I'm convinced that police could theoretically arrest every single terrorist that does or could exist (that isn't blowing themselves up before arrest) given enough time.
Actually, you run into the same problem that you are describing. Terrorists don't think of themselves as terrorists. They think of themselves as "freedom fighters", "Robin Hood", "The Sword of Justice against the Oppressors", etc, etc. They have families and they have friends. When you start rounding them up, it gives credence to their world view -- they *are* being persecuted. Just look, they're all being rounded up and placed in jails. Then their friends and families get pissed off. They get so pissed off that some of them decide to become "freedom fighters", etc, etc. Chop down one and two pop up. And because of the whole six degrees of separation, they start popping up all over the world. It's even worse when well meaning terrorist hunters use tactics that lead to "collateral damage". Here I was minding my own business when a foreign government bombed my house killing my family. Yes, I understand your justification that because I live next to a known terrorist I should expect that kind of thing, but somehow it just doesn't make me feel any better.
Humans are masters of self-deception. They can justify any feeling. When that feeling is anger, they often have very little difficulty justifying their actions, no matter how horrible those actions may be to someone watching from the outside.
This is why Machiavelli's "The Prince" should be required reading in school. He goes into great detail exactly what you have to do when you get into situations like this. You want to take one guy down? Better make sure you are ready to take down his family and friends, sparing nobody, not even the children. Because if you leave even one of them standing, they will bring an army to your door. The trick to understanding Machiavelli is to realise that you don't want to take that guy down, because the cost is too great.
Science doesn't work through interviews. The research isn't being muzzled, it's the follow up interviews by the media. The reason you have something to complain about is because the government did a study and published the results.
Personally, I don't like the situation and I don't think the government should be acting this way. But there is no real reason why we need an interview with the scientists. We have a research paper we can read if we want their scientific opinion. The reason for interviewing them is to get their personal opinion of the situation. What the government is worried about is that the scientists' personal opinion conflicts with government policy. Or, in fact, they may also be worried that the media will take the scientists' comments out of context and use it to create controversy over government policy.
The long and the short of it is that we have a real problem. I don't need the scientists' personal opinion about the situation because I already have their scientific opinion. This controversy over "muzzling" the scientists distracts from the issue at hand, which is that the fishery is in real trouble.
when capitalism pits us against each other to survive (not for wants, but for needs)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_human_needs puts this statement in context. I can sympathise with your feelings, but in a 1st world country, the items on this list are available in abundance. It is true that there are some people who are unable to take advantage of this abundance due to mental illness and the like, but I don't agree that competition for resources is a large factor.
Rather, I think that perhaps rampant consumerism couches our wants in terms of needs. We follow a logical fallacy where I need X to get Y and hence think that X is a need. But if Y is a want, then X is likewise unnecessary for survival, no matter how desirable it may be. We have created social structures in which it is unacceptable to have less than the people around you, or less than your parents had before you. This is not related to capitalism. It is consumerism.
The easiest way to escape consumerism is simply not to play that silly game. Get a humble job with a salary that meets your needs. Never, ever, ever borrow money. Realise that anything above your needs is luxury. Revel in your newly found wealth. Note: this only works in 1st world countries where we live ridiculously abundant lives without realising it. For people who live in places where they *actually* struggle to live because of a lack of resources, you probably *do* have to compete to survive.
The Japanese legal system is complicated somewhat. It doesn't work the way many other legal systems work. The police have a fair number of freedoms when interrogating suspects, such that getting confessions is easier than it might otherwise be. So to prove intent is not so difficult if you can convince the suspect to confess (as seems to have been this case here).
You might notice that I'm choosing my words carefully. Like I said, things in Japan are different. I'm not an expert on these matters, and there is no lack of people who will jump all over the Japanese legal system. I'll just say that the prosecutor's conviction rates are 95% and a great deal of those convictions come from confessions -- far more so than any other country in which I've lived. But the prosecutor is supposed to be impartial and acts to protect innocent people as well as go after guilty people (and to a certain extent, I really believe that happens).
So the upshot of laws like this in Japan is that you have to be very careful *ahead of time* to make sure that what you are doing will be interpreted in the right light. If you do that, you're probably OK.
Moreover, I can use any pseudonym I like as long as I don't use it on G+ which seems a reasonable trade-off. If your concern is that the CIA might get grandma's cookie recipe, then you're screwed if your family is contacting you through G+ but hopefully you're bright enough to do anything truly nefarious on a more secure channel.
Why is this a reasonable trade-off. What are you trading? I suppose Google can do whatever they want with the service they offer and if you feel that using the service is the plus against the minus of not using a pseudonym then I guess that's up to you. But I don't see it as a trade-off. They aren't giving me anything special in exchange for agreeing to use my real name. And let's face it, the reason they want your real name is because they profit from it.
As to the question of why do I want to use a pseudonym... My question to you, Gooba42, is why don't you have your real name in your Slashdot profile? Hmmm... I don't either, although it is trivially easy to find my real name if you look around. I can't speak for you, but for me it's because the things I write on Slashdot are meant to be taken on their own merit, not as an official statement of [WhoeverIAm]. You *could* figure it out, but I really, really doubt if anyone up to this point has bothered to do so. This means that people who know me personally can read my words and judge them only on their own merit without taking into consideration their bias for me. This is valuable to me.
Probably a rhetorical question, but basically the publisher charges for organizing the peer review, editing and distribution. One of the primary goals of creating the WWW was to allow researchers to distribute their work without having to be at the mercy of the journal publishers. But even though a lot of papers are available for free on the web, the prestige factor still prompts a lot (most?) researchers to go through the old channels. As I'm sure you're aware, they don't actually get paid for it (and neither do the peer reviewers). But if you get your paper published in Nature (which is a *very* prestigious journal), it helps on your next grant application. Putting your paper on your own web server doesn't help at all.
