Allchin said that post-NT 5.0, Microsoft will "take NT up into the traditional mainframe arena, but also down into the embedded and
real-time" spaces
He did say that this will be "post-NT 5.0," but notice that Linux is there already. We have Beowulf super-computers, Linux on OS/390, and embeded Linux. I think the fact that Linux has already accomplished several of NT's future goals and MS has resorted to attacking the development model rather than competing directly shows that MS is now playing catch-up with Linux (at least in some areas - there are still a few things NT does better, but the balance is shifting rapidly).
Academic studies may take longer to complete without market pressures to speed things along, while commercially-funded ones are at risk of cutting corners and reducing accuracy to reduce time-to-market.
Speed does not make science better, and rushing things along is almost always counterproductive in the world of science (just look to the cold-fusion debacle for a perfect example). The problem with adding commercial competition to scientific research is that the peer-review step gets left out in the name of speed, patents, and profit. Without peer review, you don't have science anymore. Other researchers have trouble repeating the experiments because of IP restrictions and the integrity of the data cannot be verified.
I would much rather know that the data and interpretation is correct, rather than know that it was generated very quickly.
I did look at the site and I do think it's supposed to be a joke, but I'm not entirely sure. People who do this kind of thing in real life often brag about it in the form of a joke. Partly because they think it's clever (look at me! I can torture and tell jokes!) and partly as an easy out if they talk themselves into trouble. A lot of these people think torturing animals is fine, but they also know that most people don't share that opinion. But rather than try to justify what they have done (most of them are cowards), they act as if it is all a big joke. This allows them to have a good laugh with other morons and most other people write them off as tasteless asses, so they don't feel as if they might get into real trouble or have a real confrontation because of their bragging.
These people certainly have the right to post whatever they want on the web, regardless of its poor taste, so long as there is no real animal cruelty going on (I suspect there isn't). This isn't really a matter of offending people, though, and they aren't being investigated for simply being offensive. I'm guessing that many of the people who think this site is funny think so because it is outrageous to the point of being unrealistic. Unfortunately, many of us have personal experience with people who have actually done outrageous things like this to animals. When you know people who would take this kind of site seriously, but think it's a clever idea for a new method of torture rather than offensive, then this isn't quite so funny. It also isn't obvious that this is a complete fabrication rather than sick people bragging and joking about their animal torture exploits.
I grew up in a small town where people didn't just make off-color jokes about flaming cats being thrown off bridges, some of them had really done it. Two guys who had dowsed a cat in gasoline, lit it on fire, and threw it off a 300 foot bridge were caught (they bragged in public) and eventually sentenced to 6 months (the max). Two years later they were both convicted for murder after breaking into a farm house and raping, torturing (for over a day), and killing the occupants. I knew people who bragged about beating cats in burlap bags with baseball bats. A friend had a cat that returned home one night with a plastic bag over its head, tied at the neck. It was hacking up blood and died on the way to the vet. The people responsible for that also thought it was pretty funny and got quite a few laughs out of it. People like this really would try to grow a cat in a jar if they were a little more creative.
Now, after that rant, let me say it again: if this is just a joke, they have every right to offend me with it. I don't have to look. But it is not at all obvious to me that this is entirely a joke, and for that reason it warrants investigation.
I think this post and story both reflect the schizophrenic attitudes that our culture has about youthfulness, which has been amplified by the tech industry. We have all of these 40+ year-olds running around, obsessing about not looking young enough and spending thousands trying to correct the 'problem.' Then they turn around and belittle and demonize anyone who actually is young. In the tech industry, everyone seems to want to hire sr. sysadmins, sr. developers, and sr. everything else with 7+ years of industry experience, a masters, and certifications in all the latest technologies (just look at the classifieds and compare the number of sr/non-sr positions that are advertised). These requirements would seem to indicate that the company is looking for someone well over 30. But, on the other hand, that sr. level, highly qualified developer had damn well better be no more than 23, straight out of college, unmarried with near-infinite energy reserves and willing to work 70 hrs a week for 40,000 a year. When (if) this person is found and hired, he will not be listened to (due to being to young to be capable of thinking) and when things go wrong, will be blamed for not speaking up about problems he knew were coming.
It's not the picture-taking that's bothering people. It's the cross referencing of pictures of everybody with a database that gets people upset. The right we are losing is the right to a presumption of innocence. Unless the police have reason to believe that I have commited a crime, they have no right to take my picture and check up on my history. This is no different than if they set up a checkpoint at the door and required everyone to present ID in order to do a background check before entering. This is just easier for them to carry out and removes my ability to consent to the check, because if I don't know they're doing it, I can't refuse. So there's another right we've just lost -- the right to decline criminal background checks ordered by the government. There have already been problems with some police departments using hidden cameras to photograph people driving their cars (and not doing anything wrong) and keeping the pictures on file for years (I think this was exposed on 60 Minutes a couple of months ago). What happens when they start combining these practices together and track where everyone is going all the time? The technology isn't that far away anymore.
If you would deny property owners the right to protect their property by imposing draconian limitations...
I don't know about this stadium specifically, but the vast majority of sports stadiums are publicly owned and payed for with taxes. Besides that, I don't consider it to be draconian to tell someone that they can't do non-consensual criminal background checks on everyone who enters their property. And it is really not draconian to tell the police and FBI that they cannot do secretive background checks on 100,000 people at a time. Even if this is private property we're talking about, it's the police (public employees whom we pay) who are spending their time and our money conducting these kinds of checks. Private property owners can request whatever the hell they want out of the government, but it is not infringing on their "essential liberties" for the government to refuse to grant the request.
