That scene drove me crazy, because I swear I saw it and then I saw a few showings on TV and didn't see that scene at all.
The auto-machine gun scene was deleted from the theatrical release, and only included in the special edition (first released on laserdisk in the early 1990s)
I don't know - to extend the metaphor, if you continued 'renting' after it broke (i.e. continued listening to the music despite the broken DRM), they'd sue you under the DMCA.
Screwyou Inc. sells cars made to run on Screwyou Inc. gasoline. They tell you ahead of time that they'll stop selling this kind of gas at some point in the future. But, they'll sue you if you put another company's gas in the car.
This sort of open letter should really be a last-resort kind of thing, but their letter says
When I (Russ) try to call the phone numbers for UK Linux, and for you individually, I get a telco intercept 'Lines are temporarily busy' for the last two weeks. Finally yesterday, a voicemail in your voice picked up, and I left a message urgently requesting a reply.
If they left a vm yesterday, they should give it at least until Monday before publicly humiliating the guy. Being a few days late in answering voiemail isn't odd at all. Also, is it out of the question to try and get someone to check his house personally? A team of 10 people have got to know someone in the UK.
That's not Linux, that's KDE or Gnome you are talking about.
Pedantry like this, which willfully ignores the issue at hand, is a kind of passive-aggressiveness which is an example of the attitude problem the parent was referring to.
On-orbit construction of the station began in 1998 and is scheduled to be complete by 2011, with operations continuing until at least 2015. In the first quarter of 2016 unless there is a change in policy... the space station will be de-orbited.
So, 13 years of construction and four years of (full-capacity) operation. This sets the standard for white elephants. As far as I'm concerned, they should either de-orbit it now and stop throwing good money after bad, or keep it up there for a lot longer, if only to do experiments on long-term living in space.
In December 2005, X-rays from another solar storm disrupted satellite-to-ground communications and Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation signals for about 10 minutes. That may not sound like much, but as Lanzerotti noted, "I would not have wanted to be on a commercial airplane being guided in for a landing by GPS or on a ship being docked by GPS during that 10 minutes."
The same article says
On Earth, power lines and long-distance telephone cables might be affected by auroral currents, as happened in 1989. Radar, cell phone communications, and GPS receivers could be disrupted by solar radio noise. Experts who have studied the question say there is little to be done to protect satellites from a Carrington-class flare.
Granted, recent the recent flare-related GPS disruption didn't last several days, but large flares do happen on a fairly regular basis (the article mentions 'huge' storms in 1942 and 1989). Which confirms the parent's main point: that backup tech (like sextants) is really a necessity when lives are at stake, simply on the basis of solar flares.
Obviously, backup tech is also needed to cover everyday problems like systems breakdowns while at sea.
The lesson to be learned here is that you can never win against the government, because they have the unique ability of coming up with cool-sounding names for things they just plain don't want you to do just because.
No, the lesson is that the law actually takes notice of the real world, and that shell games like the GP suggests only work until the laws are updated to reflect the reality...
Shell games and the like, which really do willfully ignore the copyright violation going on, feel unethical and are something I would rather not associate with. Not to mention the fact that narrowly technical claims ('not actually hosting copyrighted files', etc.) are disingenuous and, in effect, simply shift all of the blame, and criminality, to the file-shareres themselves.
If the spirit of the law says that you're not allowed to share copyrighted works, then the letter of the law should and will eventually reflect that.
The thing to do, IMNSHO, is continue working to change the spirit of the law. The goal should be to make the law reflect the fact that people should be able to share copyrighted works, as long as they aren't making money on it. Otherwise, the buck has got to stop somewhere, and someone - either the trackers, the users, or the network - will eventually have to take the blame for breaking the law.
Minidisks are still used by reporters to record interviews. A niche market much like betamax, which are also used by reporters (at least until recently) in place of VHS, long after VHS became the home standard.
If, if, if. These historical fictions always crop up, and they are useless, I say. The only if that I'd accept is: If the allies hadn't fully and completely kicked the Germans' ass, the Germans might have not unconditionally surrendered.
(The other thing about these WW2 ifs is that I've never seen one from the other POV: what about 'if' the allies finished the secret weapons they were surely working on? Etc. etc.)
Newspapers living on the gravy train? Pissing away money? That's news to me; I know some journalists and they get paid at the low end of the professional wage spectrum.
Few independent newspapers left? Overpaid CEOs? This is probably accurate, but it doesn't follow that a newspaper bailout is just about the industry; the individual papers remain, and still serve a purpose, whether or not they're part of a empire at the moment.
Oh, and the CEOs didn't come up with the idea that free content was the solution; they were forced into that. Most newspapers started out charging for their content, and many still do - if not for their current stuff, at least for their archives. The NYT's decision to make all current content free was itself news only a year or two ago.
