An hour of hot rough monkey sex has less defects than a controlled sterile scientific enviroment?
I don't know about THAT...a typical human being comes from an hour (well, okay, 2 1/2 minutes:-) of "hot monkey sex", and we all know how defective a typical human being is...:-)
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Anything as complicated as DNA is non-linear -- small changes in source can result in large changes in result, and we cannot necessarily deduce from a fixed number of known source->result mappings what all combinations of source will do.[...]Only with models of what DNA actually does could we (maybe) figure this out.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. If you mean we don't have more than a blurry understanding of chemistry involved in the proteins that are encoded in the DNA, you're absolutely right. It almost sounds as though you're implying that we don't know what DNA "does" at all, though, which is obviously not true. We know EXACTLY what expressed DNA "does" - it codes for proteins. We also know exactly what the translation of DNA-base-pair-triplets to amino acids is. Noncoding sections of DNA are obviously trickier, but some of them are reasonably well understood now as well (e.g. promotor sequences, binding sites for repressor proteins, etc.).
To figure out what A and B mean is in many ways simply to figure out how to predict what they will do in combination. And DNA has so many possible combinations...
I can hear the original poster hopping up and down with agitation at the DNA-centric message here even as we type:-)
The original poster's central [and correct!] point was that from a "functional" point of view, protein chemistry is more important than raw DNA, which I THINK is what you're getting at (if "A" and "B" in your example represent sequences coding for two separate proteins [or parts of one protein complex, like hemoglobin])
To clarify my analogy, I'm thinking of DNA as the "at, tr, grep, and cat" (ATGC, get it? Sorry, couldn't help myself. Watson and Crick made me do it...) of biology, compared to protein chemistry's "Xfree86, Mozilla, Sendmail, and Koffice". My point was just that while the tiny utilities are just a meager bit of the more broadly useful and complex applications, they are still extremely useful themselves, just as the DNA data available is itself of great (but very focussed) usefulness, even before we have better knowledge of the protein chemistry later. (we don't understand the source code well enough to sit down and rewrite XFree86 from scratch, but have a pretty good understanding of many of the little subroutines and how they might be put together into new "proglets"...)
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
The tools of biotech are very crude, like chopping away with bronze axes. It's not possible to modify organisms by mixing and matching the parts we understand in UNIX-style.
I don't know about that, necessarily, depends how you look at it: grep fluorescent_green_protein_gene JellyFish >> bunnygenes; cat bunnygenes > bunny_egg_cell; cat bunny_egg_cell | mama_bunny > glowing_baby_bunny.
Like the "core" Unix tools, our existing biotech tools ARE very "low-level", as you point out. We're certainly quite some way from the biotech equivalent of "higher-level" mix-and-match projects like php-gtk, but we've got some very useful building blocks to work with...including the project that is the subject of this article, which appears to be intended for building simulations of larger biochemical pathways...the next stage of biotechnology which we can't yet do much of, as you say. Sadly, this means I'm still probably at least a decade away from taking over the world with an army of Atomic Mutant Zombie Clones®
Incidentally, I'd be willing to bet that a determined and/or skilled individual can do a LOT with a bronze axe...but I think one level of analogy is plenty, so I'll avoid belaboring the point. Besides, I understand what you mean: Hype bad. Results good.:-).
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Because ANYBODY can write like this. Lawyers as a group(1) seem to like unnecessarily complicated laws and strange ways of wording things so that it's necessary to pay them piles of money to keep from getting flung in jail and/or bankrupted by silly lawsuits. In addition, I think the jargon adds to their mystique, and therefore their perceived value. (Would you feel a surgeon was worth the money if he/she said "One of your blood vessels in your heart was clogged up, so we whacked open your chest and wired in a new one"? Of course not...that's why they say "Myocardial infarction necessitated coronary bypass surgery" instead...)(2)
(1 - I say "as a group" because I know a number of individual lawyers, and none of them strike me as the type to encourage this sort of thing, at least not intentionally.)
2 - I am not a [real] doctor, and certainly not a real MEDICAL doctor and therefore may have my jargon mixed up, but you get the idea...) --- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
For that matter, is "dynamical" even a real word? (Check the title of the page on the "BioSPICE" link above - "Arkin Laboratory for Dynamical Genomics"...)
