What, exactly, is the accusation? Even if she is a front for IBM and even (heavens, dare I say it...) is paid by IBM... So? Does that somehow change the validity (or lack thereof) of her argument(s)? IBM employs (as in pays to work for them) dozens dozens of lawyers — are they all somehow inferior to what she is (or implies to be)?
Today's subject, class, is avoiding ambiguity. Unless you want to be funny with intentionally ambiguous expressions (especially in the titles), be sure to make them as explicit as possible. Avoid lesser-known slang expressions, which can be misunderstood.
For example, instead of "hitting the street", use "goes on sale".
I am a bulkregister.com customer (bulkregister was recently acquired by enom). This past December a few of my domains were expiring and I wanted to renew them while on business trip in Ukraine. Bizarrely, Enom refused to accept my credit card, because I was connecting from Kyiv... They never responded to my e-mail on the subject either, of course (bulkregister used to respond to e-mails back 6 or so years ago, when I had some DNS issues).
I note, that you quote $8.10 per year — bulkregister still wants $12 even though they are part of enom now. I'll look into that.
When registering an account — with anyone, but especially registrars and web-hosters, since they are supposed to know — try giving an e-mail address with a plus-tag (like mine here <mi+slashdot@aldan.algebra.com>).
If a site rejects such an address is "invalid", stay away — their techs are incompetent...
If ssh on your cisco boxes is slow, you either have serious network problems [...]
Most likely, the reverse DNS is misconfigured. This is the number one reason for ssh-login delays. Maybe, the nameservers initially put into the router's configuration are no longer reachable due to subsequent "hardening". Or, maybe, they went away and were replaced long ago — without anybody telling the routers. Nothing else on a router uses DNS usually, so this problem affects only ssh-daemon and gets blamed on it...
The daemon could, of course, be a little bit smarter and not try to do a reverse DNS, when there are no hostname-based authorization rules in the first place... But that's a minor bug compared to reverse DNS being dysfunctional.
Synapse firing is a simplified approximation of the passing of chemical signals from one cell to another.
I thought, the nerves pass along electrical signals, rather than chemicals (like body's other systems). This makes you jump if you step on hedgehog much faster (under a second), than even dying from hydrogen cyanide (minutes) would take...
Are you, William Shatner? Or perhaps, Horatio Cane? I couldn't help, but notice, your plentiful pauses, throughout your post.
According to the Ukrainian (and Russian) rules of punctuation, your first coma is erroneous, but you are missing one before "perhaps". The last two should not be there either.
As for the English rules, nobody — except for a few professors — seems to know exactly, what they are. Makes it very hard for someone, who learns the language by example, to figure them out. But I'm working on it...
now with the National ID card (papers please), both parties seem to be endorsing this movement.
How would the "National ID card" be different in the papers-please department from the "I need a government-issued ID to let you into the building"?
When I asked a security guard recently, how would seeing my out-of-state Driver's License tell him, it is not a fake, he explained, that one of the courses, he had to take to get the job, studied different IDs of the US-states, Canada, and a bunch of other countries — including Venezuela.
This changed my perspective on the issue quite a bit. A National ID card would just make life easier for these guys (and thus make their services less expensive)...
And if you are worried about central repository of personal data — well, you should never have let Social Security Number become, what it is now...:-(
When did the small group of zealots in the first two paragraphs go to "we" in the third?
Well, somehow these zealots have persuaded the US Department of Agriculture, that the coveted "Organic" certification can be issued only to foods without any GM ingredients. Thus the zealots' little religion is imposed on all of us, who want foods without growth hormones and dangerous chemicals, but don't share the zealots' aversion to genetic modifications.
But in some places things are even worse. My dear Ukraine, for example, is an unexpected beneficiary of Poland's foolishness — Poland has decided to stop importing GM-corn and will now buy Ukraine's instead of the cheaper Brazil's. Ukraine, of course, simply could not afford GM-seeds in the past — but Poland is the loser (thanks to its zealots). I wonder, if they'll let autism-sufferers be treated, if the genetic cure being discussed in TFA is ever developed...
