A similar fiasco happened here in Spokane. It was embarrassingly stupid how everyone reacted.
Some students at our local catholic university, Gonzaga, tried to hold a Planned Parenthood meeting on campus, using campus facillities, student activity budgets, campus event schedules, invited guest speakers, and so on. The president of Gonzaga, who incidently is a Catholic Priest (hm... at least they promote their own...) cancelled the event. Liberal students got excitable. It didn't strike him as the kind of thing that overlapped the Mission of the University in a Venn diagram kind of way. Generally speaking, Catholic schools have a Mission. In case the students forgot this basic fact somehow, Gonzaga named the street the University is on "Mission" to remind them. Nearby is a street called "Sharp" providing the students another subtle hint.
It's the ecology, stupid!
on
Golden Rice
·
· Score: 1
Most criticism of genetically engineered foods I've seen focuses too much on what it will do to humans -- cause cancer, etc. But the real danger is how it will react with the local ecology. If this new rice provides an unrivaled, bountiful food source for local pests, you could set off FE a misquito plague. The misquitos could carry a blood-born virus, and thousands, maybe millions could die. Or the vitamin-rich new rice crops could provide better habitat for fungus or disease, which could devestate the crop or, worse yet, spread it to adjacent "normal" rice plants or other crops in the neighboring field or in storage. The anti-starvation crop could set off a famine. Or the crops DNA could be too homogenous (the same), and the first disease/infection it gets could erradicate it 100% (opposed to say every other or every third plant, which will happen in a diverse population. Some members will be immune/resistant). Or the genetics of the rice could alter the adjacent soil chemistry and set off wildfire growth in a local weed, again providing new food/habitat for undesirable insects or diseases, or choking the waterways where rice is grown with overgrowth, which can cause flooding, and so on.
Sure these are propped up examples, but this is the kind of stuff that has happened in the past when humans have translocated other plants and animals. Just recently they figured out that if a brown bear doesn't eat its annual dose of riverside salmon, the local forest suffers because the salmon saturates the bear's stool with nitrogen and other nutrients that aren't as abundant in the food the bear usually eats (unless the tourist in question eats a lot of bacon). So they add this to the pros and cons of removing the dams from our state, which would deprive us of 25% of electricity, our least polluting source of it. It would cause a lot of air pollution to replace that electricity (and no one's going to use less of it). Is it because of what a bear buries behind a tree when no one's around to hear it? (Except for some hunters: Didja hear that?! Ewwwee!) Naw. But it will add to the "pile" of evidence the government will consider in deciding whether dams stay or go.
Anyway, I think the dietary danger to humans implied by these crop is exaggerated, founded on pure cowardice. Smoking is probably more dangerous. Or eating at fast food restaurants where the employees don't wash their hands. It's just a sequence of DNA that gets read by the ribosome and generates a protein. If you pick a well-understood protein, you have a decent chance to predict what it will do in the body. It's the ecological side effects of these crops that are harder to predict (and to fix after the fact). Meanwhile, the hysteria about GE crops focuses on what it will do to humans because it's a scare tactic that ignorant bystanders can visualize while they smoke, eat bacon, drink their coffee with BGH milk, booze, or processed sugar in it, and brush their teeth with floride from fertilizer and mining waste. Wash it all down with a glass of cool tap water. Mmm. You mean it might be bad for me? Those godless scientists...
I'm not a radio engineer, so I don't claim to know the answer to this. But won't these packs give off a variety of detectable radiation? Radio waves from the wireless tcp/ip, infra-red from the circuitry and power supply, and possibly others (maybe even sound?)? Can a passive reciever triangulate the location of this kind of broadcast?
The 3rd world has scientists and engineers too. If it costs us $10K to $100K to outfit our soldiers with all this experimental gear, that doesn't mean it won't cost them some time, money, and US/Soviet surplus or scrap to piece together a "US grunt detector". It doesn't preclude more advanced nations or terrorists groups from developing such a thing to sell on the black market, raise some funds, further their goals against the US. They'd just be addressing a real market demand...