Here's a real word for these people - "Neologism."...
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Rating the advances in biotechnology simply by looking at DNA sequencing improvements is not very smart..
Definitely a good point, but I wouldn't underestimate the usefulness of simply being able to sequence better.
DNA Sequences alone can be/are useful for a lot of different research. Archaeologists and Anthropologists can use DNA sequences to help determine, for example, the relationship of one population to another and/or help trace migration of a population. Medical types can not only check for genetic diseases, but could also use DNA sequences to quickly check the identity of a pathogenic organism, if the sequencing technology becomes readily available enough. (Running a few PCR cycles is still much faster than trying to isolate and culture a pathogen from a swab). Zoologists and Paleontologists can use DNA sequences for similar purposes to what I mentioned for anthropologists and archaeologists, and can be handy for environmental research.
Until we understand the *function* of the proteins that are derived from these genes, all biotechnology can do is recombine the already existing technologies.
Again, this is true...but don't forget that "recombining already existing technologies" can be pretty powerful and useful all by itself. (Heck, "recombining existing technologies" is, basically, a fundamental design principle of Unix-based systems, isn't it? I know MY Unix-based systems are extremely useful... I love my "|" key...)
I'm confident we'll be getting plenty of use out of DNA while we work on the harder problems of protein functions and chemistry
P.S. Thanks for reminding me...I've been meaning to download the folding@home client and throw some of my meager computing resources at helping out...
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Of course, the odds of such a law happening are slim; the odds of a well-crafted law passing are about zero.[emphasis added]
This, unfortunately, is EXACTLY why many of us disagree with your subject line...though your suggestion of a good privacy law is not unreasonable, the fact is, US Govt. Inc. has been showing itself more likely to do harm rather than good when it interferes. After all, the DMCA (for example) and the Indecent Communications Act [Yes, I called it that on purpose:-) ] were both, arguably, intended to protect artists and/or children...but only served to attempt serious harm to the rights of US internet users (and, indirectly, internet users elsewhere in the world). The CDA was fortunately swiftly slammed. I can only hope the DMCA is next, but fear there's too much money pouring in through lobbyists to fix it completely.
Given this track record, I'd be worried that the hypothetical "Internet Users Privacy Act" might contain provisions to, say:
Require ISP's to send copies of personal data to a new Federal Office of Internet Privacy Protection to be checked for violations [and, "of course", to help track down child pornographers and/or tax evaders. Hey, this IS congress we're talking about...]
Appropriation of $15,000,000 to investigate possible shady activities of Hormel [a clause tacked on by minimally clueful legislators trying to appear "tough on Spam"...]
A clause making it illegal to make a left turn on tuesdays during a full moon unless your name is Myrna. [Don't you just love riders?]
27 clauses amending the DMCA and making it less comprehensible...
Details of how complaints of privacy violation should be handled, such as requiring complaints be submitted as Microsoft Word 2001 documents...
Okay, okay, that's enough necro-equine flagellation from me... --- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Seriously. In both cases I just can't bring myself to feel anything but mild glee over punishment being meted out to those being taken to court...but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the precedent that it sets.
This paragraph from the article, in particular:
In this case, the crime was elevated to felony status because the spam was sent using an unauthorized e-mail account and caused tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage.
As with so many of the "hacking" (cracking) cases, I REALLY wonder which orifice they pulled this dollar figure out of. Every time this happens, the notion that "hacking" (as the mainstream media calls it) ALWAYS results in HUGE expenses for the victim is more firmly engrained in public consciousness. Appending the words "with a computer" to the description of a crime causes the same ridiculous overreaction among legal types and the media as adding it to a patent seems to have on the US PTO, and cases like this don't help the problem.
Further, this precedent is subject to serious abuses. Imagine you start receiving a pile of junk email which appears that it may be relayed from one particular server. Perhaps, in an effort to be helpful, you decide to test the relay by sending a single message to yourself through it. You find the server does, indeed relay, and you report your findings to the ISP. The ISP's sysadmin, embarassed, reports you to the ISP's lawyers and you find YOURSELF being sued for "using an unauthorized e-mail account", and "costing" the ISP thousands of alleged dollars (It'll cost them thousands in advertising to 'spin' the incident until they get over the embarassment, you see...).
