you can't just disable javascript's ability to open new windows whilst leaving the rest of its abilities intact. grrrr.
That's it. End of story. If browsers let you do that, we'd all be happy.
What? I can't? Shoot, I'd better turn that off then!:-)
Konqueror has exactly this option - you can tell it to disallow opening new windows completely, to have it ask, or to allow javascript window.open() always. Handy little feature...
I still think that you (and many, many others) are focussing on the Biotech Boogieman to such an extent that the actual problems you have brought up, none of which originate in Biotechnology, are being addressed!
Agree re labelling - I just want to be able to choose.
Obviously a "policy" issue rather than a biotech issue. Also, as I mentioned above, the big, panicked push is to get "GMO" lables on food...which is not informative at all. Unfortunately, if screaming activists got their "GMO" lable, I suspect they'd be content with it, and we'd never get INFORMATIVE labelling (even if they WEREN'T content with it, after rushing the "GMO" label requirement through I'd bet it'd be difficult to get our overpaid legislators to do the work to put through a more informative labelling bill any time soon...). I hear "label genetically modified foods!" all the time. I never hear "Label the food as to it's origin and chemicals used on it!"
Roundup (glyphosate) has been linked to cancer already, so anything that increases its use is probably not good
While I wouldn't rule out the possibility (after all, to paraphrase the scientist who studied saccharin, "EVERYTHING causes cancer in sufficient quantities"), I'd want to see some followup studies before panicking. From the article you mention: The findings are based on a population-based case-control study conducted in Sweden between 1987 - 1990. The necessary data was ascertained by a series of comprehensive questionnaires and follow-up telephone interviews. Dr. Hardell and Dr. Eriksson found that 'exposure to herbicides and fungicides resulted in significantly increased risks for NHL'.[emphasis added]
Without digging up the paper itself it's hard to tell, but questionnaires and phone interviews don't strike me as a real accurate way to measure exposure to a specific agricultural chemical. ("Question 1:Have you been exposed to at least 1 microgram of glyphosphate per kilogram of body weight from your food? Question 2: Did it give you Non-Hodgkins Lymphona?...".). I find it difficult to imagine such data even addressing exposure from FOOD accurately (though it might reveal problems from direct exposure, i.e. the guys actually SPRAYING the stuff.) Does the paper break down the risks they found in their sample in sweden 10 years ago by specific chemicals? The implication of the summary is that the conclusions apply to agricultural chemicals in general.
Finally, of course, the problem here isn't Biotech, it's the use (and possibly abuse) of agricultural chemicals. I hear "ban biotech!", but I don't hear "Reduce Glyphosphate Use!". The
"Biotech Boogieman" is a distraction from the problem that actually needs to be addressed. (Studies have shown that violent video games and/or television may promote violent behavior. Should we ban them? Or should viewers/players be required to "label" themselves with a clearly displayed indication of their "Violent Media Exposure Index" or something, so that we can avoid these potentially dangerous individuals?)
(p.s. any pointers to other, more recent glyphosphate studies? You've got me curious now...)
but likelihood of problems/non-self-erasing mutation seems much greater with point gene alteration, especially when introduced into a monoculture.
How so? Honestly, I feel a lot more comfortable with the controlled addition of a single gene which produces a well known and well characterized product, especially in a monoculture which is easily identified (PCR is our friend). Plus, since monocultures are generally more susceptible to problems, it's more likely to get itself wiped out or have the gene mutate into dormancy than to somehow produce something worrisome...
You're not the only one. I'd just about KILL for Olestra Crunchy Cheetohs...
There are two, or possibly three ways to get digestive, uh, problems from Olestra. One is psychosomatics, as you say. The other is to eat an entire bag of the stuff all in one sitting and not eat anything else (Olestra IS, in effect, an "unabsorbed" oil-like substance ["sucrose polyester" - yum!], so if it's a major proportion of your food you might very well have a problem...but then, eating an entire bag of REGULAR chips in one sitting and nothing else might have a similar effect anyway...). There may or may not be the third case of just being susceptible to it, but I don't imagine that's a majority of the population by any means...
