Re:You know everyone, dockers won't kill you
on
Suit Up Or Ship Out?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I've got to answer this one.
The photos you see are the photos that NASA management of the time wanted you to see. Said management, of course, were 1950's and 1940's aerospace engineers who had climbed the management ladder, and they were indeed buzzcut-tie-cigarette types. But they weren't the ones doing the real engineering work any more. The ones who actually sent men to the moon, the ones who were crunching the numbers and getting the rockets off the ground, were hippies. Long hair, joint, and tattered work shirt were their uniform. And there were ferocious culture clashes between them and the older guys, but they got the job done.
How do I know this? Because my Dad was one of those hippie engineers...
Oh, I suspect Melman understands the difference perfectly well; he, Berman, Valenti, Rosen, et bloody al are hoping that everyone else won't. If they can start blurring the distinction in people's minds (which is kind of like blurring the distinction between war and peace, freedom and slavery, or up and down -- but those have never been too hard to sell either) then Berman's bill and other repulsive pieces of legislation will become more acceptable. These people are smart. Never forget that. Evil, worthless, useless -- but smart.
Show me a worldwide, universally accessible computer network, a continent-spanning highway system, an educational system that provides equal access for poor and rich children, or a manned space program built by private companies and you'll have a reason to call my statements "unsupported." Until then, the simple fact is that governments have done all these things and market forces haven't.
market forces have shown to be the driving force in all new ventures
[sigh] I am getting really sick of hearing this bit of ideology repeated as though it were an established fact. Some things happen as a result of market forces, some as a result of government forces, and some (actually most) as a result of the combination of the two. Just because a generally capitalist economic system is healthier and more innovative than a generally socialist economic system (which is true) does not mean that "the market will take care of" everything, all the time.
If the Internet depended on "market forces," it wouldn't exist -- we'd be living in a world of multiple incompatible networks with users of any one network unable to communicate with those of others. If the highway system depended on "market forces," there would be no way in hell you could drive from one coast to the other. If education depended on "market forces," only the children of the rich would ever get an education. Etc. And if space exploration depends on "market forces," then you can kiss any chance you or your great-grandchildren have of ever getting off this planet goodbye.
We need a patent office, or something like it. We also need a copyright and trademark office, or something like it. It may be that the current setup is broken and needs to be done away with, but it's not fundamentally evil. Actually, I think blaming it on the bureaucrats who have to deal with increasingly absurd and self-contradictory laws while their funding is being slashed to pay for blowing the shit out of illiterate peasants on the other side of the world isn't quite fair... The best solution would be a complete, ground-up rewrite of IP law based on the Constitutional principles authorizing it, and the money to enforce the law properly. Given the influence of the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, TLA, etc. on "the Senator from Disney" and other key political players, don't hold your breath.
The "a senior executive at Pan IP" bit is almost surely bullshit, but the post is worth answering, because it represents some common misconceptions about both what IP law is for and about the "average/.'ers" feelings on the matter.
A tiny minority of people, on/. or anywhere else, feel that IP laws (patent, copyright, trademark) are fundamentally wrong and broken and should be done away with. I'm not one of them. The Constitution spells out the purpose of IP law very nicely; "to promote... progress" and "limited time" are the key phrases. Good grants of IP protection serve this purpose, by rewarding the genuinely innovative thinkers who keep our world moving forward. Bad grants of IP protection, such as those used by PanIP, do precisely the reverse.
Not everything should be patented, copyrighted, or trademarked. There are some ideas (e.g. "buying and selling things over the Web") that are a) not the invention of any one person or group of people, b) immediately obvious to anyone with a brain, and c) so widespread that any attempt to enforce IP law on them would have crippling economic effects. Generally speaking, I think falling into any two of those three categories ought to be enough to remove something from IP protection. I'm particularly concerned about (c) because it seems to be something that a lot of IP vultures Just Don't Get: when a bunch of people are doing something and nobody's bothered to file an IP grant application on it, just because you did file the application does not give you the right to deprive a whole bunch of other people of their livelihood.
And, oh yeah, on the off chance that you actually are "a senior executive at Pan IP": you and others like you are scum who contribute nothing to the world in which you live. You create no value of any kind, and would be of more service to humanity shoveling shit.