Also, while I am not in those crowds, I have heard that GM foods are modified to sell better (eg. redder tomatoes) with nutritional value not being a priority. In other words, they may not be bad for you, but they're not as good for you. This much, IMO, makes sense.
Better-looking stuff sells better other things being equal. There are a lot of other things, though — taste, shelf-life, yields, resistance to cold/heat, etc. Taste and shelf-life affects consumers directly — contributing to better sales. Yields and resistance helps lower the prices and keep the planet greener as less land is needed for farming.
You are right pointing out, that genetic modifications are applied in pursuit of profit. But you are not original. Karl Marx wrote over 150 years ago, that the capitalists make nice things not because they are good people, but because there is profit in making them. He also said, that if it were profitable to make shredded glass, they would've been making shredded glass...:-)
Heck, the "organic" food crowd would have you believe, that eating genetically modified foods may be gravely dangerous to you and the humanity.
I would've ignored this crowd for the loons they are, yet, unfortunately, for well-grown food to be given the coveted "Organic" label, it has to be made from non-GM ingredients. That's just annoying — and gratuitously more expensive.
Yet here they are talking about genetically modifying people directly... Why are we willing to modify a sick person's genes, but not those of cows or maize?
Sure, some malicious person could add patented code to the some existing GPL project and try to use this for some quick get-rich-scheme.
You got it backwards. The problem is that a non-malicious business (Novell in this case) can not safely add a patented algorithm to a GPL-ed piece of software (even as part of its own open-source product)...
If the business owns the patent, then the GPL is doing (kind of), what it was meant to — forces the patent-owner to give it up (sort of, GPL was meant to force giving up source, not patents, but it similar in spirit here).
But if the business merely has a license to use the algorithm, it can not mix it into GPLed software.
Whether one approves or disapproves of the former aspect of GPL is another story. But as for the latter, FSF seems willing to ignore it — for now. The "bomb" is in the fact, FSF may have a change of heart in a few years...
We just got this at the library I work at. We pay for a certain amount of downloads per month, if it exceeds this we have to pay more. So we only allow residents of the city to use it since they are the ones paying the taxes.
Your library is trying to fit the new media into the old way(s) of doing business — not entirely unlike RIAA/MPAA.
While it made sense for each local library to stock their own copies of books, the dispersed storage of copies of downloadable files is foolish. It duplicates (tries to, rather), what AKAMAI et. al are already doing on a much bigger scale and with much higher efficiency.
Instead of sponsoring each library to do this, PermissionTV and other sponsors should've set up a single server of their own and pay AKAMAI (or one of their competitors) to proxy the stuff.
Would've been far cheaper than to pay for multitude of programmers like yourself to set it up, for multitude of sysadmins to maintain it, and for the hardware and bandwidth. And it would've made the files available anonymously... Sigh...
However it decreases the freedom of the country as a whole to make its own laws on subjects their culture might disagree with the US on.
This is about as valid, as claiming, my nose violates your fist's freedom of movement. US is regulating its own companies — and we are free to do so, limited only by its own Constitution and other laws and international treaties.
But why did you ignore my analogy with FCPA? The act severely limits other countries' officials' bribe income — surely, some of the negative sentiment thus created has contributed to the WTC destruction, has not it?..
Imagine the EU decided to make it illegal for companies to do business in areas where capital punishment exists.
They are free to do so.
By attempting to interfere with the laws in other countries you create a lot of negative sentiment, the kind that political leaders use to make people fly planes into skyscrapers.
With physical media (books, CDs, DVDs) the card is an important proof, that one has no outstanding items before she/he can borrow more.
Why can't the Internet downloads be anonymous? To make sure, only local residents can view the material?
A silly restriction in the Internet age — instead of spending money on each library's card-verification software, web-server hardware et al., they should've hired Akamai or someone like that to carry the stuff for everyone.
