Unfortunately viruses don't compete directly in that potentially harmless way . . . HIV's niche is in your T cells (and others), reproducing itself until the cell explodes. Viruses don't really prey on each other (they are simple RNA injection machines that parasitically use the replication mechanisms of cells they infect for reproduction. The only way for another virus to block it is to just kill all the potential target cells first (not so helpful) or to infect them with counter-RNA that neutralizes that of HIV. The problem with the second is that unless it's also doing dangerous things to you, that helper virus isn't going to be able to spread in order to combat the HIV. It's just not the same as gut bacteria - they take up residence on the limited available real estate, do some digesting of the food you helpfully provide, and defend their turf from unwanted invaders while managing their own reproduction and such, whereas viruses are hijackers by nature.
Natural selection is a general principle that applies to anything that reproduces -- things that reproduce well will continue to exist and spread, and when variation occurs, those variants that are best equipped to survive and reproduce successfully in a given environment will come to dominate the population. This has even been applied to ideas in the greatly overhyped meme theory.
Touché. Missing a spelling error in a one line post is just desserts for making a one-line post in the first place, I suppose. Especially when it's an intentionally stupid one-liner. -1 Idiot for me.
Well, the cure might or might not be so easy . . . if we already knew it was a genetic malady, there's a good chance we knew the gene to some degree, and finding out that it's an ancestral retrovirus gives fairly minimal new information on how to address it. If we were once tolerant of it and now are not, that implies some cost to the tolerance-granting genes, since we lost them . . . in that case, they may not be around to find, and even if they are, where do you look? If we acquired some new trait that made us vulnerable to this now-dormant virus, that's going to be even less helpful, and again, how do you tell? All of this boils down to, we've got a touch more information about origin, but it doesn't point us anywhere.
The real benefits of this research lie elsewhere - in the ability to recover and play with old viruses, see what they do, and possibly track their evolution through the genetic record, which may help us combat the change and spread of nasty current retroviruses like HIV.
Public comment would be useful, but does that pose potential disclosure issues? Major corps that profit from easy patents (especially for their small-competitor-quashing capability: "Hi, we want to buy you out. Otherwise, we fling this patent at you. If you fight the patent, we can afford to keep it in court long enough to run you out of money.") will fight any such improvement, and I suspect that whether or not there's any merit to it, they'll say that disclosing the patent prior to approval will disadvantage them versus foreign companies who can then copy and file at home, especially if the reiew says that modifications and resubmission are needed. I am not sure how disclosure currently works, this may not be an issue at all.
A possible fix for that, if it is an issue, would be to have a 'final round' of public comment for determining obviousness/prior art, after the patent office has approved something and it would be disclosed anyway, just prior to final approval. The patent office might not be such a big fan of doing all their work just to have it trashed a lot of the time by the public, though, and the patent office would also have to do an extra round of work to vet, analyze, and verify public comments . . . again, I fear that's too easy to argue against.
And any system will eventually get compromised somehow -- competitors flooding each other's patent comments, etc etc etc . . . *sigh* I still agree that something like this would be the best method though.
Once it's in the wild, news sites are generally safe in pointing out the leakage of confidential whatever.
Also, confidential != state secret. The guy who leaked it can get in big trouble for breach of contract &c., but Slashdot never agreed not to publicize AMD's docs - IANAL, but I believe the worst that could be brought against them would be a copyright violation, and standard practice there is DMCA, which involves takedown requests before suing comes in.
While planned obsolescence is more widespread than ever these days, it's nothing new - Companies have always realized the benefits of forcing buyers to come back on as frequent a schedule as the market will bear, and have pushed consumers down that road whenever possible.
My father has a few pairs of socks that he got 40-ish years ago that he wears regularly - they're comfortable and haven't stretched or worn out at all . . . for fairly obvious reasons, the company that made them no longer exists. Or, for a more entertaining example, look to the 1952 movie The Man in the White Suit - guy invents perfect, invincible fabric and attempts to sell idea to clothing companies. Clothing companies see the writing on the wall and turn to desperate measures . . . so even way back in 1952 the concept of planned obsolescence was thought about enough to generate a movie.
