Take, for instance, any form of acquired behavior.
Wrong. Thank you for playing. Features aquired while alive (not counting genetic mutations in the sperm/egg or genome of an asexually reproducing organism) do NOT get passed on. That kind of thinking (as mentioned in another response to my post) is Lamarkian. Acquired traits do not get passed on. In the example stated, the Giraffe did NOT evolve a longer neck by stretching to reach the higher branches. Rather, the (ancestors of) Giraffes with a genetic predisposition for longer necks had the advantage and out-competed those with shorter necks. Also, while I am on the topic of your first point, I didn't say it was only Natural Selection. I said it was a combination of many factors, all of which comprise the scientific theory of evolution.
I don't disagree with your second point.
Your third point, however is as wrong as your first. Populations cannot be driven to evolve. They either evolve or they don't, i.e. they either have the traits for survival and/or advantageous reproduction or they don't. Saying that they are driven indicates that they have a choice. There is pressure from the environmental circumstances, but the organism really has NO choice. Either it has the traits necessary for survival (and can pass them on to its offspring) or it does not. This is not Douglas Adams talking about Haggunennon evolving over the course of a meal. This is reality as evolutionary biology has shown it thus far.
The ONLY way acquired traits get passed on is through teaching and learning, and the only organisms that manage that are those genetically predispositioned to teach their offspring (and have offspring that learn).
Humans have (obviously) had these advantages, so here we are today able to contemplate these things.
Perhaps I am misinterpretting the statement (from TFA), but that is because it leaves too many incorrect points open to interpretation (of which my may well be included).
As I said, organisms cannot choose to evolve, so they cannot be driven to evolve. For an off the wall example, if various hypotheses/theories of global climate change are correct and the worst case scenario comes about (think "Day After Tomorrow" only over say a century), humans will not have the choice to evolve to fit the new world. That takes too much time. We (or at least some of us) will have either already evolved the adaptability to survive or we will die out. Personally, I think many of us have already evolved this ability, and those that do survive the possible catastrophes will (hopefully) be able to pass on those traits (of adaptability, NOT the adapted traits) to their offspring.
THAT is evolution as I have come to understand it.
Again, as a semi-offtopic ranting sidenote, the reason many people have trouble accepting they theory of evolution is that they cannot comprehend the timeframes involved. It takes many many many generations of slowly reproducing organisms (like humans) to evolve. We are not driven to it. We either do it or we don't (and perhaps die out). That is life. It maybe a tautology, but everything that happens happens. Everything that doesn't disappears.
'This may have driven humans to evolve increased levels of co-operation, according to their theory.'
Statements like this bother me...a lot.
Organisms cannot be driven to evolve. They can either have the trait that is advantageous for survival or they can die. Humans had the trait, probably for adaptation (perhaps through creative thinking) and developed sociability as a means of survival. They were not driven to evolve sociability and cooperation. They were driven to use these traits that they already had.
In other words, they were driven to adapt.
[semi-offtopic rant]It is statements like these that make some people think that intelligent design is a plausible scientific theory. These kinds of statements give people the idea that evolution has a goal and because of this it must have been designed. Evolution is a combination of natural selection, genetic (in)stability and mutations, environmental factors, and random chance (like natural disasters) all acting together to dictate that the organisms with the best traits for a given environment will have the best chance of survival and pass those traits on to their offspring. It is a number of simple rules and factors working together to make intricate (and beautiful, if I may say so) complexity. No designers needed. Sorry for the off-topic rant.[/semi-offtopic rant]
Whoa...upon further review and a second cup of coffee, it seems I totally misread the intent of your post. Sorry about the "WTF?" post because it seems that we are in agreement.
Yeah, because good relations with Iraq was much more important than good relations with the US, which they traded with twenty times as much, and who would (explicitly admitted) have granted them reconstruction deals had they taken part in the invasion.