Would've been far better and likely cheaper too, especially if "Akamai" (or whoever) could be persuaded to give the service a discount...
America's current regime fits none of your three items. If anyone, Chavez is a much better candidate.
The only reason people the word is used is to insult — just like calling Bush "idiot" or "baboon" does not mean, he has mental degradation or is not a human, "Fascism" is used as a dirty word.
Fascism does not necessarily point to racism. It can - and belligerent nationalism often does. But that doesn't mean it has to.
Genocidal racism is the only thing, that makes Fascism as disgusting as, say, Communism. Absent the racism, there is no justification for the use of the dirty word.
the economy of Germany absolutely skyrocketed and was doing awesomely while hitler was in charge.
We are doing pretty well under Bush too, thank you very much. The growth is not as dramatic as Hitler's Germany's was, but that's because they started from a much lower base (a loser of WWI, devastated by reparations to the victors). Not that that's relevant...
and even then it would probably be unlikely. I mean, aren't their Linux distros with the Intel 3945ABG driver in them? That's not OSS (not completely anyway).
Drivers are part of the kernel, which is not under GPL.
I think the FSF is probably more interested in keep peoples rights from being abused when it comes to existing OSS applications, or large-scale/severe infractions. I think they aren't an evil organization, they are willing to overlook minor infractions.
It seems rather foolish for serious business to bet the very legality of their major product on the benevolence of some outside organization. They may not be "evil" today, but there is no telling, what kind of zealot may come to the helm 5 years from now.
I'm sorry to repeat this flame-bait, but GPL is a "bomb". Not a "time bomb" (for the explosion is not certain), but a remotely activated one — whether or not you trust the people, who hold the activator, you'd be comfortable without the bomb entirely.
Novell gained a lot of good publicity and good will by getting entangled with Linux. I hope, they'll never regret it, but I think, they should've picked a BSD-licensed OS instead... Applications (like Evolution or Samba) would've been licensed the same way, of course, but, at least, there would've been no problems with the core.
I doubt, we'll have the SciFi-like all-encompassing roof for another 100 years. I think, the base will consist of a few buildings connected by tunnels. You could fly from one level to another — in fact, that's what people would do, for there will be no elevators, but no free flight over "city blocks" any time soon.
The base will, simply, be too small. I bring up (once again) the example of Antarctica. The place is a lot more habitable than Moon, but all it has are some small science bases (America's McMurdo being the largest). All attempts to establish permanent settlements on the continent have so far failed, however — people just don't want to live (as in "raise children") there.
Maybe if a strong country like US gets to it, it will, eventually, succeed in bribing people to live there (as it currently does with Alaskans)... But they would need to spend a lot of time in the gym, or else coming to Earth would crush them (Asimov warned about this)...
I'm amazed that apparently enough people to mod you to a 4 think that the locations of important infrastrucure is somehow particularly "secret," and omg this is a huge exploit!
You can see a lot more than mere "location" of a building on Google's maps. You can, for example, figure out, where the doors and windows are, or where certain buildings (like the guard-house) are inside a fence or in an otherwise restricted area — where you can not just take a look while posing as a casual passer-by. Knowing the exact coordinates can help you program your GPS-using missiles, for example, or simply allow you to better your "conventional" attack plans.
Google's pictures offer very high detail — and are only getting better... Remember the recent story about Google doing a "fly-over" of Sydney (and some companies trying to make their names visible from the air)? I don't think, you (an ordinary person) would get very far with a flight-plan saying: "To fly over the city and take high-resolution pictures".
India may be the first, but it is not going to be the last to take exception (I suspect, other countries already have — just quietly).
Right when the original fingerprinting became routine.
DNA (the genetic fingerprinting) is no different... It helps law-enforcers and is not any more invasive, than the long-accepted practices.
