... but unfortunately, sometimes their politics override their common sense. "Just what circumstances might warrant tracking a soldier's DNA, for example, were not spelled out in any detail. " Um, we're already doing this, and have been for some years: if nothing else, it's useful for identifying badly mutilated corpses. The idea is that there will be no more Unknown Soldiers. Modern warfare doesn't just kill people, it destroys them. Families have both a right and a need to know if anonymous body parts recovered from the battlefield belong to their sons and daughters.
What might be just as interesting ...
on
Net Cemetery
·
· Score: 3
... although maybe harder to track, would be a museum of what might be called zombie-baby sites. These are pages that reach some very early stage of development -- lots of "coming soon" and occasionally even still those cheesy "under construction" icons -- and then just stop. And yet they don't actually go away, which is the weird thing: someone's paying for the hosting, but not doing anything with it.
I'm not into the idea that a page has to change all the time to be worthwhile -- for a lot of businesses, I think updates once a year or so are fine. But unfinished pages (either commercial or personal) with Last Modified dates of, say, 1997 really puzzle me.
I think the point isn't what views are presented on Slashdot, but rather to the world at large. The vast majority of computer users and (more importantly, from a business perspective) buyers believe whatever line of crap Microsoft feeds them unless they see plenty of evidence to the contrary.
1) There's no such word as "virii." If you're going to use the standard Latin plural, it would be "viri" -- but in fact, in English, the plural of "virus" is "viruses."
2) How is it "Human Centric" to say "AIDS is not a genetic disease" when we're talking about _human_ genetics? Of course infectious diseases have a genetic component in the sense of the genomes of the infectious agents (viruses, bacteria, fungi, etc.) but infectious vs. genetic disease is still a useful distinction to make, particularly if we're talking about the prospects for gene therapy cures. I work in biotech; don't try to teach me my business.
NB: AIDS is not a genetic disease like the others. Say "mechanism" instead of "gene(s)" and I'll mostly agree with you.
"Mostly" because IIRC there have been some moderately successful cystc fibrosis gene therapy trials. "Moderate" success in this case means the patient living a year or solonger than he would have otherwise. Which is far from a cure, but it means that we may be on the right track.
This does sound like something a little more advanced. Truth is, neither the live-fire exercises I did as an infantryman (11B, too, none of this mechanized stuff for us -- we _walked_ where we were going, by God!:) nor the patient-care exercises I did as a medic prepared me for the reality of Iraqi AA aimed at my medevac chopper. Now, quite possibly, nothing could have -- but the closer they can come to the actual environment _without_ killing as many people in training as on the battlefield, the better off our soldiers will be.
The United States is botha republic and a democracy -- a republican democracy, or a democratic republic (though that phrase was unfortunately hijacked by Communism, which is a form of very undemocratic republicanism.) Simple fact is, democracies which aren't republics are unworkable over a certain very small size (unless you've got a system that isn't legally a republic but uses republican forms to do the serious business of government -- these are often constitutional monrachies like the UK) while republics which aren't democracies are usually just very unpleasant places to live, e.g. the People's Republic of China or the late, unlamented, and badly misnamed German Democratic Republic. Communist republics and republics like Iraq are just as republican as the US, but they're missing the crucial element of democracy. The line "the US isn't a democracy, it's a republic" is so ignorant that when people use it in an argument, it makes just about anything else they have to say seem completely worthless.
The depressing part is that, at some point, it would be nice if we really, truly knew how all this shit worked so we could start doing things with it. A true understanding of the Fundamental Nature Of The Universe (tm) might bring a lot of our science-fiction dreams to life; at worst, it would let us know which dreams were possible and worth pursuing (FTL? Time travel? Telepathy? Etc.) and which ones weren't. As long as the FNOTU stays mysterious, we simply will have no idea.
... "job security for particle physicists." Every time they answer a weird question, it raises a bunch of new, weirder questions.
I'm not sure if this is cool or depressing.
Re:So, out of pure curiousity ...
on
Space Blimps
·
· Score: 1
1) It floats with the wind. That's one of the nice things about airships. It's actually much harder to crash an airship with high winds (well, at high altitudes, anyway -- once you're down among mountains, etc. it's a different story) than an airplane.
