I'm really glad that they are consulting religous leaders
I find it strange. Sure - a debate may be necessary, we don't want them to create a dangerous organism. But that is a discussion for people who have the knowledge, and for the political leaders. Bringing in the religious for any kind of decisions makes no sense at all, other than as a PR stunt.
And for the "playing god" types out there: There was a time when certain people claimed aeroplanes were evil too. If man were meant to fly then we'd be born with wings... (If we were meant to be naked then we'd probably been born that way too...)
It isn't even as if they create something new. They are merely taking away unnecessary stuff from existing bacteria, and not even knowing what the remaining parts exactly do. Much like an ignorant trimming a tree - he can cut off some branches but not all, the "new" tree will still live, but is hardly a new creation although it looks funny.
Creating life would be different, they would have to design the dna from scratch, then design and manufacture all the other parts of the cell too because dna alone doesn't work. This will probably happen some day, by someone who isn't very religious.
Has any experimentation been done on creatures with differences in only their 'junk' DNA. There have been quite a few experiments on mice.
It just seems a bit iffy to say it's junk because it doesn't do something that we know other DNA does. If you can remove the sequences completely and still have a healthy animal develop, chances are it was indeed junk. This is not surprising, mutations can cause anything, including the inclusion of unused DNA.
A detection system based on civilian radio transmission isn't that much harder to stop. On your own territiory: Require a military controlled switch installed in all civilian transmitters. Click - and no more civilian-assisted detection during war. On enemy territory - bomb the "civilian" transmitters/power supplies along with the military ones. This is done anyway in order to stop the propaganda machine.
Orwell predicted such measures over a half-century ago. If they can monitor you for "crime prevention" reasons why not monitor people to see if they are "political agitators"? Lets monitor these people to make sure that they're not critical of the government or the police. Can't you see that?
A good point. Not that they need CCTV to do this - ordinary cops prevent political meetings every day in low-tech police states.
Still, If I had to choose I would prefer a place with little violent crime and CCTV over a "free" place with so much crime that I would need a weapon for protection. Currently neiter is necessary where I live, but that isn't always possible.
The same argument doesn't apply to hardware serial numbers, software crime is merely an economy thing. It does usually not cause physical harm.
Re:The humans rights violations are irksome
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China Enters Space
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· Score: 1
Interesting footnote: At the beginning of WWII, Goddard himself approached the Army with the suggestion to build long range rocket based weaponry. The U.S. Army is reputed to have told him that the idea was ludicrous, and that missile weapons were a pipe dream.
Keep in mind that there were no nukes at the time. A conventional bomb on that time's rockets wasn't very effective. The nazi rocket-weapons didn't help them much. Shorter range than a bomber plane, and barely enough accuracy to hit entire cities. A bridge, airport or factory was too small targets to aim for. The kill ratio was something like 2 people per V-weapon fired.
Nukes made long-distance rockets useful, due to the large affected area. Better navigational systems made the conventional long-distance rockets useful too. But try getting that kind of precision from a mechanically guided rocket of the forties...
No problem. I buy 5 music cd's, burn a new one with favourites from each, bring it to a party and have it played there. No different from bringing my 5 cd's and a playlist, just more convenient for all. Of course I keep the homemade cd when I leave.
That number probably includes the typical disk space requirements for cached pages and images. People have different philosophies about cache size, but a cached image is going to take up just as much disk space with Mozilla as it is with IE, or with any other browser.
I cache my images etc. with squid. Caching does not belong in the browser (it does a poor job). Using a caching proxy means I can switch from one browser to another and still have the page cached. There are other advantages too.
So, we must provide and HTML mail client. Do we make them download it seperately? What do you do about the shared components such as core layout? do we make people download it twice?
Debian and other linux distributors have solved that one a long time ago:
Put the shared core in a spearate core package, and have the browser package and the mail package depend on the core package.
Of course there is no usable package management system for windows, so you may want to ship windows binaries as a single big archive.
Linux users however is used to having one product consist of several packages. And I don't have to worry about getting all the packages either - If it gets packaged for debian this way I simply install the "browser" package. The "core" will follow automatically because of dependencies. Same thing happens if I install "mail" only. Installing "mail" some time after "browser" will not download "core" again, because the dependency on core will be satisfied by the already installed "core".
The legal difference is big. Intel doesn't deny me running my celeron 333s at 500 MHz. The licence doesn't criminalize that, they just don't warrant it. Of course a 500MHz chip won't fail at 333, so guaranteeing that is cheap.