This looks like a device patent rather than one of the infamous business method patents, so it shouldn't be a big deal. I would be surprised if you can buy any wireless device that has not been patented, and this one is no different. It just happens to have an interface that makes use of HTML. It doesn't patent wireless HTML interfaces in general, just one specific interface in one particular product. This won't prevent anyone else from designing (and patenting) their own wireless device with an HTML interface. It just can't be an exact copy of the GeoWorks device. Change the size of the screen and add/subtract a button and you're all set.
If you had followed the link to the screenshot provided in the article, you would have seen that the text is not ambiguous. Under the permissions section, it says 'This book cannot be read aloud.' Nothing ambiguous about that. This is in addition to such gems as 'No text selections can be copied from this book to the clipboard,' and 'This book cannot be lent or given to someone else.' Notice that they also acknowledge that the text for the book was taken from Project Gutenburg, which has the mission of providing free (speech and beer) access to books in the public domain or with expired copyrights.
This same web page has Adobe's reply to complaints about their permissions page.
A big part of the problem is that the PTO is using a completely non-obvious definition of 'obvious.' They seem to want an objective method of finding an answer to an inherently subjective question (Is this idea obvious?). The problem for them is that what is obvious to one person may not be obvious to another. This is why the Constitution requires the invention to not be 'obvious to a person of normal skill in the art' (or words to that effect). That is, Alta Vista's 'invention' should not be considered obvious by the average network programmer.
Of course, the PTO doesn't define 'obvious' the way you and I do, so they have thrown out any tests that a normal person would use to determine obviousness. Instead, they reason that if an idea or invention is truly obvious, it would have been mentioned in public already. To them, this means that the idea would have been published in a relevant professional journal or mentioned in a previous patent application. The problem with this logic is that professional journals don't generally accept obvious ideas for publication and most people who come up with obvious ideas don't file for patents on them. Here's an example: it seems obvious to me that I have to turn my PC on before I can use the compiler, but I challenge anyone to find a paper in a professional journal that discusses this as a method for improving programmer efficiency. The PTO, on the other hand, would reason that since this fact has never been published before, it must have been original and difficult to conceive.
Most reviews of this movie that I've read so far seem to be missing out on the surrealistic aspects in the story. IMO, most of the film had more to do with reflections on the absurd than with a critique of Hollywood/Art, although the critique does play a role. Examples of this are the obvious joy that Count Orlock gets out of playing an actor playing a vampire, the vampire attempting to negotiate with the director over which cast members are not really needed (so he could eat them), and the fact that the director is obviously more irritated that his crew is being killed off than frightened (he treats the situation as if it is a problem with an inexperienced actor misbehaving himself rather than a killer on the set). There were also some interesting comparisons made between opium addiction and vampirism, which is a nice twist on the vampire mythology.
If you have a good sense of the absurd, you will love this movie.
Dummies like me. I've wanted a small Beowulf cluster (like 3 or 4 machines) just to play around with since I heard about them. I love coding, but I hate doing sysadmin stuff, so I never wanted to spend the time learning how to set up a cluster manually. I have been hoping for years that somebody would put together a package like this.
This will also allow developers to write applications designed for clusters with at least some chance that other people will be able to use them. I have always wanted to run distributed neural nets on a Beowulf cluster, and now I'll actually be able to do it! Woo-hoo!
If utilities are publically owned, the
decisions about how much to produce, how, and who gets it are made politically.
First of all, a substantial number of utilities are publically owned. They're everywhere I live, and they work quite nicely. They've been that way for years. The private utilities are also heavily regulated, and they work well, also. So no, I won't trust you because you're an economist. The system works fine the way it is and I would rather not have people tampering with it based on nothing more than a religous belief in the "wisdom of the market."
The problems in CA stem from political action. California chose to deregulate the wholesale market, without deregulating the retail market.
This is true, but out of context. The utilities wanted it this way because they knew the public wouldn't go for electric bills that are $100 one month and $500 the next. This isn't something that was forced on the utilities -- they asked for it. Everyone expected the wholesale electricity prices to go up and the utilities were gambling on this expectation to inspire generation companies to build more power plants. The gamble failed.
One thing that many people don't seem to realize (even though it has been brought up in the news and/. repeatedly) is that there is really not a power shortage at all. This problem started because the generators that supply 25% of CA's power all went offline in the same week, supposedly for maintenance. This did create a temporary shortage. Because of the deregulated wholesale market, the prices went from $25/MWH to over $500/MWH in a couple of days. This caused the utilities to lose millions every day. A couple of weeks of that drove them to the point of bankruptcy. The stations are back in business now, but the wholesalers are refusing to sell to the utilities because of credit problems. Again, the utilities expected some of these price fluctuations, which is why they took the gamble, but they weren't expecting it to be as bad as it was. For anyone wondering why they weren't concerned about fixed prices for consumers when they expected costs to rise, it's because utilites don't make their big money on residential sales. The big money comes from industrial sales, and those contracts are usually based on wholesale costs, so the utilities can't lose. The problem is, if the utilities lose too much on residential, the guaranteed profits from industrial contracts don't matter. I'm not just talking out of my ass, here. I work for a utility and am responsible for some of the software that deals with industrial billing.
What was the first mistake? Their stupid, infeasible environmental laws, which are really about social and technological ignorance and NIMBY
rather than any realistic concern for the human environment.
There are very real environmental issues associated with power generation. Virutally all atmospheric physicists now agree that global warming is a reality and is being caused by human production of CO2. We should have laws to discourage unnecessary production of CO2. Besides that, the environmental laws of CA are a red herring. The power plants that supply California don't have to be in that state (and many aren't), they just have to be on the same electrical grid.
Study some political philosphy before you speak. There's a whole lot more to both fascism and socialism than who owns and/or controls property. Beyond that, you don't even get the distinction correct.
