Answer: nope. We can describe these phenomena perfectly well, in a language called mathematics. Sure it takes some years to gain fluency in, but so does German.
I hope someone said something similar to your friend the philosophy student.
To be clear, I'm not one of those string theorists who claim that reality itself is a mathematical construct, to which we ascribe some "physical" process to make ourselves feel better about it. They would say, write down the equations and that's all there is. Believe me, I know several of them. However, quantum mechanical objects can be completely described mathematically, and as such you can't hope to describe them more precisely in some other language.
Get me an electron beam splitter and create an interferometer with 4 kilometer long arms. Now show an experiment which can only be explained by the fact that the electrons travel down both arms simultaneously....
I don't think anyone's bothered to do such an experiment with 4-km interferometer arms, since you can demonstrate the wave nature of the electron with a much smaller apparatus. The simplest way is with the analogous 2-slit experiment for electrons -- requires very small slits, and so is generally done instead with a crystal lattice, but the results are just as you would expect.
The way quantum mechanics is formulated -- which, I would point out, does an extremely good job of describing the world as we see it -- absolutely precludes describing anything purely as a particle or as a wave. And that's not even the spooky part...
What's your evidence? You could at least give examples of software that you find "criminally, lacking in either stability or features". My guess, you were either using early alpha software, or you were using software that wasn't meant to do what you thought it was.
Hint: don't download Abiword expecting a drop-in replacement for MS Office. For that, you want OpenOffice, and a recent build too.
Yeah, Adam's a bright kid, but sadly when I met him at the '97 ISEF I got the distinct impression that all his success had made him a seriously cocky hotshot. I suppose he may have improved, but he certainly wouldn't have been easy to work with then.
Anyway, I read the copy of his Westinghouse paper that he gave me, and frankly he won on the technical chutzpah of building a STM in his garage, not for any special insightfulness. He was just so proud of himself for making an STM-quality damping system out of Legos and bungee cords, that he didn't even realize that he'd pretty much totally failed to make his "electrochemical paintbrush" actually work. Nor do I think he understood why his idea wouldn't work for nanoscale lithography in the first place.
What I'm trying to point out is that out in the real world, bright kids are a dime a dozen -- hell, I was one, and going to a college a lot harder than Harvard, where I was barely average, was an amazingly sobering experience -- but being bright doesn't mean squat unless you learn to take criticism, work collaboratively, and refine ideas. Even in academic research, there's little room for hotshots, and I worry that all the fawning and praise that got heaped on this kid will make him stay just that.
That said, last I checked Adam was studying in Cambridge on a Marshall scholarship, so I suppose there's hope. Whether he learns how to work in the real world, or becomes one of the very few successful hotshots, I don't know.
A note that I think should have gotten into today's Slashback -- the New Scientist is reporting that the IEEE has rescinded its decision to make all paper submitters agree not to violate the DMCA in their articles, amid a storm of protest.
"The plan is to remove the reference to the DCMA," says Bill Hagen, intellectual property rights manager for the IEEE. "It's controversial to say the least. We've been getting a lot of correspondence, comment and opinion and have been forced to reconsider it."
This is even better than preserving the status quo, because in this case the hooplah got the problems of the DMCA out in front of the IEEE membership, which is very large and includes some extremely influential people. Score one for the good guys.
The important comments surround their reaction to Liberty Alliance which is a direct threat to their future revenue stream. Their future OS will only serve as a convenient gateway to where the real money will be made: brokering "identities" to developers using.NET for their application's authentication/profile component.
Nah, the real money is to be made in brokering identities for consumers and the businesses they buy things from, and taking a cut out of every transaction. Why risk alienating developers when you can keep giving away the product until you have the power to levy your own tax on every online transaction? After all, look how much money governments take in through sales taxes.
Please raise your hand if you develop software for a living; that is, you support yourself and/or your family by developing software.
Now, keep your hand raised if you believe that your company could offer the same software that you helped to create as a free, open-source download and still keep you employed.
Actually, some free software advocate or other asked nearly this same question of an audience of programmers. Yes, everyone in the room was employed writing software. Very few hands stayed up when he narrowed it down to people writing software for sale as a separate product.
The point is that the vast majority of programmers are employed writing and maintaining in-house software that, while essential to the businesses that use it, is not a commercial product. Large chunks of this code would pass the test that you suggest.
Unfortunately, I am at a complete loss to find a link to said speech, but you get the idea.
What I was going to say was, if on the other hand your "smaller changes" refer to smaller perturbations to the light curve of a star, caused by smaller bodies transiting -- then, yes, it might be practical to detect earthlike bodies simply using more sensitive equipment. Personally, I kind of doubt that anyone will be able to see small bodies far enough from the parent star to be in the habitable zone, but the intrumentalists have certainly surprised me before.
However, this method suffers from the same problem as velocity perturbation analysis, which is that it only tells you that a body is there, without giving much interesting information about it. Still, it makes a pretty nifty survey technique.
