Very few Christians are strict pacifists. People who call themselves Christians may complain about video games leading kids to "violence", but if you cross-examine them, most of them wouldn't object to kids engaging in socially acceptable violence (as members of the armed forces, for example).
Today's popular association betwen Christianity and sweet docility goes back to the 19th century, when people treated the Church as a haven from the brutal competition of the Marketplace. However, violence, symbolic or actual, in the alleged service of J.C. has a long and, er, distinguished history.
The Jewish liturgy, for example, has a large number of elegies that were composed during the Crusades: as the Crusaders marched through Europe, on their way to take Jerusalem from the heathen Muslims, some of them slaughtered heathen Jews in towns they passed.
Heck, there's plenty of violence in the Bible itself. See, for example, chapter 34 of the book of Genesis.
There's just no way to transmute water into anything else without adding a whole lot of energy. Where will that energy come from?
Every few hours, you will rub your underarms with napalm.
Sheesh, do I have to spell out all these trivial technical details? I'm trying to be a Visionary here, showing you closed-minded faint-hearted masses what a wonderful future we all have in store, and you pester me with late-twentieth-century science?
Once we have our nanomachine-built AIs, we can ask them to find exceptions to those alleged "Laws of Thermodynamics"!
OK, so what do you propose that these nanites do with the snot and other body waste that accumulates on your body?
Burn it into its constituent atoms, of course.
This technology will make its users feel most comfortable where the ambient air temperature is around 40F. Programmers will abandon sweltering California, and flock to Alaska's new "Silicon Tundra".
Nanotech will be very very useful for certain things, but I suspect it will be a niche product for a long time, happily taking one very simple thing and turning it into another simple thing.
Or happily taking a lot of simple things, turning them into a few complex things, but also creating a bunch of complex side effects... which will require human intervention to manage intelligently.
When writers in the Golden Age of SF predicted powerful computers, they usually didn't predict the tasks involved with maintaining those computers: system administration, database tuning, spam-filtering, etc.
I think jobs like this will always exist, even as AI gets better and better. We want our machines to serve us, and as our machines get more powerful and more complex, we think of more powerful and complex ways for them to serve us -- but then describing exactly how we want to be served, and describing how to prioritize those services when resources are limited, becomes an intellectual challenge. (Some people have a hard time explaining to other humans exactly what they want; why should they have any better luck with machines?)
The languages that we (or our agents) use to tell machines what we want from them grow more abstract and more efficient, but our ambitions for what we want from computers grow until they strain the capacity of our languages and our machines' resources... and then someone invents a more expressive language, or a more efficient implementation of an existing language, or a machine with more raw power, and the cycle continues.
...of IP addresses whose hosts had recognizable security holes, and limited the total amount of traffic that they would accept from all IP addresses on the list?
I don't know much about routing technology, so I don't know how practical this is.
Of course, the only way they could compile the greylist would be to run through IP addresses and test them for security holes, the same way that the script kiddies do. Would that be ethical?
My wife has a Ph.D. in chemistry. When she was looking for a job, she learned that some law firms will hire Ph.D.'s as assistants (I don't know the formal job title) to help their lawyers prepare applications and the like, and then pay the Ph.D.'s way through law school. You can get a similar job if you have a master's degree, but you might have to pay your own law-school bill.
Setting aside the ethical questions for a moment...
What could the IETF (or a protocol defined by the IETF) do to make Internet communications easier to tap? In particular, what could they do when the communicating parties both know the protocol in use and are trying to spoof it?
Furthermore: in many countries, the law permits police wiretapping, but also places restrictions on its use. It doesn't seem fair for a protocol to make the wiretapping easier without also making it easier to enforce the restrictions. But then you'd need a protocol that could handle the various authorization, auditing, and verification requirements of hundreds of different political jurisdictions. Is this really practical?
Does this mean that there will develop different strains of humanity reflecting different parents' taste?
Or different parents' income? If prenatal genetic engineering becomes effective but not cheap...
This may magnify the economic gap between First and Third World countries, especially for Third World countries where citizens have trouble getting basic prenatal and infant care.
