I use an iBook, and I love it. It's a great machine and I'm glad I spent the money (a little more that $999, since I bought it last year, and I maxed out the RAM, which was a worthwhile expenditure IMO.) If anyone asks me "what kind of laptop should I buy?" an iBook is usually at the top of my recommendation list.
But.
I'm getting really sick of the comments that seem to attach to any story about any product X talking about how you should use Y or Z instead. Linux story: a bunch of comments about how you should use OS X. OS X story: ditto, but from the Linux side. MySQL/PostgreSQL: duuude, MySQL/PostgreSQL sucks, use PostgreSQL/MySQL instead. Any story about programming language X: Language X 5ux0rz, Language Y r0x0rz. Et bloody cetera.
Different people want different tools for different tasks. Deal with it.
Apple's Mail.app for OS X has such a feature. The first few times you run the program, it runs in "training" mode -- you get all the messages in your inbox, it marks what it thinks is and isn't spam, and you tell it if it's right or not. When you're satisfied, you switch it to regular mode, which is pretty much the same except that the messages it marks as spam get sent either to a special "Junk" mailbox, or the trash, your choice. You can always tell it if it makes a wrong choice, and if you mark a message as spam, it sends it off to the Junk box for you and... does whatever it does to learn the changes. I usually have it send the marked messages to Junk rather than straight to the trash, since I like to look through the subject lines and senders to make sure there aren't any false positives before I delete them.
It's very, very good. I'd say I haven't had any false positives since training it early on (some of the mailing lists I subscribe to tend to look a lot like spam, but it picked up on those fast) and I get very few false negatives, under 5%. It's not perfect, but it's a good start. It also has a "Bounce Message To Sender" option that I rarely use, since what usually happens is that the message gets bounced right back to me -- forged headers, etc.
Well, so far, no black holes have appeared right next to the planet and sucked it in, or, well, we wouldn't be having this conversation. OTOH, asteroids do hit the earth, and not all that infrequently, geologically speaking.
You're right, there's not a damn thing we could do about an asteroid the size of Britain; that would be a planet-killer, and we couldn't stop it. Something along the lines of the dinosaur-killer, though? (Estimated at a few kilometers in diameter, IIRC.) That we might be able to do something about... if we knew enough about it, and had enough advance warning. The spacefaring nations of the world could come up with some pretty impressive rock-stopping technology pretty fast with that kind of motivation. Ingorance in this case is definitely not bliss.
You're putting the cart before the horse in mentioning Armageddon. The reason that movie was made is that someone in Hollywood finally noticed what scientists and SF authors have been talking about for years. If you honestly think that scientists got their ideas on asteroid impacts from Hollywood, you haven't been paying attention.
Um... riiight, which is why everyone was so concerned about the razor-thin New Mexico recount in 2000, and nobody paid any attention to Florida. Because small states are sooo important. Right?
Nope. There are a few key swing states in each election, and those are almost always big states. Small states aren't in the running. (New Hampshire gets campaigned in heavily for reasons that have nothing to do with its number of electoral votes.) And the way the "system failed" in the 1860 election is instructive: there was no popular vote winner, but there were enough electoral college votes to put Lincoln in office, and thus precipitate secession. Whether this was a good or a bad thing for the country depends on your POV, I suppose...
(Yes, in the long run I suppose it was. So in that sense, the system worked. Once. OTOH, several times, it's given us Presidents who are the anti-Lincoln: instead of amazingly competent people who make the best of a very bad situation, we get amazingly incompetent people who take a good situation and fuck it up. Bush is only the most recent example of this.)
Re the elctoral map: the one that I see referred to all over the place shows results county-by-county. (Using red for the Republicans and blue for the Democrats... hmmm, nice Cold War symbolism there, but maybe not the kind the Republicans have in mind...) But it doesn't say anything about the percentage of popular votes in those counties. Since Gore did in fact win the popular vote, it can't have been as much of a landslide as the map makes it look like. I'd like to see a "hot-cold" pseudocolor map sometime; I suspect that you'd see a country with a few red and blue points and a whole bunch of yellow and green. No mandate of any kind, sorry.
Well, if you put it that way (minus the hyperbole -- "sociopath," etc.) I agree with you. I wonder how difficult it would have been for you to say that in the first place instead of giving a lovingly pornographic description of prison rape.
Congratulations! You've (almost) learned how to construct a coherent argument. Next, work on walking upright and using simple tools.
Oh, God, I'd almost managed to forget that site existed. It reads like a wannabe-macho 14-year-old's wet dream of the way he wants the world to work.
Truth in advertising: there are men who act like that, and yes, there are women who like men who act like that. But if you're not one of those men, you're essentially selling your soul to become one -- and the women you'll pick up that way aren't going to be worth your while for very long. Trust me on this.
My favorite quote from the site:
INSTINCTUALLY women KNOW their role." The key word here is INSTINCTUALLY. What this means is that on an "instinctual" level women ARE all the same! They get their juices flowing when they are in the presence of a MAN who is living HIS ROLE. MAN is the dominant one, NOT woman.
