Sickle cell anemia is a horrible disease. It's a co-dominant trait. If you've got double-dominant genes, you don't have the disease. If you've got double-recessive, your blood can't carry enough oxygen, and you probably die by age four.
If you're single-recessive, you have a mild, survivable version of the disease. You probably couldn't live at high altitudes. And you're very resistant to malaria. A malarial infection sends your blood into a sickling crisis, and the malaria can't get enough oxygen to survive.
So, if you live in a malarial environment, single cell recessives are the only people that can survive. And sickle cell anemia is a good thing.
Clearly, autism isn't that simple. Everybody does fine without any traces of autism. And it's also surely not just one gene. But people with mild forms of autism may have some kind of advantage in certain settings in modern society. And full autistics rarely have children. It could be worse than just dying, in terms of evolution, because not only does the autist die, but he or she also detracts from the ability of their parent to have more children.
All people with sickle cell anemia have ancestors from malarial environments. And now we're seeing a similar effect in silicon valley. It's an environment where the semi-autistic people have some kind of competitive advantage, like the single-recessive sickle cell anemics. However, in this case, the double-dominant people do not have much of a disadvantage at all, compared to the double-dominant people did in malarial regions (A sure death of malaria is a big disadvantage). So. I have a guess for what might happen. If these conditions continued indefinitely (where semi-autists have some kind of competitive advantage, and these conditions will likely not remain unchanged) then eventually there would be some kind of adaptation that makes it so that semi-autists are less attracted to semi-autists.
This way, autism would still be propagated, but rarely to the point where people were no longer functional.
Re:The little guy is only going to get bigger.
on
Smalltime Wireless ISPs
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Absolutely. I'm a senior CS undergraduate. When I was a freshman, we were in the thick of the moronic dot com business models. "We'll revolutionize online toilet paper delivery!"
All of the ideas coming out of my classmates were equally moronic. Or moreso. (even my older classmates:) Now that no one is *looking* for businesses to start, and no one is hiring, they're just finding ways to make money. And it's working. They're not incorporating, they're not talking about venture capital, and they're thinking smaller.
People realized that they're not going to be millionaires, and they're making money. The internet can still make you money. Small businesses rule.
Totally. But keep in mind that when they did this there wasn't really any 802.11b, so they paid to develope their own solutions. That's where the $$ got spent.
Would it make you feel better to think of it as an online reenactment? I assure you that the people playing this game will never envy you for being there.
Convenient to this debate is the fact that someone owns the Linux trademark. Lindows runs the Linux kernel. Doesn't really matter what you think Linux is, whether that's the penguin, the smile, or non-commercial software.
Hrm. I thought that they were saying that the method of execution is determined by the type (audio/x-wav in this case) and the displayed name is determined by the filename. This would mean that if they sent you an.exe as audio/x-wav it would attempt to play the executable as audio. Just ugly noise, no security problem.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is a big problem, but I think it's different than you describe.
MacOS 7.5.3 on a non-powerpc mac. I'm positive that you need OpenTransport for DHCP to work, and I think the oldest versions that OT worked with was like 7.5.5 or 7.6.
I don't know if this is the newest version that won't work, but I know it won't work. AT&T might not support non-powerpc macs at all, so you might want to go to ftp://ftp.info.apple.com and get the OpenTransport standalone installer and see what it says its required system is.
I thought that the accusation was that they use one method to show the user the name and they use the other method to actually operate on the file. If they use the file extention to determine file type and also use the file extension to decide what to do with the file, then there is no security risk.
If any other browsers are using one method for identification to the user and another method for execution, then it's not IE-only.
Yes. But there are laws that limit the power of these license agreements. Iduno what MS has cooked up in their EULA, but stuff like the "No warranty of suitability for any particular purpose" stuff is often illegal, and the same with the limitation of damages to the cost of the software.
So it would depend what jurisdiction you're in (in microsoft's case, everywhere) and what your real damages were.
Well, the real reason that their "billions" in losses are pure bullshit is that losses in these companies are very closely watched. If they really lost "billions" to *anything* they would be required to report this loss to their shareholders. They do not. So the losses do not exist.