I actually like Intel for doing this - I can get 500 MHz chips with 100MHz buses a lot cheaper this way. (If Intel didn't do this then their 500-rated chips might be cheaper - but probably not as cheap as the 333 chips based on the same production process.:-)
One major driving force in the server share market is companies that have a "one platform only" policy.
This is one of microsoft marketings greatest accomplishments - the "one platform policy"
Ever seen anybody standardize completely on any other platform? Servers, desktops, and so on? Today?
Marketers tell them that standardizing will have a benefit when it simply isn't true. windows on desktops often makes sense - thats something the workers know after all. It makes a lot less sense in server rooms. Standardizing on windows is just as stupid as standardizing on exactly the same office size and office equipment for all employees (boss, secretaries, janitors), no matter what their job specification is.
Sure - you can get volume discounts that way, but quite a few will get tools that are either inadequate, overkill, or just plain wrong for the task at hand.
The mindcraft tests proved NT to be faster serving static pages from disk cache with several network cards. The c't test showed Linux to be faster in most other cases, such as: - serving through one card in general - serving dynamic content, one or more cards - serving a set of pages too big for the disk cache, i.e. when disk reading have to happen. Do your web server actually have more RAM than content? Now note that these "other" cases are much more typical than the mindcraft setup.
of microsoft if ms would give it out for free... you all know what i mean, make a shoddy product that wont work, then charge $30.00 a minute for support. now i'm not saying it'l be like that, thats just what pops into my head
Yes! Please do that! Today the PHB's don't understand about "free" linux. If MS did this then the linux/windows comparison would reduce to this:
Who cost most in support? I.e. (support price)x(amount of support necessary during normal use)
The problem I see with the idea of making money off support of a product is this: The more stable and easy-to-use your product is, the less money you make! This is an ironic situation, whereby overwhelming success in the ease-of-use department could almost be your undoing.
Nope. The more stable your product - the more people use it. Lots of users means more support. Some will want a support contract just to be on the safe side. Some are dumb enough to want support even for notepad. And there will always be someone who want help on some really advanced feature. Or maybe even request something new and pay extra to get it on top of the to-do list. (Assuming you want to implement their suggestion at all).
He has a point, actually. Not all linux apps have good cut & past abilities, but the kind of cut & paste found in xterm is something windows lacks for sure.
Xterm (and several others) let me mark text with the mouse, and then paste it anywhere by middle-clicking. This works wery well for a lot of things, where windows sometimes force me to press 4 keys (ctrl+insert, shift+insert) in addition to selecting the other app with the mouse. Windows force keyboard usage, which is bad. Having the option of using the keyboard in linux would be good, but no forcing please.
And why did they make it shift-insert? Only insert would be quicker, toggling insert mode is such a rare occurence that it could be moved to a more complex key combination. cut & paste is the most used features, except from typing.
heh. It's impossible, for the near future, to physically extract significant information from the human brain Bribes or force will often do the trick.
(such as a PIN or password). Some work has been done in biological computing to use the "brains" of smaller insects to store information - because it shows promise to being 100% tamper resistant.
We need a way to extract the info from the insect, or it would be useless as a storage device. What would stop a cracker from using exactly the same method after stealing the insects and the interface hardware?
Though, nothing working has any practical use yet - as far as I'm aware.
Unforunately for you poor non-Statesmen (non-americans), patents are usually respected internationally. So, it may be a problem of our legal system, but it affects everyone .
Not so. US patents falling in a clearly non-patentable category here (such as software patents) are not respected. The obvious exception is anyone interested in selling their product in the U.S. Those who don't aim for more than the European market, or write free software, don't care.
A slightly related question: what is the maximum size for a portable computer screen?
20" is appropriate. I can then have a real keyboard on the portable. Of course the 20" screen should come with almost no border, and the whole thing should be rather thin. It is still small enough for my suitcase.
As an aside - I am stuck using Netscape for mail at work, and it identifies itself as running on Linux whenever I send out a message. I have checked everything I could think of, but I have not found out how to change this to make it look like I am sending from an NT box.
Fortunately, people who says "you can't use linux because I say so" usually aren't capable of viewing the message headers either.
Now, if netscape use a uname call, consider changing your linux source so uname returns "NT" or whatever you want. Yucky, but if that's what you need...
For web browsing, let the junkbuster proxy tell the servers what os/browser you are running. (configurable) That gets around client-type filtering.
A disposable phone is silly. We have another kind where I live. You buy the phone, and pay for the hardware only. No monthly bills. Then you buy a card that lets you talk for x hours. When it is used up, toss the card and and buy a new one. The phone remains. This has all the advantages of the disposable phone (privacy, paid in advance) but a lot less garbage, and recycling a card is easier than the whole phone too.
