Yes, exactly. In strict terms, the grandparent poster is correct -- any species that goes extinct is, by definition, not fit. But humans are the only species that gets to make conscious decisions about fitness, which means we'd better make good ones...
... and if we make bad decisions, we may end up making ourselves unfit.
One of the best explanations I've heard of why shark populations, in particular, are important, was on NPR this afternoon. Basically, the point was that sharks are top predators -- and (unlike most top land predators such as wolves and tigers) a significant portion of their diet is other predators. So by keeping these midsize predators in check, sharks actually increase the availability of the other fish that we humans eat.
... that Microsoft and Sun will stay locked in this battle long enough for other technology to grow around the whole issue. While Microsoft is dealing with Java, they won't be able to push C#/.NET effectively, and with luck, by the time they've dealt with it (and given the current pro-Microsoft government slant, I have to assume they will deal with it) it won't matter that much.
I used to be a big Java fan, but it's become so bloated, and there are so many better alternatives out there, that I'm no longer as interested in its fate as I used to be. Almost anything you want to do with Java, you can now do faster and more efficiently in some other language. Once Parrot is up and running, the OSS world will finally have a full-fledged VM that can beat the hell out of both Java and anything Microsoft is likely to come up with. Web services are already falling to PHP, Python, and mod_perl. The efforts of Zend (PHP) and the Parrot (Perl and Python) team will accelerate this trend. And depending on how well Parrot can be integrated into native API's, we may well be seeing real "write once, run anywhere" apps written in Python or Perl within a couple of years. It's funny to think that something that started as an April Fool's joke may be the actual Next Big Thing.
Well, if Microsoft were the underdog, they might make better products. The reason I stick with Apple, for all its sins, is because it makes great products -- and the reason it does so, I'm convinced, is because it's the underdog. If the relative market shares were reversed, MacOS would probably be stuck in the System 7 days, only more bloated, and Windows might very well be fast and stable (and quite possibly Unix-based.)
Actually, I don't even think their market positions would have to be reversed for this to happen, just closer to parity (and preferably with other competitors, e.g. Linux, at about the same level.) An example of this is IBM. Big Blue actually makes some pretty good products these days -- once they lost their absolute market dominance, they figured out how to do actual engineering again.
If Windows were head and shoulders above the competition the way, say, Photoshop is, no one would hate Microsoft that much. It's the combination of power and crappy products that makes them uniquely hated, especially when there are better products with much lower market share (OS X, Linux, et bloody cetera.)
The "what about PHP" question is a serious one, I think. The release of a stable command-line version of PHP (which I think happened in 2002, IIRC) is major news in the scripting-language world.
Well, if businesses can patent vague ideas that are really more social than technological in nature -- e.g., 1-click -- then I'm sure some lawyer, somewhere, sometime, will argue that social engineering techniques are a "technological measure."
Yeah. For pets, there's someone (the owner) who has a legitimate reason for wanting to know where the pet is at all times. For adult humans... there is nobody who has a legitimate reason for wanting to know where I am at all times. Not my employer, not the government, not my family -- nobody.
My only real hope about the proto-Orwellian age in which we find ourselves living is that it will spark a massive backlash, and create a privacy movement comparable to the civil rights movement of the 50's and 60's, or the labor movement of the early part of the 20th c. Not just among the folks at the EFF and the ACLU, who come off as a bit fanatical to most folks, but something broad-based. (NB: I'm not calling the EFF and ACLU fanatical -- I support both organizations. But a lot of people think of them as "those nutjobs." I suspect that may be about to change...) Because that's what it will take to keep Orwell's vision from coming true.
I think there may be early signs of this. People may say that it's okay for the government to infringe our privacy in one way to "fight terrorism," or the RIAA to do so in another to "fight piracy," or some huge business to do so in still another for "market research," or whatever... but if you can get people to think about it all at once, they realize what a Big Brother monstrosity our society can become, without our even noticing until it's too late.
Seems fair enough. If you get involved with someone who wears a sign saying `scam artist' around their neck,or `reverand' before their name, you are volunteering to be shafted, so I don't see where the courts would have a way in.
