President Bush knows, or at least his handlers know, that US space exploration needs the support of the public. While a great many things can be hidden away in a budget as vast as the US Federal government's there is considerable political danger in diverting money to something unpopular.
Consider that while the push to put a human on the moon was mostly a marketing campaign the end result was that the public was happy to see large sums of their money spent on it. The shuttle program had similar hype but it has faded away, both from explosions and from the fact that people are bored with seeing the same thing. The Mars rovers generated some excitement as well but it was short lived.
So the administration may well be trying to generate the same kind of public support for space exploration that it had in the Apollo era. Quite often, if you let the marketing people do their thing, the end result is a gain in resources that will eventually fund more important work. Like it or don't, "We've landed and claimed Mars in the name of the USA" will result in a lot more cheering and bumper ribbons and T shirt sales than "We've made a startling discovery regarding the dynamics of planetary formation within stellar nurseries".
I have been toying with both myself, when I am on my Vista machine, and you are correct that Firefox 2.0 still has memory problems.
IE7 seems to have some rendering issues. Half of the comments here, using the "New Discussion Style" view, are split in half by their subject line. Haven't gotten around to looking into that yet.
The good thing is that we can all be pretty sure that that both the Firefox memory issues and the IE rendering flaws will actually be fixed, because both teams have to continue to develop now that they are faced with having an actual realistic competitor. It makes me want to start working on Gimp again.
The problem with getting away from paper is that it soundly thrashes anything you can produce on a computer when it comes to resolution and density of content. Unfortunately, most paper training supplements don't take advantage of either and end up being direct copies of the electronic material.
Being aware of what paper can do goes a long way toward reducing the amount of information you actually print. While different subjects offer different opportunities, focusing on graphic means of communicating ideas and data and combining that with the resolution of paper can often mean that you can compress dozens of electronic slides into a single piece of paper.
Read some of Edward Tufte's work, it is a good place to start.
The mask looks like it took maybe 2 minutes to make, and most of that time was spent threading the tape into the label maker.
Paining it blue would have taken too much time I suspect.
I bought an iPod yesterday that came with two Apple stickers, armed with those and pretty much nothing else it looks like I could be a serious contender in this thing.
Several people who built on DVD Jon's work already put together a program that would go through your iTunes music and strip the DRM from it, even convert it to MP3 if you chose, in a batch process.
As far as I know any version of iTunes > 5.0 prevented it from working so you may be too late to the party.
This particular DVD Jon related news is not about stripping DRM, it is about creating DRM'd files in the same format as iTunes to engage in direct competition.
Photography has had a grey market for years and manufacturers have more or less resigned themselves to its existence. They take specific steps to protect their business arrangements, Canon USA will not provide warranty service for a non-Canon USA imported item, but they generally do not pressure retailers.
So camera manufacturers have figured out how to live with it, I'd like to see why Sony has gotten the idea that it is better to sue it out of existence.
No, that is not how it is supposed to work. Well before 'these days' US courts defined concepts like vicarious copyright infringement and contributory copyright infringement.
Content providers do not simply feel the government should act against the organizations you describe, it is a matter of legal precedent. This issue was dealt with by the courts long before the internet allowed people to share copyrighted content.
This is YouTube being officially notified that their service is distributing material that infringes.
YouTube will need to take this material down I suspect.
As additional material is uploaded that infringes, and they are notified of this by additional copyright holders, evidence will begin to indicate that YouTube is indirectly infringing due to the fact that they are both profiting from copyright infrongement and that they have the ability to prevent it from occurring.
YouTube is very likely to be judged guilty of vicarious infringement if they do not find a way to keep copyrighted material from appearing in the first place.
Please do not blaspheme the internet. It has changed everything, its just that the rest of the entire world has not kept up with frenetic pace set by our beloved internet.
Like, you know, how all content, all entertainment, all information, is now freely available to everyone everywhere, which is so tantalizingly similar to the abundant economies predicted by our favorite sci-fi shows (now, by the way, freely available for free download) that we cannot restrain ourselves from making ever more boastful predictions covering things we know nothing about apart from our certainty that they will be fundamentally changed by the internet. Like in the 90s only we're right this time.
