How the hell did the parent get moderated as a troll? That isn't in ANY way a troll. Even if it was wrong, it wouldn't be a troll, but sad as it is - it's correct. Gator offers at least nominally useful servies, and many people go "Oh look, a bonus utility! Nice of them to include it!".
Warning - moderators on crack loose in this discussion! (Which makes it different than every other slashdot thread, of course...)
Sure this is/. and all, but at least TRY and read the article if your going to comment directly on it.
As the article makes clear, Sun is doing no such thing, so even IF Sun said that in the past (which I doubt, it contradicts a lot of what they've been saying), the article would be news because it talks about the non AMD64 chips they are still developing, and how important they are to the company.
Yeah. At this point, of Nokia really truly wants to be in the game hardware market, they need to drop the name, and ideally shunt the whole idea to some third party - it could even be a subsidiary, but right now, all it takes is the words "Nokia" and "games", and people start snickering.
What they need is a fresh start. Oh, and some decent hardware, of course.:-)
I have also heard it suggested that doing so would probably create many jobs in the US as the building and operations infrastructure was being put into place
By morons, maybe.
This is just a special case of the Broken Windows Fallacy. Just think! Were I to chuck a brick through your window, I would at a stroke create work for the glazier to make a new pane of glass, for the repairman to install it, for the deliveryman to carry it from the glazier workshop, for a miner to mine the sand needed for the glass, for farmers to feed all these people - a large net good for the economy, no? So we should encourage people to chuch bricks through windows, right? And dig pointless ditches, move mountains three feet to the left, and blanket a large and fairly empty continent with a dense passenger rail network, right?
The answer, of course, is no. There are much more productive things those resources could be doing (or they'd already be doing it).:-)
(Hardcore Keynesians will of course argue that in very special circumstances (ie, the Great Depression) there may be some point to paying people to do nonproductive things. It's arguable if this was true then, it certainly isn't true now.)
If I had any mod point today, I'd mod the original poster insightful, and you as flamebait.
First, he didn't say spam filtering and HTML blocking was new, he simply said that it was new to Outlook. Not using Outlook myself, I can't comment as to the accuracy of that, but I note that your ad hominem attack didn't even begin to address the actual point. Did you misinterpret it on purpose, or are your reading comprehension skills just that poor?
Next, "all linux server admins" certainly don't know that spam filtering is best done server-side, or there wouldn't be email servers running linux without spam filtering. This is also, incidentally, why we've seen a proliferation of client-side filtering tools, including in your beloved Mozilla Mail[1]. Even if you did think that server-side filtering is the One True Way, most people don't admin their own mail server, making their opinions irrelevent. Or you might want to use client side in addition to server side filtering. Regardless, if for whatever reason you choose (or are forced to choose) to use client side filtering, then it's important to know what clients support it, and how well. Which is why HIS post was insightful, and YOUR post was a poorly written troll.
[1]: A truly awful mail client, in any case. Real men don't use GUI's.
"Is touch screen voting the best solution available or is a conspiracy afoot?"
What sort of stupid question is that? Next up on Slashdot! Clothing! Does it cure cancer, or will it cause the downfall of civilization as we know it?
Correct voting answer - it fixes some serious problems with current systems, introduces some potentially serious problems, and is being pushed not as part of an Evil Conspiracy, but by well-meaning but niave people who seek a technological panacea despite not really understanding the concepts involved. It's cargo cult security - "these systems are secure, and they're electronic, so lets if we need security, we just need to make everything electronic!". Morons.
I did touch on it - see, ethanol isn't a renewable source of energy either because it's not a "source" any more than hydrogen is. In both cases, it's simply a storage mechanism - in this case, for solar power. The problem is, it's not a very good one, the conversion process is horribly ineficient, and in this particular example, they plan on going through a second conversion process, just to make it even better. This strikes me as a being of dubious ecological benefit.
(Incidentally, there is solid evidence that at present, producing ethanol uses more energy (mainly from fossil fuels) than it produces. The inefficiencies of the hydrogen conversion process will make this even worse - therefore without some pretty major changes (like nuclear powered tractors ), ethanol isn't renewable either.)
I'll believe it when I see it. Their technology may well work exactly as they say, but consider this - if you take 100 kJ of ethanol, no conversion process will get you more than 100 kJ of hydrogen - indeed, while the CNN article didn't say, I'd be pretty surprised if the effeciency was over half. Even if it was 100%, the amount of ethanol required to fuel any significant number of hydrogen cars is stunning - we're talking about many billions of gallons. This sounds less like an environmentally sound tech trick, and more like a pipe dream from the minds of Archer Daniels Midland's lobbyists (who are to thank for the impressive sums already wasted^H^H^H^H^H^Hspent on ethanol fuel production - which has been so far a net environmental loss).
Oh, and also, why on earth would you want to convert the ethanol to hydrogen, anyhow? (For that matter, I've yet to be convinced that converting sunlight to ethanol is a wise move - plants don't really make very efficient solar cells).
I suppose if journalists only wrote about what they really understood, they'd be limited to nursery rhymes (and the simpler ones at that), but still...
Notably missing from the article is how on earth they planned on wiping carp out with a gene that by definition doesn't confer any evolutionary advantage.
Fine, say they release zillions of GM carp - unless they can somehow ensure that only (*ONLY*) the GM carp get to breed, the result will be the next generation of carp consisting of soem mix of GM and non-GM carp, and that'll be repeated for each subsequent generation - unless one generation has so few GM (or non-GM) carp that only the non-GM (or GM) carp breed.
The key point that is absent from the article is why the scientists believe that the numbers of non-GM carp will ever drop below sustainability.
I'm not a population biologist (I don't even play one on TV), and so I certainly wouldn't go out on a limb and say that it won't happen - but it does seem unlikely. Even if it happened in any one lake or stream, it'd have to happen all over Australia at once to work!