You can get hosting for them. To me that seems genuinely useful. A lot of stuff that you could do that people might give you bitcoins for require an online presence. Maybe you don't want to receive *only* bitcoins, but it does overcome some of the many problems that might come up with something like Paypal. Also, there are a surprisingly large number of people willing to give you US dollars for bitcoins. The daily volume is considerably higher than I would have thought reasonable. But there you go... (if it's money laundering, I think some people will get a rude awakening, as one can infer from the TFA...)
Not my thing and there are a lot of oddities about Bitcoin that make me cautious, but it is not entirely useless.
He's a CEO. He doesn't have to be taken seriously amongst those with knowledge in the field. He just has to be taken seriously amongst those with investment money. If he can spin an exciting story that makes investors think, "What if he's right? No matter what the risk, I should get in on this because the payout is unlimited" then he wins. He gets people to front money, which he spends on whatever he wants.
The world of business is not so far removed from the world of fiction.
I don't know about the money scam thing, but I think this sums it up well. HURD was run with a pretty closed development team initially. To an extent I understand it. Back then that's the way things were done. You had to prove yourself before anyone would let you contribute to a project. It was Linus and the way that Linux was run that changed everything.
But apart from that, there were personalities on the HURD team that many people had a problem with. A lot of people considered the HURD team to be elitist. It became popular to bash the HURD and use it as the butt of jokes. It's not so much that there was anything wrong with the HURD, but since a lot of very respected people were miffed at the HURD team, other people just jumped on board. I don't think most people who bash the HURD have any idea about the project (other than it being very late).
IMHO, anyway, there was never really a big problem technically with the HURD. There are lots of good ideas in there. It was definitely a people problem and it is a very good example of the importance of good people skills on free software projects. On the other hand, it also shows another important point of free software. Your project is yours. Even if nobody else uses it or cares about it, that's not a reason to give up developing it. Who knows what the future brings and if it benefits you, keep going.
Even more importantly, contributing for selfish reasons creates a win-win situation. Contributing in a way that is detrimental to you, is detrimental for the community. It is important for people and organisations to realise that we want them to succeed in their enterprises.
I think a lot of people misunderstand the driving forces behind free and open source software. They see it as some kind of charity where the group "donating" code is losing out. Instead, groups should understand how they are going to benefit from contributing to a free software project before they do so. Benefit can come in the form of money, it can come in the form of eyeballs (attracting attention to an under serviced area), or it can simply come from the pleasure of contributing. These are all benefits.
Free and open source software allows more than one group to benefit from contributing to a project. You can't control how much benefit another group can get from a project, but the more you do to tie your success to the success of the project, the more you benefit you get from other people's contributions. Ideally, we want companies like MS to make money from the success of free software. The more they do so, the more they will understand the opportunities they are missing. The more they rely on our success, the more everyone benefits.
I think even 10 years ago the bloom was off the rose for microkernels. Back in the late 80s and early 90s microkernels were all the rage for a variety of reasons. One is maintainability. Microkernels force you to partition what you are doing. You have a set of core functionality that is used by the next layer. It consolidates access to the hardware and other resources. Theoretically it should be easier to port, and by carefully optimising the lowest layer, you should be able to get performance improvements.
Linux kinds of cheats, though. You've got literally thousands of programmers sticking their fingers in the kernel. We've seen quite a number of large refactorings in the Linux kernel, which probably would never get done if a single entity was paying all the programmers. Some of the advantages in design of a microkernel fall away when you can throw a huge number of programmers at a problem and coordinate them well. In a similar vein, you don't have a single entity paying for every port to another architecture. Even if it is more expensive, there is usually *somebody* out there willing to pay to port Linux to a particular architecture. SInce everyone shares the code, everyone benefits. Finally, optimisation is possible in the Linux kernel because you have a large number of well organised people working on it. Large kernel-wide optimisations happen frequently, which IMHO wouldn't happen in a monolithic organisation.
While microkernels are arguably better from a design perspective, there is really very little benefit to moving from Linux to the HURD. The design problems are more than made up for with good development practices, and even if it is slightly more costly, the cost is still acceptable. I don't expect to see a lot of people changing over, so as long as Linux keeps the mind share it will be the most effective platform to work on.
It has always been interesting for me to reflect on the HURD. The issue of mind share was crucial when comparing Linux and the HURD. Back in 1991 (or early 1992, maybe... can't remember that far back) I tried to contribute to the HURD. I had done some work on Mach in an OS course at school and was interested in playing more with it. But since I was pretty much a new grad and didn't have a proven track record working on OS kernels, the HURD team told me to take a hike. Well, they were polite about it, but were clear that they didn't want help from a nobody.
Linux was completely different. Linus may have blasted your code, but he accepted any and all help. This created mind share. For those who weren't around at the time, the whole idea of accepting work from any random joe off the street was a relatively new concept. The "Cathedral and the Bazaar" hadn't been coined by ESR yet and the normal way to do things in the free software world was to have one or two uber programmers hacking away, never seeing the light of day. Now everybody realises that a key indicator of success on a free software project is having an open and unobstructed development process.
The HURD has some good ideas, but their initial attitude killed them. Even though the team is very different now (from what I've hear, anyway -- lost interest in it more than a decade ago), there is really no chance of making a comeback, I think. Enticing eyeballs away from other projects will just be too difficult. Linus' biggest contribution to free software was *not* the Linux kernel, IMHO, but rather the development process that Linux used. He showed everyone how it should be done.