Fascist governments are not generally concerned with controling property (the Nazis were an exception). They generally leave it up to businesses to decide what should be done with property. If there is a conflict between a business and an individual, business always wins. Musollini once said something along the lines of 'Fascism is a system in which the needs of business take precedence over the needs of the people.'
Your description of socialism only applies to state socialism (and only the most extreme forms of state socialism, such as Stallinism). Classical Anarchism is a socialist philosophy that is also anti-statist, which means it doesn't have a place for government at all. Classical Anarchists also frequently reject the concept of property entirely. That makes your point moot -- no one can control something that does not exist. Those anarchists who do accept the notion of property generally accept that property can be either private or public, depending on the context (a house is private, but a factory is public).
If you think CNN or any other US media organization is representative of the Left, then you must not have ever met a real leftist. Compared to my political beliefs, the mainstream media is terribly conservative. Compared to Strom Thurmond, the media is pretty liberal. This probably means that, in reality, the media is fairly centrist. The only real leftist on TV that I can think of is Michael Moore, but his program is more entertainment than news.
If you leave the Left in power, they _will_ take your freedom to program, they will take your freedom to encrypt, and they will turn us into the world's newest socialist/fascist country if given enough rope to hang us with.
Just to nitpick, fascism is a right wing political ideology -- it has nothing to do with either the left or socialism. Pat Buchanan is a good example of a fascist, and he is definately conservative. Also, American leftists (the real ones - not your idealized 'CNN leftists') are generally strong civil libertarians. Ideologies that support strong civil liberties can be found on both the right (the Libertarian party) and the left (classical anarchism, progressives, the Green Party). Stallinism is only one particular incarnation of socialism and is NOT representative of socialism in general, just as the Nazi party is not representative of conservatives in general. Anyone who insists on characterizing civil liberties as a left vs. right battle is doing a huge disservice to other civil libertarians. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have poor records when it comes to civil liberties. Lets work together on this and argue about the real differences in our opinions rather than throwing up Left/Right boogeyman red herrings.
Perhaps a more honest answer is that their leftist contributors like gun control.
Before you get too deep into stereotypes (and red herings), many of us (the leftist ACLU supporters) are not in favor of gun control. I personally think gun control is poor social policy in America -- it can't be enforced and is not consistent with the culture of large portions of the country. But I do not believe gun ownership is a civil right, so it is not an issue for the ACLU to take up. The NRA covers that department sufficiently.
Free speech, unlike gun ownership, is a civil right. The ACLU should get involved any time the government or a government-sponsored organization (i.e. ICANN) starts coming up with policies that limit that right. It is not for you, ICANN, the Greys, or anyone else to decide who should or should not be granted a domain name. You may not care about having your own domain for non-commercial purposes, but I do. I want to be able to run my own web server off of my own box and say whatever the hell I want to say without risking some hypersensitive sysadmin wiping out my site because someone sent him a nastygram. I can't do that without my own domain name. TLDs have value beyond commercial value, but ICANN is refusing to acknowledge that.
It's important to remember that 100 years ago the US Bill of Rights was essentially unenforced. For example, during WWI, people were routinely imprisoned for publicly objecting to the war and the courts considered that to be constitutional at the time. McCarthyism was raging 50 years ago. In general, we have more freedom now (at least in the US), but we are also losing many freedoms that were won by previous generations. Why? Because too many people became content with their situation and stopped the fight.
The article has it wrong. Freedom on the net is in danger, but it isn't a matter of whether or not governments will let freedoms remain in place. The real issue is whether or not users are willing to fight to keep it free. If we want freedom, we can have it, but it will require a great deal of work, both online and offline. In the offline world, we must do a better job of keeping bad legislation from being passed and keeping organizations like the EFF funded. Online, people need to support projects and standards that will preserve freedoms and create alternatives to technologies that have fallen to censorship. It won't be easy, but it isn't impossible and it isn't something governments can stop if we don't give up.
Encryption is a good example of a successful struggle against government control of technology. The situation is still not perfect, but most governments have given up on controlling it. Anyone who wants to use encryption and/or steganography can use it now (and could before, even though the US gov. wouldn't admit to that). Governments can pass laws, but that doesn't mean they can enforce them if we don't allow them to be enforced.
As in the meat world, the price of freedom online is still eternal vigillance.
The question as to why patents on genes should be allowed is not a knee-jerk reaction -- it's critical thinking. Remember, patents are not allowed on scientific discoveries. Only inventions can be patented. So the real question here is 'Why should we make an exception for the discovery of genes?' None of these companies invented the genes.
These patents would be OK if they were patents on specific treatments or tests that happened to use those genes, but they aren't. They cover anything and everything one could possibly want to do with those genes. What if I wanted to use those genes to develop a way to give people four color receptors instead of the standard three? This isn't treatment for any existing disorder and is completely independent of anything that company might be doing with those genes, but it is still not allowed. That impedes innovation and is contrary to the purpose of the patent system.
I get mad every time I see something like this. A lot of people put a great deal of effort into fixing very real problems and getting others to fix their problems. They did a tremendous job. But instead of thanking them for their trouble and commending them for accomplishing a near-impossible task, they are now derided for doing there jobs too well and raising the alarm too effectively.
I spent 1998 and 1999 working on Y2K bugs for a power company. I spent over a year rewriting programs that had been running on old, non-compliant hardware (a VM machine connected to a mainframe). That machine really did crash when the date rolled over. We got most of the important stuff rewritten by Dec. 1999.
