It means that although the DNA will remain the same, how it is transcripted into proteins (and how often, and in reaction to what stimuli) changes. That is the purview of epigenetic study (the epi- prefix meaning over or above). Here's a useful link.
What the article is discussing is how methylation differs between very young and very old people. The abstract of the original paper may be more instructive:
Human aging cannot be fully understood in terms of the constrained genetic setting. Epigenetic drift is an alternative means of explaining age-associated alterations. To address this issue, we performed whole-genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS) of newborn and centenarian genomes. The centenarian DNA had a lower DNA methylation content and a reduced correlation in the methylation status of neighboring cytosine—phosphate—guanine (CpGs) throughout the genome in comparison with the more homogeneously methylated newborn DNA. The more hypomethylated CpGs observed in the centenarian DNA compared with the neonate covered all genomic compartments, such as promoters, exonic, intronic, and intergenic regions. For regulatory regions, the most hypomethylated sequences in the centenarian DNA were present mainly at CpG-poor promoters and in tissue-specific genes, whereas a greater level of DNA methylation was observed in CpG island promoters. We extended the study to a larger cohort of newborn and nonagenarian samples using a 450,000 CpG-site DNA methylation microarray that reinforced the observation of more hypomethylated DNA sequences in the advanced age group. WGBS and 450,000 analyses of middle-age individuals demonstrated DNA methylomes in the crossroad between the newborn and the nonagenarian/centenarian groups. Our study constitutes a unique DNA methylation analysis of the extreme points of human life at a single-nucleotide resolution level.
what I understand from that wall of text is this: The paper puts forward is another factor that contributes to errors cropping up causing diseases associated with old age, like cancer. Methylation controls (or should that be retards?) transcriptional activity, so a change in methylation patterns, or a drop in the occurence of methylation, would change the types of activities the DNA undergoes, and change the probability (probably upwards) of things going wrong.
I am but a lowly undergrad who doesn't pay as much attention is lectures as he should, so please someone correct me if I am wrong.
Why don't you ever try to quote your arguments, or paraphrase the gist of them? Why do you just place cryptic links full of wordspam agreeing with your world-veiw? Here's a link to a concept I think you're using here. Argumentum ad tl:dr basically means you're burying your opponent in reams of text that could meaningfully be expressed in a few sentences.
An easy summary of what your link has to say is this:"I am a gay man, and therefore I speak for all gays; however, those gosh darn gay activists on the news DON'T speak for all gays, so have I proclaimed by the power vested in me by my suspicion of the evil government. When gay activism was repealing laws that criminalized homosexuality, I supported it, but now that they're trying to make NEW gosh darned laws making gay marriage legal, I don't support it because it goes against the beliefs of all these conservative Christians who have been so nice to me. In fact, "no major religious conservative has called for legal measures against homosexuals.", they're just "acting defensively, in working to overturn gay rights legislation that attacked their most deeply held beliefs.""
And my reply to that argument is: "Riiiiiight... Totally only defensively, and your deeply held religious beliefs TOTALLY have more importance than my life and my freedom
For example, in spite of claims that persons with same-sex attraction (SSA) are ‘born that way’ and can’t change, there is no scientific evidence that to back up these assertions,[1] and plenty of evidence that SSA is rooted in early negative experiences[2] and that change is possible.[3] Many teenagers who think they might be “gay” discover later they aren’t.
The last claim is true. Sexuality is confusing, and a lot of teenagers might think they're X when really they're Y, or even Z. Having more knowledge about the spectrum of human sexual behaviour just helps them solve their confusion quicker. Everything else in that paragraph is just plain bullshit.
Sexually transmitted diseases are rampant in the gay community. Since 1981, 300,000 MSM have died of AIDS, and 6,000 are expected to die this year and every year for the foreseeable future. According to the CDC, in 2008, 17,940 MSM were diagnosed with HIV infections, an increase of 17% from 2005. MSM accounted for 53% of all new infections. MSM are 44 to 86 times more likely to be diagnosed HIV positive than men who don’t.
Do you know why those health statistics use the term MSM (Men who have Sex with Men)? Because they encompass everything from gay and proud fashion designers who live in San Fransisco and attend pride, right down to conservative, anti-gay, religious leaders, so deep in the closet they might as well be in Narnia. If homosexuals/bisexuals were not forced by public opinion into hiding and marginalizing their sexual behaviour (and despite how gay and free the big cities are, it's still a thing in most countries, even the most progressive ones), it would be safer, much more like heterosexual dating patterns.