2) Who cares? Thing gets bounced around, maybe thrown off course, when the wind calms down it just goes back to what it's supposed to be doing.
3) Probably less than a lot of other options for exploring Titan, so the real question is: do you think Titan is worth exploring, or are you an imagination-impaired Luddite? (There is no third option.)
As another WP user from way back (WP 3.5 for the Mac is still my favorite werp of all time, with 6.0b for DOS running a close second) I say, "Hell, yeah."
Combining this with the above thread on XML... maybe what the world really needs, in addition to open source suite projects, is an open source file translation project, with the goal of being able to convert all the common (and some not so common) formats to and from XML? An OpenDataViz kinda thing... Something like this that really worked, and was genuinely open and cross-platform, with people contributing new modules to it for ever more obscure file formats (need to put your dBase files into a ClarisWorks spreadsheet? We can do that) would solve a lot of problems.
Would make sense -- it's quite Lovecraftian, and makes me think specifically of the subway-platform painting in "Pickman's Model."
In any case, no one has a monopoly on that kind of stuff. It's a universal motif, floating around in the collective unconscious, free for the taking, to the joy and betterment of all. Kind of like MP3's before the RIAA noticed them. But not exactly.
Maybe the lower number of BSD posts is because BSD users spend their time actually coding and stuff instead of posting flamebait trashing other people's operating systems?
I have _exactly_ this problem and haven't found any one cure-all. Usually I pop a few Motrin the instant I feel it setting in, and get up from my chair and stretch a bit. (It takes some experimentation to find stretches that will really hit these muscles, but it can be done.) I also, unsurprisingly, find that when I'm exercising regularly, it doesn't happen as often or as severely.
A friend of mine is a massage therapy student and a big portion of her homework is giving people massages, which is also helpful.:)
And oh yeah, if it gets really awful, don't have anyone rub it or it will get worse. Lie down flat on your back on something soft (bed or long couch), with a heating pad under your shoulderblades if possible, and just try to relax. That's the only thing that works for me if it hits a crisis point, which fortunately is pretty rare.
This post is so over-the-top that I'm almost sure it's a joke. If not, it's one of the most vicious racist screeds I've ever read, up there with anything produced by the Nazis or the KKK.
I'm not sure how smart he really is -- or, more importantly, how well he chooses to use his intelligence. He admits to being uninformed, by choice, on the Napster case, which is surely one of the major intersections of law and technology in our time. And he cites an MBA as proof of Dubya Bush's intelligence, which is sort of like citing a drunk driving conviction as proof of an interest in addiction-related issues. He also seems blind to the enormous role government played in the early growth of Silicon Valley; I suspect that in this case his political ideology has overridden his common sense.
This post initially angered me, but on thinking about it, I think it's a fair post that deserves a fair response.
The open-sourse crowd as a whole really, truly does not want to destroy software companies. Maybe Stallman does; certainly the original GNU Manifesto was rather hostile toward the whole idea of making money in the software biz, though I think even he has mellowed over the years. But the rest of the signers have no desire to see software companies go out of business en masse.
What they do want is for software companies to play fair, and to respect other people's ideas of how intellectual property should be disposed of (e.g., the GPL) even when it conflicts with the established business model. Ultimately, the blame for failing software companies doesn't lie with the GPL: it lies with a) anti-competitive business practices from giant companies like Sun, Oracle, and (especially) Microsoft that quite naturally crush small companies before they crush large ones, because small companies are more vulnerable, and b) mindless VC's (who are hardly ever techies themselves) who are much more interested in cashing in on whatever they perceive as the Next Big Thing than they are in really understanding how the software industry works.
A) is too well documented to require further discussion, IMO. B) is not so well understood. The problem is that the Next Big Thing usually turns out to be a Not Quite So Big Thing, and even when there's still money to be made, the sheeplike mentality of the VC's requires them to drop their investments and find Another Next Big Thing to pin their hopes on. A lot of dead "dot-bomb" companies were actually on the verge of profitability when the VC's panicked. Meanwhile, the likes of Microsoft keep going through sheer inertia, no matter how lousy their products, because the VC's and other business droids all use Windows and Office...
