I'm surprised that so many slashdot readers take seriously the idea that the Washington Post (owned by the Moonies) is a non-partisan observer. If anything, it is more partisan in the sense that it represents a narrow subset of the American political spectrum in content. Like any other newspaper I know about it the Washington Post has an editorial policy, endorses political candidates, chooses columnists that match its target audience (no fascists, communists, socialists, anarchists, etc...). It is also of course implicity pro-American, discussions center around whether whether America should "pre-emptively" attack Iraq, not whether Iraq should "pre-emptively" attack the United States. I'll take the diversity, kooks and chaos of Wikipedia any day of the week. Those opinions may seem like "agitprop" to some, but go to another country, another time, another group and they are unremarkable.
You would think by now that people would have given up the notion of an unbiased media source but I guess some habits die hard.
The US still has nukes because the US is likely to need them in the future as a deterrent. Any country can say this. Actually the US pleading a need for deterence is significantly less credible than Iran making the same case given the much larger military power of the United States. The US is the titan the plops down on occasion trying to fix the worlds wrongs. Now, I am not going to argue that every time the US juggernaut stomps its foot it is doing right. I am arguing that no one else has bothered to do so. This assumes that the US is trying to do right most of the time which most of the rest of the world doesn't believe. It is also not true that no other country does this, many other countries participate in military conflicts through the UN or unilaterally. For instance Vietnam invaded Pol Pots Cambodia after the end of the US-Vietnam war - this was opposed by the US at the time. In any event, claiming a humanitarian motive for invasion is something almost every invader does. When Europe can unite and show a willingness to strap on their boots and go kick some ass for democracy, There's not real evidence that either Europe or US are willing to "kick ass" for democracy. The US isn't kicking ass for democracy when it is supporting Pakistan, liberating Kuwait to restore a monarchy to power, propping up Saudi Arabia, or invading Iraq (despite what the White House says).
If you want democracy, I'd suggesting struggling for it at home because invading armies seldom promote democracy abroad.
Well said. I agree; the playing field looks just fine from where I'm sitting, and I damn well don't need anyone jiggering around and propping up the low end of it, thanks very much.
So basically you are saying you think you are going to do well for yourself and you don't give a fuck about the people below you, real nice.
that whole freaking industry is going out of business in this country, because of the way the Unions have driven the cost of production through the roof.
Care to cite anything to back that up? Because last I checked wages in the auto industry in the United States have been decreasing relative to inflation, and certainly far below productivity since about the 1970s. That's even using the bullshit inflation #s that fed puts out today. In fact, unions are pretty much crushed in his country so I find it hard to believe your statement that they are destroying the industry.
Just because business almost always prefer non-unionized labor (nothing new) it doesn't prove your statement that union wages are destroying the auto industry. In fact, the auto-industry is still producing cars, it has just shifted away from the big 3 and Detroit to foreign tranplants using (often non-unionized labor) in the south. So we still have an auto industry, just that less of benefits of it are accuring to American workers.
Given that in developed countries governments have been privatizing power companies since the 80s I'm having a real hard believing this. Particulary since your solution (nuclear power) is an incredibly centralized power source - you are not attacking sticking it to "the Man" are you? Unless you are proposing everyone gets a nuclear reactor on their block...
Renewable energy source (like wind and solar) are much easier to decentralize than nuclear power, so you should be supporting their development (although wind doesn't really need any help) instead of singing the praises of nuclear power.
