I was curious about this too. As I understood Bill Van Etten who spoke at LISA on Nov. 18, 2005, naturally ocurring genes have hundreds or thousands of inert codons. The laboratory version eliminates those, and it is this "efficient" version of the gene that gets patented. The follow-up question that didn't occur to me then was: so why couldn't I put a few inert codons into the gene and declare myself non-infringing?
In classical ethics, there are a few actions that are intrinsically evil, among them, lying. The trouble with lying is that it consists not only of the selection of some arbitrary symbols, but a selection which intentionally misleads the person begin lied to. There seems always to have been a distinction between the explicit lie and the tacit one: early Roman Christians were content not to disabuse their fellow citizens of the Christians' (non-)pagan status unless specifically challenged. Otherwise, the Roman eradication would have been rather more complete.
With a published work such as Google, the issue is complicated by the many audiences. Who is Google's audience? Me? I don't feel lied to when I see "province of China" plastered over Taiwan, because I am aware of the situation and expect to be notified of a regime change by CNN, not Google.
What about the larger U.S. public? Due to our pathetic world geography education, those folks may be deceived. But the degree of deception is tempered by the overwhelming apathy of that audience.
Most of the rest of the Google audience is better educated, and not deceived. Certainly the Taiwanese are not deceived. I've been assured that the mainland Chinese are also aware of their government's pervasive influence on the media -- though not all, evidently: see the dogmatic statements on Korea earlier in this discussion.
That last minority is a troubling one: those who want to believe the lie (N.B.: I am not disputing the claims concerning Korean history above; it's just that I have no means to judge the source's credibility). Another example: those religious fanatics who insist that sexual preference is always a matter of choice. But one may defend the "misleading" publication that lends them support by casting the responsibility back on them: they could find the truth if they wanted to find it. Thus the misrepresentation is found in the intent of the reader, not the publisher.
Google is making a judgement that the good they bring overwhelms the transparent deceptions in which they must participate to bring it. Perhaps they're wrong. Those without sin will certainly continue to cast stones.
A conservative reading of the U.S. constitution would hold that the freedom to assembly clause only limits the actions of the federal government. Court tradition has expanded the clause to apply to state and municpal governments as well. A liberal interpretation would broaden its scope to limit the actions of corporations, but the corporations have bought and sold away all the liberals. Unless there are some dramatic changes in who gets elected Real Soon Now, you'll see all labor laws (including restrictions on child labor and all the rest) swept away by a Supreme Court that "honors the individual" by reasserting the "freedom to enter a contract".
There is a wide ignorance about the scientific method. I'd guess that a majority of slashdot readers wouldn't be able to formulate it. Some scientists don't even know its underpinnings, although they satisfy its requirements by following the procedures of the community in which they operate. From wikipedia:
Scientific methods or processes are considered fundamental to the scientific investigation and acquisition of new knowledge based upon physical evidence. Scientists use observations, hypotheses and deductions to propose explanations for natural phenomena in the form of theories. Predictions from these theories are tested by experiment. Any theory which is cogent enough to make predictions can then be tested reproducibly in this way. The method is commonly taken as the underlying logic of scientific practice. A scientific method is essentially an extremely cautious means of building a supportable, evidence-based understanding of our natural world.
There are crucial areas of human knowledge outside the scope of science. Often, it is because the knowledge does not have predictive power. "Why did the chicken cross the road? Because God wanted it to." That explanation is true, but it does not have predictive power. The evolution model makes myriad predictions about what fossils you will or will not find in what rock strata, whereas "Satan wants to deceive mankind" does not. Indeed, any model which includes the action of a supernatural being cannot be science. Scientific statements about even human behavior must necessarily be weak, because, at the very least, the system is too complex for specific predictions. Nonetheless, there are important statements about freedom, justice, and charity that are true - they are simply outside the scope of science. Note, for instance, that Marx did not understand these limitations, and further note how badly the predictions of his "scientific materialism" failed.
Scientific pronouncements on global warming fall directly within the scope of science: evidence has been gathered, models developed, the models have made predictions, and the predictions have been confirmed.
Please mod parent up. I usually find myself on the side of those opposing such techniques because they destroy the result of conception, which I hold to be the fertilization of a human egg by a human sperm. In this case, no such fertilization occurs, therefore, I find myself approving of the technique.
Unless the sentence author makes a clarification, it's hard to know his intent. Marvin was so over the top (under the bottom?) I found him hilarious - and being an organic being chauvinist, I didn't even feel guilty about enjoying the misery of another sentient. On the other hand, Arthur's fate in book five of the trilogy doesn't seem to have left many readers feeling ebullient.
