Oh, yeah, and my wife says how are you supposed to read an ebook in the bath?
If it's an open format, then presumably you could print it without too much hassle. Just because it's distributed electronically doesn't necessarily mean it has to stay in an electronic form for reading it. Electronic distribution on its own has all kinds of advantages if it's not done in a crippling way.
If there's enough of a demand over time, someone may even develop a bathroom ebook reader to which you could temporarily transfer your book at the page you're up to. One of the best things about open standards is that you're usually not restricted to whatever readers the publishing companies decide to dish out.
Yeah, it's not exactly as easy to do all of this right now. But I hope the concept of future ebooks doesn't get trodden down too much because of how people see them today.
Personally I really do like being able to put books on the shelf before and after I read them, but I read books on the screen occasionally and don't want to rule out ebooks in the future. I'd quite like a reader that looks and feels more like a regular book, perhaps using some form of digital paper that can be recycled for other books in the future. (Technology might still need to catch up with this one.)
They are the future of unaccountable editorializing.
For the most part, I agree. Weblogs do, at least, usually have a place for comments, though, so there's often space for people to criticise the content. It gets ambiguous if the owner starts censoring comments, and also if there's a very biased or unqualified audience. For this reason, I don't think many weblogs are very reliable.
But a lot of professional journalistic media isn't very different. Much television media, for instance, is very trashy. Even scarier is the fact that trashy media often does its best to present itself as respectable, and people fall for it. It frequently has an agenda that conflicts with providing reliable information, and most importantly it doesn't normally provide channels for criticism.
Respectable print media, at least, does allow for reader criticism and feedback. The two or three newspapers that I have some respect for do publish letters quite openly, including the ones that are critical of the paper's journalism. The letters are moderated to an extent, but my experience has been that they tend to publish anything within the stated rules, or at least acknowledge that they haven't published a letter and explain why.
The letters to the editor is a section that I almost always look at. This isn't because I have a lot of respect for random people's ideas, but because it's a good indication of when the paper's information is in dispute.
Weblogs aren't too far off print media. Although they usually don't have the journalistic staff, they still have ample space and design for immediately available feedback and criticism. Given the right conditions and if it's done well, a weblog could still be a good and reliable source of information. I don't know if any really exist at the moment, though. Slashdot certainly isn't one.
Scientists of old had more significant hobby time than dop typical US citizens. They also were funded more often by local lords who thought it a status symbol to be funding the local science or art geek.
I'm not an expert, but I suspect that it hasn't changed all that much. "Scientists of old" are the people who are remembered because they made such a significant impact on science. Just because we remember them, however, doesn't mean that there weren't scores of potentially capable scientists whose potential was blocked by limitations of society.
Tycho Brahe, for instance, is famous for making the first seriously accurate measurements of several thousand stars. (He had many assistants, of course.) He may have been well above average, or even brilliant. But the main driving force behind him being able to do this was that he had his own sources of money. He came from an aristocratic family, was in renowned standing with the various kings of the day, and was able to pull together his own resources to do what he enjoyed. This later extended into sponsoring further research and more scientists (Keplar is the most famous), but Tycho was one of the few exceptions in this. The social norms for people with money was for them to become educated in managing their money, lands and social situations, and not much more.
This isn't terribly dissimilar to today. Some people have money, most people don't. A few people with money or power do decide to support science, some support other interests, and some prefer to keep their wealth to themselves. If anything, we're better off because we have governments that see science as an important thing to support, at least relative to governments of centuries ago. But although there are tens of thousands of scientists contributing around the world, only a few will be remembered and have their names commonly recognised centuries from now.
We probably do remember a larger proportion of scientists from long ago. But if we do, it's because there weren't as many scientists then as there are now.
I agree, but I don't think your subject line is a very fair one, unless you're aiming it at the journalist instead of the scientists. Otherwise it sounds as if you're bashing the scientists for doing this properly and making sure that it's correct.
It's likely quite intuitive to most people, including psychologists, that lying takes more effort. The problem is that intuition isn't good enough for science. This is an actual study that scientifically demonstrates that it takes more effort to lie. It can be reliably cited and criticised by anyone who wants to base further research on it. If it didn't exist, then anyone who wanted that formal verification would need to conduct their own study anyway.
It's not really a huge thing or a very counterintuitive thing. Chances are it was only picked up by the media because a journalist somewhere thought they could make it sound interesting... and slashdot picked it up because it's slashdot.
What religious or natural philosophy would include property rights on another planet?
I actually read it very differently. The promoters of this idea aren't claiming any property rights at all. They're more interested in seeking international agreements to respect the environment, as anything like this needs to, and similar to whatever agreements govern places like Antarctica.
On the contrary, I think that leaving space junk lying around without cleaning it up is much more akin to invoking property rights.