New Zealand tried to wipe out there rabbit population by releasing a REALLY nasty rabbit virus. It spread really well, was quite fatal - was perfect. And as everyone expected, it completely failed to wipe out the rabbit population. Put a big dent in it for a few years, but as the rabbit population dropped, the disease became unable to spread. Meanwhile, the vulnerable rabbits died, and the resistant ones lived. Soon the population was back where it started, only now they were immune.
Why won't the same thing happen in Australia? It would be very surprising if the GM changes didn't make the transgenic carp look/act/smell slightly "different", and once the carp population selects away from breeding with the GM carp, it's all over. Again, there may be some clever trick used to avoid this - what?
Lastly, the talk of the gene spreading beyond carp is even worse. I have serious doubts that this will work on carp - the idea that it might work for other species is absurd. Oh, genes can cross the species barrier (it's rare, but it can happen). But the *one* thing that might make it work for carp is if they introduce a large number of GM carp across all of Australia at once. If it crossed from carp to some other fish species, you'd get one GM trout (or whatever). That's not going to get you anywhere.
If (and this is a really big if) it was well done, I might be interested in a program that sat between me and usenet, irc, IM, email (and whatever other mediums comes along), and filtered out the worst, brought the urgent stuff to my attention, and just stored the rest.
My initial negative reaction to his article was because for the technically savvy user, email (his major focus) is (or can be) like he wants. A bit of fiddling with procmail, install a bayesian filter, a bit of training, and email isn't really a problem.
That still leaves two fairly important problems which do need adressing - perhaps even by his "control panel". First, the tools need to get easier for the non-tech-savvy to use (although that's a much lesser problem than it was, given the integration of bayesian filtering in current versions of Mozilla). Second, the tools need to be expanded and integrated. My usenet client supports filtering using a static ruleset - but in its own "special" format. My email client uses bayesian filtering - but my IM client doesn't do any at all!
What would be nice is a single place where you write rules and/or feed stuff into bayesian filters for ALL your incoming communications. That'd be the tech-savvy version of Nielsen's "control panel", should be useful, and might not even be that hard to implement.
For a start, how hard would it be to write an IM to email gateway? That is, an IM client that accepts incoming IM messages, converts them into emails and feeds them into your MDA (procmail, say) where you could run it through whatever filters you wanted? Google turns up this project, but it looks to be nothing more than a rough outline of an initial design doc so far.
Still, if you took the concept and extended it, your MDA and MUA would become your CDA (communications delivery agent) and CUA (communications user agent) - methods for filtering, managing, and displaying all sorts of communications, not just email. If filters can keep pace with the spam, then that should solve the problen...
Forcing people to pay for security updates would be stupid IF it guaranteed the insecurity of a greater number of Internet-connected machines.
You are, of course, assuming that a smaller percentage of people will install the available patches if they have to pay - which is obviously true. You are also assuming that nobody will be lured to write a patch for an unsolved vulnerability by the thought of large piles of cash, which is obviously incorrect.
To put it another way, by limiting the price to zero, you will cause a shift in both the quantity demanded and the quantity supplied. When there is a shift in both, you can make no conclusions about the net effect on the equilibrium point.:-)
In *general*, it would be quite silly to charge for a patch to Apache - but its easy to imagine a specific case (maybe a remote root exploit) where volunteers might be able to deliver a patch in 36 hours, but someone might be willing to pay for a patch delivered in 12 hours[1], even knowing that another 24 hours would give them a comparable patch for free.
In that situation, how could you possibly argue that banning payment (meaning there won't be any patch for the full 36 hours) possibly do any good? Or for an even better example, what about for a program so old and/or obscure it simply won't BE patched if someone doesn't pay?
[1]: Feel free to substitute your own times if it makes the example seem more realistic to you. Hours, days, weeks, minutes.
A lot of aracades where I live have specials (usually on evenings in the middle of the week, when business is slow). The way they work is you pay an entry fee of a few dollars, but all games (ALL) inside are then free and you can play whatever you want for a few hours.
Costs about the same as renting a DVD for the evening, and it's a lot of fun - particularly because you can try games you wouldn't normally play for fear it wouldn't be worth the money.
I've always wondered why more arcades don't do that - it's a business model that actually sounds like it could compete with consoles and PCs.
I think something is seriusly wrong with there math. On the face of it, it seems fine. $0.25 in 1978 (year Space Invaders was released) dollars comes to $0.74 in 2003 dollars. In other words, $0.50 actually represents a price cut of about 1/3. Not bad...except for one thing.
While prices overall have roughly trippled since 1978, prices of computers, electronics - almost everything that uses transistors, in fact - have plummeted. The hardware to run Space Invaders wasn't far off cutting edge in 1978, and it was *EXPENSIVE* (hey, it ran at a whole 2 Mhz!). The price of $0.25 was as high as it was because the operators needed to pay off the purchase price. On the other hand, the hardware needed to play Space Invaders is cheap. Hell, a $8 embedded microtroller has enough grunt to do it. With hardware costs so low, I'd expect a MUCH lower cost to play, not just 1/3 lower.
Incidentally, I note it's now selling for $2,772. Anyone know what the cabinet cost when new? I'm wondering how big a price drop that represents...
Frankly, I'm surprised to see criticism of the style of writing on/.
Laws (well written laws, anyhow) have to be written in a similar style to programs, and for much the same reason - the primary goal is for them to be precise. Human readability comes a distant second.:-)
For example, most laws try and put the definitions in one place, the actual "program logic" in another, and refer very specifically to the definitions by location. Then, if the definition needs to change, you have to patch one line of the law, not 50. It's the exact same issue as solved by #define statements in the C pre-processor, and very nearly the same solution.
When this isn't followed, you get problems. Some poor laws integrated platform specific assumptions into the program logic, which has resulted in headaches. Some laws restricting the governments ability to use "pin registers" (that is, to recording the addressing information, not the content of communications) was written to apply so specifically to phones only, that a judge had ruled there were no(!) resistrictions on "pin registers". It's a bit like assuming you know the size of an int, porting the code to a new platform, then having massive buffer overflow vulerabilities.
