Actually, the article says people with ALS were 4.8 times more likely (than people without ALS) to have been thin.
Quoting from the article:
The study showed that compared to the control group, patients with motor neuron disease were: ... - 4.8 times as likely to have had a body mass index under 25 before they got ill. That means they were either underweight or of healthy weight, as opposed to being overweight or obese.
Don't ban guns, or cars, or forks because people may do bad things.
I agree with the sentiment, but it totally misses the point in this case. If SMTP servers are like guns then authentication is like trigger locks.
Suppose I left a gun in an unlocked shed "so my friends can use it". If kids were stopping by and firing bullets around the neighborhood, my neighbors might be pretty upset. If I self-righteously protested that neither I nor any of my friends had fired those bullets, they probably wouldn't be mollified. If I refused to lock up the gun, they might go to my landlord and try to get me evicted.
According to the article, Gilmore is a libertarian. So he should applaud people finding private solutions to the problem his open relay is creating.
Flash is killing the web by effectively blocking content from search engines, making it impossible to link to specific information etc
This is really a key point. If your site can't be linked to and can't be indexed by search engines, are you really "on the web"? This is both a theorectical question (Is hypertext that can't be linked to an oxymoron?) and a practical one (Are you on the web if no one knows your site exists?).
A lot of the same issues apply to DHTML sites where a page consists solely of a huge mass of Javascript.
Speaking from personal experience, if Google can't see your site, odds are I won't either.
His story (see link above from solman) doesn't mention money changing hands, so what do you believe?
Philip's account disappeared from his site at the same time that the settlement was announced--presumably in compliance with the settlement agreement. (That's why you're reading it on archive.org.) So Philip never got to tell the end of the story from his perspective.
Presumably, since the VC's didn't settle with Eve, she wasn't bound by the same constraints.
So the poor, Starving Artist picks out the Creative Commons license that meets her need. For the moment, assume the license is ironclad. Then, mean old Megacorp comes along and steals Starving Artist's work. How is she going to enforce her license? Will Creative Commons maintain a staff of lawyers to work license infringment cases pro-bono? Do we trust that lawyers will take these cases on a contingency fee basis?
Unless there's some answer, the license won't mean much. Lessig is a very smart guy. It will be interesting to see his full proposal on how he expects this to work.
"Teenagers will re-jigger them, make them go very fast, and break their necks in Extreme Ginger exhibitions in front of admiring babes, leading to further restrictions by official killjoys. Small children will ride them down stairs, to very bad outcomes. And dogs will chase them relentlessly.
For dogs, surely, Ginger is proof of God's infinite love and generosity. For the rest of us, it's an amusing novelty, possibly a fad, but we don't quite see, as Steve Jobs reportedly did, cities being designed around it."
Cutriss writes:
"The ICANN seems to be thinking about giving in to public demands. According to this article on Wired.com mentions that ICANN is considering allowing domain owners to elect their board of directors. It's a step in the right direction."
According to ICANN's original charter (which the board has ignored), all internet users were supposed to be able to elect half of the board. Now this committee proposes (and the board will no doubt rubber stamp) that domain name owners elect one third of the board, with the rest appointed by a variety of industry "stakeholders".
As of last night, I could get into msn.com with Mozilla 0.9.4 (after being blocked on Friday).
But when I tried with an old Mac PowerBook running IE 4.5, I still received the "upgrade your browser message", rendered as plain text, not HTML. Unbelievable!
IALAL, but my understanding is that you could file a lawsuit, but you'd lose because gun owners aren't a "protected class". Employers can't discriminate based on legally protected categories like race, ethnicity, sex, disability and, in some states, sexual orientation.
On the other hand, if they want to discriminate based on gun ownership, how many piercings you have or what brand of car you drive, they're free to do that.
I use Junkbuster to block ads. I had never bothered blocking slashdot ads because they're less annoying then most, and I wanted to support the site.
But, as I was reading this story, up came the annoyingly flashing PlanetHardDrive.com banner. So, images.slashdot.org/banner just went into sblock.ini.