Unfortunately, the "Olestra causes explosive diarrhea" meme has been floating around so long people think it's an Absolute Truth...
But, most genetically engineered crops are not sufficiently tested for their effects on animal and plant life.
Okay, I can no longer hold back...
What, exactly, counts as "sufficient" testing?
After all, for all we know, perhaps certain varieties of the funky mutant grasses we call "corn" which were produced with old-school biotech (rather than controlled gene-splicing) might cause cancer in susceptible people. Has anybody tested this? How much testing would be "sufficient" to prove that it's "safe"?
Testing these effects is left up to the public. So they can sell them, cause everyone to get cancer, and then have the public pay for this.
There are two really popular changes that are done to food plants now. One is to produce plants that make an insecticidal protein. The other is to produce plants that carry a version of an amino-acid producing gene that isn't affected by herbicides like "Roundup" that target it.
There is only one, narrow difference between either of these and the plants they were made from.
In the first case, the plant produces a protein that paralyzes the digestive system of a particular type of insect [presumably one that likes to eat the plant in question]. This is the same natural protein that organic farmers often simply spray on the plants. Either way, the protein HAS been tested, and is harmless to all but the group of insects that it affects. Summary - It's been tested. It's safe.
In the other case, the "herbicide resistant" gene produces the same thing that the herbicide-vulnerable version of the gene does. The only way these genes could be harmful is if the original gene was also harmful. Summary - What is there to test here, besides whether or not plants in general might give us cancer?
I can understand the concerns and fear of the fast pace of technology, but most of the real problems, to me, seem to be a matter of people (the way businesses operate, the way some activists and journalists spread fear, lack of education, etc.) and not the technologies involved...
I read that one bright team had put the venom producing genes from scorpions into a plant...
Where? And why? (Antivenom production? Or perhaps the venom has some possible useful medical value?)
no accountability to anyone here, no labelling of food
We've had that since old-school biotech (i.e. artificial selection and crossbreeding). They don't label what they've sprayed on the plants. They don't label which farm grew the plants. They don't even label which varieties of plants they use most of the time. All of which I'd kind of like to know. A label showing "GMO" would tell me nothing, as the material so far seems to be nutritionally identical to "Naturally Inbred" plants. A label showing something like "MegaAgro SuperCorn Hybrid", on the other hand, would allow people to avoid buying food produced by companies they disapprove of, or to avoid varieties (GMO or not) that they don't want.
I understand that actually more pesticide is used, rather than less
Nope. You're mixing up two different popular modifications. LESS pesticide ("Pest"-killer chemicals, i.e. for insects, mites, etc.) is indiscriminately sprayed on plants engineered to produce the natural BT toxin (which is an extremely "specific" toxin, each variety of which only affects a narrow range of insects. To us mammals, it's just another nutritive protein to digest).
You're thinking of the Herbicide-resistant plants ("Roudup[tm] Ready" crops). I suspect the herbicides used are relatively harmless to animals [the herbicide acts against the "plant version" of a particular amino-acid-producing gene - "Roundup Ready" plants have a bacterial version of the gene added that isn't crippled by the herbicide. I imagine any animal with a similar gene would be similarly immune.)
This might breed "Roundup Resistant" weeds in the long run, though.
Biotech is being forced upon us...
So was potty training...
"Big Agribusiness" and monoculture farming ARE both legitimate concerns. "Biotech", in and of itself, is just another tool, and really no more of a concern than "tractors". Focussing on "Biotech" as if it were the supreme boogieman of Things Of Concern In Modern Agriculture is just taking attention AWAY from the broader concerns that, in my opinion, need to be dealt with.
It might set an interested precedent if the judge wins. As another poster mentioned, there's probably one of the usual "we disclaim any liability for it not working" sort of clauses somewhere in the agreement. (While the agreement for signing up with the cable company may not have been an actual "click-through" thing, the "it's not our fault if it doesn't work" is a common feature of such things).
