synthetic biology involves the large-scale rewriting of genetic codes to create metabolic machines with singular purposes.
And there you have it. Life, living beings, are not "machines with singular purposes." Having but one purpose pretty much defines how a machine differs from life, defines an instrument to be used by myriad-purposed life forms. Human beings are the most general-purpose life forms evident on Earth. But anything more than a bacterium (maybe even them) has evolved in a many-dimensional environment, to which single-purpose fitness would not have been fitness at all.
None of the people playing with novel gene coding has the slightest idea how to make anything beyond single-purpose machines with it - no schemes for anything remotely resembling us, our dogs, or the squirrel in the yard. So this whole article's image of mad scientists "composing" new life forms like symphonies is just bad sci-fi, especially in the near to mid-term future. Can we pervert a life form into a machine? Sure. That's what happens when we put a horse before a cart. And perverting a microbe to make oil? Sure. But at that point we've reduced life to machinery, not created life.
Ubuntu (and Linux) is not based on original AT&T Unix code nor is it certified Unix. It is a unix-like kernel.
Quit right. It's all those GNU programs that fool us into thinking that Linux is UNIX - since from the command line they're, um, just about identical. And gee, if I open a terminal in my wife's iMac I notice that the UNIX utilities Apple has included are generally less powerful, and a smaller subset of the standard toolbox, than on my Debian-derived (thus cousin-to-Ubuntu) ASUS Eee, that cost and weighs half as much. What's with that? Apple's certified UNIX offering less of a UNIX experience than a basic GNU installation?
It's long been claimed that the development of human culture freed us from evolutionary pressures, by separating us from our prior, "natural" niches. Thus we may be "evolved from monkeys," but that's enough evolution, thank you. We've stopped doing that nasty stuff!
The current Ah ha!, backed up by analysis of genetic clues, is that of course evolution applies to creatures in any niche, and the rapid change of available niches forces relatively rapid evolution. Since a niche largely comprised of human culture will actually often change faster than an "merely natural" one, instead of "saving us" from biological evolution, it forces biological evolution to run faster - with the increased populations our cultures support providing more raw material to work the evolutionary process across.
So our cultures are part of the loop that forces biological evolution - both by defining many of the biases of "sexual selection," and also by defining the niches our fitness is for.
It also, of course, can work backwards: the "least evolved" of us work for their own benefit by trying to revert the culture to prior states, in which they used to have some genetic advantage. This is known as the "conservative" strategy.
The problem with China marching "over Taiwan and Japan" is that pesky ocean. "The word kamikaze originated as the name of major typhoons in 1274 and 1281, which dispersed Mongolian invasion fleets" (ref). Then, you had to depend on the lucky wind for defense. Compare the similar fate of Spain again England - with another body of water to cross and a wind in the wrong direction that day. But with more modern armaments, and independence from wind, you get Germany against Britain. Islands are defensible with just a bit of luck, or with modern weapons to hinder incoming ships.
Then look at the size of the navy the Allies launched from Britain to take the Continent back. They did that by stealth, because if Germany noticed it, it could have bombed it before it was launched. Do you think China could amass a similarly-sized fleet of landing craft before Taiwan or Japan could take them out? Taiwan and Japan both are fully equipped with America's best defensive weapons (even if we pretend that Taiwan's been hobbled a bit in deference to the Mainland - the Mainland doesn't believe that, because it's mostly not true).
Note the perfect parallel: The very industry that goes crying to the government for help "enforcing" their intellectual property "rights" especially where computers and the Net are concerned is working at the very same time to be sure that the actual creators of the core of the intellectual property most currently at risk from file sharing - TV shows and films - get next-to-nothing when their creations are sold, via the Net, to the public.
If the studios where willing to pay the writers of the stories they sell on a comparable scale for Net releases as they currently do (quite prosperously for themselves) with TV and movie theater releases, then we could believe this is really about making sure that we have plenty of good, creative content flowing into our culture by rewarding it well. Instead, we have an industry asking for massive government subsidy for their copyrights of materials they at the same time insist on their right to distribute without the traditional and fair compensation to the actual creators. (Compare the music business, where musicians have never been fairly paid except for a few megastars.) It's like saying we get healthy forests via government favoritism towards logging companies whose main goal is to clearcut our forests at least expense to themselves. Here we're to get healthy cultural content by subsidizing media companies - sparing them the expense of private copyright enforcement they've shown they can easily afford - whose main goal is to seize content from its creators at least expense to themselves.
If the government's to be involved at all here, we should just nationalize the buggers and pay artists a fair stipend proportional to the viewership their peer-to-peer distributed creations receive. Not that I'm in favor of that; government shouldn't run the culture. But that's just the point. Government should stay far away from this mess.
The ASUS Eees are good. Yeah, MS is set to sell XP for them for another $40, but their default PDA=like screens are idiot-proof, and it's simple to switch them to a clean, ASUS-customized KDE. The screen is good. The keyboard's good. There's nothing cheap about them except maybe the button bar beneath the touchpad - and you can get the same function from the touchpad itself. And there are no rough edges in the Linux experience. It's not for games, but it boots and loads apps plenty fast. It even has mplayer working out of the box - no extra installation steps for a modern browsing experience (as with, say, Ubuntu).