Fixing this (just like if it was some spaghetti-coded mess of ill-commented C) requires some major patching - which is what you see above. In fact, one area of the PATRIOT ACT (not quoted above) is actually an attempt to rewrite and clarify the pin register law so it does apply only to a single specific platform, and thus doesn't have massive loopholes in it. (Yes, some sections of the PATRIOT ACT actually do increase civil liberty protections. Beleive It...or Not!)
Much like code, "legalese" is a seperate language, and not particularly human readable. That isn't necesarilly a problem - if you thing GCC will choke on passages of "real" English text, wait till you see what the legal system will do!:-)
...but they do have a point. Not a very large one, and fairly well hidden, but a point nonetheless.
Open procurement processes are a Good Thing(tm). Letting anyone bid, and choosing the best solution is *GOOD*. Choosing a sub-group, and only letting them bid isn't a good idea, even if you think that sub-group contains the vendor with the best offer.
The way this SHOULD work is Mass. draws up a list of features, and solicits bids from everyone, probably in the format of $X upfront and $Y/per year.
The governors move was based on the idea the MS simply cannot offer a competitive bid. This lobby groups complaint is based on the idea that only MS can offer a competitive bid. The entire *point* of a procurement process is that we have no idea who is going to offer competitive bids, so we let everyone offer them.
(I've a feeling someone will feel compelled to reply with "but Open Source is a feature the Mass. government has chosen!". No. Open Source isn't a feature. Security, let's say, is a feature. Open Source may well be more secure, and Mass. may well desire security - but the proper way to achieve that is a contract clause that makes the vendor liable for all damages plus penalties for each and every security breach, *NOT* requiring a particular implementation that you hope is secure.)
...for Spider Robinson to be saying this. I don't really consider him a sci-fi author, and I don't much care for his books. Indeed, to the extent that there is a decline in sci-fi, I've always thought of him as a prime exhibit. His stories are so...soft. Fluffy. Fantastic (in the very litteral sense).
That being said, I don;t think there's really any crunch coming for sci-fi. What Spider is saying is that the type of sci-fi he likes (and that he writes) is disapearring. This is true! But sci-fi is the reflection of tomorrow on today, and is constantly changing. In times past, post-apocalytpic wastelands, or psi powers, or laser printers, or time machines, or Martians, or portable phones almost as small as your fist were fantasies that appealled. Sometimes the world moved on, sometimes we learnt they weren't plausible, sometimes they happened - but in any case, they're now no longer suitable for sci-fi.
There's plenty of great sci-fi being written today (Baen Books publishes several good authours (and should in any case be supported for pioneering a content distribution model that doesn't rely on DRM. They give away some titles on their website, sell others cheaply, and include CDs with some hardbacks with dozens more.)
But it's not the same kind of sci-fi as was being written 20 or 30 years ago (and it would be pretty worrying if it was). For some, that puts it beyond the pale - it isn't "real" sci-fi. It's space opera, or military sci-fi, or too soft, or too hard, or whatever. For these people, intent on living in the past, I suppose the appeal of Fantasy isn't too surprising. But that's not the same thing as saying sci-fi is declining. Sci-fi is where it's always been - slightly on the edge, asking question some people would rather ignore.
...but this is a good thing. The overall thrust of the ruling is that you can install software that does things large companies don't like - specifically, that interfere with their marketing alerts you to competitors offers, and otherwise helps you (at least in theory). This is good - if you doubt it, imagine the reverse. What if U-Haul had WON, and now there was a precedent saying that U-Haul got to micromanage my desktop and browsing experience at that level?
The specific details of the ruling benefits some nasty adware, sure - but the problems with the adware aren't that it pops up ads - there's nothing wrong, per se, with software that does that - IF YOU WANT TO INSTALL THAT SOFTWARE. (Sorry for shouting.) What's wrong is the deceptive tricks used to get the adware installed, and that is NOT at all related to the decision. I dislike WhenU, and have no beef with U-Haul, but this was still the right decision.
I'll say it again - a judge just ruled that you have the rights of control over your browsing experience that you'd expect. This is good. Step two, of course, is getting some rulings mandating disclosure and truth-in-advertising for the adware providers, but that is, and should be, a seperate issue.
Three points. Firstly, using "left-wing economic models", in this context, is akin to arguing that if you assume that Allende sucessfully cast the 20th level spell "Feed Country", his problems would have been solved. Both arguments are quite true, but I'd be rather interested to see someone show either has much relevence to the real world.:-)
Secondly, if you read the article, particularly the direct quotes from Allende, you'll see that Allende's government wasn't at risk of deteriorating into chaos, but indeed was quite revoutionary in it's nature. It was purposefully heading there, not accidentally straying.
Finally, this certainly doesn't justify the CIA's intervention - but I wouldn't blame the CIA for the results either. There is a peculiar conceit found in some odd corners that overestimates the US's importance. The idea runs that the US is so powerful, so awesome, so amazing, that it can do whatever it wants - save Western civilization, destroy a continent, anything, everything, all SINGLEHANDIDLY! Thus the US deserves sole credit for winning World War II, and sole blame for deposing Allende. In the real world, it doesn't work that way.
The CIA's intervention was inefectual, half-hearted, ill-thought out, and quite redundant - Allende, whatever his other faults, was quite capable of wrecking his country. Many of the major players were only aware of the CIAs role much later, so limited was it's scope. (Nor is this the view solely of "right-wing" historians - as the article makes clear, it bases its conclusions partly from Marxist sources as well.)
I hope they're right. If Europe really wants to become more independent from US influence, avoiding a US-style patent regime would be a wise choice.
Even if they don't want to become "independent", avoiding US-style patents would be a good thing on its own merits.
(Of course, if they did want to become independent of US influence, their best bet would probably be to increase productivity, encourage research and innovation, reverse the brain drain, and so on. Ironically, software pattents are supposed to help with most of that. In reality...well, I hope they manage to dodge them.)