Some might argue that the police can trace you as you use the same phone all the time. Not so, you can sell the phone to anybody and buy a new one as often as you wish. There is no paperwork at all involved in that. Yes - there was a debate that criminals might like this and it looks like they do. Having criminals at all is the bigger problem though.
At one time, that argument worked, and well. That's why for a number of years web designers went to great pains to ensure that webpages were well-tested on both browsers.
But not today. Considering the number of people that use IE, many web designers are simply testing their page against IE. If the current trend continues, you'll become a *very* small minority, one that they don't care about since the percentage doesn't substantially hurt their business.
No sane company would want to loose even 10% of their market if the only advantage was "it use a new cool-looking feature in IE" Their game isn't using the latest html oddities, it is selling their stuff, plain and simple.
How about you doing the recording, and several other people doing the playback? Real handy for line dancing.:)
Even more interesting when a few of them get out of sync. Oriented the wrong way, fallen over...
You cannot have two people walking using the same signals. They have different weight, their muscles may react slightly different, and soon enough one falls over forward. Trying to correct this the other one falls backwards. It wouldn't work - not even with identical twins. One might step on a pebble and so on.
If you're NT is constantly die-ing then you probably have a misconfigured item somewhere in your system.
Good configured NT systems are as stable as Unix machines.
Possibly, but unix machines tend to be well-configured by default. Performance optimizations may be possible, but I never heard about a unix box "constanly dying" because of a sloppy set-up.
As I said, the interpreter needs to be ported - then you're done. "all the C programs" is another thing entirely. You can port the compiler - that's one job. Then, you probably still need to port all those individual programs. Thousands, millions of them. But the interpreted source code doesn't need to change at all.
What makes you think we'll need more change to the C-source than to the interpreted source???
A very good port of the compiler will compile anything that compiled before, just as a good port of the interpreter will interpret anything. And an ill-ported interpreted will have just as many failures as an ill-ported compiler.
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I asked if bacteria had souls, he said no. Fish? no. Monkeys? no. A human fetus? yes. An embryo? yes. A fertalized egg? yes.
Odd guy. Does he worry about the souls of all the fertilized eggs that get lost? It is well-known that only a fraction of them succeeds.
I'm really glad that they are consulting religous leaders
I find it strange. Sure - a debate may be necessary, we don't want them to create a dangerous organism. But that is a discussion for people who have the knowledge, and for the political leaders. Bringing in the religious for any kind of decisions makes no sense at all, other than as a PR stunt.
And for the "playing god" types out there: There was a time when certain people claimed aeroplanes were evil too. If man were meant to fly then we'd be born with wings... (If we were meant to be naked then we'd probably been born that way too...)
It isn't even as if they create something new. They are merely taking away unnecessary stuff from existing bacteria, and not even knowing what the remaining parts exactly do. Much like an ignorant trimming a tree - he can cut off some branches but not all, the "new" tree will still live, but is hardly a new creation although it looks funny.
Creating life would be different, they would have to design the dna from scratch, then design and manufacture all the other parts of the cell too because dna alone doesn't work. This will probably happen some day, by someone who isn't very religious.
Has any experimentation been done on creatures with differences in only their 'junk' DNA.
There have been quite a few experiments on mice.
It just seems a bit iffy to say it's junk because it doesn't do something that we know other DNA does.
If you can remove the sequences completely and still have a healthy animal develop, chances are it was indeed junk. This is not surprising, mutations can cause anything, including the inclusion of unused DNA.
A detection system based on civilian radio transmission isn't that much harder to stop.
On your own territiory: Require a military controlled switch installed in all civilian transmitters. Click - and no more civilian-assisted detection during war.
On enemy territory - bomb the "civilian" transmitters/power supplies along with the military ones. This is done anyway in order to stop the propaganda machine.
Orwell predicted such measures over a half-century ago. If they can monitor you for "crime prevention" reasons why not monitor people to see if they are "political agitators"? Lets monitor these people to make sure that they're not critical of the government or the police. Can't you see that?
A good point. Not that they need CCTV to do this - ordinary cops prevent political meetings every day in low-tech police states.
Still, If I had to choose I would prefer a place with little violent crime and CCTV over a "free" place with so much crime that I would need a weapon for protection. Currently neiter is necessary where I live, but that isn't always possible.
The same argument doesn't apply to hardware serial numbers, software crime is merely an economy thing. It does usually not cause physical harm.
