I am 43, married, father of 2. Freelancer, software developer doing java in germany. End of last year due to some reasons I decided to go to a psychologist to find out whether or not I am an autist. Turns out I am. Asperger syndrome / High functioning autism. For me it was very important to get the diagnosis since it answered a question I had for 43 years: Why am I different and what makes me different.
For my parents and siblings this is a different story. they think that since I have a job, make decent money, know how to deal with my life and generally have not strange behaviours this 'being an autist' is just some of my strange ideas and eventually I will forget about it.
Even my wife from time to time has some trouble understanding all of that.
So i know how you feel, sort of. Simple advise from me: Grab yourself a psychologist who a: has some serious knowledge about dealing with adults on the spectrum and b: you can trust and then get your diagnosis. This helps a lot.
In a couple of weeks me second son (5 years) is due for his diagnosis...
I deeply admired Babylon 5. What do you think of starting a spin of like Babylon 4? You already introduced it and created a story around it. From my point of view it would be a perfect successor to B5.
Two questions: 1.: When you now look at the stars, sitting in your chair at home in a warm summer evenening, what do you dream about?
2.: If all of a sudden technology would advance and real spaceships with the ability of interstellar travel would be constructed and they offered you a real captains seat on a real spaceship, would you take it?
On first thought that is a scary thing and the road you now have to travel for the (statistically) next 1 to 2 years is not really an easy one.
But on the other hand you now have an opportunity not many of us have. Thing is, we are all dying. There is a fair lot of people here on this board who will be dead long before your wife passes away. And many of them would have wished to have known this two years in advance. Statistically there are about 160000 people who will not see the next sunrise. And some of them might be readers on slashdot.
So you have some albeit limited time left to focus on the important things in life.
- Don't waste time focusing on the sickness. Like talking about this. What I learned about talking with my children is that whatever you tell them they will perceive 10fold. So if the sickness is an important thing during the time to come it will be ten times as much important for your children as it is for you. And don't try to hide the sickness from your children. I don't know how much they can realise already, but children understand much more than we can imagine. At least on an empathic level. Try to be "normal" about your wife.
- Focus on the time you have as a family. And focus on your children. Supposing you are doing a standard 9 to 5 job having the weekends off you should start using the weekends for short trips, like camping and stuff. I don't know what the physical condition is your wife is in right now, but start _doing_ things. If it is possible, go on as many bicycle trips as you can. Travel around. My wife and me are currently in the process of bying a campmobile. Since I am working on a freelance basis the weekends are the times we can share as a family. And with my oldest son starting school this year our holiday time will be focused on the main holiday seasons, which are extremely expensive. So buying a campmobile and doing weekend trips seems like a good thing for me.
- Give your kids memories of good times. By spending time together. They will remember their family in a way everybody should have been able to remember their family. In the end this is what matters. How did we perceive our parents while they were with us. And the foundation for this is being laid while the kids are young.
As mentioned in the title I thought about doing this for my kids for various reasons. My way of doing this will be to start taking short videoblogs for my two sons. With the built in camera of my mobile (htc legend). These videoblogs will be short and will focus on letting them take part in my daily life. And maybe I will try to incorporate the fact into these videos that my sons will get older. So I will try to record videos for times when they are older. For storing purposes I will put them on cd and on sd-cards. Copied multiple times with one set of copies being stored in a safe-deposit box. My wife will know about this and I will put instructions about that into some sort of testament.
But how many of them you take it will always be like looking through a box full of pictures of lost ones. They cannot replace the real thing. In the end it will be your job as a father to help your kids focus on the future. This is where our road heads to. And the future is where your kids will need you.
You don't even have to google his name. It is hidden in plain. His Email, which is in the header of his post, is `gro.smconane' `ta' `nad'. Now read that backwards....
