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For years I've been criticizing all those fake solutions to the patent problem, such as "patent pledges" or the Open Invention Network (OIN). Both Google and Oracle are licensees of the OIN. The OIN patent agreement is meant to be a non-aggression pact between its members, with respect to "the Linux System".

Given that Android is a Linux distro (and a strategically very important one), it should be fully covered by the OIN as the self-proclaimed protective shield for the Linux ecosystem. Consequently, Oracle should be prohibited by the OIN cross-license agreement to sue its fellow OIN licensee Google. I'm not the only one to have raised that question. I saw Simon Phipps (OSI board member, former chief open source exec at Sun, now at ForgeRock) and Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Center (and formerly FSF) raise the same kind of question on Twitter/identica. Now TheRegister contacted the OIN and wanted a comment on Oracle vs. Google, and the OIN declined to comment.

By the way, Eben Moglen promoted the OIN big time at LinuxCon, just a few days before Oracle announced its lawsuit.

What's certainly not a fake solution (although difficult to achieve) is the proposal to abolish software patents. The EndSoftPatents.org campaign runs the software patent wiki and has a pretty informative Wiki page on Oracle vs. Google.

"It's a sad comment on the morality of large modern software companies that Microsoft, while I don't think they've gotten any better since Sun sued them, probably has the high ground."

He seems to mean this primarily in terms of compliance with the official Java specification but one could also look at it in terms of software patent action against FOSS. I recently wrote about Microsoft's use of patents in connection with open source and got bashed for simply telling the truth: so far it's actually other companies who make the truly hostile moves. Far be it from me to defend software patents; I just mean to point out that there are different ways in which they get used, and in light of Oracle vs. Google, I believe more people will agree with me now.

One group of people James Gosling doesn't criticize are all those former Sun execs who strongly supported Oracle's acquisition of Sun because it was financially advantageous for them, only to leave the combined company as soon as possible after the closing of the deal. Many of those told the FOSS community that Sun had patents that could be very dangerous for open source, and Oracle was such a "reasonable" patent holder that it would be much better for them to acquire those patents than to take any risk that maybe Microsoft (which by the way never made a bid for Sun) could get them.

I opposed Oracle's acquisition of Sun. I also had concerns over the Java part but kept quiet about that and focused on MySQL. That's because I cooperated with Monty (the original author and founder of MySQL) and he wanted to be neutral about programming languages. For those who heard the slander that my work in that context aimed to change MySQL's license from the GPL to something else (which some even propagated here on Slashdot), I've meanwhile posted a detailed explanation, including links to several documents I used during my fight against the Oracle/Sun deal, in order to provide conclusive evidence that I argued against -- not for -- a license change. You can find that information in this blog posting (the link leads directly to a passage on MySQL and the GPL).

"It's a sad comment on the morality of large modern software companies that Microsoft, while I don't think they've gotten any better since Sun sued them, probably has the high ground."

He seems to mean this primarily in terms of compliance with the official Java specification but one could also look at it in terms of software patent action against FOSS. I recently wrote about Microsoft's use of patents in connection with open source and got bashed for simply telling the truth: so far it's actually other companies who make the truly hostile moves. Far be it from me to defend software patents; I just mean to point out that there are different ways in which they get used, and in light of Oracle vs. Google, I believe more people will agree with me now.

One group of people James Gosling doesn't criticize are all those former Sun execs who strongly supported Oracle's acquisition of Sun because it was financially advantageous for them, only to leave the combined company as soon as possible after the closing of the deal. Many of those told the FOSS community that Sun had patents that could be very dangerous for open source, and Oracle was such a "reasonable" patent holder that it would be much better for them to acquire those patents than to take any risk that maybe Microsoft (which by the way never made a bid for Sun) could get them.

I opposed Oracle's acquisition of Sun. I also had concerns over the Java part but kept quiet about that and focused on MySQL. That's because I cooperated with Monty (the original author and founder of MySQL) and he wanted to be neutral about programming languages. For those who heard the slander that my work in that context aimed to change MySQL's license from the GPL to something else (which some even propagated here on Slashdot), I've meanwhile posted a detailed explanation, including links to several documents I used during my fight against the Oracle/Sun deal, in order to provide conclusive evidence that I argued against -- not for -- a license change. You can find that information in this blog posting (the link leads directly to a passage on MySQL and the GPL).