Granting all that, if we can get our press and to condemn China for it, it will be more embarrassing for them to do too much of it, too blatantly, themselves.
Seriously, ending trade with China would most likely do more to cut particulate pollution (25% of LA's comes from China), and cut global warming from coal burning. Sure, there'd be short-term disruption of American corporate manufacturing patterns. But what we've learned in the process of outsourcing industries to China is how to build new factories quickly. We could use that knowledge again here.
As an anon notes here (currently rated 0) the Constitution gives rights to all "persons," not just "citizens." However, the Constitution also viewed slaves as only counting as 3/5ths persons. That was obviously wrong for slaves, who hadn't freely chosen their status, and so should have been afforded the "created equal" status of the Declaration. But what of those in human form who have chosen to become nazis? Or jihadists? Surely having been "created equal," it is possible to fall below human status - not through nationality or tribe, but certainly through becoming, say, a serial murderer, or rapist of children, or planter of bombs in public places.
So the US recognizes (for the most part - Gitmo is evil!) human rights, but does not hold to the nonsensical claim that all those born human remain human through the lifespan of their bodies. And those are the "persons" we need to watch for at the boarders. Do we do it well? Not particularly. We need to get better at it; we sure don't need to stop, nor should we.
providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens
There have always been "broad and constant streams" of every sort of propaganda available to "United States citizens" because of that pesky Constitutional "right" called "freedom of the press." That is, if we're willing to call narrow and intermittent streams "broad and constant." That's a matter of perspective, maybe. But any good public library has a broad selection including radical materials that any citizen can, if she desires, spend every waking hour reading. So from her perspective it's "broad and constant," even if it's not even one percent of the books in the library - or 1 percent of the political/religious material on the Net.
Can anyone provide a single example of a terrorist act that resulted from an individual in isolation reading propaganda on the Internet? It looks like all the Muslim terrorists - even though they use the Internet - have been primarily motivated and coordinated through their mosques. So should the first thing to go be freedom of speech, when freedom of religion is much closer to the source of the terrorist threat? The Christian Web sites that have provided names and addresses of physicians providing abortions, then crossed them off as they were assassinated by the faithful, might be closer to what the Congress shows fear of. Even in that case, the prime motivators of the assassins were their preachers and congregations, not their solo reading of a hateful Web site, afaik.
There's a lot of fine, classic sci-fi in the More than Human sub-genre. There's nothing to stop the reader or viewer from identifying with the superior species. Similarly, most of us have no problem identifying with movie characters who are more beautiful than we are, speak better, &c. And a majority of American who are neither prosperous nor otherwise particularly lucky in life quite often vote for the politicians most favoring the interests of the rich and fortunate - because we all secretly like to imagine that we are but a day away from our personal windfall.
So it's not the midi-clorians. We have no trouble believing that we ourselves are the real-world equivalents of the Princes of Amber, or descendants of Lazarus Long, or otherwise genetically destined. What sucks is the bad story telling. The way to pull it off is to present the More than Humans in a way that's plausible. The Jedi aren't. In the first movie, they're portrayed in a sketchy-enough way that we can project the premise onto them, if we've the imagination for it - or have read too much sci-fi. But once we get to know them well, once the details are filled in, they're pretty much idiots. That doesn't work.
Please look up "double slit experiment" - the one with the cat! If you don't look, you get an interference pattern - the electron behaved like a wave and went through both slits at once. But if you monitor either slit, you get no interference pattern - the electron behaved like a particle and went through only one slit. This is not an instance where bumping something sends it off on a different course - there are cases where that's the problem in physics, but this isn't in that category. Rather, the "wave function" "collapses" to a particle just in case you're watching either of the slits, rather than just watching the film on the far side. Consider, the slit you watch may then have the electron-as-particle go through - but it may also have nothing at all go through - the electron half the time goes through the other slit. So at least half the time there's no chance that you bumped anything. The electron just isn't there. Somehow, because you're looking, it just never comes that way. Yet if you don't watch at all we know that every single time it goes through both slits at once.
That's the sort of observer effect we're worried about (or not worried about) here. It's a lot spookier than bumping something in the night.
Once you have a comfortable middle class, I think it's hard to avoid ending up with democracy.
Is that why the US is so assiduously removing the comfort from its middle class, if not eliminating that intermediate platform between "winners" and "losers" entirely?
Back on topic: China's experience is not that of the West. The West looks back to the success of Athens, of the Roman Republic, and of the near-democracy of the northern European tribes (the Saxons, for instance; even the Iriquois Confederacy in America). China on the other hand looks back to many centuries of imperial glory that were far in advance of anything the Roman Empire ever achieved. Unlike the Romans, the empire wasn't degenerate from a republic. Unlike the Romans, posts under the emperor were largely based on merit - anyone who could score well on the exams was given authority to match their proven learning and intelligence.