Whether we should've accepted the original collecting (and archiving) fingerprinting of suspects (rather than convicts) is another story. Maybe, those cleared by the trial should have their fingerprints (and any collected DNA-samples) destroyed. Or, maybe, there is nothing wrong with police having them — how can that be abused?
I worked for a company, that wrote its own distributed computing system (in Java/XML). It sucked awfully by all measures (latency, CPU-load, memory requirements, bandwidth), but they would not dump it in favor of PVM or one of the MPI implementations because:
We don't know, who wrote that PVM thing and how to support it.
The guys, who wrote our own system are both really nice and dumping their work would offend them...
This is such a common problem, there is a term for it...
Ok, thanks. So, the GGP is not quite right saying "it is a self-perpetuating process". Tectonic movements simply carry the RTG-produced heat to the surface — and our perpetuated by the decay, not by "self"...
I take it, Venus does not have the internal RTG of the Earth's power?
Slashdot Mirror
What, exactly, is the accusation? Even if she is a front for IBM and even (heavens, dare I say it ...) is paid by IBM... So? Does that somehow change the validity (or lack thereof) of her argument(s)? IBM employs (as in pays to work for them) dozens dozens of lawyers — are they all somehow inferior to what she is (or implies to be)?
Today's subject, class, is avoiding ambiguity. Unless you want to be funny with intentionally ambiguous expressions (especially in the titles), be sure to make them as explicit as possible. Avoid lesser-known slang expressions, which can be misunderstood.
For example, instead of "hitting the street", use "goes on sale".
I am a bulkregister.com customer (bulkregister was recently acquired by enom). This past December a few of my domains were expiring and I wanted to renew them while on business trip in Ukraine. Bizarrely, Enom refused to accept my credit card, because I was connecting from Kyiv... They never responded to my e-mail on the subject either, of course (bulkregister used to respond to e-mails back 6 or so years ago, when I had some DNS issues).
I note, that you quote $8.10 per year — bulkregister still wants $12 even though they are part of enom now. I'll look into that.
When registering an account — with anyone, but especially registrars and web-hosters, since they are supposed to know — try giving an e-mail address with a plus-tag (like mine here <mi+slashdot@aldan.algebra.com>).
If a site rejects such an address is "invalid", stay away — their techs are incompetent...
Most likely, the reverse DNS is misconfigured. This is the number one reason for ssh-login delays. Maybe, the nameservers initially put into the router's configuration are no longer reachable due to subsequent "hardening". Or, maybe, they went away and were replaced long ago — without anybody telling the routers. Nothing else on a router uses DNS usually, so this problem affects only ssh-daemon and gets blamed on it...
The daemon could, of course, be a little bit smarter and not try to do a reverse DNS, when there are no hostname-based authorization rules in the first place... But that's a minor bug compared to reverse DNS being dysfunctional.
I thought, the nerves pass along electrical signals, rather than chemicals (like body's other systems). This makes you jump if you step on hedgehog much faster (under a second), than even dying from hydrogen cyanide (minutes) would take...
According to the Ukrainian (and Russian) rules of punctuation, your first coma is erroneous, but you are missing one before "perhaps". The last two should not be there either.
As for the English rules, nobody — except for a few professors — seems to know exactly, what they are. Makes it very hard for someone, who learns the language by example, to figure them out. But I'm working on it...
How would the "National ID card" be different in the papers-please department from the "I need a government-issued ID to let you into the building"?
When I asked a security guard recently, how would seeing my out-of-state Driver's License tell him, it is not a fake, he explained, that one of the courses, he had to take to get the job, studied different IDs of the US-states, Canada, and a bunch of other countries — including Venezuela.
This changed my perspective on the issue quite a bit. A National ID card would just make life easier for these guys (and thus make their services less expensive)...
And if you are worried about central repository of personal data — well, you should never have let Social Security Number become, what it is now... :-(
Well, somehow these zealots have persuaded the US Department of Agriculture, that the coveted "Organic" certification can be issued only to foods without any GM ingredients. Thus the zealots' little religion is imposed on all of us, who want foods without growth hormones and dangerous chemicals, but don't share the zealots' aversion to genetic modifications.