Possible effects within First World countries:
The income gap between people with upper- and lower-class parents may increase.
Middle-class parents may go heavily into debt to pay for the therapy.
It may become covered by health insurance, raising premiums.
It may be covered by the state, raising taxes.
People looking for mates will have a stronger incentive to seek someone with high wealth or income.
If an engineered child turns out disappointingly average (or worse), the doctors who administer the engineering may be exposed to liability, or at least bad publicity.
Countries with strong central governments may require citizens' children to be engineered in some way -- hoping that this will spur the country's economic development, if nothing else.
People may use this engineering as an excuse to neglect low-tech ways of improving their children's health and intellect.
I agree... as I read through the paper, I kept thinking, "And the author's original point, the point that hasn't been made by ESR and other experienced open-source programmers, is... what?"
Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?
Are you without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on an OS you can try to modify for your needs?
Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-nighters to get a nifty program working?
Then this post might be just for you:-)
Linux spent most of its history as a hobby/academic project. I suspect that two years ago, if you told a Linux hacker that the business press (i.e., the suits) would refer to Linux as seriously competing against Microsoft, the hacker would want to know what you'd been smoking.
The GNU project has always been part of RMS's campaign against proprietary software in general, not against any particular software vendor.
Ironic that Mac varieties are proliferating again
on
New iMac Rolled Out
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After Jobs became Interim-CEO-For-Life of Apple, the business press applauded him for simplifying the company's product line. No more fumbling through a soup of model numbers -- there was just the iMac for regular consumers, the G3 for power users, and the G3 PowerBook for people who needed a laptop.
And now the big news from Apple is... three new and different brands of iMac.
MIT, through its Industrial Liaison Program, has been renting out its professors' (and their grad students') services for years.
The real joke here is: At MIT, if a junior professor is a good teacher, the senior faculty take this as a sign that he or she isn't working hard enough on research, and so the professor's chance of getting tenure goes down. (My wife and I are both alumni of "Hell", so I know whereof I speak....)
So what is MIT doing to improve the quality of its education? Taking a $25M grant to build fancier computer systems! And after this grant money runs out, the extra hardware and software acquired through it will be part of the school's infrastructure, so MIT will need money to maintain it -- either from more tuition hikes, or from the overhead on more research grants.
Suppose you had a cake recipe that said "...bake at 250F for 30 minutes". If you cranked up your oven to 750F, could you bake the same cake in 10 minutes? No, you'd probably end up with something that was charred on the outside and undercooked on the inside. I suspect that "overclocking the brain" would lead to a similar result.
(1) Create a ".r" TLD. (We can't use ".tm", because that's the country code for Turkmenistan.) Only organizations with a registered trademark "foo" have the right to the "foo.r" domain. (If two organizations have the "foo" trademark in two different jurisdictions, then it reverts to first-come, first-served.)
(2) Establish a convention whereby anyone who has the trademark "foo" in the country with country code "xx" can get "foo.r.xx".
(3??) As a condition of taking "foo.r" or "foo.r.xx" domains, a trademark holder should relinquish any ".com", ".net", or ".org" domains they own that contain the trademark, so that the namespace doesn't become congested from large companies grabbing up every possible domain name containing their brand names.
A group of researchers has written GJ, a derivative of Java that has generic types and methods. Every legal Java program is also a legal GJ program, so retrofitting legacy code is easy. GJ programs can be compiled into Java Virtual Machine bytecodes.
(For whatever it's worth, one of the GJ designers, Philip Wadler, works for Bell Labs, a division of Lucent, my employer.)
They presented a paper on the subject at OOPSLA '98, last October. According to the GJ page linked to above, adding generic types to Java is one of the top twenty-five requests for enhancements.
There's a lot about Katz's article that I don't like (and which dozens of other slashdotters will complain about, too, so why should I bother?), but I must disagree with this critique:
He then proceeds to attack the industry for "abusing" its customers. This is also nonsense. The computer industry has been improving its product faster than any other industry in the history of the universe. So technologically, this is certainly not true.
First, in the early days of the automobile industry, products improved and prices dropped exponentially, just as with the computer industry today. This "history of the universe" line is ignorant claptrap.