This reads like something written by a guy who just recently found out what the word "dominatrix" means and who is is Really Disturbed by the idea... because deep down, he's afraid that he might really like being tied up and whipped. Classic overcompensation.
Um... if you've got a legitimate counterargument, or even a reason why the original poster's argument is "sad [and] self-justifying," please give it. Don't try to show us how macho you are by going to the least common denominator of any discussion about criminal behavior. I swear, "getting raped in prison" deserves its own corollary to Godwin's Law.
Ford has no moral obligation to give you a car. However, Ford does have a moral (and legal) obligation to warn you if it knows that there's something wrong with your car.
I'm so fucking sick of people trying to blow off corporate misbehavior by claiming that there are no moral obligations for corporations. Corporations are made up of people. Those people make decisions, and most, if not all, of those decisions have a moral dimension. You don't stop being human, with the same moral obligations as any other human being, when you go to work.
As a Coloradoan, I can say that the state Do Not Call list has been quite successful, and I'll happily put my address on a Do Not Spam list as well. Yes, it probably won't be that effective, because spamming is a lot easier and cheaper than telemarketing, but every little bit helps. Most of the objections seem to fall into two categories:
"This won't solve the problem." Well, by itself, of course not. Speed limits don't keep people from speeding, either, but it's a start. You have to be willing to try multiple approaches, I think. Better spam filtering, opt-out lists, whatever... add enough of these things that make life at least a little inconvenient for spammers, and sooner or later we'll reach a "critical mass" where taken altogether, spamming just won't be worth it for a lot of them.
"It's not my responsibility to tell people not to spam me." In a perfect world, this would be true. (Actually, in a perfect world, no one would ever have sent one spam, ever.) But since we live in the real world -- well, what the hell. You do what you can. Sometimes you shouldn't have to do anything, but if you do, go ahead and do it.
Actually, I suspect that the reason Red Hat aren't part of it is that they don't really care that much about Linux on the desktop. They're on a fair number of desktops, of course, because they have the best-known distro, but they're basically a server software company. They probably figure that their core business is doing fine, why try to to expand into other areas? Let the others take the risks.
Whether or not this is a sound strategy, only time will tell.
The "popularity defense" has some validity when you're talking about "general-purpose" viruses, particularly those that spread by e-mail, because Windows/Outlook really is far and away the most common OS and e-mail setup. But when you're talking about this kind of thing, it's bullshit. MS SQL Server is not the most popular DBMS, and MS IIS is not the most popular Web server -- and yet both are hit far, far more often than the market leaders (Apache in the second case, not sure about the first -- I think Oracle and DB2 trade off for the top spot.) And really, the number of regular Windows/Outlook viruses is out of proportion even to their popularity: their market share is about 95%, but their share of the virus market is more like 99.99%. (And if you have statistics to the contrary, you'll have to better than "Look at a recent article...", sorry. That's about as credible as spam that starts out, "This program was featured on a major news show!")
Um, I think you're misinterpreting the concern. I doubt anyone is speculating that the Israeli astronaut is (was?) himself a terrorist. It's more that, because he's Israeli, the Columbia might have been a target for terrorists. Given how much of a terrorist target Israel itself is, this is a reasonable line of speculation.
I doubt that's what happened, though, simply because security was so fanatically tight. If the shuttle is lost, it's probably because of a simple mechanical failure. Remember, Columbia is (was?) the oldest one in the inventory.
On a more general level, I agree with you that the current climate of racial profiling is repulsive. I just don't think that's what we're seeing here.
Well, as a former medic (1989-1997) I can say, with authority, that I know nothing about any such stuff.;) A few posts back, someone was talking some spray called "Tropostat," which was apparently something along those lines, but it sounds like it may have been pulled from the market. Probably caused cancer in rats that would otherwise have bled to death, or something...
Some userful things never get approved by the FDA for "NIH" (Not Invented Here) reasons. When I was stationed in England, we worked with the British hospitals a lot, and they had some cool epoxy-like bandaging stuff -- basically, you'd pour it into thw wound, and it would form perfectly to the shape of the wound, and then get slowly absorbed by the patient's body as the wound healed. Now, British medicine is just as good as US; I see no reason why we couldn't have trusted the stuff for our patients. But we couldn't use it because it hadn't been approved by the FDA yet -- and since that was over ten years ago, I suppose it probably never has been or will be.
When will people ever get it? When you pick up a work of creative fiction you suspend disbelief and enjoy the ride. Stop trying to impress us with your knowledge of science. Get a life, dude!
For a lot of readers, suspension of disbelief is a lot easier when the author does his homework. I'd say three of the major skills of a good science fiction writer (and technothrillers are really SF, even if they're not marketed that way) are: knowing where to go to find information on the science behind the story, knowing how much of that information to use in the story, and knowing how to gloss over gaps in that knowledge in a way that won't make readers knowledgeable in the field tear out their hair.