If the judge wins, should commercial software developers start worrying about the lack of protection that these clauses in the licenses?
[I'd rather see] a.Net cemetery for Microsoft.[...]But maybe that's just me.
Yup, nobody else on slashdot feels this way...
I think the rest of us would rather NOT have to see it. It'd be nice to hear that it existed though - there are things that just aren't healthy to look at....:-)
What, you mean my internet access is supposed to be free? Those dirty cheaters at my ISP told me I have to PAY for it already!
But facetiousness aside, we ARE paying for it. It's often on a flat-rate basis (much like local phone calls and basic cable TV services) rather than a "per-packet" basis, but it is paid for. Spammers can use the same services - though I get the impression that just about every ISP has a service agreement that says [to paraphrase] "our service is not for sending spam, so don't do it or we'll kick you off". (I suspect ISP's who DON'T have this in their acceptable use terms in the contracts get blacklisted pretty quickly...)
Personally, I prefer to use the term "Legally Free Software", which pretty much covers both the fact that "it's not stealing even though you don't have to pay anybody" and "you can make copies for other people without getting arrested".
Gore got the majority of votes, yet bush was "voted" into power.
The fundamental problem here is the electoral college, I think. Last I heard, the ongoing (though obviously unofficial since the election was "finalized") counts in Florida showed Bush had indeed "won".
While I do personally think Bush was the "lesser of two evils", I can't say that I'm much more pleased with him than I would have been with the other "mainstream" candidate. Maybe if we could manage to dump the electoral college some of the other choices might at least start showing up on the "official" records often enough to start influencing policy towards a bit more rationality...
At least with the current close distribution of the mainstream parties in congress maybe they'll keep each other busy bickering and not have time to screw up much of anything for the next few years...
EXACTLY. While a lot of the things Government-authorized people are allowed to do these days does bother me, I've never had a problem with the "plain view doctrine". A police officer pulling someone over at random and demanding to search the car just in case they're carrying drugs bothers me, but a police officer pulling over a car with smoke pouring out of the windows and arresting the driver on the basis that there's a planter full of marijuana plants plainly visible in the front seat next to an open, half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels doesn't really bother me at all...
100's of acres of land out in the open sounds like "plain view" to me, too.
The government, effectively, is a big corporation. Specifically, it's sort of a giantic insurance company.
"Insurance" is basically a way of spreading risks - everyone who MIGHT be affected by a problem pools their money, and those random few who ARE affected get the money and/or its equivalent in resources to help deal with it...minus the administrative costs, executive salaries and perks, etc. You pay your "premiums" (taxes) for "Foreign Invasion Insurance", "Civil Rights Insurance", "Ability-To-Get-From-One-City-To-Another-And/Or-Mo ve Freight-Between-Them Insurance" (i.e. interstate highways), "Unemployment Insurance", "Criminal Activity Insurance", etc. etc. If, for example, someone burglarizes your house, "US Government Insurance Corp" pays for the attempt to track down and recover the stolen goods, to find the criminal, and penalize them, etc.
The only problem many of us have with this is that we only have one insurance company to choose from, and in many cases we are required to pay for insurance we REALLY don't want ("Government-Buildings-Not-Having-Expensive-Enough -Art insurance","Media-Corporations-Need-More-Revenue-S treams insurance", etc.) and we cannot get the corporation to offer some types of insurance that we might actually want (e.g. "Corporate-Hijacking-Of-Fair-Use-Rights Insurance", "Personal Privacy Insurance",
"At-Least-Equal[to Corporations]-Protection-Under-The-Law insurance" [under US copyright law, Corporations
explicitly get a longer copyright term than
actual human beings do, as I understand it...], etc.)