Well...yes, actually. If they think that's what best, then they should do that. (And it actually might be - as bad as what you outline is, there's a whole 'nother side to the issue.)
Countries do stupid things all the time. It's what democracy is all about, incidentally. The idea that you or some small group of people know what's best for a country, and should therefore be given the power to make sure the country does so is a common one. Historically, it's not a GOOD one.
In fact, more than one country has fought a war for the right to do stupid things. Sometimes the "stupid things" are disasters, but then again, sometimes they aren't. I'm opposed in principle to the idea of trying to guess which one's which before they're tried. It doesn't tend to work well.
Democracies tend to be very short-sighted. Live with it.:-)
As much as it pains me to say it, I'm somewhat in favor of Microsofts position.
Look, what effect will Dr. Villanueva's bill have?
Perhaps, as all good *nix zealots know, open source really is a lot better. In that case, I'm sure the Peruvian goverment, populated as it is by honest, intelligent politicians will choose open source. Dr. Villanueva's bill will have no effect.
On the other hand...what if, unlikely though it may be, Peru might actually benefit in some small way from purchasing Microsft products? I can hear your laughter now, but what if they'd be better off with MS software? Well, in that case, Dr. Villanueva's bill would force them to make a bad choice.
Forcing people or goverments to do whats best for them is not generally a good long term strategy. Perhaps we (and Dr. Villanueva) really do know what's best for Peru, but forcing them to make the "right choice" seems a bit condescending. "Don't worry about this high technology stuff - you're just a small unimportant backwater, and obviously don't know what you're doing. Listen to us and everything will be fine."
Of course, if what we're really concerned about is that the politicians don't know how to weigh the pros and cons of the sitation - say so! Why not write them and explain? Get your friends to write them. Run a contest to find convincing arguments. Or maybe you're concered the politicians might accept bribes (in one form of another) from MS? In that case, maybe Dr. Villanueva should introduce some anti-bribary legislature. But the only way his current bill can help is if open source really is better, but the Peruvian goverment is too stupid, clueless, and/or corrupt to see and agree. If any or all of those is the case, I don't think the bill is the correct answer.
You seem to be equating the cost of energy with some monetary cost. Once you get a machine that can generate enough energy to produce another working copy of itself and continue to operate, you are getting energy for free from an economic standpoint. Sure, you might be 'paying' by using sunlight or fusion, but that won't necessarily cost you a dime.
I'm equating the two because they're the same.:-)
Don't forget, if a power plant generated less energy than it consumed, it wouldn't be a power plant, would it? And if it's generating more energy than it consumes, you can use any percentage of that surplus energy to build a new power plant.
If the percentage you choose to use is less tha 100%, you've fufilled your description of a way to get energy for "free". However, maybe it's free to you, but from an economic standpoint, it's anything but. That energy could also be used to do something directly useful (or more likely, run the televisions of suburban America, but that's neither here nor there), so the cost of making a new power plant is not doing something actually useful in and of itself. If the payoff from building a new plant isn't large enough (in terms of the useful things you could do with the new plant later down the line), then you won't do it. If it is, then you'll build new plants until the payoff of building plants drops below the cost of building plants.
No actual cash is neccesarily involved in this, note!
Anyhow, that's why we'll never have free energy, or even power that's "too cheap to meter" like "they" used to say nuclear power would be.
I don't think you understand basic economics. The quote you give is fine, but it doesn't mean what you think it does.
A current factory takes energy (in several different forms) and outputs finished products, based on a design.
A high-tech factory like you're talking about will take energy (in various forms), and output finished products, based on a design.
So what changes between the two? The cost gets lower. Same output, fewer inputs. Less waste (but not NO waste - remember entropy?), more efficiency. Everything gets cheaper. But still not free (nothing is EVER FREE). You still have to buy those cells from someone (or build them yourself, accepting the opportunity cost that implies). No, it wouldn't be a monopoly, because they're not only available from a monoply NOW. But it still costs.
Currently, a fission power plant will generate more energy than it uses. So I could build one, and devote it's entire output to building another one (by trading the output for the materials and labor required). Once I had two, I could devote BOTH to building a third, and so on, generating a nice ever-steepening curve.
Or I could use your magical factory and solar cells. What's the difference? Well, instead of trading the energy generated for a new plant, I can use the output to build myself some more cells directly. Wooo, I've now saved myself the trading costs. A whole fraction of a percent!
The key figure is how the output compares to the costs. How fast can a given chunk of cells plus a magic factory produce a chunk of the same size? If it's fast enough, the supply will expand geometrically till supply outstrips demand such that it's no longer economic to "waste" the output on making more. At no point, under no assumptions, will we end up with "free" energy.
However, we might end up with some much cheaper energy. I don't see solar as being the answer though. Takes too many wild assumptions to make it work, REGARDLESS of how efficient you make the production side of things. Mayvbe fusion.
what's free is the energy (sunlight), labor, and material cost, but the development costs (like with software) will remain.... until AI makes design intelligence less scarce.:)
As an aside, you blithly state that solar power is free. It isn't, in that you have to convert it into usable form using equipment that isn't free (even for plants). And no, having the molecular assemblers you postulate wouldn't make the solar cells free either, although assuming total capacity increased faster than total demand, the price would drop.
Buying $100,000 worth of solar cells just so you can get $10,000 worth of energy per year isn't free, although it'll be a good idea if they last long enough (maybe 11-12 years, depending on a LOT of other factors).
The problem is that the curve isn't that steep. If you devoted the entire output of all solar cells into making more solar cells, how many years would it take for capacity to double?
Sadly, the answer is "quite a while" (too much trouble to calculate any further, but another way of asking the question is what is the return on investment of generating companies in a free market). It's also about the same as any other power source. That means that while solar may end up providing most or even all our energy, it won't provide us with CHEAPER energy. Molecular copiers aren't required - a device that accepts energy and outputs products is known as a factory, and we already have quite a few.:-P
Slashdot Mirror
How the hell did the parent get moderated as a troll? That isn't in ANY way a troll. Even if it was wrong, it wouldn't be a troll, but sad as it is - it's correct. Gator offers at least nominally useful servies, and many people go "Oh look, a bonus utility! Nice of them to include it!".