This kind of thing already happens too much, and will happen more since it's facilitated by minimally clueful (how's that for politically correct?) legislators, who pass laws like the DMCA.
("What, you legally purchased that DVD and the computer equipment you're using to view it? Doesn't matter, you embarassed us and we're suing you for using an unauthorized decoder...And claiming you cost us millions of dollars by doing so, you filthy pirate.")
Spamming definitely "feels" like a crime to me, but more of the "30 days in county jail, a couple of weeks of community service, and a fine" variety rather than the "up to 9 years in prison" sort.
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
The article talks about the Windows drivers (complaining a bit about them - I assume they're still in development though). It does mention openGL support in the windows drivers...
Does anyone know if there will be DRI support for this chipset any time soon? One of these days I'll have to upgrade from my old Voodoo Banshee card...
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Most likely the cause of the infestation is monoculture farming. Diverify the crops, like Nature has, and your problem is solved
Ah, NOW we're getting somewhere. A fairly rational alternative. I think the only problem with it is economic - I think it's probably a lot cheaper for a farmer to invest in, say, equipment and materials geared towards corn farming, than trying to support many crops at once (or even one different crop every year).
the first step would be to mimic him [The Diety®] in his ways.
Oh, very well...
Ahem...I HEREBY COMMAND YOU ALL TO CUT OFF YOUR......oh, never mind...:-)
Or did you mean things like creating new organisms? Or even whole new worlds? But then, isn't that what the opposition to this experiment is objecting to?
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
so the scientists can run around the fields and kill the moths.
Only problem is, they won't be getting any SCIENCE done then, and we'd have no way of telling which scientists we'd want to breed.
Worse, the scientists who spend the MOST time swatting moths and the LEAST time Sciencing are the ones who breed, producing a new generation of Scientists who are more interested in swatting and less in research, eventually producing really crappy scientists.
The idea isn't without merit, though. Just replace "Scientists" with "Legislators" and I think we're onto a winner! More bugswatting, Less bad lawmaking!
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Actually, they don't glow in the dark, they're fluorescent. They look pretty much normal except under ultraviolet light...sort of like flowers (which often have features that show up in the ultraviolet).
Though maybe the moths will have to worry about harassment from bees trying to pollinate them...
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I have hardware fullscreen anti-aliasing built into my old 20" monitor!
That's nothing, I've got a screensaver built into my monitor's hardware. I just push the little button with the "circle with a line through it" symbol and up comes this screensaver. It appears to be a 3D animation of being lost inside of a coal mine without a light source. Neat!:-)
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
how did you fix the 'configure saying QT > 2.2.3 is not found' thingy?
In my case, I "cheated" - I've been putting the QT libraries in/usr/local/qt-[version] (e.g./usr/local/qt-2.2.4/usr/local/qt-2.3.0) and just making a symbolic link/usr/local/qt to whichever one I'm using. When I want to try a new one, I put it in a new directory, compile it, change where/usr/local/qt points to, and go.
Having just installed qt-2.3.0 earlier today, I hadn't yet deleted qt-2.2.4, so I pointed the qt symbolic link to that, ran the./configure script, then re-pointed the qt link back to qt-2.3.0.
Not a real elegant solution - I imagine the "current" KDE sources (i.e. CVS and/or beta versions coming soon) will have that fixed. Maybe if we're lucky they'll fix the current kde-2.1 scripts to realize that 2.3.0 is greater than 2.2.3....
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
If your XFree 4.0.2 was compiled with XRender (xdpyinfo to make sure) then it should "Just Work"(tm)
The catch is (I THINK!) that Xfree86 support for freetype2 is optional, and not compiled by default. RENDER is in my xdpyinfo list, but I don't recall compiling it with freetype2 support - hence all of the recompiling I just tried...
The "undefined symbol" errors looked like they were all related to the truetype aliasing and such, which is what makes me wonder if my build of freetype2 was incomplete...