We need to get all the stars that have large planets identified as such, and hopefully all of the large planets in such solar systems. Then as our equipment gets better we'll be able to focus on even smaller changes, which will allow us to pick up earth sized planets or smaller.
I assume that, by "smaller changes", you are referring to the detection of extrasolar planets by spectroscopic searching for the periodic velocity signature of an orbiting body. Unfortunately, this method will probably never be sensitive enough to detect an earthlike planet at earthlike distances; the smallest planets detected so far are roughly Jupiter-mass.
On the other hand, direct optical observation of earthlike planets is possible using large interferometers. Note that this is probably only possible with free-flying space-based telescopes, but it might just be doable using terrestrial interferometric telescopes with advanced adaptive optics. What's more, interferometers can not only detect such planets, but should be able to resolve spectra for them, telling us immediately whether or not they are likely to be habitable or hosting life of their own. For instance, since starlight breaks down ozone, an ozone signature in a planet's spectrum would be an almost certain indicator of biological or exotic chemical processes at work producing large quantities of oxygen. And so on.
Raskin's major peeve regarding skinnable UIs is that productivity is harmed when a person is forced to use an interface even slightly different than what they are used to. This I can believe, as even small changes can be distracting at times. However, I have to disagree with this claim that the only solution to this is to get *cough* someone *cough* to design the ultimate-God's own-Uber-UI and mandate it for all systems. I, apparently along with a lot of people posting here, doubt that such an interface even exists.
What he should really be arguing for, then, is portable user-associated UI skins; if any computer you sit down at automatically calls up your preferred skin and thus reconfigures its appearance to match your expectations, the productivity loss to distraction disappears. The means to do this aleady exists to an extent, via centrally exported home directories with stored preference files. The pieces still missing are the usual Linux-UI gripes: not all apps listen to global preferences (e.g. non-Gnome apps don't care what the Gnome/GTK theme is), and some apps actively use their own separate theming system (e.g. Mozilla). This is why we heard a few weeks ago that RMS wants Gnome and KDE to work on making their skinning systems interoperable. Of course, even doing that wouldn't help with the army of older apps that use Tck/Tk, Motif, etc., as their interface layer.
Some distros are working on this kind of thing; Redmond Linux (sorry, Lycoris/LX) comes to mind. All they really do is decide on a desktop environment, and then choose only apps that work well with that environment, including only those that listen to the global skinning system.
Anyway, Raskin's bitching about the availability of skinnable UIs isn't going to get him anywhere, since all the interesting Linux interfaces are free software. Suppose for a nanosecond he convinced Gnome, KDE, etc, to remove themability in favor of his pet UberUI. Fine, five minutes later any developers who disagreed have posted their own versions of the software with theming back in. If Raskin really wants the One True UI to dominate, the answer is to get some developers together and write the damn thing himself -- if it's as good as he says it can be, everyone will use it. If not... well, that's life when the user is empowered.
Close, but not quite. Part of the DES algorithm includes a step in which hardcoded bit-pattern substitutions are made; the tables describing these substitutions are called S-boxes (for their appearance in a flowchart, I believe).
Anyway, the NSA discovered that the S-boxes could be used to tune the algorithm's resistance to differential cryptanalysis. In 1991, Adi Shamir et al discovered that the resistance of DES to this procedure makes it almost exactly as hard to break DES this way as by brute force, indicating that the S-boxes had been tweaked for this (improbable) result.
I'm afraid I can't find an online reference for this at the moment; you could probably search for Shamir's papers on differential cryptanalysis, and it is also summarized in Schneier's Applied Cryptography.
Yeah, but there are larger reprecussions. ...
Keeping these people in country is a good thing for other reasons - it will bring money into the country (and from a stable currency, like the US dollar). A programmer making $40k US who lives in New Delhi is a major earner by foreign standards. In a sense its Trickle-Down economics. ...
The bottom line question is: does the benefit provided by GNOME being improved outweigh the overall costs of supporting the chain of national dependencies?
This statement misses an important fact (that you even mentioned earlier in your post) -- making software, even is a "sweatshop" environment -- is fundamentally different from making shoes. You can't write software unless you're educated, and if you're paid too little it's relatively easy to migrate somewhere else because the demand for programmers is high. Thus, as you say, this practice will only increase the size and power of the educated middle-class, which every economist in the world has acknowledged is one of the most best economic stabilizers you can get.
The wonderful thing about a large educated middle-class is that it tends to be self-supporting, economically speaking, as its presence tends to drive both the production and consumption of goods and services. (Say what you will about consumerism... I think Americans take it waaaaay too far, but a little bit is really necessary to keep everyone employed.) So once these programmers standard of living rises enough to price themselves out of the cheap-overseas-labor market, they'll probably have jobs waiting for them in the local market. Meanwhile, some other location gets to reap the benefits of this process.
