"He's a physicist and this is biology" is just a slightly mangled appeal to authority - a logical fallacy.
Why do you think anybody listens to Hawking in the first place? Because he is famous. If he weren't, nobody would give a damn what he had to say about biology. Refuting him on biology is no more worthwhile than refuting the guys at the Creation Science institute on biology.
The 1 day reduction is an average, and it doesn't tell you about what else it does.
I had a regular flu and was prescribed Tamiflu (it's prescribed routinely in Europe); it does reduce the severity of symptoms. How do I know? I forgot to take a dose and noticed it right away.
Tamiflu is not a magic bullet against the flu and it has significant side effects. It's not something you want to take if you're just feeling a little ill. But it does have benefits and I suspect it would save some lives when used in an epidemic.
You know, I'm kind of tired of this bashing of the swine flu "hysteria".
You're aware that every year, around 30000 people die from the flu in the US alone?
All in all, everybody go to exercise their preparedness responses, and improve on them if they were deficient.
And what "preparedness response" would that be?
The only thing you can do to prepare for swine flu is: eat healthy, exercise, and get enough sleep. Once there's a vaccine, you might want to take that.
That's it. There's nothing else you can do. Get used to it.
If Amazon monopolizes placing ads in books, I'm all for it. A lot of their other patents are on equally annoying behaviors, so they are good because they keep other companies from doing these stupid things.
What human evolution means and how it interacts with culture is an active field of research and has been so for a long time. There are mathematical models, empirical observations, and long scientific debates. It's so typical of physicists to ignore all that and jump in with the kind of observations that a smart lay reader of popular science books would make. Hawking should stick to physics, where he actually is an expert.
As far as I can tell, open source and Linux are being used far more widely in cloud computing than in corporate America. Cloud computing is going to be a cut-throat business, and it will be tough for companies like Microsoft to compete. Few of their usual dirty tricks work. And the cost of switching is low.
If you want to save the source form or markup, use a language designed for it: LaTeX. LaTeX lets you represent all the things you would want to represent in an academic paper, it's fairly readable, very widespread, and has tons of tools. And LaTeX converts to both HTML and PDF.
If you want to display on the web, use HTML. It's meant for the web. It's not a good representation for paged media. If you must represent paged media, you need to use CSS or XSL, but you probably don't want to.
If you want archival quality paged representations, PDF is the only game in town really. HTML with CSS doesn't come close. But it doesn't make sense to save your own papers only in PDF because PDF is not really editable and doesn't have the semantic information.
No, being a "big, fat, meanie" is not illegal. Tormenting underage girls when you are an adult IS illegal.
Well, apparently not, because she wasn't even charged with that.
And what exactly would that even mean? How do you define "tormenting"? Drew's behavior doesn't even meet the standard of "harassment" or "spam", since the communications were engaged in voluntarily on both sides, and both Meier and her parents could have stopped them whenever they chose.
[The prosecutor] added that his office "will always take risks on behalf of children."
Well, maybe he can prosecute the parents, then, instead of constructing wild legal theories that turn contract law into criminal law.
While Lori Drew's messages were both forged and rude, they were within the bounds of what a teenager needs to be able to cope with in real life. I think the parents are trying to shift blame here. They are ultimately responsible for their daughter's online activities and for not supervising her enough. Her suicide didn't come out of the blue, she was depressed, had ADD, was on medication, and her parents picked a fight with her.
It's easy to choose between someone else's safety and your perceived rights within a democracy.
Freedom of speech is not a "perceived right", it's a constitutionally guaranteed one. And I have been consistent about valuing my rights more than my safety. Living in a free society has serious risks in that other people can harm you and me and even get away with it fairly easily. If you can't live with that, you can't live in a democracy. I still prefer those risks to living in a totalitarian state.
(NOte that I still don't see how you have a "right" to this information; in the same way you don't have a "right" to information about troop movements.)
The test is whether the speech constitutes a "clear and present danger". This doesn't pass that test.