WTF? So the US says, "Hey, we're gonna go totally destroy this country. Wanna come along and help and then make money rebuilding it? Don't worry...we're sure not too many of your soldiers will die, and we've gotten much better about friendly fire." And you think France should have said, "Oh, yeah. We're in. After all, it is only brown sand people."
Asking a country to participate in war (that was started on false premises) because they can profit from it is one of the more disgusting things I have ever heard.
I would say that good relations with Iraq, not to mention not killing thousands of innocent people, is much more important than slaughtering people and destroying countries for money.
Seeing that the Vatican is it's own sovereign state, it would depend on Vatican law, so I imagine that perhaps yes, they have the right to demand that there.
The link I posted is specific to US law, though at the bottom of the page there is a link to Photographer's Rights in the UK...
One of my friends was taking pictures of an industrial facility at night for a photography class - security detained him and destroyed his film.
Was this private security for the complex? Or was it actual law enforcement?
Because if it was private security, the first thing your friend should have done was call the police and have the security guards arrested for theft and/or destruction of personal property. It is not legal for them to do that. They can ask you to stop taking pictures and if you actually are on their property then you must comply, but they cannot take your film. Well, at least not without a court order.
Are you sure about that? If so, then I suppose you won't mind if the major labels come along and take anything that your artists create that they (the labels) like without permission or compensation and just go ahead and call it their own...right?
Because if your company truly is "No Copyright", then that means everything that your artists make will be Public Domain, which means the public can use it however they want...
Perhaps you should rethink things a bit and keep the Inellectual Property idea, but be more lenient with it a la Creative Commons licensing.
Remember, Copyright is what keeps your creations out of the hands of those who would rip you off, just like it is what allows the GPL to keep code open and free.
Don't get me wrong. I do like your ideas, but I really think you need copyright to make them work, otherwise you will simply get the less scrupulous profitting off of your and your artists's hard work with no reward for you. Seriously, consider Creative Commons. It is AWESOME!
Seems we are for the most part being left out, which is obviously no surprise since it is "PC Magazine". Oh well, no biggie. Here's a few for you to play with.
Personally, I go for BitsOnWheels. It has a nice informative interface with a really funky 3D view of your torrent download, and it rarely gives me any problems. The only thing I have noticed about it is that it seems to develop a memory leak when downloading a torrent with lots of (as in thousands of) peers (say a Slashdotted torrent). Other than that it works well and looks kind of cool.
Personally, I have had almost no success with the latests releases of the official BitTorrent Client. It always starts the download and seems fine for a few seconds and then just stops receiving any data...
Disinfectant caught it right away. That was 1992, so I guess I'm too smug.
*sigh* I must have come to the party too late. By the time I started really using the Internet (late '92 or early '93) Disinfectant was already up to date on everything out there, so I have never had a Mac infected by a virus.
Disinfectant was a nice peice of software...fast, free, small memory footprint, small size... Of course, it was probably pretty easy to keep up to date since it only had 40 or so viruses to keep track of...
Personally, I'm looking forward to the OS X version of Disinfectant... That is, assuming we eventually get to the point where we actually need it.;p
Virus writers are after the most bang for their effort, and it logically follows that WIntel products will be the brunt of their efforts
I guess if you define "bang" to be the highest number of affected systems, then you are right.
But, if you define "bang" as the most publicity for your exploit, then surely there must be something to authoring the first MacOS X virus and managing to get it spread in the wild. Granted, there is the security through obscurity/low market share, but come on. I imagine if someone managed to write a successful virus or worm for OS X and got it to spread, every news agency would report it (since they report just about anything Apple, and something like this would be big), every "geek" site would cover it like mad, the blogsphere would go just about crazy, etc.
Certainly, that is worth a significant amount of "bang", isn't it?
However.. the free plugin does not enable a Mac user to encode WMV. You'll have to pay for that.
And if you listen very closely, you can hear the hoards of Mac users who need this feature rushing out to pay for it!