Warning - moderators on crack loose in this discussion! (Which makes it different than every other slashdot thread, of course...)
Sure this is /. and all, but at least TRY and read the article if your going to comment directly on it.
As the article makes clear, Sun is doing no such thing, so even IF Sun said that in the past (which I doubt, it contradicts a lot of what they've been saying), the article would be news because it talks about the non AMD64 chips they are still developing, and how important they are to the company.
Yeah. At this point, of Nokia really truly wants to be in the game hardware market, they need to drop the name, and ideally shunt the whole idea to some third party - it could even be a subsidiary, but right now, all it takes is the words "Nokia" and "games", and people start snickering.
:-)
What they need is a fresh start. Oh, and some decent hardware, of course.
I have also heard it suggested that doing so would probably create many jobs in the US as the building and operations infrastructure was being put into place
:-)
By morons, maybe.
This is just a special case of the Broken Windows Fallacy. Just think! Were I to chuck a brick through your window, I would at a stroke create work for the glazier to make a new pane of glass, for the repairman to install it, for the deliveryman to carry it from the glazier workshop, for a miner to mine the sand needed for the glass, for farmers to feed all these people - a large net good for the economy, no? So we should encourage people to chuch bricks through windows, right? And dig pointless ditches, move mountains three feet to the left, and blanket a large and fairly empty continent with a dense passenger rail network, right?
The answer, of course, is no. There are much more productive things those resources could be doing (or they'd already be doing it).
(Hardcore Keynesians will of course argue that in very special circumstances (ie, the Great Depression) there may be some point to paying people to do nonproductive things. It's arguable if this was true then, it certainly isn't true now.)
If I had any mod point today, I'd mod the original poster insightful, and you as flamebait.
First, he didn't say spam filtering and HTML blocking was new, he simply said that it was new to Outlook. Not using Outlook myself, I can't comment as to the accuracy of that, but I note that your ad hominem attack didn't even begin to address the actual point. Did you misinterpret it on purpose, or are your reading comprehension skills just that poor?
Next, "all linux server admins" certainly don't know that spam filtering is best done server-side, or there wouldn't be email servers running linux without spam filtering. This is also, incidentally, why we've seen a proliferation of client-side filtering tools, including in your beloved Mozilla Mail[1]. Even if you did think that server-side filtering is the One True Way, most people don't admin their own mail server, making their opinions irrelevent. Or you might want to use client side in addition to server side filtering. Regardless, if for whatever reason you choose (or are forced to choose) to use client side filtering, then it's important to know what clients support it, and how well. Which is why HIS post was insightful, and YOUR post was a poorly written troll.
[1]: A truly awful mail client, in any case. Real men don't use GUI's.
"Is touch screen voting the best solution available or is a conspiracy afoot?"
What sort of stupid question is that? Next up on Slashdot! Clothing! Does it cure cancer, or will it cause the downfall of civilization as we know it?
Correct voting answer - it fixes some serious problems with current systems, introduces some potentially serious problems, and is being pushed not as part of an Evil Conspiracy, but by well-meaning but niave people who seek a technological panacea despite not really understanding the concepts involved. It's cargo cult security - "these systems are secure, and they're electronic, so lets if we need security, we just need to make everything electronic!". Morons.
I did touch on it - see, ethanol isn't a renewable source of energy either because it's not a "source" any more than hydrogen is. In both cases, it's simply a storage mechanism - in this case, for solar power. The problem is, it's not a very good one, the conversion process is horribly ineficient, and in this particular example, they plan on going through a second conversion process, just to make it even better. This strikes me as a being of dubious ecological benefit.
(Incidentally, there is solid evidence that at present, producing ethanol uses more energy (mainly from fossil fuels) than it produces. The inefficiencies of the hydrogen conversion process will make this even worse - therefore without some pretty major changes (like nuclear powered tractors ), ethanol isn't renewable either.)
I'll believe it when I see it. Their technology may well work exactly as they say, but consider this - if you take 100 kJ of ethanol, no conversion process will get you more than 100 kJ of hydrogen - indeed, while the CNN article didn't say, I'd be pretty surprised if the effeciency was over half. Even if it was 100%, the amount of ethanol required to fuel any significant number of hydrogen cars is stunning - we're talking about many billions of gallons. This sounds less like an environmentally sound tech trick, and more like a pipe dream from the minds of Archer Daniels Midland's lobbyists (who are to thank for the impressive sums already wasted^H^H^H^H^H^Hspent on ethanol fuel production - which has been so far a net environmental loss).
Oh, and also, why on earth would you want to convert the ethanol to hydrogen, anyhow? (For that matter, I've yet to be convinced that converting sunlight to ethanol is a wise move - plants don't really make very efficient solar cells).
I suppose if journalists only wrote about what they really understood, they'd be limited to nursery rhymes (and the simpler ones at that), but still...
Notably missing from the article is how on earth they planned on wiping carp out with a gene that by definition doesn't confer any evolutionary advantage.
Fine, say they release zillions of GM carp - unless they can somehow ensure that only (*ONLY*) the GM carp get to breed, the result will be the next generation of carp consisting of soem mix of GM and non-GM carp, and that'll be repeated for each subsequent generation - unless one generation has so few GM (or non-GM) carp that only the non-GM (or GM) carp breed.
The key point that is absent from the article is why the scientists believe that the numbers of non-GM carp will ever drop below sustainability.
I'm not a population biologist (I don't even play one on TV), and so I certainly wouldn't go out on a limb and say that it won't happen - but it does seem unlikely. Even if it happened in any one lake or stream, it'd have to happen all over Australia at once to work!
New Zealand tried to wipe out there rabbit population by releasing a REALLY nasty rabbit virus. It spread really well, was quite fatal - was perfect. And as everyone expected, it completely failed to wipe out the rabbit population. Put a big dent in it for a few years, but as the rabbit population dropped, the disease became unable to spread. Meanwhile, the vulnerable rabbits died, and the resistant ones lived. Soon the population was back where it started, only now they were immune.