Well, that's the thing - as I've mentioned elsewhere, I've been looking for cases where the newspaper is reporting on other hostages and the act of reporting on them places them in further danger, and I am coming up blank. As a result, I'm not seeing the double standard.
The newspapers made the argument that reporting on the kidnapping would have increased the value of this hostage, but that argument can be made in many kidnapping situations. Since newspapers don't refrain from reporting on such other kidnappings, they have already decided that doing so does not constitute a "clear and present danger" in general, and therefore it doesn't constitute one here. Merely reporting news that causes someone harm is something newspapers do every day anyway.
Seriously, the reporter is kidnapped. You know what his captors want? Publicity for their campaign
And how is that different from any other person that gets kidnapped and that the newspapers report on?
I'll tell you: it's only different because it's a reporter has been kidnapped. When it's a doctor, politician, priest, baby, nun, lawyer, businessman, girl, or oil worker, they smear it all over the front pages and milk it for all it's worth.
What kind of bullshit argument is it that news coverage would increase the reporter's value and make negotiations more difficult? When do newspapers show that kind of consideration to other people? Do they keep other people out of the news because it inconveniences them or puts the at risk? Safety trumps freedom of speech? Since when? Only when one reporter is doing something for another, apparently.
What this story really shows again is that newspapers are corrupt: they are capable of censoring the news, and they will do so if it benefits the companies or the people working there. Furthermore, they have enough leverage to influence sites like Wikipedia.
We need to find ways of disseminating the news free from censorship, whether by Iranian madmen or self-serving American news organizations.
[that's not relevant to Tomboy or other Linux C# applications because those don't use.NET.]
They use the runtime, that's part of what Mono is.
That part isn't covered by the patent. Just because people like you sloppily refer to Microsoft's patent as the ".NET patent" doesn't mean that it covers everything Microsoft ships under the name ".NET". Come on, many, use your head and don't be such a marketing victim.
Microsoft has created C# and dotnet from scratch and indications are that they have a very strategic and aggressive system in place to protect their interfaces with patents.
The set of possible patents that Microsoft holds on C# and related technologies is easy to look up and verify. Microsoft has applied for *one* patent on the.NET APIs, a patent that simply has no bearing on Mono as it is used on Linux.
As for "aggressive systems", Mono has never been threatened by Microsoft (in fact, they have supported it). As an example, by comparison, Sun has made legal threats against several open source projects and several vendors over Java.
How can you compare a patent Microsoft might have related to a kernel or compiler that was developed years after the creation of the kernel/compiler/whatever with following a standard to the T that Microsoft created all by themselves (as mono does)?
They aren't comparable at all; the situation with the kernel or compilers is obviously much worse.
Microsoft's patent application on the.NET APIs is specific and clear, and it is obvious that it has no bearing on Mono as used in Gnome, Debian, or Ubuntu because those systems don't use those APIs. Even if Mono did violate the patent somewhere, it would be easy to work around.
In contrast, the patents that Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Oracle, and other companies hold on kernel and compiler technologies likely do cover technologies used in the Linux kernel, GCC, Gnome, KDE, and lots of other tools we use daily. That's not a matter of "if", you can find them on the USPTO site. If Microsoft wanted to sue open source developers, they already have a much better basis for that then Mono.
Anyone who is paying attention instead
Well, I hope you're paying attention to RMS's other pronouncements as well, like, for example, not using Java.
Personally (and I probably have known the guy longer than you have been alive), there's some things he's really good at and a lot of things he's completely out of touch with.
No they haven't. They've waived their hands with nothing distinct.
Which is what I said: they have claimed that they have patents.
But C# and dotnet - they've filed patents on an disclosed those patents to ECMA when they submitted their stuff for standardization.
That is wrong. Microsoft has filed *a* patent on.NET, but that's not relevant to Tomboy or other Linux C# applications because those don't use.NET. Microsoft has not filed any patents on C#.
RMS still writes code
Yeah, but who actually cares? 20 years ago, people waited with bated breath for his new releases; these days--not anymore. I assume he fixed bugs in GNU C, but that makes him part of the problem, not part of the solution.