The only legitimate purpose of a paper is to keep watch on the government? That's absurd.
The industry may be changing, evolving, or even growing a sixth finger, but it doesn't follow that the ads-classifides-susbcriber-box business model will fail. I don't know anyone who _prefers_ to read from an LCD over dead-tree. More than that, news simply does not have to be up-to-the-minute; 99% of the stuff in a paper is fine when its 12 hours old, and some things - like columns - are better after bit of reflection.
and MP3 is such a totally alluring name? people don't care what it's called as long as it's what they're used to.
Acronyms like MP3 are used all the time - my laptop is a T500, the military has guns called M1 through M1000, cars have V6 engines, etc, etc, etc. Number-letter acronyms are commonly used in technology nomenclature; when people hear 'MP3' they expect something technological, and that's what they get.
Ogg, on the other hand, could be onomatopoeia - it sounds like a grunt. It's very off-putting. The only place I can imagine it fitting in well is as a name for a hardcore punk band.
I'm just becoming reacquainted with math, and here is a proof I encoutered recently, showing that the square root (sqrt()) of 2 is not a rational number:
Proof of sqrt(2) != rational number:
suppose sqrt(2) = rational number:
then, sqrt(2) = m/n, where m = integer, n = non-zero integer (see definition of rational number), where n is the lowest common denominator
thus, sqrt(2) = m/n 2 = m^2/n^2 2n^2 = m^2
we now know that m is an even number, for squares of even numbers are always even, and squares of odd numbers are always odd; if m^2 can be expressed as double the square of an integer, it must be even.
then, knowing m is even, we can create a new number q, which is m/2. Thus, m = 2q, m^2 = 4q^2 so
2n^2 = 4q^2 n^2 = 2q^2
thus, n is an even number (see reasoning for m being an even number)
so, if m and n must be even numbers, m/n cannot be a fraction at the lowest common denominator
thus sqrt(2) cannot be expressed as a rational number
thus sqrt(2) is not a rational number, thus sqrt(2) is an irrational number.
This is the proof as I understand it - starting from axioms (definition of a rational number, algrebraic rules), and arriving at a conclusion.
And yes, as I understand it, you have to write out every step to show the proof - though at times you are relying on assmptions taken as read (ig the properties of squares).
It's a lot to take in, but it is very rule-based, and, if broken down into small bits, can be digestible (I hope!)
Computers have entered new niches over time, but no format has ever gone out of use. Mainframes are still around, as are minicomputers, workstations, desktops, laptops, and subnotebooks. Even smartphones aren't anything terribly new, being just a combination of PDAs and cell phones.
Rather, I think people will look back at our time and laugh at us for thinking that portable computers with full-sized keyboards would ever fall out of use:)
I can't speak to stargate, but I do know that replicators are in star trek. They first showed up in The Next Generation, which began in 1987.
In the show, they were usually used to make food, but could also be used to make anything anyone could dream up (they had some excuse re: why they couldn't just replicate starships, I forget what it was). They could also disassembled the dishes and scraps when someone was done, too.
I believe they were supposed to work by using transporter-like technology to assemble, atom-by-atom, the item requested. Presumably the raw materials were stored in some hold on the ship.
Whether or not the story is true, competition - even from the likes of Microsoft - competition in the search market is a good thing to have. Google has been been without serious competition in the web search market for almost a decade, and there are definitely ways they can improve the quality of their results.
Two things that most people will want avoided are 1) feature-bloat rather than basic s/n improvement as the method of competition, and 2) unfair use by microsoft of its (diminished) OS monopoly. Both these things were seen in the browser wars, and it took 5 years (more or less) for browser software to recover from that fiasco.
IMHO we don't need accurate predictions of just how exactly the climate will behave in n years to know we need to do something about global warming. We know for a fact that certain gases causes a greenhouse effect, and we know a warmer climate won't be good for us (if only because most of us live on the coast and higher sea levels wouldn't be good). The details aren't important, the big picture is already clear.
Slashdot Mirror
That scene drove me crazy, because I swear I saw it and then I saw a few showings on TV and didn't see that scene at all.
The auto-machine gun scene was deleted from the theatrical release, and only included in the special edition (first released on laserdisk in the early 1990s)
I don't know - to extend the metaphor, if you continued 'renting' after it broke (i.e. continued listening to the music despite the broken DRM), they'd sue you under the DMCA.
Screwyou Inc. sells cars made to run on Screwyou Inc. gasoline. They tell you ahead of time that they'll stop selling this kind of gas at some point in the future. But, they'll sue you if you put another company's gas in the car.
So, according to him, noone ever 'buys' movies or music; they just rent them until they break.
I almost hope he wins; stupid restrictions like this only increase the incentive to avoid DRM.