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I've been running KDE 2.1 on QT 2.2.4 and XFree86 4.0.2 just fine. (It's BEAUTIFUL, by the way!) Now I want to try anti-aliased fonts.
Firstly - I have the current CVS for the DRI drivers, which includes the Xft, Xrender, etc. library sections. I managed to get freetype2 built and installed (I think! There were some problems...), and configured the hosts.def file accordingly. I managed to get everything to build and install...but then KDE wouldn't start. (KSplash complaining about undefined symbols in the Xft library).
I figured maybe I needed to rebuild KDE (at least KDELIBS) against the new X stuff, so I tried. Firstly, the 2.1 configure script complains about 2.3.0 not being "QT >= 2.2.3", but I got around THAT. Trying to build, it errors out with similar complaints about undefined symbols in Xft...
So (to finally get to the point)...I figure either I need to rebuild QT (my next try), or I didn't actually successfully build freetype2, or I have to build all of X from scratch...
Anybody know any good "shortcuts" for me to add support for this feature? (I'm running on a "Slackware-Post-7.1" based distribution if it matters...)
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
isn't some of the enhanced detail provided by antialiasing lost in a jpeg bitmap?
It may very well be that I just don't "get" antialiasing...but I thought I understood the basic concept. That being the case, this question sounds funny to me.
Isn't "antialiasing" (to oversimplify) a form of "intelligent blurring"? (In this case, blurring the fonts corners a bit so that they blend a little smoother with the background).
If so...don't you LOSE detail (while improving the actual appearance) when you antialias?
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I guess it's everybody's choice.. seems rather like cutting your nose off to spite your face though.
(Don't tell anybody, but to be honest, it's been more a matter of feeling too lazy to download it and mess with it than a licensing issue. Quite frankly, I don't have a huge problem with the QPL, as much as I'd prefer to see it GPL'd. I just haven't felt that my code was running too slow at the moment...)
Wait a minute...did I just say "don't tell anybody" in the middle of a public slashdot post? Must be getting late. Can I go home yet?:-)
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Personally, I love (in the platonic sense, you sickos!...) PHP. I'm looking forward to playing with this new stuff.
Just a few random comments/opinions on some issues that have come up here:
The "but it's not GPL!" issue seems to revolve around two things. One is that there is a clause in the license for PHP that says, to paraphrase, "if you use any of our code for something else, give us credit". This is apparently GPL-incompatible, but I don't personally have a moral problem with this. The other licensing issue is the Zend stuff, which when dealt with separate from PHP is under a different, more restrictive license (the "Zend Optimizer" which if I remember right is a separate product, is under the much-maligned QPL, apparently.
I tend to think of PHP as "PERL-lite". It's not as big or "full-featured" as PERL is, and is therefore of more limited (but more focused!) use. PHP does have what to me seems to be a very PERL-like syntax, though. Perhaps one might think of PHP as "Programming marijuana" which leads to escalation to Harder programming languages like PERL*:-). Like PERL, PHP can be worked with in either Object Oriented or standard Procedural ways (or a combination thereof), and both are similar (though I must admit I'm still slightly baffled on PERL OO - PHP doesn't use anything like bless(), for example...)
It LOOKS like "PHP-gtk" and the standard PHP will be separate projects, which is probably good, as it should keep bloat down while allowing each project to borrow relevant improvements from each other.
Mind you, I think the "bloat" issue is mostly nonexistent. The Linux Kernel itself might be considered extremely bloated...except that running "make config" "de-bloatifies" it by setting up to only compile what you need or want. PHP will almost certainly remain the same way.
Maybe now somebody will come up with a "flash authoring" tool for Linux using PHP's swf support (I've been wanting to "dabble" with flash animation, but I don't know of any linux tools for putting them together...)
(* - It's a joke! Really! No, I'm NOT trying to start a "war on drugs" flamewar!) --- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
because it includes a BSD-like advertising clause.
Basically, it looks like it's "free but not GPL". (Personally, I don't have a philosophical problem with the "give us credit if you use our code" clause of the license, but that's me.)