Think of the technological gap between our soldiers in the 60s/70s and the Vietnamese. Bombs, napalm, jets, and M-16s against punji stakes, tripwires, snipers, etc. So what if the transmissions are encrypted if lets the enemy know where you are? Or if not that, just the fact that a US soldier is near?
It is convenient for Microsoft to have a new excuse to unlease the hounds on samba and wine, just when they need to. It doesn't even have to be that bad - they may have a contigency plan for "What if our code gets stolen?" - a lemonade recipe, if you will.
But this kind of thing has been a long time in coming. Kevin Mitnick did this to Sun, and they weren't merciful in kind. Microsoft has been 2600's holy grail of sites to hack for the longest time. It was just a matter of time, talent, and working up the courage to hack the scariest, meanest software company in the US. There's this irrational fear of Microsoft in the US, but in the last two years they've lost a lot of their intimidation value, thanks to their stupidity at the trial.
This is almost certainly already the case. It's just a matter of what and where. Bug fixes and exploits on the BSD TCP/IP stack revealed that NT essentially used BSD's TCP/IP logic (if not the code). But I haven't seen many dialogs in Windows saying "portions of this product are owned by the Regents of UC Berkeley".
That doesn't mean you'll find the code from BSD lifted wholesale in there, but a search of the Windows or NT source would probably turn up a little intellectual property theft.
Besides the network code, I'd look at the "Compress" attribute for files, the PostScript drivers, the POSIX "compatibility" sub-system, IIS, Internet Explorer (since it's based on the Spyglass browser), ftp client, telnet, and some of the networking services (DHCP, RCP). You all could probably name other likely candidates for GNU/BSD code lifts.
Of course Windows Me has its particular code tree, so who knows what's there. There was also the mass exodus of Apple programmer to Microsoft in the 90s. So if you developed at Apple in the last 15 years, you might be able to find some of your own work in the source for various Microsoft products. Remember "Video for Windows"?
Not that other companies don't do this too. Apple's Disk Copy utility makes disk images which are basically tar balls. Probably a little borrowing there, but it's convenient if you run Linux on your Macintosh.
You'd have to target the 6502 first, which is about the same as porting linux to the Apple II.
Kinda fails the "reasonable architecture" requirement for Linux.;-)
where n is the max number of old versions you want VMS to retain. Otherwise, you have play janitor with your disks every so often or keep a purge job retained in batch queue.
PURGE/KEEP=n will delete all but the last n versions.
Also, versioning on vms requires the app to implement it correctly. You can easily update a file without creating a new version with a little rms know-how. One of our vendor systems does it wrong. It will only execute version 1 of a file, read from the latest version, and save to the latest version without creating a new file. This is where that set file/version=1 comes in handy... VMS can be made to do what you want, except save just the diff between versions. AFAIK, it makes a completely new copy each time.
I thought someone wrote a cvs filesystem as a add-on to ext2. You'd have to have a really clear idea when to clean out old diffs, or your file system would start looking like a masters thesis written in MS Word on "Fast Save".
Sounds like what you really want is a groupware enabled Window Manager for X. I'm exposing my ignorance here, but couldn't a scriptable window manager like sawmill or one that supports plugins be a able to share windows over the network. I know X supports multiple mice and cursors on a display of 1 or more monitors, so you should in theory not have to fight each other for the cursor or leave emacs open to type "Ok, steve has the floor";-)
Since when is Zen about feeling anything? It's just a skill practiced until you can do it 100% accurately without thinking or fussing the details (i.e. blindfolded). In hacking? I guess if you could write working code in a single pass without debugging, revision, or consulting docs/man pages, there probably wouldn't be anything about Zen you wouldn't already know -- only you probably wouldn't know it.;-)
The idea is most conscious thought is counter-productive; you just slowly drive yourself crazy obsessing. Since good ideas usually come from your subconscious anyway, the idea is any time you can silence that constant running monologue you won't become happy, but you'll be less unhappy, and if you get really good at it maybe you'll be less unhappy more often.
Zen and The Art of Archery is a good and short book on the subject. (except that reading about zen doesn't do any good...)