First time I saw anyone point this out was with the Mitnick trial. The prosecutors wrote letters to all the different companies that Mitnick had acquired source from and asked them what it cost them to develope the software. Sun said, "Well, we spent 8 billion on Solaris." The prosecutors then told the court that Mitnick caused 8 billion in damages to Sun.
Somehow, Sun didn't feel the need to report these losses to their shareholders. Either the executives at Sun were completely remiss in their obligations to their shareholders or the prosecutors knowingly mislead the court. Of course, it's not as bad as what's happened to Skylarov, but it was still horrible.
Paypal only makes sense if you're pretty low volume. If you're making any real money with your business it's always safer to sign up with visa/amex/whoever and accept credit card payments. It's not much more expensive than paypal and it's a lot safer for both customers and merchants.
Yes, the term addiction here is being used too easily. Unfortunately, so is OCD:). People with OCD do not enjoy their obsessive behavior, nor do they describe it as fun. They know that it is irrational and still cannot stop themselves from doing it. You have pinpointed the difference between obsession and addiction. And there is a difference.
Yeah. You're right. This technology might make it easier to find the people, though. Depending on how the infrastructure worked, you might be able to find every single one.
The biggest problem for me was speed. My dual celery 525 couldn't keep up with drawing the screen on CivIII. It would take (I timed it) 7 minutes for a turn to complete as my workers ran around building mines/railroads/whatever. Alpha Centauri would let you not move your field of view while units did their business, and turns took sooo much less time.
I think this might have something to do with WinXP, though, as my roommates had better luck (but still bad). Either that, or the celery's cache, but that's the only real difference between our machines.
This is a really really neat idea. Might be totally wrongheaded, but it's interesting. The biggest problem that leaps to mind is with the fifth amendment.
If an accuser comes forward with information implicating an alleged criminal/terrorist/whatever, then the accused party would want every single peice of evidence that even slightly pertains to the crime at his disposal. That might include every peice of video that the accuser produced for months preceding the crime, and all video produced within a mile of the incident.
I don't know if this would be a legitimate request on the part of the accused, but I have a feeling it might be. Of course it would be impossible to supply, because it would require people to testify against themselves if they were filming something unrelated and incriminating.
Is there a good way to compare this problem to a present day scenario in evidence rules?
Hmmm. Can't tell if you're serious. The only reason that Sterling's idea makes any sense is that citizen CX29BR7 could distribute his video footage (and perhaps the footage of his own murder, if he's organized) so widely that everyone would know about it. Of course if we lost the ability to distribute information freely, then this would not work at all, and there would be no reason to expect any benefit from this technology.
Re:IT -- successor of the banana peel
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2
The core components seem to all be redundant. And the tires aren't inflated. The battery is very easy to monitor. It seems to fail safe in every way I can think of. Sure, if there's a bug, this could happen, but it seems unlikely.
If they do compiler improvements and then recompile, I don't think patches are necesarily a great answer. And they could not be certain where the user moved all of the files in the original install.
Well, their system doesn't have binary failure. It's really good right now, but it could definitely be better. There are (admittedly rare) times when I feel like my searches aren't handled as well as they could be. This is just one possible way they could improve their relevance.
RMS addresses exactly this concern in his answers. That is, the fact that he is considered very bad at compromising. It's possible that he would not cause extra dissention for all of the reasons that he discussed. Also, one of the primary goals of Gnome *is* to encourage Free Software. So RMS is a good choice. And he's fine at seeing the other sides of arguments. He's still sure he's right.
Also, I've never heard him define freedom any differently than you do. You might not like his definition of Free Software though, but since he made up the term, I figure that should be ok.
If he were trying to join the KDE board or something, then I'd agree with you completely. But he's not. He's trying to join the Gnome board. Gnome is all about Free Software (as RMS defined it).