Spacecraft on Mars are still a novelty, and even the promoters of the idea acknowledge that it's centuries into the future when this type of thing is likely to become more relevant. But we're at the point now when a contaminated spacecraft could potentially damage local or larger places on Mars that are interesting to explore for all sorts of reasons.
We're also at a point when corporations are on the edge of going there much more frequently than scientists, and when there's no governing authority in place, corporates are likely to have a lo less respect for the environment than scientists. I don't see it as being altogether irrational to be considering something like this.
Don't you need a nation before you can have a national park?
Actually the article calls them "planetary parks" (or something similar), to be governed in a similar way to national parks. The sensationalisation factor of slashdot simply neglected that detail.
The idea of assigning planetary parks seems a little absurd to me, at least at the moment. As you've pointed out, Mars is huge, and the small number of exploring vehicles travelling there at the moment is unlikely to make a dent. I can appreciate the reason to be concerned in the longer term, though.
Traditionally, the first people to colonise a new world are the ones who are most destructive. New worlds have no (recognised) government or restrictions on what can be done. This is why they're so enticing for plunderers. It's essentially how and why Europeans spread around the globe. A lot of cultures and spaces were destroyed or heavily damaged because profiteers with guns could do what they wanted and nobody who might control them knew or cared about what they were doing.
In the end, the people paying the bulk of the price for this, short of everyone who was killed, are us, because lots has been lost. There aren't any people living on Mars, but there's the potential for a lot of resources. It's certainly big. At the same time, however, the ability of small profiting groups for destroying or heavily damaging big things in relatively short spans of time (such as the amount of time it would take to establish a proper government) is also very significant.
Establishing planetary parks seems a bit silly to me. I can appreciate the point of view that says we should take an interest, however. On the assumption that it's not monitored, I think today's corporates could quite possibly destroy a lot of Mars before people start to realise there's even a problem.
Without knowing the details, I have mixed feelings. Technically by that argument, you'd need redundancy with the cables running into somebody's house, or into each street (however obscure). Otherwise their emergency services might be cut off if someone cut a phone line. It's more of an issue of whereabouts to draw the line on building in redundancy.
On the more positive side, for instance, the entire country, state or city wasn't cut off --- 25,000 people were. I definitely agree that 25,000 people is a large number and quite disturbing, but without having more details on how the whole system is wired up, I'd be reluctant to assign too much blame to the system at this point. Hopefully there's an investigation, and it's fixed if it needs to be.
Actually, it's a great idea, now only if a cool Open source dev would make an open version of this and take away that whole throttling thing.. who would they sue?
Well I, for one, find this attitude quite disturbing. I'm referring to both your own attitude, and the Lycos attitude.
If everyone starts to see it as acceptable to apply vigilante mob justice to whomever they disagree with, all kinds of havoc could result. One of the key points here is that something like a screen saver is very accessible to everyone. Unfortunately, quite a large amount of "everyone" have very strong views on things that you may happen to disagree with.
Consider the result, for instance, if there was a legally acceptable screensaver that would DDOS any and all left wing websites that were denounced by certain religious evangelists with large followings. Maybe just political websites that disagree with one side's point of view would end up being attacked.
I hate spammers as much as most people, but I don't think that making it easy for everyone to participate in annoying them is the right way to go. If people are going to DDOS someone, I'd like to think that they're at least as interested in what they're doing to know who they're attacking. They should also be clear about why they're attacking them, what all of the consequences for that party will be (preferably from a first person perspective), and then be absolutely sure that they're happy with what they're doing and the problems they'll be causing someone.
In this case, most of the decision making power and information is determined by Lycos. I don't see Lycos as a particularly neutral, objective or trustworthy party to be running something like this. (Nor would I normally trust anyone to lead as much of other people's destructive power.)
I've known several people who've used Netscape 4 until at least very recently, and at least one person who still does. The main reason they don't use Firefox, short of not having heard of it, is that it's not a complete replacement for Netscape 4. All it does is browse the web.
In every case that I've known, the barrier to change hasn't had anything to do with web browsing. It's all been about mail storage, since they've used Netscape for managing their email.
These people are used to an integrated browser/mail-reader, so switching to Firefox and using a separate email program is unnatural, especially considering that its email-equivalent (Thunderbird) hasn't yet reached version 1.0.
When I've been able to switch these people to anything, it's been either the branded Netscape 6/7 or the less-branded complete Mozilla suite. Compared with Netscape 4, the complete Mozilla is a resource hog. With decent hardware it's okay, but conisdering that some of these people's systems are relatively limited, Mozilla becomes much less of an option.
I hope that Thunderbird is completed soon. It'll still be difficult to convert people from a browsing/email application to two separate applications, but at least there will be a viable replacement to the complete Netscape 4 that won't be quite as resource intensive as the current options.
I completely agree that the tone of the article shows a poor understanding.
That aside, I thought there was an announcement shortly after (or perhaps before) the 2.6 kernel release, essentially saying that it wouldn't be forked to 2.7 this time, and patches would simply go into 2.6. I don't recall the reference, but from that perspective at least, I guess that this is news.