There are multiple people out there (including Linus Torvolds, Jeff Atwood, and some random poster in this story)

BTW, if you want citations:

Linus on his Intel:

In fact, I can't recall the last time that a new tech toy I got made such a dramatic difference in performance and just plain usability of a machine of mine. ...
Everything performs well. You can put that disk in a machine, and suddenly you almost don't even need to care whether things were in your page cache or not. Firefox starts up pretty much as snappily in the cold-cache case as it does hot-cache. You can do package installation and big untars, and you don't even notice it, because your desktop doesn't get laggy or anything.

Jeff Atwood (admittedly, where I saw Linus quoted):

And, frankly, I was blown away by the performance difference compared to the 300 GB Velociraptor I had in my system before. That drive is not exactly chopped liver; it's incredibly fast by magnetic platter drive standards. ...
In my humble opinion, $200 - $300 for a SSD is easily the most cost effective performance increase you can buy for a computer of anything remotely resembling recent vintage. Whether you prefer the 80 GB X25-M SSD or the 128 GB Crucial SSD, it's money well invested for people like us who are obsessive about how their computer performs.

Trust me, you will feel the performance difference of a modern SSD in day to day computing. That's far more than I can say for most of today's CPU and memory upgrades. The transition from magnetic storage to solid state storage is nothing less than a breakthrough.

Random /.'er rabtech:

I can tell you that installing an SSD in my work laptop was the single greatest (relative) performance jump I've ever seen, starting with my 8086/1MB/CGA machine until the present day, including all processor/memory/graphics upgrades I've ever done.

Is this analysis of r57shell still relevant?

http://weeklypaper.blogspot.com/2008/01/touring-johnstown-pennsylvania.html

It's fairly blatant. Not much sympathy for a priest who feels the need to take some other groups branding to sell god. I don't know about suing, if actual money is involved, but asking him to politely "Get his own brand" is entirely appropriate, rather than stealing one that Best Buy has spent a lot of time and money building. This doesn't even touch the issue that as a company, Best Buy would probably prefer not to be associated with the Christian church, and alienate the 3.5 billion non-christian potential customers on the planet.

A lot depends on the type of data. If it is truly experimental results, then results could be easily organized in tables, and tables can be logically accessed, arranged and manipulated using standard rules of set theory. Relational databases work this way, but there are other approaches.

If your data is derived or crunched, You may have a massive logic problem. See this: http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2010/04/problems-with-cap-and-yahoos-little.html , and take heed.

The previous suggestions about leaving your data intact and refining the access is good advice. I have used and developed some network dbms systems for this type of data. The current trend seems to be toward Object-Oriented Network dbms systems, but I'm not sure that is the way to go; OONDBMS tends to be static and hard to maintain in a dynamic experimental environment. The largest experimental environment that I've had the opportunity to work on, with an energy company here in Houston, was a statistical analysis of nuclear reactions. The data was constantly changing and we needed a self-referencing, dynamic data repository. This is the type of system where you download data sets and do your analysis AFTER you have acquired it locally. The dbms was written in FORTRAN90 and was very fast, but you need a team for something like this unless you are epert enough to program it all yourself.. It actually used very little code, but the record management and indexes (mostly ISAM/invertedISAM took massive amounts of computer power. There are now some cute tools in FORTRAN 2000 that allow you to use a web browser as a front end, but I don't usually want to look at the data being gathered; I usually want to crunch the statistics and see the results. The browser front-ends I have seen tend to require too much tweaking in order to adapt to the changing data parameters. Remote terminals make more sense. Maybe you should be willing to change the method of accessing the data and not try to maintain dozens of links.

That's true, for some lax definitions of "true".

In my case, when I was sitting without a job for a full year, I would have gladly taken a low wage job, just to get back to work and have some income.

Instead, as the economy got worse, American jobs kept disappearing. One company I called with a question before even applying said that they couldn't afford to hire anyone else. Their application (online) was gone the next day.

Personally, I think the situation's the same in other companies. In addition to the agreed wage, there's a significant overhead cost for each employee. Companies can't afford to hire people, so people don't buy things, so companies can't afford to hire people. It's a vicious cycle.

There are several ways out of it. One retail shop I have connections to had their most profitable day ever during the 2008 Christmas season. They had a huge sale, with discounts cutting their profit margin by about half. People could buy things, and the company could make money again.

I think the other half of the cycle can be fixed as well. If companies had simply started hiring again, at a far lower wage, then people could afford to start buying again, albeit slowly.

