I generally don't buy at Amazon simply because I can find lower prices elsewhere. But Amazon does offer one thing... the most comprehensive collection of customer reviews on the net. This is where Amazon really did it right. Sure you can get reviews on deja, but Amazon now has moderation of the reviews, and gives you an average score as well. You can't get that from deja.
Alan Greenspan, chairman of the US Federal Reserve (Central Bank) who is relatively conservative when it comes to asset valuations has made very interesting comments regarding the "internet bubble".
When asked about it in front of a US Senate Finance Committee meeting, especially if he viewed it as a destabilizing financial factor he stated the following (I am working from memory here so don't fry me I get some details wrong).
1. The internet is having a measurable and strong effect on improving economic efficiency and worker productivity in the US.
2. It is quite clear that the internet is in its very early stages in terms of its economic growth and effects on the economy. In particular investments that are being made in internet infrastructures in the US are huge by any standards, and will have an inevetable impact in the shape of the economy for many years to come.
3. Taken in these terms, the total valuation of internet stocks measured against the current value of the existing and net present value of potential economic activity is at appropriate levels even by relatively conservative estimates, and may in fact be undervalued.
4. Participation in existing internet equities is very risky because at this stage as it is impossible to predict who the winners will be. However the valuation levels of the sector as a whole are appropriate and do not have any real potential to destabilize the stock market. In early growth situations like this investing in equities is similar to placing bets at a horse race - you have poor odds of picking a winner, but there will be a winner, and those who choose the winner will be handsomely rewarded.
So Mr. Greenspan, based on a fundamental economic analysis thinks there is no internet bubble; a rather startling conclusion to those who are looking at stock valuations in the present atmosphere. He does however warn that picking a horse to ride may be very risky business.
So - should you buy AOL stock? Probably not. But should you buy an internet mutual fund? Probably yes, especially if you have an investment time horizon of five years or more.
Let the engineers be free to make their choices regarding what to use
Rolling on the floor, laughing, crying. The engineers NEVER get to choose, except perhaps for their home systems or if they have graduated to management, at which point they are not really engineers any more. Senior IT management choses WinTel not for technical reasons, but because Nobody gets fired for buying {IBM, Microsoft}. Senior management has one overriding aim. Keep their high paying jobs. This is why FUD *WORKS*.
If you think that there is a government IT purchasing process in action anywhere on the face of the earth that operates on the basis of choosing the best engineering alternative, you are hopelessly naive. IBM is famous for the phrase 'choose my system or I will get your boss to fire you."
The same principle operates for Microsoft now. People are AFRAID to recommend anything else.
Now we have the {Brasilian, Chinese, Mexican, French} governments talking about Linux. Fine. That is their perogative. Will wider use be good for Linux. You bet.
But don't kid yourself. There is no way such decisions are going to be made at the level of the implementor. It doesn't happen that way. It's why the Challenger blew up.
The best we can hope for is that Linux gets recognized as a safe choice so people will not get fired for choosing it.
Microsoft is doing it's best to cloud the issue, and if it weren't for the DOJ it would be REALLY ugly right now.
Like it or not, we all realize you pretty much have to be MSOffice compatible in order to exchange documents with outsiders.
WHY????
People will submit stuff to the government in whatever format the government asks for, be it LaTeX, XML, PDF, or Klingon. In fact Klingon is probably a lot easier to understand than the format used to electronically file income taxes in the US. If I was able to submit my taxes as an Excel spreadsheet as an email attachment, that would be one thing. But NoooOOOOooo, it's a bizarre format and special protocols requiring custom software all the way.
As a US citizen I strongly object to the US Government adopting a standard that is controlled by ONE COMPANY, one that has been proven to be a monopoly in a court of law. This will in fact have a real cost to taxpayers because the government is no longer able to obtain real competitive bids (as in this particular suit!).
As far as I am concerned Corel is doing the US taxpayers a great service. I hope they win and win big.
Well, the president of Canada used to and may still ride around in a Toyota Camry.