It means we don't demand much, either. The point I was making was that the US is using its power in one area to force other countries around in another.
I don't really care if that's the way the US wants to do business, although I'd prefer that it didn't. That's what's happened, and that's why NZ had decided to look the other way. The reason for my posting was to point out that this is exactly how the US has so much influence over other countries when convincing them to implement and enforce its own badly thought out and arguably corrupt ideas.
They were my thoughts, too. I have all sorts of philosophical problems with supporting China, and I have mixed feelings about whether more trading with it is a good idea.
But I guess my intended point was that the main reason we seem to be going to China for this type of stuff is because the USA has decided to put up its own trade blocks, because we disagree with it on several issues.
The local economy here really depends a lot on international trade, because the population isn't big enough for economies of scale in most industries. This is somewhat different from the USA which has enough trade between its own states that it could survive economically without much international trade at all, though perhaps not comfortably.
The internet is international, how will this be enforcable?
It won't be too difficult. The standard thing that the US does in this situation is to say "implement our laws or we won't trade with you, we'll tell everyone else not to trade with you, and we'll make it even more difficult for your citizens to travel via or into the US".
It's surprisingly effective, because they only need to actually have it enforced in western countries, and such countries typically rely on trade with the US either directly or indirectly.
It's really not so surprising that corporates (most obviously Microsoft) get away with what they do in the US, because the Federal Government leads by example. The essential foreign policy of the United States is to use its power/monopoly in one region to lock everyone else out of another region.
Having said this, I come from a smaller nation (New Zealand) that has decided to not support the US on several occasions, including various nuclear issues and the Iraq invasion. The result is that our government is now pursuing a Free Trade Agreement with China, because the US won't speak to us. I'm not sure which is worse.
We are comparitively lucky in many ways out here, though. I won't forget that.
I think that this is true, as long as the voter is somehow forced to put the matching receipt in the box having voted. eg. the machine displays it to them and allows them to watch it drop into the box, or alternatively into a shredder (or something of similar nature) which allows them to vote again.
I think it's quite an important thing to be sure to include in a system. If people are just given a receipt, then at least some of them simply won't put it in the ballot box. This, of course, means there are two counts that are arguably correct, and has potential to create great controversy all over again. (People will start claiming that they put their receipt in the box when they didn't, and all sorts of things.)
Furthermore, it makes the election less immune to manipulation, because people can still be threatened or enticed based on bringing out the receipt instead of putting it in the ballot box, on the assumption that there's probably not going to be a paper recount.
Doesn't Gentoo manage something like a/usr/share/doc/package-name/ directory?
At least, that's often the first place I look after installing a Debian package. It's just the upstream documentation and readme files, as well as any distro-related documentation.
I guess my point is that direct marketing organisations that represent businesses often (not always, to be fair) do want certain amounts of rules in place.
For instance, the New Zealand direct marketing association (with which I'm most familiar) requires that all of its members follow some very strict rules, including at least having some form of opt-in system, making sure that members make it easy for people to get off their list and ensuring sure that it actually happens properly. For the record, I still don't agree that this is enough on it's own --- I'm absolutely in favour of verified opt in at minimum.
They're fully in favour of anything that lets them have some ability to use email for marketing purposes, but cracks down on anyone who seriously violates the trust. One of the big problems at the moment is that almost nobody has any trust in the majority of direct marketing material they get. (Almost all of it is quite dodgy spam, which floods out anything that might be genuine.) eg. Unless I'm absolutely sure that I know and trust the source, I'll almost never send an unsubscribe email, because most spammers are likely to ignore it, use it as a guarantee that I'm reading my email, and shunt my address onto the next spammer.
Direct marketers, meaning the genuine ones, don't like it when people don't trust them. Aside from legal issues, if people don't trust them then it means they're less likely to read the email in the first place or take any notice of them. Many direct marketing businesses have much more honest operations to protect the reputation of, and using email for anything is quite a risk if it's potentially going to make people hate them.
Gentoo linux simply does not, now or ever, warrant release notification. It is released and will remain so; up to date today, regardless. This is why I choose it...
I've not yet looked at Gentoo, and I'm curious. Does Gentoo have an established way of managing version dependencies while keeping it up-to-date? Presumably there are some packages that break when new versions of other packages are released, unless every package is checked carefully before releasing it into the distro. If they are checked carefully, how long will it normally take to get from an upstream release into Gentoo?
Debian, for instance, has its various releases, where packages tend not to get into testing and stable unless it's believed that they'll happily co-exist with the versions of other packages that are already in those releases.
I don't know anything about Karl Rove, but my experience has been that the majority of direct marketing associations don't like regular spammers.
Direct marketers would like to be able to send people emails as much as everyone else, and I'm not trying to argue that this is a good thing. There are many sorts of direct marketers, however, and not all of them want to spam as many people as possible using brute force.