Of cource MS doesn't have a monopoly in web development software either, so I guess we should all shut up untill they extends these terms to the Windows OS.
In the paper, he argues that the government doesn't (and shouldn't) want access to authentication (as opposed to encryption) keys, because the risks of forgery are too high.
"In such a scenario, the obvious tack for law enforcement to take would
be to demand to have access to the secret authentication key shared by
Alice and Bob. But access to authentication keys is one thing that
government has long agreed that they don't want to have. Having such
access would allow the government to forge authentic-looking packets
for any pair of parties that are communicating. This is way beyond
mere access to encrypted communications, as loss of such
authentication keys could wreak massive havoc to the structure and
integrity of the entire Internet, allow hackers not only to overhear
private messages, but to actually control computers, perhaps to shut
down power systems or to airline traffic control systems, etc. The
power to authenticate is in many cases the power to control, and
handing all authentication power to the government is beyond all
reason, even if it were for well-motivated law-enforcement reasons;
the security risks would be totally unacceptable."
The power of his technique is precisely that it enables the same kind of confidentiality using authentication keys that one can get using encryption.
Of course, if you read the article, you'd realize he said the same thing:
"But sometime probably between 2010 and 2020, we lose the largest single factor that lets us continue on that curve--our ability to make things smaller."
Of course, what we call Moore's Law was really nothing more than an off the cuff remark by an "important person", so by following it, the semiconductor industry has validated it.
How important was Gordon Moore in 1965? In what sense was his prediction "self-fulfilling"?
Do you think that the advances in semiconductor fabrication that have occurred in the last 35 years happened because Moore made his prediction?
Why not give him credit for making a bold prediction that turned out to be right?
All the SSTO examples you cite are disposable. X-33 and DC-X are meant to be prototypes of a reusable SSTO, which is a much harder beast to build, but would presumably have much greater impact on costs.
What's needed is someone to take hardware - be it G4 hardware, GF3 chips, whatever, standardize on it and then say "WE WILL SUPPORT THIS TILL DEATH DO US PART". This lets software developers push that metal to the limit, just like they did on the Amiga.
The UK is certainly far enough North. Go out tonight and hope they're still going. (That's what I will do here in the NE USA, where it was snowing last night, even if I had known to look.)
I haven't read Sunstein's book, but according to George Will's column last Sunday, he goes further than simply decrying the fragmentation of information:
He would have government use various measures--from "must carry" requirements for broadcasters to mandatory links connecting Web sites to others promoting different views--to manage "the scarce commodity" of the public's attention. Government, he thinks, should actively "promote exposure to materials that people would not have chosen in advance."
If this sounds like a good idea to you, then let's extend it to another area that enjoys First Amendment protection; religion. I think that that membership in a denomination encourages people to (quoting Katz) "eliminate from their screens and minds anything they might not want to see or hear or might disagree with."
So let's do something about it! Require religious organizations to present alternative viewpoints during their services. Wait, that's not enough. What about all those atheists and agnostics who aren't being exposed to any religious viewpoints. The government should mandate that TV, movies and websites include religious indoctrination (in all the different religions, of course).
As others have noted, this is really about the elites that have had effective control of information trying to regain what they've lost.
The terms of a contract can be nullified if they are unconscionable/ The GPL confiscates your rights to your own code if you include even one line of GPLed code. It hence creates a Faustian bargain which is not legal.
So put up or shut up, Brett. Use some GPL'd software in a commercial product, publicized the fact that you did it, and you can be the test case. We'll see whether your interpretation of contract and copyright law stands up in court.
Prior art is prior art. If the patented technique was disclosed before they applied for the patent, the patent isn't valid. The fact that Oracle owns Rdb now doesn't make any difference.
Re:This could be bad news for manned space travel.
on
Life On Mars: ALH84001
·
· Score: 1
Quoting from the Chronicle article:
Thomas-Keprta said the new study strongly supports the original claim and may even suggest that there is still microscopic life on Mars.