Well, that might be the whole point of Open Source. For you. If Open Source were only about freedom of choice, then Gnome would not be Open Source... Oh wait, it's not. It's Free software. And the point of Free Software is to eliminate proprietary software. Well, people may use Free Software for other purposes, but the original designed goal of the GPL is to eliminate proprietary software. RMS is correct in that Gnome was also created to further these goals. You might not agree with these goals. That's ok. I don't think I do either.
Your comments about worry, bigotry, and insult do not follow from any of your other comments. You just seem to not like Free Software. That's ok. Eric S Raymond has a big tent for you. I'm in that tent too some of the time.
Oh. Yeah. Wish I noticed that before I replied. I feel like a moron.
The technology being discussed in this article is probably going to be doing usefull things a long time before 50-60 years from now, it just won't be accessing memory. It might be used in prosthetics or research comparatively quickly.
I don't know if they're able to put these dots in living people (I doubt it) so the insanely promising concept for the near future would be research in biological computing, just like the article describes. Again, by near future I just mean less than 50 years:)
Er... That will be a while longer. By the time they have this particular technology researched and tested, we might have wireless connectivity everywhere. But this technology isn't going to allow us to do what you're talking about. We're many decades (at least) from understanding the mechanics of how memory works. We're learning fast, but still mostly about the macro elements. It's going to be quite a while before we can trap a memory lookup like that:)
Also, until we have personal massively parallel supercomputers for everyone, there's another totally impenetrable roadblock for this idea. The kind of processing required to implement a human-like memory system would be completely impossible on any mechanical device like current computers. Instead of 1 processor with 32 bit instructions, we have 1,000,000,000,000 processors with 1 bit instructions. Er... debatable how many instructions. Still.
This technology will probably be useful for something in a relatively short period of time. Just not memory. Perhaps (rudimentary) vision or hearing for blind or deaf people.
While your points about BT going under are all informative, I'm sure that their potential demise will have nothing to do with whether or not they persue this case. If the case could be profitable for BT (which would be their only reason for doing it) then, least of all, someone could purchase the rights to sue when BT goes under. Or they could do it like Be Inc. is doing, where they went under and sold everything except the right to sue MS.
Slashdot Mirror
Sickle cell anemia is a horrible disease. It's a co-dominant trait. If you've got double-dominant genes, you don't have the disease. If you've got double-recessive, your blood can't carry enough oxygen, and you probably die by age four.
If you're single-recessive, you have a mild, survivable version of the disease. You probably couldn't live at high altitudes. And you're very resistant to malaria. A malarial infection sends your blood into a sickling crisis, and the malaria can't get enough oxygen to survive.
So, if you live in a malarial environment, single cell recessives are the only people that can survive. And sickle cell anemia is a good thing.
Clearly, autism isn't that simple. Everybody does fine without any traces of autism. And it's also surely not just one gene. But people with mild forms of autism may have some kind of advantage in certain settings in modern society. And full autistics rarely have children. It could be worse than just dying, in terms of evolution, because not only does the autist die, but he or she also detracts from the ability of their parent to have more children.
All people with sickle cell anemia have ancestors from malarial environments. And now we're seeing a similar effect in silicon valley. It's an environment where the semi-autistic people have some kind of competitive advantage, like the single-recessive sickle cell anemics. However, in this case, the double-dominant people do not have much of a disadvantage at all, compared to the double-dominant people did in malarial regions (A sure death of malaria is a big disadvantage). So. I have a guess for what might happen. If these conditions continued indefinitely (where semi-autists have some kind of competitive advantage, and these conditions will likely not remain unchanged) then eventually there would be some kind of adaptation that makes it so that semi-autists are less attracted to semi-autists.
This way, autism would still be propagated, but rarely to the point where people were no longer functional.
Absolutely. I'm a senior CS undergraduate. When I was a freshman, we were in the thick of the moronic dot com business models. "We'll revolutionize online toilet paper delivery!"
:) Now that no one is *looking* for businesses to start, and no one is hiring, they're just finding ways to make money. And it's working. They're not incorporating, they're not talking about venture capital, and they're thinking smaller.
All of the ideas coming out of my classmates were equally moronic. Or moreso. (even my older classmates
People realized that they're not going to be millionaires, and they're making money. The internet can still make you money. Small businesses rule.