That's a completely different thing than advocating against using software that is patent bait.
And which software "is" patent bait? Microsoft has claimed patents on the Linux kernel, Linux compilers, and lots of other Linux tools. Sun, IBM, Oracle, Apple, Xerox, and others probably have many more patents. By your reasoning, we should stop using all of that. In terms of patents, C# is much more in the clear than most open source software.
As the linked post says, he doesn't browse the web for PERSONAL REASONS.
You wouldn't take advice on how to tune a high performance sports car from someone who rides around in a horse and buggy "for personal reasons". In the same way, Stallman's comments on Mono are not relevant anymore: he is out of touch and doesn't know what's going on anymore.
(1) Although Microsoft has applied on a patent for the (non-ECMA/ISO).NET APIs, Tomboy and other Mono applications don't use those.
(2) Any free software is threatened by patents and the patents can come from any company; with C#, people at least have looked at this issue in detail and come up empty.
Legally speaking, it's probably safer to use Mono than any other platform other than C at this point.
The statement from Stallman is particularly bizarre because the entire GNU project started out under a huge cloud of legal uncertainty: AT&T had extensive intellectual property claims to UNIX, including patents, and Stallman just ignored all of those.
Furthermore, if Stallman wants us not to use Mono, he needs to come up with a better alternative; so far, there is none. The closest we have to a successor to C/C++ is D, but it has limitations and isn't widely accepted.
Here, I have to present (and have recorded) ID to get a cell phone, or to post an international parcel, and the government has been trying to bring in compulsary internet filtering. I'd rate NZ better than Australia better than USA better than UK.
You'd rate it that way based on what? In the US, you do not need an ID to get a cell phone, to post an international parcel, and there is no compulsory Internet filtering and there won't be. In the US, you don't need to carry an ID and you don't need to register with the government where you live. Sounds to me like Australia, NZ, etc. are considerably worse.
Unless Lego has gone into the porn business themselves (have they?), Lego is clearly in the wrong here; they had no right to shut down FreeLegoPorn.com What they should be "suffering" from is a serious lawsuit for abuse of trademark law.
Mars colonization is the Hernan Cortes route to developing widespread sustainable living.
Cortes came to a continent teeming with wildlife and full of natural resources. With just a gun, you could survive to a ripe old age, as the environment provided pretty much everything you needed. And what Cortes did was the opposite of sustainability: he started rapid growth through unsustainable living.
We can live sustainably here; we choose not to. On Mars, that choice does not exist
Yes, because we can't live at all on Mars. You need a population of a few million people, plus a functioning agricultural base, plus easily accessible natural resources in order to even begin a technological society. A few hundred colonists with resources brought from earth simply won't work. Their machines will start failing long before they will have the means to replace them or build new ones for a growing population.
Maybe once we have self-replication and robotics a bit better under control, we'll have more options. For now, colonizing Mars is a pipe dream.
Sooner or later we will have a global disaster that WILL wipe us out. Volcano, comet, magnetic shift, meteor, gamma ray burst, germ, ect ect ect... And then what. we're done. no more humans. haha. game over.
The most likely global disaster that will wipe out humanity is... humanity. And we can't run from that because we take that with us. It is merely a threat here, on Mars or Titan or a long term space voyage, it would guarantee disaster.
We need to learn to live sustainably here on Earth first. We need to change and figure out how to live with ourselves. Then we can colonize space.
The question isn't travel; somehow, we could get people to Titan. But how are they going to live there? Build a manufacturing base? Think about how many millions of people it takes just to make a microprocessor or your food.
If we could do that under the constraints on Titan or Mars, why aren't we doing it here on earth already under much more relaxed constraints?
Slashdot Mirror
"He's a physicist and this is biology" is just a slightly mangled appeal to authority - a logical fallacy.
Why do you think anybody listens to Hawking in the first place? Because he is famous. If he weren't, nobody would give a damn what he had to say about biology. Refuting him on biology is no more worthwhile than refuting the guys at the Creation Science institute on biology.