So, by all means support the use of overseas programmer farms (and international knowledge workers in general), even if like me you don't buy shoes from Nike.
You can rant at Walmart all you wish, but if you want to do something about it, you will need to get the market behind you. Convince them that the benefits of "community" are worth a higher weekly grocery bill. I wish you luck.
Believe me, there is no shortage of people -- myself included -- who are trying to do exactly that: convince the market that Wal-Mart is too high a price to pay for discounted retail goods. After all, with a few exceptions (violations of labor laws, abuse of local monopolies) Wal-Mart is not a problem that can be solved through external regulation. Instead, it must be attacked by communities deciding that they will not give their dollars to such a corporation, meaning both boycotting existing Wal-Marts and vocally opposing the opening of new ones.
So no, I'm not just ranting about Wal-Mart because it makes me feel better. I'm hoping to make converts and spread the meme of opposition to evil corporate practices, which is why I try to include links documenting my claims as well as links to organiztions involved in this fight.
IANAL, but in the US, if the message is part of an investigation, they could get a warrant requiring you to turn over the key. No new law needed.
True, but if you can plausibly claim that you no longer have the key in question, you're off the hook in the U.S. Under the U.K.'s RIP act, you can be jailed for not turning over the key, even if you have legitimately lost it (if law enforcement feels like making an example of you, anyway).
I will carry your item only if it fits my general strategy.
I give you chance , make it fit or else...
Do you want to take away Walmart's right to govern itself ?
No, I'm not especially interested in denying anyone their right of self-determination. Certainly not over something like the availability of some CD or other. However, I reserve the right to call Wal-Mart on its practices, withhold my economic and/or political support from it, and encourage others to do the same.
On the other hand, when the company's executives decide that they will not carry certain drugs (emergency contraceptives in particular) that are maximally effective only if taken in a 12-hour window, then some regulation might be in order, at least in those markets in which Wal-Mart is the monpoly pharmacy. Or are you opposed to all regulation?
The first one -- the virtual network performance obviously cannot be independent of the physical network, since you clearly can't exceed the physical layer's capacity. However, to first order you don't really need to worry about the underlying communication system, since it won't be any different for any arrangement of virtual nodes.
The issues examined by this paper revolve around things like, how many copies of a given packet need to be created to deliver it, how many nodes must it traverse, and what subset of nodes and links is carrying a disproportionate amount of traffic. This last issue is why the hypercube comes out on top in this analysis -- traffic is perfectly distributed over all nodes and links.
What this analysis does not consider, though, are complications such as routing protocol overhead, and the mapping of virtual links onto physical ones, among other things. While you can consider a computer and its phone line as a unit, you really need to think about the fact that, if your network spans two continents, a large number of your virtual links are going to be sharing a single physical connection. But again, to first order you can neglect these effects.
They also don't sell backhoes.. The gas station does not sell bicycles. So what. If you want birth control, go to a drug store. The inventory choice might not be driven by any factor other than keeping a low profile so even church people will shop there. It might not be a political statement.
However, it is political. WalMart is overwhelmingly run by southern conservative christian white men, to the extent that they have been investigated repeatedly for racism in hiring and promotions (numerous lawsuits pending). WalMart is the nearest drugstore for something like 30-40% of Americans, and the only accessible drugstore for a sizeable fraction of that, because all the others have been driven out of business.
WalMart has been fined several times because executives made a policy of looking the other way in the face of sexual harrassment complaints. Also, of the roughly 34% of WalMart employees who have health insurance (most employees are classified as part-time, i.e. less than 39 hours a week, and thus would have to pay WalMart to be included in the health plan; very few WalMart workers can afford this, as a majority of them already qualify for food stampes and other public assistance), none are offered coverage for contraceptives in any form. WalMart has also been fined for lying to judges and destroying evidence related to victims of assaults that occur on its premises, because its executives don't want to get involved. The vast majority of such victims are women.
Taken together, one should start to suspect a pattern larger than not feeling like selling certain drugs. See this page for a useful selection of links on this and other issues.
In general, not carrying an item is not censorship. However, the case is a bit fuzzier when your record label's single largest distributor calls up and tells your producer that either you change the lyrics in your album or they drop the thing altogether.
Same goes for mass-market book and magazine publishing, video games, you name it.
Judging from their size and crazy profitability, I'd guess that no, there's likely someone else out there not boycotting WalMart. Too bad, really, because it is really a poster child for much of what is wrong with corporate America. I.e. make as much money as possible, with no regard for the costs to society, except when executives feel like using the vast power of a megacorporation to further their personal agendas.
Consider: WalMarts destroy local business via predatory pricing, aggressive marketing, and outright intimidation. Best estimate, for every two jobs created by a WalMart, three jobs in the larger community dissapear. These jobs are regularly worse than average, too: less than 35% of WalMart employees have health insurance, a majority the jobs WalMart creates in communities are part-time, with variable hours and no benefits or opportunity for promotion, and as a result, a significant fraction (a majority in some areas) of WalMart employees live below the poverty line. WalMart justifies these facts by claiming that it primarily creates retail jobs appropriate for working part-time after school or in conjunction with a "real" job. This, when it is single largest employer in many communities.