In fact, that seems to be part of the intent behind Title I of the HIRE Act, which gives up to $6000 (in the form of tax credits) to companies who hire previously-unemployed workers.

Lowering the cost of hiring makes hiring more likely. This is pretty much the point I was originally tried to make, which got ignored in favor of a little quip against labor unions, so here it is again, nice and clear:

In my opinion, American workers generally expect too much in return for their work.

Is work continuing on KHTML...?

It seems so. Check this.

http://mockingbirdnyc.blogspot.com/2010/02/this-american-life-letter-day-saint.html you can listen for free there; I didn't check the copyright terms.

"willingly" would be opt-in, instead of having to opt-out.

Which is precisely how this functions.

How many web sites use Google Analytics?

How many of those websites jumped out of the Internet, grabbed your browser, and forced you to visit them? If you don't trust a website to not use Google, why would you trust that website with the same information?

If they get a National Security Letter they will have to comply with it.

They have publicly fought government requests for information.

If a rogue employee decides to misuse the data, it's done.

And how do you know what procedures they have in place to prevent this situation? This isn't Facebook, where that sort of thing actually happens.

It's completely Google's fault for requiring H.264. They could always fall back to another format.

At what cost? Either massive amounts of CPU to transcode on the fly, or massive amounts more storage to store yet another encoding.

That said, they do have a few videos in WebM format.

If you want to talk about FUD, then H.264 is where it's at, straight from Google...

I'm not an encoding expert, but the comparison you link to actually favors H.264:

In the case of the 499kbit/sec H.264 I believe that under careful comparison many people would prefer the H.264 video.

And that's a single clip. Google has the resources to actually test this on a large scale. They also have a huge library of h.264 videos which would suffer a drop in quality at re-encoding, and, again, cameras encode h.264 in hardware, so they'd have brand-new h.264 videos for which the quality would instantly drop.

I also wouldn't be terribly surprised if H.264 deals with re-encoding H.264 videos better than Theora does.

At the worst, they can offer a lower-quality version, they way they do now with Flash Video.

Is that really what you're suggesting -- that we should use Theora and HTML5 only for lower-quality versions? I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here.

It's GIF all over again

Regarding that article, why compare Vorbis to MP3? There's AAC -- compare those. There's also the mention of On2, which has now become WebM, which was my point in saying that only Theora might be open -- WebM is patented, and may be infringing patents.

A few things to remember about GIF:

First, PNG still hasn't replaced it. You still can't do animated PNG -- there are two competing proposals for how to do it, neither of which have universal browser support. Hell, it's only recently that transparent PNG was properly supported in IE.

Second, there hasn't really been anything that's replaced gif, png, or jpeg in each of their respective areas. The relevant GIF patents have expired, and if jpeg hasn't, it will soon. The problem is that video is a lot more bandwidth, and is still an area of active research. Any codec we choose today is likely to be obsolete eventually, so we should be looking at what the next codecs are. If they don't become obsolete, the patents will expire, and when that happens, I'd be much happier with higher quality from h.264.

Finally, aside from animations, PNG actually did beat GIF. It was better at absolutely everything else than GIF was. The same is true of gzip vs compress, and seems to be true today with lzma (or 7zip) vs rar, at least for files which need to be compressed at all. Theora is worse than H.264 -- the anti-FUD article you linked to says so. I'm not sure how vorbis compares to AAC, but AAC isn't even the latest and greatest -- I just use FLAC.

I don't have a solution. What I would like to see is a genuinely better codec emerge, which is actually free -- and I suspect Google would support such a format. But Theora isn't it.

Or use Chrome, which has a very neat inbuilt translation. When it detects a page with a langauge different to you main language, it asks whether it should translate it : Picture. Extremely useful!

Yes, absolutely.

"Math is about clear, concise communication of concepts..."

And that's the crux of it: communication requires specific, shared conventions. Learning to learn a specific vocabulary, and attention to detail, I think, is the most valuable takeaway from a remedial math class.

(Also, it repeats this specific requirement in boldface 20-point font on every assignment sheet, so if you can't do that, repeatedly, then you really you don't deserve to be in college. )

More on philosophy of a class like this: http://angrymath.blogspot.com/2009/02/basic-teaching-motivation.html

The fuel cost isn't even the biggest problem. Think about the increased wear and tear on the suspension when a fat person drives a car. 99% of cars don't use progressive rated springs, so a fat person compressing the coils just once messes them up for life. Turning a car with a fat person is harder too and stresses out the tie rods and such. I wish more people would just read this thinspirational fatography blog .