The Zend Optimizer (which is optional, and a separate but related product, isn't it?) apparently uses the QPL according to the Gnu page mentioned above, which is the license that used to be used by QT and got the flamewars about the "freeness" of KDE going, wasn't it?
My personal solution is to go ahead and use PHP, but not bother with the separate Zend Optimizer download.
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about THAT...a typical human being comes from an hour (well, okay, 2 1/2 minutes :-) of "hot monkey sex", and we all know how defective a typical human being is... :-)
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Anything as complicated as DNA is non-linear -- small changes in source can result in large changes in result, and we cannot necessarily deduce from a fixed number of known source->result mappings what all combinations of source will do.[...]Only with models of what DNA actually does could we (maybe) figure this out.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. If you mean we don't have more than a blurry understanding of chemistry involved in the proteins that are encoded in the DNA, you're absolutely right. It almost sounds as though you're implying that we don't know what DNA "does" at all, though, which is obviously not true. We know EXACTLY what expressed DNA "does" - it codes for proteins. We also know exactly what the translation of DNA-base-pair-triplets to amino acids is. Noncoding sections of DNA are obviously trickier, but some of them are reasonably well understood now as well (e.g. promotor sequences, binding sites for repressor proteins, etc.).
To figure out what A and B mean is in many ways simply to figure out how to predict what they will do in combination. And DNA has so many possible combinations...
I can hear the original poster hopping up and down with agitation at the DNA-centric message here even as we type :-)
The original poster's central [and correct!] point was that from a "functional" point of view, protein chemistry is more important than raw DNA, which I THINK is what you're getting at (if "A" and "B" in your example represent sequences coding for two separate proteins [or parts of one protein complex, like hemoglobin])
To clarify my analogy, I'm thinking of DNA as the "at, tr, grep, and cat" (ATGC, get it? Sorry, couldn't help myself. Watson and Crick made me do it...) of biology, compared to protein chemistry's "Xfree86, Mozilla, Sendmail, and Koffice". My point was just that while the tiny utilities are just a meager bit of the more broadly useful and complex applications, they are still extremely useful themselves, just as the DNA data available is itself of great (but very focussed) usefulness, even before we have better knowledge of the protein chemistry later. (we don't understand the source code well enough to sit down and rewrite XFree86 from scratch, but have a pretty good understanding of many of the little subroutines and how they might be put together into new "proglets"...)
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I don't know about that, necessarily, depends how you look at it:
grep fluorescent_green_protein_gene JellyFish >> bunnygenes; cat bunnygenes > bunny_egg_cell; cat bunny_egg_cell | mama_bunny > glowing_baby_bunny.
Like the "core" Unix tools, our existing biotech tools ARE very "low-level", as you point out. We're certainly quite some way from the biotech equivalent of "higher-level" mix-and-match projects like php-gtk, but we've got some very useful building blocks to work with...including the project that is the subject of this article, which appears to be intended for building simulations of larger biochemical pathways...the next stage of biotechnology which we can't yet do much of, as you say. Sadly, this means I'm still probably at least a decade away from taking over the world with an army of Atomic Mutant Zombie Clones®
Incidentally, I'd be willing to bet that a determined and/or skilled individual can do a LOT with a bronze axe...but I think one level of analogy is plenty, so I'll avoid belaboring the point. Besides, I understand what you mean: Hype bad. Results good. :-) .
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Because ANYBODY can write like this. Lawyers as a group(1) seem to like unnecessarily complicated laws and strange ways of wording things so that it's necessary to pay them piles of money to keep from getting flung in jail and/or bankrupted by silly lawsuits. In addition, I think the jargon adds to their mystique, and therefore their perceived value. (Would you feel a surgeon was worth the money if he/she said "One of your blood vessels in your heart was clogged up, so we whacked open your chest and wired in a new one"? Of course not...that's why they say "Myocardial infarction necessitated coronary bypass surgery" instead...)(2)
(1 - I say "as a group" because I know a number of individual lawyers, and none of them strike me as the type to encourage this sort of thing, at least not intentionally.)
2 - I am not a [real] doctor, and certainly not a real MEDICAL doctor and therefore may have my jargon mixed up, but you get the idea...)