The US Military buys a lot of parts from Japan and Europe for a variety of reasons.
The only real restrictions these days are strategic; that is the military may decide to buy from a US customer because it wants to be sure the US has the capability to make something in time of war - and not get cut off from a vital part.
I believe in the case of Canada they are treated as if they were the same as US sourcing for military strategic reasons; that is nobody can envision a situation that wouild result in the US military not being able to get parts from Canada.
unless there is no, i repeat, no American company to make something that the US GOV'T needs, they will always buy American. And why not?
The reason why not is economic efficiency. The US makes certain things more efficiently than other countries, and visa versa. If you just buy American, then you end up with a lower standard of living (or higher taxes in the case of the government) than if you buy from the most efficient producer.
Van Goegh(sic) was WAY nuts. This is the guy who cut of his ear for fun, and later suicided. Ypu can see the progress of his mental disease throught the WIERDNESS of his paintings.
We have a privatized water supply here. IT SUCKS. The cost is horrendous. The mismanagement is beyond belief. The company is always running into problems with the EPA for trying to cut corners. Everybody has switched to bottled water because they are afraid their will be something like the cryptosporidium outbreak that occurred in Milwaukee.
We can't get a decent company to compete or takeover because the current company has let things get run down in search of profits and it would require a major investment to bring things up to snuff. The state has threatened several times to take over by eminent domain. Everyone who lives here hopes it will be SOON. Before people are killed by a bug or other contamination.
Anyone who thinks privatization is the solution to all problems has a case of severe anal-cranial inversion.
There are several aspects to this story that make it highly dubious. The first is that the last report was conducted in June. Few industries, ANYWHERE had completed their Y2K preparations as of June. The second is that even if the Y2K preparations are not complete there is no great likelihood of serious failure. Few industrial control systems are particularly date sensitive. Only the supervisory/accounting systems are. Finally these systems always include multiple levels of redundancy right down to manual override in case of primary control element failure.
This is going to be just another Y2K Chicken Little story drummed up by panic mongers.
I would be very careful to read the fine print before I tried transferring a domain to a different registrar. The disclaimer on Register.com states that they are not responsible if you lose the domain in the transfer process!!
One poster mentioned that when buying a domain, you should make sure the transfer payment is void unless you actually receive ownership. Given the current state of affairs I agree entirely. Since the registration services do not assume any sort of responsibility, I would want some assurances that I am not going to be left with an empty wallet and no name.
Another thing that I would do if I lost a name in this fashion would be to go to ICANN, and their regulators as well. ICANN is supposed to have a dispute resolution process too. This would sure be a good test of this process.
Please don't say the constitution, because a lot of people would end up in jails and censored before it got to the courts.
The First Amendment is very strongly worded.
Censorship before publication is called prior restraint, and it is VERY difficult to get a US court to issue such an order. You have to prove that irreperable harm will occur on publication.
There have been innumerable attempts to get newspaper stories surpressed. Very few have been successful.
Is it just me, or has linux started absorbing (at an absolutely incredible rate) all the qualities it's supporters initially dismissed as both irrelevant and/or evil?
Linux is supposed to be "free speech, not free beer"...
Think about what you just wrote. "Free speech, not free beer" directly implies making money from something that is freely distributed.
Any group of people will have a collection of views on the topic that are varied. However I think that most of the leaders of the open source movement have always wanted to put forth business models that allowed both the freedom of having open software and the ability to make money from that software. Even some of the most adamant, like Richard Stallman have put forth ideas on how to do this, and have put it into action. The Free Software Foundation does after all have expenses. Programmers have to eat and pay rent (although Richard Stallman did try to live in his office).
The thing most people worry about is somebody trying to limit free speech in order to increase their cash flow. Open source or free software should not be against making money per se. Involvement in commercial activity is in fact needed to improve the quality of the software. Companies like RedHat, SGI, IBM, SuSe and so on are contributing tremendously to the advances in Linux.
The important issue is to make sure free speech continues.
President Clinton announced a budget *surplus* some time ago. How come the US treasury still reports a higher US national debt every month?