The difficult part of the problem, as I see it, is getting as much power as is reasonable back down to the individual, rather than having to choose whether private corporations get more power or the gigantic government corporation gets more power. (Or, in the US apparently, whether you want to give still more power to "old-style" private corporations [e.g. manufacturing, power, oil, etc.] and the gigantic US Government Corporation, or to "new-style" private corporations [e.g. media companies and other "intellectual property" barons, etc.] and the gigantic US Government Corporation. That seems to be the choice between the two political parties who share the power here these days...].
However, if you must get emotional about, do it productively and start an open source equivalent project. The phrase "don't get mad, get even" comes to mind for some reason.
Damn, where are those moderator points when I need them. I've got to admit, MY first thought was "Oh, well, if Zero Knowledge's stuff is something Free Software users (Gnu/Linux, BSD, etc.) want, somebody will start up a free implementation of the same sort of thing eventually."
Hey, it worked for OpenSSH, and SSH didn't even drop support, they just proprietized it...
You just did, you have filled a bug report in, havent you?
For what it's worth, this bug has been in DRI's sourceforge bug database for about a month and a half now (I went to report it myself a couple of weeks ago and found someone else already had, so I just added what little extra info I had about it to the discussion...)
Oh, and if you go to look it up, I'm not the one who reported it as "WTF ARE YOU GUYS THINKING?!?!", so no flames, please...the bug report can be found here. ---
It's not, unfortunately - I've got the same problem with my Diamond Monster Fusion AGP (as does the reporter of the bug in DRI's sourceforge buglist, though he's got the PCI version). The Banshee Bug has been in the DRI since at least early April's CVS.
I'm hoping they get it fixed soon - I've been itching for XVideo support, which HAS been fixed (but I can't use because of the banshee bug corrupting everything...). The bug was assigned a while back now - my guess is it'll be fixed soon (the fix may be delayed because the DRI team is evidently busy moving to Mesa 3.5...)
Or, spend the 30$ and get a voodoo3...
If I can manage to find a Voodoo3 AGP locally for only about $30, I may just do that...
No, no, this isn't a complaint about the moderation above or anything (Hey, I thought it was funny, too). It just struck me that this is about the 10th message in this list or so that was funny enough to be moderated "funny", several of which have hit the 4-5 point level. Just caught me off guard, that's all - at first glance this seemed like a relatively "dry" topic...
I wonder if someone could get a paper puplished in some sociology journal somewhere on the correlation of topics and the types of comments (as measured by moderation rates) they tend to attract...
then all you lot would be whooping around, screaming with joy.
No...we wouldn't. We'd be wondering what the heck Linus was smoking to have inserted a web page filter into the kernel, where it really doesn't belong...
That takes care of client-side, but not "server-side", which I think is what most people are worried about.
The point is that people are worried that if Microsoft decides to "smart-tag", say, references to Linux to be links to Microsoft's amusing "Linux Myths" page, and the IE6 user turns on Smart Tags because he or she wants "smart tags" for their favorite stamp-collecting sites, Microsoft could then 'auto-deface' people's linux information sites with links to the so-called "Linux Myths" page, unless the operator of that site has gone through all of his or her pages and inserted the IE6-specific "smart-tag disabling" meta-tag.
In short - the concern seem to be that Microsoft is making extra work for anyone who doesn't want to accept any links that Microsoft may want to insert into your pages when displayed to IE6 users.
I'm personally less bothered by the fact that I'll have to go through and add tags to all of my pages than I am by the fact that I now have to add "Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0"-only tags, specifically. The notion that, as with file formats, Microsoft could potentially later change the format of the tags for IE 6.5, say, to add other features might "re-enable" the so-called "smart tags" for IE 6.5 users by default, until the page owners go back through and add/change "Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.x"-only tags to all of their pages AGAIN probably also worries some of us...
Slashdot Mirror
I thought all roads lead away from McDonalds! (with apologies to Terry Pratchett for adapting his joke...)
That's it. End of story. If browsers let you do that, we'd all be happy.