But in some places things are even worse. My dear Ukraine, for example, is an unexpected beneficiary of Poland's foolishness — Poland has decided to stop importing GM-corn and will now buy Ukraine's instead of the cheaper Brazil's. Ukraine, of course, simply could not afford GM-seeds in the past — but Poland is the loser (thanks to its zealots). I wonder, if they'll let autism-sufferers be treated, if the genetic cure being discussed in TFA is ever developed...
Better-looking stuff sells better other things being equal. There are a lot of other things, though — taste, shelf-life, yields, resistance to cold/heat, etc. Taste and shelf-life affects consumers directly — contributing to better sales. Yields and resistance helps lower the prices and keep the planet greener as less land is needed for farming.
You are right pointing out, that genetic modifications are applied in pursuit of profit. But you are not original. Karl Marx wrote over 150 years ago, that the capitalists make nice things not because they are good people, but because there is profit in making them. He also said, that if it were profitable to make shredded glass, they would've been making shredded glass... :-)
Imagine a, oh, whatever, cluster of these!..
Heck, the "organic" food crowd would have you believe, that eating genetically modified foods may be gravely dangerous to you and the humanity.
I would've ignored this crowd for the loons they are, yet, unfortunately, for well-grown food to be given the coveted "Organic" label, it has to be made from non-GM ingredients. That's just annoying — and gratuitously more expensive.
Yet here they are talking about genetically modifying people directly... Why are we willing to modify a sick person's genes, but not those of cows or maize?
You got it backwards. The problem is that a non-malicious business (Novell in this case) can not safely add a patented algorithm to a GPL-ed piece of software (even as part of its own open-source product)...
If the business owns the patent, then the GPL is doing (kind of), what it was meant to — forces the patent-owner to give it up (sort of, GPL was meant to force giving up source, not patents, but it similar in spirit here).
But if the business merely has a license to use the algorithm, it can not mix it into GPLed software.
Whether one approves or disapproves of the former aspect of GPL is another story. But as for the latter, FSF seems willing to ignore it — for now. The "bomb" is in the fact, FSF may have a change of heart in a few years...
Your library is trying to fit the new media into the old way(s) of doing business — not entirely unlike RIAA/MPAA.
While it made sense for each local library to stock their own copies of books, the dispersed storage of copies of downloadable files is foolish. It duplicates (tries to, rather), what AKAMAI et. al are already doing on a much bigger scale and with much higher efficiency.
Instead of sponsoring each library to do this, PermissionTV and other sponsors should've set up a single server of their own and pay AKAMAI (or one of their competitors) to proxy the stuff.
Would've been far cheaper than to pay for multitude of programmers like yourself to set it up, for multitude of sysadmins to maintain it, and for the hardware and bandwidth. And it would've made the files available anonymously... Sigh...
This is about as valid, as claiming, my nose violates your fist's freedom of movement. US is regulating its own companies — and we are free to do so, limited only by its own Constitution and other laws and international treaties.
But why did you ignore my analogy with FCPA? The act severely limits other countries' officials' bribe income — surely, some of the negative sentiment thus created has contributed to the WTC destruction, has not it?..
They are free to do so.
Yeah, right. It was our fault, was not it?..
With physical media (books, CDs, DVDs) the card is an important proof, that one has no outstanding items before she/he can borrow more.
Why can't the Internet downloads be anonymous? To make sure, only local residents can view the material?
A silly restriction in the Internet age — instead of spending money on each library's card-verification software, web-server hardware et al., they should've hired Akamai or someone like that to carry the stuff for everyone.
Would've been far better and likely cheaper too, especially if "Akamai" (or whoever) could be persuaded to give the service a discount...
Right here. See the 4 Insightful and subsequent discussion.
America's current regime fits none of your three items. If anyone, Chavez is a much better candidate.