Nationwide, a majority of WalMart employees qualify for food stamps.
WalMart is also guilty of enforcing cultural homogeneity. Because it is such a large buyer, many publishers in a variety of media -- especially music and magazines -- have begun self-censorship out of fear that WalMart executives will yank a given product from their shelves. The article linked from this story discusses WalMart's increadible influence in the IT market; their influence in a dozen other industries is even larger. People yell about Nike and The Gap because they are brand-image based empires, but most of the output of Mexican, Pacific, and domestic sweatshops ends up on WalMart's shelves, and WalMart is big enough that they don't have to care if people hate them for this.
The WalMart model is a major contributor to urban sprawl and the degradation of community-oriented life. By destroying the local business base, and by locating stores on huge plots of land on the peripheries of towns and cities, it contributes to the flight to the suburbs, thereby increasing dependence on automobile transportation and the assorted problems that leads to.
Enough ranting for now, but maybe you understand why some people aren't too fond of this company. I can't possibly include a reasonably comprehensive set of links here, since people despite WalMart for so many reasons, but a really good links page can be found at Wal-Mart Watch.
I really don't see how you can sweep the actual physical infrastrucure under the rug like this. Eventually, virtual hypercubes turn into real packets on a real network.
It doesn't. The problem with the tree topology used by Gnutella is that it utilizes the available bandwidth in a fashion that becomes highly inefficient as the number of nodes becomes large. At around 10^6 nodes, it uses 15-20% of the total available capacity, whereas a hypercube topology at 10^6 nodes uses essentially 100% of the available bandwidth.
So obviously, if your application runs up against the physical capacity of your underlying communications systems, you can't send more data. But via correct choices of virtual network topology, you can ensure that the physical capacity is being used productively.
It would seem that I have inserted my foot squarely in my mouth, as I have now been scolded both here and in RL about how Carbon is actually a parallel API to Cocoa, not a wrapper as I once thought, and apparently an incompletely specified one at that.
Oh well, having a Mac expert who yells at me out here in meatspace sometimes makes me think I know more than I do.
Well, you might or might not have to rewrite the GUI code to get it working under Linux. MS Office for OSX is a Carbon-based app, and Carbon is a wrapper around the Cocoa system that emulates the OS9 GUI API. So all you would actually need to do (in that area) would be to write a wrapper around GNUStep that provides the same interface, and in theory it would work.
Of course, then you'll need to wrap a BSD interface around the Linux kernel API, and if you aren't running Linux/PPC you will only be able to run Office in a PPC-to-X emulator. So, maybe more work than it needs to be, but not for the reason you were thinking of.
I was going to ask what crack-smoking moderator bumped you down to -1, but this comment apparently hasn't been moderated. Oh well, trolls can ask good questions, too.
Bah, if you're going to do it in public, be really public about it. I'm thinking, get that giant death laser out of the basement and carve your proposal on the moon.
Anyway, all my best to Taco and Sarcasta (and their R.L. counterparts, Rob and Kathleen).
You shouldn't dump too much on patent owners who aren't fully utilizing their patents -- most small inventors (whether they patent their invention or not) see large corporations swoop in and seize their work before they could possibily have capitalized on it. If they're lucky, they have a patent and a good understanding of patent law, and can thus make something off of the corporation in question. Usually not, though.
You probably don't want to strengthen patents any more than they already are, because we're already seeing all kinds of problems with software patents being used to lock open source solutions out of various areas. Many industries also have the problem that start-ups are impossible because the established players already own the necessary patents, and have no interest in licensing them to a new competitor.
Personally, I suspect that the answer is probably a compulsory license regime for patents. In this case, a sensible solution might be to set default payments which are somewhat high, but that scale with number of units sold and price charged. Thus, large corporations still have an incentive to negotiate with patent holders for lower license fees, but start-ups needn't pay anything until they start shipping units, and would be free to use the patents at that rate whether or not their competitors want to let them into the market. Finally, free software would be protected, since in this scheme the developers would be implicitly accepting the default terms, which wouldn't require payment for copies not being charged for (but RH et al would have to fork out for distros that they sell).
Unsurprisingly, a number of powerful lobbies have ensured that this cannot happen without major changes to our IP system; for one thing, it would require breaking the WIPO treaty, which the megacorps paid really good money for.
True, this will never happen on a large scale using devices dedicated to file swapping, as whoever made them would be lawyered into a smoking crater. But don't forget that cell phones and PDAs are converging and acquiring media capabilities. The industry hasn't.