The "dude, it's fiction" thing only goes so far. Imagine some really stupid mistake that anyone would catch -- say, a novel set on the Atlantic coast of Kansas. Don't you think that would interfere with your suspension of disbelief, just a little? For people with any significant degree of scientific knowledge, dumb science mistakes are just as jarring.
I kind of doubt it. Colorado is one of the states that has a state DNC list (which applies to out-of-state callers as well) and I haven't seen any sign of abuse -- just a (wonderful) reduction in the number of junk calls I get. In fact, I think I've only had one telemarketer call me since my number went on the list, and when I said, "This number is on the state do-not-call list, and it is illegal for you to call me," he apologized and hung up quickly. The only real hole I see in the system is the exemption for charities and political groups -- guys, if I want to donate to your organization to save the homeless veteran baby seal politicians, I'll seek you out on my own, don't call me at dinner, thanks.
There are some big differences between telemarketing and spam that make abuse less likely:
1) "Verified" phone numbers can usually be found simply by opening up the phone book. People don't drop phone numbers nearly as often as they drop e-mail addresses. So the whole concept of verifying numbers isn't likely to be all that important to telemarketers.
2) It costs money to call from other countries. Obviously there are deals by which big companies can make it cost not-that-much; otherwise IBM wouldn't be setting up call centers in India. But I suspect the resources for that kind of thing are a little beyond the fly-by-night organizations that set up spam centers.
3) You can make life a lot harder for telemarketers than you can for people on the other end of spam. Scream at them, blow a whistle into the phone, press and hold buttons... Even back when I was getting telemarketing calls, I didn't do these things, because I know most telemarketers themselves (as opposed to their bosses) are just normal people trying to make a living. But if I didn't have any other resources to get them off my ass, I'd probably start doing that. I know people who have done that sort of thing regularly and said they got a dramatic reduction in the number of calls -- apparently, somehow, word gets around.
Well, yes, of course, and vagueness is a problem with a lot of patents these days; a less esoteric example is the infamous 1-Click patent. The solution to the problem is... er... well... don't accept vague patents.
Basically, IMNSGDHO, implementations should be patentable, but ideas should not. "1-Click shopping cart" should not be patentable; "using this specific code to implement a 1-Click shopping cart" I suppose should be (although in general I think code should be copyrighted, not patented, and algorithms shouldn't be patentable at all, but that's a whole 'nother argument.) "Using this gene to determine predisposition for breast cancer" should not be patentable; "using this specific chemical and that specific equipment in the way we developed to... [etc.]" should be.
Any gene, other nucleic acid sequence, protein, or any other chemical that occurs naturally in the body should automatically be public domain, period. The idea of doing things with those chemicals should also be public domain. Artificially developed genes et al should be patentable, I suppose -- if you develop a "good gene" that can be used to replace the "bad gene" (yes, I'm oversimplifying) and develop some unique delivery mechanism, then both the gene and the mechanism deserve patent protection. But we're a long way off from this being the kind of patent that most biotechs and pharmas want to file.
A lot of people have been pointing this out, but it seems to me to be largely irrelevant in this day and age - any kind of combat an armed surface ship is going to encounter is going to either do so little actual physical damage as to be irrelevant, or it's going to straight-up sink it (look at the Sheffield, the oversize crew was just that many more people to die). Basically, here just don't seem to be that many weapons systems left these days that have the capability to do severe damage to a ship, killing half the crew, and leave her in any shape that the surviving half is going to want to try and stay aboard - it's either a skiff full of C4 attacking you in harbor, or an Exocet missile blowing you clean in half, there's no middle ground anymore.
Or you hit a mine, in which case the ship won't sink (if you're lucky) but you'll damn sure want every hand you can get to keep the ship going.
A lot of people seem to be unaware of this (just as a lot of people are unaware that the whole thing was anything but a video game) but during Desert Storm, two US Navy ships were damaged by mines, one very badly. (Don't remember the names of the ships right offhand, sorry.) The more severely damaged one barely made it back to port, and it did so only because of a large, well-trained crew with plenty of redundancy working very hard to keep going.
The same is probably true of the USS Cole (the "skiff full of C4" incident, for those who didn't catch the reference) -- the size of the hole in the ship rather strongly indicates that the result of that attack was not "so little actual physical damage as to be irrelevant." As for the Exocet case, most anti-ship missiles are big enough to destroy smaller ships quickly and completely, but not to do the same to the big ones. I'm not sure there's any non-nuclear missile big enough to take down an aircraft carrier in one shot -- but the better missiles could certainly do a lot of damage and kill a lot of crew, again making redundancy very important.
That arguments would be more convincing if Big Pharma companies weren't posting such huge profits. If all the money generated by selling drugs at high prices went back into R&D, I don't think anyone would object. But it doesn't -- most of it, instead, goes into increasing the value of the executives' stock options.
And patenting drugs is fine, but patents on gene sequences are absurd, and should not be recognized by any country. And I say this as someone who works in biotech...