Err, or maybe that is just the sound of paint drying...
But seriously, good on the developers of Flip4Mac! They have done an excellent job. There appear to be some stability issues, especially with QuickTime7.0.4, but otherwise, I think it does an excellent job and for me it can even handle the occasional files that MPlayer and VLC cannot or at least cannot handle well (audio sync problems and such). Good stuff.:D
Slashdot is about the stories. I honestly do not care who submits them or what their motivation might be. As an analogy, I don't care if the software I use is written by someone at Red Hat (paid incentive to make this software) or by a volunteer in the community. What's important is that it's good. I don't see why it should be any different for stories on Slashdot.
I agree 100%.
However, as the GPP mentioned, a lot of normal users have given up submitting stories because they know they will be beaten out by a link whore. I think that is kind of a shame because when a link whore posts a story and summary, it is usually very canned and normal (a good example is that Beatles Beatles guy...every summary is the same). When a regular user posts a story and summary, they try to convey in the summary what interested them about the story because they feel that others will also be interested.
I don't know about you, and granted, it is mainly about the story itself, but I prefer a nice, interesting summary with a bit of personal touch rather than someone who posts something along the lines of:
[article source] has a(n) [adjective] article about [topic]. [insert cut and paste from TFA here]
Just the humble opinion of someone who hasn't submitted many stories (because they are almost always rejected and then posted later by a different submitter, sometimes with a better summary, sometimes with a boring summary)
Let's stop bullshitting ourselves and just admit the truth: you want the sweat of other people's brow and you don't want to have to pay for it.
I'm going to make an off the wall guess and say that you are flat out wrong on this one.
Maybe I'm naive, but I think that people are more than willing to pay the creators for their work, or at least come up with some kind of decent exchange that betters society (e.g. the number of GPL fans here). The problem is that people are sick of handing all of their money and rights over to the various copyright cartels (**AA, I'm talking about you!).
It isn't that people want everything for free without compensating the creators. It is that people are sick of the abuse of the system. WhyTF should we pay tax on media because we might use it to violate someone's copyright? Why should we have to deal with copyright owners (who are often not the creators) pulling crap like installing rootkits on our computers, preventing us from viewing/listening to/using their materials in other formats, basically removing our fair use rights, etc.? Why do we have to put up with the virtual death of Public Domain?
I am a creator (writing, photography, sometimes music, et al) and sometimes my creations make me money. Still, I call bullshit on the entire system. I'm fed up with it.
I've given myself a copyright limit of 15 years, the last five of which, all of my creations go Creative Commons at minimum if they aren't already. After that, everything goes public domain, regardless of whether or not I am making money off of it. The idea of copyright is that anyone can have any idea, but the creator comes up with it first and therefore gets the rights to it for a LIMITED time. After that, it MUST go back to the public whence it came.
People don't want to necessarily leech the system. People want their rights back, and people want to stick it to those who would take away their rights.
Copyright is not a natural right, and should not be treated as such.
8. Only collect limited personal information necessary to provide enhanced CD functionality
Very serious "WTF??" happening here. Enhanced CD functionality? How many people buy music CDs for anything more than the ability to listen to the music on them?
They know the activation date (January 5, 2006), and they know the URLs that Sober will try to connect to on that date, right? From this, I see a few things:
1.) Assuming the author(s) is(are) paying attention to happenings on the internet, he would be an idiot to actually try to put anything on those domains for that date (assuming there isn't anything there yet). If he does, I would guess that he would be as good as caught...well...maybe...I guess it depends on how well he covers his tracks when uploading his intended payload.
2.) Both of the linked articles urge SysAdmins to block the URLs they have listed, but I HIGHLY doubt that most of the infected home users will do so, or even know how to, so that will leave a lot of machines trying to connect. Can the URLs be blocked at the ISP level?
