The church supported a lot of the early scientific endeavour in western Europe. Mendel was a monk, and Darwin trained in theology. Science was the province of the wealthy, and the church had most of the wealth.
A real alternative vision would be to look at what might have happened if we had not invaded the middle east in the crusades and clamped down on Islam. Those guys were way ahead of us in scientific terms, and so much of value was lost.
Most places have some form of misuse of computers act, data protection act, and others. Maybe it's time to start requesting copies of all personal data from the phone carriers in the same way as has been done recently with FB.
So much hate in here. They are just people concerned about the ethical treatment of animals. Kind of like a scientific ethics committee trying to stop people taking animal abuse to extremes in the rush to consume anything and everything.
Namespaces are a lie. They pretend that the work is divided up into this and that, countries and states, companies and educational institutions, porn and not porn. This whole idea of a simple world with simple divisions between things is nonsense. Why shouldn't a site be equally American and Mexican? Why shouldn't a site be equally commercial and educational? Why shouldn't a site have porn and notporn? Get over the idea that the world is like this when it's not.
So you are saying that you think the internet should be spying on every single thing everyone does and using all this spying to profile everyone. I must say I don't like that idea. Do you think this spying should be the responsibility of governments or unaccountable corporations? I have a better idea. Get over the idea that computers can securely identify a person and stop building systems that depend on this happening. Use computers for more fun things.
Cue epidemic of amateur finger amputations by petty criminals looking to log in to people's bank accounts. Fingerprint (and iris scan and all other biometrics) are not secure in any way at all. You can fool them by forging the biometric with a photograph or other copy, or obtain the body part itself.
I worked for Perot Systems for a while and it was a good company. The guy clearly had strong business skills, and was a good communicator. He used to email us all every day, which was kinda cute, and also noone had job titles or ranks - we were all 'Associates'. I guess business culture might be a problem for some potential veterans moving into the private sector. When the mission is to provide service and innovation for a profit, it does help if you have had some experience of this, and when the culture requires that you establish your own authority based on your actions, rather than have it provided through a chain of command, some might struggle, I dunno.
Don't forget, they have the API call stream, but that is not their only data resource. They have already spidered the web so they have a reasonable idea which pages end up calling out to their API, and they probably have some reasonably accurate pagehit estimates for the pages, so they already have enough info to figure out an estimated bill for each domain. However much you obscure it they can probably spider to correlate API calls with originating site.
The cloud idea likes to project an illusion of it not mattering where the file is, but it is predicated on (more or less) limitless bandwidth with near zero latency, and limitless local storage/cache. If the file you want is not on the local hard disk then it isn't. If your OS needs to fetch it behind the scenes then you need to wait until it arrives. Yes you might think you don't want to know where the file is physically, but when it takes ten minutes to open a file that should take ten seconds, you will probably want to know why (oh, it's in another country and the network is busy because everyone is watching some new TV prog, i see now). Not knowing where the file is just means needing to ask all the time. Is it really better not to know, than just knowing in the first place, and making sure it is where you need it to be? Bandwidth will never be unlimited and latency will never be zero. We are routinely working on 10GB files now where I work, and you always need to know where they are, and to care because however big the pipes are and how ever big the disk space and the RAM, the data streams grow even faster. The technologies underlying data capture devices obey their own version of Moore's law, frequently with higher multiplicities.
Yes I would. If I deliberately transmit a message to someone else, then I have no expectation of being able to 'untransmit' that message. The logic error here is thinking that files are like objects. They are not (only), they are also like messages. Big business wants files to be like objects so they can own them. Everyone knows they can't do it, and this effort will fail like all others, due to the nature of reality. Files are not objects.
Do you really want your rice to contain human blood protein without your knowledge? Or anti-cancer drugs, or viagra or whatever else shit someone decided they could make a fast buck from? Once people start putting this stuff into crops, it is only a matter of time before we start eating it. transfer rates of 0.8% sound small until you remember how many plants there are in a field.
I would argue that the copies do have value, but their worth relates to the effort it takes to make them. When industries were needed to make the copies, they made them expensively. Now we can all make the copies, they are worth much less. The whole thrust from the rights holders is to make the copies harder to make, hence more valuable, but they are guaranteed to lose. We all have the technology now and we aren't giving it back.
I agree, the duty of the courts is to uphold and enforce laws. Two things flow from this statement for me. First, it is not BT's duty to uphold and enforce laws. Their duty is to maximise shareholder return, within the word of the law. They have no business interests in legal investigation and enforcement and the court has no business privatising these roles and demanding BT perform them. Second, BT did not break any laws, so there seems no reason for them being in front of a judge in the first place. Refusing to prevent someone else from enabling someone else to potentially commit a copyright crime is not a criminal offence. You might argue that the judge saw it differently, and maybe so, but he was wrong. This ruling will never stop anyone from accessing pirated material through BT's service, it serves only to hand over responsibilities from the legal system to big business, with no expectation whatsoever that they will be able to discharge those responsibilities effectively.