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
For that matter, is "dynamical" even a real word? (Check the title of the page on the "BioSPICE" link above - "Arkin Laboratory for Dynamical Genomics"...)
Here's a real word for these people - "Neologism."...
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Definitely a good point, but I wouldn't underestimate the usefulness of simply being able to sequence better.
DNA Sequences alone can be/are useful for a lot of different research. Archaeologists and Anthropologists can use DNA sequences to help determine, for example, the relationship of one population to another and/or help trace migration of a population. Medical types can not only check for genetic diseases, but could also use DNA sequences to quickly check the identity of a pathogenic organism, if the sequencing technology becomes readily available enough. (Running a few PCR cycles is still much faster than trying to isolate and culture a pathogen from a swab). Zoologists and Paleontologists can use DNA sequences for similar purposes to what I mentioned for anthropologists and archaeologists, and can be handy for environmental research.
Until we understand the *function* of the proteins that are derived from these genes, all biotechnology can do is recombine the already existing technologies.Again, this is true...but don't forget that "recombining already existing technologies" can be pretty powerful and useful all by itself. (Heck, "recombining existing technologies" is, basically, a fundamental design principle of Unix-based systems, isn't it? I know MY Unix-based systems are extremely useful... I love my "|" key...)
I'm confident we'll be getting plenty of use out of DNA while we work on the harder problems of protein functions and chemistry
P.S. Thanks for reminding me...I've been meaning to download the folding@home client and throw some of my meager computing resources at helping out...
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
This, unfortunately, is EXACTLY why many of us disagree with your subject line...though your suggestion of a good privacy law is not unreasonable, the fact is, US Govt. Inc. has been showing itself more likely to do harm rather than good when it interferes. After all, the DMCA (for example) and the Indecent Communications Act [Yes, I called it that on purpose :-) ] were both, arguably, intended to protect artists and/or children...but only served to attempt serious harm to the rights of US internet users (and, indirectly, internet users elsewhere in the world). The CDA was fortunately swiftly slammed. I can only hope the DMCA is next, but fear there's too much money pouring in through lobbyists to fix it completely.
Given this track record, I'd be worried that the hypothetical "Internet Users Privacy Act" might contain provisions to, say:
- Require ISP's to send copies of personal data to a new Federal Office of Internet Privacy Protection to be checked for violations [and, "of course", to help track down child pornographers and/or tax evaders. Hey, this IS congress we're talking about...]
- Appropriation of $15,000,000 to investigate possible shady activities of Hormel [a clause tacked on by minimally clueful legislators trying to appear "tough on Spam"...]
- A clause making it illegal to make a left turn on tuesdays during a full moon unless your name is Myrna. [Don't you just love riders?]
- 27 clauses amending the DMCA and making it less comprehensible...
- Details of how complaints of privacy violation should be handled, such as requiring complaints be submitted as Microsoft Word 2001 documents...
Okay, okay, that's enough necro-equine flagellation from me...---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Seriously. In both cases I just can't bring myself to feel anything but mild glee over punishment being meted out to those being taken to court...but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the precedent that it sets.
This paragraph from the article, in particular:
In this case, the crime was elevated to felony status because the spam was sent using an unauthorized e-mail account and caused tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage.
As with so many of the "hacking" (cracking) cases, I REALLY wonder which orifice they pulled this dollar figure out of. Every time this happens, the notion that "hacking" (as the mainstream media calls it) ALWAYS results in HUGE expenses for the victim is more firmly engrained in public consciousness. Appending the words "with a computer" to the description of a crime causes the same ridiculous overreaction among legal types and the media as adding it to a patent seems to have on the US PTO, and cases like this don't help the problem.
Further, this precedent is subject to serious abuses. Imagine you start receiving a pile of junk email which appears that it may be relayed from one particular server. Perhaps, in an effort to be helpful, you decide to test the relay by sending a single message to yourself through it. You find the server does, indeed relay, and you report your findings to the ISP. The ISP's sysadmin, embarassed, reports you to the ISP's lawyers and you find YOURSELF being sued for "using an unauthorized e-mail account", and "costing" the ISP thousands of alleged dollars (It'll cost them thousands in advertising to 'spin' the incident until they get over the embarassment, you see...).