Because of the basis that is used for the accounting. The budget "surplus" announcement is based on the total amount of money the governemnt takes in vs. what it spends.
The debt however includes money that one part of the government is borrowing from another part. This year the overall government ran a surplus, but the General Fund ran a deficit that was covered by borrowing from the Social Security Fund. This borrowing from the SS fund shows up in the total debt figure.
There are some people that argue that this should not be counted as 'Government Debt". Others feel that it should. I am not an accountant. Some people even think that decreasing government debt is a bad thing because the result will be people will not be able to invest their money in stable instruments like government bonds. Most economicists believe that government debt is only a problem if it is increasing at a faster rate than the GNP.
Next year the government is hoping that they won't need to borrow from the SS Fund. If this occurs the debt figures on this page should start dropping.
I think ultimately technology is going to make it possible to track the whereabout and activities of nearly every individual on earth in excruciating detail. Paper money will disappear; it is already only a small part of most people's finances. People's locations will be tracable with electronics they carry such as phones, wearables network via wireless, and their interactions with machines, be it toll booths, ATMs, any purchase they make by electronic media, where they move on the highway will be monitored by traffic control, and so on. Ultimately the technological forces are unstoppable.
The question is, what is the result of this going to be? The question is not so much the data as it is the use of the data. One possible solution is instead of attempting to hide everything is to instead make everything open, and completely so. An overzealous prosecutor would be vulnerable to having the minutia of his life examined just as closely as his investigatorial target. No government official would dare snoop into somebodies taxes because his taxes are just as open.
Abuses of privacy are important because goverment itself maintains the sole power to abuse the privacy. If the entire society was completely transparent the availability of the data would become insignificant.
I think you vastly underestimate the risk. There is already a lot of work ongoing towards the understanding of genetic codes that influence intelligence in people. Once this knowledge is gained, it could easily be used to select for or manipulate genomes that would in fact lead to creating something more intellignet than onesself.
While this patent is quite probably illegitimate because of the method it was obtained, it is also quite clearly NOT a patent of genetic material, i.e. it is not a DNA patent as per the article headline.
Regardless of what you think about the legitimacy of patenting of genetic codes, this has to do with processes and other technologies used to analyze and fabricate DNA, and nothing to do with the actual makeup of the codes.
In addition the article makes the error of claiming that this will make DNA research easier. Quite incorrect. Patent laws ALREADY exempt research activities from any patent infringement claims.
For some basic information on patent laws, this page is useful.
There is an old sci-fi story in which this poor sot gets a package from the future - The Acme Build-A-Friend Kit.
He proceeds to open it up and follow the instructions, and ends up with a clone of himself, only with most of the flaws missing.
A few hours later a time cop arrives, looks the situation over and decides that the original person must be the construct (because of the flaws) and disassembles him.. and takes the kit back to the future.
Sooner or later there is really going to be a big question about where this technology is going to take the human race.
In some ways a site like/. serves as a new publication populated by a bunch of amatuer journalists and a couple of wet-behind the ears editors. Great. But there is smoe precident here.
Journalists have to face the issue of anonymous sources every day. Anonymity will sometimes allow people to reveal information they otherwise would not, BUT anonymity also prevents people from verifying information. Thus journalists (at least good ones) try to avoid using anonymous sources whenever possible.
Anonymity may be a cloak for illegal action, like making claims intended to influence the price of a stock (very common on the internet) or slander a political candidate (like the recent campaign claiming that John McCain was suffering psychological damage from his tour as a prisoner of war).
It is important for journalists to be able to use anonymous sources, but it is ALSO important for journalists to take information received from such sources with a large dose of salt.
The boon and the flaw in the internet is that you get the news unfiltered. The danger is that the audience may take too much of it as fact, especially if the sources are not verifiable.
What is really needed when reading places like slashdot is a healthy dose of schepticism and a willingness to do a little thinking. The first is easy, but the second?