3.) Going with the parent post's idea, might it not be a good idea for the authorities to set up those URLs now, and put removal tools on them (assuming they can be automated and it can happen in the background)? It seems to me that any machines still infected when that date hits would be automatically cleaned and the problem would be solved on the first day...
4.) Or, if it is even possible, have the ISPs monitor for requests to those URLs (while blocking them), and if they receive requests for those URLs on that date, automatically send an email to the account holders of the IPs that are trying to access the URLs informing them that their machines are infected with Sober and provide instructions (and software) on how to remove it? Of course, this requires cooperation from a LOT of ISPs, but it doesn't seem completely impossible. Of course, this idea also depends on the users to take action to clean their systems and we all know how well personal responsibility is doing these days...
5.) However, perhaps the ISPs can monitor requests for the URLs that Sober will request, and then perhaps start disconnecting users who don't clean their systems after being warned.
Anyway, just some thoughts...but I see no reason for the net to be rid of Sober after the first day (or first month going by 4 and 5 above) of activation...
Of course, I don't know a lot of details about how these things could be implemented, so take it with a grain of salt...
Isn't it about time we stopped going "well maybe you'll do something wrong.." and start going "well 99% of people don't do this bullshit, maybe it's best we don't piss them all off for that 1 in a billion chance".
Or 1 in a hundred chance, based on your own percentage.;p
But, no, seriously, I do agree with Turn-X Alphonse. The paranoia in current society is ridiculous. It would be nice to see the majority of society no longer considered to be potential criminals just for existing.
One of the main premises of GATTACA (IMHO) was that the system could be circumvented by the dedicated.
Granted, the main character was found out, but that lead to the (again IMHO) main premise of the movie: Genetic testing does not necessarily define one's abilities. Granted, this particular statement is off-topic, but the idea that it can be circumvented is not.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't disagree with your second point.
Your third point, however is as wrong as your first. Populations cannot be driven to evolve. They either evolve or they don't, i.e. they either have the traits for survival and/or advantageous reproduction or they don't. Saying that they are driven indicates that they have a choice. There is pressure from the environmental circumstances, but the organism really has NO choice. Either it has the traits necessary for survival (and can pass them on to its offspring) or it does not. This is not Douglas Adams talking about Haggunennon evolving over the course of a meal. This is reality as evolutionary biology has shown it thus far.
The ONLY way acquired traits get passed on is through teaching and learning, and the only organisms that manage that are those genetically predispositioned to teach their offspring (and have offspring that learn).
Humans have (obviously) had these advantages, so here we are today able to contemplate these things.
Perhaps I am misinterpretting the statement (from TFA), but that is because it leaves too many incorrect points open to interpretation (of which my may well be included).
As I said, organisms cannot choose to evolve, so they cannot be driven to evolve. For an off the wall example, if various hypotheses/theories of global climate change are correct and the worst case scenario comes about (think "Day After Tomorrow" only over say a century), humans will not have the choice to evolve to fit the new world. That takes too much time. We (or at least some of us) will have either already evolved the adaptability to survive or we will die out. Personally, I think many of us have already evolved this ability, and those that do survive the possible catastrophes will (hopefully) be able to pass on those traits (of adaptability, NOT the adapted traits) to their offspring.
THAT is evolution as I have come to understand it.
Again, as a semi-offtopic ranting sidenote, the reason many people have trouble accepting they theory of evolution is that they cannot comprehend the timeframes involved. It takes many many many generations of slowly reproducing organisms (like humans) to evolve. We are not driven to it. We either do it or we don't (and perhaps die out). That is life. It maybe a tautology, but everything that happens happens. Everything that doesn't disappears.
Organisms cannot be driven to evolve. They can either have the trait that is advantageous for survival or they can die. Humans had the trait, probably for adaptation (perhaps through creative thinking) and developed sociability as a means of survival. They were not driven to evolve sociability and cooperation. They were driven to use these traits that they already had.
In other words, they were driven to adapt.