I think the point is that if you google for the words in the letter, they don't show up anywhere except the article. I don't really understand this stuff but since other articles filed by the court are available on the web, wouldn't this letter also be there? Maybe I should use a different search engine (ha ha!). Groklaw also hasn't reported this letter either.
Furthermore, doing more searches I can't find anyone else reporting this letter except TFA (although a *lot* of sites have reprinted it or linked to it). Is it possible that the article is completely untrue? No idea, but personally I'd like to see a little more verification of the facts.
If you drink your own piss, then there is no problem with bacterial infection. Any infection you pick up from your own piss is an infection that you already have (assuming that you drink it quickly).
This is actually an important point in waste disposal. For some reason people assume that our waste products leave our bodies swarming with diseases. The only diseases or bacteria that emerges are those that you already have. This should be obvious, but our cultural upbringing of "sewage = disease" kind of gets in the way. When you start to get in trouble is when you pile a whole bunch of different peoples sewage together since you don't know what diseases some other guy might be carrying.
No offence, but you are taking a very narrow view. Solar is already economical in a lot of places (including where I live).
I think a lot of people think that if they can't completely replace all energy production with solar then it's not worth it. Even if it doesn't replace all your energy demands, it can still be economical. Or rather, it is more likely to be economical if you are careful about what you are using it for.
For example, I live in Japan and most people bathe in the evenings. Thus hot water demand is generally from 5 o'clock to about 8 o'clock (come home from work, have a bath, eat dinner and then go to bed). A lot of people in my neighbourhood have solar hot water heaters that are low tech, cheap to build and install and work well. Of course they have gas backup for cloudy/cold days (although my friend's system works fine even on cloudy days). Especially since gas is expensive in Japan the systems pay for themselves very quickly. No, it doesn't take over 100% of the power generation, but is that really a concern?
Where I live electrical solar panels are also economical (although that is helped dramatically by 30+ cents per KWH electricity costs). Since the problem at Fukushima, there is also a scarcity of electricity and a lot of people can't run their A/C (we've had temps over 30 degrees C 19 out of the last 20 days). People with solar panels *can*. As you can imagine, solar panel installation is starting to become popular, especially when you think that you need the power when the sun is out.
Honestly, I don't know where you live, but I used to live in Ottawa Canada and even there there are examples of houses that were built to be partially heated from passive solar heating. There are even some houses that are entirely heated with solar, but use active systems to move heat through the house (using water reservoirs for heat storage). Before I moved to Japan I looked into building a house with such a system and over the lifetime of the house, it *is* economical.
Solar energy is *never* going completely replace other forms of power generation. But implying that it shouldn't be used at all is very short sighted. We need to move away from the idea that there is some silver bullet technology that will take care of all our needs and start thinking creatively about how to obtain energy from a variety of different sources.
Are you really in the minority? I'm currently living in a place where solar energy is quite economic (high energy prices and lots of sun all year round). Quite a lot of people have solar water heaters or solar energy panels on their roof. You can even buy everything from the local hardware stores. Just looking out the window now and I'd guess 10% of the houses have something. I've never heard anyone complain about them being ugly. In fact they are considerably better looking than some of the roofing options people use (although the tile roofed houses still look the best IMHO). If I weren't renting I'd definitely invest in it. Actually, if I didn't have to move next year for my job, I'd even ask my landlord if I could put up panels on the roof. I'm sure it would be fine.
Even though the rich have gotten richer, it is not necessarily the case that the average person has gotten poorer. I'll admit to being lazy and not looking up the figures, so take this with a grain of salt. But generally, when productivity goes up, the profit doesn't all get funnelled into some rich guy's pockets. The vast majority of it actually gets "spent" reducing the price of the good. The industry that has been hit the hardest to automation is actually farming. In real dollars, the price of food has been falling dramatically over the last century, while the number of workers has been slashed to almost nothing. People used to be able to farm their fields without a tractor, now you'd be hard pressed to even walk to the other side of the field without some kind of motor vehicle. You've got farms with thousands of cows, all being cared for and milked by a handful of people. Yes, the distributors are skimming the cream and getting (remaining) stupidly wealthy, but the vast amount of real value that comes from the automation goes to the average person in the form of reduced price. I'm sure there must be googleable graphs of the real dollar price of wheat and milk. It's ridiculous.
We don't reduce our production because we keep consuming at insane rates. We keep demanding that prices fall in real dollar terms year after year. And we work ourselves to death (and go into debt) to pack our houses with garbage. Welcome to the consumer society (aka the American Dream).
Before you could get Linux to run as a kernel, the GNU code was making the rounds. It ran on all the popular Un*x hardware and was pre-compiled for a variety of kernels. You could even buy tapes which contained distributions of it. The GNU code was so much better than anything shipping with the hardware that it was practically the first thing you would install after you got your box. There *were* people (and still are) that preferred the original BSD code, mostly because they were used to it, I think. You have to understand that at the time that Linux was being developed, GNU had very little competition.
When the Linux kernel became available people started to put together small distributions of GNU code that included the Linux kernel. Especially at the beginning, there were still a lot of legal hurdles that BSD had to jump through. For me, personally, I didn't really have confidence that BSD was going to continue to be in existence. And besides, I wanted GNU. I might as well get a Linux kernel along with GNU pre-compiled, rather than get BSD (whose future was uncertain) and compile GNU on top of it.
What people fail to realise is that nobody was distributing Linux with a whole bunch of stuff along with it. They were distributing a whole bunch of stuff (originally just GNU, but later X and many, many apps) and including the Linux kernel with it. *That's* why the distribution was called "Linux". It was the same distribution of software that people already wanted, but coupled with a kernel and pre-compiled for that kernel. I don't think anyone even considered calling it GNU with Linux at first, because everyone knew it was GNU. There wasn't anything else you could distribute.