Have you never seen the claims hundreds of famous scientists made about flight? They said it would break the laws of physics!
Do you have a citation of any reputable physicist (famous or not) saying that flight would violate the laws of physics?
I kind of doubt it. Birds had been flying without breaking any physical laws for a very long time; everyone knew it was possible. Furthermore, and more relevantly, people had been flying gliders for decades before the Wright Flyer took off at Kitty Hawk. Controlled, human, heavier-than-air flight had been demonstrated to be entirely possible, and there were a lot of people in the race to add power to the equation. The Wright Brothers just (maybe) got there first.
Now, there was a lot of skepticism that powered, controlled, heavier-than-air human flight would be achieved any time soon, because so many attempts had failed so spectacularly. But anyone who knew anything about aviation knew it was possible, and would happen sooner or later. Those who believed it was impossible were by and large members of the lay public, not scientists of any kind.
Cranks and their supporters tend to overestimate the mockery which pioneers received. They didn't think Columbus would fall off the edge of the Earth; they didn't laugh at Newton or Darwin or Einstein. Skepticism, yes -- because skepticism is the appropriate reaction to an untried venture or unproven theory. Those few people who prove the skeptics wrong (the skeptics are far more often right, something which is often conveniently forgotten) deserve our applause. But outright mockery or disbelief is far more rare than would-be pioneers and their sycophants tend to believe.
I'm not saying Moller is a crank, mind; I don't know enough about aeronautical engineering to judge one way or another. But saying "They laughed at ____ too" is not enough to counter those who say he is.
Short answer: MySQL simply doesn't have the feature set of either Oracle or PostgreSQL. Subselects, views, etc.... (It does have transaction support now, fortunately.) These are features which have been on the "coming soon" list for a while, and which a lot of developers regard as essential.
Having worked pretty extensively with both MySQL and PostgreSQL, I'll say that what keeps me going back to MySQL is speed, speed, speed. Yeah, having to implement stuff in interface code (PHP or Perl) that I really ought to be able to do in SQL is a bummer, but the queries are so much faster that it makes up for it. But it's really a matter of personal preference. PostgreSQL is a very good DBMS.
Hoping to head off the apparently inevitable MySQL-PostgreSQL flamewar...
Hardly anyone ever actually claims to have "found the gene for" anything, because biologists know that it's usually much more complex than that. Journalists use phrases like that because they're catchy. There are a couple of exceptions to this rule -- e.g., cystic fibrosis, and I believe sickle-cell anemia as well -- but everybody who actually works in the field knows that most genetic diseases involve a lot of genes and/or regulatory mechanisms for those genes which are, in most cases, still not well understood.
This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine: people making assumptions about the behavior and motivation of scientists that have nothing to do with the way real scientists actually do their jobs, and a lot more to do with catchy headlines and fear-mongering. Sorry if I'm overreacting.
[shrug] Madonna is the exception, obviously. There were plenty of other singers with a similar schtick who have now sunk into obscurity. In fact, the key to Madonna's longevity is that she keeps reinventing herself. If she were still trying to do the "Like A Virgin" thing ("Holiday" was later, IIRC) she'd be in the same position as other washed-up 80's stars, playing small venues to scratch out a living and/or working a regular job because nobody cares any more.
Partly this is the fault of the music industry, yes, for pushing crap. Partly it's the fault of musicians themselves, who are more interested in being Rock Stars(tm) than in making actual music. Partly it's the fault of the buying public who listen to whatever crap is hot this week. Say what you will about Madonna's music (personally I think most of it is mediocre and some is pretty good) but you can't deny that she's a lot smarter than most of her contemporaries when it comes to keeping her career going.
I believe there are ways around this even in the US -- the prosecution can ask to have the original trial declared a mistrial if they can show that the original trial was conducted improperly, or some such. And of course there's always the possibility of trying people for different charges relating to the same crime, as in the Federal civil rights trial of the cops in the Rodney King case after they were acquitted of State assault charges. The Norwegian deal might be something like one of these two -- the article certainly didn't give much detail. Anyone who knows more, please feel free to correct me.
The real lesson here, I think, is that The Forces Of Evil never rest in their attempts to persecute hackers for actions that should not, by any sane measure, be crimes at all. This is apparently no less true in Norway than anywhere else.
I don't think it's really fair to say that China will be "30 years behind" if they get a human into space this year. It could reasonably be argued that the US is now "behind" where it was 30 years ago, since at that time we had a launch vehicle (the Saturn V) that could lift considerably more than the Shuttle, and we were regularly putting people on the Moon... And, of course, aerospace tech hasn't stood still since then; China isn't starting from the same nearly-zero level as the US and USSR did. The Chinese can and will take advantage of all the advances in materials science, computer science, etc. since then. And to be blunt, China can and if necessary will kill people in pushing the envelope, just like the US and (especially) the USSR did in the early days.