First, keep in mind that the longer it stays radioactive, by definition the less radioactive (and thus less dangerous) it is. Depleted Uranium, for instance, despite being technically radioactive, is actually used as radiation shielding! Depleted uranium (mostly U238) is extremely toxic and carcinogenic and has a half life of 4.46 × 10^9 years (wikipedia) so please don't tell us how it is going to get less dangerous - that's not going to happen for awhile. And despite the ability of DU to absorbs neutrons it is also naturally radioactive and pretty good at emitting them. It gets used in tank shells and is scattered across the Balkans, Kuwait and Iraq where it is definitely causes problems above background radiation. But nevermind over there, there are enough leaks (documented and undocumented) to cause worry here in North America. Take a look at Uranium City for instance... http://www.interlog.com/~grlaird/uraniumcity.html Yeah, and how much of the economic uncertainty comes from artificial barriers created by scientific illiterates who oppose nuclear power? Other than fossil fuels, nuclear is the only type of generator that is proven to be long-term viable and scalable to any capacity. Or to turn that around how much of the economic costs are born because nuclear power in any form is supported by scientific illterates? Once closing and storage costs are factored in nuclear plants are expensive even with the massive government subsidies they usually get. And its not like they are long-term viable, the world can run out of affordable uranium too - it will just take a couple of hundred years longer than oil. Right now wind power in many locations is cheaper and more viable long term than nuclear power. And BTW nulcear power is not a type of generator.
I'm not saying nuclear is worse than coal (I'm honestly not sure) but these aren't good arguments for nuclear fission.
Right now there is a 4+ year backlog on immigration - in short the system is broken and is desperately in need of funding to reduce the backlog. This affects me because I am Canadian who moved to the US in 2002 and I am married to a foreign national (Romanian).
Canada may have a pretty good immigration system relative to other countries, that still isn't saying much. One of the reasons we moved to the US was so that my wife (who is a medical doctor) could practise medicine. Despite physician shortages the medical system in Canada is very much closed to foreign medical grads (FMGs). Highly qualfied FMGs fight for the few remaining residency positions AFTER all the Canadian MDs have had their first crack (even the guy who graduated last in his class). In the US it is much more fair to foreigners, with merit playing a bigger role.
We have thought about moving back to Canada but the system makes it too much of a pain. For an MD it requires so many exams/money/time (although medicine is pretty much the same in English Canada and the US) that it is not worth it yet. Plus if we want to bring a mother-in-law from Romania to Canada we have to wait 4 years?! It's just stupid. BTW my wife is still not a Canadian citizen (because we are living in US) and if I were to sponsor her anyway with no assurance of success (huge amounts of paperwork and at least $1500 last I heard) she would still have to wait 18 months to get permenant residency! In short, the system really does need fixing.
BTW having experienced both medical systems (Alberta and BC versus Kaiser in GA and BlueCross/Shield in IL) I can tell you there is no one best system for everybody. However I can say that if you do NOT have at least an upper middle class income with a good employer you are better off in Canada (BC or Alberta). We paid a big sum of money for individual coverage in GA and even after calculating in the tax difference it was better to be in Alberta (by far) and just sligtly better to be in BC. Now however we are probably slightly better off in US moneywise.
We're still happy to move back though (for the lifestyle and cheaper high quality education) if things were made a bit easier for us.
The only problem I can see being an issue is that I don't particularly care for hockey... Is that a deal-breaker on naturalization? Well that's pretty close to a deal breaker, but if you like any of curling, poutine, the Tragically Hip or beer we may be able to make an exception.:)
Economic pressures are great because you don't have to mandate any laws, the price of the commodity forces a change in the market. This is great? A "change in the market" may mean that people that need water do without - like the 1 billion or so people in the world who do not have sufficient water. (http://www.un.org/events/water/brochure.htm)
Water is not just another commodity, it is essential for life and if left to "market forces" (which in practise has meant politicans giving sweetheart deals to investors to privatize water supplies) the public gets screwed. This is exactly what happened in the city of Atlanta (they are now taking back control of their water system).
So while a "change in the market" in the United States may mean that people get ripped off, it may be the difference between life and death in other countries. People who don't have water aren't likely to suffer "market forces" lightly, they are more likely to riot until the situation is fixed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochabamba_protests_ of_2000)
When dealing with scarcity essential to life, the best solution is rationing - not the market. This is why when countries go to war and they need oil, iron, etc... it is procured directly with little complaint from the bulk of the public.
From your own link: "The carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide is generated by partial oxidation of coal and wood-based fuels"
I've seen from other sources that synthetic fuel production from coal produces about twice as much waste carbon dioxide then if you just simply burned the coal alone. Also natural gas reserves are becoming increasingly depleted so methane isn't going to be easy to come, unless you want to go through this coal oxidation process which is just going to increase global warming. I actually think coal mining is one of the worse ways fuel sources, the mines destroy the landscape, the fuel creates acid rain, it generates more (albeit diffuse) radioactivity than nuclear power plants, it creates plenty of carbon dioxide and it centralizes power generation.