The Chinese went wild for Mao because they have fond cultural memories of life under great emperors. Mao didn't work out so well, yet still their cultural memory has little place for democracy. The Nationalists - their one "democratic" leadership - were mobsters through and through. Mao was a relief after that. Even Hong Kong was only given democracy as the Brits left; it had been under thoroughly imperial governance up until then by the Brits - and quite prosperously and delightfully so as far as the inhabitants were concerned.
The saving grace for the rest of the world is that the Chinese have most often been an inward-looking, rather than expansionist empire. But what they're looking at as examples of progress are Singapore - not exactly a Western democracy in fact, despite pretenses - and what the Brits did with Hong Kong - an unelected government favoring largely-uncontrolled business operations. Taiwan would be a bright light, except Taiwanese businesses are so invested in the mainland now the last thing they want to see is a truly democratic government there that might do something drastic like expropriate their factories in favor of "the workers," or some other throwback to the Maoism that's still given some respect there.
The problem with Leahy - I'm one of the people who could vote him out of office, but he's been very good on habeas corpus, torture and the like lately, which if I have to choose is more important than whether the feds start getting as stupid about copyright as they currently are about drugs.
What can I say? Too many compromises evident in even the best Democrats. But the Republicans aren't standing up for basic Constitutional rights, let alone understanding how bad IP laws undermine our economic future. Given that choice, I'll take the Constitution. I'm sure not going to toss Leahy for the sort of idiots the opposition party runs against him.
At least I can be happy that my other senator belongs to neither party.
A word or an expression must be registered before it becomes a trademark.
Wrong! I was some time back the clerk in charge of accepting trademark registrations for one of the many US states which base their trademark law on the Uniform Code. Trademark law in the US recognizes trademark rights as being acquired under Common Law by the use of the mark in association with the sale of goods or services. You cannot file a trademark registration with any of the majority of states using the Uniform Code until you have an actual sample of something - typically packaging or advertising - that you can attest demonstrates the actual use of the mark in trade. And even at that point, you can only register the mark for the class of goods or service (there are well over a hundred classes) for which the mark as already been used. So if you register "Ford" for cars, that does not prevent someone from using "Ford" for, say, plumbing supplies.
So with a domain name, if the name is being used as a distinctive mark in the sale of something particular, then under common law the owner of the business has a right to the mark just for the category of goods or services sold, presuming that nobody else is already using a substantially-similar mark for other goods or services in that same category. Further, until they (1) have actually sold goods or services using the mark, and (2) have subsequently registered the mark on either the federal or state level - or both - they can't go to court against you.
20th Century physics is based on mathematical trivia from centuries before. See Why Beauty Is Truth and Fearful Symmetry for popular accounts of how stuff that appeared to be total trivia - even to most of the mathematicians who indulged in it - turned out to be the basis of our best equations for describing reality.
If progress had depended on Wikipedia, it wouldn't have happened. And it's not just in hard science - an art historian could provide countless examples of what became major movements in art that began far out in the margins. In censoring "trivia" is Wikipedia castrating humanity's future?
what are *you* going to do if the Democrats take office and the abuse doesn't stop?
It depends on what "abuse" is. A substantial number of people working with President Bush have been guilty of treason and/or crimes against humanity - treason not being defined as "against the president's will" but as "substantially subverting the interests of the nation," and "humanity" not being defined as "rich white Americans" (despite my being one of those). Can justice be served without waterboarding these people? Perhaps. Do they deserve status as other than "enemy combatants"? Perhaps. But it would be just to hold them as enemy combatants and waterboard them. Nonetheless, I would protest vigorously. I am unwilling to see even those accused of the wort of treasons and crimes against humanity treated thus.
It's well-known in linguistics and philosophy that "You don't get semantics from syntax." It's well-known in computer science that computers are syntactical. It's well-known in recent business history that all startups claiming they'd produce "expert systems" or "artificial intelligence" in which computer systems would, despite these accepted truths, perform semantic feats have miserably failed to live up to their claims.
So why don't we give PR puff pieces like this the same warm reception we give to the latest announcement of a perpetual motion machine? It's the kind of project only plausible to those who know very little of the basic background well-accepted by experts in the pertinent adjacent fields. That one or two big names from the success of the syntactical www either aren't familiar with or don't accept core knowledge from linguistics and philosophy of language is finally no different than Thomas Edison working for years on a machine to talk to ghosts: brilliance in one area most often doesn't translate into other areas in which you have no background - and even more rarely into areas where nobody knows how it would be done.
Just to keep this in perspective, Stalin is enormously popular in Russia. About 60% of younger Russians, in a recent poll, said they admire Stalin greatly. The main difference between Russia and the US now in that regard is one of degree - the base for authoritarianism in Russia is that 60% (plus some), whereas the base for authoritarianism in the US is only at the 30% of hard-core Bushies - now leaning towards Rudy - plus a few percent of the Hillary supporters.