I strongly suspect that Russia will essentially sell their space program to the EU at some point, yes. I also suspect that, with the way the US is pissing off the major European powers, they'll do the same with their military, but that's another story...
Japan has the technology and the ambition but not, by themselves, the money. They'll have to partner with someone, either NASA or the expected EU/Russian team. (The chances of them partnering with China are roughly the chances of Bill Gates suffering a sudden attack of conscience and giving all his money to Richard Stallman.)
Europe: see above. Also, the recent Ariane failures do not detract from what has generally been a very successful program. (I believe, though I'm not sure, that Arianespace now has a greater total lifting capacity than NASA, though NASA can still put bigger individual loads up.) European money + both European and Russian tech (especially if Russia ever is actually invited into the EU, which could happen in the not-too-distant future) will be a powerful combination.
The US -- well, let's hope the competition gets us off our asses, because apparently nothing else will.
Slashdot Mirror
Aaargh.
I use an iBook, and I love it. It's a great machine and I'm glad I spent the money (a little more that $999, since I bought it last year, and I maxed out the RAM, which was a worthwhile expenditure IMO.) If anyone asks me "what kind of laptop should I buy?" an iBook is usually at the top of my recommendation list.
But.
I'm getting really sick of the comments that seem to attach to any story about any product X talking about how you should use Y or Z instead. Linux story: a bunch of comments about how you should use OS X. OS X story: ditto, but from the Linux side. MySQL/PostgreSQL: duuude, MySQL/PostgreSQL sucks, use PostgreSQL/MySQL instead. Any story about programming language X: Language X 5ux0rz, Language Y r0x0rz. Et bloody cetera.
Different people want different tools for different tasks. Deal with it.
Apple's Mail.app for OS X has such a feature. The first few times you run the program, it runs in "training" mode -- you get all the messages in your inbox, it marks what it thinks is and isn't spam, and you tell it if it's right or not. When you're satisfied, you switch it to regular mode, which is pretty much the same except that the messages it marks as spam get sent either to a special "Junk" mailbox, or the trash, your choice. You can always tell it if it makes a wrong choice, and if you mark a message as spam, it sends it off to the Junk box for you and ... does whatever it does to learn the changes. I usually have it send the marked messages to Junk rather than straight to the trash, since I like to look through the subject lines and senders to make sure there aren't any false positives before I delete them.
It's very, very good. I'd say I haven't had any false positives since training it early on (some of the mailing lists I subscribe to tend to look a lot like spam, but it picked up on those fast) and I get very few false negatives, under 5%. It's not perfect, but it's a good start. It also has a "Bounce Message To Sender" option that I rarely use, since what usually happens is that the message gets bounced right back to me -- forged headers, etc.
Well, so far, no black holes have appeared right next to the planet and sucked it in, or, well, we wouldn't be having this conversation. OTOH, asteroids do hit the earth, and not all that infrequently, geologically speaking.
... if we knew enough about it, and had enough advance warning. The spacefaring nations of the world could come up with some pretty impressive rock-stopping technology pretty fast with that kind of motivation. Ingorance in this case is definitely not bliss.
You're right, there's not a damn thing we could do about an asteroid the size of Britain; that would be a planet-killer, and we couldn't stop it. Something along the lines of the dinosaur-killer, though? (Estimated at a few kilometers in diameter, IIRC.) That we might be able to do something about
You're putting the cart before the horse in mentioning Armageddon. The reason that movie was made is that someone in Hollywood finally noticed what scientists and SF authors have been talking about for years. If you honestly think that scientists got their ideas on asteroid impacts from Hollywood, you haven't been paying attention.
Um ... riiight, which is why everyone was so concerned about the razor-thin New Mexico recount in 2000, and nobody paid any attention to Florida. Because small states are sooo important. Right?
...
... hmmm, nice Cold War symbolism there, but maybe not the kind the Republicans have in mind ...) But it doesn't say anything about the percentage of popular votes in those counties. Since Gore did in fact win the popular vote, it can't have been as much of a landslide as the map makes it look like. I'd like to see a "hot-cold" pseudocolor map sometime; I suspect that you'd see a country with a few red and blue points and a whole bunch of yellow and green. No mandate of any kind, sorry.
Nope. There are a few key swing states in each election, and those are almost always big states. Small states aren't in the running. (New Hampshire gets campaigned in heavily for reasons that have nothing to do with its number of electoral votes.) And the way the "system failed" in the 1860 election is instructive: there was no popular vote winner, but there were enough electoral college votes to put Lincoln in office, and thus precipitate secession. Whether this was a good or a bad thing for the country depends on your POV, I suppose
(Yes, in the long run I suppose it was. So in that sense, the system worked. Once. OTOH, several times, it's given us Presidents who are the anti-Lincoln: instead of amazingly competent people who make the best of a very bad situation, we get amazingly incompetent people who take a good situation and fuck it up. Bush is only the most recent example of this.)