Why won't the same thing happen in Australia? It would be very surprising if the GM changes didn't make the transgenic carp look/act/smell slightly "different", and once the carp population selects away from breeding with the GM carp, it's all over. Again, there may be some clever trick used to avoid this - what?
Lastly, the talk of the gene spreading beyond carp is even worse. I have serious doubts that this will work on carp - the idea that it might work for other species is absurd. Oh, genes can cross the species barrier (it's rare, but it can happen). But the *one* thing that might make it work for carp is if they introduce a large number of GM carp across all of Australia at once. If it crossed from carp to some other fish species, you'd get one GM trout (or whatever). That's not going to get you anywhere.
...but still interesting.
If (and this is a really big if) it was well done, I might be interested in a program that sat between me and usenet, irc, IM, email (and whatever other mediums comes along), and filtered out the worst, brought the urgent stuff to my attention, and just stored the rest.
My initial negative reaction to his article was because for the technically savvy user, email (his major focus) is (or can be) like he wants. A bit of fiddling with procmail, install a bayesian filter, a bit of training, and email isn't really a problem.
That still leaves two fairly important problems which do need adressing - perhaps even by his "control panel". First, the tools need to get easier for the non-tech-savvy to use (although that's a much lesser problem than it was, given the integration of bayesian filtering in current versions of Mozilla). Second, the tools need to be expanded and integrated. My usenet client supports filtering using a static ruleset - but in its own "special" format. My email client uses bayesian filtering - but my IM client doesn't do any at all!
What would be nice is a single place where you write rules and/or feed stuff into bayesian filters for ALL your incoming communications. That'd be the tech-savvy version of Nielsen's "control panel", should be useful, and might not even be that hard to implement.
For a start, how hard would it be to write an IM to email gateway? That is, an IM client that accepts incoming IM messages, converts them into emails and feeds them into your MDA (procmail, say) where you could run it through whatever filters you wanted? Google turns up this project, but it looks to be nothing more than a rough outline of an initial design doc so far.
Still, if you took the concept and extended it, your MDA and MUA would become your CDA (communications delivery agent) and CUA (communications user agent) - methods for filtering, managing, and displaying all sorts of communications, not just email. If filters can keep pace with the spam, then that should solve the problen...
Mmm, your close. More correct would be:
:-)
Forcing people to pay for security updates would be stupid IF it guaranteed the insecurity of a greater number of Internet-connected machines.
You are, of course, assuming that a smaller percentage of people will install the available patches if they have to pay - which is obviously true. You are also assuming that nobody will be lured to write a patch for an unsolved vulnerability by the thought of large piles of cash, which is obviously incorrect.
To put it another way, by limiting the price to zero, you will cause a shift in both the quantity demanded and the quantity supplied. When there is a shift in both, you can make no conclusions about the net effect on the equilibrium point.
In *general*, it would be quite silly to charge for a patch to Apache - but its easy to imagine a specific case (maybe a remote root exploit) where volunteers might be able to deliver a patch in 36 hours, but someone might be willing to pay for a patch delivered in 12 hours[1], even knowing that another 24 hours would give them a comparable patch for free.
In that situation, how could you possibly argue that banning payment (meaning there won't be any patch for the full 36 hours) possibly do any good? Or for an even better example, what about for a program so old and/or obscure it simply won't BE patched if someone doesn't pay?
[1]: Feel free to substitute your own times if it makes the example seem more realistic to you. Hours, days, weeks, minutes.
A lot of aracades where I live have specials (usually on evenings in the middle of the week, when business is slow). The way they work is you pay an entry fee of a few dollars, but all games (ALL) inside are then free and you can play whatever you want for a few hours.
Costs about the same as renting a DVD for the evening, and it's a lot of fun - particularly because you can try games you wouldn't normally play for fear it wouldn't be worth the money.
I've always wondered why more arcades don't do that - it's a business model that actually sounds like it could compete with consoles and PCs.
I think something is seriusly wrong with there math. On the face of it, it seems fine. $0.25 in 1978 (year Space Invaders was released) dollars comes to $0.74 in 2003 dollars. In other words, $0.50 actually represents a price cut of about 1/3. Not bad...except for one thing.
While prices overall have roughly trippled since 1978, prices of computers, electronics - almost everything that uses transistors, in fact - have plummeted. The hardware to run Space Invaders wasn't far off cutting edge in 1978, and it was *EXPENSIVE* (hey, it ran at a whole 2 Mhz!). The price of $0.25 was as high as it was because the operators needed to pay off the purchase price. On the other hand, the hardware needed to play Space Invaders is cheap. Hell, a $8 embedded microtroller has enough grunt to do it. With hardware costs so low, I'd expect a MUCH lower cost to play, not just 1/3 lower.
Incidentally, I note it's now selling for $2,772. Anyone know what the cabinet cost when new? I'm wondering how big a price drop that represents...
Frankly, I'm surprised to see criticism of the style of writing on /.
:-)
:-)
Laws (well written laws, anyhow) have to be written in a similar style to programs, and for much the same reason - the primary goal is for them to be precise. Human readability comes a distant second.
For example, most laws try and put the definitions in one place, the actual "program logic" in another, and refer very specifically to the definitions by location. Then, if the definition needs to change, you have to patch one line of the law, not 50. It's the exact same issue as solved by #define statements in the C pre-processor, and very nearly the same solution.
When this isn't followed, you get problems. Some poor laws integrated platform specific assumptions into the program logic, which has resulted in headaches. Some laws restricting the governments ability to use "pin registers" (that is, to recording the addressing information, not the content of communications) was written to apply so specifically to phones only, that a judge had ruled there were no(!) resistrictions on "pin registers". It's a bit like assuming you know the size of an int, porting the code to a new platform, then having massive buffer overflow vulerabilities.