Oh, there are a tremendous number of stupid British shows; no one's disputing that. And there are plenty of highbrow American shows, for that matter. But there exists a specific problem with importing foreign (British or otherwise) TV to America -- it seems that it always has to presented as Foreign And Literary And Important for the expensive-wine-and-public-broadcasting crowd, or dumbed down for the Budweiser-and-pro-wrestling crowd. What's missing is the middle ground.
It's an acronym, kinda. The point is that the letters in the title are G, A, T, and C. There are no nucleotides whose names start with I. (At least not in DNA; I suppose it would be possible to have a helical nucleic acid that incorporated isoleucine, but it doesn't happen in nature.)
That might be what he meant, but the way the article was written, it certainly sounded like he thought the CC might be a base pair. Would have been better if he hadn't used one good base pair (CG) and one bad one (CC) in the example.
And yes, I know a lot of people will see this as a nitpick, but damn it, this stuff is important.
Which marketplace did you mean? It seems to me that the only marketplace of which Apple is a part is the Apple marketplace.
GMAFB. Apple is part of the PC marketplace; its products compete directly against those of Dell, HPaq, Gateway, er, IBM... etc.
Re:Why would I buy this?
on
Reflecting Fires
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Yes, I think this is the major reason why e-books have yet to take off. There are technical reasons, too, of course -- fundamentally, that there's no electronic reading platform that most people find as comfortable and versatile as a book -- but that's "build it and they will come" thing. If there were more demand for e-books, it would push the whole PDA industry to new heights, just as video games are currently driving a lot of desktop PC advances.
I'm not surprised that traditional publishers Just Don't Get It as far as e-book pricing is concerned, but I'm rather saddened that even dedicated e-book publishers are making the same mistake.
Folks, sell e-books for a buck a pop, and you'll sell a bunch, and probably make a healthy profit. Sell them for as much or more than physical paper books, and you'll be lucky to make enough to pay for your ISP's hosting charges.
Well, see, I'm a database guy too. I split my day pretty much equally between SQL and PHP. A lot of people may not consider that "real programming." I do, and in fact I've done some pretty heavy-duty scientific application programming in that past, and I'm here to tell you, I use my math skills just as much now as I did then. Because I don't just write queries and interfaces; I write them with absolutely fanatical attention to detail, and I subject everything I put up on my company's server to the kind of rigorous scrutiny I learned in set theory and algorithm analysis classes. And as a result, it works, and it works well, and on the rare occasions that something doesn't work as well as it should, I know how to fix it. The bigger applications get, the less meaningful the 90/10 theory really is -- for very big applications, a whole of bunch of seemingly trivial speed and scalability tweaks add up to big improvements down the road.
Your code may do the job, but does it do the job efficiently? And if it didn't, how would you know?
I changed majors from CS to Mathematics halfway through because I realized that programming is easy; you can always learn a new language or a new technique by picking up the appropriate O'Reilly book on the subject. But writing good programs -- programs that are robust, that scale well, that do as much as possible as quickly as possible -- is really applied math. And math is hard.
You simply have no idea how much you don't know, and with the attitude you have, you probably never will.
Depends on how far away the moon is from the gas giant, surely. Aren't some of the big moons in our system (Titan, Europa) far enough away that they're not tidally locked, and not constantly bathed in radiation?
I wasn't thinking in terms of colonization so much (although it's an appealing idea for the very long term) as in terms of looking for life that might already be there. And sure, there might be life in the atmospheres of gas giants, or in the clouds of gas and dust in interstellar space, or in all sorts of other environments -- but we wouldn't have a clue how to look for it. Life on an Earthlike planet (or gas giant moon) would be more likely to be of a type we could understand.
If you can answer that question, you'll be getting the next Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology. "What makes us age?" is one of those deceptively simple questions in biology, like "How do proteins fold?" that seems like it should be simple to answer but turns out to be fractal in its complexity -- the closer you look, the more details emerge, and the closer you look at those details... etc.