"By the end of 1995, computers and software ranked #8 in the Top 10 list for complaints to the Better Business Bureau, outdoing used car dealers. As sales increased, complaints increased. In 1996, computer-related complaints rose to #7 on the list."
"The software industry has been one of the worst for leaving callers on hold. A small study by Service Management International indicated that software companies leave callers on hold longer than any other industry studied, worse than government agencies, computer hardware companies, airlines, banks, utility companies, and others."
If there were "lemon laws" to protect the buyers of computer products and services, like there are to protect car buyers, sellers might spend more time "improving their product" through better quality control and better usability -- rather than shoveling every feature that Marketing dreams up into the next release and shipping it as soon as possible, and then declaring "There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed".
IANAL, but I hope one of the law students reading/. can confirm...
As I understand it, you can use someone else's trademark to describe your own product, but you can't use it without permission in a way that implies an endorsement by the trademark holder.
Trademark cases can get hairy because, of course, implication is in the mind of the beholder. If I write an OS that has absolutely no connection with Linux, call it "Finnux", and sell it, can Linus Torvalds sue me for infringing on his trademark? His lawyer and my lawyer would go to court and argue over what potential customers would think; would the similarity in names confuse them, even slightly?
(Suppose someone else makes an OS that's just as bad as Finnux but calls it "VaporOS". Some people pick up the Finnux boxes for a closer look because of the name's similarity to Linux, but leave VaporOS on the shelf. Finnux has thus received a benefit from the Linux trademark.)
But if I say in my advertising, "my product is just as good as Linux", that's a descriptive statement, and can't be grounds for a trademark suit.
If I were marketing unofficial Red Hat CD-ROMs, I would probably label them something like this: Seth's Linux Distribution This is an exact copy of all the open-source software in Red Hat Linux 6.0. It is not sold, endorsed, or supported by Red Hat Inc. and I would feel pretty safe. Customers would see "Red Hat" in/etc/issue and so forth, but by that time, they've already bought the software, so I haven't used "Red Hat" as a brand name to sell it to them.
(Of course, if some local computer store buys my CD-ROMs wholesale, installs one on a computer and then uses that computer to demo the distribution, with all the Red Hat logos on the screen... I don't know if I could get in trouble for that.)
If you have a book that you want to see published, there are four ways to go:
Royalty -- in exchange for publication rights, the publisher prints and sells the book, and gives you royalties if the book is successful; you pay the publisher nothing.
Vanity -- you pay the publisher to print and bind your book; the printed books are your property, and you have to sell them.
Subsidy -- a combination of the above two; you pay the publisher some money up front, and they print the book, sell it, and pay royalties.
Self -- you form your own little publishing company, choosing your book's graphic design, hiring a printer, etc., etc.
As a general rule, subsidy and vanity publishers do hardly any work to promote a book -- why should they, since they already have your money? Reviewers are unlikely to review subsidy- and vanity-published books, and bookstores are unlikely to stock them -- if the publisher isn't betting any money on the book's success, why should anyone else risk wasting time or shelf space on it? Furthermore, a number of vanity and subsidy publishers have been outright scams, conning thousands of dollars out of writers.
Fatbrain's program doesn't seem as bad as some of the outfits described on SFWA's site. But this program looks like a way to separate foolish writers from their money. As such, it's likely to be a smashing success. I can imagine thousands of people writing what they imagine to be the Great American Novel, uploading it to Fatbrain, fantasizing about the fame and fortune that awaits them, and not missing the leak from their credit cards.
But read the fine print: After the promotional period, Fatbrain takes $12/year/book from your credit card, and half of your book's download price -- in exchange for what labor or risk? The company doesn't promise to do anything to promote your book. It doesn't even promise a quality-of-service level for its download site!
So why should anyone interested in self-publishing go through Fatbrain, rather than setting up an ecommerce site through a regular ISP?
On the one hand, since I am a Prisoner of Bill here at work, I'm glad that I could download perl and run it on my NT machine for free.