But their reputation is damaged by spammers who use very shady techniques to market directly to people. eg. Faking headers, distributing via viruses or infected machines, routing email through China where SMTP servers may be less secure, redirecting bounce messages to fake addresses (often innocent unsuspecting people with email accounts) essentially trying to hide the source of their emails, and selling illegal products.
Whichever way you spin it, these aren't ethical business practices, and if they're not against the law then there are a lot of legislators who would like to shut them down if it could be done cleanly.
I'm pretty sure that most direct marketers would like this person to be stopped as much as everyone else, simply because he's not doing them any favours by making people dislike direct marketing.
OTOH, were you to ask CLI users the same question.... they would all know exactly how to use wc, and interestingly enough, had you asked the same question to the CLI users over the past fifteen years you would have gotten the same answers. So, in addition to a simple answer, CLI is a consistent one.
I routinely use both graphical and command line interfaces, and they both have their good and bad points. It's really just the difference between beginner and expert interfaces, and each has its benefits and problems. I certainly prefer a beginner's interface in some circumstances --- usually when I don't have the time or interest to learn the more advanced way of doing things. (Hey, you still have to learn the commands.) Although 'wc' is certainly one of the simpler ones, there are a lot out there that many people will only need very infrequently, and spend a lot of time and effort searching for what they want when they do.
I think that one of the major benefits of the UNIX command line, which you sort of hinted at but didn't really stress, isn't just that it's (relatively) consistent over time, but that it's consistent between uses. When you actually do learn how to use 'wc', you're not just learning how to count words, lines or characters in a document. You're learning how to count words, lines or characters in nearly any stream that can be translated to a standard text format... and text streams are very common in UNIX environments because they're so useful for so many commands that can be used.
It's usually not all that difficult to learn to count words in a word document, or words in an openoffice document, or words in an excel spreadsheet (I think), or words in a web page, or files in a folder, or exceptions thrown by a particular program, and so on. The problem with GUI's due to their nature is that each of these tends to have a different way of doing a very similar thing.
With a good command line interface that keeps the functions separate from the media, you still need to learn the basics of how to deal with whatever media is being used. But once it can be translated to an appropriate form of text the words can be counted, or the output can be filtered, or saved to a file, or the lines produced can be executed as commands, or the output can be mailed to an administrator or a thousand people on a mailing list, and so on.
People are so stupid and hooked on Internet Explorer that they spend extra time trying to find it. They don't understand that IE is not the internet.
I don't know much about your school specifically, but I could very easily understand people not realising that something called "Safari" is a web browser, or for that matter has anything to do with the Internet.
Calling people stupid just because they don't know (or care) how computers work and are arranged is also very unfair. Chances are (if you drive) that you don't have a clue what most of the components inside your car do, and you're probably not stupid because of it. The same goes for just about anything that's specialised.
Microsoft knows how to market its product, and it has the resources to do it properly. Whether people with other products (such as Firefox and Safari) can successfully compete with the Microsoft marketing machine remains to be seen, but people aren't stupid just because they don't all keep the same priorities that you do.
The worst case (and sadly common) is when bad science and bad journalism go hand in hand. The classic case is where a study finds an increased risk of disease X when using chemical Y. The change was from 1 in a million to 2 in a million... data noise. But the grant seekers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H researchers publish anyway, and the media breathlessly proclaims "Chemical Y causes a 100% increase in disease X!"
Personally I tend to put more of this down to bad journalism than bad science, or at the very least a big misunderstanding (or ignoring) of how science works on the part of journalists. Sometimes scientists actively go to the media with rubbish data, and in those cases I don't have much sympathy for them. At least as often, and I've had first-hand experience with this, scientists get manipulated or quoted out of context through misunderstanding or otherwise, by journalists, into giving a convenient sound-byte that might be quite mis-representative of their study.
Scientists publish when they've studied something because that's what they're supposed to do. As long as they publish properly, they'll include all of the relevant information for replication so that other scientists can see how useful (or useless) the study is, and if necessary run the study again. There's room to openly criticise the study on the grounds that it was performed, and this (usually) happens.
Journalists don't do this. They're more likely to do something a-kin to reading the conclusion of a study without the background or peer review, and transforming it into something that they think is news.
Scientists in some areas have had to radically adjust their own internal communications simply because they're being monitored by journalists who don't properly understand them. A great example of this is with asteroid tracking, where astronomers often report newly discovered asteroids that might collide with Earth at some point. The point of this publication is to request other astronomers to collect lots of observations so that a more accurate orbit can be calculated and any potential collision will be dis-proven. Frequently however, the media will simply pick it up as a story about an asteroid "possibly hitting Earth and wiping out life" in 20 years.
I also find some of the details a little disturbing, in particular the tactics used to catch him. From the article:
At about the same time, an investigator from an online security firm hired by Microsoft sent an e-mail message to Mr. Genovese, who was using an alias, and asked for a copy, the complaint said.