As technology moves forward, more and more items become commodities or at least lend themselves to planned obsolescence. Nowadays, modern manufacturing processes have brought the prices of most electronic gadgets down to the point where consumers will stand for being forced to replace regularly, and it's often more profitable to sell an upgrade cycle than it is to sell service/repair contracts (plus the sheeple really like being told how many wonderful new features they're getting when they replace broken version 12 with ever-so-(temporarily)-shiny version 13). Companies only have an incentive to serve their customers well enough to keep them coming back to spend - anything more is wasted and too much quality might shut off that revenue stream entirely!
Also, I have to make the obligatory and oft-harped-upon point that open source software is one of the very few examples of a product that is immune to this unfortunate market force - software companies are strongly incented to steer their customers toward application designs that will require regular upgrades/patches, because a stable and perfected application can only be sold once. Some compnaies have figured out that if they do enough interface changing with every major upgrade, they can even tack on a new "training" revenue stream, a side benefit to the quest for lock-in . . . [/rant]
Eclipse is widely deployed in university environments, which means the TFs and Profs will be familiar with it - pushing students to use it will ensure that those who will need the most help will be easy to help. Anyone who knows enough to have a strong preference can (presumably) take care of him/herself.
NetBeans and Eclipse would be the only two options most profs would encourage, as they are the major Free, *Open-Source* IDEs. There are plenty of heavily-deployed commercial IDEs that can do Java (MSVS, etc), but especially when programming, it's a good idea to use the open-source, standards-based libs etc unless you have a really good reason not to. Free is good and not being tied to a commercial product over which you have no control is good. By encouraging students to work with these tools, profs both equip them to be independent and help to expand the open-source userbase, always a good thing, as it both increases adoption and pushes commercial vendors to stick closer to standards. [There's a reason that commercial IDEs are provided cheap or free to college students - training lock-in! Same reasons profs resist when possible. So it's actually an *anti*-marketing-troll stance.]
Another thing is that, as several posters have mentioned, IBM and a few others make a lot of nice extensions for Eclipse, and as it's F/OSS, the profs and TFs can write helpful extensions easily (Duke University, for example, has a very nice default Eclipse setup built with a bunch of nice IBM tools and some Duke custom extensions, including a homework submission tie-in). Also also, it works gorgeously between operating systems - I've shared projects between Windows and Linux without a glitch, which is very convenient if you use labs and might not have a choice, or if you just want to be able to work from multiple systems specializing in different things (perhaps you have auxiliary tools on both OSes).
Personally, I strongly prefer Eclipse to NetBeans. NetBeans was the original full-featured F/OSS Java IDE, but Eclipse just blew past it somewhere in the 2003-2004 range. I admit I haven't used the latest NetBeans release, but there's nothing I need that I don't have in Eclipse, either built-in or added on. I like the environment better than even the very pricey commercial IDEs I've used, and I really like the rich framework it provides - with a few plugins, I can code Java, PHP, and C/C++ all in Eclipse, which makes managing big collections of projects and even multi-part, multi-language projects much easier. This gives it a strength that once was reserved for very expensive, irritatingly proprietary and unbelievably bloated IDEs like MSVS (when I used that, I was constantly having to crosscheck outside refs to make sure I hadn't accidentally created windows-specific code, or some dumb call that was going to require a buggy, non-standard MS lib . . . granted, I was young and inexperienced, but GAH.) And it's only as powerful as you need it to be - it's trim and light, with only the bits you want turned on or even installed, and it can be altered quickly and cleanly.
"It first formulated that defense against a dismissal motion"
So, it's a defense of their offensive (in several ways!) cases, justifying ("defending") their acts of bringing people to court.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this unfortunate? I, for one, [would] welcome our, uh, assimilated(?) possibly-robotic overlord!
But better still are Chekov's "wessels." Can't compete with that.
I == mastar of gramer!! Or typoing, at least . . . :-( Proofreading is for notmeh! >.