Welcome to the new privatised legal system. Some big corporations don't trust the real legal system to be fair [biased in their favour], so they are establishing a privatised shadow legal system by the back door, where other corporations take over the roles of investigation, judgement, enforcement.
He didn't limit it to changes of domain name though. He has placed the responsibility on BT to be police, judge and jury in future. Let's say an imaginary property owner comes to BT with a domain name, and a claim that the operators of Newzbin2 are using this domain to provide information about other IP addresses where copyright-infringing material may be held. BT now has to investigate whether the domain is really being used by the operators of Newzbin2 (police work, if this is really a crime), and if so, whether it is being used to offer links to material that really does break copyright law (the job of the courts). Since when was BT part of the legal system? Their customers, do not pay them to decide who does or does not 'make use of' a particular domain name, nor do they pay BT to decide what material is or is not infringing someone's copyright. Their customers pay them to provide access to the internet.
The real scandal is that every government in the world is NOT hugely subsidising the production of cheap solar panels. If we all produced our own power though, who would have the power?
Let the sceptics provide proof it is not caused by man. The primeval forests grew for about 100 million years before the first herbivores evolved on land, capturing atmospheric carbon and burying it under their own canopies, with the young trees growing in the debris of their dead ancestors. The atmospheric CO2 levels fell dramatically during this period, and the earth cooled considerably as a result. Forests are very efficient at capturing sunlight and using it to capture atmospheric carbon, and atmospheric CO2 is very good at keeping heat at the plant's surface. We are well on our way to burning through 100 million years of captured sunlight, and releasing the stored energy back into the atmosphere as free CO2. If someone has a good hypothesis as to how this would not change the climate, they are free to try to prove it.
Slashdot Mirror
The gears are non-linear in some way to match the elliptical movements of the planets. That counts as a bit alternate anyway.
The church supported a lot of the early scientific endeavour in western Europe. Mendel was a monk, and Darwin trained in theology. Science was the province of the wealthy, and the church had most of the wealth. A real alternative vision would be to look at what might have happened if we had not invaded the middle east in the crusades and clamped down on Islam. Those guys were way ahead of us in scientific terms, and so much of value was lost.
Most places have some form of misuse of computers act, data protection act, and others. Maybe it's time to start requesting copies of all personal data from the phone carriers in the same way as has been done recently with FB.
Stay in the car!
So much hate in here. They are just people concerned about the ethical treatment of animals. Kind of like a scientific ethics committee trying to stop people taking animal abuse to extremes in the rush to consume anything and everything.
Damn /. for putting in the ./ on the end of my proposed URL which said h t t p : / / g o o g l e
I propose removing the TLDs. For instance Google's URL would be http://google./
Namespaces are a lie. They pretend that the work is divided up into this and that, countries and states, companies and educational institutions, porn and not porn. This whole idea of a simple world with simple divisions between things is nonsense. Why shouldn't a site be equally American and Mexican? Why shouldn't a site be equally commercial and educational? Why shouldn't a site have porn and notporn? Get over the idea that the world is like this when it's not.
So you are saying that you think the internet should be spying on every single thing everyone does and using all this spying to profile everyone. I must say I don't like that idea. Do you think this spying should be the responsibility of governments or unaccountable corporations? I have a better idea. Get over the idea that computers can securely identify a person and stop building systems that depend on this happening. Use computers for more fun things.
Cue epidemic of amateur finger amputations by petty criminals looking to log in to people's bank accounts. Fingerprint (and iris scan and all other biometrics) are not secure in any way at all. You can fool them by forging the biometric with a photograph or other copy, or obtain the body part itself.
I worked for Perot Systems for a while and it was a good company. The guy clearly had strong business skills, and was a good communicator. He used to email us all every day, which was kinda cute, and also noone had job titles or ranks - we were all 'Associates'. I guess business culture might be a problem for some potential veterans moving into the private sector. When the mission is to provide service and innovation for a profit, it does help if you have had some experience of this, and when the culture requires that you establish your own authority based on your actions, rather than have it provided through a chain of command, some might struggle, I dunno.
Don't forget, they have the API call stream, but that is not their only data resource. They have already spidered the web so they have a reasonable idea which pages end up calling out to their API, and they probably have some reasonably accurate pagehit estimates for the pages, so they already have enough info to figure out an estimated bill for each domain. However much you obscure it they can probably spider to correlate API calls with originating site.