Mr. Genovese requested that $20 be sent to a PayPal account and when the payment cleared, the investigator was given access to an Internet address where he could download a file with the source code.
I don't know a lot about the US legal system, but isn't this like asking and paying someone to rob your house, and then complaining to the police when they do it?
If the facts are correct about how this person was trying to sell the code, then he probably should be prosecuted to at least some degree. But from the text of the article, it seems at least arguable that Microsoft's hired security firm was as responsible for the sale of the code as he was.
Dude, if you still owe $100,000 on a house that's been in your family for generations, then your granddad must have been a colossal retard.
That's quite a simplistic way to look at it. You could easily owe money on a family home if you mortgaged it to borrow money for paying off something else, as happens quite a lot in many places for all sorts of reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's an open format, then presumably you could print it without too much hassle. Just because it's distributed electronically doesn't necessarily mean it has to stay in an electronic form for reading it. Electronic distribution on its own has all kinds of advantages if it's not done in a crippling way.
If there's enough of a demand over time, someone may even develop a bathroom ebook reader to which you could temporarily transfer your book at the page you're up to. One of the best things about open standards is that you're usually not restricted to whatever readers the publishing companies decide to dish out.
Yeah, it's not exactly as easy to do all of this right now. But I hope the concept of future ebooks doesn't get trodden down too much because of how people see them today.
Personally I really do like being able to put books on the shelf before and after I read them, but I read books on the screen occasionally and don't want to rule out ebooks in the future. I'd quite like a reader that looks and feels more like a regular book, perhaps using some form of digital paper that can be recycled for other books in the future. (Technology might still need to catch up with this one.)
For the most part, I agree. Weblogs do, at least, usually have a place for comments, though, so there's often space for people to criticise the content. It gets ambiguous if the owner starts censoring comments, and also if there's a very biased or unqualified audience. For this reason, I don't think many weblogs are very reliable.
But a lot of professional journalistic media isn't very different. Much television media, for instance, is very trashy. Even scarier is the fact that trashy media often does its best to present itself as respectable, and people fall for it. It frequently has an agenda that conflicts with providing reliable information, and most importantly it doesn't normally provide channels for criticism.
Respectable print media, at least, does allow for reader criticism and feedback. The two or three newspapers that I have some respect for do publish letters quite openly, including the ones that are critical of the paper's journalism. The letters are moderated to an extent, but my experience has been that they tend to publish anything within the stated rules, or at least acknowledge that they haven't published a letter and explain why.
The letters to the editor is a section that I almost always look at. This isn't because I have a lot of respect for random people's ideas, but because it's a good indication of when the paper's information is in dispute.
Weblogs aren't too far off print media. Although they usually don't have the journalistic staff, they still have ample space and design for immediately available feedback and criticism. Given the right conditions and if it's done well, a weblog could still be a good and reliable source of information. I don't know if any really exist at the moment, though. Slashdot certainly isn't one.
I'm not an expert, but I suspect that it hasn't changed all that much. "Scientists of old" are the people who are remembered because they made such a significant impact on science. Just because we remember them, however, doesn't mean that there weren't scores of potentially capable scientists whose potential was blocked by limitations of society.
Tycho Brahe, for instance, is famous for making the first seriously accurate measurements of several thousand stars. (He had many assistants, of course.) He may have been well above average, or even brilliant. But the main driving force behind him being able to do this was that he had his own sources of money. He came from an aristocratic family, was in renowned standing with the various kings of the day, and was able to pull together his own resources to do what he enjoyed. This later extended into sponsoring further research and more scientists (Keplar is the most famous), but Tycho was one of the few exceptions in this. The social norms for people with money was for them to become educated in managing their money, lands and social situations, and not much more.
This isn't terribly dissimilar to today. Some people have money, most people don't. A few people with money or power do decide to support science, some support other interests, and some prefer to keep their wealth to themselves. If anything, we're better off because we have governments that see science as an important thing to support, at least relative to governments of centuries ago. But although there are tens of thousands of scientists contributing around the world, only a few will be remembered and have their names commonly recognised centuries from now.
We probably do remember a larger proportion of scientists from long ago. But if we do, it's because there weren't as many scientists then as there are now.
I agree, but I don't think your subject line is a very fair one, unless you're aiming it at the journalist instead of the scientists. Otherwise it sounds as if you're bashing the scientists for doing this properly and making sure that it's correct.
It's likely quite intuitive to most people, including psychologists, that lying takes more effort. The problem is that intuition isn't good enough for science. This is an actual study that scientifically demonstrates that it takes more effort to lie. It can be reliably cited and criticised by anyone who wants to base further research on it. If it didn't exist, then anyone who wanted that formal verification would need to conduct their own study anyway.