I can tell you from my own experience that a baby in the fifth week of its life is capable of surviving. Like my son, who was born week 25+2 (meaning 25 weeks plus two days), weighing 740 grams. My wife had developed a condition called hellp syndrome. Now he is six years old. I have videos of his very first hours of life and although this little thing might not be even close to what you think of as a baby I can tell you that this little person has feelings and emotions. Odd thing: even minutes before his birth it would have been legal to abort him. Doing the same five minutes after his birth would constitute as murder. Who decides that this baby, when it is still in the womb, can be killed?
Did you fucker ever realize that roads were _not_ made for cars only? Where did you get that false impression from? Unless these roads are clearly marked as cars-only they are free to use for everybody. Especially inside cities.
And cut that "living on borrowed time" crap. Ever thought about that driving your car makes _you_ live on everybodyies ecosystem, climate, health and time? What do you thing turns our big cities into traffic jam nightmares? Or causes these fuckloads of smog? Or this stupid war for oil? Pedestrians? Bikes? No, don't think so.
Whoever modded this insightful... Saying that orange juice and cola are almost the same from the health point of view is unbelievable bullshit. Take a short look at the ingrediants of cola. - artificial sugars - phosphor acids - non-natural flavorings The only ingredient of these that you find in some of the cheap versions of orange juice is artificial sugar.
Known facts (check wikipedia for sources) are that there are links between - cola and ostheoporosis due to the phosphor - cola and diabetes due to the sugar
Both deal with links between cola and cancer. Google for increases in oesophagus cancer due to the increased consumate of cola.
And you claim that the juice of oranges is equally health-destructive as cola? You must be kidding.
I do have acid reflux and due to that I have to take pantozol (similar to nexium / purple pill). My physiological background is that I have an hiatus hernia. Used to drink 2-3 liter of cola (diet coke) every day. I had tried quitting drinking this stuff already, but without success. I was addicted. Like being addicted.
And from time to time I've got pains in my oesphagus although I took my pills.
Somewhere in march I read about the connections between cola and oesophagus cancer. Which hit me like a hammer. I instantly did quit drinking cola, which is now three month ago. Instead I drink pure water and coffee. With the result that I do not have to take the pantozol-pill every day anymore. I am down to taking it every second day. Which is a huge success for me.
Since I am in the process of leaving my company for becoming a freelancer I recently had the necessity to buy a replacement for the laptop which my company had given me.
The machine had to be capable of doing the usual office stuff, software- and db-development with java, and some music production (entry level).
The laptop I had from my company was an asus M50VM. Wrt to performance this machine is really top notch. 2.53 GHz, 4GB ram, 1GB graphics card. Barely ever had to utilize this machine even 10 %.
My main concern was the weight of this monster. It weighs around 3.2 KG ('bout 6 pounds, for the illiterate ones of you...).
In addition the charger weighs about 500 grams. So altogether, in my backpack, I caried a whopping 3.7 KG while commuting on bike to my workplace. And one single battery charge was barely enough for letting this monster work for 2 hours.
So I thought long about buying a netbook. Knowing that the reviews all read that they are dog slow, barely capable of running their operating systems, just powerful enough for surfing, emails and that stuff. But in the end I gave it a try.
The machine I've bought is an asus eeepc 1000HE (Atom n280). I've upgraded the ram to 2 GB, plugged in an other hd (500Gb Seagate momentum). And: I am deeply surprised that _all_ of my computational needs are (almost) perfectly satisfied.
I've installed debian linux with gnome, java, apache, tomcat and all the stuff I need for software development. And all of this runs reasonable fast.
Then I tried to start the virtualbox with the windows xp instance I had copied from the other machine. And to my utter surprise even this works reasonbly fast. So I can do all the office-2007-stuff I have to do for my still-current-employer from within this virtualboxed XP, without the need for dualbooting.
And all of that for a mere 378 EUR plus upgrade costs. The machine weighs about 1.3 KG including charger. And on a single battery charge it runs for roundabout 5.5 hours.