The whole macro trend and issues of accumulation of wealth is very interesting. Cashing in on the 401k's is not likely to be a problem because that will occur very gradually, and a lot of retirees will want to just live off the income, and pass on a lot of the capital to their children. The bigger concern is the shift from more aggressive investments into less aggressive investments that occurs as people go into retirement.
The other wild card in all of this is the possibility that the government will pay off it's debt over the next 20 years. This means that government bonds will become scarce, something that frightens investors because these bonds are such a well established part of the whole investment world, and these are exactly the investments that the boomers will want as a secure place for their money. What will people put money into for security when these bonds dry up? some people think that this will trigger even more investment into stocks, either directly or indirectly through types of stock derivatives aimed at minimizing volatility.
Here's my main beef: there's no opportunity for anyone to profit from these stocks.
There is plenty of opportunities to profit from these stocks. Take a look at the Redhat charts and you will see that there has been lots of opportunity for an investor to make damn good money from Redhat even if you were not in on the initial IPO. In late Sept RHAT was around 60, and the same in late Nov. Now it's around 300.
The same has been true for Apple, Dell, AOL, Yahoo, Cisco, Microsoft and any of the technical stocks on the US market. I expect that VALinux will have its ups and downs too.
In any case the REAL way for an individual to make money in the stock market is not with IPOs or short term trading that is little more than gambling. It's to put your money into the market on a regular basis into a basket of good companies, and keep it there for 40 years. No other investment does better over the long haul. With dividend reinvestment you can count on doubling your money every 7 years or so. Over a 40 year working career that adds up to a VERY comfortable nest egg.
The traders that are playing games with VALinux today are not the fund managers - they are the day traders that are playing all sorts of momentum games. They will also be riding the stock on the way down, too. Right into the psycho ward, assuming they don't go postal first. When it bottoms out, the fund managers will start nibbling.
The good thing is that companies like VALinux can use this money to help build open source.
Oh well, at least I'm glad that I'm not a not a financial consultant or work for a brick-and-mortar investment firm. Their days are numbered.
I really disagree with this. As the boomers retire there is going to be a lot more need for intelligent asset management. Along with a variety of medical products, resort real estate and similar services for the old folks, it's the boomers that are and will continue to the largest force in the overall economy.
Try ait is a LOT paranoid. Since when have you seen ANY indication that AC or Redhat is not fully behind open source principles? They have done nothing but give back to the community, and yet they get PLENTY of very undeserved criticism based on actions that somebody thinks they MIGHT take in the future.
Personally I think that is insane. If they did something that was clearly against open source principles, criticism would be warranted. But giving somebody a hard time because they MIGHT do something in the future is flat out wrong in my book.
I wonder why nobody has challenged such information gathering under the laws covering unauthorized use of computers. To me this is no different from cracking a site and downloading something.
Xerox routinely, sometimes WITHOUT REQUIRING A WARRANT, gives out information regarding ownership of copiers based on these ID numbers.
That's fine for a $50,000 commercial color copier, but how is that going to work for the $93 inkjet that I buy using paper money in WalMart?
You might catch some numnuts script kiddie with this, but any halfway intelligent person is going to have an untraceable serial number. The problem then is the same as before.. you have to find the printer by other means.
I think there are much much worse things to worry about than printer codes.
Locksmiths have special access to a lot of information needed to do their job. I locked my self out of a rental car while traveling once by dropping the keys in the trunk. I called a locksmith. He was able to open the door with a slim jim, and then make a key by reading a code from the inside of the glove compartment, and a second code from a book that he carried.
It would be obvious that such a professional could be licensed to have such tools, just as many other professionals (say, doctors) have access to otherwise illegal materials.
Slashdot Mirror
I generally don't buy at Amazon simply because I can find lower prices elsewhere. But Amazon does offer one thing... the most comprehensive collection of customer reviews on the net. This is where Amazon really did it right. Sure you can get reviews on deja, but Amazon now has moderation of the reviews, and gives you an average score as well. You can't get that from deja.