It's not really a huge thing or a very counterintuitive thing. Chances are it was only picked up by the media because a journalist somewhere thought they could make it sound interesting... and slashdot picked it up because it's slashdot.
I actually read it very differently. The promoters of this idea aren't claiming any property rights at all. They're more interested in seeking international agreements to respect the environment, as anything like this needs to, and similar to whatever agreements govern places like Antarctica.
On the contrary, I think that leaving space junk lying around without cleaning it up is much more akin to invoking property rights.
Spacecraft on Mars are still a novelty, and even the promoters of the idea acknowledge that it's centuries into the future when this type of thing is likely to become more relevant. But we're at the point now when a contaminated spacecraft could potentially damage local or larger places on Mars that are interesting to explore for all sorts of reasons.
We're also at a point when corporations are on the edge of going there much more frequently than scientists, and when there's no governing authority in place, corporates are likely to have a lo less respect for the environment than scientists. I don't see it as being altogether irrational to be considering something like this.
Actually the article calls them "planetary parks" (or something similar), to be governed in a similar way to national parks. The sensationalisation factor of slashdot simply neglected that detail.
The idea of assigning planetary parks seems a little absurd to me, at least at the moment. As you've pointed out, Mars is huge, and the small number of exploring vehicles travelling there at the moment is unlikely to make a dent. I can appreciate the reason to be concerned in the longer term, though.
Traditionally, the first people to colonise a new world are the ones who are most destructive. New worlds have no (recognised) government or restrictions on what can be done. This is why they're so enticing for plunderers. It's essentially how and why Europeans spread around the globe. A lot of cultures and spaces were destroyed or heavily damaged because profiteers with guns could do what they wanted and nobody who might control them knew or cared about what they were doing.
In the end, the people paying the bulk of the price for this, short of everyone who was killed, are us, because lots has been lost. There aren't any people living on Mars, but there's the potential for a lot of resources. It's certainly big. At the same time, however, the ability of small profiting groups for destroying or heavily damaging big things in relatively short spans of time (such as the amount of time it would take to establish a proper government) is also very significant.
Establishing planetary parks seems a bit silly to me. I can appreciate the point of view that says we should take an interest, however. On the assumption that it's not monitored, I think today's corporates could quite possibly destroy a lot of Mars before people start to realise there's even a problem.
Without knowing the details, I have mixed feelings. Technically by that argument, you'd need redundancy with the cables running into somebody's house, or into each street (however obscure). Otherwise their emergency services might be cut off if someone cut a phone line. It's more of an issue of whereabouts to draw the line on building in redundancy.
On the more positive side, for instance, the entire country, state or city wasn't cut off --- 25,000 people were. I definitely agree that 25,000 people is a large number and quite disturbing, but without having more details on how the whole system is wired up, I'd be reluctant to assign too much blame to the system at this point. Hopefully there's an investigation, and it's fixed if it needs to be.
Well I, for one, find this attitude quite disturbing. I'm referring to both your own attitude, and the Lycos attitude.
If everyone starts to see it as acceptable to apply vigilante mob justice to whomever they disagree with, all kinds of havoc could result. One of the key points here is that something like a screen saver is very accessible to everyone. Unfortunately, quite a large amount of "everyone" have very strong views on things that you may happen to disagree with.
Consider the result, for instance, if there was a legally acceptable screensaver that would DDOS any and all left wing websites that were denounced by certain religious evangelists with large followings. Maybe just political websites that disagree with one side's point of view would end up being attacked.
I hate spammers as much as most people, but I don't think that making it easy for everyone to participate in annoying them is the right way to go. If people are going to DDOS someone, I'd like to think that they're at least as interested in what they're doing to know who they're attacking. They should also be clear about why they're attacking them, what all of the consequences for that party will be (preferably from a first person perspective), and then be absolutely sure that they're happy with what they're doing and the problems they'll be causing someone.
In this case, most of the decision making power and information is determined by Lycos. I don't see Lycos as a particularly neutral, objective or trustworthy party to be running something like this. (Nor would I normally trust anyone to lead as much of other people's destructive power.)
I've known several people who've used Netscape 4 until at least very recently, and at least one person who still does. The main reason they don't use Firefox, short of not having heard of it, is that it's not a complete replacement for Netscape 4. All it does is browse the web.
In every case that I've known, the barrier to change hasn't had anything to do with web browsing. It's all been about mail storage, since they've used Netscape for managing their email.
These people are used to an integrated browser/mail-reader, so switching to Firefox and using a separate email program is unnatural, especially considering that its email-equivalent (Thunderbird) hasn't yet reached version 1.0.
When I've been able to switch these people to anything, it's been either the branded Netscape 6/7 or the less-branded complete Mozilla suite. Compared with Netscape 4, the complete Mozilla is a resource hog. With decent hardware it's okay, but conisdering that some of these people's systems are relatively limited, Mozilla becomes much less of an option.