Interesting footnote: At the beginning of WWII, Goddard himself approached the Army with the suggestion to build long range rocket based weaponry. The U.S. Army is reputed to have told him that the idea was ludicrous, and that missile weapons were a pipe dream.
Keep in mind that there were no nukes at the time. A conventional bomb on that time's rockets wasn't very effective. The nazi rocket-weapons didn't help them much. Shorter range than a bomber plane, and barely enough accuracy to hit entire cities. A bridge, airport or factory was too small targets to aim for. The kill ratio was something like 2 people per V-weapon fired.
Nukes made long-distance rockets useful, due to the large affected area. Better navigational systems made the conventional long-distance rockets useful too. But try getting that kind of precision from a mechanically guided rocket of the forties...
No problem. I buy 5 music cd's, burn a new one with favourites from each, bring it to a party and have it played there. No different from bringing my 5 cd's and a playlist, just more convenient for all. Of course I keep the homemade cd when I leave.
That number probably includes the typical disk space requirements for cached pages and images. People have different philosophies about cache size, but a cached image is going to take up just as much disk space with Mozilla as it is with IE, or with any other browser.
I cache my images etc. with squid. Caching does not belong in the browser (it does a poor job). Using a caching proxy means I can switch from one browser to another and still have the page cached. There are other advantages too.
So, we must provide and HTML mail client. Do we make them download it seperately? What do you do about the shared components such as core layout? do we make people download it twice?
Debian and other linux distributors have solved that one a long time ago:
Put the shared core in a spearate core package, and have the browser package and the mail package depend on the core package.
Of course there is no usable package management system for windows, so you may want to ship windows binaries as a single big archive.
Linux users however is used to having one product consist of several packages. And I don't have to worry about getting all the packages either - If it gets packaged for debian this way I simply install the "browser" package. The "core" will follow automatically because of dependencies. Same thing happens if I install "mail" only. Installing "mail" some time after "browser" will not download "core" again, because the dependency on core will be satisfied by the already installed "core".
Where's the difference,
:-)
The legal difference is big. Intel doesn't deny me running my celeron 333s at 500 MHz. The licence doesn't criminalize that, they just don't warrant it. Of course a 500MHz chip won't fail at 333, so guaranteeing that is cheap.
I actually like Intel for doing this - I can get 500 MHz chips with 100MHz buses a lot cheaper this way. (If Intel didn't do this then their 500-rated chips might be cheaper - but probably not as cheap as the 333 chips based on the same production process.
One major driving force in the server share market is companies that have a "one platform only" policy.
This is one of microsoft marketings greatest accomplishments - the "one platform policy"
Ever seen anybody standardize completely on any other platform? Servers, desktops, and so on? Today?
Marketers tell them that standardizing will have a benefit when it simply isn't true. windows on desktops often makes sense - thats something the workers know after all. It makes a lot less sense in server rooms. Standardizing on windows is just as stupid as standardizing on exactly the same office size and office equipment for all employees (boss, secretaries, janitors), no matter what their job specification is.
Sure - you can get volume discounts that way, but quite a few will get tools that are either inadequate, overkill, or just plain wrong for the task at hand.
The mindcraft tests proved NT to be faster serving static pages from disk cache with several network cards. The c't test showed Linux to be faster in most other cases, such as: - serving through one card in general - serving dynamic content, one or more cards - serving a set of pages too big for the disk cache, i.e. when disk reading have to happen. Do your web server actually have more RAM than content? Now note that these "other" cases are much more typical than the mindcraft setup.
of microsoft if ms would give it out for free... you all know what i mean, make a shoddy product that wont work, then charge $30.00 a minute for support. now i'm not saying it'l be like that, thats just what pops into my head
Yes! Please do that! Today the PHB's don't understand about "free" linux. If MS did this then the linux/windows comparison would reduce to this:
Who cost most in support? I.e. (support price)x(amount of support necessary during normal use)
It couldn't possibly hurt.
The problem I see with the idea of making money off support of a product is this: The more stable and easy-to-use your product is, the less money you make! This is an ironic situation, whereby overwhelming success in the ease-of-use department could almost be your undoing.
Nope. The more stable your product - the more people use it. Lots of users means more support. Some will want a support contract just to be on the safe side. Some are dumb enough to want support even for notepad. And there will always be someone who want help on some really advanced feature. Or maybe even request something new and pay extra to get it on top of the to-do list. (Assuming you want to implement their suggestion at all).
He has a point, actually.
Not all linux apps have good cut & past abilities, but the kind of cut & paste found in xterm is something windows lacks for sure.