Totally. But keep in mind that when they did this there wasn't really any 802.11b, so they paid to develope their own solutions. That's where the $$ got spent.
Would it make you feel better to think of it as an online reenactment? I assure you that the people playing this game will never envy you for being there.
Convenient to this debate is the fact that someone owns the Linux trademark. Lindows runs the Linux kernel. Doesn't really matter what you think Linux is, whether that's the penguin, the smile, or non-commercial software.
Hrm. I thought that they were saying that the method of execution is determined by the type (audio/x-wav in this case) and the displayed name is determined by the filename. This would mean that if they sent you an .exe as audio/x-wav it would attempt to play the executable as audio. Just ugly noise, no security problem.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is a big problem, but I think it's different than you describe.
MacOS 7.5.3 on a non-powerpc mac. I'm positive that you need OpenTransport for DHCP to work, and I think the oldest versions that OT worked with was like 7.5.5 or 7.6.
I don't know if this is the newest version that won't work, but I know it won't work. AT&T might not support non-powerpc macs at all, so you might want to go to ftp://ftp.info.apple.com and get the OpenTransport standalone installer and see what it says its required system is.
I thought that the accusation was that they use one method to show the user the name and they use the other method to actually operate on the file. If they use the file extention to determine file type and also use the file extension to decide what to do with the file, then there is no security risk.
If any other browsers are using one method for identification to the user and another method for execution, then it's not IE-only.
Yes. But there are laws that limit the power of these license agreements. Iduno what MS has cooked up in their EULA, but stuff like the "No warranty of suitability for any particular purpose" stuff is often illegal, and the same with the limitation of damages to the cost of the software.
So it would depend what jurisdiction you're in (in microsoft's case, everywhere) and what your real damages were.
Well, the real reason that their "billions" in losses are pure bullshit is that losses in these companies are very closely watched. If they really lost "billions" to *anything* they would be required to report this loss to their shareholders. They do not. So the losses do not exist.
First time I saw anyone point this out was with the Mitnick trial. The prosecutors wrote letters to all the different companies that Mitnick had acquired source from and asked them what it cost them to develope the software. Sun said, "Well, we spent 8 billion on Solaris." The prosecutors then told the court that Mitnick caused 8 billion in damages to Sun.
Somehow, Sun didn't feel the need to report these losses to their shareholders. Either the executives at Sun were completely remiss in their obligations to their shareholders or the prosecutors knowingly mislead the court. Of course, it's not as bad as what's happened to Skylarov, but it was still horrible.
Paypal only makes sense if you're pretty low volume. If you're making any real money with your business it's always safer to sign up with visa/amex/whoever and accept credit card payments. It's not much more expensive than paypal and it's a lot safer for both customers and merchants.
Yes, the term addiction here is being used too easily. Unfortunately, so is OCD :). People with OCD do not enjoy their obsessive behavior, nor do they describe it as fun. They know that it is irrational and still cannot stop themselves from doing it. You have pinpointed the difference between obsession and addiction. And there is a difference.
Yeah. You're right. This technology might make it easier to find the people, though. Depending on how the infrastructure worked, you might be able to find every single one.
The biggest problem for me was speed. My dual celery 525 couldn't keep up with drawing the screen on CivIII. It would take (I timed it) 7 minutes for a turn to complete as my workers ran around building mines/railroads/whatever. Alpha Centauri would let you not move your field of view while units did their business, and turns took sooo much less time.
I think this might have something to do with WinXP, though, as my roommates had better luck (but still bad). Either that, or the celery's cache, but that's the only real difference between our machines.
This is a really really neat idea. Might be totally wrongheaded, but it's interesting. The biggest problem that leaps to mind is with the fifth amendment.
If an accuser comes forward with information implicating an alleged criminal/terrorist/whatever, then the accused party would want every single peice of evidence that even slightly pertains to the crime at his disposal. That might include every peice of video that the accuser produced for months preceding the crime, and all video produced within a mile of the incident.