The client (CGS) for Cybergraphic Inc's newspaper publishing systems does this. It's written in Pascal and acts as a VT100/FIMS terminal over TCP/IP to a relational database running on a VAX. It has a bitmapped "draw" mode, which is basically a "print preview" of the current page or take. CGS ran on DOS PCs and UNIXWARE. We bought it in 1990/1, and it wasn't new then.
Cybergraphic was bought by Geac (geac.com), the buyer-of-all-things. They'd probably share your interest in this patent.
Mixed mode on AD lets W2K emulate one NT4 domain, so you can replace your PDCs with it. I think your BDCs can remain NT4, pulling the SAM from your W2K AD servers. You have to use the "new&improved" srvrmgr.exe that comes with W2K.
The problem is trust. In NT4 trusts are 1 way only (Domain A trusts Domain B). AD trusts are heirarchal (A trusts B, B trusts C, hence A trusts C). But AD trusts don't translate in the emulated NT domain in mixed mode (NT4 client in C, can't log on). So if you have more than one NT4 domain, you have to set up different ADs each emulating a different NT domain or consolidate all your NT domains back into one (good luck and don't screw up!).
(Is just the lack of good coffee, or does it seem like you could hack Domain A by hacking into C, because A trusts B trusts C? Sounds like ISP heaven.)
Check out http://www.windows2000faq.com/Articles/Index.cfm?A rticleID=13387
All the crap that should be in NT docs, readme.wri files, or TechNet can generally be found here.
>>If you were trying to build a library, would you only stock periodicals?
This is only a valid criticism for the current code. With data only purged when it falls off the stack, then implement more stacks. This IS free software. Unpopular information would then be dropped from more popular stacks to less popular stacks, say stored across tiers of servers or on tapes or WORM media instead of disks. True, the server would have to be able to say "I can get you what you asked for from the archive, but it will take a few hours" for which you could charge a few if you could work out the privacy details of anonymous payment. In college we called this mysterious service "Inter-Library Loan".
From what I can see, the server should be allowed to customize what it does with its own stack, so long as it accurately advertises its collection of keys to clients and other servers and deliver up what they request.
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dip them in carbonite and mount them on display in the lobby.
A similar fiasco happened here in Spokane. It was embarrassingly stupid how everyone reacted.
Some students at our local catholic university, Gonzaga, tried to hold a Planned Parenthood meeting on campus, using campus facillities, student activity budgets, campus event schedules, invited guest speakers, and so on. The president of Gonzaga, who incidently is a Catholic Priest (hm... at least they promote their own...) cancelled the event. Liberal students got excitable. It didn't strike him as the kind of thing that overlapped the Mission of the University in a Venn diagram kind of way. Generally speaking, Catholic schools have a Mission. In case the students forgot this basic fact somehow, Gonzaga named the street the University is on "Mission" to remind them. Nearby is a street called "Sharp" providing the students another subtle hint.
Most criticism of genetically engineered foods I've seen focuses too much on what it will do to humans -- cause cancer, etc. But the real danger is how it will react with the local ecology. If this new rice provides an unrivaled, bountiful food source for local pests, you could set off FE a misquito plague. The misquitos could carry a blood-born virus, and thousands, maybe millions could die. Or the vitamin-rich new rice crops could provide better habitat for fungus or disease, which could devestate the crop or, worse yet, spread it to adjacent "normal" rice plants or other crops in the neighboring field or in storage. The anti-starvation crop could set off a famine. Or the crops DNA could be too homogenous (the same), and the first disease/infection it gets could erradicate it 100% (opposed to say every other or every third plant, which will happen in a diverse population. Some members will be immune/resistant). Or the genetics of the rice could alter the adjacent soil chemistry and set off wildfire growth in a local weed, again providing new food/habitat for undesirable insects or diseases, or choking the waterways where rice is grown with overgrowth, which can cause flooding, and so on.