Watch yourself. The most gogeous sales staffer I know also has an IQ that raises the average of any room she's ever walked into, and a boyfriend who makes Tom Cruise look boring (and is no dim bulb himself). You'd get nowhere and later bad things would happen to you and you'd never know why.
Time Warner/AOL owns Road Runner, and Road Runner shows no signs of leaving the broadband market. I don't get it: if they actually are leaving the market, why are they trying to get me to spend another $20/month for a 3Mbps to 6Mbps boost? ("Road Runner Premium"). If they're not leaving the market, why isn't AOL sending their business to Road Runner?
Markets must be kept at their unstable equilibrium by appropriate societal (ethical) or governmental (legal) constraints. Otherwise they head toward the nicely stable condition of monopoly -- e.g., Standard Oil -- to the severe detriment of society. As Mencken said, for every complex problem there is a simple, attractive solution - and it's wrong. Both unfettered markets (pure capitalism) and total state control (stalinism) prove the point. Things could be a lot worse than the current situation, but they could also be a lot better if people demanded of themselves and their leaders an acceptance of complex reality, instead of simplistic, popular lies. Something scientists, engineers, and the well educated *ought* to be capable of.
I love my laptop because it's *MY* laptop and I have a right to all the data on it. It is not at all clear that these laptops belong to the students, and in particular what their rights to the content are. The laptops are running an MS OS (see the Vital Source Technologies website). Vital Source's web site doesn't (at least easily) display their licensing terms.
The economics of books provide a certain protection of liberties. Unfortunately, laptops do not.
I had a good experience with Matrix Resources, http://www.matrixres.com. They didn't get me a deluge of interviews, but the ones they did were just what I was looking for.
No, you're not sending the same bits as in the file. Instead, assuming the question bits were generated randomly, you're encrypting the file with a one time pad that was sent in the clear. Elegant! Still unfair to the artist, however.
Except the 3rd party software we need to provide only supports RH7.2. In our testing, it works under RH7.3 but not RH8.0. I can't justify spending the money for Advanced Server just to find out if the 3rd party software simply works, with no prospect of *support* for that that software. If the 3rd party vendor moves to a different distribution/version, we'll be nearly certain to move to it.
My favorite part is the page generating fake e-mail addresses for the spam bots to consume. If you missed it, you can go straight there.
Re:Some people seem to miss the point.
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 1
Exactly. Here's a little story (containing serveral simplifications) about why business may save us from software jail. My company runs an application on RH7.2 that doesn't work properly on RH8.0. I can't fix the application, it's closed source. Now, we just acquired a new x86 server, but the ethernet card in it is not supported until RH8.0. So in the current environment, I just back-ported the ethernet driver from RH8.0 to RH7.2, and I'm good to go. We'll be buying lots more of that model of server.
Now, if those servers were only loading DRM signed kernels, you know how many of those boxes we'd buy? Zero.
My hope is that variations on this scenario will occur so frequently that there will be a thriving, legal market in non-DRM machines.
I bought my laptop at Best Buy. Best Buy was good about giving me all the paperwork I needed (receipt copies, bar codes, etc.) to get their $100 rebate. HP was asking for a bar code that I don't think existed, since this was a custom configured rather than a pre-configured model. Nonetheless, a few weeks after having sent them a pound of forms, cut out pieces of corrugated cardboard (with unlabeld bar codes), and photocopies of everything I didn't have yet another copy of from Best Buy, my $100 check from HP arrived in the mail. I figure I spent four hours earning that $200. And I did earn it: since this machine was fully tax deductible on my Schedule C, that was $200 more on the bottom line that I'll get taxed on. What? Deduct the pre-rebate price and forget to mention the money that came back? No way! I keep apologetic letters from the IRS as trophies.
Find the local user groups associated with your topic(s). Usually the meetings feature a talk on some aspect of the topic; some (such as trilug.org) frequently have in-depth classes, cheap or free.
From the review, it sounds as if this book is a good antidote to the unfortunate simplification that (network security === firewall). Good!
Nonetheless, firewalls and VPN's are still important tools in creating a secure network. My old 1995 edition of Chapman & Zwicky's "Building Internet Firewalls" has been useful to me; I've no reason to think newer versions would be any less so. If you want to build a stateful firewall, Ron Ziegler's "Linux Firewalls" does a good job with the concepts and details of iptables. Another highly recommended book is Kolesnikov & Hatch's "Building Linux Virtual Private Networks". Whenever you do security, you *must* understand what you're doing, and these authors help you do that; that understanding is portable to any OS.