Re the elctoral map: the one that I see referred to all over the place shows results county-by-county. (Using red for the Republicans and blue for the Democrats
Well, if you put it that way (minus the hyperbole -- "sociopath," etc.) I agree with you. I wonder how difficult it would have been for you to say that in the first place instead of giving a lovingly pornographic description of prison rape.
Congratulations! You've (almost) learned how to construct a coherent argument. Next, work on walking upright and using simple tools.
Truth in advertising: there are men who act like that, and yes, there are women who like men who act like that. But if you're not one of those men, you're essentially selling your soul to become one -- and the women you'll pick up that way aren't going to be worth your while for very long. Trust me on this.
My favorite quote from the site:
This reads like something written by a guy who just recently found out what the word "dominatrix" means and who is is Really Disturbed by the idea
Enjoy your jack-off fantasies, kids.
Um ... if you've got a legitimate counterargument, or even a reason why the original poster's argument is "sad [and] self-justifying," please give it. Don't try to show us how macho you are by going to the least common denominator of any discussion about criminal behavior. I swear, "getting raped in prison" deserves its own corollary to Godwin's Law.
Ford has no moral obligation to give you a car. However, Ford does have a moral (and legal) obligation to warn you if it knows that there's something wrong with your car.
I'm so fucking sick of people trying to blow off corporate misbehavior by claiming that there are no moral obligations for corporations. Corporations are made up of people. Those people make decisions, and most, if not all, of those decisions have a moral dimension. You don't stop being human, with the same moral obligations as any other human being, when you go to work.
As a Coloradoan, I can say that the state Do Not Call list has been quite successful, and I'll happily put my address on a Do Not Spam list as well. Yes, it probably won't be that effective, because spamming is a lot easier and cheaper than telemarketing, but every little bit helps. Most of the objections seem to fall into two categories:
... add enough of these things that make life at least a little inconvenient for spammers, and sooner or later we'll reach a "critical mass" where taken altogether, spamming just won't be worth it for a lot of them.
"This won't solve the problem." Well, by itself, of course not. Speed limits don't keep people from speeding, either, but it's a start. You have to be willing to try multiple approaches, I think. Better spam filtering, opt-out lists, whatever
"It's not my responsibility to tell people not to spam me." In a perfect world, this would be true. (Actually, in a perfect world, no one would ever have sent one spam, ever.) But since we live in the real world -- well, what the hell. You do what you can. Sometimes you shouldn't have to do anything, but if you do, go ahead and do it.
Actually, I suspect that the reason Red Hat aren't part of it is that they don't really care that much about Linux on the desktop. They're on a fair number of desktops, of course, because they have the best-known distro, but they're basically a server software company. They probably figure that their core business is doing fine, why try to to expand into other areas? Let the others take the risks.
Whether or not this is a sound strategy, only time will tell.
The "popularity defense" has some validity when you're talking about "general-purpose" viruses, particularly those that spread by e-mail, because Windows/Outlook really is far and away the most common OS and e-mail setup. But when you're talking about this kind of thing, it's bullshit. MS SQL Server is not the most popular DBMS, and MS IIS is not the most popular Web server -- and yet both are hit far, far more often than the market leaders (Apache in the second case, not sure about the first -- I think Oracle and DB2 trade off for the top spot.) And really, the number of regular Windows/Outlook viruses is out of proportion even to their popularity: their market share is about 95%, but their share of the virus market is more like 99.99%. (And if you have statistics to the contrary, you'll have to better than "Look at a recent article ...", sorry. That's about as credible as spam that starts out, "This program was featured on a major news show!")
Um, I think you're misinterpreting the concern. I doubt anyone is speculating that the Israeli astronaut is (was?) himself a terrorist. It's more that, because he's Israeli, the Columbia might have been a target for terrorists. Given how much of a terrorist target Israel itself is, this is a reasonable line of speculation.
I doubt that's what happened, though, simply because security was so fanatically tight. If the shuttle is lost, it's probably because of a simple mechanical failure. Remember, Columbia is (was?) the oldest one in the inventory.
On a more general level, I agree with you that the current climate of racial profiling is repulsive. I just don't think that's what we're seeing here.
Well, as a former medic (1989-1997) I can say, with authority, that I know nothing about any such stuff. ;) A few posts back, someone was talking some spray called "Tropostat," which was apparently something along those lines, but it sounds like it may have been pulled from the market. Probably caused cancer in rats that would otherwise have bled to death, or something ...
Some userful things never get approved by the FDA for "NIH" (Not Invented Here) reasons. When I was stationed in England, we worked with the British hospitals a lot, and they had some cool epoxy-like bandaging stuff -- basically, you'd pour it into thw wound, and it would form perfectly to the shape of the wound, and then get slowly absorbed by the patient's body as the wound healed. Now, British medicine is just as good as US; I see no reason why we couldn't have trusted the stuff for our patients. But we couldn't use it because it hadn't been approved by the FDA yet -- and since that was over ten years ago, I suppose it probably never has been or will be.