But somewhere along the way, as users became less and less technical, they got confused about what was Linux and what was other stuff. Now there are a lot more options. It *is* confusing to say "Android is Linux". It certainly isn't anything like the Linux distribution on my desktop. The TFA is ranting about about this situation. To me it's bloody obvious. My desktop is GNU and X with a Linux kernel. My phone is Android with a Linux kernel. It's perfectly clear. But somehow the TFA can't understand the point and the confusion is due to unclear naming.
Even in this thread there is confusion. Do you *really* care if you have a Linux kernel? Granted it has a lot of hardware support and there are some other advantages. But if you had GNU and X sitting on top of a BSD kernel, you would barely notice a difference. If you had Android sitting on top of Linux on your desktop, that would be a massive change from your normal desktop. And yet we talk about our system being "Linux with a bunch of other stuff", even though Linux is not what we generally care about.
The FSF really goofed the situation when they pressed for the whole GNU/Linux thing. It came out as some big ego thing (which it might have been, I don't have the slightest notion). But they foresaw the situation where someone was going to take a Linux kernel and build an OS around something other than GNU. At this point the distinction is important (GNU/Linux vs Android) and now, when it is important, we can't do a damn thing about it because people are pissed off about something that is barely relevant (whether the whole GNU/Linux thing was just an ego play).
It is possible that RIAA marketing is necessary to become obscenely rich making music, but there are a lot of artists who make a decent living doing nothing but playing gigs. What are the odds of "making it big" with the RIAA? One in a hundred thousand? I have a fair number of friends who are musicians who have recordings released by RIAA companies. They aren't superstars, but a couple of them are internationally well known in their area. None of them make any money at all from their recordings. The recording companies pocket it all. I've suggested to them that they might actually be better off giving their recordings away for free, given that they don't make any money anyway, but they are always chasing that pot of gold.
Why does "make it" imply making millions of dollars and being a household name everywhere in the world? Why doesn't "make it" mean having a good job that you enjoy and making enough money to live comfortably and bring up a family? Like I said, the former may require the RIAA (although I actually kind of doubt it), but why should we encourage that kind of thinking? Let's have more musicians making a good wage rather than a handful making megabucks (and putting 10 times that into a distribution system that isn't necessary at all).
Stock options are a way to pay you without having the money come out of operations. Usually, the options are covered by stock that the board has authorized the company to create for that purpose. It costs the company nothing for you to exercise the option, the cost comes in the dilution of the stock. In other words, the shareholders end up paying the bill due to lower share value. This isn't always the case. Sometimes the company will buy back stock to cover the options, but it isn't very common (though if they do, it still potentially comes out of a different budget which allows them to play games with their accounting). Using options as compensation may even allow the company to avoid payroll taxes and the like (depending on the country).
Is there *anything* good that can happen to an ecosystem? Surely *some* changes are good?
Depends on who you are. Things change all the time. There are areas that have been grazed as a result of human farming for a couple of hundred years. These have developed into ecosystems that are threatened because farming practices like hill farming (where you let your livestock wander around the hills grazing) has gone out of fashion (we reduced the price of meat to the point where it's no longer sustainable). There are species of birds that are threatened because the way we used to farm has changed. But the thing is that those ecological niches weren't there before we stuck out fingers in. There have even been huge debates over whether we should allow grazing and keep threatened species, or forbid grazing and allow the ecosystem to go back to what it was before we fucked with it. It's all very complicated.
We are part of nature. Our actions have an impact, but it's a mistake to think that having an impact is somehow evil. Every species has an impact. It's that whole "web of life" thing (cue crappy Disney tunes). It's also a mistake to think that we should be controlling every aspect of nature. As much as possible, we should let it get along on its own. But we need to allow it to get along. If we go and bulldoze every surface for the hell of it, then our world is not going to be very interesting/useful/comfortable.
Right now our value systems are skewed. We are geared in to production. If it doesn't aid in production, then I don't want to think about it. We aren't paying much attention to quality of life. Or rather, we are letting people bulldoze our quality of life in the name of production without much oversight. IMHO, this is where we need to be careful.
From the article: 'Asked what health consequences he expected from Fukushima, he said: "From what I know now, nothing, because levels are so low. In food, people are talking about levels which would give you one millisieverts per year, five millisieverts per year... this is nothing where we would expect major health impacts."'
There is a UN investigation team tasked with long term health monitoring. It will be interesting to see what their findings are 10 or 20 years from now. This does not mean that there are no problems. There are problems to the environment and those problems will continue for quite a long time. This is going to be one messy and costly clean up.
A lot of people don't have a good handle on what level of (and especially what sorts of) radioactivity are likely to cause health problems. They often incorrectly assume that any level of radiation exposure will lead to a statistically significant number of cancers. Standards for radiation exposure are set incredibly low compared to the amount necessary to cause health effects. There is a misunderstanding that exceeding an exposure standard will lead to health problems.
Personally, I found it really helpful to read the collections of reports here: http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html These talk about the amount of radiation that came from Chernobyl, how people were exposed, the type of treatment they received and the long term health effects. It's kind of a hard read, but if you keep Wikipedia open in another tab, you can slowly make your way through it. Finally, information about radioactive contamination in Fukushima is available from the International Atomic Energy Agency at the UN http://www.iaea.org/ After you get a handle on the effects of what happened at Chernobyl you can compare it to Fukushima using real data.
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I'm convinced that police could theoretically arrest every single terrorist that does or could exist (that isn't blowing themselves up before arrest) given enough time.