Sure these are propped up examples, but this is the kind of stuff that has happened in the past when humans have translocated other plants and animals. Just recently they figured out that if a brown bear doesn't eat its annual dose of riverside salmon, the local forest suffers because the salmon saturates the bear's stool with nitrogen and other nutrients that aren't as abundant in the food the bear usually eats (unless the tourist in question eats a lot of bacon). So they add this to the pros and cons of removing the dams from our state, which would deprive us of 25% of electricity, our least polluting source of it. It would cause a lot of air pollution to replace that electricity (and no one's going to use less of it). Is it because of what a bear buries behind a tree when no one's around to hear it? (Except for some hunters: Didja hear that?! Ewwwee!) Naw. But it will add to the "pile" of evidence the government will consider in deciding whether dams stay or go.
Anyway, I think the dietary danger to humans implied by these crop is exaggerated, founded on pure cowardice. Smoking is probably more dangerous. Or eating at fast food restaurants where the employees don't wash their hands. It's just a sequence of DNA that gets read by the ribosome and generates a protein. If you pick a well-understood protein, you have a decent chance to predict what it will do in the body. It's the ecological side effects of these crops that are harder to predict (and to fix after the fact). Meanwhile, the hysteria about GE crops focuses on what it will do to humans because it's a scare tactic that ignorant bystanders can visualize while they smoke, eat bacon, drink their coffee with BGH milk, booze, or processed sugar in it, and brush their teeth with floride from fertilizer and mining waste. Wash it all down with a glass of cool tap water. Mmm. You mean it might be bad for me? Those godless scientists...
I'm not a radio engineer, so I don't claim to know the answer to this. But won't these packs give off a variety of detectable radiation? Radio waves from the wireless tcp/ip, infra-red from the circuitry and power supply, and possibly others (maybe even sound?)? Can a passive reciever triangulate the location of this kind of broadcast?
The 3rd world has scientists and engineers too. If it costs us $10K to $100K to outfit our soldiers with all this experimental gear, that doesn't mean it won't cost them some time, money, and US/Soviet surplus or scrap to piece together a "US grunt detector". It doesn't preclude more advanced nations or terrorists groups from developing such a thing to sell on the black market, raise some funds, further their goals against the US. They'd just be addressing a real market demand...
Think of the technological gap between our soldiers in the 60s/70s and the Vietnamese. Bombs, napalm, jets, and M-16s against punji stakes, tripwires, snipers, etc. So what if the transmissions are encrypted if lets the enemy know where you are? Or if not that, just the fact that a US soldier is near?
And you'll get 50 squats for not taking a can of compressed air to "Charlene"
It is convenient for Microsoft to have a new excuse to unlease the hounds on samba and wine, just when they need to. It doesn't even have to be that bad - they may have a contigency plan for "What if our code gets stolen?" - a lemonade recipe, if you will.
But this kind of thing has been a long time in coming. Kevin Mitnick did this to Sun, and they weren't merciful in kind. Microsoft has been 2600's holy grail of sites to hack for the longest time. It was just a matter of time, talent, and working up the courage to hack the scariest, meanest software company in the US. There's this irrational fear of Microsoft in the US, but in the last two years they've lost a lot of their intimidation value, thanks to their stupidity at the trial.
This is almost certainly already the case. It's just a matter of what and where. Bug fixes and exploits on the BSD TCP/IP stack revealed that NT essentially used BSD's TCP/IP logic (if not the code). But I haven't seen many dialogs in Windows saying "portions of this product are owned by the Regents of UC Berkeley".
That doesn't mean you'll find the code from BSD lifted wholesale in there, but a search of the Windows or NT source would probably turn up a little intellectual property theft.
Besides the network code, I'd look at the "Compress" attribute for files, the PostScript drivers, the POSIX "compatibility" sub-system, IIS, Internet Explorer (since it's based on the Spyglass browser), ftp client, telnet, and some of the networking services (DHCP, RCP). You all could probably name other likely candidates for GNU/BSD code lifts.
Of course Windows Me has its particular code tree, so who knows what's there. There was also the mass exodus of Apple programmer to Microsoft in the 90s. So if you developed at Apple in the last 15 years, you might be able to find some of your own work in the source for various Microsoft products. Remember "Video for Windows"?