Fixing this (just like if it was some spaghetti-coded mess of ill-commented C) requires some major patching - which is what you see above. In fact, one area of the PATRIOT ACT (not quoted above) is actually an attempt to rewrite and clarify the pin register law so it does apply only to a single specific platform, and thus doesn't have massive loopholes in it. (Yes, some sections of the PATRIOT ACT actually do increase civil liberty protections. Beleive It...or Not!)
Much like code, "legalese" is a seperate language, and not particularly human readable. That isn't necesarilly a problem - if you thing GCC will choke on passages of "real" English text, wait till you see what the legal system will do!
...but they do have a point. Not a very large one, and fairly well hidden, but a point nonetheless.
Open procurement processes are a Good Thing(tm). Letting anyone bid, and choosing the best solution is *GOOD*. Choosing a sub-group, and only letting them bid isn't a good idea, even if you think that sub-group contains the vendor with the best offer.
The way this SHOULD work is Mass. draws up a list of features, and solicits bids from everyone, probably in the format of $X upfront and $Y/per year.
The governors move was based on the idea the MS simply cannot offer a competitive bid. This lobby groups complaint is based on the idea that only MS can offer a competitive bid. The entire *point* of a procurement process is that we have no idea who is going to offer competitive bids, so we let everyone offer them.
(I've a feeling someone will feel compelled to reply with "but Open Source is a feature the Mass. government has chosen!". No. Open Source isn't a feature. Security, let's say, is a feature. Open Source may well be more secure, and Mass. may well desire security - but the proper way to achieve that is a contract clause that makes the vendor liable for all damages plus penalties for each and every security breach, *NOT* requiring a particular implementation that you hope is secure.)
...for Spider Robinson to be saying this. I don't really consider him a sci-fi author, and I don't much care for his books. Indeed, to the extent that there is a decline in sci-fi, I've always thought of him as a prime exhibit. His stories are so...soft. Fluffy. Fantastic (in the very litteral sense).
That being said, I don;t think there's really any crunch coming for sci-fi. What Spider is saying is that the type of sci-fi he likes (and that he writes) is disapearring. This is true! But sci-fi is the reflection of tomorrow on today, and is constantly changing. In times past, post-apocalytpic wastelands, or psi powers, or laser printers, or time machines, or Martians, or portable phones almost as small as your fist were fantasies that appealled. Sometimes the world moved on, sometimes we learnt they weren't plausible, sometimes they happened - but in any case, they're now no longer suitable for sci-fi.
There's plenty of great sci-fi being written today (Baen Books publishes several good authours (and should in any case be supported for pioneering a content distribution model that doesn't rely on DRM. They give away some titles on their website, sell others cheaply, and include CDs with some hardbacks with dozens more.)
But it's not the same kind of sci-fi as was being written 20 or 30 years ago (and it would be pretty worrying if it was). For some, that puts it beyond the pale - it isn't "real" sci-fi. It's space opera, or military sci-fi, or too soft, or too hard, or whatever. For these people, intent on living in the past, I suppose the appeal of Fantasy isn't too surprising. But that's not the same thing as saying sci-fi is declining. Sci-fi is where it's always been - slightly on the edge, asking question some people would rather ignore.
...but this is a good thing. The overall thrust of the ruling is that you can install software that does things large companies don't like - specifically, that interfere with their marketing alerts you to competitors offers, and otherwise helps you (at least in theory). This is good - if you doubt it, imagine the reverse. What if U-Haul had WON, and now there was a precedent saying that U-Haul got to micromanage my desktop and browsing experience at that level?
The specific details of the ruling benefits some nasty adware, sure - but the problems with the adware aren't that it pops up ads - there's nothing wrong, per se, with software that does that - IF YOU WANT TO INSTALL THAT SOFTWARE. (Sorry for shouting.) What's wrong is the deceptive tricks used to get the adware installed, and that is NOT at all related to the decision. I dislike WhenU, and have no beef with U-Haul, but this was still the right decision.
I'll say it again - a judge just ruled that you have the rights of control over your browsing experience that you'd expect. This is good. Step two, of course, is getting some rulings mandating disclosure and truth-in-advertising for the adware providers, but that is, and should be, a seperate issue.
Three points. Firstly, using "left-wing economic models", in this context, is akin to arguing that if you assume that Allende sucessfully cast the 20th level spell "Feed Country", his problems would have been solved. Both arguments are quite true, but I'd be rather interested to see someone show either has much relevence to the real world. :-)
Secondly, if you read the article, particularly the direct quotes from Allende, you'll see that Allende's government wasn't at risk of deteriorating into chaos, but indeed was quite revoutionary in it's nature. It was purposefully heading there, not accidentally straying.
Finally, this certainly doesn't justify the CIA's intervention - but I wouldn't blame the CIA for the results either. There is a peculiar conceit found in some odd corners that overestimates the US's importance. The idea runs that the US is so powerful, so awesome, so amazing, that it can do whatever it wants - save Western civilization, destroy a continent, anything, everything, all SINGLEHANDIDLY! Thus the US deserves sole credit for winning World War II, and sole blame for deposing Allende. In the real world, it doesn't work that way.
The CIA's intervention was inefectual, half-hearted, ill-thought out, and quite redundant - Allende, whatever his other faults, was quite capable of wrecking his country. Many of the major players were only aware of the CIAs role much later, so limited was it's scope. (Nor is this the view solely of "right-wing" historians - as the article makes clear, it bases its conclusions partly from Marxist sources as well.)
A lot of people seem somewhat confused about exactly what Allende was, and the nature of the regime.
It probably wasn't what you think.
I hope they're right. If Europe really wants to become more independent from US influence, avoiding a US-style patent regime would be a wise choice.
Even if they don't want to become "independent", avoiding US-style patents would be a good thing on its own merits.
(Of course, if they did want to become independent of US influence, their best bet would probably be to increase productivity, encourage research and innovation, reverse the brain drain, and so on. Ironically, software pattents are supposed to help with most of that. In reality...well, I hope they manage to dodge them.)