I do not care what you say. The internet is not owned by the same corporations that own everything else. The packets that come to my house are not carried over wires owned by a profit seeking ISP, carried at their whim rather than mine. By virtue of my birth into this world I have earned an inalienable right to these packets and any other packets I might want to receive or send. The internet is not dependent on routers and switches owned by telcos that can decide to allow or reject packets based on their specific business needs or the constraints placed on them by the governments that allow them to operate. No one can sue me for doing something wrong, like piracy or theft of information or slander, as long as I am using the internet because the internet is a playground of limitless freedom that no man, no government, can ever hold back. Not even a nation of millions.
If you don't recognize that the internet has ushered in a new era of free, and freedom, then you way off in the weeds. We disciples praying at the altar of the internet are leaving you behind, old man.
There are thousands of exceptions. The idea that we have a full enough understanding of the ecosystem to declare victory is preposterous.
The truth of the matter is that in most developed countries we have been able to erect a wall between us and certain death, with waste treatment and clean water and the like. There are very many places in this world where the population is holding on by a much thinner thread. Right now, far away from my clean office with its bottled water and filtered air, there is a person halfway through the process of pulling a parasitic worm through a hole they cut in another person's skin, an extremely painful process that will take several weeks to finish. The worm is one of many parasites these two people deal with every day, and we have yet to figure out how to eradicate any of them.
I read the original post and imagine myself standing there taking a photo, wearing a "Mission Accomplished" shirt with a graphic of a human putting the final nail in a coffin containing all the things that want to kill us. After the photo I get on a jet that gets me back home in time to eat a nice dinner of fresh scallops trucked 400 miles overland and Japanese seaweed from halfway across the globe. The jet and the dinner help me actually believe that my shirt is correct and keep me from having to face the fact that in trade for my current state of smugness about how wonderfully powerful I am, every single inch of progress we make against the elements comes at the cost of thousands of lives, from the people who froze to death in the middle of the wilderness that used to be where my office sits to the ones currently having their insides liquefied by some bacteria we haven't figured out how to stop.
"Destroying the planet" is a fabrication of the environmental movement to frighten people into changing their behavior. All it really means is that we would render it uninhabitable for us. I do not think nature would care on way or the other if we detonated every nuclear bomb we have ever built, it would be nothing more than a tiny blip on the graph of the history of the planet. Squirrels and beavers and snakes might be screwed in the short term but that doesn't consitute destroying the planet. Like in Aldo Leopold's cycle, everything we vaporize with bombs will eventually be rebuilt into something else.
Everything else in your post, refreshingly above the usual banter of 12 year olds.
not all artists want their music to come with an EULA and hefty price tag
So how are we to distinguish between those that do and those that don't? I know, maybe we figure that by virtue of their having singed a contract with a record label that requires DRM and various other copy protection methods, they indeed want the distribution of their music to be controlled by the label.
Those who prefer to release their material on their own, creative commons, various GPL derivaties, etc, would like for you to freely share their music with as many people as possible.
Oh I don't deny that they are crooked, as crooked as any other large industry but not quite as much as your local or national government.
But what you have presented is an actual fact that demonstrates a problem with the entertainment industry. You didn't have to resort to babbling about vaporous micropayment systems, or how unrestricted P2P file copying is actually good for people trying to make a living from their art, or whatever else you have to hold up to ensure that you yourself have an unlimited supply of tepid entertainment, created by someone else with the expectation the protections afforded by copyright, that you don't have to pay for.
And yet they have successfully convinced quite a few of you that it is the downloading of a copyrighted file violates copyright, rather than the sharing.
Yeah, those silly record labels, they just can't keep up with the level of business savvy here on Slashdot I tell you what. If they could just see the light, I mean seriously.
How the hell these imbeciles built a $35 billion dollar industry without retaining you people as consultants is beyond me.
There are people out there who like to fight, some of whom have internet access. I myself sometimes get the urge to feel my fist smashing into a mouth full of teeth, but I just go to any of several hillbilly biker bars around my area to get my fill.
Also, maybe if you spent less time perfecting your emo and more time paying attention to reality you wouldn't need news articles to point out that the internet, like every other human institution, has some untoward goings on.
I don't think it increases anyone's popularity because the people who download the songs already want them. Probably because they saw the CD in store or saw an ad somewhere, both of which were put there by the record company on behalf and at the request of the artist, who chose to ally with the label to distribute his music rather than take part in your imagined economy where all music is distributed freely in the hopes that someone buys a t-shirt or paypals whatever amount they see fit to paypal.