There were also quite a few problems with the hardware in substations and generating plants (although I did not personally work on those). Many of the substations had components that failed when the date rolled over. Those had to be tracked down and replaced (all of them). As it turned out, only around 0.5% of the ICs had a Y2K problem, but that would have been enough to destabilize the power grid if they had not been replaced. (BTW -- replacing was the cheap and easy part. Most of the money was spent just finding the chips.) There were also quite a few problems with generators that would shut down when the date rolled over. Some of these were not corrected until the middle of 1999!
Please do not perpetuate the myth that there were no significant Y2K problems to be resolved. Those of us who solved those problems deserve credit for averting a disaster, not derision for getting people to act.
This appears to be similar to the technique used by Hopfield's Mus Silicium neural net speech recognition contest. The solution ended up being that recognition occurs when a large number of neurons connected to the same output neuron 'synchronize' and fire at about the same time. The big difference between these approaches seems to be that Hopfield is using spiking neurons and these guys are using some form of back propagation to train smaller networks that have to agree on what some data set represents in order to return a positive result.
Microsoft could contribute proprietary code to a distribution, but why? They couldn't do much to make binaries that run on MS Linux incompatible with ELF binaries without rewriting portions of the kernel. Any kernel changes are covered by the GPL and would be patched (and not accepted into the official tree, making it expensive for MS to keep their changes up to date). They could acomplish the same sort of thing by writing their own windowing system, with an api separate from X, but why? People could install X anyway MS users would be cut off from all of the existing software. They could go with X, but have a proprietary window manager and toolkit, but what developer would use it? They would have a bigger audience by linking against the proprietary (if they were writing non-free software) version of QT, since most people already have free QT.
Traditionally, this is how science already works. The Free/Open Source software ideals are not original; they are rooted in the ideals of scientific research. In science, secrets are kept only to the point of publication, and at that point everything is disclosed for peer review. And, until recently, scientific discoveries could not be patented or claimed as "intellectual property" (a phrase that any scientist with integrity should consider to be an abomination). This is why science works. Any trend that puts commercial interests above the scientific method, and still claims to be scientific, is a threat to the legitimacy of science and should be rejected.
Several other posts in this thread have stated that the methods used in writing Free Software won't work in science and that science will grind to a halt without private funding and the patents that go along with it. They should read some history. Einstein objected to monetary interests interfering with science so much that he once said that it is essentially unethical for a person to be employed as a scientist. He believed that scientists should have other professions and do research as a hobby (he then remarked that he would have liked to be a plumber).
It is true that companies like Celera have to make a profit in order to stay in business. But it is not the job of the scientific comunity to help Celera make a profit any more than it is my job as a Free Software developer to help Microsoft make a profit. If Celera wants to participate in the scientific process, fine. If they can make a profit by doing so, that's also fine. The scientific comunity, however, should not compromise it's principles just to make sure the money Celera spent on research is realized in profits. To do so would compromise the legitimacy of any discoveries that Celera claims to have made and would damage the credibility of the scientific process in general. Celera should follow the same rules and traditions that other scientists do, and Science should be criticized for allowing them an exception (even though this is a relatively minor exception). Where would we be if Werner Heisenberg had demanded payment before revealing how he had formulated the uncertainty principle? Not posting to Slashdot, that's for sure.
There is a lot of neural machinery devoted to visual processing. Yet one doesn't need to be able to see to be able to think. So can we subtract the neurons and the corresponding connections devoted to the visual system from the number of neurons needed to think?
Unfortunately, this doesn't work out very well. It is true that you don't need a visual system to think, but you do need some sort of sensory input. This has been demonstrated with sensory deprivation experiments. People in sensory deprivation chambers quickly lose their ability to maintain coherent thoughts and begin having wild hallucinations. Why does this happen? If you remove the inputs to a neural net, the activity that is normally driven by sensory inputs begins to be driven by random neuronal activity. Normally, the random firings of neurons are overwhelmed by the sensory inputs. But if you remove the inputs, you're left with just the random activity driving the network.
I don't believe that Nader's issues have as much mainstream support as you say,
although I would be willing to look at any poll links you might provide.
Here's a poll from BusinessWeek (not a left wing source).
It's attached to a larger story about corporate power in general. This is one of Nader's core
issues. I think 72% either agreeing or agreeing strongly that corporations have too much power
qualifies at least this issue as mainstream.
I would like to point out that the Dems have not been in control the last eight
years--they've had the presidency, but not Congress, and I would say that they
have been functioning as one of the defenses.
Where were they with the Communications Decency Act? That's right. Democrats voted for it
in Congress and Clinton signed it into law. What about the DMCA? Again, this gained wide
support from the Democrats (although it has not yet been shown to be unconstitutional). The list
goes on. But my original point about the Dems refusing to act as a defense was in reference to
the Regan and Bush Sr. administrations when the Democrats did control Congress. They did very little
during that time to stop right wing justices from being appointed to the supreme court.
Corporate powermongering does not compare to the civil rights movement--nobody is
getting lynched by AT&T.
It isn't the same as the civil rights movement, but I wasn't trying to make that comparison.
The civil rights movement was an example of a social movement in which people were risking there
lives by giving support. The risks of supporting Nader are extremely small compared to what people
have had to go through in the past, so why do we get so much critisism for taking those risks?
If it isn't unreasonable to risk your life for civil rights, why is it unreasonable to risk having
Bush as president now? There is a risk of abortion rights being overturned and environmental laws being gutted, but I think the abortion issue is overblown (I think the rebublicans know that they will lose congress and the presidency if they really do away with abortion). Many environmental laws have already been gutted and Gore isn't the advocate he used to be.
Just as a side note about corporations and lynching, the Shell Oil company
is currently the subject of a lawsuit in California (it could actually be over now - I haven't checked
on it in a while) over the murders of labor leaders in Nigeria (I think that's the country). They
apparently used a company helicopter to transport members of the Nigerian military to the village
where the labor leaders lived and pointed them out. They were then arrested and executed by the military.