Only problem I currently have is the rtc. Don't know why, but jack (audio), ardour and rosegarden always complain that the rtc is missing. But with rtc turned off inside jack even the music production stuff works.
Alltogether, this is a great machine and I am deeply amazed of what this netbook is capable of.
This is one of the most ignorant and arrogant views I have heard in a long long time. And you even get modded insightful. Wow. Yes, third world faces horrendous problems. War, dictatorships, racism, food crisis, diseases. So yes, it is a dying world. And by your proposed logic something like homicide shouldn't even be considered a crime there, because "They die anyway".
All the foreign aide going into third world is useless, because "They die anyway". Safe the money which is invested into the education in these countries because "They die anyway".
I do not hope that the next time you visit a doctor this pendulum swings back to you. Might be interesting to see if you'd agree to some totally arrogant bitch of a stranger telling the doctor to stop helping you because "Listen doctor, in another couple of decades he will die anyway".
The reason for saving the lifes of people is to give them a chance to create a better world. But interesting enough with people like you, living in such a better world (No, I do not know your particular world, but from the point of view of some of the poorest people in this world your life looks like heaven, no matter how hard you think it is), there is a reason why this world is turning for the worse every day a little bit.
Hi, nice theory. But how comes that jesaja, the prophet who lived a couple of hundred years before jesus, prophesized this virgin birth? Was that too a "marvellous" addition?
Btw, who are "they" that altered the original story? I would like to know these people in charge of the content of the bible.
The idea behind this all is a bit more complicated then just providing (hopefully) two way trips to the borders of space. It is much more then that.
EADS builds a vehicle which is capable of repeatedly reaching this border. Since it takes off via conventional jet engines it doesn't need these launch pads like the us fleet of space crafts. Standard starting procedures via a runway, reusable - sounds almost like a standard airplane. And all this with a business modell that will pay for a reasonable amount of research and maintenance for this ship. 1.2 Billion $ which do not have to be paid for by tax payers.
Suddenly we come into a position where space tourism is on the border to become main stream. Granted, 200K$ is much. But wait some 10 or 20 years. When there will not only be 3 parties (Russia via their space fleet, virgin galactic and now EADS) providing such trips but maybe 10 or 20 companies. Prices will be in a reasonable region, the ships will be much advanced and pretty much standard.
This is a fascinating, although a bit not-so-obviously coincidence with what's happening here in germany. One of our politicians, wolfgang schaeuble, currently tries to pass a new law which allows the police and secret services to secretely spy on your computers. All in the name of counter-terrorism. What he tells the german people is that there is a great deal of danger coming from islamistic fundamentals, left-wing fundamentals, right-wing fundamentals. If passed, this law enables the police to spy on literally everyones computer.
This ippa2007 tries to implement instruments which could be used to seize your computers and to wiretap you. All in the name of piracy prevention. If passed it will give the police the means to seize the computers of a majority of U.S. citizens. It can be used to criminalize each and everyone. If passed, this law enables the police to seize literally everyones computer.
According to wikipedia "Primary or elementary education consists of the first years of formal, structured education that occur during childhood.". In other words, the target group of this excercise is in the age of 5 - 11 years.
What could possibly be the reason behind something like this? Exposing little children to such a nightmare scenario is insane. I guess there will be more than just one child being left behind with psychological traumata as a result of this.
Either the teachers were completely out of mind or these teachers have the intention of inflicting fear, making the children obedient.
Relax and wait. Over time, ISPs will start to get seriously annoyed by this waste of bandwidth. As soon as customers start calling and complain about their crawling download speed, ISPs will have to start to act.
And ISPs who act against it will finally gain a reputation for providing being spam-free services. Just regularly call your ISP and complain about that they don't filter the spam.
For me having about 20-30 junk mails in my inbox per day isn't really much trouble. T'Bird does a fairly good job detecting them. And if it really starts to bug me I will install something like spamassassin on my server. So, who cares.
Don't get me wrong: I just hate this stuff like everyone else. But even wasting thoughts on it is useless.