Sort of off topic but there was a science fiction story about this scientist who created a potion that could make him smaller, and he just kept shrinking and shrinking, and all the different worlds he went thru each time, atoms turned into solar systems, and he just kept going down, down, down into infinite smallness. The story is here.

I'm thinking more like this.

Actually, the pine tree in a lung ... that was (obviously) a fake: http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2009/04/russian-man-did-not-aspirate-fir-tree.html But if this pea actually did grow insidiously inside a man's lung, this is actually remarkable in any number of ways. The immune system surely could not handle a pea, it's simply too large. Plants of been around for a lot longer than mammals, and this just goes to show their evolutionary dominance. If you're an imaginative person, it brings to mind that M. Night Shyamalan movie about the plants intentionally releasing pollen that was toxic to humans. Twilight zone stuff.

A plant growing inside a human, able to cause pain and possibly death, much like a virus, brings to mind lots of philosophical questions.

I've noticed and written about this previously. I don't even blame the students that much; I don't think I was ever explicitly told what the symbol meant either. In standard curriculum you either have to pick it up inductively or you're crippled. Quoting myself:

But here's another way of looking at it: Each line of math is, effectively, a sentence. (A highly condensed sentence in specialized notation, but the same nonetheless. It can be re-hydrated back into normal English at any time.) And the equals sign is the verb "to be". It's the most important verb in any language! What if someone were in a writing class and submitted a paper without any verbs? What if they were entirely unable to say "you are", "I am", "he is" anything at all? Would an English teacher totally flip out? You bet they would.

http://angrymath.blogspot.com/2010/03/equals-signs.html

RMS is really a great visionary but Oracle actually proves him wrong because he recently warned against Mono, DotGNU and C# because of patent concerns. I disagreed and said that those platforms are the last pieces of software against Microsoft would consider using its patents because those basically help the .NET ecosystem. More importantly, I said that other programming languages are also patent-encumbered, and I mentioned Java. That's why I thought it was wrong to single out C#.

Oddly enough, right now -- just a few weeks later -- it looks like C#, which was submitted to a standards body, is actually much safer from a patent point of view than Java and much more of an open standard.

RMS is really a great visionary but Oracle actually proves him wrong because he recently warned against Mono, DotGNU and C# because of patent concerns. I disagreed and said that those platforms are the last pieces of software against Microsoft would consider using its patents because those basically help the .NET ecosystem. More importantly, I said that other programming languages are also patent-encumbered, and I mentioned Java. That's why I thought it was wrong to single out C#.

Oddly enough, right now -- just a few weeks later -- it looks like C#, which was submitted to a standards body, is actually much safer from a patent point of view than Java and much more of an open standard.

It will be hard to find out whether Oracle planned this kind of aggression when buying Sun, but it can certainly be stated that the free software/open source community hasn't benefited from the acquisition.

There's a number of important questions that Oracle's patent attack raises:

• Did Oracle try to resolve this amicably with Google (by way of a license deal) or is Oracle pursuing purely destructive objectives?
• Will Google solve this patent problem in a way that the entire Android ecosystem (including the makers of Android-based phones and the authors of Android apps) will be reassured, or will Google only take care of its own risk?
• Is Java less of an open standard now than C#? I don't really buy the argument that Oracle may only be suing because of deviations from the standards definition. This kind of patent attack is evil no matter whether Google adhere to certain specififcations or not.
• Isn't this now the ultimate proof that the Open Invention Network doesn't really protect the Linux ecosystem from patent attacks? This is case of one OIN licensee (Oracle) suing another (Google).
• Where are those FOSS advocates who said that Oracle's acquisition of Sun would be good for the cause and for the community? Some of them even claimed that it was important to have Oracle acquire Sun's patents. I've documented that on my blog.
• Is it perhaps time to forget about the community's favorite bogeyman and recognize that IBM, Oracle and others are a much more serious threat to FOSS at this stage?
• How can the so-called OpenForum Europe lobby the European Union for open source/open standards when its two most powerful members, IBM and Oracle, are patent aggressors against open source, especially in interoperability contexts?

This is a patent dispute with very wide-ranging implications.