Slashdot Mirror
I was curious about this too. As I understood Bill Van Etten who spoke at LISA on Nov. 18, 2005, naturally ocurring genes have hundreds or thousands of inert codons. The laboratory version eliminates those, and it is this "efficient" version of the gene that gets patented. The follow-up question that didn't occur to me then was: so why couldn't I put a few inert codons into the gene and declare myself non-infringing?
In classical ethics, there are a few actions that are intrinsically evil, among them, lying. The trouble with lying is that it consists not only of the selection of some arbitrary symbols, but a selection which intentionally misleads the person begin lied to. There seems always to have been a distinction between the explicit lie and the tacit one: early Roman Christians were content not to disabuse their fellow citizens of the Christians' (non-)pagan status unless specifically challenged. Otherwise, the Roman eradication would have been rather more complete.
With a published work such as Google, the issue is complicated by the many audiences. Who is Google's audience? Me? I don't feel lied to when I see "province of China" plastered over Taiwan, because I am aware of the situation and expect to be notified of a regime change by CNN, not Google.
What about the larger U.S. public? Due to our pathetic world geography education, those folks may be deceived. But the degree of deception is tempered by the overwhelming apathy of that audience.
Most of the rest of the Google audience is better educated, and not deceived. Certainly the Taiwanese are not deceived. I've been assured that the mainland Chinese are also aware of their government's pervasive influence on the media -- though not all, evidently: see the dogmatic statements on Korea earlier in this discussion.
That last minority is a troubling one: those who want to believe the lie (N.B.: I am not disputing the claims concerning Korean history above; it's just that I have no means to judge the source's credibility). Another example: those religious fanatics who insist that sexual preference is always a matter of choice. But one may defend the "misleading" publication that lends them support by casting the responsibility back on them: they could find the truth if they wanted to find it. Thus the misrepresentation is found in the intent of the reader, not the publisher.
Google is making a judgement that the good they bring overwhelms the transparent deceptions in which they must participate to bring it. Perhaps they're wrong. Those without sin will certainly continue to cast stones.
A conservative reading of the U.S. constitution would hold that the freedom to assembly clause only limits the actions of the federal government. Court tradition has expanded the clause to apply to state and municpal governments as well. A liberal interpretation would broaden its scope to limit the actions of corporations, but the corporations have bought and sold away all the liberals. Unless there are some dramatic changes in who gets elected Real Soon Now, you'll see all labor laws (including restrictions on child labor and all the rest) swept away by a Supreme Court that "honors the individual" by reasserting the "freedom to enter a contract".
There is a wide ignorance about the scientific method. I'd guess that a majority of slashdot readers wouldn't be able to formulate it. Some scientists don't even know its underpinnings, although they satisfy its requirements by following the procedures of the community in which they operate. From wikipedia:
There are crucial areas of human knowledge outside the scope of science. Often, it is because the knowledge does not have predictive power. "Why did the chicken cross the road? Because God wanted it to." That explanation is true, but it does not have predictive power. The evolution model makes myriad predictions about what fossils you will or will not find in what rock strata, whereas "Satan wants to deceive mankind" does not. Indeed, any model which includes the action of a supernatural being cannot be science. Scientific statements about even human behavior must necessarily be weak, because, at the very least, the system is too complex for specific predictions. Nonetheless, there are important statements about freedom, justice, and charity that are true - they are simply outside the scope of science. Note, for instance, that Marx did not understand these limitations, and further note how badly the predictions of his "scientific materialism" failed.
Scientific pronouncements on global warming fall directly within the scope of science: evidence has been gathered, models developed, the models have made predictions, and the predictions have been confirmed.
Given recent observations of our leaders, the more relevant question might be: "How did cooperative behavior go extinct?"
Please mod parent up. I usually find myself on the side of those opposing such techniques because they destroy the result of conception, which I hold to be the fertilization of a human egg by a human sperm. In this case, no such fertilization occurs, therefore, I find myself approving of the technique.
Unless the sentence author makes a clarification, it's hard to know his intent. Marvin was so over the top (under the bottom?) I found him hilarious - and being an organic being chauvinist, I didn't even feel guilty about enjoying the misery of another sentient. On the other hand, Arthur's fate in book five of the trilogy doesn't seem to have left many readers feeling ebullient.
Watch yourself. The most gogeous sales staffer I know also has an IQ that raises the average of any room she's ever walked into, and a boyfriend who makes Tom Cruise look boring (and is no dim bulb himself). You'd get nowhere and later bad things would happen to you and you'd never know why.