Alan Greenspan, chairman of the US Federal Reserve (Central Bank) who is relatively conservative when it comes to asset valuations has made very interesting comments regarding the "internet bubble".
When asked about it in front of a US Senate Finance Committee meeting, especially if he viewed it as a destabilizing financial factor he stated the following (I am working from memory here so don't fry me I get some details wrong).
1. The internet is having a measurable and strong effect on improving economic efficiency and worker productivity in the US.
2. It is quite clear that the internet is in its very early stages in terms of its economic growth and effects on the economy. In particular investments that are being made in internet infrastructures in the US are huge by any standards, and will have an inevetable impact in the shape of the economy for many years to come.
3. Taken in these terms, the total valuation of internet stocks measured against the current value of the existing and net present value of potential economic activity is at appropriate levels even by relatively conservative estimates, and may in fact be undervalued.
4. Participation in existing internet equities is very risky because at this stage as it is impossible to predict who the winners will be. However the valuation levels of the sector as a whole are appropriate and do not have any real potential to destabilize the stock market. In early growth situations like this investing in equities is similar to placing bets at a horse race - you have poor odds of picking a winner, but there will be a winner, and those who choose the winner will be handsomely rewarded.
So Mr. Greenspan, based on a fundamental economic analysis thinks there is no internet bubble; a rather startling conclusion to those who are looking at stock valuations in the present atmosphere. He does however warn that picking a horse to ride may be very risky business.
So - should you buy AOL stock? Probably not. But should you buy an internet mutual fund? Probably yes, especially if you have an investment time horizon of five years or more.
Let the engineers be free to make their choices regarding what to use
Rolling on the floor, laughing, crying. The engineers NEVER get to choose, except perhaps for their home systems or if they have graduated to management, at which point they are not really engineers any more. Senior IT management choses WinTel not for technical reasons, but because Nobody gets fired for buying {IBM, Microsoft}. Senior management has one overriding aim. Keep their high paying jobs. This is why FUD *WORKS*.
If you think that there is a government IT purchasing process in action anywhere on the face of the earth that operates on the basis of choosing the best engineering alternative, you are hopelessly naive. IBM is famous for the phrase 'choose my system or I will get your boss to fire you."
The same principle operates for Microsoft now. People are AFRAID to recommend anything else.
Now we have the {Brasilian, Chinese, Mexican, French} governments talking about Linux. Fine. That is their perogative. Will wider use be good for Linux. You bet.
But don't kid yourself. There is no way such decisions are going to be made at the level of the implementor. It doesn't happen that way. It's why the Challenger blew up.
The best we can hope for is that Linux gets recognized as a safe choice so people will not get fired for choosing it.
Microsoft is doing it's best to cloud the issue, and if it weren't for the DOJ it would be REALLY ugly right now.
Like it or not, we all realize you pretty much have to be MSOffice compatible in order to exchange documents with outsiders.
WHY????
People will submit stuff to the government in whatever format the government asks for, be it LaTeX, XML, PDF, or Klingon. In fact Klingon is probably a lot easier to understand than the format used to electronically file income taxes in the US. If I was able to submit my taxes as an Excel spreadsheet as an email attachment, that would be one thing. But NoooOOOOooo, it's a bizarre format and special protocols requiring custom software all the way.
As a US citizen I strongly object to the US Government adopting a standard that is controlled by ONE COMPANY, one that has been proven to be a monopoly in a court of law. This will in fact have a real cost to taxpayers because the government is no longer able to obtain real competitive bids (as in this particular suit!).
As far as I am concerned Corel is doing the US taxpayers a great service. I hope they win and win big.
Well, the president of Canada used to and may still ride around in a Toyota Camry.
The US Military buys a lot of parts from Japan and Europe for a variety of reasons.
The only real restrictions these days are strategic; that is the military may decide to buy from a US customer because it wants to be sure the US has the capability to make something in time of war - and not get cut off from a vital part.
I believe in the case of Canada they are treated as if they were the same as US sourcing for military strategic reasons; that is nobody can envision a situation that wouild result in the US military not being able to get parts from Canada.
unless there is no, i repeat, no American company to make something that the US GOV'T needs, they will always buy American. And why not?