Whenever you create something like an application, a picture, a poem, a scientific article or whatever, it is your own creation. Copyright gives you the legal means to make sure that no one can take away your creation from you.
In the current world the copyright says that one can only copy a product if he complies with the restrictions imposed by the copyright owner. Therefore in this world we life in the very concept of open source would not exist without a licenses like the gpl, bsdl and such. These licenses rely heavily on the fact that someone owns the copyright to the creation in question. All these licenses define the way in which you are allowed to copy the product.
In a situation in which copyright as a concept doesn't exist you would have no more rights to your own creation. Sure, you're still the creator of it. But this wouldn't be relevant anymore. Everyone and his dog could take your creation and exploit it commercially. Cause there is no need anymore to respect you as creator of your creation.
In such an imaginary un-copyrighted world you could license an application you created under the gpl or whatever license you like. But you couldn't enforce it anymore, since you wouldn't have the right to control who copies it. I just could take your precious application and sell it.
And believe me, in such a world the greed of commercial companies would very very fast outperform the good natured os-activists.
gmueckl, who wrote "The State of Open Source 3D Modeling" should have called his rant "Why blender sucks". That he is one of the main developers behind moonlight|3d actually speeks louder than the entire article. This article is soooo obviously nothing more but a rant that it already hurts.
I use blender for 2+ years now and am fairly impressed with what you can achieve with it. Many people claim that blenders UI is crap. Don't really know why. Granted, it is not the usual windows UI. But does this really matter? To actually start being productive with any 3d tool you need a highly configurable ui. And in blender you can configure the ui to exactly show you whatever informations you want. For almost every action you can use shortcuts. This makes it incredibly fast to use. Yes, you have to actually learn them, but this happens whenever you want to achieve something new.
And although I pay my bills by developing software I do not care about flaws in the codebase, ugly architectures and stuff as long as the tool does what is required. And blender does this fairly good.
The development speed of blender is really amazing. Take a look at the new sculpting tools. They are incredible. During this 2+ years of using blender I had only a couple of crashes. And during this time many features were added. I guess that many parts of blender have already been rewritten.
Another really enjoyable part of blender is its community. Take a look at elysiun.com. One of the most supportive and effective communities in the open source world that I know of.
Take a look at blendernation.com, a great source for blender news. There is even a magazine around: blender art magazine. Pretty nice.
Altogether the community around blender is one of the important driving forces behind blender.
Finally, judge the tools by what they have accomplished. Especially look at the art-galleries of the tools:
Hi FinalMidnight, I did some googling for the stomach ulcer treatment and ran about this side: "http://vianet.net.au/~bjmrshll/". Is this the guy you talk about?
Slashdot Mirror
I am 43, married, father of 2. Freelancer, software developer doing java in germany. End of last year due to some reasons I decided to go to a psychologist to find out whether or not I am an autist. Turns out I am. Asperger syndrome / High functioning autism. For me it was very important to get the diagnosis since it answered a question I had for 43 years: Why am I different and what makes me different.
For my parents and siblings this is a different story. they think that since I have a job, make decent money, know how to deal with my life and generally have not strange behaviours this 'being an autist' is just some of my strange ideas and eventually I will forget about it.
Even my wife from time to time has some trouble understanding all of that.
So i know how you feel, sort of. Simple advise from me: Grab yourself a psychologist who a: has some serious knowledge about dealing with adults on the spectrum and b: you can trust and then get your diagnosis. This helps a lot.
In a couple of weeks me second son (5 years) is due for his diagnosis...
I deeply admired Babylon 5. What do you think of starting a spin of like Babylon 4? You already introduced it and created a story around it. From my point of view it would be a perfect successor to B5.
Two questions:
1.: When you now look at the stars, sitting in your chair at home in a warm summer evenening, what do you dream about?
2.: If all of a sudden technology would advance and real spaceships with the ability of interstellar travel would be constructed and they offered you a real captains seat on a real spaceship, would you take it?
