun. Each subsequent orbit approach would be different due to the previous perturbation. Because the Earth's influence is so significant, this means that lunar orbits tend to be highly irregular, and preturbations that result in orbiting objects leaving orbit of the moon or crashing into the moon are quite common.
Orbiting objects may also collide with other objects, and such collisions will have some effect on the orbital pattern. An atmosphere means that such collisions are much more likely and uniform in their effect on the orbiting object.
>The problem is that mankind is the best on this world in doing that so they are known as the most evil race on the planet (until they finally destroy themselves).
That won't allow you to buy at the opening day price, you need to be an institutional investor with connections at the company handling the IPO.
Let's take a ferinstance. E-Toys (ETYS) sold its shares at the IPO at ~20. The next morning, when open trading (for us regular folks) began, the selling price was 75. A nice 3.5x gain for those who got to buy the first day. It's now 50, so anyone who bought at 75 and hasn't sold yet is in the red, but those early investors still have a 2.5x gain for owning a stock for a week or so.
"I have a question for all the solar energy fans out there... does anyone know how these lovely eco-friendly phtovoltaic cells are made?"
For a solar power "plant", you can use parabolic mirrors to greatly increase your effective surface area per cell. Not much help for getting off the grid, but it does help solar plants come closer to cost-effectiveness.
Conservation probably holds out the most hope for reducing pollutants. Fluorescent bulbs that are plug-in replacements for incandescents, better insulation, more efficient heating/cooling systems & other appliances, flat panel TVs, etc., all could help to reduce power consumption, both reducing pollution and saving money. Heck, the web could help too, as we could do more online shopping and less driving around for what we need.
"To paraphrase a very powerful theme from the Babylon 5 series, we know for certain that at some point in the future our sun will go out."
That, to my mind, was one of the dumbest bits of B5. Current predictions are for the Sun to survive another five billion years. If that's the reason for space exploration, I don't think we need to hurry that much.
Meanwhile, we average putting a person in orbit at a rate of certainly no more than one every five days. Meanwhile, Earth's population increases by a rate of ~80 million a year ~= 250,000 a day. Are we really going to be sending 1.75 million people a week to Mars? Seems like it would consume an incredible amount of resources doing so.
Space exploration can be justified based on its contribution to the knowledge of humanity, and the possible contribution it may make to helping with other problems. But I think it's foolish to trivialize a $15 billion annual expense ("just" 1% of the U.S. budget is an immense amount of money), and questioning whether space exploration should receive as much of the federal government's science budget is also a valid question. And, if most of that knowledge can be ascertained via unmanned missions rather than manned, is the psychological gain of having human footprints in the Martian soil is worth the expense, given the many other problems that one might be able to solve?
Slashdot Mirror
>Think about it--there is only one
> - Yoda
According to the Ep. 1 scrapbook (and maybe the movie, I haven't seen it yet), another member of the Jedi council is a female of the same species named Yaddle. She has strangely human female-style long hair.
> - Greedo
At least one member of the Imperial Senate is a Greedo-species alien, again based on that scrapbook.
>He then proceeds to silly analogies, such as "Would we allow a car to be driven with features which would evade and outrun police cars?"
The real analogy Freeh should be using is would be "Would we allow a car to be driven that doesn't include a remote shutdown control so the police can stop it whenever they wish?" Or, "Would we allow people to put locks on their houses that we can't unlock without resorting to a battering ram?" Of course, then Freeh would look like an even bigger idiot if he said no to those.
Just to hit on the Darth Vader redemption bit, it should be pointed out that this is Christian-style (although not Republican "Christian"-style) redemption. That is, it doesn't matter what you've done in your past as long as you truly repent, that you have in a sense become "born again." So it wasn't just that Vader saved his son, it's that he cast aside everything -- including his own life -- to save Luke and to destroy the Emperor and his evil.
>First, IANAL, but i think it's patents which expire if not enforced.
No, it's trademarks. (Kleenex, Xerox, etc.) Trademarks last forever if protected, it's only through failure to protect that they can be lost. (This has led to some annoying abuses of the trademark concept being used as a substitute for copyright. You can distribute the original Tarzan story, but you can't write new Tarzan stories, for example.)
While open source might be trademarkable, it would be extremely hard to protect, simply because it is so widely used already.
I'd almost suggest "gnuware" as an alternate term, but I suspect X and BSD license users would object based on the implied GPL bias.
>It doesn't seem right that I should aquire a "bad moderation" record for trying to fix a problem.
On the other hand, if there are redundant posts, there's no reason for readers to read several of them. Does having a low score on a post in any way really affect you overall? My understanding is that at worst, it might trivially affect your odds of getting moderator status.
