I can believe that it's not a troll. Quite a while ago I was making a web page and I picked up a cheapie clip-art CD from Kmart or something, manufactured by Corel.
The contract specifically disallowed publishing those graphics on a website.
I wondered what the purpose of clip-art was if the license didn't allow someone to use the art.
And don't forget that the RTG that was onboard Aquarius (the Apollo 13 lunar lander turned into a lifeboat is now sitting in the ocean near Australia. It's not leaking radiation.
I hope my karma doesn't take a beating for this, but when I heard that people were actually protesting the Cassini launch, I wanted to fricking slap those ignorant people.
Modula-2 is a *much* better language than Pascal will ever be.
Ahhhhh, those were the days. Modula-2 on my Atari ST was awesome. Actually, I think my memory might be just a bit selective. I had to really work hard to get the compiler to fit onto two floppy disks, and that left just a small space to store source and object code. The compiler was just about the largest program that my Atari was capable of running. I envied everyone with a hard disk.
On the other hand, I learned Pascal on a TRS-80 model IV, and the Pascal-80 compiler looked very very similar to Turbo Pascal 1.
In my opinion, the ultimate Wirth inspired language was Turbo Pascal 4.0. Every feature of Modula-2 was in the language, plus it had a great development environment and compiler.
> I pose the question to you. Is there, somewhere, > a better, easier and more efficent way to > present images and information to the human > brain?
Yes, and it's called text. If you need further proof, try rephrasing this article in the form of icons.
Or, you can think of a word as an icon. The bitmap pattern that forms the following icon between the brackets [courage] is a better graphical representation for the concept of courage than a lion or some such nonsense.
It's efficient too. The bitmap pattern that forms that excellent icon for courage can be compressed to 7 bytes, including the 0 at the end of the string.
Whenever I am forced to use Word, the first thing I do is remove all the default tool buttons and replace them with my own text labeled tool buttons. I find it far easier to use them. "Cut" and "Paste" are simpler to read and use than some goofy icon with two sheets of paper or some scissors or a cartoonish bottle of glue.
>Maybe poverty will appear just as shocking as >slavery is to us
I sure hope so. If what you say actually happens, then that means two things: the world would still be here, and it would be a better place than it is today.
As far as the attitudes of some people towards reason, that can be explained: "Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." John 20:29
The ISS will not fail. We've got 85% of the hardware sitting around the assembly building waiting to be stuck on the shuttle. Our politicians wouldn't allow it.
NASA even had their own version of the living quarters already built and ready to launch in case the Russians failed to launch Zvezda.
And I disagree that the Russians should not have been allowed to participate. How else were we going to get the experience necessary to operate the station effectively and efficiently. Sure, we could have figured it out for ourselves, but that's stupid. It's the NIH syndrome. Even though the Russians were two years late, I can bet you it would have taken us a hellava lot longer to figure out what they already know. We are stronger with the Russians than without them. NASA knows this, and that's why they have been so patient.
Russia pays a lease for the launching facility. The location of the facility can sometimes cause problems. In recent months, two protons were lost during launch because of manufacturing irregularities in the engine (nozzles I believe). The proton doesn't use a very environmentally safe fuel, so Kazakhstan threatened to cut Russia off from Baikanur unless they assessed the environmental damage and performed cleanup of their lost rockets.
I was happy to see that the launch went smoothly this time.
When monitors and printers die, they tend to catch fire. Just ask WB Doner advertising in Detroit where a friend of mine used to work. Printer caught fire in the middle of the night and burned the entire business up. They had to tear the building down to the steel and concrete to fix the damage.
Then exactly why is Apple demanding that websites take down pages?
Apple's being a bully it seems to me. Mac OS Rumors would probably kick Apple's ass in court, but that takes money. Rather than fight, they fold, because fighting would cost too much. When companies get abusive, it's time for someone bigger than them to stomp hard. That means a legal restraint.