The only reason people the word is used is to insult — just like calling Bush "idiot" or "baboon" does not mean, he has mental degradation or is not a human, "Fascism" is used as a dirty word.
Genocidal racism is the only thing, that makes Fascism as disgusting as, say, Communism. Absent the racism, there is no justification for the use of the dirty word.
We are doing pretty well under Bush too, thank you very much. The growth is not as dramatic as Hitler's Germany's was, but that's because they started from a much lower base (a loser of WWI, devastated by reparations to the victors). Not that that's relevant...
Drivers are part of the kernel, which is not under GPL.
It seems rather foolish for serious business to bet the very legality of their major product on the benevolence of some outside organization. They may not be "evil" today, but there is no telling, what kind of zealot may come to the helm 5 years from now.
I'm sorry to repeat this flame-bait, but GPL is a "bomb". Not a "time bomb" (for the explosion is not certain), but a remotely activated one — whether or not you trust the people, who hold the activator, you'd be comfortable without the bomb entirely.
Novell gained a lot of good publicity and good will by getting entangled with Linux. I hope, they'll never regret it, but I think, they should've picked a BSD-licensed OS instead... Applications (like Evolution or Samba) would've been licensed the same way, of course, but, at least, there would've been no problems with the core.
I doubt, we'll have the SciFi-like all-encompassing roof for another 100 years. I think, the base will consist of a few buildings connected by tunnels. You could fly from one level to another — in fact, that's what people would do, for there will be no elevators, but no free flight over "city blocks" any time soon.
The base will, simply, be too small. I bring up (once again) the example of Antarctica. The place is a lot more habitable than Moon, but all it has are some small science bases (America's McMurdo being the largest). All attempts to establish permanent settlements on the continent have so far failed, however — people just don't want to live (as in "raise children") there.
Maybe if a strong country like US gets to it, it will, eventually, succeed in bribing people to live there (as it currently does with Alaskans)... But they would need to spend a lot of time in the gym, or else coming to Earth would crush them (Asimov warned about this)...
You can see a lot more than mere "location" of a building on Google's maps. You can, for example, figure out, where the doors and windows are, or where certain buildings (like the guard-house) are inside a fence or in an otherwise restricted area — where you can not just take a look while posing as a casual passer-by. Knowing the exact coordinates can help you program your GPS-using missiles, for example, or simply allow you to better your "conventional" attack plans.
Google's pictures offer very high detail — and are only getting better... Remember the recent story about Google doing a "fly-over" of Sydney (and some companies trying to make their names visible from the air)? I don't think, you (an ordinary person) would get very far with a flight-plan saying: "To fly over the city and take high-resolution pictures".
India may be the first, but it is not going to be the last to take exception (I suspect, other countries already have — just quietly).
Right when the original fingerprinting became routine.
DNA (the genetic fingerprinting) is no different... It helps law-enforcers and is not any more invasive, than the long-accepted practices.
Whether we should've accepted the original collecting (and archiving) fingerprinting of suspects (rather than convicts) is another story. Maybe, those cleared by the trial should have their fingerprints (and any collected DNA-samples) destroyed. Or, maybe, there is nothing wrong with police having them — how can that be abused?
All I want are the decent IMAP (with SSL, of course) and SSH clients...
I worked for a company, that wrote its own distributed computing system (in Java/XML). It sucked awfully by all measures (latency, CPU-load, memory requirements, bandwidth), but they would not dump it in favor of PVM or one of the MPI implementations because:
This is such a common problem, there is a term for it...
You need atmosphere for gliding — not necessarily breathable, but dense enough to support your coat.
You can fly without atmosphere, though — a jet-pack would, actually, be practical on the Moon.
Ok, thanks. So, the GGP is not quite right saying "it is a self-perpetuating process". Tectonic movements simply carry the RTG-produced heat to the surface — and our perpetuated by the decay, not by "self"...
I take it, Venus does not have the internal RTG of the Earth's power?