Yt,
Gunnar
Beating. A. Dead. Horse. Successfully...
On first thought that is a scary thing and the road you now have to travel for the (statistically) next 1 to 2 years is not really an easy one.
But on the other hand you now have an opportunity not many of us have. Thing is, we are all dying. There is a fair lot of people here on this board who will be dead long before your wife passes away. And many of them would have wished to have known this two years in advance. Statistically there are about 160000 people who will not see the next sunrise. And some of them might be readers on slashdot.
So you have some albeit limited time left to focus on the important things in life.
- Don't waste time focusing on the sickness. Like talking about this. What I learned about talking with my children is that whatever you tell them they will perceive 10fold. So if the sickness is an important thing during the time to come it will be ten times as much important for your children as it is for you. And don't try to hide the sickness from your children. I don't know how much they can realise already, but children understand much more than we can imagine. At least on an empathic level. Try to be "normal" about your wife.
- Focus on the time you have as a family. And focus on your children. Supposing you are doing a standard 9 to 5 job having the weekends off you should start using the weekends for short trips, like camping and stuff. I don't know what the physical condition is your wife is in right now, but start _doing_ things. If it is possible, go on as many bicycle trips as you can. Travel around. My wife and me are currently in the process of bying a campmobile. Since I am working on a freelance basis the weekends are the times we can share as a family. And with my oldest son starting school this year our holiday time will be focused on the main holiday seasons, which are extremely expensive. So buying a campmobile and doing weekend trips seems like a good thing for me.
- Give your kids memories of good times. By spending time together. They will remember their family in a way everybody should have been able to remember their family. In the end this is what matters. How did we perceive our parents while they were with us. And the foundation for this is being laid while the kids are young.
As mentioned in the title I thought about doing this for my kids for various reasons. My way of doing this will be to start taking short videoblogs for my two sons. With the built in camera of my mobile (htc legend). These videoblogs will be short and will focus on letting them take part in my daily life. And maybe I will try to incorporate the fact into these videos that my sons will get older. So I will try to record videos for times when they are older. For storing purposes I will put them on cd and on sd-cards. Copied multiple times with one set of copies being stored in a safe-deposit box. My wife will know about this and I will put instructions about that into some sort of testament.
But how many of them you take it will always be like looking through a box full of pictures of lost ones. They cannot replace the real thing. In the end it will be your job as a father to help your kids focus on the future. This is where our road heads to. And the future is where your kids will need you.
Yt,
Gunnar
You don't even have to google his name. It is hidden in plain. His Email, which is in the header of his post, is `gro.smconane' `ta' `nad'. Now read that backwards....
Yt,
Gunnar
So in the end you are not a human being either. Is it legal then to kill you?
I can tell you from my own experience that a baby in the fifth week of its life is capable of surviving. Like my son, who was born week 25+2 (meaning 25 weeks plus two days), weighing 740 grams. My wife had developed a condition called hellp syndrome. Now he is six years old. I have videos of his very first hours of life and although this little thing might not be even close to what you think of as a baby I can tell you that this little person has feelings and emotions.
Odd thing: even minutes before his birth it would have been legal to abort him. Doing the same five minutes after his birth would constitute as murder. Who decides that this baby, when it is still in the womb, can be killed?
Yt,
Gunnar
Did you fucker ever realize that roads were _not_ made for cars only? Where did you get that false impression from? Unless these roads are clearly marked as cars-only they are free to use for everybody. Especially inside cities.
And cut that "living on borrowed time" crap. Ever thought about that driving your car makes _you_ live on everybodyies ecosystem, climate, health and time? What do you thing turns our big cities into traffic jam nightmares? Or causes these fuckloads of smog? Or this stupid war for oil? Pedestrians? Bikes? No, don't think so.
In your own words: Move the fuck over.
Yt,
Gunnar
Whoever modded this insightful...