It will be hard to find out whether Oracle planned this kind of aggression when buying Sun, but it can certainly be stated that the free software/open source community hasn't benefited from the acquisition.

There's a number of important questions that Oracle's patent attack raises:

• Did Oracle try to resolve this amicably with Google (by way of a license deal) or is Oracle pursuing purely destructive objectives?
• Will Google solve this patent problem in a way that the entire Android ecosystem (including the makers of Android-based phones and the authors of Android apps) will be reassured, or will Google only take care of its own risk?
• Is Java less of an open standard now than C#? I don't really buy the argument that Oracle may only be suing because of deviations from the standards definition. This kind of patent attack is evil no matter whether Google adhere to certain specififcations or not.
• Isn't this now the ultimate proof that the Open Invention Network doesn't really protect the Linux ecosystem from patent attacks? This is case of one OIN licensee (Oracle) suing another (Google).
• Where are those FOSS advocates who said that Oracle's acquisition of Sun would be good for the cause and for the community? Some of them even claimed that it was important to have Oracle acquire Sun's patents. I've documented that on my blog.
• Is it perhaps time to forget about the community's favorite bogeyman and recognize that IBM, Oracle and others are a much more serious threat to FOSS at this stage?
• How can the so-called OpenForum Europe lobby the European Union for open source/open standards when its two most powerful members, IBM and Oracle, are patent aggressors against open source, especially in interoperability contexts?

This is a patent dispute with very wide-ranging implications.

Well honestly, there's also a difference between "quality" and "expressiveness". XKCD's stick figures are completely expressionless; their thoughts and feelings come almost entirely from the text. If you blocked out all the words, there would be no joke in almost every comic - and the rare comics that use art primarily to express the storyline are kinda messy and badly paced (like this one).

Hyperbole and a Half, on the other hand, has art that's only marginally better than stick figures but is far more expressive even without words - just look at the first comic sequence from this recent post.

In both cases, though, the comic is engaging and stimulating enough to encourage your mind to fill in the blanks - the expressions on Allie's face, the snarky things that Black Hat says, all work towards providing you with enough material that your brain can interpolate the rest of the content it needs. I would argue that this is the primary motivation behind the effect the researchers at Rice University noticed - engaging and entertaining content encourages your mind to work and fill in the gaps, with boring content your mind just doesn't care so you notice the fuzz and gaps.

I've actually noticed something like this - when I'm wandering around by myself, I tend to listen to music over my Bluetooth headset, which has terrible quality (it's only designed to receive voice signals, after all). I also listen to it at a low volume, in order to not destroy my hearing :). I usually know which of my songs is playing, but sometimes those two factors conspire against me I lose the thread of the music; I have to cup the headset to my ear in order to catch up to the song. What's weird about this is that while I don't know what song is playing, I can't figure out what the lyrics are or what the beat is or really understand what's playing at all; once I've identified the song (even if the conditions are otherwise exactly the same) I can follow along perfectly. Once my mind knows what it should be hearing, it can of provide me with a much clearer song than the real input I'm getting.

Most things that are claimed to be uniquely human are just more sophisticated versions of what other intelligent animals can do. As you point out birds (and chimps) have primative tool designing abilities. Birds and chimps also make elaborate nests by collecting and assembling parts, chimp nests are a kind of bed they build in a tree to sleep at night.

Cats pee on a gooseberry bush anyone?

Sorry State of Sound in Linux.

He wrote an update in 2009.

He pretty much hits the nail on the head with every single problem I've had with Linux audi.

Sorry State of Sound in Linux.

He wrote an update in 2009.

He pretty much hits the nail on the head with every single problem I've had with Linux audi.

I'm pretty sure the deciding factor will be which on can stop a 7.62 x 39 mm round.

http://www.product-reviews.net/2007/04/10/ipod-extended-soldiers-life/

http://www.zolved.com/blog/view_entry/27867/iPod_saves_soldier_but_now_wont_show_up_in_iTunes_Updated

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2010/02/blackberry-stops-a-bullet-and-saves-a-relationship/

http://blackberrysync.com/2010/02/blackberry-curve-85xx-stops-bullet-from-victims-boyfriend/

http://momento24.com/en/2009/11/03/cell-phone-stops-bullet-saves-womans-life/

http://technology-nuggets.blogspot.com/2008/11/moto-razr-stops-bullet-saves-mans-life.html

You know, I have to start carrying my crappy old cell phone where it can protect more than my upper thigh.