Heh. Go for it. Just take a careful look at the topo maps first, okay? ;)
The "dude, it's fiction" thing only goes so far. Imagine some really stupid mistake that anyone would catch -- say, a novel set on the Atlantic coast of Kansas. Don't you think that would interfere with your suspension of disbelief, just a little? For people with any significant degree of scientific knowledge, dumb science mistakes are just as jarring.
I kind of doubt it. Colorado is one of the states that has a state DNC list (which applies to out-of-state callers as well) and I haven't seen any sign of abuse -- just a (wonderful) reduction in the number of junk calls I get. In fact, I think I've only had one telemarketer call me since my number went on the list, and when I said, "This number is on the state do-not-call list, and it is illegal for you to call me," he apologized and hung up quickly. The only real hole I see in the system is the exemption for charities and political groups -- guys, if I want to donate to your organization to save the homeless veteran baby seal politicians, I'll seek you out on my own, don't call me at dinner, thanks.
... Even back when I was getting telemarketing calls, I didn't do these things, because I know most telemarketers themselves (as opposed to their bosses) are just normal people trying to make a living. But if I didn't have any other resources to get them off my ass, I'd probably start doing that. I know people who have done that sort of thing regularly and said they got a dramatic reduction in the number of calls -- apparently, somehow, word gets around.
There are some big differences between telemarketing and spam that make abuse less likely:
1) "Verified" phone numbers can usually be found simply by opening up the phone book. People don't drop phone numbers nearly as often as they drop e-mail addresses. So the whole concept of verifying numbers isn't likely to be all that important to telemarketers.
2) It costs money to call from other countries. Obviously there are deals by which big companies can make it cost not-that-much; otherwise IBM wouldn't be setting up call centers in India. But I suspect the resources for that kind of thing are a little beyond the fly-by-night organizations that set up spam centers.
3) You can make life a lot harder for telemarketers than you can for people on the other end of spam. Scream at them, blow a whistle into the phone, press and hold buttons
Well, yes, of course, and vagueness is a problem with a lot of patents these days; a less esoteric example is the infamous 1-Click patent. The solution to the problem is ... er ... well ... don't accept vague patents.
... [etc.]" should be.
Basically, IMNSGDHO, implementations should be patentable, but ideas should not. "1-Click shopping cart" should not be patentable; "using this specific code to implement a 1-Click shopping cart" I suppose should be (although in general I think code should be copyrighted, not patented, and algorithms shouldn't be patentable at all, but that's a whole 'nother argument.) "Using this gene to determine predisposition for breast cancer" should not be patentable; "using this specific chemical and that specific equipment in the way we developed to
Any gene, other nucleic acid sequence, protein, or any other chemical that occurs naturally in the body should automatically be public domain, period. The idea of doing things with those chemicals should also be public domain. Artificially developed genes et al should be patentable, I suppose -- if you develop a "good gene" that can be used to replace the "bad gene" (yes, I'm oversimplifying) and develop some unique delivery mechanism, then both the gene and the mechanism deserve patent protection. But we're a long way off from this being the kind of patent that most biotechs and pharmas want to file.
A lot of people seem to be unaware of this (just as a lot of people are unaware that the whole thing was anything but a video game) but during Desert Storm, two US Navy ships were damaged by mines, one very badly. (Don't remember the names of the ships right offhand, sorry.) The more severely damaged one barely made it back to port, and it did so only because of a large, well-trained crew with plenty of redundancy working very hard to keep going.
The same is probably true of the USS Cole (the "skiff full of C4" incident, for those who didn't catch the reference) -- the size of the hole in the ship rather strongly indicates that the result of that attack was not "so little actual physical damage as to be irrelevant." As for the Exocet case, most anti-ship missiles are big enough to destroy smaller ships quickly and completely, but not to do the same to the big ones. I'm not sure there's any non-nuclear missile big enough to take down an aircraft carrier in one shot -- but the better missiles could certainly do a lot of damage and kill a lot of crew, again making redundancy very important.
That arguments would be more convincing if Big Pharma companies weren't posting such huge profits. If all the money generated by selling drugs at high prices went back into R&D, I don't think anyone would object. But it doesn't -- most of it, instead, goes into increasing the value of the executives' stock options.
...
And patenting drugs is fine, but patents on gene sequences are absurd, and should not be recognized by any country. And I say this as someone who works in biotech
I kind of doubt it. Birds had been flying without breaking any physical laws for a very long time; everyone knew it was possible. Furthermore, and more relevantly, people had been flying gliders for decades before the Wright Flyer took off at Kitty Hawk. Controlled, human, heavier-than-air flight had been demonstrated to be entirely possible, and there were a lot of people in the race to add power to the equation. The Wright Brothers just (maybe) got there first.
Now, there was a lot of skepticism that powered, controlled, heavier-than-air human flight would be achieved any time soon, because so many attempts had failed so spectacularly. But anyone who knew anything about aviation knew it was possible, and would happen sooner or later. Those who believed it was impossible were by and large members of the lay public, not scientists of any kind.