What companies have made significant enhancements to GPL code? Any of them sell proprietary code?
What I hate about the GPL is that it plays on an emotion as bad as greed; the fear that someone *else* might make money off of one's code. What makes this particularly inane is that people are making money with the aid of one's code (Red Hat, VA Linux, any commercial website using Apache) anyway, it's just other programmers you are keeping from earning a living.
>It is my understanding that doing Mpeg2 in hardware fast enough isn't even easy
The ATI All-in-Wonder 128 does MPEG-2 capture, although as yet ATI hasn't been forthcoming with Linux drivers for any of its products.
Heck, regardless of crashing or no, NT can't claim to be a real quality OS as long as it uses drive letters... They've Got To Go. Not clearly separating the OS binary files from the OS data files (and furthermore, defaulting user data to subdirectories of the OS directory) is a further sign of a poorly though-out OS.
.lnk...
Also, I just love the support for directory links. Click on one in the File Save dialog and it replaces the name of the file with the name of the
>If a company copyrights something and then DOESN'T sue others for infringing on this copyright, they risk losing the copyright.
No, that's trademark law. You can't "lose" copyright whether or not you go against violators.
Bill Gates owns ~1 billion shares of Microsoft, each worth ~$80 at last look. There's certainly more shares out there, but let's use that as an estimate. We would need to buy at least 500 million of Bill's shares (assuming he would sell, a big assumption), so the cost would be ~$40 billion. Assuming there are about 10 million Linux users, that's $4,000 apiece MINIMUM.
I think we could make Linux super-easy to install, self-updating, with consistent interfaces and support for just about every piece of non-Microsoft hardware in the world for rather less than that.
>This is cool. I wonder if they will make this in a removeable drive?
Any non-laptop drive can be removable. Just get a removable hard drive bay from any of the myriad sources, for example computergate.com. I do that with my Linux drive -- it makes sure my Windows partition doesn't mess with it!
>what is the best digital camera out there anyway
It really depends on your needs. There's megapixel cameras for ~$300 that are pretty nice, some of which were reviewed in PC Magazine. But then what they find best might not be best for you, depending how important things like storage medium type, time between shots, transfer mechanism, etc. matter to you. A two megapixel camera may be great, but if you're taking pictures for a web site, it's overkill.
My recommendation? Figure out what's important to you, and then look for magazine and on-line reviews. The reviews will help judge image quality as well as describing the feature sets of the individual cameras.
Your science is woeful, but amazingly, your hypothesis is probably correct.
RF travels at about the speed of light. It's sound that travels much slower (and not at all, through a vacuum like deep space).
Odds are, though, any alien race we encounter will be far more advanced than us. Why? Because we have been transmitting significant RF signals for less than 100 years of our planet's 5 billion year history. Assuming advanced civs aren't inherently unstable, we should be transmitting RF for many thousands, millions, or even billions of years to come, and advancing technologically all along the way. Persumably other alien civilizations would develop similarly. The odds, then, that we would receive a signal from exactly that tiny window of time when their civilization is near the same point of development as ours seems pretty darned small.
It's possible, of course, that for various reasons technological advances tend to slow beyond a certain point. (Perhaps once a civ gets "holosuites" and "replicators", technological advancement slows.) Or it may be that civs only generate significant enough RF emissions to be detected from other stars for a very brief time, so we would miss the even more advanced civs due to their radio silence. In that case or for other reasons, it might be more likely that the only civs we could hear were (at the time of transmission) at a similar level of technological development.
>so forget about compatability, forget about case space, forget about this.
I think you're being a little overly harsh.
Sure, many people took a glance at it and thought it was a slocket you could plug into any motherboard. If that's what you wanted, indeed, that's not an option.
However, a motherboard like this has real potential. With the single slot 1, the motherboard can be smaller -- the same size as a single processor system. While some cases may have power supplies in the way of a tall riser like this, others should work just fine. A single slot 1 is cheaper to build than 2, and a single large riser card is cheaper to build than two single CPU riser cards. So viewed as a possible dual-processor motherboard choice, it may be an attractive option. Heat is potentially an issue from having two CPUs so close together, but on the other hand it may make arranging a cooling system easier.
>FDT: Why should a company pay for software it will not control?
First off, most companies pay lots of money for a whole lot of software they don't control. I work for a company that develops proprietary software, and we certainly pay substantial amounts for development tools, revision control, word processing, etc. over which we have little or no influence. If there's a bug in that software that requires workarounds or (worse) may lead to a problem with our software, we're out of luck.
Paying for bug fixes or new features in open source tools might be less expensive than buying proprietary stuff, and would allow us to exert more control over the issues that matter to us most. Would sponsors be exerting control over the direction of development? Of course they would be! But that wouldn't necessarily make the software less useful to others; at worst it could be forked.