A cleaner, cheaper approach would be to rely more on wind power (which despite high upfront capital costs is quite cheap over the lifetime of the plant, unlike solar) and to increase the effiency of existing technologies. Hopefully by the 22nd centry we won't be doing coal mining anymore.
Molecular biologists have been trying to engineer a safe, reliable, effecient method of drug delivery to selected cells for decades. This includes modifying viruses, poxviruses, herpes viruses, adenoviruses,retroviruses, etc.. but they all have problems. Creating the viruses isn't difficult, nor is mutation a serious problem. What is difficult is selectively targetting ONLY the cells you want, getting ALL (or most) of them with a sufficient quantity of whatever agent you are delivering. That's hard. The big deal about this result isn't RNAi (which people have known about now for several years) but the success in hijacking the transferrin transporter to bring the RNAi in.
Sorry, but this arguement just falls down flat. Linus seems to be having no problems moving away from BK to another solution Writing your own version control system is no big problem?! That's a BIG problem in the books of most developers, even though Linus is a great programmer he himself admits that his solution is nothing more than "a stupid (but extremely fast) directory content manager". So going from a really nice SCM like BitKeeper to this is a big deal no matter how you spin it.
From the article: The reactionary nature of much of the open source community is something that DiDio claims is unique in the software industry. "I've lived through the Unix wars none of them reacted in this way," said DiDio. "It's just software. This has got way out of proportion."
I think DiDio is missing the point, it IS about a lot more than software. While it's true that people like Linux for its intrinsic value, what is really driving the debate and the adoption of Linux is its license. The debate is really over how the industry imagines itself:
1)Something similar to the scientific community, where knowledge and protocols are shared freely and published for all to see. Additionally (unlike science for the most part) a community where the means of production (in this case, OS, compilers, various tools) are in the hands of the community via copyleft licenses. 2)Code is hidden, software tools are not freely distributed but are for the most part in the hands of the major players in the industry. Writing code is encumbered with patents, high start-up costs, artificial scarcity is created for software tools, etc...
Take your pick (although it is likely there will continue to be a mix of both for awhile), but any way you slice it is about more than software.
Of course, some people would prefer to see the United States undertake unilateral nuclear disarmament, something they've been advocating since SANE/FREEZE was telling us we could trust the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Only today they claim we can trust Kim Il Jong and the mullahs of Iran more than the democratically elected government of the United States, just as they claimed we could trust Leonid Breshnev and Yuri Andropov more than we could trust Ronald Reagan. Their views are every bit as ill-conceived now as they were then. Nice strawman you've constructed, but pray tell who are these "some people" you are talking about? I challenge you to cite a single press release, webpage or publication by any independent NGO (even kooky ones) pushing for nuclear disarmanment that claims Kong Il Jong can be trusted. I can't think of any disarmament/peace group that would be opposed to 3rd party bilateral weapons inspections.
It excludes China and India from any kind of emissions controls.China consumes more material than the U.S., exclusive of oil China and India are still developing their economies, and each have about 4 times the population of the United States (more or less). Also in virtually every category (not just oil) the US consumes far more resources than either India or China (nevermind per capita). China may now consume more steel and concrete than the US, but that's about it. If you have a sense of fairness you would also say it is fair for China to consumes about 4 times what the US does before the US can complain.
They burn 40% more coal without scrubbers. Bad. If it makes you any happier they are switching over to nuclear power as per several slashdot stories.
How many times has Slashdot linked to articles about the toxic stuff coming out of the electronics disassembly operations in China?This is slashdot, not the international environmental movement. Slashdot readers are mostly from the English speaking world, so of course they are going to put more emphasis on the US and its problems instead of China. Telling a China (a one party state) what it ought to do on slashdot in English is a waste of time. Incidentally, lots of those computers being recycled in China are coming from the developed world including the US
Europe already exceeds its allocated emissions. Oops. Guess they should stop driving and making electricity, huh? This is the first time I have ever heard that implementing Kyoto is going to force signatory nations to stop driving cars and making electricity - care to back that statement up with any actual facts?