Obama's refusal to waive the Jones act due to union pressure,

You're a fucking idiot. That is complete speculation, because guess what? Noone has asked for the Jones act to be waived

I don't disagree that he has been an amazing manager at HP, helping to turn things around after the mess that was Carly Fiorina.

You might not, plenty of people disagree. I realize this is just coming from a blog, but the guy has his name (or someone's anyway) on it, and he spent almost 30 years at HP.

He raped HP employees (figuratively, without violating the sexual conduct code at HP) by eliminating the sixty-five year concept of profit sharing, preferring to move to obscene bonuses for himself and his five top minions -- a mere $113 million payout for them in a year he chopped everyone else's pay by 5% plus profit-sharing. These were raises for some of the five people by as much as 400% -- a tidy uptick.

...

The Voice of the Workplace, HP's thirty-five year historic 'measure' of employee feelings (done every five years) showed in April an astonishing finding -- more than two-thirds of HP's employees would quit tomorrow if they had an equivalent job offer. Not a raise, not a promotion, simply an alternative.

He might have turned the economics of the company around, but that doesn't mean he wasn't driving it into the ground. He sounds like a sociopath and a world-class shithead.

Kind of, quoting Rick Spencer from Canonical:

OEMs are companies that sell assembled computers to people. One of these customers asked Canonical if there was some way that they could know how many computers that they send out with Ubuntu on them keep Ubuntu on them.

BTW:

The customer didn't really want to use a unique identifier though, because though it was anonymous, the customer wanted to *count* computers, but unique identifiers are for *tracking* (following a user over time). [...] So, we flashed on this: if each install sent just the model name and the number of times it has updated, systems could be counted, but no unique data would ever be sent to the server.

Google already has broken its commitment to privacy: Personalized Search for Everyone. As of last December, every computer that uses Google is opted in by default to being tracked, whether you're logged in or not.

If you read his side of the story, the most recent update says:

I have adopted the best [suggestion] - an E-contact form that maximises my accessibility to constituents, but does not advertise my email address to lobbyists.

I would prefer to publish my email address, as I did until recently. So, I have also written to the Information Commissioner seeking clarification of the right to have an email address removed from the automated devices and distribution lists that lobby groups deploy to send clone emails.

...you should see this blog post from Google: Personalized Search For Everyone.

Whether a computer is signed in or not, the Gorg is tracking everything the computer does, in order to "personalize" the search results for it.

It seems the concept of "opt in" is now gone forever, since tracking is the default. I wonder if privacy advocates even understand the implications, given how often Google is the Internet for so many people.

(By the way, for Google fanboys, a non-evil company would have a toggle on the search page saying, "Personalized Results: ON - OFF"... But I won't hold my breath waiting for that to happen.)

This guy is my (brand new) MP and so I've been keeping an eye out for him and it strikes me that this is partly him trying to get in the news. He's turned up in a couple of rather silly, but newsworthy debates so far. He's young, keen and probably after a ministerial job at some point - and what better way to get noticed by (and support from) the other conservative backbenchers than by complaining about these "evil, liberal lobby groups sending lots of emails to MPs through the Interwebs... It's also a little hypercritical of him as he was actively encouraging people to send him emails to discuss issues during his election campaign. So, given how important being able to write to an MP is, and the circumstances, I strongly disagree with him removing his email address from "the public HoC Internet".

That said, I think this is mainly 38 Degrees's fault, and I also disagree with what they (and the ORG) have been doing. Writing to one's MP is an important part of the system, however each MP may represent 100,000 people, so if each of them sent an email or letter each time they had a though, this system would break (which is almost what we are seeing here). As such, there is a useful check on this; the effort required to write a letter. Now, it may not seem like much, but when I ended up writing to his predecessor (over the Digital Economy Bill, now Act) it took the best part of a day to write the letter, make sure it was all properly worded, that I had a clear idea of what I wanted to say etc. and find out where to send it. This is a good thing, as it means that the only people contacting their MPs are those that are willing to spend the time and effort to do so. By setting up a mass-template-email system, you remove this check and make it as simple as clicking a button. This is great for us, but terrible for the MP who then has to manually go through all these emails and (unlike a ministerial office, or department) is unlikely to be able to set up a mass-response system - which is what is really needed. [When I wrote to my MP, he had obviously received many template emails/letters on the same issue, so he wrote one response and sent it out to everyone - after the Bill passed.] If anything, the mass-template-emails drown out the real responses, which is a bad thing.