But those figures are for what we might call "hard" authoritarianism. There's "soft" authoritarianism that's another large block in the US: the sort that enforces "conventional wisdom" across our corporate media. It's not the stuff that FOX is the outlier on that's the key that locks the American mind, but the stuff that FOX/ABC/NBC/CBS/Time/Newsweek and often even the NY Times share as common stances and assumptions. That's what took us into the Iraq disaster in such stupid form, not that "Bush lied us into it." It's a kinder, gentler authoritarianism - that lets us believe we're a "free" people while jailing a larger proportion of our population than any other industrialized country, and ignoring the clear majority will in favor of universal health care, large-scale restructuring of energy use, and the end of corporate domination of our politics.
I'm sure Putin would agree that Russia should only have it so good.
the government created the whole mess in the first place with geographical monopolies on the right to run telephone lines
Do you know why? Telephone lines came after railroads. Railroads were a great speculative bubble where the modern equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars was lost because competing companies built redundant track to everywhere. (A bit like the internet cable buildout in the 90s.) Fortunately there was still plenty of empty land most places to lay that track across - often granted the railroads for free.
When it came time to build telephone systems, which were a obvious boon to many aspects of society and business, the investors didn't want to face the same staggering losses they'd faced building railroads. This dovetailed with the fact that the "last mile" end of all those phone lines was often going into densely-populated areas. Nobody wanted to see lines from a half-dozen different phone companies (plus a half-dozen different electric companies) all tangled up above their streets - and this was at a time when electrical transmission lines of a single company used many more wires than with our present tech, and when phone lines were expensive enough to provision that most residences shared them as party lines.
So it was in part "government" helping out "business interests," but it was also largely "the people" using their power through elective government to prevent private firms from turning their towns and cities into complete cobwebs.
A truck knocked down the utility poll in front of my house a couple of weeks ago. Since it had electric (with a transformer and streetlight), phone and cable strong on it, it was more than a full day's work for about eight men from the three companies replacing the poll and reinstalling everything on it. If there were a half-dozen each of electric, phone and cable companies with kit strung to that poll, it would have easily taken them a week-and-a-half to rebuild it. We would have a ridiculously fragile infrastructure with that sort of "unregulated, free market" regime.
Here's a different angle: Is there an aspect of the nature of natural events that's close enough to the "God" metaphor to make the concept "God" still useful? As an example, if it should turn out that we are in fact on some level telepathic, then there's a fair question about whether the vast communicating system we'd potentially comprise has an aspect of personality which could potentially - perhaps telepathically - be addressed. It's hard to see how a nature which in fact included telepathy could avoid evolving god-like (in a metaphoric sense) entities. However, it might be more likely that those most proximate to us in scale would be local - say, human or Gaian or even specific to the valley you're in - rather than universal. That wouldn't rule out galactic-or-larger structures based in telepathic matrices; but we'd probably have the most success communicating or resonating with local nodes, of more local character.
I'm not saying this conjecture plays much of a role in my life. But I have seen instances strongly suggesting telepathy happens - if perhaps rarely. If that evidence is accepted at some future point by scientific consensus, then I don't see how science can avoid positing questions about god-like entities within a somewhat group-minded nature. And our current understanding of quantum events does not rule out the possibility that telepathy could be mediated there.
Here's the question: Did you know what you were doing in terms of security. PHPBB not only has had a terrible security track record, but when you find significant security flaws (I have) they don't even want to hear about them. This isn't to say they haven't fixed their worst security lapses - they've had little choice once the fire gets hot. But they are far, far from proactive about heading off new ones.
So if you have something secure, that's a decent subset of PHPBB's functionality, not too ugly (PHPBB isn't much in the beauty contest category anyhow), and with an efficient-enough way for moderators to deal with comment spam and Russian spammer registrations (in the PHPBB instance I still run, I've rolled my own extensions to handle this since what's built in is just too damn inefficient)... if you've got that stuff sussed, there are plenty of people who'd take what you've started with and extend it. PHPBB is a main reason the PHP people have asked other groups to stop putting "PHP" in the names of their projects; gives the whole language a bad rep.
Has anyone found a convenient way to fix this problem? I've been active in several Yahoo Groups e-mail lists for years, and now my submissions get culled before the list moderators can even see them. On the one hand, my domain's been around for 13 years, so there's regular spam forging it as the from address; on the other I have an SPF record specifying that nothing is legitimate aside from my own IP range. And Yahoo is supposed to be a strong SPF supporter. Go figure.
I also can't get anything through to University of New Hampshire's many dispersed systems - unfortunate since a number of their professors subscribe to an arts list I run. Their friggin servers all say "Sender domain may be forged" - despite that the reverse DNS matches, the SPF record is set, and the outgoing server matches the MX for the domain. It doesn't surprise me so much that a second-rate state university system has amateur-level sysadmins though, compared to Yahoo, which really should hire uber-competent staff.