I hope that Thunderbird is completed soon. It'll still be difficult to convert people from a browsing/email application to two separate applications, but at least there will be a viable replacement to the complete Netscape 4 that won't be quite as resource intensive as the current options.
I completely agree that the tone of the article shows a poor understanding.
That aside, I thought there was an announcement shortly after (or perhaps before) the 2.6 kernel release, essentially saying that it wouldn't be forked to 2.7 this time, and patches would simply go into 2.6. I don't recall the reference, but from that perspective at least, I guess that this is news.
It means we don't demand much, either. The point I was making was that the US is using its power in one area to force other countries around in another.
I don't really care if that's the way the US wants to do business, although I'd prefer that it didn't. That's what's happened, and that's why NZ had decided to look the other way. The reason for my posting was to point out that this is exactly how the US has so much influence over other countries when convincing them to implement and enforce its own badly thought out and arguably corrupt ideas.
They were my thoughts, too. I have all sorts of philosophical problems with supporting China, and I have mixed feelings about whether more trading with it is a good idea.
But I guess my intended point was that the main reason we seem to be going to China for this type of stuff is because the USA has decided to put up its own trade blocks, because we disagree with it on several issues.
The local economy here really depends a lot on international trade, because the population isn't big enough for economies of scale in most industries. This is somewhat different from the USA which has enough trade between its own states that it could survive economically without much international trade at all, though perhaps not comfortably.
(Disclaimer: I'm not an economist.)
It won't be too difficult. The standard thing that the US does in this situation is to say "implement our laws or we won't trade with you, we'll tell everyone else not to trade with you, and we'll make it even more difficult for your citizens to travel via or into the US".
It's surprisingly effective, because they only need to actually have it enforced in western countries, and such countries typically rely on trade with the US either directly or indirectly.
It's really not so surprising that corporates (most obviously Microsoft) get away with what they do in the US, because the Federal Government leads by example. The essential foreign policy of the United States is to use its power/monopoly in one region to lock everyone else out of another region.
Having said this, I come from a smaller nation (New Zealand) that has decided to not support the US on several occasions, including various nuclear issues and the Iraq invasion. The result is that our government is now pursuing a Free Trade Agreement with China, because the US won't speak to us. I'm not sure which is worse.
We are comparitively lucky in many ways out here, though. I won't forget that.
I think that this is true, as long as the voter is somehow forced to put the matching receipt in the box having voted. eg. the machine displays it to them and allows them to watch it drop into the box, or alternatively into a shredder (or something of similar nature) which allows them to vote again.
I think it's quite an important thing to be sure to include in a system. If people are just given a receipt, then at least some of them simply won't put it in the ballot box. This, of course, means there are two counts that are arguably correct, and has potential to create great controversy all over again. (People will start claiming that they put their receipt in the box when they didn't, and all sorts of things.)
Furthermore, it makes the election less immune to manipulation, because people can still be threatened or enticed based on bringing out the receipt instead of putting it in the ballot box, on the assumption that there's probably not going to be a paper recount.
Doesn't Gentoo manage something like a /usr/share/doc/package-name/ directory?
At least, that's often the first place I look after installing a Debian package. It's just the upstream documentation and readme files, as well as any distro-related documentation.
I guess my point is that direct marketing organisations that represent businesses often (not always, to be fair) do want certain amounts of rules in place.
For instance, the New Zealand direct marketing association (with which I'm most familiar) requires that all of its members follow some very strict rules, including at least having some form of opt-in system, making sure that members make it easy for people to get off their list and ensuring sure that it actually happens properly. For the record, I still don't agree that this is enough on it's own --- I'm absolutely in favour of verified opt in at minimum.
They're fully in favour of anything that lets them have some ability to use email for marketing purposes, but cracks down on anyone who seriously violates the trust. One of the big problems at the moment is that almost nobody has any trust in the majority of direct marketing material they get. (Almost all of it is quite dodgy spam, which floods out anything that might be genuine.) eg. Unless I'm absolutely sure that I know and trust the source, I'll almost never send an unsubscribe email, because most spammers are likely to ignore it, use it as a guarantee that I'm reading my email, and shunt my address onto the next spammer.
Direct marketers, meaning the genuine ones, don't like it when people don't trust them. Aside from legal issues, if people don't trust them then it means they're less likely to read the email in the first place or take any notice of them. Many direct marketing businesses have much more honest operations to protect the reputation of, and using email for anything is quite a risk if it's potentially going to make people hate them.
I've not yet looked at Gentoo, and I'm curious. Does Gentoo have an established way of managing version dependencies while keeping it up-to-date? Presumably there are some packages that break when new versions of other packages are released, unless every package is checked carefully before releasing it into the distro. If they are checked carefully, how long will it normally take to get from an upstream release into Gentoo?
Debian, for instance, has its various releases, where packages tend not to get into testing and stable unless it's believed that they'll happily co-exist with the versions of other packages that are already in those releases.