The 1 day reduction is an average, and it doesn't tell you about what else it does.
I had a regular flu and was prescribed Tamiflu (it's prescribed routinely in Europe); it does reduce the severity of symptoms. How do I know? I forgot to take a dose and noticed it right away.
Tamiflu is not a magic bullet against the flu and it has significant side effects. It's not something you want to take if you're just feeling a little ill. But it does have benefits and I suspect it would save some lives when used in an epidemic.
You know, I'm kind of tired of this bashing of the swine flu "hysteria".
You're aware that every year, around 30000 people die from the flu in the US alone?
All in all, everybody go to exercise their preparedness responses, and improve on them if they were deficient.
And what "preparedness response" would that be?
The only thing you can do to prepare for swine flu is: eat healthy, exercise, and get enough sleep. Once there's a vaccine, you might want to take that.
That's it. There's nothing else you can do. Get used to it.
If Amazon monopolizes placing ads in books, I'm all for it. A lot of their other patents are on equally annoying behaviors, so they are good because they keep other companies from doing these stupid things.
What human evolution means and how it interacts with culture is an active field of research and has been so for a long time. There are mathematical models, empirical observations, and long scientific debates. It's so typical of physicists to ignore all that and jump in with the kind of observations that a smart lay reader of popular science books would make. Hawking should stick to physics, where he actually is an expert.
As far as I can tell, open source and Linux are being used far more widely in cloud computing than in corporate America. Cloud computing is going to be a cut-throat business, and it will be tough for companies like Microsoft to compete. Few of their usual dirty tricks work. And the cost of switching is low.
If you want to save the source form or markup, use a language designed for it: LaTeX. LaTeX lets you represent all the things you would want to represent in an academic paper, it's fairly readable, very widespread, and has tons of tools. And LaTeX converts to both HTML and PDF.
If you want to display on the web, use HTML. It's meant for the web. It's not a good representation for paged media. If you must represent paged media, you need to use CSS or XSL, but you probably don't want to.
If you want archival quality paged representations, PDF is the only game in town really. HTML with CSS doesn't come close. But it doesn't make sense to save your own papers only in PDF because PDF is not really editable and doesn't have the semantic information.
No, being a "big, fat, meanie" is not illegal. Tormenting underage girls when you are an adult IS illegal.
Well, apparently not, because she wasn't even charged with that.
And what exactly would that even mean? How do you define "tormenting"? Drew's behavior doesn't even meet the standard of "harassment" or "spam", since the communications were engaged in voluntarily on both sides, and both Meier and her parents could have stopped them whenever they chose.
That's because a similar situation without a computer would have been manslaughter. (Homicide without intent.)
Being rude and offensive is not manslaughter.
The daughter was mentally ill and apparently suicidal; it was her parents' responsibility to keep her out of situations that would trigger a suicide.
[The prosecutor] added that his office "will always take risks on behalf of children."
Well, maybe he can prosecute the parents, then, instead of constructing wild legal theories that turn contract law into criminal law.
While Lori Drew's messages were both forged and rude, they were within the bounds of what a teenager needs to be able to cope with in real life. I think the parents are trying to shift blame here. They are ultimately responsible for their daughter's online activities and for not supervising her enough. Her suicide didn't come out of the blue, she was depressed, had ADD, was on medication, and her parents picked a fight with her.
but you can't tuna fish.
It's easy to choose between someone else's safety and your perceived rights within a democracy.
Freedom of speech is not a "perceived right", it's a constitutionally guaranteed one. And I have been consistent about valuing my rights more than my safety. Living in a free society has serious risks in that other people can harm you and me and even get away with it fairly easily. If you can't live with that, you can't live in a democracy. I still prefer those risks to living in a totalitarian state.
(NOte that I still don't see how you have a "right" to this information; in the same way you don't have a "right" to information about troop movements.)
The test is whether the speech constitutes a "clear and present danger". This doesn't pass that test.