Being anti-government was the in thing back in the 60's kiddies, decide which generation you are part of. Also, I think its time some folks spent a few months reading some world history with an eye to comparing the "evil" US to what has happened in the past in other countries and regions . When you have a firm grip on that then rethink all this tripe.
I served my country (yes, that's the US) in uniform for eight years, including Desert Storm; if you think I'm mindlessly anti-government, you're a moron. And I've spent a lot more than "a few months" reading history; I know quite well how the US's record compares to that of other countries. And finally, I choose my political beliefs based on my own knowledge of the world, not generational labels.
Just because the US has historically been the "good guy" in most cases -- and we have -- does not mean that everything we do is automatically good. In this case, and in the Sklyarov case, we fucked up. It's that simple. And in fact, those of us Americans who are bitching about it are doing our patriotic duty by pointing out when, where, and how our government fucked up. That's a big part of what being an American means.
The government should always be watched closely by the people. Hence elections, and failing that... the second amendment. The constitution and the bill of rights are suprisingly robust documents.
Very true. That's what the rest of us are doing, watching our government closely. Why aren't you?
Looks like you missed the point. The poster wasn't worried about the holocaust. The point is to talk about when internal conditions in a country justify intervention, even when those conditions (seemingly) do not violate local law. You have failed to address the main contention. If you've got some holocaust bug that's gettin' at you, that's another story. Yes, you missed something.
Um, did you miss the whole second paragraph of my reply? I certainly did "address the main contention." If we had declared war on Germany solely because of the Holocaust, and subsequently intervened to stop it, that would have been perfectly justified, IMO. But we're not at war with Russia, and that means that both we and they have to play by the rules of civilian law -- in which the sovereignty of national borders is paramount. If we decided that their credit card hackers represented enough of a threat, or they decided that the DMCA represented enough of a threat, to go to war, that would be another story.
I normally don't reply to AC's, but this one is interesting enough, and represents a common enough misconception, that it's worth answering.
Is that so ?
Frankly, this entire hoopla about Holocaust and conquering Germany was apparently legal ONLY because we were attacked first. If only Hitler stayed within his own borders there would be no case for intervening in his mass slaughter of the Jews. After all, it was legal to discriminate against them in Nazi Germany.
The decision to go to war against Germany had nothing to do with the Holocaust. Which is pretty shameful, BTW -- there's a fair amount of evidence that Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin all knew exactly what Hitler was doing to the Jews and turned a blind eye. But the simple fact is that the UK and the US only went to war with Germany when their allies were attacked, and the USSR only when it was attacked itself. Stopping the Holocaust was, to put it bluntly, a side-effect of the war, not a cause.
In any case, war changes the rules. IMO almost any country in the world (even Stalin's USSR!) would have been justified in declaring war on Germany because of the Holocaust alone, and once war is declared, invasion and other violations of national sovereignty are pretty much part of the game. But we're not at war with Russia -- or did I miss something?
This is nothing like the Skylarov case. These were real criminals committing real crimes.
You're missing the point. Yes, I agree with you that stealing credit card numbers should be illegal -- in any country -- while reverse engineering document encoding shouldn't be illegal -- in any country. But the point is that governments set the laws that define what is and isn't illegal within their own borders (a pretty fair definition of what a government is) and that agents of other governments are (or should be) just as liable as anyone else when they break those laws.
Imagine the outcry in the US if a) a member of the Russian national police (what used to be the KGB -- can't remember what they're calling it now, but it's basically the same people doing the same job) hacked into US computers to catch someone doing anything that was illegal under Russian law, whether or not it was a crime in the US; or b) a US citizen traveling in Russia was arrested for doing something in the US which was a crime in Russia but not the US. Can you imagine? We'd very possibly be at war the next day.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got to answer this one.
...
The photos you see are the photos that NASA management of the time wanted you to see. Said management, of course, were 1950's and 1940's aerospace engineers who had climbed the management ladder, and they were indeed buzzcut-tie-cigarette types. But they weren't the ones doing the real engineering work any more. The ones who actually sent men to the moon, the ones who were crunching the numbers and getting the rockets off the ground, were hippies. Long hair, joint, and tattered work shirt were their uniform. And there were ferocious culture clashes between them and the older guys, but they got the job done.