On the other hand, if I want to sit down and write an open-source application in my spare time, using C or C++, why should I do it for Windows rather than Linux/*BSD? I'd have to invest a lot of time and effort into learning the Win32 API, and that knowledge will become obsolete in three months. The time that I spend fixing Windows-specific bugs will cut into the time I have available for fixing Linux/*BSD-specific bugs. I don't see how experience with Win32 (as opposed to, say, EROS or PalmOS) would help me learn things about the general craft of programming that I couldn't learn from experience with Linux/*BSD alone.
I don't understand the whole idea of taxing one to make money (income tax) and then taxing them on spending that same money...
Well, theoretically, the government could get all of its revenue from one tax (an import duty, an income tax, a sales tax, a property tax, whatever). However, such a tax would run into two political problems:
The tax would be very large, and therefore there would a large incentive for people to evade it, legally or illegally. For example, if the US government got all its revenue from a sales tax, then people would have a powerful incentive to spend as little money within the US as possible, which would not be good for many US-based businesses.
The political interest groups who engaged in the taxed transactions would envy those who did not. For example, if the only taxes were on imports, then managers of companies that purchase lots of imported goods would envy the companies that do not depend on imports; eventually, they would translate that envy into political lobbying.
Since "socialist" is a dirty word in the US political culture, a legislature is more likely to pass a tax break to benefit a given group than to pass an outright grant of money -- even when, from an economist's point of view, the two are equivalent.
unless the gummint is prepared to accept the receipts of electronic businesses and take on faith that they are accurate,
Why wouldn't they do that?
When a brick-and-mortar business reports a certain amount of income coming from cash transactions, the government takes those reciepts on faith, unless the auditor has a reason to suspect fraud.
A few months back, a letter to Crypto-Gram pointed out that people use security measures that they believe in. People trust ink-on-paper signatures, even though security experts know how easy it is to forge a signed paper document; therefore, the authorization mechanisms that actually exist in our society rely heavily on such signatures.
Some day, I hope, every junior-high-school student will learn the basic cryptographic concepts behind PGP and its kin. Then, most people will know enough about cryptography to evaluate products that use published cryptographic protocols and shun products that don't. (I can dream, can't I?) Until then, most people will continue to trust ink on paper more than anything else, and the field of commercial cryptography will be littered with buggy software, snake oil, and Trojan horses.
One of the best ways to find a job is to exploit social networks. If the social network of people who already have tech jobs is primarily white, then black people are at a disadvantage, even if the people making hiring decisions are not racists.
Slashdot Mirror
Today's popular association betwen Christianity and sweet docility goes back to the 19th century, when people treated the Church as a haven from the brutal competition of the Marketplace. However, violence, symbolic or actual, in the alleged service of J.C. has a long and, er, distinguished history.
The Jewish liturgy, for example, has a large number of elegies that were composed during the Crusades: as the Crusaders marched through Europe, on their way to take Jerusalem from the heathen Muslims, some of them slaughtered heathen Jews in towns they passed.
Heck, there's plenty of violence in the Bible itself. See, for example, chapter 34 of the book of Genesis.
Sheesh, do I have to spell out all these trivial technical details? I'm trying to be a Visionary here, showing you closed-minded faint-hearted masses what a wonderful future we all have in store, and you pester me with late-twentieth-century science?
Once we have our nanomachine-built AIs, we can ask them to find exceptions to those alleged "Laws of Thermodynamics"!
This technology will make its users feel most comfortable where the ambient air temperature is around 40F. Programmers will abandon sweltering California, and flock to Alaska's new "Silicon Tundra".
When writers in the Golden Age of SF predicted powerful computers, they usually didn't predict the tasks involved with maintaining those computers: system administration, database tuning, spam-filtering, etc.
I think jobs like this will always exist, even as AI gets better and better. We want our machines to serve us, and as our machines get more powerful and more complex, we think of more powerful and complex ways for them to serve us -- but then describing exactly how we want to be served, and describing how to prioritize those services when resources are limited, becomes an intellectual challenge. (Some people have a hard time explaining to other humans exactly what they want; why should they have any better luck with machines?)