The reason why not is economic efficiency. The US makes certain things more efficiently than other countries, and visa versa. If you just buy American, then you end up with a lower standard of living (or higher taxes in the case of the government) than if you buy from the most efficient producer.
The natural question is ... how about a Beowolf Cluster of these!
Van Goegh(sic) was WAY nuts. This is the guy who cut of his ear for fun, and later suicided. Ypu can see the progress of his mental disease throught the WIERDNESS of his paintings.
Anyone would consider him for the booby hatch.
We have a privatized water supply here. IT SUCKS. The cost is horrendous. The mismanagement is beyond belief. The company is always running into problems with the EPA for trying to cut corners. Everybody has switched to bottled water because they are afraid their will be something like the cryptosporidium outbreak that occurred in Milwaukee.
We can't get a decent company to compete or takeover because the current company has let things get run down in search of profits and it would require a major investment to bring things up to snuff. The state has threatened several times to take over by eminent domain. Everyone who lives here hopes it will be SOON. Before people are killed by a bug or other contamination.
Anyone who thinks privatization is the solution to all problems has a case of severe anal-cranial inversion.
There are several aspects to this story that make it highly dubious. The first is that the last report was conducted in June. Few industries, ANYWHERE had completed their Y2K preparations as of June. The second is that even if the Y2K preparations are not complete there is no great likelihood of serious failure. Few industrial control systems are particularly date sensitive. Only the supervisory/accounting systems are. Finally these systems always include multiple levels of redundancy right down to manual override in case of primary control element failure.
This is going to be just another Y2K Chicken Little story drummed up by panic mongers.
I would be very careful to read the fine print before I tried transferring a domain to a different registrar. The disclaimer on Register.com states that they are not responsible if you lose the domain in the transfer process!!
One poster mentioned that when buying a domain, you should make sure the transfer payment is void unless you actually receive ownership. Given the current state of affairs I agree entirely. Since the registration services do not assume any sort of responsibility, I would want some assurances that I am not going to be left with an empty wallet and no name.
Another thing that I would do if I lost a name in this fashion would be to go to ICANN, and their regulators as well. ICANN is supposed to have a dispute resolution process too. This would sure be a good test of this process.
Please don't say the constitution, because a lot of people would end up in jails and censored before it got to the courts.
The First Amendment is very strongly worded.
Censorship before publication is called prior restraint, and it is VERY difficult to get a US court to issue such an order. You have to prove that irreperable harm will occur on publication.
There have been innumerable attempts to get newspaper stories surpressed. Very few have been successful.
Is it just me, or has linux started absorbing (at an absolutely incredible rate) all the qualities it's supporters initially dismissed as both irrelevant and/or evil?
Such as? Shrink Wrap Licenses? Nope. Hidden NSA keys? Nope. Undocumented APIs? Nope. Unavailable source code? Nope. DOJ Anti-trust lawsuits? Nope. Undocumented proprietary standards? Nope. Upgrade treadmills? Nope. Slow response to bug reports? Nope.
Linux is supposed to be "free speech, not free beer"...
Think about what you just wrote. "Free speech, not free beer" directly implies making money from something that is freely distributed.
Any group of people will have a collection of views on the topic that are varied. However I think that most of the leaders of the open source movement have always wanted to put forth business models that allowed both the freedom of having open software and the ability to make money from that software. Even some of the most adamant, like Richard Stallman have put forth ideas on how to do this, and have put it into action. The Free Software Foundation does after all have expenses. Programmers have to eat and pay rent (although Richard Stallman did try to live in his office).
The thing most people worry about is somebody trying to limit free speech in order to increase their cash flow. Open source or free software should not be against making money per se. Involvement in commercial activity is in fact needed to improve the quality of the software. Companies like RedHat, SGI, IBM, SuSe and so on are contributing tremendously to the advances in Linux.
The important issue is to make sure free speech continues.