"You cannot uncook Mushoo pork once is has been cooked"
Sure you can. Feed it back to the pig! (Ok, you then have to use the poop as fertilizer...)
The same answer works for "How do you unscramble an egg?"
These are probably the same pundits who spread FUD about the "social security cut" the Evil Republicans (tm) were planning. The planned social security budget was actually more than the previous years, but not by the expected amount so it was called a "cut" by opponents.
Last I checked, we had an ever-increasing number of senior citizens. So even if the overall budget goes up, it's quite possible that the amounts for each individual go down. I'm not saying this *is* the case in this case -- I don't know -- but remember the bit about "lies, damned lies, and statistics." A good healthy dose of skepticism is always justified.
>So GPL folks aren't the only ones getting it for free ;)
At least in theory, the GPL is more "Free speech, not free beer." Pirated software doesn't come with source...
>What does this mean? It means that Microsoft can call Windows 2000 "Open Source" if they want to.
No they can't. The phrase has meaning even if not trademarked, and for Microsoft to make that claim about an OS that clearly does not approach any publicly accepted definition of open source would be false advertising.
As a parallel, you can't advertise a car as having air bags just because it has a couple of balloons in it. "Air bags" has a meaning without a certification mark and organization enforcing a definition.
>Uh, orbits degrade because of atmospheric drag. No atmosphere on the moon.
There are multiple reasons that an object's orbital trajectory might change, including changing in such a fashion that it strikes the orbited object.
The most prevalent in this case is the presence of other significant gravitational fields, namely those of the Earth and the Sun. Just as the moon's presence makes the Earth's trajectory around the sun "wobble" (basically the center of mass of the earth/moon system has a smooth orbital path), an object orbiting the moon would have its trajectory perturbed as it neared the Earth or the Sun. Each subsequent orbit approach would be different due to the previous perturbation. Because the Earth's influence is so significant, this means that lunar orbits tend to be highly irregular, and preturbations that result in orbiting objects leaving orbit of the moon or crashing into the moon are quite common.
Orbiting objects may also collide with other objects, and such collisions will have some effect on the orbital pattern. An atmosphere means that such collisions are much more likely and uniform in their effect on the orbiting object.
>The problem is that mankind is the best on this world in doing that so they are known as the most evil race on the planet (until they finally destroy themselves).
"They"? Are you not a member of mankind then?
>Open an account with an on-line trading company.
That won't allow you to buy at the opening day price, you need to be an institutional investor with connections at the company handling the IPO.
Let's take a ferinstance. E-Toys (ETYS) sold its shares at the IPO at ~20. The next morning, when open trading (for us regular folks) began, the selling price was 75. A nice 3.5x gain for those who got to buy the first day. It's now 50, so anyone who bought at 75 and hasn't sold yet is in the red, but those early investors still have a 2.5x gain for owning a stock for a week or so.
At the very least, http://www.vinod.com is still up, and it still says he works for Microsoft.
"I have a question for all the solar energy fans out there... does anyone know how these lovely
eco-friendly phtovoltaic cells are made?"
For a solar power "plant", you can use parabolic mirrors to greatly increase your effective surface area per cell. Not much help for getting off the grid, but it does help solar plants come closer to cost-effectiveness.
Conservation probably holds out the most hope for reducing pollutants. Fluorescent bulbs that are plug-in replacements for incandescents, better insulation, more efficient heating/cooling systems & other appliances, flat panel TVs, etc., all could help to reduce power consumption, both reducing pollution and saving money. Heck, the web could help too, as we could do more online shopping and less driving around for what we need.
"To paraphrase a very powerful theme from the Babylon 5 series, we know for certain that at some point in the future our sun will go out."
That, to my mind, was one of the dumbest bits of B5. Current predictions are for the Sun to survive another five billion years. If that's the reason for space exploration, I don't think we need to hurry that much.
Meanwhile, we average putting a person in orbit at a rate of certainly no more than one every five days. Meanwhile, Earth's population increases by a rate of ~80 million a year ~= 250,000 a day. Are we really going to be sending 1.75 million people a week to Mars? Seems like it would consume an incredible amount of resources doing so.
Space exploration can be justified based on its contribution to the knowledge of humanity, and the possible contribution it may make to helping with other problems. But I think it's foolish to trivialize a $15 billion annual expense ("just" 1% of the U.S. budget is an immense amount of money), and questioning whether space exploration should receive as much of the federal government's science budget is also a valid question. And, if most of that knowledge can be ascertained via unmanned missions rather than manned, is the psychological gain of having human footprints in the Martian soil is worth the expense, given the many other problems that one might be able to solve?