It doesn't happen here, but it does happen in third world countries and shouldn't be tolerated. I don't
think this is a fringe issue, either.
I'm not giving up on any issues. We are taking the risk of a Bush presidency, but that risk is
small compared to the risks people had to take in other social movements. People who supported civil
rights in the south risked hanging from a tree. Bush may want to hang me from a tree, but he won't.
The environment and abortion are serious issues, but the democrats haven't been much better than the
rebublicans on a national scale in the last 8 years. Gore won't support environmental policies that
risk a negative economic impact (even if the impact is only temporary) and even though women have a
legal right to an abortion, they can't find a doctor to perform one in 85 percent of the counties.
This is worse than when Clinton took office. The supreme court is another issue, but remember that
the most conservative justice was confirmed unanimously by a democratic senate (that includes
Al Gore's vote). The president nominates the justice, but the senate doesn't have to go along. The
democrats abdicated their duty to balance the executive branch when they had the opertunity.
I should also point out that the supreme court should be the final defense against unconstitutional
laws, not the only defense. The chief justice criticized both the president and congress last year
for passing blatantly unconstitional laws and leaving it up to the judicial system to sort out the
mess. This has to stop and politicians who engage in this kind of behavior need
to be held accountable. Unconstitutional laws need to be stopped at the source.
Many of the issues raised by Nader get a lot of support in the polls, but people are too afraid to stand up for what they believe in. These aren't fringe issues, even though the two major parties want you to believe they are. A large majority of americans believe that corporations have too much power. Why don't the democrats and republicans address this instead of bowing down before their masters?
Nader took 100 000 of the Florida vote! That vote could have been Gore's and this whole
thing would be over with Gore for President! I was seething when I went to bed last night,
after reading that Bush won Florida last night at about 1:30.
Nader didn't take anyone's vote. People voted for Nader because they have been abandoned, ignored,
and betrayed by the two major parties. Gore is not entitled to anyone's vote, liberal or otherwise.
Just like any other candidate, he has to earn his votes, and in this case he didn't. The
Clinton/Gore administration alienated a significant portion of their former supporters, and now
Gore is paying the price. Blame him. Don't blame those of us who won't cave into a system
that insists on second-best.
I used to support Gore, but the turning point for me was the gross behavior of this administration
during the WTO demonstrations here in Seattle. If you still think I should have voted for Gore,
then tell me with a straight face why I should support a party that considers my beliefs to be
on the fringe. Tell me why I should support the party that violated my first amendment rights by
declaring downtown Seattle to be off-limits to political protest. Tell me why I should vote for a
party that supported gassing and beating those of us who disagree with their policies. I will not
support either faction of the US Corporate Party. I will not support a candidate who's best
argument for me to change my vote amounts to nothing more than a scary bedtime story
about the Republican monster under my bed.
Bush is worse than Gore; I won't debate that. But we cannot cause change in a corrupt system by
continuing to vote for corruption. Those who voted for Gore out of fear did the equivalent of
paying off a gangster for 'protection' from the guy across the street. I won't do it and I won't
feel guilty on behalf of those who continue to pay.
Slashdot Mirror
He did say that this will be "post-NT 5.0," but notice that Linux is there already. We have Beowulf super-computers, Linux on OS/390, and embeded Linux. I think the fact that Linux has already accomplished several of NT's future goals and MS has resorted to attacking the development model rather than competing directly shows that MS is now playing catch-up with Linux (at least in some areas - there are still a few things NT does better, but the balance is shifting rapidly).
Speed does not make science better, and rushing things along is almost always counterproductive in the world of science (just look to the cold-fusion debacle for a perfect example). The problem with adding commercial competition to scientific research is that the peer-review step gets left out in the name of speed, patents, and profit. Without peer review, you don't have science anymore. Other researchers have trouble repeating the experiments because of IP restrictions and the integrity of the data cannot be verified.
I would much rather know that the data and interpretation is correct, rather than know that it was generated very quickly.
I did look at the site and I do think it's supposed to be a joke, but I'm not entirely sure. People who do this kind of thing in real life often brag about it in the form of a joke. Partly because they think it's clever (look at me! I can torture and tell jokes!) and partly as an easy out if they talk themselves into trouble. A lot of these people think torturing animals is fine, but they also know that most people don't share that opinion. But rather than try to justify what they have done (most of them are cowards), they act as if it is all a big joke. This allows them to have a good laugh with other morons and most other people write them off as tasteless asses, so they don't feel as if they might get into real trouble or have a real confrontation because of their bragging.
I grew up in a small town where people didn't just make off-color jokes about flaming cats being thrown off bridges, some of them had really done it. Two guys who had dowsed a cat in gasoline, lit it on fire, and threw it off a 300 foot bridge were caught (they bragged in public) and eventually sentenced to 6 months (the max). Two years later they were both convicted for murder after breaking into a farm house and raping, torturing (for over a day), and killing the occupants. I knew people who bragged about beating cats in burlap bags with baseball bats. A friend had a cat that returned home one night with a plastic bag over its head, tied at the neck. It was hacking up blood and died on the way to the vet. The people responsible for that also thought it was pretty funny and got quite a few laughs out of it. People like this really would try to grow a cat in a jar if they were a little more creative.
Now, after that rant, let me say it again: if this is just a joke, they have every right to offend me with it. I don't have to look. But it is not at all obvious to me that this is entirely a joke, and for that reason it warrants investigation.