What? I can't? Shoot, I'd better turn that off then! :-)
Konqueror has exactly this option - you can tell it to disallow opening new windows completely, to have it ask, or to allow javascript window.open() always. Handy little feature...
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Obviously, the lawyers haven't got the faintest clue what their doing (other than the usual protection racket sort of thing).
Offer, instead of the flat $2000, to settle for license to keep the KIllustrator name for 30% of the profits from it. :-)
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I still think that you (and many, many others) are focussing on the Biotech Boogieman to such an extent that the actual problems you have brought up, none of which originate in Biotechnology, are being addressed!
Agree re labelling - I just want to be able to choose.Obviously a "policy" issue rather than a biotech issue. Also, as I mentioned above, the big, panicked push is to get "GMO" lables on food...which is not informative at all. Unfortunately, if screaming activists got their "GMO" lable, I suspect they'd be content with it, and we'd never get INFORMATIVE labelling (even if they WEREN'T content with it, after rushing the "GMO" label requirement through I'd bet it'd be difficult to get our overpaid legislators to do the work to put through a more informative labelling bill any time soon...). I hear "label genetically modified foods!" all the time. I never hear "Label the food as to it's origin and chemicals used on it!"
Roundup (glyphosate) has been linked to cancer already, so anything that increases its use is probably not goodWhile I wouldn't rule out the possibility (after all, to paraphrase the scientist who studied saccharin, "EVERYTHING causes cancer in sufficient quantities"), I'd want to see some followup studies before panicking. From the article you mention:
The findings are based on a population-based case-control study conducted in Sweden between 1987 - 1990. The necessary data was ascertained by a series of comprehensive questionnaires and follow-up telephone interviews. Dr. Hardell and Dr. Eriksson found that 'exposure to herbicides and fungicides resulted in significantly increased risks for NHL'.[emphasis added]
Without digging up the paper itself it's hard to tell, but questionnaires and phone interviews don't strike me as a real accurate way to measure exposure to a specific agricultural chemical. ("Question 1:Have you been exposed to at least 1 microgram of glyphosphate per kilogram of body weight from your food? Question 2: Did it give you Non-Hodgkins Lymphona?...".). I find it difficult to imagine such data even addressing exposure from FOOD accurately (though it might reveal problems from direct exposure, i.e. the guys actually SPRAYING the stuff.) Does the paper break down the risks they found in their sample in sweden 10 years ago by specific chemicals? The implication of the summary is that the conclusions apply to agricultural chemicals in general.
Finally, of course, the problem here isn't Biotech, it's the use (and possibly abuse) of agricultural chemicals. I hear "ban biotech!", but I don't hear "Reduce Glyphosphate Use!". The "Biotech Boogieman" is a distraction from the problem that actually needs to be addressed. (Studies have shown that violent video games and/or television may promote violent behavior. Should we ban them? Or should viewers/players be required to "label" themselves with a clearly displayed indication of their "Violent Media Exposure Index" or something, so that we can avoid these potentially dangerous individuals?)
(p.s. any pointers to other, more recent glyphosphate studies? You've got me curious now...)
but likelihood of problems/non-self-erasing mutation seems much greater with point gene alteration, especially when introduced into a monoculture.How so? Honestly, I feel a lot more comfortable with the controlled addition of a single gene which produces a well known and well characterized product, especially in a monoculture which is easily identified (PCR is our friend). Plus, since monocultures are generally more susceptible to problems, it's more likely to get itself wiped out or have the gene mutate into dormancy than to somehow produce something worrisome...
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You're not the only one. I'd just about KILL for Olestra Crunchy Cheetohs...
There are two, or possibly three ways to get digestive, uh, problems from Olestra. One is psychosomatics, as you say. The other is to eat an entire bag of the stuff all in one sitting and not eat anything else (Olestra IS, in effect, an "unabsorbed" oil-like substance ["sucrose polyester" - yum!], so if it's a major proportion of your food you might very well have a problem...but then, eating an entire bag of REGULAR chips in one sitting and nothing else might have a similar effect anyway...). There may or may not be the third case of just being susceptible to it, but I don't imagine that's a majority of the population by any means...