Actually, you run into the same problem that you are describing. Terrorists don't think of themselves as terrorists. They think of themselves as "freedom fighters", "Robin Hood", "The Sword of Justice against the Oppressors", etc, etc. They have families and they have friends. When you start rounding them up, it gives credence to their world view -- they *are* being persecuted. Just look, they're all being rounded up and placed in jails. Then their friends and families get pissed off. They get so pissed off that some of them decide to become "freedom fighters", etc, etc. Chop down one and two pop up. And because of the whole six degrees of separation, they start popping up all over the world. It's even worse when well meaning terrorist hunters use tactics that lead to "collateral damage". Here I was minding my own business when a foreign government bombed my house killing my family. Yes, I understand your justification that because I live next to a known terrorist I should expect that kind of thing, but somehow it just doesn't make me feel any better.
Humans are masters of self-deception. They can justify any feeling. When that feeling is anger, they often have very little difficulty justifying their actions, no matter how horrible those actions may be to someone watching from the outside.
This is why Machiavelli's "The Prince" should be required reading in school. He goes into great detail exactly what you have to do when you get into situations like this. You want to take one guy down? Better make sure you are ready to take down his family and friends, sparing nobody, not even the children. Because if you leave even one of them standing, they will bring an army to your door. The trick to understanding Machiavelli is to realise that you don't want to take that guy down, because the cost is too great.
Hmmm... You make some good points. I may actually rethink my stance.
Science doesn't work through interviews. The research isn't being muzzled, it's the follow up interviews by the media. The reason you have something to complain about is because the government did a study and published the results.
Personally, I don't like the situation and I don't think the government should be acting this way. But there is no real reason why we need an interview with the scientists. We have a research paper we can read if we want their scientific opinion. The reason for interviewing them is to get their personal opinion of the situation. What the government is worried about is that the scientists' personal opinion conflicts with government policy. Or, in fact, they may also be worried that the media will take the scientists' comments out of context and use it to create controversy over government policy.
The long and the short of it is that we have a real problem. I don't need the scientists' personal opinion about the situation because I already have their scientific opinion. This controversy over "muzzling" the scientists distracts from the issue at hand, which is that the fishery is in real trouble.
when capitalism pits us against each other to survive (not for wants, but for needs)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_human_needs puts this statement in context. I can sympathise with your feelings, but in a 1st world country, the items on this list are available in abundance. It is true that there are some people who are unable to take advantage of this abundance due to mental illness and the like, but I don't agree that competition for resources is a large factor.
Rather, I think that perhaps rampant consumerism couches our wants in terms of needs. We follow a logical fallacy where I need X to get Y and hence think that X is a need. But if Y is a want, then X is likewise unnecessary for survival, no matter how desirable it may be. We have created social structures in which it is unacceptable to have less than the people around you, or less than your parents had before you. This is not related to capitalism. It is consumerism.
The easiest way to escape consumerism is simply not to play that silly game. Get a humble job with a salary that meets your needs. Never, ever, ever borrow money. Realise that anything above your needs is luxury. Revel in your newly found wealth. Note: this only works in 1st world countries where we live ridiculously abundant lives without realising it. For people who live in places where they *actually* struggle to live because of a lack of resources, you probably *do* have to compete to survive.
The Japanese legal system is complicated somewhat. It doesn't work the way many other legal systems work. The police have a fair number of freedoms when interrogating suspects, such that getting confessions is easier than it might otherwise be. So to prove intent is not so difficult if you can convince the suspect to confess (as seems to have been this case here).
You might notice that I'm choosing my words carefully. Like I said, things in Japan are different. I'm not an expert on these matters, and there is no lack of people who will jump all over the Japanese legal system. I'll just say that the prosecutor's conviction rates are 95% and a great deal of those convictions come from confessions -- far more so than any other country in which I've lived. But the prosecutor is supposed to be impartial and acts to protect innocent people as well as go after guilty people (and to a certain extent, I really believe that happens).
So the upshot of laws like this in Japan is that you have to be very careful *ahead of time* to make sure that what you are doing will be interpreted in the right light. If you do that, you're probably OK.
Moreover, I can use any pseudonym I like as long as I don't use it on G+ which seems a reasonable trade-off. If your concern is that the CIA might get grandma's cookie recipe, then you're screwed if your family is contacting you through G+ but hopefully you're bright enough to do anything truly nefarious on a more secure channel.
Why is this a reasonable trade-off. What are you trading? I suppose Google can do whatever they want with the service they offer and if you feel that using the service is the plus against the minus of not using a pseudonym then I guess that's up to you. But I don't see it as a trade-off. They aren't giving me anything special in exchange for agreeing to use my real name. And let's face it, the reason they want your real name is because they profit from it.
As to the question of why do I want to use a pseudonym... My question to you, Gooba42, is why don't you have your real name in your Slashdot profile? Hmmm... I don't either, although it is trivially easy to find my real name if you look around. I can't speak for you, but for me it's because the things I write on Slashdot are meant to be taken on their own merit, not as an official statement of [WhoeverIAm]. You *could* figure it out, but I really, really doubt if anyone up to this point has bothered to do so. This means that people who know me personally can read my words and judge them only on their own merit without taking into consideration their bias for me. This is valuable to me.
Probably a rhetorical question, but basically the publisher charges for organizing the peer review, editing and distribution. One of the primary goals of creating the WWW was to allow researchers to distribute their work without having to be at the mercy of the journal publishers. But even though a lot of papers are available for free on the web, the prestige factor still prompts a lot (most?) researchers to go through the old channels. As I'm sure you're aware, they don't actually get paid for it (and neither do the peer reviewers). But if you get your paper published in Nature (which is a *very* prestigious journal), it helps on your next grant application. Putting your paper on your own web server doesn't help at all.