Police will stop your car... as a reason to stop your car. The police will say, "We didn't do it. Maybe it was some hacker. Maybe you were just stoned and driving in a confused way. Of course once you pulled over, we needed to stop and see what the problem was. Since you appeared disoriented, even disturbed, we needed to search your car and sample your breath. You have the right to an attorney. We've done everything by the book, and within the Constitution."
Seriously, here in Vermont the police stop out-of-state cars for having fuzzy dice hanging - there's a unique law here making anything hanging from your rear-view mirror illegal. But they don't care about the fuzzy dice. They just want to check you over to see if they can bust you for something more serious. Yet they can't just pull you over with not violation apparent. Being able to stall your car at will can provide them with a real convenient violation - apparently erratic driving, driving too slow for safety on the freeway, improperly maintained equipment, whatever.
Consider MS's frustration. It would like to sue someone to set an example and get new revenue sources in line. But who? Red Hat would be an obvious deep pocket. But where is the infringement located in the distro? Unless it's something so fundamental that there's no way to code around it, it will be coded around soon after MS reveals it. If it's a key functionality for some businesses (say, Samba) that MS can get Red Hat to withdraw from the distro, that package will simply move offshore. If MS starts suing large corporate customers for something like Samba that interoperates with MS tech, it will be suing its own customers - so do they solve this by dropping their key servers, or by finally moving their desktops and the Exchange-y stuff they run on Windows over to *nix to avoid the problem?
And if it is something so fundamental to the core of Linux it can't be coded around, the odds are long that MS's patent will be found invalid, since virtually all that stuff was invented for *nix before MS ever existed.
So if MS sues, in most any scenario *nix (both Linux and most probably Sun) wins. This is such a sure thing we should consider doing all we can to provoke MS to sue - except that we'd hate having some of our best minds preoccupied for a few years with the court battles.
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None of the people playing with novel gene coding has the slightest idea how to make anything beyond single-purpose machines with it - no schemes for anything remotely resembling us, our dogs, or the squirrel in the yard. So this whole article's image of mad scientists "composing" new life forms like symphonies is just bad sci-fi, especially in the near to mid-term future. Can we pervert a life form into a machine? Sure. That's what happens when we put a horse before a cart. And perverting a microbe to make oil? Sure. But at that point we've reduced life to machinery, not created life.
Quit right. It's all those GNU programs that fool us into thinking that Linux is UNIX - since from the command line they're, um, just about identical. And gee, if I open a terminal in my wife's iMac I notice that the UNIX utilities Apple has included are generally less powerful, and a smaller subset of the standard toolbox, than on my Debian-derived (thus cousin-to-Ubuntu) ASUS Eee, that cost and weighs half as much. What's with that? Apple's certified UNIX offering less of a UNIX experience than a basic GNU installation?
It's long been claimed that the development of human culture freed us from evolutionary pressures, by separating us from our prior, "natural" niches. Thus we may be "evolved from monkeys," but that's enough evolution, thank you. We've stopped doing that nasty stuff!
The current Ah ha!, backed up by analysis of genetic clues, is that of course evolution applies to creatures in any niche, and the rapid change of available niches forces relatively rapid evolution. Since a niche largely comprised of human culture will actually often change faster than an "merely natural" one, instead of "saving us" from biological evolution, it forces biological evolution to run faster - with the increased populations our cultures support providing more raw material to work the evolutionary process across.
So our cultures are part of the loop that forces biological evolution - both by defining many of the biases of "sexual selection," and also by defining the niches our fitness is for.
It also, of course, can work backwards: the "least evolved" of us work for their own benefit by trying to revert the culture to prior states, in which they used to have some genetic advantage. This is known as the "conservative" strategy.
The problem with China marching "over Taiwan and Japan" is that pesky ocean. "The word kamikaze originated as the name of major typhoons in 1274 and 1281, which dispersed Mongolian invasion fleets" (ref). Then, you had to depend on the lucky wind for defense. Compare the similar fate of Spain again England - with another body of water to cross and a wind in the wrong direction that day. But with more modern armaments, and independence from wind, you get Germany against Britain. Islands are defensible with just a bit of luck, or with modern weapons to hinder incoming ships.
Then look at the size of the navy the Allies launched from Britain to take the Continent back. They did that by stealth, because if Germany noticed it, it could have bombed it before it was launched. Do you think China could amass a similarly-sized fleet of landing craft before Taiwan or Japan could take them out? Taiwan and Japan both are fully equipped with America's best defensive weapons (even if we pretend that Taiwan's been hobbled a bit in deference to the Mainland - the Mainland doesn't believe that, because it's mostly not true).
Note the perfect parallel: The very industry that goes crying to the government for help "enforcing" their intellectual property "rights" especially where computers and the Net are concerned is working at the very same time to be sure that the actual creators of the core of the intellectual property most currently at risk from file sharing - TV shows and films - get next-to-nothing when their creations are sold, via the Net, to the public.