Heh. Being an almost-atheist agnostic, I tend to agree with you. But society as a whole doesn't see clergymen that way -- in fact, they're supposed to hold greater trust than just plain folks. (This is one reason why the Catholic sex-abuse scandal is such a big deal; the point is not only that the priests abused the kids, but that they did so from a position of trust.) So viewed from that perspective, the courts ought to come down harder on religious scammers than regular con men.
In your example, the raising of prices after killing the competition would be the abuse, not the lowering of prices. Lowering prices is the entire point of competition from the point of view of the consumer.
Um... and how exactly do you suppose "killing the competition" happens? Look, when a company makes a better product and sells it at a better price, that's competition. When a company makes a product (whether or not it's better -- usually not, because monopolies and shitty products always seem to go hand in hand) and sells it at a better price for however long it needs to do so to drive the competition out of business, even if it's taking a loss in doing so, that's abuse.
Has Microsoft ever, in its entire history, made a better product than the competition, sold it for a better price, and made a profit doing so? I'm not trolling; I'm genuinely curious to know if this has ever happened.
"Don't vorry... ve can solf zis problem... lie back, and tilt your head, like zo... ah..."
Okay, seriously. This is a really good thing. T-PA, as the article mentions, is a powerful lifesaving drug but is also really horrible stuff. IIRC from my ER days, we used to routinely push some other incredibly powerful drugs without a second thought -- e.g. levophed, aka "leave 'em dead," which keeps core blood pressure up in heart attack and massive trauma victims but can have the unpleasant side effect of reducing peripheral circulation to the point that you'll eventually have to have some limbs amputated -- but T-PA was about the only drug that we absolutely had to have a second opinion on. They didn't trust the ER docs to make the call; an internal medicine doc had to approve it. That's how vicious the stuff is. Anything that provides a major improvement will be welcome.
I believe that Myriad is claiming that any test for the gene infringes on their patents -- which isn't quite the same thing as claiming to have patented the gene itself, but it's damn close. I see this as part of a general problem with patents being granted for ideas instead of implementations, which is inherently fucked up.
"The linguists then came up with a definition that emphasised syntax much more than symbols," says de Waal. "Sometimes we feel it's a bit unfair that they move the goal posts as soon as we get near."
This is a real problem, which affects other areas of research as well, e.g. AI. There is a pseudo-religious, notably unscientific meme that basically says, "These are the things that make us human, so any time anyone shows us something else (an animal, a machine) that can do these things, we'll change the definition of 'these things.'" It's been abundantly obvious for some time that several species of smart animals have language, not only for communicating with humans but with each other -- e.g., different orca pods speak mutually incomprehensible dialects -- but there's such resistance to the idea that dedicated researchers have a hard time getting their results taken seriously. I can't think of any other area of science that's as vulnerable to ideology as research into the nature of intelligence.
(And no, evolutionary biology doesn't count, because the creationists are operating outside the scientific community, not within it -- however much the "intelligent design" people might like to believe otherwise.)
No, wage negotiations (in any country) are not inherently evil. The problem is that, in the current setup, they're inherently unequal. The whole concept of negotiations pretty much depends on the idea of the negotiating parties having, if not equal power, at least comparable power. Right now, the balance of power is tilted so far in favor of the employer that employees have basically nothing to bring to the table. The whole idea of unions is to bring the balance of power closer to something to which the word "balance" can reasonably be applied.
Sometimes this happens without collective bargaining, but only in unusual economic conditions; the height of the dot-com boom is an example. And the often hysterical denunciations coming from the corporate world of the techie work culture at the time shows how seriously the suits take this threat to their power -- as does the anti-union meme which has been successfully implanted in American culture among otherwise intelligent people (e.g. techies.)
Look, when you go in to try to get a job, or ask for a raise, or whatever, you're sitting across the desk from someone who has the collective power of an entire corporation behind him. You, on the other hand, have... just you. Unions, labor laws, etc. are a way to address this imbalance. What's the problem?
Someone once said in response to a similar argument, "I always envision a bunch of Indians standing on the beach watching Columbus' ships coming in and saying to each other, 'Surely any race advanced enough to build ships that can cross the ocean has progressed beyond war and conquest!'" Technological superiority is, IMO, in general a useful tool of moral advancement (Star Wars and GTA3 notwithstanding, people now generally are more moral than they were then, in large part because technology allows them to be) but it's no guarantee.