It is telling that you require a metaphor to understand this situation and I do not, because I am not an imbecile.
Slashdot Mirror
Or from the rooftops.
Consider that while the push to put a human on the moon was mostly a marketing campaign the end result was that the public was happy to see large sums of their money spent on it. The shuttle program had similar hype but it has faded away, both from explosions and from the fact that people are bored with seeing the same thing. The Mars rovers generated some excitement as well but it was short lived.
So the administration may well be trying to generate the same kind of public support for space exploration that it had in the Apollo era. Quite often, if you let the marketing people do their thing, the end result is a gain in resources that will eventually fund more important work. Like it or don't, "We've landed and claimed Mars in the name of the USA" will result in a lot more cheering and bumper ribbons and T shirt sales than "We've made a startling discovery regarding the dynamics of planetary formation within stellar nurseries".
I have been toying with both myself, when I am on my Vista machine, and you are correct that Firefox 2.0 still has memory problems.
IE7 seems to have some rendering issues. Half of the comments here, using the "New Discussion Style" view, are split in half by their subject line. Haven't gotten around to looking into that yet.
The good thing is that we can all be pretty sure that that both the Firefox memory issues and the IE rendering flaws will actually be fixed, because both teams have to continue to develop now that they are faced with having an actual realistic competitor. It makes me want to start working on Gimp again.
Being aware of what paper can do goes a long way toward reducing the amount of information you actually print. While different subjects offer different opportunities, focusing on graphic means of communicating ideas and data and combining that with the resolution of paper can often mean that you can compress dozens of electronic slides into a single piece of paper.
Read some of Edward Tufte's work, it is a good place to start.
The mask looks like it took maybe 2 minutes to make, and most of that time was spent threading the tape into the label maker.
Paining it blue would have taken too much time I suspect.
I bought an iPod yesterday that came with two Apple stickers, armed with those and pretty much nothing else it looks like I could be a serious contender in this thing.
Several people who built on DVD Jon's work already put together a program that would go through your iTunes music and strip the DRM from it, even convert it to MP3 if you chose, in a batch process.
As far as I know any version of iTunes > 5.0 prevented it from working so you may be too late to the party.
This particular DVD Jon related news is not about stripping DRM, it is about creating DRM'd files in the same format as iTunes to engage in direct competition.
They also make the CCDs that go in a number of other cameras, including market leaders Nikon and Canon.
Photography has had a grey market for years and manufacturers have more or less resigned themselves to its existence. They take specific steps to protect their business arrangements, Canon USA will not provide warranty service for a non-Canon USA imported item, but they generally do not pressure retailers.
So camera manufacturers have figured out how to live with it, I'd like to see why Sony has gotten the idea that it is better to sue it out of existence.
No, that is not how it is supposed to work. Well before 'these days' US courts defined concepts like vicarious copyright infringement and contributory copyright infringement.
Content providers do not simply feel the government should act against the organizations you describe, it is a matter of legal precedent. This issue was dealt with by the courts long before the internet allowed people to share copyrighted content.
This is YouTube being officially notified that their service is distributing material that infringes.
YouTube will need to take this material down I suspect.
As additional material is uploaded that infringes, and they are notified of this by additional copyright holders, evidence will begin to indicate that YouTube is indirectly infringing due to the fact that they are both profiting from copyright infrongement and that they have the ability to prevent it from occurring.
Napster was not that long ago folks.
YouTube is very likely to be judged guilty of vicarious infringement if they do not find a way to keep copyrighted material from appearing in the first place.
Please do not blaspheme the internet. It has changed everything, its just that the rest of the entire world has not kept up with frenetic pace set by our beloved internet.
Like, you know, how all content, all entertainment, all information, is now freely available to everyone everywhere, which is so tantalizingly similar to the abundant economies predicted by our favorite sci-fi shows (now, by the way, freely available for free download) that we cannot restrain ourselves from making ever more boastful predictions covering things we know nothing about apart from our certainty that they will be fundamentally changed by the internet. Like in the 90s only we're right this time.