Saying that orange juice and cola are almost the same from the health point of view is unbelievable bullshit. Take a short look at the ingrediants of cola.
- artificial sugars
- phosphor acids
- non-natural flavorings
The only ingredient of these that you find in some of the cheap versions of orange juice is artificial sugar.
Known facts (check wikipedia for sources) are that there are links between
- cola and ostheoporosis due to the phosphor
- cola and diabetes due to the sugar
Check out these two links:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3235539,00.html
http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2006/08/25/benzene-beverages.html
Both deal with links between cola and cancer. Google for increases in oesophagus cancer due to the increased consumate of cola.
And you claim that the juice of oranges is equally health-destructive as cola? You must be kidding.
I do have acid reflux and due to that I have to take pantozol (similar to nexium / purple pill). My physiological background is that I have an hiatus hernia. Used to drink 2-3 liter of cola (diet coke) every day. I had tried quitting drinking this stuff already, but without success. I was addicted. Like being addicted.
And from time to time I've got pains in my oesphagus although I took my pills.
Somewhere in march I read about the connections between cola and oesophagus cancer. Which hit me like a hammer. I instantly did quit drinking cola, which is now three month ago. Instead I drink pure water and coffee.
With the result that I do not have to take the pantozol-pill every day anymore. I am down to taking it every second day. Which is a huge success for me.
Yt,
Gunnar
Since I am in the process of leaving my company for becoming a freelancer I recently had the necessity to buy a replacement for the laptop which my company had given me.
The machine had to be capable of doing the usual office stuff, software- and db-development with java, and some music production (entry level).
The laptop I had from my company was an asus M50VM. Wrt to performance this machine is really top notch. 2.53 GHz, 4GB ram, 1GB graphics card. Barely ever had to utilize this machine even 10 %.
My main concern was the weight of this monster. It weighs around 3.2 KG ('bout 6 pounds, for the illiterate ones of you...).
In addition the charger weighs about 500 grams. So altogether, in my backpack, I caried a whopping 3.7 KG while commuting on bike to my workplace. And one single battery charge was barely enough for letting this monster work for 2 hours.
So I thought long about buying a netbook. Knowing that the reviews all read that they are dog slow, barely capable of running their operating systems, just powerful enough for surfing, emails and that stuff. But in the end I gave it a try.
The machine I've bought is an asus eeepc 1000HE (Atom n280). I've upgraded the ram to 2 GB, plugged in an other hd (500Gb Seagate momentum). And: I am deeply surprised that _all_ of my computational needs are (almost) perfectly satisfied.
I've installed debian linux with gnome, java, apache, tomcat and all the stuff I need for software development. And all of this runs reasonable fast.
Then I tried to start the virtualbox with the windows xp instance I had copied from the other machine.
And to my utter surprise even this works reasonbly fast.
So I can do all the office-2007-stuff I have to do for my still-current-employer from within this virtualboxed XP, without the need for dualbooting.
And all of that for a mere 378 EUR plus upgrade costs. The machine weighs about 1.3 KG including charger. And on a single battery charge it runs for roundabout 5.5 hours.
Only problem I currently have is the rtc. Don't know why, but jack (audio), ardour and rosegarden always complain that the rtc is missing. But with rtc turned off inside jack even the music production stuff works.
Alltogether, this is a great machine and I am deeply amazed of what this netbook is capable of.
Don't want to switch back anytime soon...
Yt,
Gunnar
So much to the question if you should trust your feelings. If you really care, take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premature_birth
And I know from first-hand experience that prematire birth can happen without giving you a chance to intervene.
Yt,
Gunnar
This is one of the most ignorant and arrogant views I have heard in a long long time. And you even get modded insightful. Wow.
Yes, third world faces horrendous problems. War, dictatorships, racism, food crisis, diseases.
So yes, it is a dying world. And by your proposed logic something like homicide shouldn't even be considered a crime there, because "They die anyway".