Our own weather forecasters can't even get the weather correct 48 hours in advance most of the time (save for areas like the equator and extreme north/south, of course). Predicting weather is very, very hard. Predicting a single variable (say a regional average temperature) is much easier. For instance with only about 30 years of experience BUT also with a good model of seasonal temperature variation I can predict that December of 2100 will be colder than July of 2100 in North America. I can't tell you anything about the weather or the temperature of the days on that month - but lack of previous data isn't deterring me from being confident in my prediction.
We're going to have global warming because the scientists so! Oh, wait! Just 30 years ago we were supposed to be entering a new ice age because the scientists said so! Those predictions did not account for the effect of CO2 buildup and global warming. We may have well entered another ice age if global warming did not happen. See this month's Scientific American for more details.
Sailors from hundreds of years ago reported the unusually warm, Pacific waters hundreds of hears before the Industrial Revolution! We are talking about global warming, not regional variations.
An asteroid is going to slam into us in 30 years because scientists said so! Oh, wait! It's actually going to miss us by about 1 million miles because other scientists said so. Science isn't about trusting scientists, it is a method or tool to give us a more accurate picture of the world. Look at the information and decide for yourself what to believe.
There are many more humans on this planet, with little sign of a stable population anytime in the near future. Well the human population may be increasing, but the rate of growth has been slowing down for the last couple of decades or so. Population is also decreasing in some countries, although not the heavily populated ones. No one knows what "critical mass" is regarding population, but don't doubt for one minute that population control will be the "next big thing" at some point in the next 50 years. Population control in 50 years may be trying to convince people to actually bother to have children.
Linux to me becomes unusable in a enterprise environment if full disclosure before the fix becomes the norm. Why? Any system which has a vulnerability is unstable, you're just more likely to know about it in Linux. Even without a patch as a sysadmin you may be able to do something about it - ie) turn off a service, switch a service, etc... which is a good thing. We need time to regression test fixes and make changes to large systems. That's ideal, but in the real world you don't always have time for that. If a bug is revealed, and the vendor takes a month doing regression system that is a month that your system could be broken into it. Full Disclosure gives the bad guys more time to do damage. This is your best arguement and it is true if the bad guy would not have found out anyway despite vendor security. However waiting for the vendors to fix things leaves sysadmins vulnerable to any attackers who know about the bug anyway. Vendors could easily spend months fixing and testing their patch. However it is possible the sysadmin could workaround the bug (stop using a vulnerably file system type or whatever) and prevent attacks right away. Also if their is full open disclosure the pressure to fix the bug will be much more powerful.
Nevermind arguments about fixing bugs (although I think Linus is right here too). The important thing is to NOT let kernel security issues be driven by vendors perceived needs. Give vendors that, and they will run wild. Security is a favorite bugaboo under which any change be justified - kudos to Linus for not letting this happen. If they want to form a secret cabal where they can keep secret any kernel security issues they know about - fine (but stupid), but don't try to tell everybody else you can't talk about these issues.
No more than any other country having nukes. Actually it may be a postive thing if they had nukes since that might prevent Bush from invading and killing who knows how many people (Iranian and American)
I can't believe the US government has missed the obvious solution here! Put the toxic nuclear waste in the drinking water and tell everybody it's good for them! Worked pretty well for flouride in most of North America...
These types of robots will create selective pressure against roaches unable to distinguish robots as unfriendly, be it through olfactory, visual or behavioural means. There will be massive positive selection pressure for cockroaches who know their own.