In short: it's not the GPL that hurts programmers. It's morons in suits.
I urge you not to get out of the software business. It's still one of the biggest, most stable, and most important industries in the world, and will remain so for a very long time. Suits, VC's and all, it's still a better place to work than 99 44/100 % of everything else.
Depends on how you're counting. For several years now, nanotech researchers have been building real, workable nanomachines that actually _do stuff_ (e.g., motors, lasers, etc.) However, to date, none of them have been reliable enough or cheap enough to be used for any large-scale applications. This may be the first step in moving nanotech out of the lab and into industry. So in that sense it's the "first wave" from the engineer's perspective, but the "next wave" from the scientist's.
... as long as both or all signatories to the original contract sign the new contract. (IANAL, but I am a writer among other things, so I've picked up a fair amount of contract knowledge over the years, especially WRT IP issues.) So, sure, it would be possible to draw a boilerplate contract for employers and employees that says "Previous contractual obligations shall not be construed as prohibiting this employee from participating in Open Source development projects." There could also be a list of standard exceptions: as long as it doesn't involve company trade secrets, as long as it doesn't compete directly with the company's products, etc.
How likely are employers to actually sign such a thing? Hell if I know. I'm also a developer for a small biotech company which is, for good reason, fiercely protective of its IP but is also not paranoid about whatever else its employees do... _unless_ it presents a threat to the company's IP rights or competition to its products. Odds are if I showed my boss an "open source is okay" contract he'd insist on a lawyer going over it and making amendments until I didn't really have any more rights than I do now. (I'm not complaining, much: I have pretty broad rights, certainly much broader than I'd expect to have at a larger corporation.) It probably depends much more on the corporate culture than on legal formalism, really. If you work for a company with a legal department made up of rabid weasels (Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, et al.) then forget it. If your company is run by rational human beings rather than IP-obsessed suits, you might have a chance.
"It could have changed but the story has not note about people that have come out of porn in to the main stream."
That's because right now the porn industry is growing but the "mainstream" (by which the author apparently means "anything that isn't porn") on the whole isn't. Once other types of e-commerce pick up again, I'm sure there will be plenty of former porn-site workers making the moves based on the usual reasons people change jobs: salary, benefits, location, etc.
And if I were running an e-commerce site, of any kind, I'd regard a background of running porn sites to look pretty damned good on an applicant's resume, for all the reasons mentioned by the author of the parent post. Porn sites are high-volume, high-demand sites with constantly changing inventory. Any business owner who's prejudiced against people who at one time worked in porn is probably going to lose out on some very good people.
I was struck by the constant mentions of low pay. I suspect it's because porn industry workers are too accepting of the stigma society places on them to stand up for their rights in public. Too bad. The profits in porn for the business owners are, so to speak, obscene -- I'd love to see some serious unionization and bargaining so the workers could get a piece of the, so to speak, pie.
Unfortunately, scientists are no more immune to this type of thinking than investors -- "Buy.com stocks and get rich! No, wait, dump every tech stock you own!" -- and it can do the same type of damage to research that fluctuating stock markets can do to the economy. It's my understanding that well before P&F made their big announcement, there were several reputable cold-fusion research programs going on, some of the showing very promising results, and after the brouhaha, their funding dried up because anything that said "cold fusion" was anathema to the fusion research community.
Now, all that being said, the fact is that P&F are grandstanders. They made their anouncement well before they should have because they knew of the publicity it would generate -- and, of course, if they'd been right, I mean really truly spectacularly right, then they would have deserved every bit of it. They'd rightly be hailed as heroes of science and of all humanity. But since they were, at best, maybe not quite as wrong as nuclear physicists thought they were... well, I think they still deserve a bit of scorn. Extending the analogy, the investors who dumped a significant percentage of our GDP into profitless.com's were making a big mistake, after all. Hopefully future scientists (and economists, and anyone else who trades in a field rich in potential to change the world) will take these lessons to heart.