Unfortunately, the "Olestra causes explosive diarrhea" meme has been floating around so long people think it's an Absolute Truth...
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Okay, I can no longer hold back...
What, exactly, counts as "sufficient" testing?
After all, for all we know, perhaps certain varieties of the funky mutant grasses we call "corn" which were produced with old-school biotech (rather than controlled gene-splicing) might cause cancer in susceptible people. Has anybody tested this? How much testing would be "sufficient" to prove that it's "safe"?
Testing these effects is left up to the public. So they can sell them, cause everyone to get cancer, and then have the public pay for this.There are two really popular changes that are done to food plants now. One is to produce plants that make an insecticidal protein. The other is to produce plants that carry a version of an amino-acid producing gene that isn't affected by herbicides like "Roundup" that target it.
There is only one, narrow difference between either of these and the plants they were made from.
In the first case, the plant produces a protein that paralyzes the digestive system of a particular type of insect [presumably one that likes to eat the plant in question]. This is the same natural protein that organic farmers often simply spray on the plants. Either way, the protein HAS been tested, and is harmless to all but the group of insects that it affects.
Summary - It's been tested. It's safe.
In the other case, the "herbicide resistant" gene produces the same thing that the herbicide-vulnerable version of the gene does. The only way these genes could be harmful is if the original gene was also harmful.
Summary - What is there to test here, besides whether or not plants in general might give us cancer?
I can understand the concerns and fear of the fast pace of technology, but most of the real problems, to me, seem to be a matter of people (the way businesses operate, the way some activists and journalists spread fear, lack of education, etc.) and not the technologies involved...
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Where? And why? (Antivenom production? Or perhaps the venom has some possible useful medical value?)
no accountability to anyone here, no labelling of foodWe've had that since old-school biotech (i.e. artificial selection and crossbreeding). They don't label what they've sprayed on the plants. They don't label which farm grew the plants. They don't even label which varieties of plants they use most of the time. All of which I'd kind of like to know. A label showing "GMO" would tell me nothing, as the material so far seems to be nutritionally identical to "Naturally Inbred" plants. A label showing something like "MegaAgro SuperCorn Hybrid", on the other hand, would allow people to avoid buying food produced by companies they disapprove of, or to avoid varieties (GMO or not) that they don't want.
I understand that actually more pesticide is used, rather than lessNope. You're mixing up two different popular modifications. LESS pesticide ("Pest"-killer chemicals, i.e. for insects, mites, etc.) is indiscriminately sprayed on plants engineered to produce the natural BT toxin (which is an extremely "specific" toxin, each variety of which only affects a narrow range of insects. To us mammals, it's just another nutritive protein to digest).
You're thinking of the Herbicide-resistant plants ("Roudup[tm] Ready" crops). I suspect the herbicides used are relatively harmless to animals [the herbicide acts against the "plant version" of a particular amino-acid-producing gene - "Roundup Ready" plants have a bacterial version of the gene added that isn't crippled by the herbicide. I imagine any animal with a similar gene would be similarly immune.)
This might breed "Roundup Resistant" weeds in the long run, though.
Biotech is being forced upon us...So was potty training...
"Big Agribusiness" and monoculture farming ARE both legitimate concerns. "Biotech", in and of itself, is just another tool, and really no more of a concern than "tractors". Focussing on "Biotech" as if it were the supreme boogieman of Things Of Concern In Modern Agriculture is just taking attention AWAY from the broader concerns that, in my opinion, need to be dealt with.
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This sort of thing has been going on for months in California...and here people have been blaming power companies instead. :-)
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It might set an interested precedent if the judge wins. As another poster mentioned, there's probably one of the usual "we disclaim any liability for it not working" sort of clauses somewhere in the agreement. (While the agreement for signing up with the cable company may not have been an actual "click-through" thing, the "it's not our fault if it doesn't work" is a common feature of such things).