Suppose in five years the rage is a PDA/phone device that can download media streams from licensed providers, and can do P2P messaging. How hard would it be to write an app to turn one of these into a P2P media sharing platform? Answer: depends strongly on how the device is designed, but not necessarily difficult. Writing said app would likely be illegal for one reason or another, but once it's out it out. And surprise, surprise, devices like this are already showing up in Japan.
Slashdot Mirror
Answer: nope. We can describe these phenomena perfectly well, in a language called mathematics. Sure it takes some years to gain fluency in, but so does German.
I hope someone said something similar to your friend the philosophy student.
To be clear, I'm not one of those string theorists who claim that reality itself is a mathematical construct, to which we ascribe some "physical" process to make ourselves feel better about it. They would say, write down the equations and that's all there is. Believe me, I know several of them. However, quantum mechanical objects can be completely described mathematically, and as such you can't hope to describe them more precisely in some other language.
I don't think anyone's bothered to do such an experiment with 4-km interferometer arms, since you can demonstrate the wave nature of the electron with a much smaller apparatus. The simplest way is with the analogous 2-slit experiment for electrons -- requires very small slits, and so is generally done instead with a crystal lattice, but the results are just as you would expect.
The way quantum mechanics is formulated -- which, I would point out, does an extremely good job of describing the world as we see it -- absolutely precludes describing anything purely as a particle or as a wave. And that's not even the spooky part
What's your evidence? You could at least give examples of software that you find "criminally, lacking in either stability or features". My guess, you were either using early alpha software, or you were using software that wasn't meant to do what you thought it was.
Hint: don't download Abiword expecting a drop-in replacement for MS Office. For that, you want OpenOffice, and a recent build too.
Yeah, Adam's a bright kid, but sadly when I met him at the '97 ISEF I got the distinct impression that all his success had made him a seriously cocky hotshot. I suppose he may have improved, but he certainly wouldn't have been easy to work with then.
Anyway, I read the copy of his Westinghouse paper that he gave me, and frankly he won on the technical chutzpah of building a STM in his garage, not for any special insightfulness. He was just so proud of himself for making an STM-quality damping system out of Legos and bungee cords, that he didn't even realize that he'd pretty much totally failed to make his "electrochemical paintbrush" actually work. Nor do I think he understood why his idea wouldn't work for nanoscale lithography in the first place.
What I'm trying to point out is that out in the real world, bright kids are a dime a dozen -- hell, I was one, and going to a college a lot harder than Harvard, where I was barely average, was an amazingly sobering experience -- but being bright doesn't mean squat unless you learn to take criticism, work collaboratively, and refine ideas. Even in academic research, there's little room for hotshots, and I worry that all the fawning and praise that got heaped on this kid will make him stay just that.
That said, last I checked Adam was studying in Cambridge on a Marshall scholarship, so I suppose there's hope. Whether he learns how to work in the real world, or becomes one of the very few successful hotshots, I don't know.
A note that I think should have gotten into today's Slashback -- the New Scientist is reporting that the IEEE has rescinded its decision to make all paper submitters agree not to violate the DMCA in their articles, amid a storm of protest.
"The plan is to remove the reference to the DCMA," says Bill Hagen, intellectual property rights manager for the IEEE. "It's controversial to say the least. We've been getting a lot of correspondence, comment and opinion and have been forced to reconsider it."
This is even better than preserving the status quo, because in this case the hooplah got the problems of the DMCA out in front of the IEEE membership, which is very large and includes some extremely influential people. Score one for the good guys.
The important comments surround their reaction to Liberty Alliance which is a direct threat to their future revenue stream. Their future OS will only serve as a convenient gateway to where the real money will be made: brokering "identities" to developers using .NET for their application's authentication/profile component.
Nah, the real money is to be made in brokering identities for consumers and the businesses they buy things from, and taking a cut out of every transaction. Why risk alienating developers when you can keep giving away the product until you have the power to levy your own tax on every online transaction? After all, look how much money governments take in through sales taxes.
Please raise your hand if you develop software for a living; that is, you support yourself and/or your family by developing software.
Now, keep your hand raised if you believe that your company could offer the same software that you helped to create as a free, open-source download and still keep you employed.
Actually, some free software advocate or other asked nearly this same question of an audience of programmers. Yes, everyone in the room was employed writing software. Very few hands stayed up when he narrowed it down to people writing software for sale as a separate product.
The point is that the vast majority of programmers are employed writing and maintaining in-house software that, while essential to the businesses that use it, is not a commercial product. Large chunks of this code would pass the test that you suggest.
Unfortunately, I am at a complete loss to find a link to said speech, but you get the idea.
Darn it, I hit submit too soon.
What I was going to say was, if on the other hand your "smaller changes" refer to smaller perturbations to the light curve of a star, caused by smaller bodies transiting -- then, yes, it might be practical to detect earthlike bodies simply using more sensitive equipment. Personally, I kind of doubt that anyone will be able to see small bodies far enough from the parent star to be in the habitable zone, but the intrumentalists have certainly surprised me before.