Unfortunately viruses don't compete directly in that potentially harmless way . . . HIV's niche is in your T cells (and others), reproducing itself until the cell explodes. Viruses don't really prey on each other (they are simple RNA injection machines that parasitically use the replication mechanisms of cells they infect for reproduction. The only way for another virus to block it is to just kill all the potential target cells first (not so helpful) or to infect them with counter-RNA that neutralizes that of HIV. The problem with the second is that unless it's also doing dangerous things to you, that helper virus isn't going to be able to spread in order to combat the HIV. It's just not the same as gut bacteria - they take up residence on the limited available real estate, do some digesting of the food you helpfully provide, and defend their turf from unwanted invaders while managing their own reproduction and such, whereas viruses are hijackers by nature.
Natural selection is a general principle that applies to anything that reproduces -- things that reproduce well will continue to exist and spread, and when variation occurs, those variants that are best equipped to survive and reproduce successfully in a given environment will come to dominate the population. This has even been applied to ideas in the greatly overhyped meme theory.
Before anyone else points it out, yes I realize I just misspelled "just deserts." I blame lack of food.
Touché. Missing a spelling error in a one line post is just desserts for making a one-line post in the first place, I suppose. Especially when it's an intentionally stupid one-liner. -1 Idiot for me.
Well, the cure might or might not be so easy . . . if we already knew it was a genetic malady, there's a good chance we knew the gene to some degree, and finding out that it's an ancestral retrovirus gives fairly minimal new information on how to address it. If we were once tolerant of it and now are not, that implies some cost to the tolerance-granting genes, since we lost them . . . in that case, they may not be around to find, and even if they are, where do you look? If we acquired some new trait that made us vulnerable to this now-dormant virus, that's going to be even less helpful, and again, how do you tell? All of this boils down to, we've got a touch more information about origin, but it doesn't point us anywhere.
The real benefits of this research lie elsewhere - in the ability to recover and play with old viruses, see what they do, and possibly track their evolution through the genetic record, which may help us combat the change and spread of nasty current retroviruses like HIV.
Nonono, you gombat green ooze with grey ooze! Bring on the nanobots!
Public comment would be useful, but does that pose potential disclosure issues? Major corps that profit from easy patents (especially for their small-competitor-quashing capability: "Hi, we want to buy you out. Otherwise, we fling this patent at you. If you fight the patent, we can afford to keep it in court long enough to run you out of money.") will fight any such improvement, and I suspect that whether or not there's any merit to it, they'll say that disclosing the patent prior to approval will disadvantage them versus foreign companies who can then copy and file at home, especially if the reiew says that modifications and resubmission are needed. I am not sure how disclosure currently works, this may not be an issue at all.
A possible fix for that, if it is an issue, would be to have a 'final round' of public comment for determining obviousness/prior art, after the patent office has approved something and it would be disclosed anyway, just prior to final approval. The patent office might not be such a big fan of doing all their work just to have it trashed a lot of the time by the public, though, and the patent office would also have to do an extra round of work to vet, analyze, and verify public comments . . . again, I fear that's too easy to argue against.
And any system will eventually get compromised somehow -- competitors flooding each other's patent comments, etc etc etc . . . *sigh* I still agree that something like this would be the best method though.
[/pessimism]Once it's in the wild, news sites are generally safe in pointing out the leakage of confidential whatever.
Also, confidential != state secret. The guy who leaked it can get in big trouble for breach of contract &c., but Slashdot never agreed not to publicize AMD's docs - IANAL, but I believe the worst that could be brought against them would be a copyright violation, and standard practice there is DMCA, which involves takedown requests before suing comes in.
While planned obsolescence is more widespread than ever these days, it's nothing new - Companies have always realized the benefits of forcing buyers to come back on as frequent a schedule as the market will bear, and have pushed consumers down that road whenever possible.
My father has a few pairs of socks that he got 40-ish years ago that he wears regularly - they're comfortable and haven't stretched or worn out at all . . . for fairly obvious reasons, the company that made them no longer exists. Or, for a more entertaining example, look to the 1952 movie The Man in the White Suit - guy invents perfect, invincible fabric and attempts to sell idea to clothing companies. Clothing companies see the writing on the wall and turn to desperate measures . . . so even way back in 1952 the concept of planned obsolescence was thought about enough to generate a movie.