Slashdot Mirror
... but unfortunately, sometimes their politics override their common sense. "Just what circumstances might warrant tracking a soldier's DNA, for example, were not spelled out in any detail. " Um, we're already doing this, and have been for some years: if nothing else, it's useful for identifying badly mutilated corpses. The idea is that there will be no more Unknown Soldiers. Modern warfare doesn't just kill people, it destroys them. Families have both a right and a need to know if anonymous body parts recovered from the battlefield belong to their sons and daughters.
... although maybe harder to track, would be a museum of what might be called zombie-baby sites. These are pages that reach some very early stage of development -- lots of "coming soon" and occasionally even still those cheesy "under construction" icons -- and then just stop. And yet they don't actually go away, which is the weird thing: someone's paying for the hosting, but not doing anything with it.
I'm not into the idea that a page has to change all the time to be worthwhile -- for a lot of businesses, I think updates once a year or so are fine. But unfinished pages (either commercial or personal) with Last Modified dates of, say, 1997 really puzzle me.
I think the point isn't what views are presented on Slashdot, but rather to the world at large. The vast majority of computer users and (more importantly, from a business perspective) buyers believe whatever line of crap Microsoft feeds them unless they see plenty of evidence to the contrary.
:)
... if it weren't for the fact that the last couple of releases of Toast have been buggy as hell.
That being said, this is overall a good thing, and may help stem the tide of IP grabs if the suit is susccessful.
[sigh]
1) There's no such word as "virii." If you're going to use the standard Latin plural, it would be "viri" -- but in fact, in English, the plural of "virus" is "viruses."
2) How is it "Human Centric" to say "AIDS is not a genetic disease" when we're talking about _human_ genetics? Of course infectious diseases have a genetic component in the sense of the genomes of the infectious agents (viruses, bacteria, fungi, etc.) but infectious vs. genetic disease is still a useful distinction to make, particularly if we're talking about the prospects for gene therapy cures. I work in biotech; don't try to teach me my business.
3) You're a supercilious, obfuscating twit, AC.
NB: AIDS is not a genetic disease like the others. Say "mechanism" instead of "gene(s)" and I'll mostly agree with you.
"Mostly" because IIRC there have been some moderately successful cystc fibrosis gene therapy trials. "Moderate" success in this case means the patient living a year or solonger than he would have otherwise. Which is far from a cure, but it means that we may be on the right track.
This does sound like something a little more advanced. Truth is, neither the live-fire exercises I did as an infantryman (11B, too, none of this mechanized stuff for us -- we _walked_ where we were going, by God! :) nor the patient-care exercises I did as a medic prepared me for the reality of Iraqi AA aimed at my medevac chopper. Now, quite possibly, nothing could have -- but the closer they can come to the actual environment _without_ killing as many people in training as on the battlefield, the better off our soldiers will be.
The United States is botha republic and a democracy -- a republican democracy, or a democratic republic (though that phrase was unfortunately hijacked by Communism, which is a form of very undemocratic republicanism.) Simple fact is, democracies which aren't republics are unworkable over a certain very small size (unless you've got a system that isn't legally a republic but uses republican forms to do the serious business of government -- these are often constitutional monrachies like the UK) while republics which aren't democracies are usually just very unpleasant places to live, e.g. the People's Republic of China or the late, unlamented, and badly misnamed German Democratic Republic. Communist republics and republics like Iraq are just as republican as the US, but they're missing the crucial element of democracy. The line "the US isn't a democracy, it's a republic" is so ignorant that when people use it in an argument, it makes just about anything else they have to say seem completely worthless.
Well, yeah, the cool part is obvious.
The depressing part is that, at some point, it would be nice if we really, truly knew how all this shit worked so we could start doing things with it. A true understanding of the Fundamental Nature Of The Universe (tm) might bring a lot of our science-fiction dreams to life; at worst, it would let us know which dreams were possible and worth pursuing (FTL? Time travel? Telepathy? Etc.) and which ones weren't. As long as the FNOTU stays mysterious, we simply will have no idea.
... "job security for particle physicists." Every time they answer a weird question, it raises a bunch of new, weirder questions.
I'm not sure if this is cool or depressing.
1) It floats with the wind. That's one of the nice things about airships. It's actually much harder to crash an airship with high winds (well, at high altitudes, anyway -- once you're down among mountains, etc. it's a different story) than an airplane.