Tell all your friends and family - annoy them with incessant pleas to install some mysterious software on their computer because it will make them money. And what's in it for them? They've got to become salespeople in turn if they want to make enough money to cover their electricity.
No thanks. Pay me fairly by the hour and I'll decide for myself if it's a good deal or not. If you want more people to join the project, then pay more. Simple. Don't make me annoy everyone around me. We're already sick of the make money fast schemes.
I used to contribute many cycles on many machines to distributed.net, but I haven't recently. I have never contributed to SETI@home ever.
I lost my interest because the scientific and humanitarian benefit was't great enough. distributed.net dangled the carrot that breaking large keys would help to force Congress' hand regarding pathetically small key-lengths. Now that the current project has been running for an extremely long time, I think the value of that has run out. I just can't think of a good reason for wasting cycles and electricity on a problem that has no scientific or political value anymore.
SETI@home doesn't interest me either, not because aliens aren't cool - first contact would be an amazing thing and that's an understatement. They already have more power than they can use right now, and running a memory hungry client just isn't worth it for a pathetically small contribution to the project.
The colomb ruler project is interesting, and it has real world value.
The new massively parallel computers are even faster than distributed.net, and those have the possibility of even greater future scaling. I think it's easier to build and coordinate a large beowulf than it is to coordinate a few tens of thousands of hobbyists. Throw hacking and the occaisional/inevitable corrupting of projects with bad data, and it becomes apparent that scaling of these distributed.net projects is very difficult. I'm not saying that it can't be done, but for a few million dollars you can build yourself a computer faster than distributed.net. If you were an oil company or a scientist working on a meaningful problem, which direction would you take?
We've got volunteer/non-profit CPU cycle networks, and we're going to have at least one for-profit group starting up soon. I don't speak for everyone, but I am more likely to donate my cycles to a project that has a strong benefit for everyone, which is not done for profit motives. Why should I donate cycles to a project to make someone else rich? That said, I might be persuaded to *sell* cycles to a for-profit company provided it was worth my time.
There ought to be rules about how companies can go after people if their trade secrets get leaked.
I'm assuming that Apple considers their new computer designs to be trade secrets. If Apple didn't want the whole world to know, they should have kept tight security. If somehow the world found out what the new computers looked like, then that's tough cookies for Apple. They should be barred from trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle.
A parallel is found in the auto industry. Automakers have to transport cars around to get them from the shops to the test tracks. A lot of those cars are very top secret models not meant for production for a couple years or more. Many people who work for magazines like "Car and Driver" try to get spy shots of the vehicles as they are being transported or tested. The engineers know this, so they stick on a lot of fake plastic bumps on the car to hide the true shape from the photographers. If by chance a picture is published, then the magazines won one, and the automakers lost one. Better luck for GM next time - they'll probably try to beef up security somehow.
>Certainly. If I so choose, I should be able to >manufacture and store a nuclear device in my >garage. The real limiting factor here is the >practicality of such a device.
>I don't think the poster you were responding too realizes that point.
And that would be me....
I do realize that point. But, being a practical person I understand that the right to bear arms cannot be permanently guaranteed. The censorship-proof internet can be permanent. That quality makes freedom of speech much different in character than the freedom to bear arms. My argument is not about the merit of one right vs. another right. Your points are well taken, but that wasn't what I was talking about.
I agree that it is repugnant. How will you draw the line?
Obviously kiddie porn inclus photos of 3 year olds involved in sex acts, but what about the other possible cases including:
*a 17 year old 45 year old man * a 17 year old with an 18 year old man * two 6 year olds holding hands * a 4 year old swimming naked at the beach with his family * a 6 month old taking a bath * a 2 week old nursing at his mother's breast
You get the point. I remember how surprised I was when my very own grandmother demonstrated a suprising amount of anger at seeing a baby nursing at his mother's breast in a parenting magazing. She was absolutely of the opinion that it was pornographic - kiddie porn even.