However, this method suffers from the same problem as velocity perturbation analysis, which is that it only tells you that a body is there, without giving much interesting information about it. Still, it makes a pretty nifty survey technique.
We need to get all the stars that have large planets identified as such, and hopefully all of the large planets in such solar systems. Then as our equipment gets better we'll be able to focus on even smaller changes, which will allow us to pick up earth sized planets or smaller.
I assume that, by "smaller changes", you are referring to the detection of extrasolar planets by spectroscopic searching for the periodic velocity signature of an orbiting body. Unfortunately, this method will probably never be sensitive enough to detect an earthlike planet at earthlike distances; the smallest planets detected so far are roughly Jupiter-mass.
On the other hand, direct optical observation of earthlike planets is possible using large interferometers. Note that this is probably only possible with free-flying space-based telescopes, but it might just be doable using terrestrial interferometric telescopes with advanced adaptive optics. What's more, interferometers can not only detect such planets, but should be able to resolve spectra for them, telling us immediately whether or not they are likely to be habitable or hosting life of their own. For instance, since starlight breaks down ozone, an ozone signature in a planet's spectrum would be an almost certain indicator of biological or exotic chemical processes at work producing large quantities of oxygen. And so on.
Raskin's major peeve regarding skinnable UIs is that productivity is harmed when a person is forced to use an interface even slightly different than what they are used to. This I can believe, as even small changes can be distracting at times. However, I have to disagree with this claim that the only solution to this is to get *cough* someone *cough* to design the ultimate-God's own-Uber-UI and mandate it for all systems. I, apparently along with a lot of people posting here, doubt that such an interface even exists.
... well, that's life when the user is empowered.
What he should really be arguing for, then, is portable user-associated UI skins; if any computer you sit down at automatically calls up your preferred skin and thus reconfigures its appearance to match your expectations, the productivity loss to distraction disappears. The means to do this aleady exists to an extent, via centrally exported home directories with stored preference files. The pieces still missing are the usual Linux-UI gripes: not all apps listen to global preferences (e.g. non-Gnome apps don't care what the Gnome/GTK theme is), and some apps actively use their own separate theming system (e.g. Mozilla). This is why we heard a few weeks ago that RMS wants Gnome and KDE to work on making their skinning systems interoperable. Of course, even doing that wouldn't help with the army of older apps that use Tck/Tk, Motif, etc., as their interface layer.
Some distros are working on this kind of thing; Redmond Linux (sorry, Lycoris/LX) comes to mind. All they really do is decide on a desktop environment, and then choose only apps that work well with that environment, including only those that listen to the global skinning system.
Anyway, Raskin's bitching about the availability of skinnable UIs isn't going to get him anywhere, since all the interesting Linux interfaces are free software. Suppose for a nanosecond he convinced Gnome, KDE, etc, to remove themability in favor of his pet UberUI. Fine, five minutes later any developers who disagreed have posted their own versions of the software with theming back in. If Raskin really wants the One True UI to dominate, the answer is to get some developers together and write the damn thing himself -- if it's as good as he says it can be, everyone will use it. If not
Close, but not quite. Part of the DES algorithm includes a step in which hardcoded bit-pattern substitutions are made; the tables describing these substitutions are called S-boxes (for their appearance in a flowchart, I believe).
Anyway, the NSA discovered that the S-boxes could be used to tune the algorithm's resistance to differential cryptanalysis. In 1991, Adi Shamir et al discovered that the resistance of DES to this procedure makes it almost exactly as hard to break DES this way as by brute force, indicating that the S-boxes had been tweaked for this (improbable) result.
I'm afraid I can't find an online reference for this at the moment; you could probably search for Shamir's papers on differential cryptanalysis, and it is also summarized in Schneier's Applied Cryptography.
Yeah, but there are larger reprecussions.
...
... I think Americans take it waaaaay too far, but a little bit is really necessary to keep everyone employed.) So once these programmers standard of living rises enough to price themselves out of the cheap-overseas-labor market, they'll probably have jobs waiting for them in the local market. Meanwhile, some other location gets to reap the benefits of this process.
Keeping these people in country is a good thing for other reasons - it will bring money into the country (and from a stable currency, like the US dollar). A programmer making $40k US who lives in New Delhi is a major earner by foreign standards. In a sense its Trickle-Down economics.
...
The bottom line question is: does the benefit provided by GNOME being improved outweigh the overall costs of supporting the chain of national dependencies?
This statement misses an important fact (that you even mentioned earlier in your post) -- making software, even is a "sweatshop" environment -- is fundamentally different from making shoes. You can't write software unless you're educated, and if you're paid too little it's relatively easy to migrate somewhere else because the demand for programmers is high. Thus, as you say, this practice will only increase the size and power of the educated middle-class, which every economist in the world has acknowledged is one of the most best economic stabilizers you can get.