Did you know that as among abstinence only taught straight teens, sex remains just as high, yet condom usage falls much lower, and anal sex rates increase because girls think that preserving their hymens somehow maintains their "virginity".
This has diverted attention from Savage’s objective: promoting his “It gets better,” campaign, the purpose of which is to encourage confused and troubled teenagers to ‘come out’ and experiment with homosexuality.
Anyone with basic comprehension skills will realize within moments of reading/watching an "It Get's Better" testimonial that it has NOTHING to do WHATSOEVER with "converting" or "corrupting" young people into trying something they might not normally do, and EVERYTHING to do with telling young LGBT people who need to deal with fuckhead parents and communities with attitudes like yours, that they shouldn't despair, and definitely SHOULD NOT commit suicide, but rather soldier on till they become independent adults, then GTFO that cow town, and into the big city.
I don't think so. The vast majority of people respect homosexuals.
The homosexual militancy tries to project an image of poor victims,
but, in 2012, that is not so
I know right? Like how you apparently support them! And apparently it's just the militant ones you don't like, because apparently they're giving the media this idea that they're poor victims! How dare those kids kill themselves after years of homophobic bullying, they're giving the world the wrong impression about how much they are respected!
I TOTALLY get you! I would like to subscribe to your newsletter for more of your idea
Fuckwit. You don't seem to realize heterosexuality is no guarantee someone will procreate, and homosexuality is not some promise that someone will not. Artificial insemination. Sperm banks. Idiots like you who think they're so intelligent and that intelligence is genetic usually know all about these things because they're rejected from every sperm bank they apply to.
You think that a development of a software must be paid by the sales of licenses.
No I don't think they MUST be paid, but history shows that this is the most effective way to get software into the most user's hands. A market, for reasons that involve psychology and economics, will spread something faster than a charitable donation, albeit not very equally.
You have to get paid for developing the software itself. Find a client that is in need of a software and talk with him about the cost of development, what he really needs and what you will charge.
Here's the thing, finding someone who'll bankroll you or your team of developers for a year or so to get a project going isn't very easy, because the costs for funding the ENTIRE project is likely to be sky high, unless the project were trivially easy, in which case the customer (in many but not all cases) might as well learn basic coding and do it themselves. What is more likely to be a successful business model is to identify an area of activity or a function that could benefit from software, code the project, and then sell licenses to users who need/want to use the software. Bespoke software is now only commissioned by large organizations, or very rich people with lots of money to spare, history shows that this is not a very big market, and does not lead to more people using the software.
Crowd-funding like Kickstarter seems to be a very good way to get video games funded, but I don't think it's ideal for other classes of software
It is not even true that you have no advantage once your code is published. The intimate knowledge of the code makes you the most likely developer if an improvement is required.
This is true. But unless the code is purposely obfuscated or the project is appropriately labyrinthine, the advantage is a tiny one indeed.
It just stops you from simple extorting money in exchange of future development for a captive client.
This isn't the 80's any more. Any self-respecting software user will prefer (if not outright demand) software that uses standard data formats and allows for migrating data, for maximum interoperability and an easy way to migrate away from the software if quality should decline. Lock-in can still be achieved, source or no source, if the task is difficult enough (cough cough, GCC compiler, cough cough) and the source code is crazy complicated enough (choke choke, GCC compiler, choke choke). Goodness I think I have TB!
I couldn't finish the video because it was so funny! I am still chuckling in a bad way as I type this. Embarrassment humour always makes me laugh, yet wince in sympathy at the same time, I can only take so much before I'm uncomfortable. This is so awkward, uncool and hilariously 40-year old virgin stupid I just cannot
OBLIGATORY CONSPIRACY THEORY: I think it was an epic troll by someone who doesn't like Microsoft, maybe someone from nearby Finland let go because of Nokia's "restructuring"?
Well, yes and the same can be said with monopolies : it disadvantages you horribly to not create a monopoly if you have the occasion.
A competitor showing up on the scene and trying to do better than you is one thing, but having them take the result of your work at no cost to themselves, then using it to craft a better product (since their software will have your work + their work), or even just selling the exact product you made, maybe with a bigger marketing budget since they didn't use any money on development (quite a few unscrupulous companies actually do these things ripping off OSS projects), that is quite another. When products exist in bits and bytes, things become difficult because making/designing them takes just as much work, but copying them takes a few milliseconds of processors whizzing and disks writing.