Um... I suspect the poster knew perfectly well what "Soviet Russia" itself was, it's all the "In Soviet Russia, Z does Y to X" jokes.
Very briefly, since this has been rehashed a million times: there's an allegedly Russian comedian named Yaakov Smirnoff, who enjoyed a burst of popularity during the last gasp of the Cold War, during the Reagan years. A big part of his schtick was contrasting Soviet life with American life by reversing things (i.e., in a sane world, X does Y to Z, but "in Soviet Russia...")
I think the original one, and about the only one that was ever all that funny, was, "In Soviet Russian, TV watches you!" After that it got stupid; it got even stupider when, for some unknown reason, the joke was resurrected on/.
I suspect the parent poster gets all his knowledge of military affairs from Rush Limbaugh, Tom Clancy, and FOX News.
I was in the AF during Widnall's tenure. Morale was not shit; morale was pretty much as it had been under Reagan and Bush, actually, under whom I also served. The AF under Widnall and Clinton was consistently modernized, well-funded, and adapted to fight tomorrow's wars. The dirty little secret of the military after Desert Storm (in which I served) was that it was a wreck. We had basically used up most of our Cold War stockpiles and really didn't know where to go next. To the degree that the current US military performed brilliantly in Kosovo and Afghanistan, and will hopefully do so in Iraq (note: I'm not expressing a hope for war, just a hope that if we do go to war, we'll do it well) it's because of the steady, very effective rebuilding and modernization that took place during the Clinton years. And Widnall had a lot to do with that.
Ahhh, fuck it, I'm wasting my time. The armchair warriors will believe what they want, no matter what the veterans say.
So we're supposed to pump out open source libraries so that giant companies like Micro$oft can write proprietary applications around them and profit from our labor? Would they like us to polish their boots while we're at it?
I don't trust this "article" a bit. $1000000 says it was funded by some big company looking to milk open source advocates for all they're worth.
Um, I rather doubt Lawrence Rosen is a Microsoft shill.
Did you RTFA? It's as much descriptive as prescriptive; as I read it, he's basically saying, "Here are some of the legal issues to be considered in deciding what constitutes a 'derivative work,' and they're tricky issues, so define your terms carefully." Which is entirely reasonable, especially in light of the mindless GPL-vs.-BSD flamewars.
Derviative!! Gah! I know its only two characters transposed, but it sounds so messed up. Remember, always, no wait, never.... no, always click on the Preview button first (especially editors)
I think that should be, "Click on the Perview button first"... hmmm, I see your point.
In some places, at some times, it's been necessary for almost all of the population to work almost all the time to prevent famine. In most places, at most times, it hasn't. The reason the life of most of the human race was so miserable for so long was due more to "noble" parasitic warlords than to primitive agriculture; in the few places where the peasants were able to gain some measure of autonomy (e.g. England) medieval life improved dramatically and paved the way for the rise of the urban middle class. Unfortunately, the tendency to revert to a feudal setup, even when there's no good reason to do so, seems to be deep in human nature.
I don't quite buy that analogy. The hypothetical porn movie playing in the front of the room isn't under the control of the individual student. (More realistically -- I've been in plenty of classes where there was something noisy going on outside the window, and yes, that makes it damn hard to concentrate even if you want to.) If you're doing something distracting on your own laptop while sitting in a lecture you really should be paying attention to, that's your problem; if the lecture is so boring that it's not worth paying attention to, hey, do all the IM'ing and online gaming and e-mailing and Web-surfing you want.
I'm a bit of an elitist about the distraction problem, I guess. I started grad school when my marriage was in the final stage of falling apart -- and buddy, there ain't no Wi-Fi connection in the world that's as distracting as that. And I still pulled straight A's. So, to those who can't concentrate because they really feel the need to go a few more rounds of Quake, I say: grow the fuck up. It helps when Mommy and Daddy aren't paying your way, of course...