The wonderful thing about a large educated middle-class is that it tends to be self-supporting, economically speaking, as its presence tends to drive both the production and consumption of goods and services. (Say what you will about consumerism
So, by all means support the use of overseas programmer farms (and international knowledge workers in general), even if like me you don't buy shoes from Nike.
You can rant at Walmart all you wish, but if you want to do something about it, you will need to get the market behind you. Convince them that the benefits of "community" are worth a higher weekly grocery bill. I wish you luck.
Believe me, there is no shortage of people -- myself included -- who are trying to do exactly that: convince the market that Wal-Mart is too high a price to pay for discounted retail goods. After all, with a few exceptions (violations of labor laws, abuse of local monopolies) Wal-Mart is not a problem that can be solved through external regulation. Instead, it must be attacked by communities deciding that they will not give their dollars to such a corporation, meaning both boycotting existing Wal-Marts and vocally opposing the opening of new ones.
So no, I'm not just ranting about Wal-Mart because it makes me feel better. I'm hoping to make converts and spread the meme of opposition to evil corporate practices, which is why I try to include links documenting my claims as well as links to organiztions involved in this fight.
IANAL, but in the US, if the message is part of an investigation, they could get a warrant requiring you to turn over the key. No new law needed.
True, but if you can plausibly claim that you no longer have the key in question, you're off the hook in the U.S. Under the U.K.'s RIP act, you can be jailed for not turning over the key, even if you have legitimately lost it (if law enforcement feels like making an example of you, anyway).
No, I'm not especially interested in denying anyone their right of self-determination. Certainly not over something like the availability of some CD or other. However, I reserve the right to call Wal-Mart on its practices, withhold my economic and/or political support from it, and encourage others to do the same.
On the other hand, when the company's executives decide that they will not carry certain drugs (emergency contraceptives in particular) that are maximally effective only if taken in a 12-hour window, then some regulation might be in order, at least in those markets in which Wal-Mart is the monpoly pharmacy. Or are you opposed to all regulation?
The first one -- the virtual network performance obviously cannot be independent of the physical network, since you clearly can't exceed the physical layer's capacity. However, to first order you don't really need to worry about the underlying communication system, since it won't be any different for any arrangement of virtual nodes.
The issues examined by this paper revolve around things like, how many copies of a given packet need to be created to deliver it, how many nodes must it traverse, and what subset of nodes and links is carrying a disproportionate amount of traffic. This last issue is why the hypercube comes out on top in this analysis -- traffic is perfectly distributed over all nodes and links.
What this analysis does not consider, though, are complications such as routing protocol overhead, and the mapping of virtual links onto physical ones, among other things. While you can consider a computer and its phone line as a unit, you really need to think about the fact that, if your network spans two continents, a large number of your virtual links are going to be sharing a single physical connection. But again, to first order you can neglect these effects.
However, it is political. WalMart is overwhelmingly run by southern conservative christian white men, to the extent that they have been investigated repeatedly for racism in hiring and promotions (numerous lawsuits pending). WalMart is the nearest drugstore for something like 30-40% of Americans, and the only accessible drugstore for a sizeable fraction of that, because all the others have been driven out of business.
WalMart has been fined several times because executives made a policy of looking the other way in the face of sexual harrassment complaints. Also, of the roughly 34% of WalMart employees who have health insurance (most employees are classified as part-time, i.e. less than 39 hours a week, and thus would have to pay WalMart to be included in the health plan; very few WalMart workers can afford this, as a majority of them already qualify for food stampes and other public assistance), none are offered coverage for contraceptives in any form. WalMart has also been fined for lying to judges and destroying evidence related to victims of assaults that occur on its premises, because its executives don't want to get involved. The vast majority of such victims are women.
Taken together, one should start to suspect a pattern larger than not feeling like selling certain drugs. See this page for a useful selection of links on this and other issues.
In general, not carrying an item is not censorship. However, the case is a bit fuzzier when your record label's single largest distributor calls up and tells your producer that either you change the lyrics in your album or they drop the thing altogether.
Same goes for mass-market book and magazine publishing, video games, you name it.
An old article from the Boston Globe
Rock Out Censorship calls for a boycott of WalMart
Here's a page of helpful links about WalMart and its practices in a number of areas.
Judging from their size and crazy profitability, I'd guess that no, there's likely someone else out there not boycotting WalMart. Too bad, really, because it is really a poster child for much of what is wrong with corporate America. I.e. make as much money as possible, with no regard for the costs to society, except when executives feel like using the vast power of a megacorporation to further their personal agendas.
Consider: WalMarts destroy local business via predatory pricing, aggressive marketing, and outright intimidation. Best estimate, for every two jobs created by a WalMart, three jobs in the larger community dissapear. These jobs are regularly worse than average, too: less than 35% of WalMart employees have health insurance, a majority the jobs WalMart creates in communities are part-time, with variable hours and no benefits or opportunity for promotion, and as a result, a significant fraction (a majority in some areas) of WalMart employees live below the poverty line. WalMart justifies these facts by claiming that it primarily creates retail jobs appropriate for working part-time after school or in conjunction with a "real" job. This, when it is single largest employer in many communities.