Interestingly while the robots may be scented with roach smell, this puts the manufacturer in the position of a chemical/behavioural arms race with roaches to produce acceptable robots. My money is on the roaches, since they have been around for several hundred million years.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised that so many slashdot readers take seriously the idea that the Washington Post (owned by the Moonies) is a non-partisan observer. If anything, it is more partisan in the sense that it represents a narrow subset of the American political spectrum in content. Like any other newspaper I know about it the Washington Post has an editorial policy, endorses political candidates, chooses columnists that match its target audience (no fascists, communists, socialists, anarchists, etc...). It is also of course implicity pro-American, discussions center around whether whether America should "pre-emptively" attack Iraq, not whether Iraq should "pre-emptively" attack the United States. I'll take the diversity, kooks and chaos of Wikipedia any day of the week. Those opinions may seem like "agitprop" to some, but go to another country, another time, another group and they are unremarkable.
You would think by now that people would have given up the notion of an unbiased media source but I guess some habits die hard.
Yeah, he does publish - Geology papers. He's not a climatologist.
The US still has nukes because the US is likely to need them in the future as a deterrent.
Any country can say this. Actually the US pleading a need for deterence is significantly less credible than Iran making the same case given the much larger military power of the United States.
The US is the titan the plops down on occasion trying to fix the worlds wrongs. Now, I am not going to argue that every time the US juggernaut stomps its foot it is doing right. I am arguing that no one else has bothered to do so.
This assumes that the US is trying to do right most of the time which most of the rest of the world doesn't believe.
It is also not true that no other country does this, many other countries participate in military conflicts through the UN or unilaterally. For instance Vietnam invaded Pol Pots Cambodia after the end of the US-Vietnam war - this was opposed by the US at the time.
In any event, claiming a humanitarian motive for invasion is something almost every invader does.
When Europe can unite and show a willingness to strap on their boots and go kick some ass for democracy,
There's not real evidence that either Europe or US are willing to "kick ass" for democracy. The US isn't kicking ass for democracy when it is supporting Pakistan, liberating Kuwait to restore a monarchy to power, propping up Saudi Arabia, or invading Iraq (despite what the White House says).
If you want democracy, I'd suggesting struggling for it at home because invading armies seldom promote democracy abroad.
So basically you are saying you think you are going to do well for yourself and you don't give a fuck about the people below you, real nice.
that whole freaking industry is going out of business in this country, because of the way the Unions have driven the cost of production through the roof.
Care to cite anything to back that up? Because last I checked wages in the auto industry in the United States have been decreasing relative to inflation, and certainly far below productivity since about the 1970s. That's even using the bullshit inflation #s that fed puts out today. In fact, unions are pretty much crushed in his country so I find it hard to believe your statement that they are destroying the industry.
Just because business almost always prefer non-unionized labor (nothing new) it doesn't prove your statement that union wages are destroying the auto industry. In fact, the auto-industry is still producing cars, it has just shifted away from the big 3 and Detroit to foreign tranplants using (often non-unionized labor) in the south. So we still have an auto industry, just that less of benefits of it are accuring to American workers.
Like you know this guy and his life story? Not everyone can put away half their income.
It's good to save, and Americans in particular should save more, but that is hardly the answer regarding the struggle between labor and capital.Given that in developed countries governments have been privatizing power companies since the 80s I'm having a real hard believing this. Particulary since your solution (nuclear power) is an incredibly centralized power source - you are not attacking sticking it to "the Man" are you? Unless you are proposing everyone gets a nuclear reactor on their block...
Renewable energy source (like wind and solar) are much easier to decentralize than nuclear power, so you should be supporting their development (although wind doesn't really need any help) instead of singing the praises of nuclear power.
First, keep in mind that the longer it stays radioactive, by definition the less radioactive (and thus less dangerous) it is. Depleted Uranium, for instance, despite being technically radioactive, is actually used as radiation shielding!
Depleted uranium (mostly U238) is extremely toxic and carcinogenic and has a half life of 4.46 × 10^9 years (wikipedia) so please don't tell us how it is going to get less dangerous - that's not going to happen for awhile. And despite the ability of DU to absorbs neutrons it is also naturally radioactive and pretty good at emitting them. It gets used in tank shells and is scattered across the Balkans, Kuwait and Iraq where it is definitely causes problems above background radiation. But nevermind over there, there are enough leaks (documented and undocumented) to cause worry here in North America. Take a look at Uranium City for instance... http://www.interlog.com/~grlaird/uraniumcity.html
Yeah, and how much of the economic uncertainty comes from artificial barriers created by scientific illiterates who oppose nuclear power? Other than fossil fuels, nuclear is the only type of generator that is proven to be long-term viable and scalable to any capacity.