If the judge wins, should commercial software developers start worrying about the lack of protection that these clauses in the licenses?
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"ActiveSuspension"? When did Microsoft get into making cars!?!?!
Have they released the IntelliAirbags and DirectSmog drivers yet? :-)
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>greatest overcome it.
I don't know why that sounds so sinister...
ARGH! It's times like that I REALLY wish there was a "+1 - Bad Pun" moderation category...
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Yup, nobody else on slashdot feels this way...
I think the rest of us would rather NOT have to see it. It'd be nice to hear that it existed though - there are things that just aren't healthy to look at.... :-)
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What, you mean my internet access is supposed to be free? Those dirty cheaters at my ISP told me I have to PAY for it already!
But facetiousness aside, we ARE paying for it. It's often on a flat-rate basis (much like local phone calls and basic cable TV services) rather than a "per-packet" basis, but it is paid for. Spammers can use the same services - though I get the impression that just about every ISP has a service agreement that says [to paraphrase] "our service is not for sending spam, so don't do it or we'll kick you off". (I suspect ISP's who DON'T have this in their acceptable use terms in the contracts get blacklisted pretty quickly...)
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Personally, I prefer to use the term "Legally Free Software", which pretty much covers both the fact that "it's not stealing even though you don't have to pay anybody" and "you can make copies for other people without getting arrested".
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An even better motivator, I think.
As far as I know, the Wright brothers built their airplane because they wanted to fly, not because some rich guy was paying them to do it...
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The fundamental problem here is the electoral college, I think. Last I heard, the ongoing (though obviously unofficial since the election was "finalized") counts in Florida showed Bush had indeed "won".
While I do personally think Bush was the "lesser of two evils", I can't say that I'm much more pleased with him than I would have been with the other "mainstream" candidate. Maybe if we could manage to dump the electoral college some of the other choices might at least start showing up on the "official" records often enough to start influencing policy towards a bit more rationality...
At least with the current close distribution of the mainstream parties in congress maybe they'll keep each other busy bickering and not have time to screw up much of anything for the next few years...
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EXACTLY. While a lot of the things Government-authorized people are allowed to do these days does bother me, I've never had a problem with the "plain view doctrine". A police officer pulling someone over at random and demanding to search the car just in case they're carrying drugs bothers me, but a police officer pulling over a car with smoke pouring out of the windows and arresting the driver on the basis that there's a planter full of marijuana plants plainly visible in the front seat next to an open, half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels doesn't really bother me at all...
100's of acres of land out in the open sounds like "plain view" to me, too.
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How do you know that flash animation wasn't directly imported from color-enhanced spy-satellite photos? :-)
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The government, effectively, is a big corporation. Specifically, it's sort of a giantic insurance company.
"Insurance" is basically a way of spreading risks - everyone who MIGHT be affected by a problem pools their money, and those random few who ARE affected get the money and/or its equivalent in resources to help deal with it...minus the administrative costs, executive salaries and perks, etc. You pay your "premiums" (taxes) for "Foreign Invasion Insurance", "Civil Rights Insurance", "Ability-To-Get-From-One-City-To-Another-And/Or-Mo ve Freight-Between-Them Insurance" (i.e. interstate highways), "Unemployment Insurance", "Criminal Activity Insurance", etc. etc. If, for example, someone burglarizes your house, "US Government Insurance Corp" pays for the attempt to track down and recover the stolen goods, to find the criminal, and penalize them, etc.
The only problem many of us have with this is that we only have one insurance company to choose from, and in many cases we are required to pay for insurance we REALLY don't want ("Government-Buildings-Not-Having-Expensive-Enough -Art insurance","Media-Corporations-Need-More-Revenue-S treams insurance", etc.) and we cannot get the corporation to offer some types of insurance that we might actually want (e.g. "Corporate-Hijacking-Of-Fair-Use-Rights Insurance", "Personal Privacy Insurance",
"At-Least-Equal[to Corporations]-Protection-Under-The-Law insurance" [under US copyright law, Corporations
explicitly get a longer copyright term than
actual human beings do, as I understand it...], etc.)