As technology moves forward, more and more items become commodities or at least lend themselves to planned obsolescence. Nowadays, modern manufacturing processes have brought the prices of most electronic gadgets down to the point where consumers will stand for being forced to replace regularly, and it's often more profitable to sell an upgrade cycle than it is to sell service/repair contracts (plus the sheeple really like being told how many wonderful new features they're getting when they replace broken version 12 with ever-so-(temporarily)-shiny version 13). Companies only have an incentive to serve their customers well enough to keep them coming back to spend - anything more is wasted and too much quality might shut off that revenue stream entirely!
Also, I have to make the obligatory and oft-harped-upon point that open source software is one of the very few examples of a product that is immune to this unfortunate market force - software companies are strongly incented to steer their customers toward application designs that will require regular upgrades/patches, because a stable and perfected application can only be sold once. Some compnaies have figured out that if they do enough interface changing with every major upgrade, they can even tack on a new "training" revenue stream, a side benefit to the quest for lock-in . . . [/rant]
"I'm pretty sure this is a fake made up thing. Wikipedia says it's made up pretty much." - Fixed that for you.
welcome our new zombie underlings! . . . I feel kinda dirty now.
Eclipse is widely deployed in university environments, which means the TFs and Profs will be familiar with it - pushing students to use it will ensure that those who will need the most help will be easy to help. Anyone who knows enough to have a strong preference can (presumably) take care of him/herself.
NetBeans and Eclipse would be the only two options most profs would encourage, as they are the major Free, *Open-Source* IDEs. There are plenty of heavily-deployed commercial IDEs that can do Java (MSVS, etc), but especially when programming, it's a good idea to use the open-source, standards-based libs etc unless you have a really good reason not to. Free is good and not being tied to a commercial product over which you have no control is good. By encouraging students to work with these tools, profs both equip them to be independent and help to expand the open-source userbase, always a good thing, as it both increases adoption and pushes commercial vendors to stick closer to standards. [There's a reason that commercial IDEs are provided cheap or free to college students - training lock-in! Same reasons profs resist when possible. So it's actually an *anti*-marketing-troll stance.]
Another thing is that, as several posters have mentioned, IBM and a few others make a lot of nice extensions for Eclipse, and as it's F/OSS, the profs and TFs can write helpful extensions easily (Duke University, for example, has a very nice default Eclipse setup built with a bunch of nice IBM tools and some Duke custom extensions, including a homework submission tie-in). Also also, it works gorgeously between operating systems - I've shared projects between Windows and Linux without a glitch, which is very convenient if you use labs and might not have a choice, or if you just want to be able to work from multiple systems specializing in different things (perhaps you have auxiliary tools on both OSes).
Personally, I strongly prefer Eclipse to NetBeans. NetBeans was the original full-featured F/OSS Java IDE, but Eclipse just blew past it somewhere in the 2003-2004 range. I admit I haven't used the latest NetBeans release, but there's nothing I need that I don't have in Eclipse, either built-in or added on. I like the environment better than even the very pricey commercial IDEs I've used, and I really like the rich framework it provides - with a few plugins, I can code Java, PHP, and C/C++ all in Eclipse, which makes managing big collections of projects and even multi-part, multi-language projects much easier. This gives it a strength that once was reserved for very expensive, irritatingly proprietary and unbelievably bloated IDEs like MSVS (when I used that, I was constantly having to crosscheck outside refs to make sure I hadn't accidentally created windows-specific code, or some dumb call that was going to require a buggy, non-standard MS lib . . . granted, I was young and inexperienced, but GAH.) And it's only as powerful as you need it to be - it's trim and light, with only the bits you want turned on or even installed, and it can be altered quickly and cleanly.
. . . aaaaaaand I got carried away there.
"It first formulated that defense against a dismissal motion" So, it's a defense of their offensive (in several ways!) cases, justifying ("defending") their acts of bringing people to court.