I think however that you are not seeing this from the right angle : if you share the source code, you are willing to erase any advantage you have, you are not disadvantaged. That would be the free market solution in an ideal world....
I agree with you that we are looking at this from different angles. However, I don't think my angle is incorrect. Sharing the source code is obviously good for everyone (original developers, users and possible future developers), I am not disagreeing with you there, but the EFFECTS of sharing the code may not be good for the original developers. If the original developers are willing to give up their advantages, what incentive do they have for creating the software in the first place? This is not an ideal world, freeloaders and plagiarists abound who are more than willing to take FLOSS code (or even leaked closed source code) and make their own products (whose code they do NOT share). This does not affect developers who do it for fun/education purposes/sense of goodwill, but what about the majority of developers who do it for money? Already the prestige factor has been stripped away from all but the most elite programmers, how fast will software development progress if the profit motive is stripped from it as well?
My interpretation of the GP's statement is "is not possible everywhere, extremely expensive here, if you want it for free, make it yourself". Hardly absolutist.
Lol lol lol. This has got to be the stupidest comment I have seen today. Most libertarians are at least smarter than this. The reason why such a corporation run distopia would be laissez-faire economic policy's fault is because we KNOW that people are as a rule stupid, petty and selfish. But somehow the objectivists think that these drives will somehow transmute through the power of the market into rainbows and sunshine. The reason why commerce has to be regulated is the same reason democracies need constitutions to limit how badly the majority can oppress the minority.
I do think their attempts at lockdown are anticompetitive.
Their attempts have been extremely successful. They've learnt a really Hollywood lesson, "if you're cool enough, you can get away with anything". As someone who buys iPods but will never buy a Mac, I'm stuck between horrified fascination and geeky indignation. They're so cool they have the tech media fantasizing about how cool their new Mac Pros will be, and what they might look like, whereas if HP or Lenovo had taken years to release a new workstation refresh they'd just get endless complaints. Amazing, yet horrifying.
I understand how "copyleft" licenses hack the concept of copyright, but how does that mean copyright is UNETHICAL? I agree with the sentiment that copyright law in it's current form is certainly bad in lots of places, but does that really mean the whole concept is unethical? If there was no copyright, we would be living in a brave new world indeed. I'm still not sure if that would be a good or bad thing, but it would certainly be momentously different.
it is actually unethical to give a client a software in binary form without the source code, I wholeheartedly agree.
That may be true (it certainly disadvantages them, but does it make it wrong?), but I think it's bad business sense to basically allow the creation of a competitor whenever you release your source code to another party without limiting their ability to redistribute it. In other words, for large complex projects (like OS's) the possibility of an emerging competitor leveraging your source code is offset by the complexity of the code base, and the benefits FLOSS methods give you in terms of bug-fixing, stability and developer time. But for smaller/trivial projects and things like games(where the game engine basically drives a collection of artwork, music and text to achieve a particular effect) I don't think open sourcing the projects gives the creators much benefits, while it disadvantages them horribly if they want to monetize their work. This can be seen on Linux repositories, where there is a great mass of game engines and tiny single function apps, most of which are either atrocious in quality or if they are good, having 20 different (inferior) clones using a different language or UI toolkit.
Do you wear a seat-belt when you drive? Why? You can still die in a wreck anyway! I use FLOSS for the same reason you wear a safety belt. Take your absolutist mentality elsewhere.
There's someone with an absolutist mentality commenting on the page, and it wasn't the GP.
If gossip is going to fuel internet growth, all of us should just quit using it now.. gossip is among the most toxic of fallout from human evolution to date.
Actually, that's not true. Gossip has been studies by a lot of fields (especially psychology) and is considered a useful way of communicating social mores and building alliances. Basically people who were once considered "non-technical" or whatever are using the internet as extensions of themselves more than ever, which is a good thing IMHO.
You need to read the reply below you to see why I take that tone. Also, I'm not a paleoanthropologist (bioinormatics actually), but I find it hilarious that people who know a lot about a certain domain of knowledge think they don't need to read up on another domain but throw around opinions they think are perfectly valid. Also, what I wrote is a non-sequitur only if you don't know what you are talking about and don't want to read up on the topic, which is common whenever slashdot runs an article not based on CS, Math or Physics.