If the studios where willing to pay the writers of the stories they sell on a comparable scale for Net releases as they currently do (quite prosperously for themselves) with TV and movie theater releases, then we could believe this is really about making sure that we have plenty of good, creative content flowing into our culture by rewarding it well. Instead, we have an industry asking for massive government subsidy for their copyrights of materials they at the same time insist on their right to distribute without the traditional and fair compensation to the actual creators. (Compare the music business, where musicians have never been fairly paid except for a few megastars.) It's like saying we get healthy forests via government favoritism towards logging companies whose main goal is to clearcut our forests at least expense to themselves. Here we're to get healthy cultural content by subsidizing media companies - sparing them the expense of private copyright enforcement they've shown they can easily afford - whose main goal is to seize content from its creators at least expense to themselves.
If the government's to be involved at all here, we should just nationalize the buggers and pay artists a fair stipend proportional to the viewership their peer-to-peer distributed creations receive. Not that I'm in favor of that; government shouldn't run the culture. But that's just the point. Government should stay far away from this mess.
The ASUS Eees are good. Yeah, MS is set to sell XP for them for another $40, but their default PDA=like screens are idiot-proof, and it's simple to switch them to a clean, ASUS-customized KDE. The screen is good. The keyboard's good. There's nothing cheap about them except maybe the button bar beneath the touchpad - and you can get the same function from the touchpad itself. And there are no rough edges in the Linux experience. It's not for games, but it boots and loads apps plenty fast. It even has mplayer working out of the box - no extra installation steps for a modern browsing experience (as with, say, Ubuntu).
Granting all that, if we can get our press and to condemn China for it, it will be more embarrassing for them to do too much of it, too blatantly, themselves.
Where else but China can we get lead toys for our kids? How else can we outsource pollution to a nation which believes it's its right to release carbon to make stuff for us? And what better than having all that junk shipped to us by fume-belching ships?
Seriously, ending trade with China would most likely do more to cut particulate pollution (25% of LA's comes from China), and cut global warming from coal burning. Sure, there'd be short-term disruption of American corporate manufacturing patterns. But what we've learned in the process of outsourcing industries to China is how to build new factories quickly. We could use that knowledge again here.
As an anon notes here (currently rated 0) the Constitution gives rights to all "persons," not just "citizens." However, the Constitution also viewed slaves as only counting as 3/5ths persons. That was obviously wrong for slaves, who hadn't freely chosen their status, and so should have been afforded the "created equal" status of the Declaration. But what of those in human form who have chosen to become nazis? Or jihadists? Surely having been "created equal," it is possible to fall below human status - not through nationality or tribe, but certainly through becoming, say, a serial murderer, or rapist of children, or planter of bombs in public places.
So the US recognizes (for the most part - Gitmo is evil!) human rights, but does not hold to the nonsensical claim that all those born human remain human through the lifespan of their bodies. And those are the "persons" we need to watch for at the boarders. Do we do it well? Not particularly. We need to get better at it; we sure don't need to stop, nor should we.
Can anyone provide a single example of a terrorist act that resulted from an individual in isolation reading propaganda on the Internet? It looks like all the Muslim terrorists - even though they use the Internet - have been primarily motivated and coordinated through their mosques. So should the first thing to go be freedom of speech, when freedom of religion is much closer to the source of the terrorist threat? The Christian Web sites that have provided names and addresses of physicians providing abortions, then crossed them off as they were assassinated by the faithful, might be closer to what the Congress shows fear of. Even in that case, the prime motivators of the assassins were their preachers and congregations, not their solo reading of a hateful Web site, afaik.
There's a lot of fine, classic sci-fi in the More than Human sub-genre. There's nothing to stop the reader or viewer from identifying with the superior species. Similarly, most of us have no problem identifying with movie characters who are more beautiful than we are, speak better, &c. And a majority of American who are neither prosperous nor otherwise particularly lucky in life quite often vote for the politicians most favoring the interests of the rich and fortunate - because we all secretly like to imagine that we are but a day away from our personal windfall.
So it's not the midi-clorians. We have no trouble believing that we ourselves are the real-world equivalents of the Princes of Amber, or descendants of Lazarus Long, or otherwise genetically destined. What sucks is the bad story telling. The way to pull it off is to present the More than Humans in a way that's plausible. The Jedi aren't. In the first movie, they're portrayed in a sketchy-enough way that we can project the premise onto them, if we've the imagination for it - or have read too much sci-fi. But once we get to know them well, once the details are filled in, they're pretty much idiots. That doesn't work.
Please look up "double slit experiment" - the one with the cat! If you don't look, you get an interference pattern - the electron behaved like a wave and went through both slits at once. But if you monitor either slit, you get no interference pattern - the electron behaved like a particle and went through only one slit. This is not an instance where bumping something sends it off on a different course - there are cases where that's the problem in physics, but this isn't in that category. Rather, the "wave function" "collapses" to a particle just in case you're watching either of the slits, rather than just watching the film on the far side. Consider, the slit you watch may then have the electron-as-particle go through - but it may also have nothing at all go through - the electron half the time goes through the other slit. So at least half the time there's no chance that you bumped anything. The electron just isn't there. Somehow, because you're looking, it just never comes that way. Yet if you don't watch at all we know that every single time it goes through both slits at once.