I think this post and story both reflect the schizophrenic attitudes that our culture has about youthfulness, which has been amplified by the tech industry. We have all of these 40+ year-olds running around, obsessing about not looking young enough and spending thousands trying to correct the 'problem.' Then they turn around and belittle and demonize anyone who actually is young. In the tech industry, everyone seems to want to hire sr. sysadmins, sr. developers, and sr. everything else with 7+ years of industry experience, a masters, and certifications in all the latest technologies (just look at the classifieds and compare the number of sr/non-sr positions that are advertised). These requirements would seem to indicate that the company is looking for someone well over 30. But, on the other hand, that sr. level, highly qualified developer had damn well better be no more than 23, straight out of college, unmarried with near-infinite energy reserves and willing to work 70 hrs a week for 40,000 a year. When (if) this person is found and hired, he will not be listened to (due to being to young to be capable of thinking) and when things go wrong, will be blamed for not speaking up about problems he knew were coming.
If you would deny property owners the right to protect their property by imposing draconian limitations...
I don't know about this stadium specifically, but the vast majority of sports stadiums are publicly owned and payed for with taxes. Besides that, I don't consider it to be draconian to tell someone that they can't do non-consensual criminal background checks on everyone who enters their property. And it is really not draconian to tell the police and FBI that they cannot do secretive background checks on 100,000 people at a time. Even if this is private property we're talking about, it's the police (public employees whom we pay) who are spending their time and our money conducting these kinds of checks. Private property owners can request whatever the hell they want out of the government, but it is not infringing on their "essential liberties" for the government to refuse to grant the request.
This looks like a device patent rather than one of the infamous business method patents, so it shouldn't be a big deal. I would be surprised if you can buy any wireless device that has not been patented, and this one is no different. It just happens to have an interface that makes use of HTML. It doesn't patent wireless HTML interfaces in general, just one specific interface in one particular product. This won't prevent anyone else from designing (and patenting) their own wireless device with an HTML interface. It just can't be an exact copy of the GeoWorks device. Change the size of the screen and add/subtract a button and you're all set.
This same web page has Adobe's reply to complaints about their permissions page.
Of course, the PTO doesn't define 'obvious' the way you and I do, so they have thrown out any tests that a normal person would use to determine obviousness. Instead, they reason that if an idea or invention is truly obvious, it would have been mentioned in public already. To them, this means that the idea would have been published in a relevant professional journal or mentioned in a previous patent application. The problem with this logic is that professional journals don't generally accept obvious ideas for publication and most people who come up with obvious ideas don't file for patents on them. Here's an example: it seems obvious to me that I have to turn my PC on before I can use the compiler, but I challenge anyone to find a paper in a professional journal that discusses this as a method for improving programmer efficiency. The PTO, on the other hand, would reason that since this fact has never been published before, it must have been original and difficult to conceive.
If you have a good sense of the absurd, you will love this movie.
This will also allow developers to write applications designed for clusters with at least some chance that other people will be able to use them. I have always wanted to run distributed neural nets on a Beowulf cluster, and now I'll actually be able to do it! Woo-hoo!
First of all, a substantial number of utilities are publically owned. They're everywhere I live, and they work quite nicely. They've been that way for years. The private utilities are also heavily regulated, and they work well, also. So no, I won't trust you because you're an economist. The system works fine the way it is and I would rather not have people tampering with it based on nothing more than a religous belief in the "wisdom of the market."
The problems in CA stem from political action. California chose to deregulate the wholesale market, without deregulating the retail market.
This is true, but out of context. The utilities wanted it this way because they knew the public wouldn't go for electric bills that are $100 one month and $500 the next. This isn't something that was forced on the utilities -- they asked for it. Everyone expected the wholesale electricity prices to go up and the utilities were gambling on this expectation to inspire generation companies to build more power plants. The gamble failed.
One thing that many people don't seem to realize (even though it has been brought up in the news and /. repeatedly) is that there is really not a power shortage at all. This problem started because the generators that supply 25% of CA's power all went offline in the same week, supposedly for maintenance. This did create a temporary shortage. Because of the deregulated wholesale market, the prices went from $25/MWH to over $500/MWH in a couple of days. This caused the utilities to lose millions every day. A couple of weeks of that drove them to the point of bankruptcy. The stations are back in business now, but the wholesalers are refusing to sell to the utilities because of credit problems. Again, the utilities expected some of these price fluctuations, which is why they took the gamble, but they weren't expecting it to be as bad as it was. For anyone wondering why they weren't concerned about fixed prices for consumers when they expected costs to rise, it's because utilites don't make their big money on residential sales. The big money comes from industrial sales, and those contracts are usually based on wholesale costs, so the utilities can't lose. The problem is, if the utilities lose too much on residential, the guaranteed profits from industrial contracts don't matter. I'm not just talking out of my ass, here. I work for a utility and am responsible for some of the software that deals with industrial billing.
What was the first mistake? Their stupid, infeasible environmental laws, which are really about social and technological ignorance and NIMBY rather than any realistic concern for the human environment.
There are very real environmental issues associated with power generation. Virutally all atmospheric physicists now agree that global warming is a reality and is being caused by human production of CO2. We should have laws to discourage unnecessary production of CO2. Besides that, the environmental laws of CA are a red herring. The power plants that supply California don't have to be in that state (and many aren't), they just have to be on the same electrical grid.
Fascist governments are not generally concerned with controling property (the Nazis were an exception). They generally leave it up to businesses to decide what should be done with property. If there is a conflict between a business and an individual, business always wins. Musollini once said something along the lines of 'Fascism is a system in which the needs of business take precedence over the needs of the people.'
Your description of socialism only applies to state socialism (and only the most extreme forms of state socialism, such as Stallinism). Classical Anarchism is a socialist philosophy that is also anti-statist, which means it doesn't have a place for government at all. Classical Anarchists also frequently reject the concept of property entirely. That makes your point moot -- no one can control something that does not exist. Those anarchists who do accept the notion of property generally accept that property can be either private or public, depending on the context (a house is private, but a factory is public).