Perhaps a more suitable way for 38 Degrees to act would be if they collect signatures, match them with their MP and send one email per issue (maybe after a week-long campaign) to each MP willing to take part in the system - so that MPs know how popular and important certain issues are, and get the details, but without being overloaded.

Anyways, finally in defence of my MP, it is worth noting that he is still emailable (he's set up a form here) and has explained his reasoning in detail on his blog (which includes his email address, sort of) - where he explains that he isn't against being emailed - he just doesn't want the mass-template emails from any lobby group, whether it is an industry or trade one.

[I wonder how different this story would have been if it was some big corporate website encouraging people to send template emails, rather than a civil liberties one...]

The MP in this case was wrong to have his official e-mail address taken off the Parliamentary website.

He seems to have been following advice on how to opt-out of spam:

The reason I stopped formally advertising my actual email address is that the Information Commissioner's Office advised me that, if I do, I am putting it in the public domain and then cannot ask for it to be removed from mass e-distribution lists or automated systems.

I wonder why I cant sleep after an exciting TV show for an exciting marketing blog check out http://marketmpb.blogspot.com/ matt

I used to drive a 2003 Civic Hybrid before it got totaled in a crash. I did the math to see if the gas I saved made up for the extra I paid for it. It didn't.

And I did do it again. I replaced the 2003 Civic Hybrid with a 2007.

This is part of their RMT mitigation system. Specifically, players can exchange in-game money for extra game play, or can get in-game money by buying people additional game time. The "PLEX" in-game object is how this type of transaction is performed. The plex is tradeable and has an option to extend your account time in its context menu (which consumes the plex).

http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2009/02/nobody-minds-eves-legal-rmt.html

More reactions: possible mistakes in the proof are commented:

http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/08/hp-labs-researcher-p-is-not-np.html#more

I'm a big fan of online education, but I find your cynicism well founded. And yes, Pawlenty sucks.

I think we need to rethink education. The United States, at least, has decided that a bachelors degree is a prerequisite for a middle class life. Lots of people have spent years of their life and gone tens of thousands of dollars into debt, only to come out and get a job that could be done as well by a high school grad with a twelve week job skill course under their belt. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of millions of people out there who don't have the education that equips them to be an "informed citizenry."

Nobody's going to pay tens of thousands in tuition to become "well rounded" or to learn the material needed to participate creditably in public life. So we seem to have this idea that we can hold the degree out as a +3 wallet upgrade, and sneak in things like scientific literacy through the backdoor.

It's ridiculous. A liberal arts education and job training are two very different things.

My only hope for the class divide you mention is that eventually evaluation software may get so good that incompetents cannot hide behind a piece of prestigious paper.

I made a very similar argument a couple of years ago. I'm positive hundred of other people have: "If you are one in a million, there's a thousand like you in China".

But here's the rub: while sticking to Earth is dangerous, we don't know yet that we have any physical mean to leave it. So it doesn't really matter if Hawkins is saying we should abandon Earth, if he doesn't provide a credible way to actually do it.

So I guess the question becomes: Who is actually working on faster-than-light travel, life extension or other aspects of the problem? And if we don't know how to leave, what do we do to survive either until we figure it out, or forever if it happens there's no way to leave?

A summary of the study is available, although painful to read in English. It seems to beabout the risks of social networking: "Especially misjudgments of reach, sustainability and dynamics of social web offers may encourage dangerous usage. Many users, for example, imagine themselves in closed and private communities and do not give much thought to the audience or the long-term consequences of their action, which remains documented on the Internet."

There's a national cultural component to that. There have been discussions here on Slashdot about embarrassing postings affecting later job success. Then again, there's the other approach - admit everything and say "So?".

Having said that, we really don't know enough to be certain of the long-term effects. Much more research needs to be done, but companies like Monsanto are forging ahead now, and from what I can tell, with little regard for consequence.

I gotta disagree with that one, because there has been quite a lot of research on GMO crops that have found no significant difference between them and normal crops. They are not known to produce any compounds that they're not supposed to, and the idea that the gene itself will hurt you (which is an argument I have actually seen) is just silly, considering that normal breeding and mutagenesis produces far more altered genes than GM, and besides, your body can handle everything from kepel fruit to kangaroo, and that's a lot more new genes than simple genetic modification. One could make the argument that the Bt protein used in insect resistant GMOs (also used in organic farming) is harmful, but I've never seen a shred of evidence to indicate it.