[semi-offtopic rant]It is statements like these that make some people think that intelligent design is a plausible scientific theory. These kinds of statements give people the idea that evolution has a goal and because of this it must have been designed. Evolution is a combination of natural selection, genetic (in)stability and mutations, environmental factors, and random chance (like natural disasters) all acting together to dictate that the organisms with the best traits for a given environment will have the best chance of survival and pass those traits on to their offspring. It is a number of simple rules and factors working together to make intricate (and beautiful, if I may say so) complexity. No designers needed. Sorry for the off-topic rant.[/semi-offtopic rant]
Must get some more coffee.
Asking a country to participate in war (that was started on false premises) because they can profit from it is one of the more disgusting things I have ever heard.
I would say that good relations with Iraq, not to mention not killing thousands of innocent people, is much more important than slaughtering people and destroying countries for money.
The link I posted is specific to US law, though at the bottom of the page there is a link to Photographer's Rights in the UK...
Because if it was private security, the first thing your friend should have done was call the police and have the security guards arrested for theft and/or destruction of personal property. It is not legal for them to do that. They can ask you to stop taking pictures and if you actually are on their property then you must comply, but they cannot take your film. Well, at least not without a court order.
Check out the Photographer's Right.
Because if your company truly is "No Copyright", then that means everything that your artists make will be Public Domain, which means the public can use it however they want...
Perhaps you should rethink things a bit and keep the Inellectual Property idea, but be more lenient with it a la Creative Commons licensing.
Remember, Copyright is what keeps your creations out of the hands of those who would rip you off, just like it is what allows the GPL to keep code open and free.
Don't get me wrong. I do like your ideas, but I really think you need copyright to make them work, otherwise you will simply get the less scrupulous profitting off of your and your artists's hard work with no reward for you. Seriously, consider Creative Commons. It is AWESOME!
I hope you don't mind me adding you to my friends list.
Personally, I go for BitsOnWheels. It has a nice informative interface with a really funky 3D view of your torrent download, and it rarely gives me any problems. The only thing I have noticed about it is that it seems to develop a memory leak when downloading a torrent with lots of (as in thousands of) peers (say a Slashdotted torrent). Other than that it works well and looks kind of cool.
Personally, I have had almost no success with the latests releases of the official BitTorrent Client. It always starts the download and seems fine for a few seconds and then just stops receiving any data...
Disinfectant was a nice peice of software...fast, free, small memory footprint, small size... Of course, it was probably pretty easy to keep up to date since it only had 40 or so viruses to keep track of...
Personally, I'm looking forward to the OS X version of Disinfectant... That is, assuming we eventually get to the point where we actually need it. ;p
I guess I am also too smug...
Oops, wrong web site.
But, if you define "bang" as the most publicity for your exploit, then surely there must be something to authoring the first MacOS X virus and managing to get it spread in the wild. Granted, there is the security through obscurity/low market share, but come on. I imagine if someone managed to write a successful virus or worm for OS X and got it to spread, every news agency would report it (since they report just about anything Apple, and something like this would be big), every "geek" site would cover it like mad, the blogsphere would go just about crazy, etc.
Certainly, that is worth a significant amount of "bang", isn't it?
Err, or maybe that is just the sound of paint drying...
But seriously, good on the developers of Flip4Mac! They have done an excellent job. There appear to be some stability issues, especially with QuickTime7.0.4, but otherwise, I think it does an excellent job and for me it can even handle the occasional files that MPlayer and VLC cannot or at least cannot handle well (audio sync problems and such). Good stuff. :D
However, as the GPP mentioned, a lot of normal users have given up submitting stories because they know they will be beaten out by a link whore. I think that is kind of a shame because when a link whore posts a story and summary, it is usually very canned and normal (a good example is that Beatles Beatles guy...every summary is the same). When a regular user posts a story and summary, they try to convey in the summary what interested them about the story because they feel that others will also be interested.