Or to turn that around how much of the economic costs are born because nuclear power in any form is supported by scientific illterates? Once closing and storage costs are factored in nuclear plants are expensive even with the massive government subsidies they usually get. And its not like they are long-term viable, the world can run out of affordable uranium too - it will just take a couple of hundred years longer than oil. Right now wind power in many locations is cheaper and more viable long term than nuclear power. And BTW nulcear power is not a type of generator.
I'm not saying nuclear is worse than coal (I'm honestly not sure) but these aren't good arguments for nuclear fission.
Right now there is a 4+ year backlog on immigration - in short the system is broken and is desperately in need of funding to reduce the backlog. This affects me because I am Canadian who moved to the US in 2002 and I am married to a foreign national (Romanian).
Canada may have a pretty good immigration system relative to other countries, that still isn't saying much. One of the reasons we moved to the US was so that my wife (who is a medical doctor) could practise medicine. Despite physician shortages the medical system in Canada is very much closed to foreign medical grads (FMGs). Highly qualfied FMGs fight for the few remaining residency positions AFTER all the Canadian MDs have had their first crack (even the guy who graduated last in his class). In the US it is much more fair to foreigners, with merit playing a bigger role.
We have thought about moving back to Canada but the system makes it too much of a pain. For an MD it requires so many exams/money/time (although medicine is pretty much the same in English Canada and the US) that it is not worth it yet. Plus if we want to bring a mother-in-law from Romania to Canada we have to wait 4 years?! It's just stupid. BTW my wife is still not a Canadian citizen (because we are living in US) and if I were to sponsor her anyway with no assurance of success (huge amounts of paperwork and at least $1500 last I heard) she would still have to wait 18 months to get permenant residency! In short, the system really does need fixing.
BTW having experienced both medical systems (Alberta and BC versus Kaiser in GA and BlueCross/Shield in IL) I can tell you there is no one best system for everybody. However I can say that if you do NOT have at least an upper middle class income with a good employer you are better off in Canada (BC or Alberta). We paid a big sum of money for individual coverage in GA and even after calculating in the tax difference it was better to be in Alberta (by far) and just sligtly better to be in BC. Now however we are probably slightly better off in US moneywise.
We're still happy to move back though (for the lifestyle and cheaper high quality education) if things were made a bit easier for us.
The only problem I can see being an issue is that I don't particularly :)
care for hockey... Is that a deal-breaker on naturalization?
Well that's pretty close to a deal breaker, but if you like any of curling, poutine, the Tragically Hip or beer we may be able to make an exception.
Economic pressures are great because you don't have to mandate any laws, the price of the commodity forces a change in the market.
_ of_2000)
This is great? A "change in the market" may mean that people that need water do without - like the 1 billion or so people in the world who do not have sufficient water. (http://www.un.org/events/water/brochure.htm)
Water is not just another commodity, it is essential for life and if left to "market forces" (which in practise has meant politicans giving sweetheart deals to investors to privatize water supplies) the public gets screwed. This is exactly what happened in the city of Atlanta (they are now taking back control of their water system).
So while a "change in the market" in the United States may mean that people get ripped off, it may be the difference between life and death in other countries. People who don't have water aren't likely to suffer "market forces" lightly, they are more likely to riot until the situation is fixed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochabamba_protests
When dealing with scarcity essential to life, the best solution is rationing - not the market. This is why when countries go to war and they need oil, iron, etc... it is procured directly with little complaint from the bulk of the public.
From your own link:
"The carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide is generated by partial oxidation of coal and wood-based fuels"
I've seen from other sources that synthetic fuel production from coal produces about twice as much waste carbon dioxide then if you just simply burned the coal alone. Also natural gas reserves are becoming increasingly depleted so methane isn't going to be easy to come, unless you want to go through this coal oxidation process which is just going to increase global warming. I actually think coal mining is one of the worse ways fuel sources, the mines destroy the landscape, the fuel creates acid rain, it generates more (albeit diffuse) radioactivity than nuclear power plants, it creates plenty of carbon dioxide and it centralizes power generation.