This kind of thing already happens too much, and will happen more since it's facilitated by minimally clueful (how's that for politically correct?) legislators, who pass laws like the DMCA.
("What, you legally purchased that DVD and the computer equipment you're using to view it? Doesn't matter, you embarassed us and we're suing you for using an unauthorized decoder...And claiming you cost us millions of dollars by doing so, you filthy pirate.")
Spamming definitely "feels" like a crime to me, but more of the "30 days in county jail, a couple of weeks of community service, and a fine" variety rather than the "up to 9 years in prison" sort.
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
<CondescendingParentVoice>Oh, and if everyone installed JumpOffABridge 2001 v1.1, would you install it too?</CondescendingParentVoice>
I guess MS Software is spread by peer pressure, just like other drugs! :-)
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
The article talks about the Windows drivers (complaining a bit about them - I assume they're still in development though). It does mention openGL support in the windows drivers...
Does anyone know if there will be DRI support for this chipset any time soon? One of these days I'll have to upgrade from my old Voodoo Banshee card...
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Ah, NOW we're getting somewhere. A fairly rational alternative. I think the only problem with it is economic - I think it's probably a lot cheaper for a farmer to invest in, say, equipment and materials geared towards corn farming, than trying to support many crops at once (or even one different crop every year).
the first step would be to mimic him [The Diety®] in his ways.Oh, very well...
Ahem... I HEREBY COMMAND YOU ALL TO CUT OFF YOUR... ...oh, never mind... :-)
Or did you mean things like creating new organisms? Or even whole new worlds? But then, isn't that what the opposition to this experiment is objecting to?
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
White. It's a lot like Chicken. (No, really...)
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Only problem is, they won't be getting any SCIENCE done then, and we'd have no way of telling which scientists we'd want to breed.
Worse, the scientists who spend the MOST time swatting moths and the LEAST time Sciencing are the ones who breed, producing a new generation of Scientists who are more interested in swatting and less in research, eventually producing really crappy scientists.
The idea isn't without merit, though. Just replace "Scientists" with "Legislators" and I think we're onto a winner! More bugswatting, Less bad lawmaking!
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Personally, I've been eagerly awaiting:
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Actually, they don't glow in the dark, they're fluorescent. They look pretty much normal except under ultraviolet light...sort of like flowers (which often have features that show up in the ultraviolet).
Though maybe the moths will have to worry about harassment from bees trying to pollinate them...
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Heh. "If God hadn't meant for us to fly, he wouldn't have given us hands to build airplanes with!"
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
That's nothing, I've got a screensaver built into my monitor's hardware. I just push the little button with the "circle with a line through it" symbol and up comes this screensaver. It appears to be a 3D animation of being lost inside of a coal mine without a light source. Neat! :-)
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
In my case, I "cheated" - I've been putting the QT libraries in /usr/local/qt-[version] (e.g. /usr/local/qt-2.2.4 /usr/local/qt-2.3.0) and just making a symbolic link /usr/local/qt to whichever one I'm using. When I want to try a new one, I put it in a new directory, compile it, change where /usr/local/qt points to, and go.
Having just installed qt-2.3.0 earlier today, I hadn't yet deleted qt-2.2.4, so I pointed the qt symbolic link to that, ran the ./configure script, then re-pointed the qt link back to qt-2.3.0.
Not a real elegant solution - I imagine the "current" KDE sources (i.e. CVS and/or beta versions coming soon) will have that fixed. Maybe if we're lucky they'll fix the current kde-2.1 scripts to realize that 2.3.0 is greater than 2.2.3....
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
The catch is (I THINK!) that Xfree86 support for freetype2 is optional, and not compiled by default. RENDER is in my xdpyinfo list, but I don't recall compiling it with freetype2 support - hence all of the recompiling I just tried...
The "undefined symbol" errors looked like they were all related to the truetype aliasing and such, which is what makes me wonder if my build of freetype2 was incomplete...
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I've been running KDE 2.1 on QT 2.2.4 and XFree86 4.0.2 just fine. (It's BEAUTIFUL, by the way!) Now I want to try anti-aliased fonts.