I don't know about you, and granted, it is mainly about the story itself, but I prefer a nice, interesting summary with a bit of personal touch rather than someone who posts something along the lines of:
Just the humble opinion of someone who hasn't submitted many stories (because they are almost always rejected and then posted later by a different submitter, sometimes with a better summary, sometimes with a boring summary)Maybe I'm naive, but I think that people are more than willing to pay the creators for their work, or at least come up with some kind of decent exchange that betters society (e.g. the number of GPL fans here). The problem is that people are sick of handing all of their money and rights over to the various copyright cartels (**AA, I'm talking about you!).
It isn't that people want everything for free without compensating the creators. It is that people are sick of the abuse of the system. WhyTF should we pay tax on media because we might use it to violate someone's copyright? Why should we have to deal with copyright owners (who are often not the creators) pulling crap like installing rootkits on our computers, preventing us from viewing/listening to/using their materials in other formats, basically removing our fair use rights, etc.? Why do we have to put up with the virtual death of Public Domain?
I am a creator (writing, photography, sometimes music, et al) and sometimes my creations make me money. Still, I call bullshit on the entire system. I'm fed up with it.
I've given myself a copyright limit of 15 years, the last five of which, all of my creations go Creative Commons at minimum if they aren't already. After that, everything goes public domain, regardless of whether or not I am making money off of it. The idea of copyright is that anyone can have any idea, but the creator comes up with it first and therefore gets the rights to it for a LIMITED time. After that, it MUST go back to the public whence it came.
People don't want to necessarily leech the system. People want their rights back, and people want to stick it to those who would take away their rights.
Copyright is not a natural right, and should not be treated as such.
As a creator, even I firmly believe in this.
I visited the site for the first time, which I'm sure is like many here. Good thing their logs are now probably spammed with useless IP addresses. :D
1.) Assuming the author(s) is(are) paying attention to happenings on the internet, he would be an idiot to actually try to put anything on those domains for that date (assuming there isn't anything there yet). If he does, I would guess that he would be as good as caught...well...maybe...I guess it depends on how well he covers his tracks when uploading his intended payload.
2.) Both of the linked articles urge SysAdmins to block the URLs they have listed, but I HIGHLY doubt that most of the infected home users will do so, or even know how to, so that will leave a lot of machines trying to connect. Can the URLs be blocked at the ISP level?
3.) Going with the parent post's idea, might it not be a good idea for the authorities to set up those URLs now, and put removal tools on them (assuming they can be automated and it can happen in the background)? It seems to me that any machines still infected when that date hits would be automatically cleaned and the problem would be solved on the first day...
4.) Or, if it is even possible, have the ISPs monitor for requests to those URLs (while blocking them), and if they receive requests for those URLs on that date, automatically send an email to the account holders of the IPs that are trying to access the URLs informing them that their machines are infected with Sober and provide instructions (and software) on how to remove it? Of course, this requires cooperation from a LOT of ISPs, but it doesn't seem completely impossible. Of course, this idea also depends on the users to take action to clean their systems and we all know how well personal responsibility is doing these days...
5.) However, perhaps the ISPs can monitor requests for the URLs that Sober will request, and then perhaps start disconnecting users who don't clean their systems after being warned.
Anyway, just some thoughts...but I see no reason for the net to be rid of Sober after the first day (or first month going by 4 and 5 above) of activation...
Of course, I don't know a lot of details about how these things could be implemented, so take it with a grain of salt...
I was going to say something like...
*or**or**or perhaps even*...Oh well. I guess personal responsibility will have to take care of such thngs...
But, no, seriously, I do agree with Turn-X Alphonse. The paranoia in current society is ridiculous. It would be nice to see the majority of society no longer considered to be potential criminals just for existing.
Granted, the main character was found out, but that lead to the (again IMHO) main premise of the movie: Genetic testing does not necessarily define one's abilities. Granted, this particular statement is off-topic, but the idea that it can be circumvented is not.
So I hear. :D