2) Who cares? Thing gets bounced around, maybe thrown off course, when the wind calms down it just goes back to what it's supposed to be doing.
3) Probably less than a lot of other options for exploring Titan, so the real question is: do you think Titan is worth exploring, or are you an imagination-impaired Luddite? (There is no third option.)
As another WP user from way back (WP 3.5 for the Mac is still my favorite werp of all time, with 6.0b for DOS running a close second) I say, "Hell, yeah."
... maybe what the world really needs, in addition to open source suite projects, is an open source file translation project, with the goal of being able to convert all the common (and some not so common) formats to and from XML? An OpenDataViz kinda thing ... Something like this that really worked, and was genuinely open and cross-platform, with people contributing new modules to it for ever more obscure file formats (need to put your dBase files into a ClarisWorks spreadsheet? We can do that) would solve a lot of problems.
Combining this with the above thread on XML
Would make sense -- it's quite Lovecraftian, and makes me think specifically of the subway-platform painting in "Pickman's Model."
In any case, no one has a monopoly on that kind of stuff. It's a universal motif, floating around in the collective unconscious, free for the taking, to the joy and betterment of all. Kind of like MP3's before the RIAA noticed them. But not exactly.
Maybe the lower number of BSD posts is because BSD users spend their time actually coding and stuff instead of posting flamebait trashing other people's operating systems?
I have _exactly_ this problem and haven't found any one cure-all. Usually I pop a few Motrin the instant I feel it setting in, and get up from my chair and stretch a bit. (It takes some experimentation to find stretches that will really hit these muscles, but it can be done.) I also, unsurprisingly, find that when I'm exercising regularly, it doesn't happen as often or as severely.
:)
A friend of mine is a massage therapy student and a big portion of her homework is giving people massages, which is also helpful.
And oh yeah, if it gets really awful, don't have anyone rub it or it will get worse. Lie down flat on your back on something soft (bed or long couch), with a heating pad under your shoulderblades if possible, and just try to relax. That's the only thing that works for me if it hits a crisis point, which fortunately is pretty rare.
This post is so over-the-top that I'm almost sure it's a joke. If not, it's one of the most vicious racist screeds I've ever read, up there with anything produced by the Nazis or the KKK.
Ummm ... it's not self-hatred, since the majority of Americans didn't actually vote for the guy.
I'm not sure how smart he really is -- or, more importantly, how well he chooses to use his intelligence. He admits to being uninformed, by choice, on the Napster case, which is surely one of the major intersections of law and technology in our time. And he cites an MBA as proof of Dubya Bush's intelligence, which is sort of like citing a drunk driving conviction as proof of an interest in addiction-related issues. He also seems blind to the enormous role government played in the early growth of Silicon Valley; I suspect that in this case his political ideology has overridden his common sense.
This post initially angered me, but on thinking about it, I think it's a fair post that deserves a fair response.
...
The open-sourse crowd as a whole really, truly does not want to destroy software companies. Maybe Stallman does; certainly the original GNU Manifesto was rather hostile toward the whole idea of making money in the software biz, though I think even he has mellowed over the years. But the rest of the signers have no desire to see software companies go out of business en masse.
What they do want is for software companies to play fair, and to respect other people's ideas of how intellectual property should be disposed of (e.g., the GPL) even when it conflicts with the established business model. Ultimately, the blame for failing software companies doesn't lie with the GPL: it lies with a) anti-competitive business practices from giant companies like Sun, Oracle, and (especially) Microsoft that quite naturally crush small companies before they crush large ones, because small companies are more vulnerable, and b) mindless VC's (who are hardly ever techies themselves) who are much more interested in cashing in on whatever they perceive as the Next Big Thing than they are in really understanding how the software industry works.
A) is too well documented to require further discussion, IMO. B) is not so well understood. The problem is that the Next Big Thing usually turns out to be a Not Quite So Big Thing, and even when there's still money to be made, the sheeplike mentality of the VC's requires them to drop their investments and find Another Next Big Thing to pin their hopes on. A lot of dead "dot-bomb" companies were actually on the verge of profitability when the VC's panicked. Meanwhile, the likes of Microsoft keep going through sheer inertia, no matter how lousy their products, because the VC's and other business droids all use Windows and Office
In short: it's not the GPL that hurts programmers. It's morons in suits.