You can get hosting for them. To me that seems genuinely useful. A lot of stuff that you could do that people might give you bitcoins for require an online presence. Maybe you don't want to receive *only* bitcoins, but it does overcome some of the many problems that might come up with something like Paypal. Also, there are a surprisingly large number of people willing to give you US dollars for bitcoins. The daily volume is considerably higher than I would have thought reasonable. But there you go... (if it's money laundering, I think some people will get a rude awakening, as one can infer from the TFA...)
Not my thing and there are a lot of oddities about Bitcoin that make me cautious, but it is not entirely useless.
He's a CEO. He doesn't have to be taken seriously amongst those with knowledge in the field. He just has to be taken seriously amongst those with investment money. If he can spin an exciting story that makes investors think, "What if he's right? No matter what the risk, I should get in on this because the payout is unlimited" then he wins. He gets people to front money, which he spends on whatever he wants.
The world of business is not so far removed from the world of fiction.
It would be great if the US would figure this out about Pakistan...
I don't know about the money scam thing, but I think this sums it up well. HURD was run with a pretty closed development team initially. To an extent I understand it. Back then that's the way things were done. You had to prove yourself before anyone would let you contribute to a project. It was Linus and the way that Linux was run that changed everything.
But apart from that, there were personalities on the HURD team that many people had a problem with. A lot of people considered the HURD team to be elitist. It became popular to bash the HURD and use it as the butt of jokes. It's not so much that there was anything wrong with the HURD, but since a lot of very respected people were miffed at the HURD team, other people just jumped on board. I don't think most people who bash the HURD have any idea about the project (other than it being very late).
IMHO, anyway, there was never really a big problem technically with the HURD. There are lots of good ideas in there. It was definitely a people problem and it is a very good example of the importance of good people skills on free software projects. On the other hand, it also shows another important point of free software. Your project is yours. Even if nobody else uses it or cares about it, that's not a reason to give up developing it. Who knows what the future brings and if it benefits you, keep going.
Yes. Now, instead of that we get articles about how Android, which uses the Linux kernel, isn't really Linux because it doesn't contain GNU.
Even more importantly, contributing for selfish reasons creates a win-win situation. Contributing in a way that is detrimental to you, is detrimental for the community. It is important for people and organisations to realise that we want them to succeed in their enterprises.
I think a lot of people misunderstand the driving forces behind free and open source software. They see it as some kind of charity where the group "donating" code is losing out. Instead, groups should understand how they are going to benefit from contributing to a free software project before they do so. Benefit can come in the form of money, it can come in the form of eyeballs (attracting attention to an under serviced area), or it can simply come from the pleasure of contributing. These are all benefits.
Free and open source software allows more than one group to benefit from contributing to a project. You can't control how much benefit another group can get from a project, but the more you do to tie your success to the success of the project, the more you benefit you get from other people's contributions. Ideally, we want companies like MS to make money from the success of free software. The more they do so, the more they will understand the opportunities they are missing. The more they rely on our success, the more everyone benefits.
I think even 10 years ago the bloom was off the rose for microkernels. Back in the late 80s and early 90s microkernels were all the rage for a variety of reasons. One is maintainability. Microkernels force you to partition what you are doing. You have a set of core functionality that is used by the next layer. It consolidates access to the hardware and other resources. Theoretically it should be easier to port, and by carefully optimising the lowest layer, you should be able to get performance improvements.
Linux kinds of cheats, though. You've got literally thousands of programmers sticking their fingers in the kernel. We've seen quite a number of large refactorings in the Linux kernel, which probably would never get done if a single entity was paying all the programmers. Some of the advantages in design of a microkernel fall away when you can throw a huge number of programmers at a problem and coordinate them well. In a similar vein, you don't have a single entity paying for every port to another architecture. Even if it is more expensive, there is usually *somebody* out there willing to pay to port Linux to a particular architecture. SInce everyone shares the code, everyone benefits. Finally, optimisation is possible in the Linux kernel because you have a large number of well organised people working on it. Large kernel-wide optimisations happen frequently, which IMHO wouldn't happen in a monolithic organisation.
While microkernels are arguably better from a design perspective, there is really very little benefit to moving from Linux to the HURD. The design problems are more than made up for with good development practices, and even if it is slightly more costly, the cost is still acceptable. I don't expect to see a lot of people changing over, so as long as Linux keeps the mind share it will be the most effective platform to work on.
It has always been interesting for me to reflect on the HURD. The issue of mind share was crucial when comparing Linux and the HURD. Back in 1991 (or early 1992, maybe... can't remember that far back) I tried to contribute to the HURD. I had done some work on Mach in an OS course at school and was interested in playing more with it. But since I was pretty much a new grad and didn't have a proven track record working on OS kernels, the HURD team told me to take a hike. Well, they were polite about it, but were clear that they didn't want help from a nobody.
Linux was completely different. Linus may have blasted your code, but he accepted any and all help. This created mind share. For those who weren't around at the time, the whole idea of accepting work from any random joe off the street was a relatively new concept. The "Cathedral and the Bazaar" hadn't been coined by ESR yet and the normal way to do things in the free software world was to have one or two uber programmers hacking away, never seeing the light of day. Now everybody realises that a key indicator of success on a free software project is having an open and unobstructed development process.
The HURD has some good ideas, but their initial attitude killed them. Even though the team is very different now (from what I've hear, anyway -- lost interest in it more than a decade ago), there is really no chance of making a comeback, I think. Enticing eyeballs away from other projects will just be too difficult. Linus' biggest contribution to free software was *not* the Linux kernel, IMHO, but rather the development process that Linux used. He showed everyone how it should be done.