Time Warner/AOL owns Road Runner, and Road Runner shows no signs of leaving the broadband market. I don't get it: if they actually are leaving the market, why are they trying to get me to spend another $20/month for a 3Mbps to 6Mbps boost? ("Road Runner Premium"). If they're not leaving the market, why isn't AOL sending their business to Road Runner?
Markets must be kept at their unstable equilibrium by appropriate societal (ethical) or governmental (legal) constraints. Otherwise they head toward the nicely stable condition of monopoly -- e.g., Standard Oil -- to the severe detriment of society. As Mencken said, for every complex problem there is a simple, attractive solution - and it's wrong. Both unfettered markets (pure capitalism) and total state control (stalinism) prove the point. Things could be a lot worse than the current situation, but they could also be a lot better if people demanded of themselves and their leaders an acceptance of complex reality, instead of simplistic, popular lies. Something scientists, engineers, and the well educated *ought* to be capable of.
The language of Mordor! We do not speak it here!
I love my laptop because it's *MY* laptop and I have a right to all the data on it. It is not at all clear that these laptops belong to the students, and in particular what their rights to the content are. The laptops are running an MS OS (see the Vital Source Technologies website). Vital Source's web site doesn't (at least easily) display their licensing terms.
The economics of books provide a certain protection of liberties. Unfortunately, laptops do not.
The Right to Read
Acid rain is a recent phenomenon.
I had a good experience with Matrix Resources, http://www.matrixres.com. They didn't get me a deluge of interviews, but the ones they did were just what I was looking for.
- Stephen
Has anyone serious reviewed vpnd?
No, you're not sending the same bits as in the file. Instead, assuming the question bits were generated randomly, you're encrypting the file with a one time pad that was sent in the clear. Elegant! Still unfair to the artist, however.
Except the 3rd party software we need to provide only supports RH7.2. In our testing, it works under RH7.3 but not RH8.0. I can't justify spending the money for Advanced Server just to find out if the 3rd party software simply works, with no prospect of *support* for that that software. If the 3rd party vendor moves to a different distribution/version, we'll be nearly certain to move to it.
The BIGMEM version includes SMP support, at least in RH7.3.
My favorite part is the page generating fake e-mail addresses for the spam bots to consume. If you missed it, you can go straight there.
Exactly. Here's a little story (containing serveral simplifications) about why business may save us from software jail. My company runs an application on RH7.2 that doesn't work properly on RH8.0. I can't fix the application, it's closed source. Now, we just acquired a new x86 server, but the ethernet card in it is not supported until RH8.0. So in the current environment, I just back-ported the ethernet driver from RH8.0 to RH7.2, and I'm good to go. We'll be buying lots more of that model of server.
Now, if those servers were only loading DRM signed kernels, you know how many of those boxes we'd buy? Zero.
My hope is that variations on this scenario will occur so frequently that there will be a thriving, legal market in non-DRM machines.
I bought my laptop at Best Buy. Best Buy was good about giving me all the paperwork I needed (receipt copies, bar codes, etc.) to get their $100 rebate. HP was asking for a bar code that I don't think existed, since this was a custom configured rather than a pre-configured model. Nonetheless, a few weeks after having sent them a pound of forms, cut out pieces of corrugated cardboard (with unlabeld bar codes), and photocopies of everything I didn't have yet another copy of from Best Buy, my $100 check from HP arrived in the mail. I figure I spent four hours earning that $200. And I did earn it: since this machine was fully tax deductible on my Schedule C, that was $200 more on the bottom line that I'll get taxed on. What? Deduct the pre-rebate price and forget to mention the money that came back? No way! I keep apologetic letters from the IRS as trophies.
Find the local user groups associated with your topic(s). Usually the meetings feature a talk on some aspect of the topic; some (such as trilug.org) frequently have in-depth classes, cheap or free.
You're probably thinking of Leroy Anderson's "The Typewriter".
From the review, it sounds as if this book is a good antidote to the unfortunate simplification that (network security === firewall). Good!
Nonetheless, firewalls and VPN's are still important tools in creating a secure network. My old 1995 edition of Chapman & Zwicky's "Building Internet Firewalls" has been useful to me; I've no reason to think newer versions would be any less so. If you want to build a stateful firewall, Ron Ziegler's "Linux Firewalls" does a good job with the concepts and details of iptables. Another highly recommended book is Kolesnikov & Hatch's "Building Linux Virtual Private Networks". Whenever you do security, you *must* understand what you're doing, and these authors help you do that; that understanding is portable to any OS.
I resemble that remark.
- Stephen P. Schaefer