If it turns out that our primate ancestors instead evolved elsewhere, and relocated there, that is relevant to the question of human origins, because.... it's a part of that origin.
No, you said it yourself: "as far back as we can meaningfully trace". It seems that there is some ambiguity with some of the early hominin ancestors, but basically, humans and their immediate predecessors originate from Africa. This is what happens when computer geeks think they're fully qualified to talk about paleo-anthropology or other messy science things that don't involve mathematical proofs.
Also the fact that it supported iTunes was basically saying that it was just a cheap rip-off of apples os.
Oh my god. This sounds like something written on an engadget comment thread. I agree it was a bad move, because they were reliant on Apple's goodwill (i.e, none at all) to keep it functioning, they were relying on a third party service where they got none of the revenue from, also they were providing a feature that was likely to be unreliable and make them look amateur. But no, that doesn't make WebOS seem like a cheap rip-off of iOS, if anything, iOS 5 and Android 4 show lot of features the were inspired by WebOS.
I have a feeling RIM and Nokia will be joining them soon enough as both have fallen behind the curve and in the fast paced world of tech once you are behind its hell to catch up, much less get back ahead of everyone else. That was the problem with palm in a nutshell, by the time they realized they couldn't just keep reselling the old OS the mobile world had passed them by.
I agree with everything you said except this because a lot of companies have found themselves in this position, and some of them (namely Apple and Intel) have managed to dig themselves out. Not that I have much hope for RIM or Nokia, but don't count them out till the fat lady sings. The Lumia 900 was a decent piece of hardware, and... I'm trying to think of something awesome RIM has done lately, and can't... Lol.
They didn't "cheap out" on the hardware so much as they couldn't buy any of the top drawer stuff because Apple and the Android makers had already placed their orders, and HP didn't have the faith in them to invest in making their own factories. No wonder Microsoft is sticking to Nokia like a zebra mussel, Nokia might have fallen from grace now, but they are the original masters of the mobile phone form factor. Poor Meego, and poor WebOS. Why must the awesome yet minority-share OS always suffer?
Slashdot Mirror
It means that although the DNA will remain the same, how it is transcripted into proteins (and how often, and in reaction to what stimuli) changes. That is the purview of epigenetic study (the epi- prefix meaning over or above). Here's a useful link.
What the article is discussing is how methylation differs between very young and very old people. The abstract of the original paper may be more instructive:
Human aging cannot be fully understood in terms of the constrained genetic setting. Epigenetic drift is an alternative means of explaining age-associated alterations. To address this issue, we performed whole-genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS) of newborn and centenarian genomes. The centenarian DNA had a lower DNA methylation content and a reduced correlation in the methylation status of neighboring cytosine—phosphate—guanine (CpGs) throughout the genome in comparison with the more homogeneously methylated newborn DNA. The more hypomethylated CpGs observed in the centenarian DNA compared with the neonate covered all genomic compartments, such as promoters, exonic, intronic, and intergenic regions. For regulatory regions, the most hypomethylated sequences in the centenarian DNA were present mainly at CpG-poor promoters and in tissue-specific genes, whereas a greater level of DNA methylation was observed in CpG island promoters. We extended the study to a larger cohort of newborn and nonagenarian samples using a 450,000 CpG-site DNA methylation microarray that reinforced the observation of more hypomethylated DNA sequences in the advanced age group. WGBS and 450,000 analyses of middle-age individuals demonstrated DNA methylomes in the crossroad between the newborn and the nonagenarian/centenarian groups. Our study constitutes a unique DNA methylation analysis of the extreme points of human life at a single-nucleotide resolution level.
what I understand from that wall of text is this: The paper puts forward is another factor that contributes to errors cropping up causing diseases associated with old age, like cancer. Methylation controls (or should that be retards?) transcriptional activity, so a change in methylation patterns, or a drop in the occurence of methylation, would change the types of activities the DNA undergoes, and change the probability (probably upwards) of things going wrong.
I am but a lowly undergrad who doesn't pay as much attention is lectures as he should, so please someone correct me if I am wrong.
Why don't you ever try to quote your arguments, or paraphrase the gist of them? Why do you just place cryptic links full of wordspam agreeing with your world-veiw? Here's a link to a concept I think you're using here. Argumentum ad tl:dr basically means you're burying your opponent in reams of text that could meaningfully be expressed in a few sentences.