A cleaner, cheaper approach would be to rely more on wind power (which despite high upfront capital costs is quite cheap over the lifetime of the plant, unlike solar) and to increase the effiency of existing technologies. Hopefully by the 22nd centry we won't be doing coal mining anymore.
I don't think this is correct, unless you sign or click on a license agreement when you visit a website.
Molecular biologists have been trying to engineer a safe, reliable, effecient method of drug delivery to selected cells for decades. This includes modifying viruses, poxviruses, herpes viruses, adenoviruses,retroviruses, etc.. but they all have problems. Creating the viruses isn't difficult, nor is mutation a serious problem. What is difficult is selectively targetting ONLY the cells you want, getting ALL (or most) of them with a sufficient quantity of whatever agent you are delivering. That's hard.
The big deal about this result isn't RNAi (which people have known about now for several years) but the success in hijacking the transferrin transporter to bring the RNAi in.
Sorry, but this arguement just falls down flat. Linus seems to be having no problems moving away from BK to another solution
Writing your own version control system is no big problem?! That's a BIG problem in the books of most developers, even though Linus is a great programmer he himself admits that his solution is nothing more than "a stupid (but extremely fast) directory content manager". So going from a really nice SCM like BitKeeper to this is a big deal no matter how you spin it.
From the article:
The reactionary nature of much of the open source community is something that DiDio claims is unique in the software industry. "I've lived through the Unix wars none of them reacted in this way," said DiDio. "It's just software. This has got way out of proportion."
I think DiDio is missing the point, it IS about a lot more than software. While it's true that people like Linux for its intrinsic value, what is really driving the debate and the adoption of Linux is its license. The debate is really over how the industry imagines itself:
1)Something similar to the scientific community, where knowledge and protocols are shared freely and published for all to see. Additionally (unlike science for the most part) a community where the means of production (in this case, OS, compilers, various tools) are in the hands of the community via copyleft licenses.
2)Code is hidden, software tools are not freely distributed but are for the most part in the hands of the major players in the industry. Writing code is encumbered with patents, high start-up costs, artificial scarcity is created for software tools, etc...
Take your pick (although it is likely there will continue to be a mix of both for awhile), but any way you slice it is about more than software.
Of course, some people would prefer to see the United States undertake unilateral nuclear disarmament, something they've been advocating since SANE/FREEZE was telling us we could trust the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Only today they claim we can trust Kim Il Jong and the mullahs of Iran more than the democratically elected government of the United States, just as they claimed we could trust Leonid Breshnev and Yuri Andropov more than we could trust Ronald Reagan. Their views are every bit as ill-conceived now as they were then.
Nice strawman you've constructed, but pray tell who are these "some people" you are talking about? I challenge you to cite a single press release, webpage or publication by any independent NGO (even kooky ones) pushing for nuclear disarmanment that claims Kong Il Jong can be trusted. I can't think of any disarmament/peace group that would be opposed to 3rd party bilateral weapons inspections.
China and India are still developing their economies, and each have about 4 times the population of the United States (more or less). Also in virtually every category (not just oil) the US consumes far more resources than either India or China (nevermind per capita). China may now consume more steel and concrete than the US, but that's about it. If you have a sense of fairness you would also say it is fair for China to consumes about 4 times what the US does before the US can complain.
They burn 40% more coal without scrubbers. Bad. If it makes you any happier they are switching over to nuclear power as per several slashdot stories.
How many times has Slashdot linked to articles about the toxic stuff coming out of the electronics disassembly operations in China?This is slashdot, not the international environmental movement. Slashdot readers are mostly from the English speaking world, so of course they are going to put more emphasis on the US and its problems instead of China. Telling a China (a one party state) what it ought to do on slashdot in English is a waste of time. Incidentally, lots of those computers being recycled in China are coming from the developed world including the US
Europe already exceeds its allocated emissions. Oops. Guess they should stop driving and making electricity, huh?