Well...yes, actually. If they think that's what best, then they should do that. (And it actually might be - as bad as what you outline is, there's a whole 'nother side to the issue.)
:-)
Countries do stupid things all the time. It's what democracy is all about, incidentally. The idea that you or some small group of people know what's best for a country, and should therefore be given the power to make sure the country does so is a common one. Historically, it's not a GOOD one.
In fact, more than one country has fought a war for the right to do stupid things. Sometimes the "stupid things" are disasters, but then again, sometimes they aren't. I'm opposed in principle to the idea of trying to guess which one's which before they're tried. It doesn't tend to work well.
Democracies tend to be very short-sighted. Live with it.
As much as it pains me to say it, I'm somewhat in favor of Microsofts position.
Look, what effect will Dr. Villanueva's bill have?
Perhaps, as all good *nix zealots know, open source really is a lot better. In that case, I'm sure the Peruvian goverment, populated as it is by honest, intelligent politicians will choose open source. Dr. Villanueva's bill will have no effect.
On the other hand...what if, unlikely though it may be, Peru might actually benefit in some small way from purchasing Microsft products? I can hear your laughter now, but what if they'd be better off with MS software? Well, in that case, Dr. Villanueva's bill would force them to make a bad choice.
Forcing people or goverments to do whats best for them is not generally a good long term strategy. Perhaps we (and Dr. Villanueva) really do know what's best for Peru, but forcing them to make the "right choice" seems a bit condescending. "Don't worry about this high technology stuff - you're just a small unimportant backwater, and obviously don't know what you're doing. Listen to us and everything will be fine."
Of course, if what we're really concerned about is that the politicians don't know how to weigh the pros and cons of the sitation - say so! Why not write them and explain? Get your friends to write them. Run a contest to find convincing arguments. Or maybe you're concered the politicians might accept bribes (in one form of another) from MS? In that case, maybe Dr. Villanueva should introduce some anti-bribary legislature. But the only way his current bill can help is if open source really is better, but the Peruvian goverment is too stupid, clueless, and/or corrupt to see and agree. If any or all of those is the case, I don't think the bill is the correct answer.
You seem to be equating the cost of energy with some monetary cost. Once you get a machine that can generate enough energy to produce another working copy of itself and continue to operate, you are getting energy for free from an economic standpoint. Sure, you might be 'paying' by using sunlight or fusion, but that won't necessarily cost you a dime.
:-)
I'm equating the two because they're the same.
Don't forget, if a power plant generated less energy than it consumed, it wouldn't be a power plant, would it? And if it's generating more energy than it consumes, you can use any percentage of that surplus energy to build a new power plant.
If the percentage you choose to use is less tha 100%, you've fufilled your description of a way to get energy for "free". However, maybe it's free to you, but from an economic standpoint, it's anything but. That energy could also be used to do something directly useful (or more likely, run the televisions of suburban America, but that's neither here nor there), so the cost of making a new power plant is not doing something actually useful in and of itself. If the payoff from building a new plant isn't large enough (in terms of the useful things you could do with the new plant later down the line), then you won't do it. If it is, then you'll build new plants until the payoff of building plants drops below the cost of building plants.
No actual cash is neccesarily involved in this, note!
Anyhow, that's why we'll never have free energy, or even power that's "too cheap to meter" like "they" used to say nuclear power would be.
I don't think you understand basic economics. The quote you give is fine, but it doesn't mean what you think it does.
A current factory takes energy (in several different forms) and outputs finished products, based on a design.
A high-tech factory like you're talking about will take energy (in various forms), and output finished products, based on a design.
So what changes between the two? The cost gets lower. Same output, fewer inputs. Less waste (but not NO waste - remember entropy?), more efficiency. Everything gets cheaper. But still not free (nothing is EVER FREE). You still have to buy those cells from someone (or build them yourself, accepting the opportunity cost that implies). No, it wouldn't be a monopoly, because they're not only available from a monoply NOW. But it still costs.
Currently, a fission power plant will generate more energy than it uses. So I could build one, and devote it's entire output to building another one (by trading the output for the materials and labor required). Once I had two, I could devote BOTH to building a third, and so on, generating a nice ever-steepening curve.
Or I could use your magical factory and solar cells. What's the difference? Well, instead of trading the energy generated for a new plant, I can use the output to build myself some more cells directly. Wooo, I've now saved myself the trading costs. A whole fraction of a percent!
The key figure is how the output compares to the costs. How fast can a given chunk of cells plus a magic factory produce a chunk of the same size? If it's fast enough, the supply will expand geometrically till supply outstrips demand such that it's no longer economic to "waste" the output on making more. At no point, under no assumptions, will we end up with "free" energy.
However, we might end up with some much cheaper energy. I don't see solar as being the answer though. Takes too many wild assumptions to make it work, REGARDLESS of how efficient you make the production side of things. Mayvbe fusion.
what's free is the energy (sunlight), labor, and material cost, but the development costs (like with software) will remain.... until AI makes design intelligence less scarce. :)
:-P
As an aside, you blithly state that solar power is free. It isn't, in that you have to convert it into usable form using equipment that isn't free (even for plants). And no, having the molecular assemblers you postulate wouldn't make the solar cells free either, although assuming total capacity increased faster than total demand, the price would drop.
Buying $100,000 worth of solar cells just so you can get $10,000 worth of energy per year isn't free, although it'll be a good idea if they last long enough (maybe 11-12 years, depending on a LOT of other factors).
The problem is that the curve isn't that steep. If you devoted the entire output of all solar cells into making more solar cells, how many years would it take for capacity to double?
Sadly, the answer is "quite a while" (too much trouble to calculate any further, but another way of asking the question is what is the return on investment of generating companies in a free market). It's also about the same as any other power source. That means that while solar may end up providing most or even all our energy, it won't provide us with CHEAPER energy. Molecular copiers aren't required - a device that accepts energy and outputs products is known as a factory, and we already have quite a few.