If you leave the Left in power, they _will_ take your freedom to program, they will take your freedom to encrypt, and they will turn us into the world's newest socialist/fascist country if given enough rope to hang us with.
Just to nitpick, fascism is a right wing political ideology -- it has nothing to do with either the left or socialism. Pat Buchanan is a good example of a fascist, and he is definately conservative. Also, American leftists (the real ones - not your idealized 'CNN leftists') are generally strong civil libertarians. Ideologies that support strong civil liberties can be found on both the right (the Libertarian party) and the left (classical anarchism, progressives, the Green Party). Stallinism is only one particular incarnation of socialism and is NOT representative of socialism in general, just as the Nazi party is not representative of conservatives in general. Anyone who insists on characterizing civil liberties as a left vs. right battle is doing a huge disservice to other civil libertarians. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have poor records when it comes to civil liberties. Lets work together on this and argue about the real differences in our opinions rather than throwing up Left/Right boogeyman red herrings.
Before you get too deep into stereotypes (and red herings), many of us (the leftist ACLU supporters) are not in favor of gun control. I personally think gun control is poor social policy in America -- it can't be enforced and is not consistent with the culture of large portions of the country. But I do not believe gun ownership is a civil right, so it is not an issue for the ACLU to take up. The NRA covers that department sufficiently.
Free speech, unlike gun ownership, is a civil right. The ACLU should get involved any time the government or a government-sponsored organization (i.e. ICANN) starts coming up with policies that limit that right. It is not for you, ICANN, the Greys, or anyone else to decide who should or should not be granted a domain name. You may not care about having your own domain for non-commercial purposes, but I do. I want to be able to run my own web server off of my own box and say whatever the hell I want to say without risking some hypersensitive sysadmin wiping out my site because someone sent him a nastygram. I can't do that without my own domain name. TLDs have value beyond commercial value, but ICANN is refusing to acknowledge that.
The article has it wrong. Freedom on the net is in danger, but it isn't a matter of whether or not governments will let freedoms remain in place. The real issue is whether or not users are willing to fight to keep it free. If we want freedom, we can have it, but it will require a great deal of work, both online and offline. In the offline world, we must do a better job of keeping bad legislation from being passed and keeping organizations like the EFF funded. Online, people need to support projects and standards that will preserve freedoms and create alternatives to technologies that have fallen to censorship. It won't be easy, but it isn't impossible and it isn't something governments can stop if we don't give up.
Encryption is a good example of a successful struggle against government control of technology. The situation is still not perfect, but most governments have given up on controlling it. Anyone who wants to use encryption and/or steganography can use it now (and could before, even though the US gov. wouldn't admit to that). Governments can pass laws, but that doesn't mean they can enforce them if we don't allow them to be enforced.
As in the meat world, the price of freedom online is still eternal vigillance.
These patents would be OK if they were patents on specific treatments or tests that happened to use those genes, but they aren't. They cover anything and everything one could possibly want to do with those genes. What if I wanted to use those genes to develop a way to give people four color receptors instead of the standard three? This isn't treatment for any existing disorder and is completely independent of anything that company might be doing with those genes, but it is still not allowed. That impedes innovation and is contrary to the purpose of the patent system.
I spent 1998 and 1999 working on Y2K bugs for a power company. I spent over a year rewriting programs that had been running on old, non-compliant hardware (a VM machine connected to a mainframe). That machine really did crash when the date rolled over. We got most of the important stuff rewritten by Dec. 1999.
There were also quite a few problems with the hardware in substations and generating plants (although I did not personally work on those). Many of the substations had components that failed when the date rolled over. Those had to be tracked down and replaced (all of them). As it turned out, only around 0.5% of the ICs had a Y2K problem, but that would have been enough to destabilize the power grid if they had not been replaced. (BTW -- replacing was the cheap and easy part. Most of the money was spent just finding the chips.) There were also quite a few problems with generators that would shut down when the date rolled over. Some of these were not corrected until the middle of 1999!
Please do not perpetuate the myth that there were no significant Y2K problems to be resolved. Those of us who solved those problems deserve credit for averting a disaster, not derision for getting people to act.
This appears to be similar to the technique used by Hopfield's Mus Silicium neural net speech recognition contest. The solution ended up being that recognition occurs when a large number of neurons connected to the same output neuron 'synchronize' and fire at about the same time. The big difference between these approaches seems to be that Hopfield is using spiking neurons and these guys are using some form of back propagation to train smaller networks that have to agree on what some data set represents in order to return a positive result.
Microsoft could contribute proprietary code to a distribution, but why? They couldn't do much to make binaries that run on MS Linux incompatible with ELF binaries without rewriting portions of the kernel. Any kernel changes are covered by the GPL and would be patched (and not accepted into the official tree, making it expensive for MS to keep their changes up to date). They could acomplish the same sort of thing by writing their own windowing system, with an api separate from X, but why? People could install X anyway MS users would be cut off from all of the existing software. They could go with X, but have a proprietary window manager and toolkit, but what developer would use it? They would have a bigger audience by linking against the proprietary (if they were writing non-free software) version of QT, since most people already have free QT.
Several other posts in this thread have stated that the methods used in writing Free Software won't work in science and that science will grind to a halt without private funding and the patents that go along with it. They should read some history. Einstein objected to monetary interests interfering with science so much that he once said that it is essentially unethical for a person to be employed as a scientist. He believed that scientists should have other professions and do research as a hobby (he then remarked that he would have liked to be a plumber).