I think the point is that if you google for the words in the letter, they don't show up anywhere except the article. I don't really understand this stuff but since other articles filed by the court are available on the web, wouldn't this letter also be there? Maybe I should use a different search engine (ha ha!). Groklaw also hasn't reported this letter either.
Furthermore, doing more searches I can't find anyone else reporting this letter except TFA (although a *lot* of sites have reprinted it or linked to it). Is it possible that the article is completely untrue? No idea, but personally I'd like to see a little more verification of the facts.
If you drink your own piss, then there is no problem with bacterial infection. Any infection you pick up from your own piss is an infection that you already have (assuming that you drink it quickly).
This is actually an important point in waste disposal. For some reason people assume that our waste products leave our bodies swarming with diseases. The only diseases or bacteria that emerges are those that you already have. This should be obvious, but our cultural upbringing of "sewage = disease" kind of gets in the way. When you start to get in trouble is when you pile a whole bunch of different peoples sewage together since you don't know what diseases some other guy might be carrying.
No offence, but you are taking a very narrow view. Solar is already economical in a lot of places (including where I live).
I think a lot of people think that if they can't completely replace all energy production with solar then it's not worth it. Even if it doesn't replace all your energy demands, it can still be economical. Or rather, it is more likely to be economical if you are careful about what you are using it for.
For example, I live in Japan and most people bathe in the evenings. Thus hot water demand is generally from 5 o'clock to about 8 o'clock (come home from work, have a bath, eat dinner and then go to bed). A lot of people in my neighbourhood have solar hot water heaters that are low tech, cheap to build and install and work well. Of course they have gas backup for cloudy/cold days (although my friend's system works fine even on cloudy days). Especially since gas is expensive in Japan the systems pay for themselves very quickly. No, it doesn't take over 100% of the power generation, but is that really a concern?
Where I live electrical solar panels are also economical (although that is helped dramatically by 30+ cents per KWH electricity costs). Since the problem at Fukushima, there is also a scarcity of electricity and a lot of people can't run their A/C (we've had temps over 30 degrees C 19 out of the last 20 days). People with solar panels *can*. As you can imagine, solar panel installation is starting to become popular, especially when you think that you need the power when the sun is out.
Honestly, I don't know where you live, but I used to live in Ottawa Canada and even there there are examples of houses that were built to be partially heated from passive solar heating. There are even some houses that are entirely heated with solar, but use active systems to move heat through the house (using water reservoirs for heat storage). Before I moved to Japan I looked into building a house with such a system and over the lifetime of the house, it *is* economical.
Solar energy is *never* going completely replace other forms of power generation. But implying that it shouldn't be used at all is very short sighted. We need to move away from the idea that there is some silver bullet technology that will take care of all our needs and start thinking creatively about how to obtain energy from a variety of different sources.
Are you really in the minority? I'm currently living in a place where solar energy is quite economic (high energy prices and lots of sun all year round). Quite a lot of people have solar water heaters or solar energy panels on their roof. You can even buy everything from the local hardware stores. Just looking out the window now and I'd guess 10% of the houses have something. I've never heard anyone complain about them being ugly. In fact they are considerably better looking than some of the roofing options people use (although the tile roofed houses still look the best IMHO). If I weren't renting I'd definitely invest in it. Actually, if I didn't have to move next year for my job, I'd even ask my landlord if I could put up panels on the roof. I'm sure it would be fine.
Even though the rich have gotten richer, it is not necessarily the case that the average person has gotten poorer. I'll admit to being lazy and not looking up the figures, so take this with a grain of salt. But generally, when productivity goes up, the profit doesn't all get funnelled into some rich guy's pockets. The vast majority of it actually gets "spent" reducing the price of the good. The industry that has been hit the hardest to automation is actually farming. In real dollars, the price of food has been falling dramatically over the last century, while the number of workers has been slashed to almost nothing. People used to be able to farm their fields without a tractor, now you'd be hard pressed to even walk to the other side of the field without some kind of motor vehicle. You've got farms with thousands of cows, all being cared for and milked by a handful of people. Yes, the distributors are skimming the cream and getting (remaining) stupidly wealthy, but the vast amount of real value that comes from the automation goes to the average person in the form of reduced price. I'm sure there must be googleable graphs of the real dollar price of wheat and milk. It's ridiculous.
We don't reduce our production because we keep consuming at insane rates. We keep demanding that prices fall in real dollar terms year after year. And we work ourselves to death (and go into debt) to pack our houses with garbage. Welcome to the consumer society (aka the American Dream).
Before you could get Linux to run as a kernel, the GNU code was making the rounds. It ran on all the popular Un*x hardware and was pre-compiled for a variety of kernels. You could even buy tapes which contained distributions of it. The GNU code was so much better than anything shipping with the hardware that it was practically the first thing you would install after you got your box. There *were* people (and still are) that preferred the original BSD code, mostly because they were used to it, I think. You have to understand that at the time that Linux was being developed, GNU had very little competition.
When the Linux kernel became available people started to put together small distributions of GNU code that included the Linux kernel. Especially at the beginning, there were still a lot of legal hurdles that BSD had to jump through. For me, personally, I didn't really have confidence that BSD was going to continue to be in existence. And besides, I wanted GNU. I might as well get a Linux kernel along with GNU pre-compiled, rather than get BSD (whose future was uncertain) and compile GNU on top of it.
What people fail to realise is that nobody was distributing Linux with a whole bunch of stuff along with it. They were distributing a whole bunch of stuff (originally just GNU, but later X and many, many apps) and including the Linux kernel with it. *That's* why the distribution was called "Linux". It was the same distribution of software that people already wanted, but coupled with a kernel and pre-compiled for that kernel. I don't think anyone even considered calling it GNU with Linux at first, because everyone knew it was GNU. There wasn't anything else you could distribute.