So, how do you define those fringe cases? How can you reconcile your definition of kiddie porn with my grandmothers?
When I said that censorship should be absolutely banished, I meant it knowing the consequences. It means that kiddie porn will be uncensorable, and to prosecute it you'll have to actually catch people with it on their computers, or in production. You won't be able to catch it in transmission.
Freedom exacts a horrible price. The penalty in blood from wars and in cases like your example is very high. I am still of the opinion that the penalty of censorship is still higher.
Nuclear weapons are arms as well. Do you propose that those should be allowed? Fertilizer bombs?
The right to bear arms may or may not be noble. This is not the place to argue that point. What I am saying is that there is absolutely *no way* to permanently safeguard the right to bear arms.
But that doesn't matter because there will eventually be no way to censor ideas, and ideas are far more powerful than guns.
The ivory tower comment was ad homenem. Please argue with logic, not emotion.
You bring up a lot of good points that really make me think.
I agree with you that total lawlessness would be a horrible thing to unleash on the internet. I'm a dedicated spam hunter, and have been for years now. With untraceable connections we will be deluged with spam advertizing from all directions. It would be absolutely horrible.
With the sheer horror of that to consider, I would embrace spam if it meant that total freedom of speech forever was guarenteed.
Censorship is the most horrible thing, because it prevents people from speaking about and organizing against injustice.
Slashdot Mirror
I can believe that it's not a troll. Quite a while ago I was making a web page and I picked up a cheapie clip-art CD from Kmart or something, manufactured by Corel.
The contract specifically disallowed publishing those graphics on a website.
I wondered what the purpose of clip-art was if the license didn't allow someone to use the art.
>telnet -x helium
telnet: Warning: -x ignored, no ENCRYPT support.
Trying 9.53.200.182...
It would have been better if you had put a colon at the end of the word "follows" instead of a period.
Are you afraid that if the radioactive helecopter crashed on Titan that you would need a protective suit to survive there?
Well there's something you ought to know.....
And don't forget that the RTG that was onboard Aquarius (the Apollo 13 lunar lander turned into a lifeboat is now sitting in the ocean near Australia. It's not leaking radiation.
I hope my karma doesn't take a beating for this, but when I heard that people were actually protesting the Cassini launch, I wanted to fricking slap those ignorant people.
Sorry. I feel better now.
The top of the page has a wind-up phonograph icon.
I could care less about 100 year old technology. I want to know about today's technology, like MP3's.
oops. I guess I misunderstood the icon.
Monitors aren't supposed to give the user a big radiation dose. Ya, I know that I'm sitting at the dirty end of a particle accelerator right now.
Naming their monitor technology Roentgen worries me a bit.
Modula-2 is a *much* better language than Pascal will ever be.
Ahhhhh, those were the days. Modula-2 on my Atari ST was awesome. Actually, I think my memory might be just a bit selective. I had to really work hard to get the compiler to fit onto two floppy disks, and that left just a small space to store source and object code. The compiler was just about the largest program that my Atari was capable of running. I envied everyone with a hard disk.
On the other hand, I learned Pascal on a TRS-80 model IV, and the Pascal-80 compiler looked very very similar to Turbo Pascal 1.
In my opinion, the ultimate Wirth inspired language was Turbo Pascal 4.0. Every feature of Modula-2 was in the language, plus it had a great development environment and compiler.
> I pose the question to you. Is there, somewhere,
> a better, easier and more efficent way to
> present images and information to the human
> brain?
Yes, and it's called text. If you need further proof, try rephrasing this article in the form of icons.
Or, you can think of a word as an icon. The bitmap pattern that forms the following icon between the brackets [courage] is a better graphical representation for the concept of courage than a lion or some such nonsense.
It's efficient too. The bitmap pattern that forms that excellent icon for courage can be compressed to 7 bytes, including the 0 at the end of the string.