The languages that we (or our agents) use to tell machines what we want from them grow more abstract and more efficient, but our ambitions for what we want from computers grow until they strain the capacity of our languages and our machines' resources ... and then someone invents a more expressive language, or a more efficient implementation of an existing language, or a machine with more raw power, and the cycle continues.
I don't know much about routing technology, so I don't know how practical this is.
Of course, the only way they could compile the greylist would be to run through IP addresses and test them for security holes, the same way that the script kiddies do. Would that be ethical?
My wife has a Ph.D. in chemistry. When she was looking for a job, she learned that some law firms will hire Ph.D.'s as assistants (I don't know the formal job title) to help their lawyers prepare applications and the like, and then pay the Ph.D.'s way through law school. You can get a similar job if you have a master's degree, but you might have to pay your own law-school bill.
What could the IETF (or a protocol defined by the IETF) do to make Internet communications easier to tap? In particular, what could they do when the communicating parties both know the protocol in use and are trying to spoof it?
Furthermore: in many countries, the law permits police wiretapping, but also places restrictions on its use. It doesn't seem fair for a protocol to make the wiretapping easier without also making it easier to enforce the restrictions. But then you'd need a protocol that could handle the various authorization, auditing, and verification requirements of hundreds of different political jurisdictions. Is this really practical?
I agree ... as I read through the paper, I kept thinking, "And the author's original point, the point that hasn't been made by ESR and other experienced open-source programmers, is ... what?"
The GNU project has always been part of RMS's campaign against proprietary software in general, not against any particular software vendor.
And now the big news from Apple is ... three new and different brands of iMac.
The real joke here is: At MIT, if a junior professor is a good teacher, the senior faculty take this as a sign that he or she isn't working hard enough on research, and so the professor's chance of getting tenure goes down. (My wife and I are both alumni of "Hell", so I know whereof I speak....)
So what is MIT doing to improve the quality of its education? Taking a $25M grant to build fancier computer systems! And after this grant money runs out, the extra hardware and software acquired through it will be part of the school's infrastructure, so MIT will need money to maintain it -- either from more tuition hikes, or from the overhead on more research grants.
Suppose you had a cake recipe that said "...bake at 250F for 30 minutes". If you cranked up your oven to 750F, could you bake the same cake in 10 minutes? No, you'd probably end up with something that was charred on the outside and undercooked on the inside. I suspect that "overclocking the brain" would lead to a similar result.
(2) Establish a convention whereby anyone who has the trademark "foo" in the country with country code "xx" can get "foo.r.xx".
(3??) As a condition of taking "foo.r" or "foo.r.xx" domains, a trademark holder should relinquish any ".com", ".net", or ".org" domains they own that contain the trademark, so that the namespace doesn't become congested from large companies grabbing up every possible domain name containing their brand names.
If the NSA cracked codes the way Microsoft writes software, foreign spies could send all their messages home encrypted with rot13. :-)
(For whatever it's worth, one of the GJ designers, Philip Wadler, works for Bell Labs, a division of Lucent, my employer.)
They presented a paper on the subject at OOPSLA '98, last October. According to the GJ page linked to above, adding generic types to Java is one of the top twenty-five requests for enhancements.
Second, according to the Bad Software Web site:
- "By the end of 1995, computers and software ranked #8 in the Top 10 list for complaints to the Better Business Bureau, outdoing used car dealers. As sales increased, complaints increased. In 1996, computer-related complaints rose to #7 on the list."
- "The software industry has been one of the worst for leaving callers on hold. A small study by Service Management International indicated that software companies leave callers on hold longer than any other industry studied, worse than government agencies, computer hardware companies, airlines, banks, utility companies, and others."
If there were "lemon laws" to protect the buyers of computer products and services, like there are to protect car buyers, sellers might spend more time "improving their product" through better quality control and better usability -- rather than shoveling every feature that Marketing dreams up into the next release and shipping it as soon as possible, and then declaring "There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed".As I understand it, you can use someone else's trademark to describe your own product, but you can't use it without permission in a way that implies an endorsement by the trademark holder.