Well, that's the thing - as I've mentioned elsewhere, I've been looking for cases where the newspaper is reporting on other hostages and the act of reporting on them places them in further danger, and I am coming up blank. As a result, I'm not seeing the double standard.
The newspapers made the argument that reporting on the kidnapping would have increased the value of this hostage, but that argument can be made in many kidnapping situations. Since newspapers don't refrain from reporting on such other kidnappings, they have already decided that doing so does not constitute a "clear and present danger" in general, and therefore it doesn't constitute one here. Merely reporting news that causes someone harm is something newspapers do every day anyway.
Yes! And to hell with whoever gets hurt or killed in the process - we must have our Information!
Yes, when the choice comes down to democracy vs safety, I choose democracy.
But here, the problem is a double standard: newspapers keeping information about a kidnapped reporter quiet, while reporting on many other hostages.
Seriously, the reporter is kidnapped. You know what his captors want? Publicity for their campaign
And how is that different from any other person that gets kidnapped and that the newspapers report on?
I'll tell you: it's only different because it's a reporter has been kidnapped. When it's a doctor, politician, priest, baby, nun, lawyer, businessman, girl, or oil worker, they smear it all over the front pages and milk it for all it's worth.
I find this double standard pretty disgusting.
What kind of bullshit argument is it that news coverage would increase the reporter's value and make negotiations more difficult? When do newspapers show that kind of consideration to other people? Do they keep other people out of the news because it inconveniences them or puts the at risk? Safety trumps freedom of speech? Since when? Only when one reporter is doing something for another, apparently.
What this story really shows again is that newspapers are corrupt: they are capable of censoring the news, and they will do so if it benefits the companies or the people working there. Furthermore, they have enough leverage to influence sites like Wikipedia.
We need to find ways of disseminating the news free from censorship, whether by Iranian madmen or self-serving American news organizations.
[that's not relevant to Tomboy or other Linux C# applications because those don't use .NET.]
They use the runtime, that's part of what Mono is.
That part isn't covered by the patent. Just because people like you sloppily refer to Microsoft's patent as the ".NET patent" doesn't mean that it covers everything Microsoft ships under the name ".NET". Come on, many, use your head and don't be such a marketing victim.
Microsoft has created C# and dotnet from scratch and indications are that they have a very strategic and aggressive system in place to protect their interfaces with patents.
The set of possible patents that Microsoft holds on C# and related technologies is easy to look up and verify. Microsoft has applied for *one* patent on the .NET APIs, a patent that simply has no bearing on Mono as it is used on Linux.
As for "aggressive systems", Mono has never been threatened by Microsoft (in fact, they have supported it). As an example, by comparison, Sun has made legal threats against several open source projects and several vendors over Java.
How can you compare a patent Microsoft might have related to a kernel or compiler that was developed years after the creation of the kernel/compiler/whatever with following a standard to the T that Microsoft created all by themselves (as mono does)?
They aren't comparable at all; the situation with the kernel or compilers is obviously much worse.
Microsoft's patent application on the .NET APIs is specific and clear, and it is obvious that it has no bearing on Mono as used in Gnome, Debian, or Ubuntu because those systems don't use those APIs. Even if Mono did violate the patent somewhere, it would be easy to work around.
In contrast, the patents that Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Oracle, and other companies hold on kernel and compiler technologies likely do cover technologies used in the Linux kernel, GCC, Gnome, KDE, and lots of other tools we use daily. That's not a matter of "if", you can find them on the USPTO site. If Microsoft wanted to sue open source developers, they already have a much better basis for that then Mono.
Anyone who is paying attention instead
Well, I hope you're paying attention to RMS's other pronouncements as well, like, for example, not using Java.
Personally (and I probably have known the guy longer than you have been alive), there's some things he's really good at and a lot of things he's completely out of touch with.
No they haven't. They've waived their hands with nothing distinct.
Which is what I said: they have claimed that they have patents.
But C# and dotnet - they've filed patents on an disclosed those patents to ECMA when they submitted their stuff for standardization.