Not that other companies don't do this too. Apple's Disk Copy utility makes disk images which are basically tar balls. Probably a little borrowing there, but it's convenient if you run Linux on your Macintosh.
"At last, Moneypenny, a jet pack that doesn't set your ass on fire..."
</accent>
You'd have to target the 6502 first, which is about the same as porting linux to the Apple II. Kinda fails the "reasonable architecture" requirement for Linux. ;-)
That's called HFS, the MacOS file system, not an original idea.
RTFH.
SET FILE/VERSION=n
where n is the max number of old versions you want VMS to retain. Otherwise, you have play janitor with your disks every so often or keep a purge job retained in batch queue.
PURGE/KEEP=n will delete all but the last n versions.
Also, versioning on vms requires the app to implement it correctly. You can easily update a file without creating a new version with a little rms know-how. One of our vendor systems does it wrong. It will only execute version 1 of a file, read from the latest version, and save to the latest version without creating a new file. This is where that set file/version=1 comes in handy... VMS can be made to do what you want, except save just the diff between versions. AFAIK, it makes a completely new copy each time.
I thought someone wrote a cvs filesystem as a add-on to ext2. You'd have to have a really clear idea when to clean out old diffs, or your file system would start looking like a masters thesis written in MS Word on "Fast Save".
Sounds like what you really want is a groupware enabled Window Manager for X. I'm exposing my ignorance here, but couldn't a scriptable window manager like sawmill or one that supports plugins be a able to share windows over the network. I know X supports multiple mice and cursors on a display of 1 or more monitors, so you should in theory not have to fight each other for the cursor or leave emacs open to type "Ok, steve has the floor" ;-)
The idea is most conscious thought is counter-productive; you just slowly drive yourself crazy obsessing. Since good ideas usually come from your subconscious anyway, the idea is any time you can silence that constant running monologue you won't become happy, but you'll be less unhappy, and if you get really good at it maybe you'll be less unhappy more often.
Zen and The Art of Archery is a good and short book on the subject. (except that reading about zen doesn't do any good...)
The client (CGS) for Cybergraphic Inc's newspaper publishing systems does this. It's written in Pascal and acts as a VT100/FIMS terminal over TCP/IP to a relational database running on a VAX. It has a bitmapped "draw" mode, which is basically a "print preview" of the current page or take. CGS ran on DOS PCs and UNIXWARE. We bought it in 1990/1, and it wasn't new then.
Cybergraphic was bought by Geac (geac.com), the buyer-of-all-things. They'd probably share your interest in this patent.
Mixed mode on AD lets W2K emulate one NT4 domain, so you can replace your PDCs with it. I think your BDCs can remain NT4, pulling the SAM from your W2K AD servers. You have to use the "new&improved" srvrmgr.exe that comes with W2K. The problem is trust. In NT4 trusts are 1 way only (Domain A trusts Domain B). AD trusts are heirarchal (A trusts B, B trusts C, hence A trusts C). But AD trusts don't translate in the emulated NT domain in mixed mode (NT4 client in C, can't log on). So if you have more than one NT4 domain, you have to set up different ADs each emulating a different NT domain or consolidate all your NT domains back into one (good luck and don't screw up!). (Is just the lack of good coffee, or does it seem like you could hack Domain A by hacking into C, because A trusts B trusts C? Sounds like ISP heaven.) Check out http://www.windows2000faq.com/Articles/Index.cfm?A rticleID=13387
All the crap that should be in NT docs, readme.wri files, or TechNet can generally be found here.
>>If you were trying to build a library, would you only stock periodicals?
This is only a valid criticism for the current code. With data only purged when it falls off the stack, then implement more stacks. This IS free software. Unpopular information would then be dropped from more popular stacks to less popular stacks, say stored across tiers of servers or on tapes or WORM media instead of disks. True, the server would have to be able to say "I can get you what you asked for from the archive, but it will take a few hours" for which you could charge a few if you could work out the privacy details of anonymous payment. In college we called this mysterious service "Inter-Library Loan".
From what I can see, the server should be allowed to customize what it does with its own stack, so long as it accurately advertises its collection of keys to clients and other servers and deliver up what they request.