We kind of take the 8-hour/5-day work week for granted these days
Not any more we don't. The gains won by the labor movement are slowly but surely being eaten away by suits who have somehow convinced people that a) unions are bad and b) working yourself sick is the only way to "make it." The phrases "9 to 5" and "lunch hour" seem almost quaint to the current generation -- at this point your options are either not to have a job at all, or to work 8 to 5 since your lunch hour is considered your own time... except maybe you shouldn't really take an hour... and don't leave at 5, since you're on a deadline and if you don't stay until 6, or 7, or 8... and come in over the weekend... you may find yourself at the top of the next list of layoffs... and the CEO of your company will give himself a million-dollar raise if he gets rid of you and a few hundred of your buddies.
The modern corporate ethic is simple: hire as few people as possible, work them as hard as possible, burn them out, and go on to the next batch. It's essentially a medieval approach to labor -- as long as the nobility is taken care of (and they're taken care of very well indeed) well, peasants are cheap, and there always more of them, right? It's really time and past time for a new labor movement in this country, but unfortunately the anti-union meme is so well implanted in most of the middle class that it's going to be awhile before executive abuses get so bad that people break down and realize that they need to get together with their coworkers for protection. (And to be fair, the extant unions haven't helped their own cause any with corruption and the formation of their own internal executive class.) A situation where half the work force can't get a job and the other half is working double time is not conducive to national prosperity, but that's where we're headed.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, exactly. In strict terms, the grandparent poster is correct -- any species that goes extinct is, by definition, not fit. But humans are the only species that gets to make conscious decisions about fitness, which means we'd better make good ones ...
... and if we make bad decisions, we may end up making ourselves unfit.
One of the best explanations I've heard of why shark populations, in particular, are important, was on NPR this afternoon. Basically, the point was that sharks are top predators -- and (unlike most top land predators such as wolves and tigers) a significant portion of their diet is other predators. So by keeping these midsize predators in check, sharks actually increase the availability of the other fish that we humans eat.
Here's the URL for the main site:
http://www.parrotcode.org/
... that Microsoft and Sun will stay locked in this battle long enough for other technology to grow around the whole issue. While Microsoft is dealing with Java, they won't be able to push C#/.NET effectively, and with luck, by the time they've dealt with it (and given the current pro-Microsoft government slant, I have to assume they will deal with it) it won't matter that much.
I used to be a big Java fan, but it's become so bloated, and there are so many better alternatives out there, that I'm no longer as interested in its fate as I used to be. Almost anything you want to do with Java, you can now do faster and more efficiently in some other language. Once Parrot is up and running, the OSS world will finally have a full-fledged VM that can beat the hell out of both Java and anything Microsoft is likely to come up with. Web services are already falling to PHP, Python, and mod_perl. The efforts of Zend (PHP) and the Parrot (Perl and Python) team will accelerate this trend. And depending on how well Parrot can be integrated into native API's, we may well be seeing real "write once, run anywhere" apps written in Python or Perl within a couple of years. It's funny to think that something that started as an April Fool's joke may be the actual Next Big Thing.
Well, if Microsoft were the underdog, they might make better products. The reason I stick with Apple, for all its sins, is because it makes great products -- and the reason it does so, I'm convinced, is because it's the underdog. If the relative market shares were reversed, MacOS would probably be stuck in the System 7 days, only more bloated, and Windows might very well be fast and stable (and quite possibly Unix-based.)
Actually, I don't even think their market positions would have to be reversed for this to happen, just closer to parity (and preferably with other competitors, e.g. Linux, at about the same level.) An example of this is IBM. Big Blue actually makes some pretty good products these days -- once they lost their absolute market dominance, they figured out how to do actual engineering again.
If Windows were head and shoulders above the competition the way, say, Photoshop is, no one would hate Microsoft that much. It's the combination of power and crappy products that makes them uniquely hated, especially when there are better products with much lower market share (OS X, Linux, et bloody cetera.)
The "what about PHP" question is a serious one, I think. The release of a stable command-line version of PHP (which I think happened in 2002, IIRC) is major news in the scripting-language world.
Well, if businesses can patent vague ideas that are really more social than technological in nature -- e.g., 1-click -- then I'm sure some lawyer, somewhere, sometime, will argue that social engineering techniques are a "technological measure."