``If it existed there at one time, we would expect it to exist today,'' said Thomas-Keprta.
There's an interview with TeX and Metafont author Donald E. Knuth at Advogato, where he discusses this exact question. The interview's from almost a year ago, which give an idea of just how old this issue is.
Here's an excerpt:
There's a fairly major controversy with TrueType right now,
that
there a number of patents
that are owned
now by Apple. It's kind of interesting to me
that that is the case
even though it's for the most part
derivative work of what was in
Metafont.
I've been very unhappy with the way patents are handled. But
the
more I look at it, the more I decide that it's a waste of
time. I
mean, my life is too short to fight with that, so
I've just been
staying away. But I know that the ideas for
rendering... The main
thing is that TrueType uses only quadratic
splines, and that Type1
fonts use cubic splines, which allow you
to get by with a lot fewer
points where you have to specify
things.
The quadratic has the great advantage that
there's a real cheap way to
render them. You can make
hardware to draw a quadratic spline
lickety-split. It's all
Greek mathematics, the conic sections. You can
describe a
quadratic spline by a quadratic equation (x, y) so that the
value
of f(x, y) is positive on one side of the curve and negative on
the other side. And then you can just follow along pixel by pixel,
and
when x changes by one and y changes by one, you can see which
way to
move to draw the curve in the optimal way. And the
mathematics is
really simple for a quadratic. The corresponding
thing for a cubic is
six times as complicated, and it has extra
very strange effects in it
because cubic curves can have cusps in
them that are hidden. They can
have places where the function will
be plus on both sides of the
cubic, instead of plus on one side
and minus on the other.
The algorithm that's
like the quadratic one, but for cubics, turns out
that you can be
in something that looks like a very innocuous curve,
but
mathematically you're passing a singular point. That's
sort of
like a dividing by zero even though it doesn't look
like there's any
reason to do so. The bottom line is that the
quadratic curves that
TrueType uses allow extremely fast hardware
implementations, in
parallel.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the article says people with ALS were 4.8 times more likely (than people without ALS) to have been thin.
Quoting from the article:
The study showed that compared to the control group, patients with motor neuron disease were:
...
- 4.8 times as likely to have had a body mass index under 25 before they got ill. That means they were either underweight or of healthy weight, as opposed to being overweight or obese.
Don't ban guns, or cars, or forks because people may do bad things.
I agree with the sentiment, but it totally misses the point in this case. If SMTP servers are like guns then authentication is like trigger locks.
Suppose I left a gun in an unlocked shed "so my friends can use it". If kids were stopping by and firing bullets around the neighborhood, my neighbors might be pretty upset. If I self-righteously protested that neither I nor any of my friends had fired those bullets, they probably wouldn't be mollified. If I refused to lock up the gun, they might go to my landlord and try to get me evicted.
According to the article, Gilmore is a libertarian. So he should applaud people finding private solutions to the problem his open relay is creating.
This is really a key point. If your site can't be linked to and can't be indexed by search engines, are you really "on the web"? This is both a theorectical question (Is hypertext that can't be linked to an oxymoron?) and a practical one (Are you on the web if no one knows your site exists?).
A lot of the same issues apply to DHTML sites where a page consists solely of a huge mass of Javascript.
Speaking from personal experience, if Google can't see your site, odds are I won't either.
Presumably, since the VC's didn't settle with Eve, she wasn't bound by the same constraints.
So the poor, Starving Artist picks out the Creative Commons license that meets her need. For the moment, assume the license is ironclad. Then, mean old Megacorp comes along and steals Starving Artist's work. How is she going to enforce her license? Will Creative Commons maintain a staff of lawyers to work license infringment cases pro-bono? Do we trust that lawyers will take these cases on a contingency fee basis?
Unless there's some answer, the license won't mean much. Lessig is a very smart guy. It will be interesting to see his full proposal on how he expects this to work.
How is that an improvment???
As of last night, I could get into msn.com with Mozilla 0.9.4 (after being blocked on Friday).