That's the sort of observer effect we're worried about (or not worried about) here. It's a lot spookier than bumping something in the night.
Back on topic: China's experience is not that of the West. The West looks back to the success of Athens, of the Roman Republic, and of the near-democracy of the northern European tribes (the Saxons, for instance; even the Iriquois Confederacy in America). China on the other hand looks back to many centuries of imperial glory that were far in advance of anything the Roman Empire ever achieved. Unlike the Romans, the empire wasn't degenerate from a republic. Unlike the Romans, posts under the emperor were largely based on merit - anyone who could score well on the exams was given authority to match their proven learning and intelligence.
The Chinese went wild for Mao because they have fond cultural memories of life under great emperors. Mao didn't work out so well, yet still their cultural memory has little place for democracy. The Nationalists - their one "democratic" leadership - were mobsters through and through. Mao was a relief after that. Even Hong Kong was only given democracy as the Brits left; it had been under thoroughly imperial governance up until then by the Brits - and quite prosperously and delightfully so as far as the inhabitants were concerned.
The saving grace for the rest of the world is that the Chinese have most often been an inward-looking, rather than expansionist empire. But what they're looking at as examples of progress are Singapore - not exactly a Western democracy in fact, despite pretenses - and what the Brits did with Hong Kong - an unelected government favoring largely-uncontrolled business operations. Taiwan would be a bright light, except Taiwanese businesses are so invested in the mainland now the last thing they want to see is a truly democratic government there that might do something drastic like expropriate their factories in favor of "the workers," or some other throwback to the Maoism that's still given some respect there.
The problem with Leahy - I'm one of the people who could vote him out of office, but he's been very good on habeas corpus, torture and the like lately, which if I have to choose is more important than whether the feds start getting as stupid about copyright as they currently are about drugs.
What can I say? Too many compromises evident in even the best Democrats. But the Republicans aren't standing up for basic Constitutional rights, let alone understanding how bad IP laws undermine our economic future. Given that choice, I'll take the Constitution. I'm sure not going to toss Leahy for the sort of idiots the opposition party runs against him.
At least I can be happy that my other senator belongs to neither party.
So with a domain name, if the name is being used as a distinctive mark in the sale of something particular, then under common law the owner of the business has a right to the mark just for the category of goods or services sold, presuming that nobody else is already using a substantially-similar mark for other goods or services in that same category. Further, until they (1) have actually sold goods or services using the mark, and (2) have subsequently registered the mark on either the federal or state level - or both - they can't go to court against you.
20th Century physics is based on mathematical trivia from centuries before. See Why Beauty Is Truth and Fearful Symmetry for popular accounts of how stuff that appeared to be total trivia - even to most of the mathematicians who indulged in it - turned out to be the basis of our best equations for describing reality.
If progress had depended on Wikipedia, it wouldn't have happened. And it's not just in hard science - an art historian could provide countless examples of what became major movements in art that began far out in the margins. In censoring "trivia" is Wikipedia castrating humanity's future?
It's well-known in linguistics and philosophy that "You don't get semantics from syntax." It's well-known in computer science that computers are syntactical. It's well-known in recent business history that all startups claiming they'd produce "expert systems" or "artificial intelligence" in which computer systems would, despite these accepted truths, perform semantic feats have miserably failed to live up to their claims.
So why don't we give PR puff pieces like this the same warm reception we give to the latest announcement of a perpetual motion machine? It's the kind of project only plausible to those who know very little of the basic background well-accepted by experts in the pertinent adjacent fields. That one or two big names from the success of the syntactical www either aren't familiar with or don't accept core knowledge from linguistics and philosophy of language is finally no different than Thomas Edison working for years on a machine to talk to ghosts: brilliance in one area most often doesn't translate into other areas in which you have no background - and even more rarely into areas where nobody knows how it would be done.
Just to keep this in perspective, Stalin is enormously popular in Russia. About 60% of younger Russians, in a recent poll, said they admire Stalin greatly. The main difference between Russia and the US now in that regard is one of degree - the base for authoritarianism in Russia is that 60% (plus some), whereas the base for authoritarianism in the US is only at the 30% of hard-core Bushies - now leaning towards Rudy - plus a few percent of the Hillary supporters.
But those figures are for what we might call "hard" authoritarianism. There's "soft" authoritarianism that's another large block in the US: the sort that enforces "conventional wisdom" across our corporate media. It's not the stuff that FOX is the outlier on that's the key that locks the American mind, but the stuff that FOX/ABC/NBC/CBS/Time/Newsweek and often even the NY Times share as common stances and assumptions. That's what took us into the Iraq disaster in such stupid form, not that "Bush lied us into it." It's a kinder, gentler authoritarianism - that lets us believe we're a "free" people while jailing a larger proportion of our population than any other industrialized country, and ignoring the clear majority will in favor of universal health care, large-scale restructuring of energy use, and the end of corporate domination of our politics.