How do I know this? Because my Dad was one of those hippie engineers
Oh, I suspect Melman understands the difference perfectly well; he, Berman, Valenti, Rosen, et bloody al are hoping that everyone else won't. If they can start blurring the distinction in people's minds (which is kind of like blurring the distinction between war and peace, freedom and slavery, or up and down -- but those have never been too hard to sell either) then Berman's bill and other repulsive pieces of legislation will become more acceptable. These people are smart. Never forget that. Evil, worthless, useless -- but smart.
Show me a worldwide, universally accessible computer network, a continent-spanning highway system, an educational system that provides equal access for poor and rich children, or a manned space program built by private companies and you'll have a reason to call my statements "unsupported." Until then, the simple fact is that governments have done all these things and market forces haven't.
If the Internet depended on "market forces," it wouldn't exist -- we'd be living in a world of multiple incompatible networks with users of any one network unable to communicate with those of others. If the highway system depended on "market forces," there would be no way in hell you could drive from one coast to the other. If education depended on "market forces," only the children of the rich would ever get an education. Etc. And if space exploration depends on "market forces," then you can kiss any chance you or your great-grandchildren have of ever getting off this planet goodbye.
We need a patent office, or something like it. We also need a copyright and trademark office, or something like it. It may be that the current setup is broken and needs to be done away with, but it's not fundamentally evil. Actually, I think blaming it on the bureaucrats who have to deal with increasingly absurd and self-contradictory laws while their funding is being slashed to pay for blowing the shit out of illiterate peasants on the other side of the world isn't quite fair ... The best solution would be a complete, ground-up rewrite of IP law based on the Constitutional principles authorizing it, and the money to enforce the law properly. Given the influence of the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, TLA, etc. on "the Senator from Disney" and other key political players, don't hold your breath.
The "a senior executive at Pan IP" bit is almost surely bullshit, but the post is worth answering, because it represents some common misconceptions about both what IP law is for and about the "average /.'ers" feelings on the matter.
/. or anywhere else, feel that IP laws (patent, copyright, trademark) are fundamentally wrong and broken and should be done away with. I'm not one of them. The Constitution spells out the purpose of IP law very nicely; "to promote ... progress" and "limited time" are the key phrases. Good grants of IP protection serve this purpose, by rewarding the genuinely innovative thinkers who keep our world moving forward. Bad grants of IP protection, such as those used by PanIP, do precisely the reverse.
A tiny minority of people, on
Not everything should be patented, copyrighted, or trademarked. There are some ideas (e.g. "buying and selling things over the Web") that are a) not the invention of any one person or group of people, b) immediately obvious to anyone with a brain, and c) so widespread that any attempt to enforce IP law on them would have crippling economic effects. Generally speaking, I think falling into any two of those three categories ought to be enough to remove something from IP protection. I'm particularly concerned about (c) because it seems to be something that a lot of IP vultures Just Don't Get: when a bunch of people are doing something and nobody's bothered to file an IP grant application on it, just because you did file the application does not give you the right to deprive a whole bunch of other people of their livelihood.
And, oh yeah, on the off chance that you actually are "a senior executive at Pan IP": you and others like you are scum who contribute nothing to the world in which you live. You create no value of any kind, and would be of more service to humanity shoveling shit.
Oh, there are a tremendous number of stupid British shows; no one's disputing that. And there are plenty of highbrow American shows, for that matter. But there exists a specific problem with importing foreign (British or otherwise) TV to America -- it seems that it always has to presented as Foreign And Literary And Important for the expensive-wine-and-public-broadcasting crowd, or dumbed down for the Budweiser-and-pro-wrestling crowd. What's missing is the middle ground.
The F-22 keeps its missiles in internal bays until they're ready to fire, IIRC. I would guess this thing does the same.
Couldn't you form an isoleuc-[whatever suffix] nucleotide? Aaargh. I can't remember now.
It's an acronym, kinda. The point is that the letters in the title are G, A, T, and C. There are no nucleotides whose names start with I. (At least not in DNA; I suppose it would be possible to have a helical nucleic acid that incorporated isoleucine, but it doesn't happen in nature.)