Xterm (and several others) let me mark text with the mouse, and then paste it anywhere by middle-clicking. This works wery well for a lot of things, where windows sometimes force me to press 4 keys (ctrl+insert, shift+insert) in addition to selecting the other app with the mouse. Windows force keyboard usage, which is bad. Having the option of using the keyboard in linux would be good, but no forcing please.
And why did they make it shift-insert? Only insert would be quicker, toggling insert mode is such a rare occurence that it could be moved to a more complex key combination. cut & paste is the most used features, except from typing.
heh. It's impossible, for the near future, to physically extract significant information from the human brain
Bribes or force will often do the trick.
(such as a PIN or password). Some work has been done in biological computing to use the "brains" of smaller insects to store information - because it shows promise to being 100% tamper resistant.
We need a way to extract the info from the insect, or it would be useless as a storage device. What would stop a cracker from using exactly the same method after stealing the insects and the interface hardware?
Though,
nothing working has any practical use yet - as far as I'm aware.
Unforunately for you poor non-Statesmen (non-americans), patents are usually respected internationally. So, it may be a problem of our legal system, but it affects everyone .
Not so. US patents falling in a clearly non-patentable category here (such as software patents) are not respected. The obvious exception is anyone interested in selling their product in the U.S. Those who don't aim for more than the European market, or write free software, don't care.
A slightly related question: what is the maximum size for a portable computer screen?
20" is appropriate. I can then have a real keyboard on the portable. Of course the 20" screen should come with almost no border, and the whole thing should be rather thin. It is still small enough for my suitcase.
As an aside - I am stuck using Netscape for mail at work, and it identifies itself as running on Linux whenever I send out a message. I have checked everything I could think of, but I have not found out how to change this to make it look like I am sending from an NT box.
Fortunately, people who says "you can't use linux because I say so" usually aren't capable of viewing the message headers either.
Now, if netscape use a uname call, consider changing your linux source so uname returns "NT" or whatever you want. Yucky, but if that's what you need...
For web browsing, let the junkbuster proxy tell the servers what os/browser you are running. (configurable) That gets around client-type filtering.
A disposable phone is silly. We have another kind where I live. You buy the phone, and pay for the hardware only. No monthly bills. Then you buy a card that lets you talk for x hours. When it is used up, toss the card and and buy a new one. The phone remains. This has all the advantages of the disposable phone (privacy, paid in advance) but a lot less garbage, and recycling a card is easier than the whole phone too.
Some might argue that the police can trace you as you use the same phone all the time. Not so, you can sell the phone to anybody and buy a new one as often as you wish. There is no paperwork at all involved in that. Yes - there was a debate that criminals might like this and it looks like they do. Having criminals at all is the bigger problem though.
At one time, that argument worked, and well. That's why for a number of years web designers went to
great pains to ensure that webpages were well-tested on both browsers.
But not today. Considering the number of people that use IE, many web designers are simply testing their page against IE. If the current trend continues, you'll become a *very* small minority, one that they don't care about since the percentage doesn't substantially hurt their business.
No sane company would want to loose even 10% of their market if the only advantage was "it use a new cool-looking feature in IE" Their game isn't using the latest html oddities, it is selling their stuff, plain and simple.
How about you doing the recording, and several other people doing the playback? Real handy for line dancing. :)
Even more interesting when a few of them get out of sync. Oriented the wrong way, fallen over...
You cannot have two people walking using the same signals. They have different weight, their muscles may react slightly different, and soon enough one falls over forward. Trying to correct this the other one falls backwards. It wouldn't work - not even with identical twins. One might step on a pebble and so on.
But what really scares me is the emotion control.
People have been taking illegal drugs for decades in order to perform emotion control. This may be equally sad, but scary?
If you're NT is constantly die-ing then you probably have a misconfigured item somewhere in your system.
Good configured NT systems are as stable as Unix machines.
Possibly, but unix machines tend to be well-configured by default. Performance optimizations may be possible, but I never heard about a unix box "constanly dying" because of a sloppy set-up.
As I said, the interpreter needs to be ported - then you're done. "all the C programs" is another thing entirely. You can port the compiler - that's one job. Then, you probably still need to port all those individual programs. Thousands, millions of them. But the interpreted source code doesn't need to change at all.
What makes you think we'll need more change to the C-source than to the interpreted source???
A very good port of the compiler will compile anything that compiled before, just as a good port of the interpreter will interpret anything. And an ill-ported interpreted will have just as many failures as an ill-ported compiler.