Nationwide, a majority of WalMart employees qualify for food stamps.
WalMart is also guilty of enforcing cultural homogeneity. Because it is such a large buyer, many publishers in a variety of media -- especially music and magazines -- have begun self-censorship out of fear that WalMart executives will yank a given product from their shelves. The article linked from this story discusses WalMart's increadible influence in the IT market; their influence in a dozen other industries is even larger. People yell about Nike and The Gap because they are brand-image based empires, but most of the output of Mexican, Pacific, and domestic sweatshops ends up on WalMart's shelves, and WalMart is big enough that they don't have to care if people hate them for this.
The WalMart model is a major contributor to urban sprawl and the degradation of community-oriented life. By destroying the local business base, and by locating stores on huge plots of land on the peripheries of towns and cities, it contributes to the flight to the suburbs, thereby increasing dependence on automobile transportation and the assorted problems that leads to.
Enough ranting for now, but maybe you understand why some people aren't too fond of this company. I can't possibly include a reasonably comprehensive set of links here, since people despite WalMart for so many reasons, but a really good links page can be found at Wal-Mart Watch.
It doesn't. The problem with the tree topology used by Gnutella is that it utilizes the available bandwidth in a fashion that becomes highly inefficient as the number of nodes becomes large. At around 10^6 nodes, it uses 15-20% of the total available capacity, whereas a hypercube topology at 10^6 nodes uses essentially 100% of the available bandwidth.
So obviously, if your application runs up against the physical capacity of your underlying communications systems, you can't send more data. But via correct choices of virtual network topology, you can ensure that the physical capacity is being used productively.
It would seem that I have inserted my foot squarely in my mouth, as I have now been scolded both here and in RL about how Carbon is actually a parallel API to Cocoa, not a wrapper as I once thought, and apparently an incompletely specified one at that.
Oh well, having a Mac expert who yells at me out here in meatspace sometimes makes me think I know more than I do.
Well, you might or might not have to rewrite the GUI code to get it working under Linux. MS Office for OSX is a Carbon-based app, and Carbon is a wrapper around the Cocoa system that emulates the OS9 GUI API. So all you would actually need to do (in that area) would be to write a wrapper around GNUStep that provides the same interface, and in theory it would work.
Of course, then you'll need to wrap a BSD interface around the Linux kernel API, and if you aren't running Linux/PPC you will only be able to run Office in a PPC-to-X emulator. So, maybe more work than it needs to be, but not for the reason you were thinking of.
I was going to ask what crack-smoking moderator bumped you down to -1, but this comment apparently hasn't been moderated. Oh well, trolls can ask good questions, too.
Bah, if you're going to do it in public, be really public about it. I'm thinking, get that giant death laser out of the basement and carve your proposal on the moon.
Anyway, all my best to Taco and Sarcasta (and their R.L. counterparts, Rob and Kathleen).
Happy V-day to you, too, PlatMac.
You shouldn't dump too much on patent owners who aren't fully utilizing their patents -- most small inventors (whether they patent their invention or not) see large corporations swoop in and seize their work before they could possibily have capitalized on it. If they're lucky, they have a patent and a good understanding of patent law, and can thus make something off of the corporation in question. Usually not, though.
You probably don't want to strengthen patents any more than they already are, because we're already seeing all kinds of problems with software patents being used to lock open source solutions out of various areas. Many industries also have the problem that start-ups are impossible because the established players already own the necessary patents, and have no interest in licensing them to a new competitor.
Personally, I suspect that the answer is probably a compulsory license regime for patents. In this case, a sensible solution might be to set default payments which are somewhat high, but that scale with number of units sold and price charged. Thus, large corporations still have an incentive to negotiate with patent holders for lower license fees, but start-ups needn't pay anything until they start shipping units, and would be free to use the patents at that rate whether or not their competitors want to let them into the market. Finally, free software would be protected, since in this scheme the developers would be implicitly accepting the default terms, which wouldn't require payment for copies not being charged for (but RH et al would have to fork out for distros that they sell).
Unsurprisingly, a number of powerful lobbies have ensured that this cannot happen without major changes to our IP system; for one thing, it would require breaking the WIPO treaty, which the megacorps paid really good money for.
True, this will never happen on a large scale using devices dedicated to file swapping, as whoever made them would be lawyered into a smoking crater. But don't forget that cell phones and PDAs are converging and acquiring media capabilities. The industry hasn't.
Suppose in five years the rage is a PDA/phone device that can download media streams from licensed providers, and can do P2P messaging. How hard would it be to write an app to turn one of these into a P2P media sharing platform? Answer: depends strongly on how the device is designed, but not necessarily difficult. Writing said app would likely be illegal for one reason or another, but once it's out it out. And surprise, surprise, devices like this are already showing up in Japan.