But when I tried with an old Mac PowerBook running IE 4.5, I still received the "upgrade your browser message", rendered as plain text, not HTML. Unbelievable!
IALAL, but my understanding is that you could file a lawsuit, but you'd lose because gun owners aren't a "protected class". Employers can't discriminate based on legally protected categories like race, ethnicity, sex, disability and, in some states, sexual orientation.
On the other hand, if they want to discriminate based on gun ownership, how many piercings you have or what brand of car you drive, they're free to do that.
I use Junkbuster to block ads. I had never bothered blocking slashdot ads because they're less annoying then most, and I wanted to support the site.
But, as I was reading this story, up came the annoyingly flashing PlanetHardDrive.com banner. So, images.slashdot.org/banner just went into sblock.ini.
Of cource MS doesn't have a monopoly in web development software either, so I guess we should all shut up untill they extends these terms to the Windows OS.
Why not give him credit for making a bold prediction that turned out to be right?
All the SSTO examples you cite are disposable. X-33 and DC-X are meant to be prototypes of a reusable SSTO, which is a much harder beast to build, but would presumably have much greater impact on costs.
The UK is certainly far enough North. Go out tonight and hope they're still going. (That's what I will do here in the NE USA, where it was snowing last night, even if I had known to look.)
many viewpoints giving wrong information, or one viewpoint giving correct information?
Who decides which is "correct"?
So let's do something about it! Require religious organizations to present alternative viewpoints during their services. Wait, that's not enough. What about all those atheists and agnostics who aren't being exposed to any religious viewpoints. The government should mandate that TV, movies and websites include religious indoctrination (in all the different religions, of course).
As others have noted, this is really about the elites that have had effective control of information trying to regain what they've lost.
So put up or shut up, Brett. Use some GPL'd software in a commercial product, publicized the fact that you did it, and you can be the test case. We'll see whether your interpretation of contract and copyright law stands up in court.
Of course, if your're not willing to do that...
Prior art is prior art. If the patented technique was disclosed before they applied for the patent, the patent isn't valid. The fact that Oracle owns Rdb now doesn't make any difference.
Thomas-Keprta said the new study strongly supports the original claim and may even suggest that there is still microscopic life on Mars.
``If it existed there at one time, we would expect it to exist today,'' said Thomas-Keprta.
Um, that's probably because Yahoo is now using Google as its search engine. See this press release.
Think of it, fifty-something Steve Tyler singing Walk This Way to Britney Spears. "You ain't seen nothin' 'til you're down on a muffin", indeed!
Here's an excerpt:
There's a fairly major controversy with TrueType right now, that there a number of patents that are owned now by Apple. It's kind of interesting to me that that is the case even though it's for the most part derivative work of what was in Metafont.
I've been very unhappy with the way patents are handled. But the more I look at it, the more I decide that it's a waste of time. I mean, my life is too short to fight with that, so I've just been staying away. But I know that the ideas for rendering... The main thing is that TrueType uses only quadratic splines, and that Type1 fonts use cubic splines, which allow you to get by with a lot fewer points where you have to specify things.
The quadratic has the great advantage that there's a real cheap way to render them. You can make hardware to draw a quadratic spline lickety-split. It's all Greek mathematics, the conic sections. You can describe a quadratic spline by a quadratic equation (x, y) so that the value of f(x, y) is positive on one side of the curve and negative on the other side. And then you can just follow along pixel by pixel, and when x changes by one and y changes by one, you can see which way to move to draw the curve in the optimal way. And the mathematics is really simple for a quadratic. The corresponding thing for a cubic is six times as complicated, and it has extra very strange effects in it because cubic curves can have cusps in them that are hidden. They can have places where the function will be plus on both sides of the cubic, instead of plus on one side and minus on the other.
The algorithm that's like the quadratic one, but for cubics, turns out that you can be in something that looks like a very innocuous curve, but mathematically you're passing a singular point. That's sort of like a dividing by zero even though it doesn't look like there's any reason to do so. The bottom line is that the quadratic curves that TrueType uses allow extremely fast hardware implementations, in parallel.