But somewhere along the way, as users became less and less technical, they got confused about what was Linux and what was other stuff. Now there are a lot more options. It *is* confusing to say "Android is Linux". It certainly isn't anything like the Linux distribution on my desktop. The TFA is ranting about about this situation. To me it's bloody obvious. My desktop is GNU and X with a Linux kernel. My phone is Android with a Linux kernel. It's perfectly clear. But somehow the TFA can't understand the point and the confusion is due to unclear naming.
Even in this thread there is confusion. Do you *really* care if you have a Linux kernel? Granted it has a lot of hardware support and there are some other advantages. But if you had GNU and X sitting on top of a BSD kernel, you would barely notice a difference. If you had Android sitting on top of Linux on your desktop, that would be a massive change from your normal desktop. And yet we talk about our system being "Linux with a bunch of other stuff", even though Linux is not what we generally care about.
The FSF really goofed the situation when they pressed for the whole GNU/Linux thing. It came out as some big ego thing (which it might have been, I don't have the slightest notion). But they foresaw the situation where someone was going to take a Linux kernel and build an OS around something other than GNU. At this point the distinction is important (GNU/Linux vs Android) and now, when it is important, we can't do a damn thing about it because people are pissed off about something that is barely relevant (whether the whole GNU/Linux thing was just an ego play).
It is possible that RIAA marketing is necessary to become obscenely rich making music, but there are a lot of artists who make a decent living doing nothing but playing gigs. What are the odds of "making it big" with the RIAA? One in a hundred thousand? I have a fair number of friends who are musicians who have recordings released by RIAA companies. They aren't superstars, but a couple of them are internationally well known in their area. None of them make any money at all from their recordings. The recording companies pocket it all. I've suggested to them that they might actually be better off giving their recordings away for free, given that they don't make any money anyway, but they are always chasing that pot of gold.
Why does "make it" imply making millions of dollars and being a household name everywhere in the world? Why doesn't "make it" mean having a good job that you enjoy and making enough money to live comfortably and bring up a family? Like I said, the former may require the RIAA (although I actually kind of doubt it), but why should we encourage that kind of thinking? Let's have more musicians making a good wage rather than a handful making megabucks (and putting 10 times that into a distribution system that isn't necessary at all).
Stock options are a way to pay you without having the money come out of operations. Usually, the options are covered by stock that the board has authorized the company to create for that purpose. It costs the company nothing for you to exercise the option, the cost comes in the dilution of the stock. In other words, the shareholders end up paying the bill due to lower share value. This isn't always the case. Sometimes the company will buy back stock to cover the options, but it isn't very common (though if they do, it still potentially comes out of a different budget which allows them to play games with their accounting). Using options as compensation may even allow the company to avoid payroll taxes and the like (depending on the country).
Is there *anything* good that can happen to an ecosystem? Surely *some* changes are good?
Depends on who you are. Things change all the time. There are areas that have been grazed as a result of human farming for a couple of hundred years. These have developed into ecosystems that are threatened because farming practices like hill farming (where you let your livestock wander around the hills grazing) has gone out of fashion (we reduced the price of meat to the point where it's no longer sustainable). There are species of birds that are threatened because the way we used to farm has changed. But the thing is that those ecological niches weren't there before we stuck out fingers in. There have even been huge debates over whether we should allow grazing and keep threatened species, or forbid grazing and allow the ecosystem to go back to what it was before we fucked with it. It's all very complicated.
We are part of nature. Our actions have an impact, but it's a mistake to think that having an impact is somehow evil. Every species has an impact. It's that whole "web of life" thing (cue crappy Disney tunes). It's also a mistake to think that we should be controlling every aspect of nature. As much as possible, we should let it get along on its own. But we need to allow it to get along. If we go and bulldoze every surface for the hell of it, then our world is not going to be very interesting/useful/comfortable.
Right now our value systems are skewed. We are geared in to production. If it doesn't aid in production, then I don't want to think about it. We aren't paying much attention to quality of life. Or rather, we are letting people bulldoze our quality of life in the name of production without much oversight. IMHO, this is where we need to be careful.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/06/us-japan-nuclear-health-idUSTRE7354H920110406
From the article: 'Asked what health consequences he expected from Fukushima, he said: "From what I know now, nothing, because levels are so low. In food, people are talking about levels which would give you one millisieverts per year, five millisieverts per year ... this is nothing where we would expect major health impacts."'
There is a UN investigation team tasked with long term health monitoring. It will be interesting to see what their findings are 10 or 20 years from now. This does not mean that there are no problems. There are problems to the environment and those problems will continue for quite a long time. This is going to be one messy and costly clean up.
A lot of people don't have a good handle on what level of (and especially what sorts of) radioactivity are likely to cause health problems. They often incorrectly assume that any level of radiation exposure will lead to a statistically significant number of cancers. Standards for radiation exposure are set incredibly low compared to the amount necessary to cause health effects. There is a misunderstanding that exceeding an exposure standard will lead to health problems.
Personally, I found it really helpful to read the collections of reports here: http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html These talk about the amount of radiation that came from Chernobyl, how people were exposed, the type of treatment they received and the long term health effects. It's kind of a hard read, but if you keep Wikipedia open in another tab, you can slowly make your way through it. Finally, information about radioactive contamination in Fukushima is available from the International Atomic Energy Agency at the UN http://www.iaea.org/ After you get a handle on the effects of what happened at Chernobyl you can compare it to Fukushima using real data.