I don't know if this would be a legitimate request on the part of the accused, but I have a feeling it might be. Of course it would be impossible to supply, because it would require people to testify against themselves if they were filming something unrelated and incriminating.
Is there a good way to compare this problem to a present day scenario in evidence rules?
Hmmm. Can't tell if you're serious. The only reason that Sterling's idea makes any sense is that citizen CX29BR7 could distribute his video footage (and perhaps the footage of his own murder, if he's organized) so widely that everyone would know about it. Of course if we lost the ability to distribute information freely, then this would not work at all, and there would be no reason to expect any benefit from this technology.
The core components seem to all be redundant. And the tires aren't inflated. The battery is very easy to monitor. It seems to fail safe in every way I can think of. Sure, if there's a bug, this could happen, but it seems unlikely.
If they do compiler improvements and then recompile, I don't think patches are necesarily a great answer. And they could not be certain where the user moved all of the files in the original install.
The whole OS was updated.
The whole OS was updated.
Well, their system doesn't have binary failure. It's really good right now, but it could definitely be better. There are (admittedly rare) times when I feel like my searches aren't handled as well as they could be. This is just one possible way they could improve their relevance.
RMS addresses exactly this concern in his answers. That is, the fact that he is considered very bad at compromising. It's possible that he would not cause extra dissention for all of the reasons that he discussed. Also, one of the primary goals of Gnome *is* to encourage Free Software. So RMS is a good choice. And he's fine at seeing the other sides of arguments. He's still sure he's right.
Also, I've never heard him define freedom any differently than you do. You might not like his definition of Free Software though, but since he made up the term, I figure that should be ok.
If he were trying to join the KDE board or something, then I'd agree with you completely. But he's not. He's trying to join the Gnome board. Gnome is all about Free Software (as RMS defined it).
Well, that might be the whole point of Open Source. For you. If Open Source were only about freedom of choice, then Gnome would not be Open Source... Oh wait, it's not. It's Free software. And the point of Free Software is to eliminate proprietary software. Well, people may use Free Software for other purposes, but the original designed goal of the GPL is to eliminate proprietary software. RMS is correct in that Gnome was also created to further these goals. You might not agree with these goals. That's ok. I don't think I do either.
Your comments about worry, bigotry, and insult do not follow from any of your other comments. You just seem to not like Free Software. That's ok. Eric S Raymond has a big tent for you. I'm in that tent too some of the time.
Oh. Yeah. Wish I noticed that before I replied. I feel like a moron.
:)
The technology being discussed in this article is probably going to be doing usefull things a long time before 50-60 years from now, it just won't be accessing memory. It might be used in prosthetics or research comparatively quickly.
I don't know if they're able to put these dots in living people (I doubt it) so the insanely promising concept for the near future would be research in biological computing, just like the article describes. Again, by near future I just mean less than 50 years
Anyway. Interesting points.
Er... That will be a while longer. By the time they have this particular technology researched and tested, we might have wireless connectivity everywhere. But this technology isn't going to allow us to do what you're talking about. We're many decades (at least) from understanding the mechanics of how memory works. We're learning fast, but still mostly about the macro elements. It's going to be quite a while before we can trap a memory lookup like that :)
Also, until we have personal massively parallel supercomputers for everyone, there's another totally impenetrable roadblock for this idea. The kind of processing required to implement a human-like memory system would be completely impossible on any mechanical device like current computers. Instead of 1 processor with 32 bit instructions, we have 1,000,000,000,000 processors with 1 bit instructions. Er... debatable how many instructions. Still.
This technology will probably be useful for something in a relatively short period of time. Just not memory. Perhaps (rudimentary) vision or hearing for blind or deaf people.
While your points about BT going under are all informative, I'm sure that their potential demise will have nothing to do with whether or not they persue this case. If the case could be profitable for BT (which would be their only reason for doing it) then, least of all, someone could purchase the rights to sue when BT goes under. Or they could do it like Be Inc. is doing, where they went under and sold everything except the right to sue MS.
Bacteria frat party in the toxins! Woo hoo! Let's go!