Trademark cases can get hairy because, of course, implication is in the mind of the beholder. If I write an OS that has absolutely no connection with Linux, call it "Finnux", and sell it, can Linus Torvalds sue me for infringing on his trademark? His lawyer and my lawyer would go to court and argue over what potential customers would think; would the similarity in names confuse them, even slightly?
(Suppose someone else makes an OS that's just as bad as Finnux but calls it "VaporOS". Some people pick up the Finnux boxes for a closer look because of the name's similarity to Linux, but leave VaporOS on the shelf. Finnux has thus received a benefit from the Linux trademark.)
But if I say in my advertising, "my product is just as good as Linux", that's a descriptive statement, and can't be grounds for a trademark suit.
If I were marketing unofficial Red Hat CD-ROMs, I would probably label them something like this: Seth's Linux Distribution /etc/issue and so forth, but by that time, they've already bought the software, so I haven't used "Red Hat" as a brand name to sell it to them.
This is an exact copy of all the open-source software in Red Hat Linux 6.0.
It is not sold, endorsed, or supported by Red Hat Inc. and I would feel pretty safe. Customers would see "Red Hat" in
(Of course, if some local computer store buys my CD-ROMs wholesale, installs one on a computer and then uses that computer to demo the distribution, with all the Red Hat logos on the screen ... I don't know if I could get in trouble for that.)
- Royalty -- in exchange for publication rights, the publisher prints and sells the book, and gives you royalties if the book is successful; you pay the publisher nothing.
- Vanity -- you pay the publisher to print and bind your book; the printed books are your property, and you have to sell them.
- Subsidy -- a combination of the above two; you pay the publisher some money up front, and they print the book, sell it, and pay royalties.
- Self -- you form your own little publishing company, choosing your book's graphic design, hiring a printer, etc., etc.
As a general rule, subsidy and vanity publishers do hardly any work to promote a book -- why should they, since they already have your money? Reviewers are unlikely to review subsidy- and vanity-published books, and bookstores are unlikely to stock them -- if the publisher isn't betting any money on the book's success, why should anyone else risk wasting time or shelf space on it? Furthermore, a number of vanity and subsidy publishers have been outright scams, conning thousands of dollars out of writers.For more details, see SFWA's excellent page on subsidy and vanity publishers.
Fatbrain's program doesn't seem as bad as some of the outfits described on SFWA's site. But this program looks like a way to separate foolish writers from their money. As such, it's likely to be a smashing success. I can imagine thousands of people writing what they imagine to be the Great American Novel, uploading it to Fatbrain, fantasizing about the fame and fortune that awaits them, and not missing the leak from their credit cards.
But read the fine print: After the promotional period, Fatbrain takes $12/year/book from your credit card, and half of your book's download price -- in exchange for what labor or risk? The company doesn't promise to do anything to promote your book. It doesn't even promise a quality-of-service level for its download site!
So why should anyone interested in self-publishing go through Fatbrain, rather than setting up an ecommerce site through a regular ISP?
On the other hand, if I want to sit down and write an open-source application in my spare time, using C or C++, why should I do it for Windows rather than Linux/*BSD? I'd have to invest a lot of time and effort into learning the Win32 API, and that knowledge will become obsolete in three months. The time that I spend fixing Windows-specific bugs will cut into the time I have available for fixing Linux/*BSD-specific bugs. I don't see how experience with Win32 (as opposed to, say, EROS or PalmOS) would help me learn things about the general craft of programming that I couldn't learn from experience with Linux/*BSD alone.
"Our three major weapons are..."
When a brick-and-mortar business reports a certain amount of income coming from cash transactions, the government takes those reciepts on faith, unless the auditor has a reason to suspect fraud.
Some day, I hope, every junior-high-school student will learn the basic cryptographic concepts behind PGP and its kin. Then, most people will know enough about cryptography to evaluate products that use published cryptographic protocols and shun products that don't. (I can dream, can't I?) Until then, most people will continue to trust ink on paper more than anything else, and the field of commercial cryptography will be littered with buggy software, snake oil, and Trojan horses.
One of the best ways to find a job is to exploit social networks. If the social network of people who already have tech jobs is primarily white, then black people are at a disadvantage, even if the people making hiring decisions are not racists.