President Clinton announced a budget *surplus* some time ago. How come the US treasury still reports a higher US national debt every month?
Because of the basis that is used for the accounting. The budget "surplus" announcement is based on the total amount of money the governemnt takes in vs. what it spends.
The debt however includes money that one part of the government is borrowing from another part. This year the overall government ran a surplus, but the General Fund ran a deficit that was covered by borrowing from the Social Security Fund. This borrowing from the SS fund shows up in the total debt figure.
There are some people that argue that this should not be counted as 'Government Debt". Others feel that it should. I am not an accountant. Some people even think that decreasing government debt is a bad thing because the result will be people will not be able to invest their money in stable instruments like government bonds. Most economicists believe that government debt is only a problem if it is increasing at a faster rate than the GNP.
Next year the government is hoping that they won't need to borrow from the SS Fund. If this occurs the debt figures on this page should start dropping.
I think ultimately technology is going to make it possible to track the whereabout and activities of nearly every individual on earth in excruciating detail. Paper money will disappear; it is already only a small part of most people's finances. People's locations will be tracable with electronics they carry such as phones, wearables network via wireless, and their interactions with machines, be it toll booths, ATMs, any purchase they make by electronic media, where they move on the highway will be monitored by traffic control, and so on. Ultimately the technological forces are unstoppable.
The question is, what is the result of this going to be? The question is not so much the data as it is the use of the data. One possible solution is instead of attempting to hide everything is to instead make everything open, and completely so. An overzealous prosecutor would be vulnerable to having the minutia of his life examined just as closely as his investigatorial target. No government official would dare snoop into somebodies taxes because his taxes are just as open.
Abuses of privacy are important because goverment itself maintains the sole power to abuse the privacy. If the entire society was completely transparent the availability of the data would become insignificant.
I think you vastly underestimate the risk. There is already a lot of work ongoing towards the understanding of genetic codes that influence intelligence in people. Once this knowledge is gained, it could easily be used to select for or manipulate genomes that would in fact lead to creating something more intellignet than onesself.
While this patent is quite probably illegitimate because of the method it was obtained, it is also quite clearly NOT a patent of genetic material, i.e. it is not a DNA patent as per the article headline.
Regardless of what you think about the legitimacy of patenting of genetic codes, this has to do with processes and other technologies used to analyze and fabricate DNA, and nothing to do with the actual makeup of the codes.
In addition the article makes the error of claiming that this will make DNA research easier. Quite incorrect. Patent laws ALREADY exempt research activities from any patent infringement claims.
For some basic information on patent laws, this page is useful.
...is a good first rule.
There is an old sci-fi story in which this poor sot gets a package from the future - The Acme Build-A-Friend Kit.
He proceeds to open it up and follow the instructions, and ends up with a clone of himself, only with most of the flaws missing.
A few hours later a time cop arrives, looks the situation over and decides that the original person must be the construct (because of the flaws) and disassembles him.. and takes the kit back to the future.
Sooner or later there is really going to be a big question about where this technology is going to take the human race.
In some ways a site like /. serves as a new publication populated by a bunch of amatuer journalists and a couple of wet-behind the ears editors. Great. But there is smoe precident here.
Journalists have to face the issue of anonymous sources every day. Anonymity will sometimes allow people to reveal information they otherwise would not, BUT anonymity also prevents people from verifying information. Thus journalists (at least good ones) try to avoid using anonymous sources whenever possible.
Anonymity may be a cloak for illegal action, like making claims intended to influence the price of a stock (very common on the internet) or slander a political candidate (like the recent campaign claiming that John McCain was suffering psychological damage from his tour as a prisoner of war).
It is important for journalists to be able to use anonymous sources, but it is ALSO important for journalists to take information received from such sources with a large dose of salt.
The boon and the flaw in the internet is that you get the news unfiltered. The danger is that the audience may take too much of it as fact, especially if the sources are not verifiable.
What is really needed when reading places like slashdot is a healthy dose of schepticism and a willingness to do a little thinking. The first is easy, but the second?