I don't know anything about Karl Rove, but my experience has been that the majority of direct marketing associations don't like regular spammers.
Direct marketers would like to be able to send people emails as much as everyone else, and I'm not trying to argue that this is a good thing. There are many sorts of direct marketers, however, and not all of them want to spam as many people as possible using brute force.
But their reputation is damaged by spammers who use very shady techniques to market directly to people. eg. Faking headers, distributing via viruses or infected machines, routing email through China where SMTP servers may be less secure, redirecting bounce messages to fake addresses (often innocent unsuspecting people with email accounts) essentially trying to hide the source of their emails, and selling illegal products.
Whichever way you spin it, these aren't ethical business practices, and if they're not against the law then there are a lot of legislators who would like to shut them down if it could be done cleanly.
I'm pretty sure that most direct marketers would like this person to be stopped as much as everyone else, simply because he's not doing them any favours by making people dislike direct marketing.
I routinely use both graphical and command line interfaces, and they both have their good and bad points. It's really just the difference between beginner and expert interfaces, and each has its benefits and problems. I certainly prefer a beginner's interface in some circumstances --- usually when I don't have the time or interest to learn the more advanced way of doing things. (Hey, you still have to learn the commands.) Although 'wc' is certainly one of the simpler ones, there are a lot out there that many people will only need very infrequently, and spend a lot of time and effort searching for what they want when they do.
I think that one of the major benefits of the UNIX command line, which you sort of hinted at but didn't really stress, isn't just that it's (relatively) consistent over time, but that it's consistent between uses. When you actually do learn how to use 'wc', you're not just learning how to count words, lines or characters in a document. You're learning how to count words, lines or characters in nearly any stream that can be translated to a standard text format. .. and text streams are very common in UNIX environments because they're so useful for so many commands that can be used.
It's usually not all that difficult to learn to count words in a word document, or words in an openoffice document, or words in an excel spreadsheet (I think), or words in a web page, or files in a folder, or exceptions thrown by a particular program, and so on. The problem with GUI's due to their nature is that each of these tends to have a different way of doing a very similar thing.
With a good command line interface that keeps the functions separate from the media, you still need to learn the basics of how to deal with whatever media is being used. But once it can be translated to an appropriate form of text the words can be counted, or the output can be filtered, or saved to a file, or the lines produced can be executed as commands, or the output can be mailed to an administrator or a thousand people on a mailing list, and so on.
I don't know much about your school specifically, but I could very easily understand people not realising that something called "Safari" is a web browser, or for that matter has anything to do with the Internet.
Calling people stupid just because they don't know (or care) how computers work and are arranged is also very unfair. Chances are (if you drive) that you don't have a clue what most of the components inside your car do, and you're probably not stupid because of it. The same goes for just about anything that's specialised.
Microsoft knows how to market its product, and it has the resources to do it properly. Whether people with other products (such as Firefox and Safari) can successfully compete with the Microsoft marketing machine remains to be seen, but people aren't stupid just because they don't all keep the same priorities that you do.
Personally I tend to put more of this down to bad journalism than bad science, or at the very least a big misunderstanding (or ignoring) of how science works on the part of journalists. Sometimes scientists actively go to the media with rubbish data, and in those cases I don't have much sympathy for them. At least as often, and I've had first-hand experience with this, scientists get manipulated or quoted out of context through misunderstanding or otherwise, by journalists, into giving a convenient sound-byte that might be quite mis-representative of their study.
Scientists publish when they've studied something because that's what they're supposed to do. As long as they publish properly, they'll include all of the relevant information for replication so that other scientists can see how useful (or useless) the study is, and if necessary run the study again. There's room to openly criticise the study on the grounds that it was performed, and this (usually) happens.
Journalists don't do this. They're more likely to do something a-kin to reading the conclusion of a study without the background or peer review, and transforming it into something that they think is news.
Scientists in some areas have had to radically adjust their own internal communications simply because they're being monitored by journalists who don't properly understand them. A great example of this is with asteroid tracking, where astronomers often report newly discovered asteroids that might collide with Earth at some point. The point of this publication is to request other astronomers to collect lots of observations so that a more accurate orbit can be calculated and any potential collision will be dis-proven. Frequently however, the media will simply pick it up as a story about an asteroid "possibly hitting Earth and wiping out life" in 20 years.
I also find some of the details a little disturbing, in particular the tactics used to catch him. From the article:
I don't know a lot about the US legal system, but isn't this like asking and paying someone to rob your house, and then complaining to the police when they do it?
If the facts are correct about how this person was trying to sell the code, then he probably should be prosecuted to at least some degree. But from the text of the article, it seems at least arguable that Microsoft's hired security firm was as responsible for the sale of the code as he was.
That's quite a simplistic way to look at it. You could easily owe money on a family home if you mortgaged it to borrow money for paying off something else, as happens quite a lot in many places for all sorts of reasons.
Just wondering...