Cranks and their supporters tend to overestimate the mockery which pioneers received. They didn't think Columbus would fall off the edge of the Earth; they didn't laugh at Newton or Darwin or Einstein. Skepticism, yes -- because skepticism is the appropriate reaction to an untried venture or unproven theory. Those few people who prove the skeptics wrong (the skeptics are far more often right, something which is often conveniently forgotten) deserve our applause. But outright mockery or disbelief is far more rare than would-be pioneers and their sycophants tend to believe.
I'm not saying Moller is a crank, mind; I don't know enough about aeronautical engineering to judge one way or another. But saying "They laughed at ____ too" is not enough to counter those who say he is.
Short answer: MySQL simply doesn't have the feature set of either Oracle or PostgreSQL. Subselects, views, etc. ... (It does have transaction support now, fortunately.) These are features which have been on the "coming soon" list for a while, and which a lot of developers regard as essential.
...
Having worked pretty extensively with both MySQL and PostgreSQL, I'll say that what keeps me going back to MySQL is speed, speed, speed. Yeah, having to implement stuff in interface code (PHP or Perl) that I really ought to be able to do in SQL is a bummer, but the queries are so much faster that it makes up for it. But it's really a matter of personal preference. PostgreSQL is a very good DBMS.
Hoping to head off the apparently inevitable MySQL-PostgreSQL flamewar
Hardly anyone ever actually claims to have "found the gene for" anything, because biologists know that it's usually much more complex than that. Journalists use phrases like that because they're catchy. There are a couple of exceptions to this rule -- e.g., cystic fibrosis, and I believe sickle-cell anemia as well -- but everybody who actually works in the field knows that most genetic diseases involve a lot of genes and/or regulatory mechanisms for those genes which are, in most cases, still not well understood.
This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine: people making assumptions about the behavior and motivation of scientists that have nothing to do with the way real scientists actually do their jobs, and a lot more to do with catchy headlines and fear-mongering. Sorry if I'm overreacting.
[shrug] Madonna is the exception, obviously. There were plenty of other singers with a similar schtick who have now sunk into obscurity. In fact, the key to Madonna's longevity is that she keeps reinventing herself. If she were still trying to do the "Like A Virgin" thing ("Holiday" was later, IIRC) she'd be in the same position as other washed-up 80's stars, playing small venues to scratch out a living and/or working a regular job because nobody cares any more.
Partly this is the fault of the music industry, yes, for pushing crap. Partly it's the fault of musicians themselves, who are more interested in being Rock Stars(tm) than in making actual music. Partly it's the fault of the buying public who listen to whatever crap is hot this week. Say what you will about Madonna's music (personally I think most of it is mediocre and some is pretty good) but you can't deny that she's a lot smarter than most of her contemporaries when it comes to keeping her career going.
I believe there are ways around this even in the US -- the prosecution can ask to have the original trial declared a mistrial if they can show that the original trial was conducted improperly, or some such. And of course there's always the possibility of trying people for different charges relating to the same crime, as in the Federal civil rights trial of the cops in the Rodney King case after they were acquitted of State assault charges. The Norwegian deal might be something like one of these two -- the article certainly didn't give much detail. Anyone who knows more, please feel free to correct me.
The real lesson here, I think, is that The Forces Of Evil never rest in their attempts to persecute hackers for actions that should not, by any sane measure, be crimes at all. This is apparently no less true in Norway than anywhere else.
Interesting set of points.
... And, of course, aerospace tech hasn't stood still since then; China isn't starting from the same nearly-zero level as the US and USSR did. The Chinese can and will take advantage of all the advances in materials science, computer science, etc. since then. And to be blunt, China can and if necessary will kill people in pushing the envelope, just like the US and (especially) the USSR did in the early days.
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I don't think it's really fair to say that China will be "30 years behind" if they get a human into space this year. It could reasonably be argued that the US is now "behind" where it was 30 years ago, since at that time we had a launch vehicle (the Saturn V) that could lift considerably more than the Shuttle, and we were regularly putting people on the Moon
I strongly suspect that Russia will essentially sell their space program to the EU at some point, yes. I also suspect that, with the way the US is pissing off the major European powers, they'll do the same with their military, but that's another story
Japan has the technology and the ambition but not, by themselves, the money. They'll have to partner with someone, either NASA or the expected EU/Russian team. (The chances of them partnering with China are roughly the chances of Bill Gates suffering a sudden attack of conscience and giving all his money to Richard Stallman.)
Europe: see above. Also, the recent Ariane failures do not detract from what has generally been a very successful program. (I believe, though I'm not sure, that Arianespace now has a greater total lifting capacity than NASA, though NASA can still put bigger individual loads up.) European money + both European and Russian tech (especially if Russia ever is actually invited into the EU, which could happen in the not-too-distant future) will be a powerful combination.
The US -- well, let's hope the competition gets us off our asses, because apparently nothing else will.