That is wrong. Microsoft has filed *a* patent on .NET, but that's not relevant to Tomboy or other Linux C# applications because those don't use .NET. Microsoft has not filed any patents on C#.
RMS still writes code
Yeah, but who actually cares? 20 years ago, people waited with bated breath for his new releases; these days--not anymore. I assume he fixed bugs in GNU C, but that makes him part of the problem, not part of the solution.
That's a completely different thing than advocating against using software that is patent bait.
And which software "is" patent bait? Microsoft has claimed patents on the Linux kernel, Linux compilers, and lots of other Linux tools. Sun, IBM, Oracle, Apple, Xerox, and others probably have many more patents. By your reasoning, we should stop using all of that. In terms of patents, C# is much more in the clear than most open source software.
As the linked post says, he doesn't browse the web for PERSONAL REASONS.
You wouldn't take advice on how to tune a high performance sports car from someone who rides around in a horse and buggy "for personal reasons". In the same way, Stallman's comments on Mono are not relevant anymore: he is out of touch and doesn't know what's going on anymore.
(1) Although Microsoft has applied on a patent for the (non-ECMA/ISO) .NET APIs, Tomboy and other Mono applications don't use those.
(2) Any free software is threatened by patents and the patents can come from any company; with C#, people at least have looked at this issue in detail and come up empty.
Legally speaking, it's probably safer to use Mono than any other platform other than C at this point.
The statement from Stallman is particularly bizarre because the entire GNU project started out under a huge cloud of legal uncertainty: AT&T had extensive intellectual property claims to UNIX, including patents, and Stallman just ignored all of those.
Furthermore, if Stallman wants us not to use Mono, he needs to come up with a better alternative; so far, there is none. The closest we have to a successor to C/C++ is D, but it has limitations and isn't widely accepted.
Here, I have to present (and have recorded) ID to get a cell phone, or to post an international parcel, and the government has been trying to bring in compulsary internet filtering. I'd rate NZ better than Australia better than USA better than UK.
You'd rate it that way based on what? In the US, you do not need an ID to get a cell phone, to post an international parcel, and there is no compulsory Internet filtering and there won't be. In the US, you don't need to carry an ID and you don't need to register with the government where you live. Sounds to me like Australia, NZ, etc. are considerably worse.
Unless Lego has gone into the porn business themselves (have they?), Lego is clearly in the wrong here; they had no right to shut down FreeLegoPorn.com What they should be "suffering" from is a serious lawsuit for abuse of trademark law.
Mars colonization is the Hernan Cortes route to developing widespread sustainable living.
Cortes came to a continent teeming with wildlife and full of natural resources. With just a gun, you could survive to a ripe old age, as the environment provided pretty much everything you needed. And what Cortes did was the opposite of sustainability: he started rapid growth through unsustainable living.
We can live sustainably here; we choose not to. On Mars, that choice does not exist
Yes, because we can't live at all on Mars. You need a population of a few million people, plus a functioning agricultural base, plus easily accessible natural resources in order to even begin a technological society. A few hundred colonists with resources brought from earth simply won't work. Their machines will start failing long before they will have the means to replace them or build new ones for a growing population.
Maybe once we have self-replication and robotics a bit better under control, we'll have more options. For now, colonizing Mars is a pipe dream.
Sooner or later we will have a global disaster that WILL wipe us out. Volcano, comet, magnetic shift, meteor, gamma ray burst, germ, ect ect ect... And then what. we're done. no more humans. haha. game over.
The most likely global disaster that will wipe out humanity is... humanity. And we can't run from that because we take that with us. It is merely a threat here, on Mars or Titan or a long term space voyage, it would guarantee disaster.
We need to learn to live sustainably here on Earth first. We need to change and figure out how to live with ourselves. Then we can colonize space.
The question isn't travel; somehow, we could get people to Titan. But how are they going to live there? Build a manufacturing base? Think about how many millions of people it takes just to make a microprocessor or your food.
If we could do that under the constraints on Titan or Mars, why aren't we doing it here on earth already under much more relaxed constraints?