It is true that companies like Celera have to make a profit in order to stay in business. But it is not the job of the scientific comunity to help Celera make a profit any more than it is my job as a Free Software developer to help Microsoft make a profit. If Celera wants to participate in the scientific process, fine. If they can make a profit by doing so, that's also fine. The scientific comunity, however, should not compromise it's principles just to make sure the money Celera spent on research is realized in profits. To do so would compromise the legitimacy of any discoveries that Celera claims to have made and would damage the credibility of the scientific process in general. Celera should follow the same rules and traditions that other scientists do, and Science should be criticized for allowing them an exception (even though this is a relatively minor exception). Where would we be if Werner Heisenberg had demanded payment before revealing how he had formulated the uncertainty principle? Not posting to Slashdot, that's for sure.
Unfortunately, this doesn't work out very well. It is true that you don't need a visual system to think, but you do need some sort of sensory input. This has been demonstrated with sensory deprivation experiments. People in sensory deprivation chambers quickly lose their ability to maintain coherent thoughts and begin having wild hallucinations. Why does this happen? If you remove the inputs to a neural net, the activity that is normally driven by sensory inputs begins to be driven by random neuronal activity. Normally, the random firings of neurons are overwhelmed by the sensory inputs. But if you remove the inputs, you're left with just the random activity driving the network.
Here's a poll from BusinessWeek (not a left wing source). It's attached to a larger story about corporate power in general. This is one of Nader's core issues. I think 72% either agreeing or agreeing strongly that corporations have too much power qualifies at least this issue as mainstream.
I would like to point out that the Dems have not been in control the last eight years--they've had the presidency, but not Congress, and I would say that they have been functioning as one of the defenses.
Where were they with the Communications Decency Act? That's right. Democrats voted for it in Congress and Clinton signed it into law. What about the DMCA? Again, this gained wide support from the Democrats (although it has not yet been shown to be unconstitutional). The list goes on. But my original point about the Dems refusing to act as a defense was in reference to the Regan and Bush Sr. administrations when the Democrats did control Congress. They did very little during that time to stop right wing justices from being appointed to the supreme court.
Corporate powermongering does not compare to the civil rights movement--nobody is getting lynched by AT&T.
It isn't the same as the civil rights movement, but I wasn't trying to make that comparison. The civil rights movement was an example of a social movement in which people were risking there lives by giving support. The risks of supporting Nader are extremely small compared to what people have had to go through in the past, so why do we get so much critisism for taking those risks? If it isn't unreasonable to risk your life for civil rights, why is it unreasonable to risk having Bush as president now? There is a risk of abortion rights being overturned and environmental laws being gutted, but I think the abortion issue is overblown (I think the rebublicans know that they will lose congress and the presidency if they really do away with abortion). Many environmental laws have already been gutted and Gore isn't the advocate he used to be.
Just as a side note about corporations and lynching, the Shell Oil company is currently the subject of a lawsuit in California (it could actually be over now - I haven't checked on it in a while) over the murders of labor leaders in Nigeria (I think that's the country). They apparently used a company helicopter to transport members of the Nigerian military to the village where the labor leaders lived and pointed them out. They were then arrested and executed by the military. It doesn't happen here, but it does happen in third world countries and shouldn't be tolerated. I don't think this is a fringe issue, either.
The environment and abortion are serious issues, but the democrats haven't been much better than the rebublicans on a national scale in the last 8 years. Gore won't support environmental policies that risk a negative economic impact (even if the impact is only temporary) and even though women have a legal right to an abortion, they can't find a doctor to perform one in 85 percent of the counties. This is worse than when Clinton took office. The supreme court is another issue, but remember that the most conservative justice was confirmed unanimously by a democratic senate (that includes Al Gore's vote). The president nominates the justice, but the senate doesn't have to go along. The democrats abdicated their duty to balance the executive branch when they had the opertunity.
I should also point out that the supreme court should be the final defense against unconstitutional laws, not the only defense. The chief justice criticized both the president and congress last year for passing blatantly unconstitional laws and leaving it up to the judicial system to sort out the mess. This has to stop and politicians who engage in this kind of behavior need to be held accountable. Unconstitutional laws need to be stopped at the source.
Many of the issues raised by Nader get a lot of support in the polls, but people are too afraid to stand up for what they believe in. These aren't fringe issues, even though the two major parties want you to believe they are. A large majority of americans believe that corporations have too much power. Why don't the democrats and republicans address this instead of bowing down before their masters?
Nader didn't take anyone's vote. People voted for Nader because they have been abandoned, ignored, and betrayed by the two major parties. Gore is not entitled to anyone's vote, liberal or otherwise. Just like any other candidate, he has to earn his votes, and in this case he didn't. The Clinton/Gore administration alienated a significant portion of their former supporters, and now Gore is paying the price. Blame him. Don't blame those of us who won't cave into a system that insists on second-best.
I used to support Gore, but the turning point for me was the gross behavior of this administration during the WTO demonstrations here in Seattle. If you still think I should have voted for Gore, then tell me with a straight face why I should support a party that considers my beliefs to be on the fringe. Tell me why I should support the party that violated my first amendment rights by declaring downtown Seattle to be off-limits to political protest. Tell me why I should vote for a party that supported gassing and beating those of us who disagree with their policies. I will not support either faction of the US Corporate Party. I will not support a candidate who's best argument for me to change my vote amounts to nothing more than a scary bedtime story about the Republican monster under my bed.
Bush is worse than Gore; I won't debate that. But we cannot cause change in a corrupt system by continuing to vote for corruption. Those who voted for Gore out of fear did the equivalent of paying off a gangster for 'protection' from the guy across the street. I won't do it and I won't feel guilty on behalf of those who continue to pay.