All the foreign aide going into third world is useless, because "They die anyway". Safe the money which is invested into the education in these countries because "They die anyway".
I do not hope that the next time you visit a doctor this pendulum swings back to you. Might be interesting to see if you'd agree to some totally arrogant bitch of a stranger telling the doctor to stop helping you because "Listen doctor, in another couple of decades he will die anyway".
The reason for saving the lifes of people is to give them a chance to create a better world. But interesting enough with people like you, living in such a better world (No, I do not know your particular world, but from the point of view of some of the poorest people in this world your life looks like heaven, no matter how hard you think it is), there is a reason why this world is turning for the worse every day a little bit.
Yt,
Gunnar
What an arrogant view! And you are what, a teacher? Ymbkm!
This "if you aren't going to try your best" shit is something you could stuff to adults, not to children. Try to remember how you have been in school.
There is a reason why kids aren't allowed to drink / drive / vote and stuff. They are not _reasonable_.
And if you just focus on the brilliant ones, then maybe, just maybe you are not really a teacher.
Hi,
nice theory. But how comes that jesaja, the prophet who lived a couple of hundred years before jesus, prophesized this virgin birth? Was that too a "marvellous" addition?
Btw, who are "they" that altered the original story? I would like to know these people in charge of the content of the bible.
Yt,
Gunnar
To call him a geek is an insult to me and all other geeks i know of ... To endanger other people's lives like this is utterly despicable.
Don't apply your arbitrary moral standards to the rest of us. Being a "geek" has nothing to do with submitting to a particular moral philosophy.
Condemning "endanger other people's lives like this" is an "arbitrary moral standard"? You're kiddin'. I'd rather call it common sense.Yt,
Gunnar
... think it through.
The idea behind this all is a bit more complicated then just providing (hopefully) two way trips to the borders of space. It is much more then that.
EADS builds a vehicle which is capable of repeatedly reaching this border. Since it takes off via conventional jet engines it doesn't need these launch pads like the us fleet of space crafts. Standard starting procedures via a runway, reusable - sounds almost like a standard airplane. And all this with a business modell that will pay for a reasonable amount of research and maintenance for this ship. 1.2 Billion $ which do not have to be paid for by tax payers.
Suddenly we come into a position where space tourism is on the border to become main stream. Granted, 200K$ is much. But wait some 10 or 20 years. When there will not only be 3 parties (Russia via their space fleet, virgin galactic and now EADS) providing such trips but maybe 10 or 20 companies. Prices will be in a reasonable region, the ships will be much advanced and pretty much standard.
Yt,
Gunnar
The two paragraphs that catched my eyes were:
Permit more wiretaps for piracy investigations.
and:
Allow computers to be seized more readily.
This is a fascinating, although a bit not-so-obviously coincidence with what's happening here in germany. One of our politicians, wolfgang schaeuble, currently tries to pass a new law which allows the police and secret services to secretely spy on your computers. All in the name of counter-terrorism. What he tells the german people is that there is a great deal of danger coming from islamistic fundamentals, left-wing fundamentals, right-wing fundamentals. If passed, this law enables the police to spy on literally everyones computer.
This ippa2007 tries to implement instruments which could be used to seize your computers and to wiretap you. All in the name of piracy prevention. If passed it will give the police the means to seize the computers of a majority of U.S. citizens. It can be used to criminalize each and everyone. If passed, this law enables the police to seize literally everyones computer.
Yt,
Gunnar
According to wikipedia "Primary or elementary education consists of the first years of formal, structured education that occur during childhood.". In other words, the target group of this excercise is in the age of 5 - 11 years.
What could possibly be the reason behind something like this? Exposing little children to such a nightmare scenario is insane. I guess there will be more than just one child being left behind with psychological traumata as a result of this.
Either the teachers were completely out of mind or these teachers have the intention of inflicting fear, making the children obedient.
Yt,
Gunnar
Relax and wait. Over time, ISPs will start to get seriously annoyed by this waste of bandwidth. As soon as customers start calling and complain about their crawling download speed, ISPs will have to start to act.