Whenever I am forced to use Word, the first thing I do is remove all the default tool buttons and replace them with my own text labeled tool buttons. I find it far easier to use them. "Cut" and "Paste" are simpler to read and use than some goofy icon with two sheets of paper or some scissors or a cartoonish bottle of glue.
>Maybe poverty will appear just as shocking as
>slavery is to us
I sure hope so. If what you say actually happens, then that means two things: the world would still be here, and it would be a better place than it is today.
As far as the attitudes of some people towards reason, that can be explained:
"Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast
seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that
have not seen, and yet have believed." John 20:29
The ISS will not fail. We've got 85% of the hardware sitting around the assembly building waiting to be stuck on the shuttle. Our politicians wouldn't allow it.
NASA even had their own version of the living quarters already built and ready to launch in case the Russians failed to launch Zvezda.
And I disagree that the Russians should not have been allowed to participate. How else were we going to get the experience necessary to operate the station effectively and efficiently. Sure, we could have figured it out for ourselves, but that's stupid. It's the NIH syndrome. Even though the Russians were two years late, I can bet you it would have taken us a hellava lot longer to figure out what they already know. We are stronger with the Russians than without them. NASA knows this, and that's why they have been so patient.
Russia pays a lease for the launching facility. The location of the facility can sometimes cause problems. In recent months, two protons were lost during launch because of manufacturing irregularities in the engine (nozzles I believe). The proton doesn't use a very environmentally safe fuel, so Kazakhstan threatened to cut Russia off from Baikanur unless they assessed the environmental damage and performed cleanup of their lost rockets.
I was happy to see that the launch went smoothly this time.
You can set up filters to route mails that contain the string "traffic@websidestory.com" in the "From:" field to a folder called Trash.
Go to your mail, click the options, click filters, and set it up.
The latest Linux cluster to go into production for the government nuclear stockpile simulation handily beats distributed.net
It doesn't even cost a whole lot of money. Lots of companies could afford a machine that size or larger.
When monitors and printers die, they tend to catch fire. Just ask WB Doner advertising in Detroit where a friend of mine used to work. Printer caught fire in the middle of the night and burned the entire business up. They had to tear the building down to the steel and concrete to fix the damage.
So turn off your printers at night too.
Then exactly why is Apple demanding that websites take down pages?
Apple's being a bully it seems to me. Mac OS Rumors would probably kick Apple's ass in court, but that takes money. Rather than fight, they fold, because fighting would cost too much. When companies get abusive, it's time for someone bigger than them to stomp hard. That means a legal restraint.
It's built in a distasteful pyramid scheme.
:-)
Tell all your friends and family - annoy them with incessant pleas to install some mysterious software on their computer because it will make them money. And what's in it for them? They've got to become salespeople in turn if they want to make enough money to cover their electricity.
No thanks. Pay me fairly by the hour and I'll decide for myself if it's a good deal or not. If you want more people to join the project, then pay more. Simple. Don't make me annoy everyone around me. We're already sick of the make money fast schemes.
Sorry, I was ranting..
I used to contribute many cycles on many machines to distributed.net, but I haven't recently. I have never contributed to SETI@home ever.
I lost my interest because the scientific and humanitarian benefit was't great enough. distributed.net dangled the carrot that breaking large keys would help to force Congress' hand regarding pathetically small key-lengths. Now that the current project has been running for an extremely long time, I think the value of that has run out. I just can't think of a good reason for wasting cycles and electricity on a problem that has no scientific or political value anymore.
SETI@home doesn't interest me either, not because aliens aren't cool - first contact would be an amazing thing and that's an understatement. They already have more power than they can use right now, and running a memory hungry client just isn't worth it for a pathetically small contribution to the project.
The colomb ruler project is interesting, and it has real world value.