I'm sure Putin would agree that Russia should only have it so good.
When it came time to build telephone systems, which were a obvious boon to many aspects of society and business, the investors didn't want to face the same staggering losses they'd faced building railroads. This dovetailed with the fact that the "last mile" end of all those phone lines was often going into densely-populated areas. Nobody wanted to see lines from a half-dozen different phone companies (plus a half-dozen different electric companies) all tangled up above their streets - and this was at a time when electrical transmission lines of a single company used many more wires than with our present tech, and when phone lines were expensive enough to provision that most residences shared them as party lines.
So it was in part "government" helping out "business interests," but it was also largely "the people" using their power through elective government to prevent private firms from turning their towns and cities into complete cobwebs.
A truck knocked down the utility poll in front of my house a couple of weeks ago. Since it had electric (with a transformer and streetlight), phone and cable strong on it, it was more than a full day's work for about eight men from the three companies replacing the poll and reinstalling everything on it. If there were a half-dozen each of electric, phone and cable companies with kit strung to that poll, it would have easily taken them a week-and-a-half to rebuild it. We would have a ridiculously fragile infrastructure with that sort of "unregulated, free market" regime.
I'm not saying this conjecture plays much of a role in my life. But I have seen instances strongly suggesting telepathy happens - if perhaps rarely. If that evidence is accepted at some future point by scientific consensus, then I don't see how science can avoid positing questions about god-like entities within a somewhat group-minded nature. And our current understanding of quantum events does not rule out the possibility that telepathy could be mediated there.
Here's the question: Did you know what you were doing in terms of security. PHPBB not only has had a terrible security track record, but when you find significant security flaws (I have) they don't even want to hear about them. This isn't to say they haven't fixed their worst security lapses - they've had little choice once the fire gets hot. But they are far, far from proactive about heading off new ones.
... if you've got that stuff sussed, there are plenty of people who'd take what you've started with and extend it. PHPBB is a main reason the PHP people have asked other groups to stop putting "PHP" in the names of their projects; gives the whole language a bad rep.
So if you have something secure, that's a decent subset of PHPBB's functionality, not too ugly (PHPBB isn't much in the beauty contest category anyhow), and with an efficient-enough way for moderators to deal with comment spam and Russian spammer registrations (in the PHPBB instance I still run, I've rolled my own extensions to handle this since what's built in is just too damn inefficient)
Has anyone found a convenient way to fix this problem? I've been active in several Yahoo Groups e-mail lists for years, and now my submissions get culled before the list moderators can even see them. On the one hand, my domain's been around for 13 years, so there's regular spam forging it as the from address; on the other I have an SPF record specifying that nothing is legitimate aside from my own IP range. And Yahoo is supposed to be a strong SPF supporter. Go figure.
I also can't get anything through to University of New Hampshire's many dispersed systems - unfortunate since a number of their professors subscribe to an arts list I run. Their friggin servers all say "Sender domain may be forged" - despite that the reverse DNS matches, the SPF record is set, and the outgoing server matches the MX for the domain. It doesn't surprise me so much that a second-rate state university system has amateur-level sysadmins though, compared to Yahoo, which really should hire uber-competent staff.
Police will stop your car ... as a reason to stop your car. The police will say, "We didn't do it. Maybe it was some hacker. Maybe you were just stoned and driving in a confused way. Of course once you pulled over, we needed to stop and see what the problem was. Since you appeared disoriented, even disturbed, we needed to search your car and sample your breath. You have the right to an attorney. We've done everything by the book, and within the Constitution."
Seriously, here in Vermont the police stop out-of-state cars for having fuzzy dice hanging - there's a unique law here making anything hanging from your rear-view mirror illegal. But they don't care about the fuzzy dice. They just want to check you over to see if they can bust you for something more serious. Yet they can't just pull you over with not violation apparent. Being able to stall your car at will can provide them with a real convenient violation - apparently erratic driving, driving too slow for safety on the freeway, improperly maintained equipment, whatever.
Consider MS's frustration. It would like to sue someone to set an example and get new revenue sources in line. But who? Red Hat would be an obvious deep pocket. But where is the infringement located in the distro? Unless it's something so fundamental that there's no way to code around it, it will be coded around soon after MS reveals it. If it's a key functionality for some businesses (say, Samba) that MS can get Red Hat to withdraw from the distro, that package will simply move offshore. If MS starts suing large corporate customers for something like Samba that interoperates with MS tech, it will be suing its own customers - so do they solve this by dropping their key servers, or by finally moving their desktops and the Exchange-y stuff they run on Windows over to *nix to avoid the problem?
And if it is something so fundamental to the core of Linux it can't be coded around, the odds are long that MS's patent will be found invalid, since virtually all that stuff was invented for *nix before MS ever existed.
So if MS sues, in most any scenario *nix (both Linux and most probably Sun) wins. This is such a sure thing we should consider doing all we can to provoke MS to sue - except that we'd hate having some of our best minds preoccupied for a few years with the court battles.