And ISPs who act against it will finally gain a reputation for providing being spam-free services. Just regularly call your ISP and complain about that they don't filter the spam.
For me having about 20-30 junk mails in my inbox per day isn't really much trouble. T'Bird does a fairly good job detecting them. And if it really starts to bug me I will install something like spamassassin on my server. So, who cares.
Don't get me wrong: I just hate this stuff like everyone else. But even wasting thoughts on it is useless.
Yt,
Gunnar
This "fight" is about goliath vs goliath.
In the original story david was a person who tried to free his people. He even was willing to put his own life to risk to safe his people.
For some reason or another I don't think that these "davids" have the same altruistic motives...
Yt,
Gunnar
Whenever you create something like an application, a picture, a poem, a scientific article or whatever, it is your own creation. Copyright gives you the legal means to make sure that no one can take away your creation from you.
In the current world the copyright says that one can only copy a product if he complies with the restrictions imposed by the copyright owner. Therefore in this world we life in the very concept of open source would not exist without a licenses like the gpl, bsdl and such. These licenses rely heavily on the fact that someone owns the copyright to the creation in question. All these licenses define the way in which you are allowed to copy the product.
In a situation in which copyright as a concept doesn't exist you would have no more rights to your own creation. Sure, you're still the creator of it. But this wouldn't be relevant anymore. Everyone and his dog could take your creation and exploit it commercially. Cause there is no need anymore to respect you as creator of your creation.
In such an imaginary un-copyrighted world you could license an application you created under the gpl or whatever license you like. But you couldn't enforce it anymore, since you wouldn't have the right to control who copies it. I just could take your precious application and sell it.
And believe me, in such a world the greed of commercial companies would very very fast outperform the good natured os-activists.
Yt,
Gunnar
And what mechanism do you think will prevent me from just taking, building and selling your un-copyrighted sources?
If you give up copyright you give up your right to what you created. And this is, in my humble opinion, a very bad idea.
Yt, Gunnar
gmueckl, who wrote "The State of Open Source 3D Modeling" should have called his rant "Why blender sucks". That he is one of the main developers behind moonlight|3d actually speeks louder than the entire article. This article is soooo obviously nothing more but a rant that it already hurts.
I use blender for 2+ years now and am fairly impressed with what you can achieve with it. Many people claim that blenders UI is crap. Don't really know why. Granted, it is not the usual windows UI. But does this really matter? To actually start being productive with any 3d tool you need a highly configurable ui. And in blender you can configure the ui to exactly show you whatever informations you want. For almost every action you can use shortcuts. This makes it incredibly fast to use. Yes, you have to actually learn them, but this happens whenever you want to achieve something new.
And although I pay my bills by developing software I do not care about flaws in the codebase, ugly architectures and stuff as long as the tool does what is required. And blender does this fairly good.
The development speed of blender is really amazing. Take a look at the new sculpting tools. They are incredible. During this 2+ years of using blender I had only a couple of crashes. And during this time many features were added. I guess that many parts of blender have already been rewritten.
Another really enjoyable part of blender is its community. Take a look at elysiun.com. One of the most supportive and effective communities in the open source world that I know of.
Take a look at blendernation.com, a great source for blender news. There is even a magazine around: blender art magazine. Pretty nice.
Altogether the community around blender is one of the important driving forces behind blender.
Finally, judge the tools by what they have accomplished. Especially look at the art-galleries of the tools:
-k-3d: http://www.k-3d.org/wiki/Still_Gallery
-moonlight|3d: http://www.moonlight3d.eu/forum/
-art of illusion: http://www.artofillusion.org/artgallery
Judge for yourself.
Yt,
Gunnar
Hi FinalMidnight,
I did some googling for the stomach ulcer treatment and ran about this side: "http://vianet.net.au/~bjmrshll/". Is this the guy you talk about?
Yt,
gunnar