This sort of open letter should really be a last-resort kind of thing, but their letter says
When I (Russ) try to call the phone numbers for UK Linux, and for you individually, I get a telco intercept 'Lines are temporarily busy' for the last two weeks. Finally yesterday, a voicemail in your voice picked up, and I left a message urgently requesting a reply.
If they left a vm yesterday, they should give it at least until Monday before publicly humiliating the guy. Being a few days late in answering voiemail isn't odd at all. Also, is it out of the question to try and get someone to check his house personally? A team of 10 people have got to know someone in the UK.
That's not Linux, that's KDE or Gnome you are talking about.
Pedantry like this, which willfully ignores the issue at hand, is a kind of passive-aggressiveness which is an example of the attitude problem the parent was referring to.
the safe thing to do is you should have already switched lanes (if you're in the left that is) by the time they got to you if you see them coming up.
If you're passing a line of cars, you can't merge back into the RH lane.
That's my read too.
This part of the summary was particularly misleading:
"but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion.""
it should be changed to this:
"but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for research into planetary science and nuclear fusion."
From wikipedia:
On-orbit construction of the station began in 1998 and is scheduled to be complete by 2011, with operations continuing until at least 2015. In the first quarter of 2016 unless there is a change in policy ... the space station will be de-orbited.
So, 13 years of construction and four years of (full-capacity) operation. This sets the standard for white elephants. As far as I'm concerned, they should either de-orbit it now and stop throwing good money after bad, or keep it up there for a lot longer, if only to do experiments on long-term living in space.
In the parent's defense, events strong enough to distrupt GPS comms do not have to be on the scale of the Carrington Event that you mentioned. From
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/06may_carringtonflare.htm
In December 2005, X-rays from another solar storm disrupted satellite-to-ground communications and Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation signals for about 10 minutes. That may not sound like much, but as Lanzerotti noted, "I would not have wanted to be on a commercial airplane being guided in for a landing by GPS or on a ship being docked by GPS during that 10 minutes."
The same article says
On Earth, power lines and long-distance telephone cables might be affected by auroral currents, as happened in 1989. Radar, cell phone communications, and GPS receivers could be disrupted by solar radio noise. Experts who have studied the question say there is little to be done to protect satellites from a Carrington-class flare.
Granted, recent the recent flare-related GPS disruption didn't last several days, but large flares do happen on a fairly regular basis (the article mentions 'huge' storms in 1942 and 1989). Which confirms the parent's main point: that backup tech (like sextants) is really a necessity when lives are at stake, simply on the basis of solar flares.
Obviously, backup tech is also needed to cover everyday problems like systems breakdowns while at sea.
The lesson to be learned here is that you can never win against the government, because they have the unique ability of coming up with cool-sounding names for things they just plain don't want you to do just because.
No, the lesson is that the law actually takes notice of the real world, and that shell games like the GP suggests only work until the laws are updated to reflect the reality...
Shell games and the like, which really do willfully ignore the copyright violation going on, feel unethical and are something I would rather not associate with. Not to mention the fact that narrowly technical claims ('not actually hosting copyrighted files', etc.) are disingenuous and, in effect, simply shift all of the blame, and criminality, to the file-shareres themselves.
If the spirit of the law says that you're not allowed to share copyrighted works, then the letter of the law should and will eventually reflect that.
The thing to do, IMNSHO, is continue working to change the spirit of the law. The goal should be to make the law reflect the fact that people should be able to share copyrighted works, as long as they aren't making money on it. Otherwise, the buck has got to stop somewhere, and someone - either the trackers, the users, or the network - will eventually have to take the blame for breaking the law.
Minidisks are still used by reporters to record interviews. A niche market much like betamax, which are also used by reporters (at least until recently) in place of VHS, long after VHS became the home standard.
Nuke the site from orbit.
Seriously. Mod this guy insightful. After all, it's the only way to be sure. ;-)
Did IQs drop sharply while I was away? This installation has a substantial dollar value attached to it.
If they can coerce you to vote the way they want, it follows that the can coerce you not to rat them out.
The next step is to convince AOL to start sending out their software on thumb drives. Then we all win!
The Tin Drum ... WON THE FREAKING NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE!!!
The Nobel Prize for Literature is awarded to authors for their body of work, not for particular books.
Jeez!
If, if, if. These historical fictions always crop up, and they are useless, I say. The only if that I'd accept is: If the allies hadn't fully and completely kicked the Germans' ass, the Germans might have not unconditionally surrendered.
(The other thing about these WW2 ifs is that I've never seen one from the other POV: what about 'if' the allies finished the secret weapons they were surely working on? Etc. etc.)
All that matters is we won and they lost. Woohoo!
Newspapers living on the gravy train? Pissing away money? That's news to me; I know some journalists and they get paid at the low end of the professional wage spectrum.