Could there be long term consequences of eating GMOs? Absolutely. They could kill us all tomorrow for all I know. I can't disprove the possibility that there is some sort of complex interaction via presently unknown mechanisms that will ultimately hurt us. But as Stephen Gould said, 'Apples may start rising tomorrow but such a possibility doesn't merit equal time in physics classrooms.' The smallpox vaccine might have some sort of sort of long term effect, so could cell phone and wifi radiation, but, like GMOs, we have no evidence to indicate that they do, and until there is, I wouldn't really worry about it. Yeah, there have been those 'smoking gun' type studies, they always turn out to be baloney. And keep in mind, when you reject scientific consensus to hastily over a single study, bad things can happen (remember the Wakefield study?). And of course, there is no reason to assume that all GMOs are good, they can be pretty complex when you're running a gene that produces a certain compound in one plant through entirely different pathways, as this potentially harmful GMO demonstrates, but notice that the problem was found and explained. No one has ever found, let alone provided a science based reason for the existence of, and causative agent for the harm that GMOs are occasionally claimed to cause.

Now, had you said ecological long term consequences, that is a much more complex issue, but there, if we use GURTs, genetic use restriction technology, which we are not currently using due to protests from the anti-GMO crowd, that can be kept to a minimum. And of course, there they do not need to be perfect, only a net positive over agriculture without them. For example, they currently provide known ecological benefits, so in the case of this escaped canola, it is not a matter of 'How bad is the canola' but of 'Is this worse than the damage that would be caused to the soil and water and local flora/fauna without GMOs.' I think we still come out ahead, as it isn't like this canola is some sort of 'superweed' or whatever just because it has an extra human inserted gene.

I agree with your first paragraph, just pointing out that human health is one of the least likely areas for GMOs to come back and bite us in the rear.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_PXBWMgM7Arc/S79rLhMMtSI/AAAAAAAAA08/d_nYH_lChFA/s1600/laptop+failure+rates+by+brand.jpg

According to this graph Apples' hardware failure rate is about is bad as Dell's. Not a big surprise too me, I've seen enough Apple junk fail these days to question the myth about "quality of product".

>>>you are missing an important detail: quality.

Toshiba is rated #2 in long term reliability,
Apple is rated #4.

http://voyager8.blogspot.com/2010/04/most-reliable-laptop-brands-are.html - But of course you will now come back and tell me why thee FACTS should be ignored, in order to bolster your religious belief that Apple is better quality than Toshiba. It's like debating evolution with a Christian... you never get anywhere.
.

>>>Windows laptops, unless they happen to be a Mac, are good for about a year and a half. Then they get pretty annoying. After 3 years, they are nearly unusable. By year 5, lets be honest, they collect dust and prevent papers from blowing away, and nothing else.
>>>

My Winodws98 laptop is over ten years and works just fine.
An OS 9 Macbook? Not so much.
Won't run Opera, won't run Safari, won't run iTunes, won't run IE. (They all require 10.4 or higher.)

>>>Toshibas feel like they're going to fall apart if you move them around too much

I've never used Toshibas**, but let's just assume you're correct*. When the Toshiba dies 4 or 5 years from now, you can then upgrade to the latest Windows NT 8 machine with 20-core CPU, and you will still have spent less money (about 800 dollars) than your four-year-old, aging MacBook cost you ($1000).

*
* You're probably wrong. Toshiba is rated as the 2nd most reliable brand. Apple's #4. :-) http://voyager8.blogspot.com/2010/04/most-reliable-laptop-brands-are.html
*
** Personally I'm waiting for an AmigaBook.

http://yourdaily.blogspot.com/2007/03/pc-beer-dispenser.html

This guy [High Scores Interactive Arcade museum] was thinking long the same lines. Opened Thursday afternoon, and was surprised when he got a crowd in. Even though hours went till 9, we were there till midnight!.

Its a shame a city as big as Philadelphia can't manage this, and it has to happen across the river ;-( but way to go. Look forward to seeing this place grow.

But urinating in public in most places will NOT get one a sex offender charge. Usually it's a disorderly, or a public decency charge.

Most places perhaps, but the places were it is true are big enough to affect a LOT of people:

California, Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire , Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah and Vermont.