Firstly - I have the current CVS for the DRI drivers, which includes the Xft, Xrender, etc. library sections. I managed to get freetype2 built and installed (I think! There were some problems...), and configured the hosts.def file accordingly. I managed to get everything to build and install...but then KDE wouldn't start. (KSplash complaining about undefined symbols in the Xft library).
I figured maybe I needed to rebuild KDE (at least KDELIBS) against the new X stuff, so I tried. Firstly, the 2.1 configure script complains about 2.3.0 not being "QT >= 2.2.3", but I got around THAT. Trying to build, it errors out with similar complaints about undefined symbols in Xft...
So (to finally get to the point)...I figure either I need to rebuild QT (my next try), or I didn't actually successfully build freetype2, or I have to build all of X from scratch...
Anybody know any good "shortcuts" for me to add support for this feature? (I'm running on a "Slackware-Post-7.1" based distribution if it matters...)
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
It may very well be that I just don't "get" antialiasing...but I thought I understood the basic concept. That being the case, this question sounds funny to me.
Isn't "antialiasing" (to oversimplify) a form of "intelligent blurring"? (In this case, blurring the fonts corners a bit so that they blend a little smoother with the background).
If so...don't you LOSE detail (while improving the actual appearance) when you antialias?
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
(Don't tell anybody, but to be honest, it's been more a matter of feeling too lazy to download it and mess with it than a licensing issue. Quite frankly, I don't have a huge problem with the QPL, as much as I'd prefer to see it GPL'd. I just haven't felt that my code was running too slow at the moment...)
Wait a minute...did I just say "don't tell anybody" in the middle of a public slashdot post? Must be getting late. Can I go home yet? :-)
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Hey, cool! What better language to write a GUI version of EDLIN in that we've all been wanting for so long? :-)
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Personally, I love (in the platonic sense, you sickos!...) PHP. I'm looking forward to playing with this new stuff.
Just a few random comments/opinions on some issues that have come up here:
The "but it's not GPL!" issue seems to revolve around two things. One is that there is a clause in the license for PHP that says, to paraphrase, "if you use any of our code for something else, give us credit". This is apparently GPL-incompatible, but I don't personally have a moral problem with this. The other licensing issue is the Zend stuff, which when dealt with separate from PHP is under a different, more restrictive license (the "Zend Optimizer" which if I remember right is a separate product, is under the much-maligned QPL, apparently.
I tend to think of PHP as "PERL-lite". It's not as big or "full-featured" as PERL is, and is therefore of more limited (but more focused!) use. PHP does have what to me seems to be a very PERL-like syntax, though. Perhaps one might think of PHP as "Programming marijuana" which leads to escalation to Harder programming languages like PERL* :-). Like PERL, PHP can be worked with in either Object Oriented or standard Procedural ways (or a combination thereof), and both are similar (though I must admit I'm still slightly baffled on PERL OO - PHP doesn't use anything like bless(), for example...)
It LOOKS like "PHP-gtk" and the standard PHP will be separate projects, which is probably good, as it should keep bloat down while allowing each project to borrow relevant improvements from each other.
Mind you, I think the "bloat" issue is mostly nonexistent. The Linux Kernel itself might be considered extremely bloated...except that running "make config" "de-bloatifies" it by setting up to only compile what you need or want. PHP will almost certainly remain the same way.
Maybe now somebody will come up with a "flash authoring" tool for Linux using PHP's swf support (I've been wanting to "dabble" with flash animation, but I don't know of any linux tools for putting them together...)
(* - It's a joke! Really! No, I'm NOT trying to start a "war on drugs" flamewar!)---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Basically, it looks like it's "free but not GPL". (Personally, I don't have a philosophical problem with the "give us credit if you use our code" clause of the license, but that's me.)
The Zend Optimizer (which is optional, and a separate but related product, isn't it?) apparently uses the QPL according to the Gnu page mentioned above, which is the license that used to be used by QT and got the flamewars about the "freeness" of KDE going, wasn't it?
My personal solution is to go ahead and use PHP, but not bother with the separate Zend Optimizer download.
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"