An easy summary of what your link has to say is this:"I am a gay man, and therefore I speak for all gays; however, those gosh darn gay activists on the news DON'T speak for all gays, so have I proclaimed by the power vested in me by my suspicion of the evil government. When gay activism was repealing laws that criminalized homosexuality, I supported it, but now that they're trying to make NEW gosh darned laws making gay marriage legal, I don't support it because it goes against the beliefs of all these conservative Christians who have been so nice to me. In fact, "no major religious conservative has called for legal measures against homosexuals.", they're just "acting defensively, in working to overturn gay rights legislation that attacked their most deeply held beliefs.""
And my reply to that argument is: "Riiiiiight... Totally only defensively, and your deeply held religious beliefs TOTALLY have more importance than my life and my freedom
Here's some illustrative quotes from the article:
For example, in spite of claims that persons with same-sex attraction (SSA) are ‘born that way’ and can’t change, there is no scientific evidence that to back up these assertions,[1] and plenty of evidence that SSA is rooted in early negative experiences[2] and that change is possible.[3] Many teenagers who think they might be “gay” discover later they aren’t.
The last claim is true. Sexuality is confusing, and a lot of teenagers might think they're X when really they're Y, or even Z. Having more knowledge about the spectrum of human sexual behaviour just helps them solve their confusion quicker. Everything else in that paragraph is just plain bullshit.
Sexually transmitted diseases are rampant in the gay community. Since 1981, 300,000 MSM have died of AIDS, and 6,000 are expected to die this year and every year for the foreseeable future. According to the CDC, in 2008, 17,940 MSM were diagnosed with HIV infections, an increase of 17% from 2005. MSM accounted for 53% of all new infections. MSM are 44 to 86 times more likely to be diagnosed HIV positive than men who don’t.
Do you know why those health statistics use the term MSM (Men who have Sex with Men)? Because they encompass everything from gay and proud fashion designers who live in San Fransisco and attend pride, right down to conservative, anti-gay, religious leaders, so deep in the closet they might as well be in Narnia. If homosexuals/bisexuals were not forced by public opinion into hiding and marginalizing their sexual behaviour (and despite how gay and free the big cities are, it's still a thing in most countries, even the most progressive ones), it would be safer, much more like heterosexual dating patterns.
Did you know that as among abstinence only taught straight teens, sex remains just as high, yet condom usage falls much lower, and anal sex rates increase because girls think that preserving their hymens somehow maintains their "virginity".
This has diverted attention from Savage’s objective: promoting his “It gets better,” campaign, the purpose of which is to encourage confused and troubled teenagers to ‘come out’ and experiment with homosexuality.
Anyone with basic comprehension skills will realize within moments of reading/watching an "It Get's Better" testimonial that it has NOTHING to do WHATSOEVER with "converting" or "corrupting" young people into trying something they might not normally do, and EVERYTHING to do with telling young LGBT people who need to deal with fuckhead parents and communities with attitudes like yours, that they shouldn't despair, and definitely SHOULD NOT commit suicide, but rather soldier on till they become independent adults, then GTFO that cow town, and into the big city.
I don't think so. The vast majority of people respect homosexuals. The homosexual militancy tries to project an image of poor victims, but, in 2012, that is not so
I know right? Like how you apparently support them! And apparently it's just the militant ones you don't like, because apparently they're giving the media this idea that they're poor victims! How dare those kids kill themselves after years of homophobic bullying, they're giving the world the wrong impression about how much they are respected!
I TOTALLY get you! I would like to subscribe to your newsletter for more of your idea
Fuckwit. You don't seem to realize heterosexuality is no guarantee someone will procreate, and homosexuality is not some promise that someone will not. Artificial insemination. Sperm banks. Idiots like you who think they're so intelligent and that intelligence is genetic usually know all about these things because they're rejected from every sperm bank they apply to.
You think that a development of a software must be paid by the sales of licenses.
No I don't think they MUST be paid, but history shows that this is the most effective way to get software into the most user's hands. A market, for reasons that involve psychology and economics, will spread something faster than a charitable donation, albeit not very equally.
You have to get paid for developing the software itself. Find a client that is in need of a software and talk with him about the cost of development, what he really needs and what you will charge.
Here's the thing, finding someone who'll bankroll you or your team of developers for a year or so to get a project going isn't very easy, because the costs for funding the ENTIRE project is likely to be sky high, unless the project were trivially easy, in which case the customer (in many but not all cases) might as well learn basic coding and do it themselves. What is more likely to be a successful business model is to identify an area of activity or a function that could benefit from software, code the project, and then sell licenses to users who need/want to use the software. Bespoke software is now only commissioned by large organizations, or very rich people with lots of money to spare, history shows that this is not a very big market, and does not lead to more people using the software.