Yeah. For pets, there's someone (the owner) who has a legitimate reason for wanting to know where the pet is at all times. For adult humans ... there is nobody who has a legitimate reason for wanting to know where I am at all times. Not my employer, not the government, not my family -- nobody.
...) Because that's what it will take to keep Orwell's vision from coming true.
... but if you can get people to think about it all at once, they realize what a Big Brother monstrosity our society can become, without our even noticing until it's too late.
My only real hope about the proto-Orwellian age in which we find ourselves living is that it will spark a massive backlash, and create a privacy movement comparable to the civil rights movement of the 50's and 60's, or the labor movement of the early part of the 20th c. Not just among the folks at the EFF and the ACLU, who come off as a bit fanatical to most folks, but something broad-based. (NB: I'm not calling the EFF and ACLU fanatical -- I support both organizations. But a lot of people think of them as "those nutjobs." I suspect that may be about to change
I think there may be early signs of this. People may say that it's okay for the government to infringe our privacy in one way to "fight terrorism," or the RIAA to do so in another to "fight piracy," or some huge business to do so in still another for "market research," or whatever
I think you aren't reading what I wrote very carefully. I asked about three conditions:
1) making a better product
2) selling it at a better (i.e., lower) price
3) making a profit by selling (1) at (2)
I'm not sure any of your examples, or any of the others I've seen, meet all of these conditions at once.
Has Microsoft ever, in its entire history, made a better product than the competition, sold it for a better price, and made a profit doing so? I'm not trolling; I'm genuinely curious to know if this has ever happened.
"Doctor, I think I'm having a stroke!"
... ve can solf zis problem ... lie back, and tilt your head, like zo ... ah ..."
"Don't vorry
Okay, seriously. This is a really good thing. T-PA, as the article mentions, is a powerful lifesaving drug but is also really horrible stuff. IIRC from my ER days, we used to routinely push some other incredibly powerful drugs without a second thought -- e.g. levophed, aka "leave 'em dead," which keeps core blood pressure up in heart attack and massive trauma victims but can have the unpleasant side effect of reducing peripheral circulation to the point that you'll eventually have to have some limbs amputated -- but T-PA was about the only drug that we absolutely had to have a second opinion on. They didn't trust the ER docs to make the call; an internal medicine doc had to approve it. That's how vicious the stuff is. Anything that provides a major improvement will be welcome.
I believe that Myriad is claiming that any test for the gene infringes on their patents -- which isn't quite the same thing as claiming to have patented the gene itself, but it's damn close. I see this as part of a general problem with patents being granted for ideas instead of implementations, which is inherently fucked up.
(And no, evolutionary biology doesn't count, because the creationists are operating outside the scientific community, not within it -- however much the "intelligent design" people might like to believe otherwise.)
No, wage negotiations (in any country) are not inherently evil. The problem is that, in the current setup, they're inherently unequal. The whole concept of negotiations pretty much depends on the idea of the negotiating parties having, if not equal power, at least comparable power. Right now, the balance of power is tilted so far in favor of the employer that employees have basically nothing to bring to the table. The whole idea of unions is to bring the balance of power closer to something to which the word "balance" can reasonably be applied.
... just you. Unions, labor laws, etc. are a way to address this imbalance. What's the problem?
Sometimes this happens without collective bargaining, but only in unusual economic conditions; the height of the dot-com boom is an example. And the often hysterical denunciations coming from the corporate world of the techie work culture at the time shows how seriously the suits take this threat to their power -- as does the anti-union meme which has been successfully implanted in American culture among otherwise intelligent people (e.g. techies.)
Look, when you go in to try to get a job, or ask for a raise, or whatever, you're sitting across the desk from someone who has the collective power of an entire corporation behind him. You, on the other hand, have
Someone once said in response to a similar argument, "I always envision a bunch of Indians standing on the beach watching Columbus' ships coming in and saying to each other, 'Surely any race advanced enough to build ships that can cross the ocean has progressed beyond war and conquest!'" Technological superiority is, IMO, in general a useful tool of moral advancement (Star Wars and GTA3 notwithstanding, people now generally are more moral than they were then, in large part because technology allows them to be) but it's no guarantee.