The cloud idea likes to project an illusion of it not mattering where the file is, but it is predicated on (more or less) limitless bandwidth with near zero latency, and limitless local storage/cache. If the file you want is not on the local hard disk then it isn't. If your OS needs to fetch it behind the scenes then you need to wait until it arrives. Yes you might think you don't want to know where the file is physically, but when it takes ten minutes to open a file that should take ten seconds, you will probably want to know why (oh, it's in another country and the network is busy because everyone is watching some new TV prog, i see now). Not knowing where the file is just means needing to ask all the time. Is it really better not to know, than just knowing in the first place, and making sure it is where you need it to be? Bandwidth will never be unlimited and latency will never be zero. We are routinely working on 10GB files now where I work, and you always need to know where they are, and to care because however big the pipes are and how ever big the disk space and the RAM, the data streams grow even faster. The technologies underlying data capture devices obey their own version of Moore's law, frequently with higher multiplicities.
Yes I would. If I deliberately transmit a message to someone else, then I have no expectation of being able to 'untransmit' that message. The logic error here is thinking that files are like objects. They are not (only), they are also like messages. Big business wants files to be like objects so they can own them. Everyone knows they can't do it, and this effort will fail like all others, due to the nature of reality. Files are not objects.
Do you really want your rice to contain human blood protein without your knowledge? Or anti-cancer drugs, or viagra or whatever else shit someone decided they could make a fast buck from? Once people start putting this stuff into crops, it is only a matter of time before we start eating it. transfer rates of 0.8% sound small until you remember how many plants there are in a field.
I would argue that the copies do have value, but their worth relates to the effort it takes to make them. When industries were needed to make the copies, they made them expensively. Now we can all make the copies, they are worth much less. The whole thrust from the rights holders is to make the copies harder to make, hence more valuable, but they are guaranteed to lose. We all have the technology now and we aren't giving it back.
What happens if the operators of Newsbin2 decide to use a domain that is also used by other people? The new DDOS might be impersonating Newsbin2.
I agree, the duty of the courts is to uphold and enforce laws. Two things flow from this statement for me. First, it is not BT's duty to uphold and enforce laws. Their duty is to maximise shareholder return, within the word of the law. They have no business interests in legal investigation and enforcement and the court has no business privatising these roles and demanding BT perform them. Second, BT did not break any laws, so there seems no reason for them being in front of a judge in the first place. Refusing to prevent someone else from enabling someone else to potentially commit a copyright crime is not a criminal offence. You might argue that the judge saw it differently, and maybe so, but he was wrong. This ruling will never stop anyone from accessing pirated material through BT's service, it serves only to hand over responsibilities from the legal system to big business, with no expectation whatsoever that they will be able to discharge those responsibilities effectively.
Welcome to the new privatised legal system. Some big corporations don't trust the real legal system to be fair [biased in their favour], so they are establishing a privatised shadow legal system by the back door, where other corporations take over the roles of investigation, judgement, enforcement.
He didn't limit it to changes of domain name though. He has placed the responsibility on BT to be police, judge and jury in future. Let's say an imaginary property owner comes to BT with a domain name, and a claim that the operators of Newzbin2 are using this domain to provide information about other IP addresses where copyright-infringing material may be held. BT now has to investigate whether the domain is really being used by the operators of Newzbin2 (police work, if this is really a crime), and if so, whether it is being used to offer links to material that really does break copyright law (the job of the courts). Since when was BT part of the legal system? Their customers, do not pay them to decide who does or does not 'make use of' a particular domain name, nor do they pay BT to decide what material is or is not infringing someone's copyright. Their customers pay them to provide access to the internet.
BioCyc.org hosts genomes and metabolic network models of hundreds of microorganisms. The whole thing is Lisp with a database backend AFAIK.
The real scandal is that every government in the world is NOT hugely subsidising the production of cheap solar panels. If we all produced our own power though, who would have the power?
In Soviet Russia pictures shop you.
I wonder if Owen Pengelly has friends with financial interest in 'trusted computing' firms. Someone must be feeding him this line I guess.
Let the sceptics provide proof it is not caused by man. The primeval forests grew for about 100 million years before the first herbivores evolved on land, capturing atmospheric carbon and burying it under their own canopies, with the young trees growing in the debris of their dead ancestors. The atmospheric CO2 levels fell dramatically during this period, and the earth cooled considerably as a result. Forests are very efficient at capturing sunlight and using it to capture atmospheric carbon, and atmospheric CO2 is very good at keeping heat at the plant's surface. We are well on our way to burning through 100 million years of captured sunlight, and releasing the stored energy back into the atmosphere as free CO2. If someone has a good hypothesis as to how this would not change the climate, they are free to try to prove it.