I urge you not to get out of the software business. It's still one of the biggest, most stable, and most important industries in the world, and will remain so for a very long time. Suits, VC's and all, it's still a better place to work than 99 44/100 % of everything else.
Depends on how you're counting. For several years now, nanotech researchers have been building real, workable nanomachines that actually _do stuff_ (e.g., motors, lasers, etc.) However, to date, none of them have been reliable enough or cheap enough to be used for any large-scale applications. This may be the first step in moving nanotech out of the lab and into industry. So in that sense it's the "first wave" from the engineer's perspective, but the "next wave" from the scientist's.
... as long as both or all signatories to the original contract sign the new contract. (IANAL, but I am a writer among other things, so I've picked up a fair amount of contract knowledge over the years, especially WRT IP issues.) So, sure, it would be possible to draw a boilerplate contract for employers and employees that says "Previous contractual obligations shall not be construed as prohibiting this employee from participating in Open Source development projects." There could also be a list of standard exceptions: as long as it doesn't involve company trade secrets, as long as it doesn't compete directly with the company's products, etc.
... _unless_ it presents a threat to the company's IP rights or competition to its products. Odds are if I showed my boss an "open source is okay" contract he'd insist on a lawyer going over it and making amendments until I didn't really have any more rights than I do now. (I'm not complaining, much: I have pretty broad rights, certainly much broader than I'd expect to have at a larger corporation.) It probably depends much more on the corporate culture than on legal formalism, really. If you work for a company with a legal department made up of rabid weasels (Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, et al.) then forget it. If your company is run by rational human beings rather than IP-obsessed suits, you might have a chance.
How likely are employers to actually sign such a thing? Hell if I know. I'm also a developer for a small biotech company which is, for good reason, fiercely protective of its IP but is also not paranoid about whatever else its employees do
"It could have changed but the story has not note about people that have come out of porn in to the main stream."
That's because right now the porn industry is growing but the "mainstream" (by which the author apparently means "anything that isn't porn") on the whole isn't. Once other types of e-commerce pick up again, I'm sure there will be plenty of former porn-site workers making the moves based on the usual reasons people change jobs: salary, benefits, location, etc.
And if I were running an e-commerce site, of any kind, I'd regard a background of running porn sites to look pretty damned good on an applicant's resume, for all the reasons mentioned by the author of the parent post. Porn sites are high-volume, high-demand sites with constantly changing inventory. Any business owner who's prejudiced against people who at one time worked in porn is probably going to lose out on some very good people.
I was struck by the constant mentions of low pay. I suspect it's because porn industry workers are too accepting of the stigma society places on them to stand up for their rights in public. Too bad. The profits in porn for the business owners are, so to speak, obscene -- I'd love to see some serious unionization and bargaining so the workers could get a piece of the, so to speak, pie.
Ummm ... I think your comparison of cold fusion to Nessie shows why this book is needed. Actually.
Unfortunately, scientists are no more immune to this type of thinking than investors -- "Buy .com stocks and get rich! No, wait, dump every tech stock you own!" -- and it can do the same type of damage to research that fluctuating stock markets can do to the economy. It's my understanding that well before P&F made their big announcement, there were several reputable cold-fusion research programs going on, some of the showing very promising results, and after the brouhaha, their funding dried up because anything that said "cold fusion" was anathema to the fusion research community.
... well, I think they still deserve a bit of scorn. Extending the analogy, the investors who dumped a significant percentage of our GDP into profitless .com's were making a big mistake, after all. Hopefully future scientists (and economists, and anyone else who trades in a field rich in potential to change the world) will take these lessons to heart.
Now, all that being said, the fact is that P&F are grandstanders. They made their anouncement well before they should have because they knew of the publicity it would generate -- and, of course, if they'd been right, I mean really truly spectacularly right, then they would have deserved every bit of it. They'd rightly be hailed as heroes of science and of all humanity. But since they were, at best, maybe not quite as wrong as nuclear physicists thought they were