Crowd-funding like Kickstarter seems to be a very good way to get video games funded, but I don't think it's ideal for other classes of software
It is not even true that you have no advantage once your code is published. The intimate knowledge of the code makes you the most likely developer if an improvement is required.
This is true. But unless the code is purposely obfuscated or the project is appropriately labyrinthine, the advantage is a tiny one indeed.
It just stops you from simple extorting money in exchange of future development for a captive client.
This isn't the 80's any more. Any self-respecting software user will prefer (if not outright demand) software that uses standard data formats and allows for migrating data, for maximum interoperability and an easy way to migrate away from the software if quality should decline. Lock-in can still be achieved, source or no source, if the task is difficult enough (cough cough, GCC compiler, cough cough) and the source code is crazy complicated enough (choke choke, GCC compiler, choke choke). Goodness I think I have TB!
I couldn't finish the video because it was so funny! I am still chuckling in a bad way as I type this. Embarrassment humour always makes me laugh, yet wince in sympathy at the same time, I can only take so much before I'm uncomfortable. This is so awkward, uncool and hilariously 40-year old virgin stupid I just cannot
OBLIGATORY CONSPIRACY THEORY: I think it was an epic troll by someone who doesn't like Microsoft, maybe someone from nearby Finland let go because of Nokia's "restructuring"?
Well, yes and the same can be said with monopolies : it disadvantages you horribly to not create a monopoly if you have the occasion.
A competitor showing up on the scene and trying to do better than you is one thing, but having them take the result of your work at no cost to themselves, then using it to craft a better product (since their software will have your work + their work), or even just selling the exact product you made, maybe with a bigger marketing budget since they didn't use any money on development (quite a few unscrupulous companies actually do these things ripping off OSS projects), that is quite another. When products exist in bits and bytes, things become difficult because making/designing them takes just as much work, but copying them takes a few milliseconds of processors whizzing and disks writing.
I think however that you are not seeing this from the right angle : if you share the source code, you are willing to erase any advantage you have, you are not disadvantaged. That would be the free market solution in an ideal world....
I agree with you that we are looking at this from different angles. However, I don't think my angle is incorrect. Sharing the source code is obviously good for everyone (original developers, users and possible future developers), I am not disagreeing with you there, but the EFFECTS of sharing the code may not be good for the original developers. If the original developers are willing to give up their advantages, what incentive do they have for creating the software in the first place? This is not an ideal world, freeloaders and plagiarists abound who are more than willing to take FLOSS code (or even leaked closed source code) and make their own products (whose code they do NOT share). This does not affect developers who do it for fun/education purposes/sense of goodwill, but what about the majority of developers who do it for money? Already the prestige factor has been stripped away from all but the most elite programmers, how fast will software development progress if the profit motive is stripped from it as well?
I see. Sometimes there's so much to make fun of, you don't know what the zinger is referring to.
Are you making some lame Merchant of Venice reference because he's Jewish? How "edgy"...
My interpretation of the GP's statement is "is not possible everywhere, extremely expensive here, if you want it for free, make it yourself". Hardly absolutist.
Lol lol lol. This has got to be the stupidest comment I have seen today. Most libertarians are at least smarter than this. The reason why such a corporation run distopia would be laissez-faire economic policy's fault is because we KNOW that people are as a rule stupid, petty and selfish. But somehow the objectivists think that these drives will somehow transmute through the power of the market into rainbows and sunshine. The reason why commerce has to be regulated is the same reason democracies need constitutions to limit how badly the majority can oppress the minority.
I do think their attempts at lockdown are anticompetitive.
Their attempts have been extremely successful. They've learnt a really Hollywood lesson, "if you're cool enough, you can get away with anything". As someone who buys iPods but will never buy a Mac, I'm stuck between horrified fascination and geeky indignation. They're so cool they have the tech media fantasizing about how cool their new Mac Pros will be, and what they might look like, whereas if HP or Lenovo had taken years to release a new workstation refresh they'd just get endless complaints. Amazing, yet horrifying.