Few independent newspapers left? Overpaid CEOs? This is probably accurate, but it doesn't follow that a newspaper bailout is just about the industry; the individual papers remain, and still serve a purpose, whether or not they're part of a empire at the moment.
Oh, and the CEOs didn't come up with the idea that free content was the solution; they were forced into that. Most newspapers started out charging for their content, and many still do - if not for their current stuff, at least for their archives. The NYT's decision to make all current content free was itself news only a year or two ago.
The only legitimate purpose of a paper is to keep watch on the government? That's absurd.
The industry may be changing, evolving, or even growing a sixth finger, but it doesn't follow that the ads-classifides-susbcriber-box business model will fail. I don't know anyone who _prefers_ to read from an LCD over dead-tree. More than that, news simply does not have to be up-to-the-minute; 99% of the stuff in a paper is fine when its 12 hours old, and some things - like columns - are better after bit of reflection.
and MP3 is such a totally alluring name? people don't care what it's called as long as it's what they're used to.
Acronyms like MP3 are used all the time - my laptop is a T500, the military has guns called M1 through M1000, cars have V6 engines, etc, etc, etc. Number-letter acronyms are commonly used in technology nomenclature; when people hear 'MP3' they expect something technological, and that's what they get.
Ogg, on the other hand, could be onomatopoeia - it sounds like a grunt. It's very off-putting. The only place I can imagine it fitting in well is as a name for a hardcore punk band.
I'm just becoming reacquainted with math, and here is a proof I encoutered recently, showing that the square root (sqrt()) of 2 is not a rational number:
Proof of sqrt(2) != rational number:
suppose sqrt(2) = rational number:
then, sqrt(2) = m/n, where m = integer, n = non-zero integer (see definition of rational number), where n is the lowest common denominator
thus,
sqrt(2) = m/n
2 = m^2/n^2
2n^2 = m^2
we now know that m is an even number, for squares of even numbers are always even, and squares of odd numbers are always odd; if m^2 can be expressed as double the square of an integer, it must be even.
then, knowing m is even, we can create a new number q, which is m/2. Thus, m = 2q, m^2 = 4q^2
so
2n^2 = 4q^2
n^2 = 2q^2
thus, n is an even number (see reasoning for m being an even number)
so, if m and n must be even numbers, m/n cannot be a fraction at the lowest common denominator
thus sqrt(2) cannot be expressed as a rational number
thus sqrt(2) is not a rational number, thus sqrt(2) is an irrational number.
This is the proof as I understand it - starting from axioms (definition of a rational number, algrebraic rules), and arriving at a conclusion.
And yes, as I understand it, you have to write out every step to show the proof - though at times you are relying on assmptions taken as read (ig the properties of squares).
It's a lot to take in, but it is very rule-based, and, if broken down into small bits, can be digestible (I hope!)
-- Soon-to-be student of 1st year calc
Computers still fill up entire rooms!
In fact, supercomputers seem to be getting bigger:
http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/rsc.bluegene_2004.html (Blue Gene/L, 2004)
http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/ccd/literature/ccd_annual_reports/p002.htm (Cray X/MP, 1986)
Bah!
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/
Computers have entered new niches over time, but no format has ever gone out of use. Mainframes are still around, as are minicomputers, workstations, desktops, laptops, and subnotebooks. Even smartphones aren't anything terribly new, being just a combination of PDAs and cell phones.
Rather, I think people will look back at our time and laugh at us for thinking that portable computers with full-sized keyboards would ever fall out of use :)
I can't speak to stargate, but I do know that replicators are in star trek. They first showed up in The Next Generation, which began in 1987.
In the show, they were usually used to make food, but could also be used to make anything anyone could dream up (they had some excuse re: why they couldn't just replicate starships, I forget what it was). They could also disassembled the dishes and scraps when someone was done, too.
I believe they were supposed to work by using transporter-like technology to assemble, atom-by-atom, the item requested. Presumably the raw materials were stored in some hold on the ship.
Whether or not the story is true, competition - even from the likes of Microsoft - competition in the search market is a good thing to have. Google has been been without serious competition in the web search market for almost a decade, and there are definitely ways they can improve the quality of their results.
Two things that most people will want avoided are 1) feature-bloat rather than basic s/n improvement as the method of competition, and 2) unfair use by microsoft of its (diminished) OS monopoly. Both these things were seen in the browser wars, and it took 5 years (more or less) for browser software to recover from that fiasco.
IMHO we don't need accurate predictions of just how exactly the climate will behave in n years to know we need to do something about global warming. We know for a fact that certain gases causes a greenhouse effect, and we know a warmer climate won't be good for us (if only because most of us live on the coast and higher sea levels wouldn't be good). The details aren't important, the big picture is already clear.