I do not care what you say. The internet is not owned by the same corporations that own everything else. The packets that come to my house are not carried over wires owned by a profit seeking ISP, carried at their whim rather than mine. By virtue of my birth into this world I have earned an inalienable right to these packets and any other packets I might want to receive or send. The internet is not dependent on routers and switches owned by telcos that can decide to allow or reject packets based on their specific business needs or the constraints placed on them by the governments that allow them to operate. No one can sue me for doing something wrong, like piracy or theft of information or slander, as long as I am using the internet because the internet is a playground of limitless freedom that no man, no government, can ever hold back. Not even a nation of millions.
If you don't recognize that the internet has ushered in a new era of free, and freedom, then you way off in the weeds. We disciples praying at the altar of the internet are leaving you behind, old man.
How did you measure the calories you burned?
I ask because many of the methods out there are about as accurate as throwing a dart.
There are thousands of exceptions. The idea that we have a full enough understanding of the ecosystem to declare victory is preposterous.
The truth of the matter is that in most developed countries we have been able to erect a wall between us and certain death, with waste treatment and clean water and the like. There are very many places in this world where the population is holding on by a much thinner thread. Right now, far away from my clean office with its bottled water and filtered air, there is a person halfway through the process of pulling a parasitic worm through a hole they cut in another person's skin, an extremely painful process that will take several weeks to finish. The worm is one of many parasites these two people deal with every day, and we have yet to figure out how to eradicate any of them.
I read the original post and imagine myself standing there taking a photo, wearing a "Mission Accomplished" shirt with a graphic of a human putting the final nail in a coffin containing all the things that want to kill us. After the photo I get on a jet that gets me back home in time to eat a nice dinner of fresh scallops trucked 400 miles overland and Japanese seaweed from halfway across the globe. The jet and the dinner help me actually believe that my shirt is correct and keep me from having to face the fact that in trade for my current state of smugness about how wonderfully powerful I am, every single inch of progress we make against the elements comes at the cost of thousands of lives, from the people who froze to death in the middle of the wilderness that used to be where my office sits to the ones currently having their insides liquefied by some bacteria we haven't figured out how to stop.
But the progess is encouraging.
I think that is just a screenshot from 12 Monkeys.
"Destroying the planet" is a fabrication of the environmental movement to frighten people into changing their behavior. All it really means is that we would render it uninhabitable for us. I do not think nature would care on way or the other if we detonated every nuclear bomb we have ever built, it would be nothing more than a tiny blip on the graph of the history of the planet. Squirrels and beavers and snakes might be screwed in the short term but that doesn't consitute destroying the planet. Like in Aldo Leopold's cycle, everything we vaporize with bombs will eventually be rebuilt into something else.
Everything else in your post, refreshingly above the usual banter of 12 year olds.
So how are we to distinguish between those that do and those that don't? I know, maybe we figure that by virtue of their having singed a contract with a record label that requires DRM and various other copy protection methods, they indeed want the distribution of their music to be controlled by the label.
Those who prefer to release their material on their own, creative commons, various GPL derivaties, etc, would like for you to freely share their music with as many people as possible.
Oh I don't deny that they are crooked, as crooked as any other large industry but not quite as much as your local or national government.
But what you have presented is an actual fact that demonstrates a problem with the entertainment industry. You didn't have to resort to babbling about vaporous micropayment systems, or how unrestricted P2P file copying is actually good for people trying to make a living from their art, or whatever else you have to hold up to ensure that you yourself have an unlimited supply of tepid entertainment, created by someone else with the expectation the protections afforded by copyright, that you don't have to pay for.
Yeah, those silly record labels, they just can't keep up with the level of business savvy here on Slashdot I tell you what. If they could just see the light, I mean seriously.
How the hell these imbeciles built a $35 billion dollar industry without retaining you people as consultants is beyond me.
As soon as they start actually paying for it I'm sure the RIAA will be happy to take that step.
Sa-prize!
There are people out there who like to fight, some of whom have internet access. I myself sometimes get the urge to feel my fist smashing into a mouth full of teeth, but I just go to any of several hillbilly biker bars around my area to get my fill.
Also, maybe if you spent less time perfecting your emo and more time paying attention to reality you wouldn't need news articles to point out that the internet, like every other human institution, has some untoward goings on.
It is telling that you require a metaphor to understand this situation and I do not, because I am not an imbecile.
Certainly the case.