I understand how "copyleft" licenses hack the concept of copyright, but how does that mean copyright is UNETHICAL? I agree with the sentiment that copyright law in it's current form is certainly bad in lots of places, but does that really mean the whole concept is unethical? If there was no copyright, we would be living in a brave new world indeed. I'm still not sure if that would be a good or bad thing, but it would certainly be momentously different.
it is actually unethical to give a client a software in binary form without the source code, I wholeheartedly agree.
That may be true (it certainly disadvantages them, but does it make it wrong?), but I think it's bad business sense to basically allow the creation of a competitor whenever you release your source code to another party without limiting their ability to redistribute it. In other words, for large complex projects (like OS's) the possibility of an emerging competitor leveraging your source code is offset by the complexity of the code base, and the benefits FLOSS methods give you in terms of bug-fixing, stability and developer time. But for smaller/trivial projects and things like games(where the game engine basically drives a collection of artwork, music and text to achieve a particular effect) I don't think open sourcing the projects gives the creators much benefits, while it disadvantages them horribly if they want to monetize their work. This can be seen on Linux repositories, where there is a great mass of game engines and tiny single function apps, most of which are either atrocious in quality or if they are good, having 20 different (inferior) clones using a different language or UI toolkit.
Hold up, did you just say COPYRIGHT is unethical? You realize that the GPL and other FLOSS licences rely on copyright to be enforceable?
Do you wear a seat-belt when you drive? Why? You can still die in a wreck anyway! I use FLOSS for the same reason you wear a safety belt. Take your absolutist mentality elsewhere.
There's someone with an absolutist mentality commenting on the page, and it wasn't the GP.
If gossip is going to fuel internet growth, all of us should just quit using it now.. gossip is among the most toxic of fallout from human evolution to date.
Actually, that's not true. Gossip has been studies by a lot of fields (especially psychology) and is considered a useful way of communicating social mores and building alliances. Basically people who were once considered "non-technical" or whatever are using the internet as extensions of themselves more than ever, which is a good thing IMHO.
Do you think they'll get a fine every time they dress up an old feature with slick GUI/hardware and call it "new"?
You need to read the reply below you to see why I take that tone. Also, I'm not a paleoanthropologist (bioinormatics actually), but I find it hilarious that people who know a lot about a certain domain of knowledge think they don't need to read up on another domain but throw around opinions they think are perfectly valid. Also, what I wrote is a non-sequitur only if you don't know what you are talking about and don't want to read up on the topic, which is common whenever slashdot runs an article not based on CS, Math or Physics.
If it turns out that our primate ancestors instead evolved elsewhere, and relocated there, that is relevant to the question of human origins, because.... it's a part of that origin.
No, you said it yourself: "as far back as we can meaningfully trace". It seems that there is some ambiguity with some of the early hominin ancestors, but basically, humans and their immediate predecessors originate from Africa. This is what happens when computer geeks think they're fully qualified to talk about paleo-anthropology or other messy science things that don't involve mathematical proofs.
Also the fact that it supported iTunes was basically saying that it was just a cheap rip-off of apples os.
Oh my god. This sounds like something written on an engadget comment thread. I agree it was a bad move, because they were reliant on Apple's goodwill (i.e, none at all) to keep it functioning, they were relying on a third party service where they got none of the revenue from, also they were providing a feature that was likely to be unreliable and make them look amateur. But no, that doesn't make WebOS seem like a cheap rip-off of iOS, if anything, iOS 5 and Android 4 show lot of features the were inspired by WebOS.
I have a feeling RIM and Nokia will be joining them soon enough as both have fallen behind the curve and in the fast paced world of tech once you are behind its hell to catch up, much less get back ahead of everyone else. That was the problem with palm in a nutshell, by the time they realized they couldn't just keep reselling the old OS the mobile world had passed them by.
I agree with everything you said except this because a lot of companies have found themselves in this position, and some of them (namely Apple and Intel) have managed to dig themselves out. Not that I have much hope for RIM or Nokia, but don't count them out till the fat lady sings. The Lumia 900 was a decent piece of hardware, and... I'm trying to think of something awesome RIM has done lately, and can't... Lol.
They didn't "cheap out" on the hardware so much as they couldn't buy any of the top drawer stuff because Apple and the Android makers had already placed their orders, and HP didn't have the faith in them to invest in making their own factories. No wonder Microsoft is sticking to Nokia like a zebra mussel, Nokia might have fallen from grace now, but they are the original masters of the mobile phone form factor. Poor Meego, and poor WebOS. Why must the awesome yet minority-share OS always suffer?