This is the first time I have ever heard that implementing Kyoto is going to force signatory nations to stop driving cars and making electricity - care to back that statement up with any actual facts?
Our own weather forecasters can't even get the weather correct 48 hours in advance most of the time (save for areas like the equator and extreme north/south, of course).
Predicting weather is very, very hard. Predicting a single variable (say a regional average temperature) is much easier. For instance with only about 30 years of experience BUT also with a good model of seasonal temperature variation I can predict that December of 2100 will be colder than July of 2100 in North America. I can't tell you anything about the weather or the temperature of the days on that month - but lack of previous data isn't deterring me from being confident in my prediction.
We're going to have global warming because the scientists so! Oh, wait! Just 30 years ago we were supposed to be entering a new ice age because the scientists said so!
Those predictions did not account for the effect of CO2 buildup and global warming. We may have well entered another ice age if global warming did not happen. See this month's Scientific American for more details.
Sailors from hundreds of years ago reported the unusually warm, Pacific waters hundreds of hears before the Industrial Revolution!
We are talking about global warming, not regional variations.
An asteroid is going to slam into us in 30 years because scientists said so! Oh, wait! It's actually going to miss us by about 1 million miles because other scientists said so. Science isn't about trusting scientists, it is a method or tool to give us a more accurate picture of the world. Look at the information and decide for yourself what to believe.
There are many more humans on this planet, with little sign of a stable population anytime in the near future.
Well the human population may be increasing, but the rate of growth has been slowing down for the last couple of decades or so. Population is also decreasing in some countries, although not the heavily populated ones.
No one knows what "critical mass" is regarding population, but don't doubt for one minute that population control will be the "next big thing" at some point in the next 50 years.
Population control in 50 years may be trying to convince people to actually bother to have children.
Linux to me becomes unusable in a enterprise environment if full disclosure before the fix becomes the norm.
Why? Any system which has a vulnerability is unstable, you're just more likely to know about it in Linux. Even without a patch as a sysadmin you may be able to do something about it - ie) turn off a service, switch a service, etc... which is a good thing.
We need time to regression test fixes and make changes to large systems.
That's ideal, but in the real world you don't always have time for that. If a bug is revealed, and the vendor takes a month doing regression system that is a month that your system could be broken into it.
Full Disclosure gives the bad guys more time to do damage.
This is your best arguement and it is true if the bad guy would not have found out anyway despite vendor security. However waiting for the vendors to fix things leaves sysadmins vulnerable to any attackers who know about the bug anyway. Vendors could easily spend months fixing and testing their patch. However it is possible the sysadmin could workaround the bug (stop using a vulnerably file system type or whatever) and prevent attacks right away. Also if their is full open disclosure the pressure to fix the bug will be much more powerful.
Nevermind arguments about fixing bugs (although I think Linus is right here too). The important thing is to NOT let kernel security issues be driven by vendors perceived needs. Give vendors that, and they will run wild. Security is a favorite bugaboo under which any change be justified - kudos to Linus for not letting this happen. If they want to form a secret cabal where they can keep secret any kernel security issues they know about - fine (but stupid), but don't try to tell everybody else you can't talk about these issues.
No more than any other country having nukes. Actually it may be a postive thing if they had nukes since that might prevent Bush from invading and killing who knows how many people (Iranian and American)
The link below contains a 3rd party link to human rights reports in Turkey for about the last 15 years.
http://www.hrw.org/doc?t=europe&c=turkey
I can't believe the US government has missed the obvious solution here! Put the toxic nuclear waste in the drinking water and tell everybody it's good for them! Worked pretty well for flouride in most of North America...
http://www.fluoridealert.org/
These types of robots will create selective pressure against roaches unable to distinguish robots as unfriendly, be it through olfactory, visual or behavioural means. There will be massive positive selection pressure for cockroaches who know their own.
Interestingly while the robots may be scented with roach smell, this puts the manufacturer in the position of a chemical/behavioural arms race with roaches to produce acceptable robots. My money is on the roaches, since they have been around for several hundred million years.