The difficult part of the problem, as I see it, is getting as much power as is reasonable back down to the individual, rather than having to choose whether private corporations get more power or the gigantic government corporation gets more power. (Or, in the US apparently, whether you want to give still more power to "old-style" private corporations [e.g. manufacturing, power, oil, etc.] and the gigantic US Government Corporation, or to "new-style" private corporations [e.g. media companies and other "intellectual property" barons, etc.] and the gigantic US Government Corporation. That seems to be the choice between the two political parties who share the power here these days...].
Don't mind me, just feeling cynical today...
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Damn, where are those moderator points when I need them. I've got to admit, MY first thought was "Oh, well, if Zero Knowledge's stuff is something Free Software users (Gnu/Linux, BSD, etc.) want, somebody will start up a free implementation of the same sort of thing eventually."
Hey, it worked for OpenSSH, and SSH didn't even drop support, they just proprietized it...
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For what it's worth, this bug has been in DRI's sourceforge bug database for about a month and a half now (I went to report it myself a couple of weeks ago and found someone else already had, so I just added what little extra info I had about it to the discussion...)
Oh, and if you go to look it up, I'm not the one who reported it as "WTF ARE YOU GUYS THINKING?!?!", so no flames, please...the bug report can be found here.
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It's not, unfortunately - I've got the same problem with my Diamond Monster Fusion AGP (as does the reporter of the bug in DRI's sourceforge buglist, though he's got the PCI version). The Banshee Bug has been in the DRI since at least early April's CVS.
I'm hoping they get it fixed soon - I've been itching for XVideo support, which HAS been fixed (but I can't use because of the banshee bug corrupting everything...). The bug was assigned a while back now - my guess is it'll be fixed soon (the fix may be delayed because the DRI team is evidently busy moving to Mesa 3.5...)
Or, spend the 30$ and get a voodoo3...If I can manage to find a Voodoo3 AGP locally for only about $30, I may just do that...
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No, no, this isn't a complaint about the moderation above or anything (Hey, I thought it was funny, too). It just struck me that this is about the 10th message in this list or so that was funny enough to be moderated "funny", several of which have hit the 4-5 point level. Just caught me off guard, that's all - at first glance this seemed like a relatively "dry" topic...
I wonder if someone could get a paper puplished in some sociology journal somewhere on the correlation of topics and the types of comments (as measured by moderation rates) they tend to attract...
Hey, Jon Katz, want to do a scientific paper? :-)
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No...we wouldn't. We'd be wondering what the heck Linus was smoking to have inserted a web page filter into the kernel, where it really doesn't belong...
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That takes care of client-side, but not "server-side", which I think is what most people are worried about.
The point is that people are worried that if Microsoft decides to "smart-tag", say, references to Linux to be links to Microsoft's amusing "Linux Myths" page, and the IE6 user turns on Smart Tags because he or she wants "smart tags" for their favorite stamp-collecting sites, Microsoft could then 'auto-deface' people's linux information sites with links to the so-called "Linux Myths" page, unless the operator of that site has gone through all of his or her pages and inserted the IE6-specific "smart-tag disabling" meta-tag.
In short - the concern seem to be that Microsoft is making extra work for anyone who doesn't want to accept any links that Microsoft may want to insert into your pages when displayed to IE6 users.
I'm personally less bothered by the fact that I'll have to go through and add tags to all of my pages than I am by the fact that I now have to add "Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0"-only tags, specifically. The notion that, as with file formats, Microsoft could potentially later change the format of the tags for IE 6.5, say, to add other features might "re-enable" the so-called "smart tags" for IE 6.5 users by default, until the page owners go back through and add/change "Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.x"-only tags to all of their pages AGAIN probably also worries some of us...
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