The whole macro trend and issues of accumulation of wealth is very interesting. Cashing in on the 401k's is not likely to be a problem because that will occur very gradually, and a lot of retirees will want to just live off the income, and pass on a lot of the capital to their children. The bigger concern is the shift from more aggressive investments into less aggressive investments that occurs as people go into retirement.
The other wild card in all of this is the possibility that the government will pay off it's debt over the next 20 years. This means that government bonds will become scarce, something that frightens investors because these bonds are such a well established part of the whole investment world, and these are exactly the investments that the boomers will want as a secure place for their money. What will people put money into for security when these bonds dry up? some people think that this will trigger even more investment into stocks, either directly or indirectly through types of stock derivatives aimed at minimizing volatility.
As usual, there is a lot of uncertainty....
Here's my main beef: there's no opportunity for anyone to profit from these stocks.
There is plenty of opportunities to profit from these stocks. Take a look at the Redhat charts and you will see that there has been lots of opportunity for an investor to make damn good money from Redhat even if you were not in on the initial IPO. In late Sept RHAT was around 60, and the same in late Nov. Now it's around 300.
The same has been true for Apple, Dell, AOL, Yahoo, Cisco, Microsoft and any of the technical stocks on the US market. I expect that VALinux will have its ups and downs too.
In any case the REAL way for an individual to make money in the stock market is not with IPOs or short term trading that is little more than gambling. It's to put your money into the market on a regular basis into a basket of good companies, and keep it there for 40 years. No other investment does better over the long haul. With dividend reinvestment you can count on doubling your money every 7 years or so. Over a 40 year working career that adds up to a VERY comfortable nest egg.
The traders that are playing games with VALinux today are not the fund managers - they are the day traders that are playing all sorts of momentum games. They will also be riding the stock on the way down, too. Right into the psycho ward, assuming they don't go postal first. When it bottoms out, the fund managers will start nibbling.
The good thing is that companies like VALinux can use this money to help build open source.
Oh well, at least I'm glad that I'm not a not a financial consultant or work for a brick-and-mortar investment firm. Their days are numbered.
I really disagree with this. As the boomers retire there is going to be a lot more need for intelligent asset management. Along with a variety of medical products, resort real estate and similar services for the old folks, it's the boomers that are and will continue to the largest force in the overall economy.
Maybe this is a little paranoid
Try ait is a LOT paranoid. Since when have you seen ANY indication that AC or Redhat is not fully behind open source principles? They have done nothing but give back to the community, and yet they get PLENTY of very undeserved criticism based on actions that somebody thinks they MIGHT take in the future.
Personally I think that is insane. If they did something that was clearly against open source principles, criticism would be warranted. But giving somebody a hard time because they MIGHT do something in the future is flat out wrong in my book.
More than enough. I like C, but C++ is too much. Sooner or later C++ is going to do to C what Algol 68 did to Algol.
if it's not open source you don't
I wonder why nobody has challenged such information gathering under the laws covering unauthorized use of computers. To me this is no different from cracking a site and downloading something.
Xerox routinely, sometimes WITHOUT REQUIRING A WARRANT, gives out information regarding ownership of copiers based on these ID numbers.
That's fine for a $50,000 commercial color copier, but how is that going to work for the $93 inkjet that I buy using paper money in WalMart?
You might catch some numnuts script kiddie with this, but any halfway intelligent person is going to have an untraceable serial number. The problem then is the same as before.. you have to find the printer by other means.
I think there are much much worse things to worry about than printer codes.
This, for example.
Since that article was published, a reporter was able to get tracking information on a local Police Chief. You can imagine the yelling and screaming.
Locksmiths have special access to a lot of information needed to do their job. I locked my self out of a rental car while traveling once by dropping the keys in the trunk. I called a locksmith. He was able to open the door with a slim jim, and then make a key by reading a code from the inside of the glove compartment, and a second code from a book that he carried.
It would be obvious that such a professional could be licensed to have such tools, just as many other professionals (say, doctors) have access to otherwise illegal materials.