That might be what he meant, but the way the article was written, it certainly sounded like he thought the CC might be a base pair. Would have been better if he hadn't used one good base pair (CG) and one bad one (CC) in the example.
And yes, I know a lot of people will see this as a nitpick, but damn it, this stuff is important.
Yes, I think this is the major reason why e-books have yet to take off. There are technical reasons, too, of course -- fundamentally, that there's no electronic reading platform that most people find as comfortable and versatile as a book -- but that's "build it and they will come" thing. If there were more demand for e-books, it would push the whole PDA industry to new heights, just as video games are currently driving a lot of desktop PC advances.
I'm not surprised that traditional publishers Just Don't Get It as far as e-book pricing is concerned, but I'm rather saddened that even dedicated e-book publishers are making the same mistake.
Folks, sell e-books for a buck a pop, and you'll sell a bunch, and probably make a healthy profit. Sell them for as much or more than physical paper books, and you'll be lucky to make enough to pay for your ISP's hosting charges.
Well, see, I'm a database guy too. I split my day pretty much equally between SQL and PHP. A lot of people may not consider that "real programming." I do, and in fact I've done some pretty heavy-duty scientific application programming in that past, and I'm here to tell you, I use my math skills just as much now as I did then. Because I don't just write queries and interfaces; I write them with absolutely fanatical attention to detail, and I subject everything I put up on my company's server to the kind of rigorous scrutiny I learned in set theory and algorithm analysis classes. And as a result, it works, and it works well, and on the rare occasions that something doesn't work as well as it should, I know how to fix it. The bigger applications get, the less meaningful the 90/10 theory really is -- for very big applications, a whole of bunch of seemingly trivial speed and scalability tweaks add up to big improvements down the road.
Your code may do the job, but does it do the job efficiently? And if it didn't, how would you know?
I changed majors from CS to Mathematics halfway through because I realized that programming is easy; you can always learn a new language or a new technique by picking up the appropriate O'Reilly book on the subject. But writing good programs -- programs that are robust, that scale well, that do as much as possible as quickly as possible -- is really applied math. And math is hard.
You simply have no idea how much you don't know, and with the attitude you have, you probably never will.
Depends on how far away the moon is from the gas giant, surely. Aren't some of the big moons in our system (Titan, Europa) far enough away that they're not tidally locked, and not constantly bathed in radiation?
I wasn't thinking in terms of colonization so much (although it's an appealing idea for the very long term) as in terms of looking for life that might already be there. And sure, there might be life in the atmospheres of gas giants, or in the clouds of gas and dust in interstellar space, or in all sorts of other environments -- but we wouldn't have a clue how to look for it. Life on an Earthlike planet (or gas giant moon) would be more likely to be of a type we could understand.
The history of the world argues rather strongly against the proposition that there is any correlation between religion and "ethical IQ" at all.
If you can answer that question, you'll be getting the next Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology. "What makes us age?" is one of those deceptively simple questions in biology, like "How do proteins fold?" that seems like it should be simple to answer but turns out to be fractal in its complexity -- the closer you look, the more details emerge, and the closer you look at those details ... etc.
Just because the US has historically been the "good guy" in most cases -- and we have -- does not mean that everything we do is automatically good. In this case, and in the Sklyarov case, we fucked up. It's that simple. And in fact, those of us Americans who are bitching about it are doing our patriotic duty by pointing out when, where, and how our government fucked up. That's a big part of what being an American means.Very true. That's what the rest of us are doing, watching our government closely. Why aren't you?
In any case, war changes the rules. IMO almost any country in the world (even Stalin's USSR!) would have been justified in declaring war on Germany because of the Holocaust alone, and once war is declared, invasion and other violations of national sovereignty are pretty much part of the game. But we're not at war with Russia -- or did I miss something?
Okay, fair enough.
Imagine the outcry in the US if a) a member of the Russian national police (what used to be the KGB -- can't remember what they're calling it now, but it's basically the same people doing the same job) hacked into US computers to catch someone doing anything that was illegal under Russian law, whether or not it was a crime in the US; or b) a US citizen traveling in Russia was arrested for doing something in the US which was a crime in Russia but not the US. Can you imagine? We'd very possibly be at war the next day.