The new massively parallel computers are even faster than distributed.net, and those have the possibility of even greater future scaling. I think it's easier to build and coordinate a large beowulf than it is to coordinate a few tens of thousands of hobbyists. Throw hacking and the occaisional/inevitable corrupting of projects with bad data, and it becomes apparent that scaling of these distributed.net projects is very difficult. I'm not saying that it can't be done, but for a few million dollars you can build yourself a computer faster than distributed.net. If you were an oil company or a scientist working on a meaningful problem, which direction would you take?
We've got volunteer/non-profit CPU cycle networks, and we're going to have at least one for-profit group starting up soon. I don't speak for everyone, but I am more likely to donate my cycles to a project that has a strong benefit for everyone, which is not done for profit motives. Why should I donate cycles to a project to make someone else rich? That said, I might be persuaded to *sell* cycles to a for-profit company provided it was worth my time.
There ought to be rules about how companies can go after people if their trade secrets get leaked.
I'm assuming that Apple considers their new computer designs to be trade secrets. If Apple didn't want the whole world to know, they should have kept tight security. If somehow the world found out what the new computers looked like, then that's tough cookies for Apple. They should be barred from trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle.
A parallel is found in the auto industry. Automakers have to transport cars around to get them from the shops to the test tracks. A lot of those cars are very top secret models not meant for production for a couple years or more. Many people who work for magazines like "Car and Driver" try to get spy shots of the vehicles as they are being transported or tested. The engineers know this, so they stick on a lot of fake plastic bumps on the car to hide the true shape from the photographers. If by chance a picture is published, then the magazines won one, and the automakers lost one. Better luck for GM next time - they'll probably try to beef up security somehow.
>Certainly. If I so choose, I should be able to
>manufacture and store a nuclear device in my
>garage. The real limiting factor here is the
>practicality of such a device.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
>I don't think the poster you were responding too realizes that point.
And that would be me....
I do realize that point. But, being a practical person I understand that the right to bear arms cannot be permanently guaranteed. The censorship-proof internet can be permanent. That quality makes freedom of speech much different in character than the freedom to bear arms. My argument is not about the merit of one right vs. another right. Your points are well taken, but that wasn't what I was talking about.
I agree that it is repugnant. How will you draw the line?
Obviously kiddie porn inclus photos of 3 year olds involved in sex acts, but what about the other possible cases including:
*a 17 year old 45 year old man
* a 17 year old with an 18 year old man
* two 6 year olds holding hands
* a 4 year old swimming naked at the beach with his family
* a 6 month old taking a bath
* a 2 week old nursing at his mother's breast
You get the point. I remember how surprised I was when my very own grandmother demonstrated a suprising amount of anger at seeing a baby nursing at his mother's breast in a parenting magazing. She was absolutely of the opinion that it was pornographic - kiddie porn even.
So, how do you define those fringe cases? How can you reconcile your definition of kiddie porn with my grandmothers?
When I said that censorship should be absolutely banished, I meant it knowing the consequences. It means that kiddie porn will be uncensorable, and to prosecute it you'll have to actually catch people with it on their computers, or in production. You won't be able to catch it in transmission.
Freedom exacts a horrible price. The penalty in blood from wars and in cases like your example is very high. I am still of the opinion that the penalty of censorship is still higher.
Nuclear weapons are arms as well. Do you propose that those should be allowed? Fertilizer bombs?
The right to bear arms may or may not be noble. This is not the place to argue that point. What I am saying is that there is absolutely *no way* to permanently safeguard the right to bear arms.
But that doesn't matter because there will eventually be no way to censor ideas, and ideas are far more powerful than guns.
The ivory tower comment was ad homenem. Please argue with logic, not emotion.
You bring up a lot of good points that really make me think.
I agree with you that total lawlessness would be a horrible thing to unleash on the internet. I'm a dedicated spam hunter, and have been for years now. With untraceable connections we will be deluged with spam advertizing from all directions. It would be absolutely horrible.
With the sheer horror of that to consider, I would embrace spam if it meant that total freedom of speech forever was guarenteed.
Censorship is the most horrible thing, because it prevents people from speaking about and organizing against injustice.