The enemies of freedom, themselves being quite naive, are always quick to accuse others of naivete.
Um ... I suspect the poster knew perfectly well what "Soviet Russia" itself was, it's all the "In Soviet Russia, Z does Y to X" jokes.
...")
/.
Very briefly, since this has been rehashed a million times: there's an allegedly Russian comedian named Yaakov Smirnoff, who enjoyed a burst of popularity during the last gasp of the Cold War, during the Reagan years. A big part of his schtick was contrasting Soviet life with American life by reversing things (i.e., in a sane world, X does Y to Z, but "in Soviet Russia
I think the original one, and about the only one that was ever all that funny, was, "In Soviet Russian, TV watches you!" After that it got stupid; it got even stupider when, for some unknown reason, the joke was resurrected on
Perhaps this should be in the FAQ?
I suspect the parent poster gets all his knowledge of military affairs from Rush Limbaugh, Tom Clancy, and FOX News.
I was in the AF during Widnall's tenure. Morale was not shit; morale was pretty much as it had been under Reagan and Bush, actually, under whom I also served. The AF under Widnall and Clinton was consistently modernized, well-funded, and adapted to fight tomorrow's wars. The dirty little secret of the military after Desert Storm (in which I served) was that it was a wreck. We had basically used up most of our Cold War stockpiles and really didn't know where to go next. To the degree that the current US military performed brilliantly in Kosovo and Afghanistan, and will hopefully do so in Iraq (note: I'm not expressing a hope for war, just a hope that if we do go to war, we'll do it well) it's because of the steady, very effective rebuilding and modernization that took place during the Clinton years. And Widnall had a lot to do with that.
Ahhh, fuck it, I'm wasting my time. The armchair warriors will believe what they want, no matter what the veterans say.
Did you RTFA? It's as much descriptive as prescriptive; as I read it, he's basically saying, "Here are some of the legal issues to be considered in deciding what constitutes a 'derivative work,' and they're tricky issues, so define your terms carefully." Which is entirely reasonable, especially in light of the mindless GPL-vs.-BSD flamewars.
In some places, at some times, it's been necessary for almost all of the population to work almost all the time to prevent famine. In most places, at most times, it hasn't. The reason the life of most of the human race was so miserable for so long was due more to "noble" parasitic warlords than to primitive agriculture; in the few places where the peasants were able to gain some measure of autonomy (e.g. England) medieval life improved dramatically and paved the way for the rise of the urban middle class. Unfortunately, the tendency to revert to a feudal setup, even when there's no good reason to do so, seems to be deep in human nature.
Plath, I think, would have been unlikely to write a humorous poem about suicide.
I don't quite buy that analogy. The hypothetical porn movie playing in the front of the room isn't under the control of the individual student. (More realistically -- I've been in plenty of classes where there was something noisy going on outside the window, and yes, that makes it damn hard to concentrate even if you want to.) If you're doing something distracting on your own laptop while sitting in a lecture you really should be paying attention to, that's your problem; if the lecture is so boring that it's not worth paying attention to, hey, do all the IM'ing and online gaming and e-mailing and Web-surfing you want.
...
I'm a bit of an elitist about the distraction problem, I guess. I started grad school when my marriage was in the final stage of falling apart -- and buddy, there ain't no Wi-Fi connection in the world that's as distracting as that. And I still pulled straight A's. So, to those who can't concentrate because they really feel the need to go a few more rounds of Quake, I say: grow the fuck up. It helps when Mommy and Daddy aren't paying your way, of course
The modern corporate ethic is simple: hire as few people as possible, work them as hard as possible, burn them out, and go on to the next batch. It's essentially a medieval approach to labor -- as long as the nobility is taken care of (and they're taken care of very well indeed) well, peasants are cheap, and there always more of them, right? It's really time and past time for a new labor movement in this country, but unfortunately the anti-union meme is so well implanted in most of the middle class that it's going to be awhile before executive abuses get so bad that people break down and realize that they need to get together with their coworkers for protection. (And to be fair, the extant unions haven't helped their own cause any with corruption and the formation of their own internal executive class.) A situation where half the work force can't get a job and the other half is working double time is not conducive to national prosperity, but that's where we're headed.